We’ve all met that guy, right? The guy who wears biker clothes, and has tattoos all over his body, and has a scowl on his face? The guy who has a death’s head patch on his back, the bandanna of cuss words tied around his head, and the chains hanging from his waste? And yet, when he opens his mouth, he says, “please,” and “thank you?” He might go out in the back woods and do things you don’t want to think about, but at least doesn’t smoke cigarettes.
He is our modern culture, in a nutshell. Our culture [...]
I previously wrote a rather lengthy post on why statist societies are brittle. Is there a solution to this problem? The easiest solution is to simply propose the opposite extreme —total anarchy. In fact, this is what many people do propose, in the form of libertarianism. It’s always easy to jump from one extreme to another, from absolute government control over every aspect of our lives to absolutely no control over our lives. The problem is that this won’t work, either; history shows us no time in which people have lived without peace and without government. The only time [...]
Roughly a year after a child broke his arm jumping off a swing like Superman and his parents are settling a lawsuit for $20,000, Cabell County, W.V., schools are yanking swing sets from school playgrounds. The lawsuit was one of two filed in the last year against Cabell County schools over swing set injuries, the West Virginia Record reported Thursday. School safety manager Tim Stewart, who is overseeing the removal, said he sees “a high potential when it comes to swings and lawsuits.” … A Massachusetts elementary school has told students they can’t play tag. One Boston school forbids [...]
Yesterday, in these pages, I wrote a piece about feminism, paganism, and the unhappiness of women. While poking around my bookmarks later on, I ran across two articles I had noted in the last week or so that tie into this entire theme through evolution. The first article is at Thinking Christian, pointing to an article at Scientific American, which I will quote from below.
There’s a strange whiff in the media air, a sort of polyamory chic in which liberally minded journalists, an aggregate mass of antireligious pundits, and even scientists themselves have begun encouraging readers and [...]
Two University of Pennsylvania economists have completed a study showing that over the past four decades the happiness gap between whites and African Americans has been significantly reduced. … And Baird notes that increased happiness among African American women is not the only reason that the gap has diminished. The other reason is that white women are considerably more unhappy today than they were forty years ago. -Had Enough Therapy?
Here’s a puzzle: The feminist movement in the US agitated for (and still agitates for) “freedom,” to be treated as “more than an object” —and yet somehow women now [...]
Now Dinah the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob, went out to see the women of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land, saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her. … Now Jacob heard that he had defiled his daughter Dinah. But his sons were with his livestock in the field, so Jacob held his peace until they came. … On the third day, when they were sore, two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords [...]
I was almost run off the road today. I was going to a local store to pick a few odds and ends up for projects around the house, and someone pulled out of the right hand only turn lane just before it ended, forcing me to slam on my brakes to keep the front of my truck intact. This man then continued down the road, driving much more slowly than the speed limit, weaving here and there, until he moved into the next right hand turn lane. As I passed him, I immediately realized the problem.
He had a [...]
Lady Gaga has admitted that her music is ‘inspired’ by drugs which she said stimulated her creativity. The singer, who previously disclosed that she is an occasional cocaine user, justified her decision to take drugs on the grounds that it stimulated her artistic sensibilities. She told Q magazine that through the use of drugs “I really figured out the art I wanted to make and was inspired. “Some people find inspiration in dark places. I guess I’m one of them.” -Telegraph UK
When you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas. What’s astounding to me is how [...]
Now a centurion had a servant who was sick and at the point of death, who was highly valued by him. When the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent to him elders of the Jews, asking him to come and heal his servant. And when they came to Jesus, they pleaded with him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy to have you do this for him, for he loves our nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue.” And Jesus went with them. When he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends, saying to [...]
…atonement is called definite by some because they believe it certainly secures the salvation of those for whom Christ died, and it is called limited in its extent because it effects salvation for the elect only. -Wikipedia
There is a strange idea among some Christians that Christ only died for the sins of “the elect.” That somehow, when Christ died on the cross, he only took on the sins of those God has elected, throughout the ages, to elect to salvation through faith. It’s not that Yeshua’s rejection —if even for a moment— didn’t pay for sins sufficiently, but [...]
How can President Barack Obama be so right about the mosque and yet get it so wrong? Here’s how: He is so supremely confident in his intellect that he forgets, on his way to the correct decision, to slow down and pick up not-so-gifted stragglers. … The Obama mindset is dismissive of those who have never sipped espresso in the faculty lounge. Anyone who lets emotion creep in where Obama has let reason reign is wrong. -Blomberg
Having cast Mr. Obama as one of the most intelligent people in history to run for the office of President, the press [...]
American culture is, one way or another, business culture, and our business is service. Once we were a great industrial nation. Now we are a service economy. Which means we are forced to interact with each other, every day, in person and by phone and email. And it’s making us all a little mad. I’m not sure we’ve fully noted the social implications of the shift from industry to service. We used to make machines! And steel! But now we’re always in touch, in negotiation. We interact so much, we wear each other down. We wear away the superego [...]
Then Gideon said to God, “If you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said, 37 behold, I am laying a fleece of wool on the threshing floor. If there is dew on the fleece alone, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you have said.” And it was so. Judges 6:36-38
A while back, as a freshly minted graduate from a Master’s program, I began to wonder like Gideon if the path that I felt God was asking me to follow needed [...]
After the Senate passed that $600 million Border Security Bill yesterday, Mr. Obama issued a statement asserting that securing the southwest border has been “a top priority” since he took office. But if you think Mr. Obama can have but a single “top priority,” you’d be wrong. He’s got a load of them. -CBS
The author of this piece then goes on to list all the “top priorities” Mr. Obama has: to recover and rebuild from the recession, creating jobs, free trade agreements, energy security, education reform, student loan reform, exports by small businesses, health assistance to 9/11 first [...]
Yet Leanne Foster, whose position puts her in the daily orbit of the age-old divide between teenage girls and their mothers, is not as sanguine as her daughter about female equality. She sees a unique generation gap emerging: on one side, mothers who came of age during the women’s movement of the 1970s fighting for equal opportunities, “empowerment” through financial independence and rejecting female “objectification”; on the other, their daughters, raised in a hyper-sexualized culture replete with Bratz dolls, porn-inspired American Apparel ads, and the message telegraphed by Kim Kardashian and her tabloid-cover cohorts that a leaked sex tape [...]
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