Here's the chart again -- let's see if it works this time.  And in all that long foolishness, I neglected one question about what would have happened had we not bailed out GM and Wall St.  I really don't know.  But in principle, I think the government should stay away from getting involved with private enterprise.  If it fails it fails.  The problem is that one could say the failure came about by way of government intervention to begin with, through Fannie/Freddie, so they (Bush, anyway) felt a need to fix what he had helped damage?

Politics and the Economy

Some of my friends and I have been talking about the political landscape on FB, and since my replies are getting longer and longer, I have answered here instead.  The most recent posts were:

 I'm curious. If we are to oppose a nuclear Iran, albeit with better information than we had when we went into Iraq, how can we do this without increasing spending? It's to a large degree this defense spending over the last 8 years that has put us in our current financial position. This is what troubles me about the Republican candidates; like Bush in 2000 (in the initiatives Ted notes), their claims for change have to be backed up with money, so their limited government ambitions are countered by their political aims. Paul would basically be arguing for an isolationist standpoint, so he's the only one who could back up his claims with a political ideology.

And what would have happened if Obama had not bailed out GM and Wall Street? I mean both on the short term and the long term? Do you think really think the free market would have bailed them out?

Would appreciate your thoughts.




and another: 
Ron Paul knows exactly what to do to fix our financial crisis and has no other political aims that would stop him from doing so. Our economy and the world economy are the #1 issue right now and no other candidate aside from Paul has shown me that they will make the hard decisions to correct the mistakes that has put us in the horrible position we are in now.







These are great questions - thanks for making this a real discussion, you all.  Andy, I think opposing a nuclear Iran right now will save us a lot of defense dept spending down the road as we wouldn't then have to fight another 10-year lite war as we did in Iraq.  Some of the candidates have mentioned ways to restrict Iran without spending war-levels of money.  (gasoline embargoes, et c). We can't pretend not to be a super-power (as I think it is clear Ron Paul's isolationism would have us do) but still we can listen very carefully to Paul's proposals, as well as Rick Santorum's -- each knows a great deal and has a lot of good advice, even if it is opposite in content.  They are good men.  You are right that Paul's position is consistent and clear - but it is mistaken, I believe.  I am with him on the Constitution and the economy, but not on foreign policy.  If we could have stopped Hitler in 1937, should we have done it?  


One more point about the Iraq and Afghan wars -- I don't agree that they were the cause of our financial woes today.  The combination of those two wars since 2003 doesn't come close to the spending lost through the housing crisis.  "The sum of all the deficits from 2003 through 2010 is $4.73 trillion. Subtract the entire Iraq War cost and you still have a sum of $4.02 trillion."  (that is from this write up on the issue ----   http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/08/iraq_the_war_that_broke_us_not.html.)  The federal budgets were in the hands of the Dems since FY 2008, and the increase in spending is head-spinning.  Bush added $4T to the deficit in 8 years, and Obama added that much in 2.  Each should have to answer to the American people for their gross mis-management of our tax dollars, I think.  But as to the war - the entire Iraq War, from 2003 to fall of 2011 cost $709B.  In the first few months of Obama's term, the Dem-controlled congress spent more than that on one stimulus package.  This is just the truth.  Here's the chart:



SO about the bailouts, I am surely not an expert in this field, so I don't know what to suggest -- I AM an expert about my own household economy (not that I handle it well, only that I know more about it than anyone else...), and I find that when I spend more than I make I get into trouble.  I would assume that the principle extends to governments as well (and I hold Greece and Spain up as examples).  I think there has been a very sincere attempt on the part of many well-meaning people to do something good for those in need, namely help more low-income people into houses and out of renting.  However, it was a little like trying to help more people get where they are going faster by getting them to flap their arms and jump off high buildings.  It may seem like a good goal, but it doesn't take reality into consideration.  So - we had a lot of people hitting the economic pavement at terminal velocity.  It didn't matter to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd - they were receiving kickbacks from Fannie and Freddie to write the laws to exempt the mortgage houses from careful scrutiny.  (If the Occupy WS folks really wanted to address corruption, all they would have to do is read the books being written on the Fannie/Freddie horrors.)  Countrywide made out well for a long time...but then Wall St bundled those bad debts and sold them to unsuspecting investors, spreading the disease around the world, and THIS is the reason we have such a terrible economy now, and that's why Bush and Obama felt the need to spend the the breathtakingly huge amounts in bailouts.  The Dems passed spending bills without the need for a single Republican vote in 2009, including the Obama health care bill (that came in at $1T all by itself, and they now say was grossly under estimated).  This is the reason why the Dems lost the House and nearly the Senate in 2010.  I think that (if the country doesn't have short-term memory loss) the House and the Senate and the WH will be in Republican hands this time next year.

Why does it need to be so difficult?  The reason that Europe is going under financially, and the USA is not far behind, is that countries have decided to care for the poor through the government rather than through the Church.  When the Church cares for the poor, the poor are given a much larger gift than simply food or money.  When the government is first told that it can have no religious affiliation, then is told it must be compassionate, it cannot help but offer only short-term material benefit, and so has no hope of getting the better of the problem.  The church offers spiritual help as well as material help, and the Church offers the possibility of membership in a community - a community of people who are dedicated to living their lives for God instead of for themselves.  This one aspect would disallow an individual to remain on welfare for very long.

Say you had a classmate who could never get his papers written on time, and regularly asked to copy yours and turn them in as his own.  What if you had actually agreed to do this several times?  Wouldn't you eventually try to explain to him that it actually would be better for him in the long run to get his own C than to get your A?  Can you imagine how you would feel if a majority of your classmates and teachers sided with him arguing that they couldn't see how a C is better than an A in any way, so you should be more compassionate and let him copy your work each week?  This is what it sounds like to those who are already paying most of the nation's taxes when politicians tell them, "you have to pay your fair share."  The amount considered "fair" is not based on how much an individual should be required to contribute to the government, rather it is based on how much the individual will have left over compared to those who are less well-off.  It is as though an equal amount of money for each citizen is a right that can be enforced by the government.  Our ancestors called this tyranny.  I don't believe that replacing the current president with another will solve this problem, but if he were replaced, it would be a sign that our country may have what it takes to survive this world-wide economic madness, and might be able to show the EU an alternative to the welfare state.  If we all agreed that we mustn't bankrupt our government, and drastically reduced our spending in nearly every area, we would all be motivated to find an alternative to provide help for those in need - an alternative that would have to take a person's entire humanity into consideration, as the Church does.

In order for a culture to accept homosexual practice as a cultural norm, people need to sever the link between enjoyment and purpose.

It is easy to see why people want to turn the question of homosexual marriage into a civil rights case.  People should be free to marry whoever is preferred - society and its government shouldn’t be able to interfere in the personal lives and loves of its people.  It is such a basic thought that to question it is to question both individual freedom and the very institution of marriage.  God, rather than being a Designer with our best interests at heart, seems to become a cosmic kill-joy, creating people with desires they cannot satisfy.  It seems we should oppose this limitation on principle, even if it doesn’t apply to us personally.

But on the contrary, God’s design of us must make us reconsider.  Even if my opponent has dismissed the possibility of God himself, he can’t ignore the very specific practical purposes of the “hardware” we have each been given.  (on a side note, it is not surprising that in a world that believes only in the physical, when the physical reflects a Designer, the first response is to ignore it, and if it cannot then be explained away, the next option is surgery...in any case, the physical MUST not be allowed to stand in the way of personal gratification.)  In order to embrace (forgive the pun) the homosexual life as culturally acceptable, we must disengage the passionate experience from the purpose.  If the sexual climax becomes the goal of the act, then who is to say that there is only one way to accomplish it?  Why not two men?  But with this reasoning, why should one stop there?  Why not 3?  Or with machines, or animals, or children?  By rejecting the idea that the male is made for the female and vice versa, and separating the experience of sex from any sense of purpose for the act beyond momentary pleasure (building relation between husband and wife for raising the children they make; literally making the children; forging links in the generations of an extended family), we have become sexual anorexics.  We like the taste of the food, but we reject (and eject) the nourishment.  Imagine a culture that spent all of its time preparing and chewing the finest of foods but never swallowing.  Wouldn’t that group eventually have to find ways to artificially ingest nourishment?  IV lines into the arms, taking vitamins... and wouldn’t they necessarily have increased illnesses, physical and emotional?  Is our culture not that way to a degree already?  If we divorce the connection between nourishment and pleasure we will misunderstand the entire eating process.  The same is true of sexuality.  If we disconnect the pleasurable experience from the function, we will misunderstand the entire plan and purpose.

And it is no good claiming this is only a problem with those who practice homosexuality, it is just as much a problem for those heterosexuals who have made this separation.  To indulge the pleasure of the moment without a knowledge of the purpose of the act is like clear-cutting forests or strip mining land.  We want the profits and don’t care about what we do to our selves, our partners, or our homes.  In each case, we need a re-grounding in the design of the Designer, and a reminder about how we are to both tend AND keep the world we have been given:  tending means to help it come to fruition, and keeping means to protect and cherish.

When two men decide to care for one another in the way of husband and wife, they are not only going against the physical evidence, they are misunderstanding the nature of marriage.  Marriage is the harmonizing of two people.  Harmony in music (at least since 1100) can only happen when there is more than one pitch:  a unison is not harmony.  Two of the same gender cannot create harmony, harmony requires difference.  And it is interesting that when two different pitches are tuned properly they generate overtones - some of which are actually new pitches, not merely octave representations of the original two.

What’s more, the greatest example of harmony is to be found within the Trinity.  There, the three Persons have been in harmonic relation throughout eternity, making one single God able to love and relate in harmony, not unison.  There are not three Fathers, or three Sons, or three Spirits -- there is one of each, and they have specific relations and roles they each play in relation to each other.  Marriage is designed to be an imitation of that relation: a harmony of one made up of two different ones, and that cannot be accomplished if the two are of the same gender.

For those who look on reality from a sentimental point of view, it may seem harsh or unkind to put limits on the definition of marriage when it means that many desires will go unsatisfied.  But surely this is a view that places individual desire above reality?  Don’t we have rules that keep peoples’ desires in check in other arenas of life?  Don’t we say that it is wrong to have sex with minors?  (there are those trying to change that too, by the way, and on the same principles)  and don’t we say that it is wrong to favor your own gender or race above others in court or business hiring?  Why should those desires, preferences, and inclinations be limited when sexual desires are allowed free reign?

Why do you suppose past generations have been so clearly against homosexual practice?  Could it be that they understood the design of the world better than we do, and, like the reasonable ban on adultery, knew that certain practices, if allowed free reign, would destroy the society?

Bill is a coal miner.  His father was a coal miner, and his grandfather was too.  Here’s a picture of him coming out of the mine one day, with his fellow workers in their hard hats, grinning, looking forward to lunch.

But last year, Bill turned 22, and began to think that the mines were not as safe as they should be for the men who worked in them.  He thought that if they were designed differently, he might be able to reduce the number of cave ins, so he began to think like an engineer, and learned quickly that he didn’t know what he needed to know about mine design, so he decided to start an engineering degree at the local vo-tech college.  He took out a few student loans, and finished his degree nights while working a few shifts to make ends meet.

Once finished, he worked in the engineering office as an apprentice for a couple of years, and eventually was able to craft some designs of his own that were indeed very helpful for the company, and as a result, he was hired as an engineer (which paid, by the way, a salary higher than the hourly he drew as a miner).  As the company implemented his designs, there were fewer problems, and the company turned a greater profit.  As a result, he was given a bonus from the owners, and even some stock in the company.  

Later, with his own salary, he purchased more stock in the company, as he wanted to invest something back into the business that had given him a livelihood.  (He could have invested in pork bellies, or aerospace, and might have made more money in the long run, but he didn’t know anything about them, and his heart was in mining).  So after awhile, he found that he owned a good portion of the company that he was working for, and as a result, as the company prospered, so did Bill.

Here’s a picture of Bill at age 62, leaving from the board room after discussing with the board the best designs for some new mines.  Mines they were able to purchase partly because Bill had made the company more efficient.  The company’s profits were spent opening these new mines, hiring more miners, and raising the hourly rates of the best miners (they wanted to keep their best producers happy).

Let’s compare the two pictures.  The first is of Bill, dirty but grinning, wearing a blue collar and helmet; a worker.  And the second was of Bill, clean, wearing a white collar, and looking for all the world like “management.” 

But it is the same person.  He was only a member of a “class” of people when you see his life in still photographs.  If you see his life as a movie, day to day, his life is quite different.

Why should we be told in our country that “The rich are getting richer” or that “the corporations are taking the profits” as though these things are bad things?  The only way the rich get richer is if the business is profitable.  The only way the business is profitable is if they have product and buyers.  The only way they have product and buyers is if the company is producing, and the only way the company can produce is if jobs are assigned and each does his job well.  The CEO all the way to the least experienced miner.  And the only way that you can hire CEOs OR miners is if you pay them a salary commensurate with their abilities.  That means that some will be paid more than others.  If some are paid more than others, it means by necessity that there will be the well-paid (rich) and the lesser-paid (poor).  There is nothing insulting, sinful, degrading, or cruel about paying one more than the other.  Bill was paid to dig coal by the hour when he started out, and was paid to design mines for coal workers to work in, and the two amounts were not the same.  The difference in pay was simply a designation of the fact that the design work was considered more valuable by the hour than the digging (rather like a pound of diamonds are worth more than a pound of mulch).  This was the result of the kind of gifts being exercised, and the rarity of those gifts.  It really is the result of supply and demand:  the supply of coal miners is larger than the supply of mine engineers, and the supply of those who have the ability to run the company are rarer still.  The greater the supply, the lower the salary one can require.  Likewise the demand:  there is a demand for coal miners, otherwise none would be hired.  It is not the kindness or cruelty of the owner of the mines that many or few jobs are offered to miners -- the demand for the coal dictates how much coal he needs to produce, and that dictates how many miners he needs to produce that amount.  If the demand for coal suddenly went down, he would make less money with the company, and there would be no need for all the workers.  On the other hand, if the demand goes up, the owner needs to hire more workers, and as the demand for workers goes up, so does the pay for a miner (meaning that the worker benefits when the company does well).  If the owner were to keep all the profits for himself, he would not be putting the money into the pay for the miners, and they would not produce the amount of coal that he needs for the demand.  This (like another still photograph of one moment in time) LOOKS possible, but it is only possible for a few moments before the company falls apart.  The way the owner makes money is not by hoarding profits, it is selling the coal that he pays the miners to collect.  If they don’t produce, he doesn’t have any profits to “keep.”  If the demand for an excellent CEO or a trained mine engineer is high, there will be competition for their services at more than one company.  The market-rate for hiring someone with that rare set of skills will go up, and the miner is a fool if he complains that those with greater or rarer skills are making more money than he is.  It is part and parcel of the same system that pays him for the work he is doing.  Destroy or interrupt the market’s influences on others and you will soon find that your own position is destroyed or interrupted as well.  It is all the same piece of cloth.

In one picture, Bill looks like “the poor” in another he looks like “the rich” -- but he is the same person.  Conservatives are accused of protecting “the rich” while abusing “the poor” - as though they are protecting Bill the coal miner from Bill the stock-purchasing mine engineer.  But they are the same person.  What conservatives are actually trying to do is to remember that life is not a still photograph but a moving, living, breathing day-to-day life where people are in flux, and because of this, they think that the best way to proceed is to protect freedom for each and every person regardless of position when the picture is taken.  This is the freedom that Bill benefitted from.

Attacking the rich to serve the poor only makes sense if you see the world in categories suggested in still photographs.  The attack takes all those in one category and forces them to help those in the other.  If you see life more as a movie, the result of this attack is only to discourage Bill from studying, improving his gifts and offerings, and contributing more to the need of the company and the community.  The result is that Bill remains a miner all his life (which is not bad in and of itself) but because of that, he doesn’t improve the mines, which in turn leads to more injuries and deaths.  It also leads to lower profits for the company in the long run which means that they are not able to buy more mines and employ more workers, and the miners that ARE working are paid less than they would have been.  How is this better in any meaningful way?

This is the reason we have a stagnant economy right now.  

ps - some would say that I am not an economist.  They would be right.  But what about my parable here is wrong?  It may be an oversimplification of more complex issues, but I would rather have you think of it as principled.  Where are the principles wrong?  I will consider any argument on that level.  Arguments that suggest simply that I have neglected the complications of economics because I am not an economist must first address how those added complications oppose or change the principles I am offering before they will carry any weight with an honest man.  

Rational activity involves both ends and means.  In a technological age we acquire an increasing grasp of the means to our goals, and a decreasing grasp of the reasons why we should pursue them.  The clarity of purpose that I observed in Homer’s Odysseus is not a clarity about means:  it is a clarity about ends, about the things that are worth doing for their own sake, like grieving and loving and honoring the gods.  The mastery of means that emancipated mankind from drudgery has brought with it a mystery of ends - an inability to answer, to one’ sown satisfaction, the question what to feel or do.  The mystery deepens with the advent of the consumer society, when all the channels of social life are devoted to consumption.  For consumption, in its everyday form, is not really and end.  It destroys the thing consumed and leaves us empty-handed:  the consumer’s goals are perpetually recurring illusions, which vanish at the very moment they loom into view, destroyed by the appetite that seeks them.  The consumer society is therefore phatasmagoric, a place in which the ghosts of satisfactions are pursued by the ghosts of real desires.

Roger Scruton, from An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, page 32

I would like to make a case for something that should need no case – faith.  Ultimately, faith itself is nothing – it is the object of faith that is significant (obviously I could have faith that my pen would save me – and a nice pen it is too – but God Himself is a bit more authoritative regarding my soul).  So I don’t mean in any way to say that it doesn’t matter who you put your faith in.  However, I would like to take a minute to consider faith itself and what part it plays in the life of a person.

I have often fallen into a way of thinking that goes sort of like this:  there is a clear choice in life.  You can either live by faith, or you can live by sight.  The Christian (and followers of other religions) live by faith, the typical atheistic scientist lives by sight.  And this dichotomy runs full through all things – you can know by faith (that is, taking the bible seriously), or you can know by sight (that is, trusting your senses, your experiences, the latest science).  Knowing itself is accomplished by 2 different routes, and the Christian is on one, and the majority of the academic world is on the other.  (Small wonder we have such dissonances at college!)

But this is a cheat – what I am finding is that it is not this way at all.  It turns out that living and knowing by faith is the default position, and that even those who claim to be living and knowing by sight are not able to do so.  In fact, no one lives without faith.  By that, I mean everyone lives trusting in things he cannot see or touch.

When you go to the dentist, a strange and mysterious thing happens – a person (and perhaps someone you don’t even know), in a mask and white coat, picks up a needle, or a sharp instrument, or sometimes something that sounds like a tiny buzz saw, and asks you to open your mouth.  Now, one might question a person’s sanity at what happens next.  Like lambs to the slaughter, we dutifully open our mouths.  It happens every day, at hundreds of points around the city, and no one thinks anything of it.  Nothing on the news… but if you want to see just how insane this act is, just change the circumstances.  Let’s say you are walking down a dark alley one night and out from the shadows jumps a guy with a needle in one hand and a sharp instrument in the other and he says “Open up!”  The mask and white coat that seemed so reassuring on the dentist would only make this guy creepier.   In each case we have to make a decision about obeying or politely refusing the command.  How do we make that decision?  Faith.  If you believe in the person making the request, you can obey.  If you don’t you can’t.  That’s the way of the world.  It is the same way with God – if you believe Him, you can obey Him, if you don’t, you can’t.  And suddenly, it makes sense to hear Him tell us that without faith it is impossible to please God.  Or that the righteous will live BY FAITH.

In fact, we do nearly everything by faith – we certainly believe when we do things like taking wedding vows, or trusting the promises in the scripture.  But these acts are not as strange as the world thinks when we point out that we also sign contracts, cross streets in front of busses, pet our dogs, and sit in chairs by faith.  We believe bus drivers won’t run us over, or that our dogs won’t bite us, and that a chair will hold our weight.  

You may rightly say that having faith in God and having faith in my chair are not the same thing, and you would be right, but not in the way people usually think.  The argument usually goes that faith in God is faith in something we can’t see while faith in the chair is in something we do see.  And furthermore, that we have experience with chairs, so we are trusting in our own experience and our senses.  This sounds very good until you think about it a little more deeply.  

We actually are unable to trust our senses and experience unless we have a world that is coherent – that is, if we pet a dog six days in a row without a bite, we probably don’t even think about his biting us on the seventh.  Or the scientist in the lab who yesterday put two chemicals together and observes the result assumes that if he today combines the same chemicals in the same situation, he will observe the same result.  But there is no reason to believe this.  Why would that be?  Why isn’t the universe actually random?  Why don’t dogs change their personalities on an irregular basis?  Where do these laws of nature come from if there is no design that they adhere to?  And how can there be a design if there is no designer?  

Fact is, there is not only no reason to trust the uniformity of the laws of nature, there is no reason why we should be able to trust our senses – why don’t we SEE differently from one day to the next?  Can’t our senses be fooled?  Have you noticed how in the last 10 years there have been a lot of movies about false realities?  Did you see the film The Matrix?  Or the 13^th Floor?  Or Dark City?  Or The Truman Show?  They are all about how our senses are fooled into thinking that we are experiencing reality when we are actually not.  We know that our eyes can be fooled by certain sensual experiences – when we see a pole in the water that looks broken by refraction, or see a mirage on the road due to heat and reflection, et c.

And one more element:  memory.  For things to make sense we have to REMEMBER what happened the last time we pet the dog or combined the chemicals.  If we don’t, we don’t have the benefit of predicting the outcome, and it is that prediction that makes it possible for our actions.  Have you noticed how many films there have been in the last 10 years about the loss of memory?  Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Paycheck, What Dreams May Come, even Dorrie in Finding Nemo.  Each of these films has at least one character who has lost his memory – and there is always something horrible about that experience – we know ourselves by our memories as well.  Who we love, who our family and friends are, where we live, work, how to work the cell phone…

My point in all this is that without faith, we cannot obey God, but neither can we obey our dentist.  Without faith we have to give up the Christian worldview, but we also have to give up the scientific worldview because we cannot trust our senses, our experiences, or our memories unless there is a God who designed everything, gave us senses to see things as they really are, and memories that are reliable.  In the end, it is NOT a question of living by faith or living by sight – it is only a question of what or who you are going to put your faith IN.  Saying that we are not going to live by faith is really a little like saying I am not going to breathe air – I can try water or chocolate pudding, or ammonia, but it won’t last long…the reason is, we were MADE to be faithful creatures.  

So it shouldn’t surprise us that God teaches us that 

1 - we can’t please Him without faith, 

2 – that our righteousness is accomplished not by our obedience, but by our faith in His obedience,

3 – that we should walk by faith not by sight, and even that

4 – we should always remember what the Lord has done for us (Deut 6)

When Moses knows he is going to be leaving the Israelites, he gathers them around to tell them one last thing:  and that is to ALWAYS REMEMBER.  Why?  Because they were to pass the faith down to the next generation, and our memory of what God has done for us tells us who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.  All things quite necessary for us to remain sane.

One last point:  this all means that revelation and reason are not two different ways to know things:  they are two sides of the same coin.  We don’t think that there are two ways to go, like faith OR science – revelation OR reason.  Both are gifts from God given to better know Him, His plans, and how we fit into them.  We know that revelation is a gift from God, but it turns out reason is a gift too – given to be able to make sense of revelation.  And revelation comes in two types:  Special and General.

In a blog today, someone called Steve Aden had an interesting point:  "In law and culture, as in all spheres of life, the “natural order” tends always to disorder. Culture, as the term implies, must be cultivated, because bad ideas drive out good ones like weeds in an unkempt garden."


He went on to speak rightly of the need to stand against abortion, but it seemed to me as I read it that it could be equally a call to stand against the foolish thinking in many other areas of political and cultural life.  


I have never read Mr. Aden before, but I think he hit on something when he said that culture comes first, then law.  And while we may understandably feel overwhelmed when we as individuals think of making or remaking laws, making culture is a matter of daily choice for each and all of us.  Culture is simply the fabric we create when we make the thousands of little decisions every day about how we will choose to live.  Will we mow our grass or not?  Where will we invest our time and money?  Dine at home or out tonight?  What shoes will I wear?  How will I arrange our bathroom cabinet?  What will we do for a living?  Do those drapes go with that couch?  


And these questions are answered only after we have answered more fundamental ones:  what do we believe is valuable?  what true?  what good?  what beautiful?  What/who do we trust to guide us when we define these categories?  


But this leads me back to the first quote from Mr. Aken.  In all spheres of life, the natural way is toward disorder.  Things, if left alone, will fall apart, not come together.  It requires energy, time, expense, focus, discipline, for good to occur.  In short, it takes a will to work to make things good.  A culture declines as soon as it thinks that good can occur without work.  If we were ever, for example, to come to the point that most people wanted to live well without working, we would come apart at the seams as a culture.  We would go down in the history books like Rome: defeated not by outward attack, but by a lack of inward commitment to the good, true, and beautiful.  Without the will to strive for these things the natural forces take over, and we decline into barbarism.  Cultures decline due to exhaustion - we can rest on our rakes, but we can't put them away.  Things don't stay neutral, they decline, so without a vision, there is no work to accomplish that vision, and thus the people perish.  The welfare state/big government issues are not my point here - big government is the natural result of what I am saying which is that making cultural decisions like what is beautiful, and what is delicious turn out to be far more important than we have been led to believe.  Those commitments to the good, true, beautiful, by millions of people, leads to civilization with wiser laws, more honest governors, truer charity, and sounder fiscal policy.  In the long run, we must be committed to principles that make a certain course of action distasteful (even if it is legal), and so rejected because it runs against our corporate vision of the human life well lived before God.  Without these inner commitments, there is no civilization in our culture.  

Did you ever fear that God's requirements of you were too much to ask?  That death to self was just a little too far?  There really HAS to be some part of your life that you can call "your own"?  That God keeps His hands off?  What if we were looking at that the wrong way, and that everything we keep for ourselves will eventually die?  Here's CS Lewis from a little-known essay:


"For some (nobody knows which) the Christian life will include much leisure, many occupations we naturally like.  But these will be received from God's hands.  In a perfect Christian they would be as much part of his "religion" his "service" as his hardest duties, and his feasts would be as Christian as his fasts.  What cannot be admitted - what must exist only as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy - is the idea of something that is "our own," some area in which we are to be "out of school" on which God has no claim.

For He claims all, because He is love and must bless.  He cannot bless us unless He has us.  When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.  Therefore, in love, He claims all.  There's no bargaining with Him."

from the essay, "A Slip of the Tongue,"  CS Lewis (The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

Praise God that He won't allow us even the smallest part of our own lives...it is out of His love for us that He does not.

Ok, you dads, let's say you have a teenaged daughter who borrowed the credit card for one purchase, then used it to run up a huge balance buying the "latest things" that she convinced herself she couldn't live without.  Once she got into the delightful rhythm of buying anything anytime, not really thinking about anything but the joy of spending, she didn't want to give the card back.  "Just one more day, dad!  I'll be careful!"  How could you refuse?  But after that first week the bills were staggering.  The second week balances that were only terrible turned astronomical, and you insist that she give the card back.  Now she won't.  Perhaps she can't.  What would you do?

There seem to be two schools of thought on how to proceed.  One way is to call the credit card company and stop the card.  Then, tell the girl that the only way to put things right would be to get TWO jobs and work until the balance is paid off, even if it takes a year or two.  The other way is first to go along, then ignore, then finally when your wife insists you do something, tell the girl that you'll make a deal with her.  If she will just begin to curb her spending -- not stop altogether, just make a reduction of, say, 2% a year -- you will call the credit card company and ask them to raise the limit on the card so that she can continue to spend.

Why would anyone choose the second course of action?  Perhaps we think the pain of the cuts will be too hard, and the daughter will have to suffer too much.  (was it a gift you gave her, or a right?  That will go a long way to helping clarify things.)  We might also think we dads are partially to blame anyway, because we didn't raise her right, or gave her the card before she was wise enough to use it.  (sound condescending?)  Or, we might be tempted to take this second route if we knew we were planning to divorce her mom and move away soon, leaving the girl and the debt with mom...

For him who has ears to hear...

I thought you'd like to see this interesting piece written by a friend of mine, Vishal Mangalwadi on the work and long-lasting influence of William Carey in India.  It speaks volumes about the importance of all we just discussed about "what is man?" at the Circe conference in Dallas: how the cultural aspects of the Faith take root in the lives and practices of a people, giving an Incarnational reality to teaching.  And notice that later even at a point when many no longer believed the Gospel, Indians still live and think according to the patterns of a Christian culture, and benefit from them (for example, no longer practicing sati or child sacrifice).

I am not advocating this approach because I give greater value to cultural influence in this world then to the state of souls, I am just pointing out that when souls are converted, they begin to consciously change language, literature, technology, politics, et c., in accordance with the innate nature and value of the human being.  The result is a culture that makes the Faith all the more reasonable, and harder to disagree with than it would be without it -- for example, when one Indian says to the other, "This Christianity cannot be true."  The other might say, "I don't understand all of it, and I don't much care for the whole 'death-to-self' that it teaches, but look at the more humane way of life we now have.  We don't starve while protecting cows, we no longer perform child sacrifice, our political system no longer withholds justice from the poor simply because of their poverty, we are safer on the streets, we have universities and hospitals, people live more hopeful lives, and government corruption is down, so we have more money.  It may be that Christianity is not true, but if it is a lie, it is certainly a helpful one.  Maybe we should give its beliefs a second look before we give up on it."

In the West today, it would be good to get a glimpse of what life was like before the Christian mind led the culture.  To do so, we would have to go back a lot farther into our own past than the Indians do -- perhaps back to Old Testament times to read how the Persians, or the Philistines, or the Cartheginians lived.  Or maybe not that far back - perhaps the Celts, Goths, Saxons or Vikings before they were converted. These cultures lacked more than just electricity or anesthesia (neither of those was available as late as the American Civil War), what they lacked was a view of the human that couldn't even imagine universities, hospitals, or statues of blind justice.

In a culture in decline, a Christian standing alone but calling on his cultural inheritance stands in the midst of a majority.  To cultures in ascent, the work may be to call barbarians to imagine what the culture might become, but today we are in decline, and dismissal of our own history and cultural inheritance will only make the Gospel less compelling.  In either situation, however, Christians are advocates of the "permanent things," not looking longingly back to a golden cultural past, OR hoping for a utopian cultural future.  Of course those things do exist.  The Faithful, simply living out belief in permanent things, generate times that in retrospect will seem golden, and contemplate a future that will actually BE golden.

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.  James 2:10

Imagine that you are asked to sweep the porch, but you take one straw out of the broom you have been given and insist on sweeping with that.  It would certainly take you a lot longer.  No one could complain that you are not sweeping -- you are.  No one could complain that you are not using a broom -- you are, albeit a very small one...

This is what happens when a culture decides to remove one virtue from the bible to use to bring about good in the world.  No one can complain that you are not attempting to do good -- you are.  And no one can complain that you are not quoting from the bible -- you are, albeit only part of what it says.

It is no good trying to pull society in the direction of a particular virtue unless you are willing to call them to ALL virtue.  It is right and good to call the rich to care for the poor (the bible condemns the rich using their wealth to withhold justice from the poor), but not without also calling the poor to work for their employers as though they were serving Jesus Himself (Eph 6:7), or denying food to those who don’t work (2 Thess. 3:10).  And this doesn’t begin to touch on the call to sexual purity, soberness, and honor of parents...

Today, we hear each of the political parties claiming moral high ground for their positions:  “stop greed!” or “grant liberty!”  But it is no good removing these straws from the broom of what CS Lewis calls “the Tao” and attempting to sweep with them.  The only thing worse would be to remove two from the broom and pit them against each other.  Then even the sweeping stops, and the devil just laughs as we use our straw to beat each other.  "How can you be against us?  We are for liberty!"  or "Anyone who opposes us is in favor of greed!"  More than that, don’t we assume that only the rich can be greedy?  And don’t we really think that liberty only means the right to be left alone to do as you please?  Even the definitions of these virtues need to be drawn from the broom.  The broom offers far more benefit than great numbers -- each individual virtue is limited by and defined by the others in the broom, and only in the broom can they do the work they are able to do.  The broom teaches that greed is universal, and can be just as strong in the poor as in the rich.  Having money doesn’t make you greedy, being greedy just makes you focus on acquiring money.  Liberty is only meaningful if it is used to do the right thing, not anything.  So, not only do we need liberty, we need a definition of the right toward which we might exercise our liberty.

The reality is that anything short of the full person of Jesus is going to be short of true goodness.  

TS Eliot was right, there are two ways to go:  you can hold a progressive view of the world, or you can hold a tragic view.  Who would choose the latter when he could have the former?  Progressive sounds so new and intelligent and so forward-looking, and optimistic.  The tragic view sounds so negative, so old-fashioned, so hopeless.  Who would knowingly choose to view the world as tragic?  Besides, Christians are to see the story as having a happy ending, right?  Jesus wins!  Life is not a tragedy!  In fact, there's even to be a wedding!  Why. so. serious?

The problem with the progressive perspective is that it is an attempt to have the happy ending without Jesus.  If Jesus is leading his followers to a happy ending, it seems a little like bad taste to see things as tragic.  We just need to be optimistic.  Ah, there's the rub:  optimism.  To be an optimist one needs to believe that the world is basically good, and that given time and a little room to maneuver, things will turn out right.  But this dismisses the most important point of our reckoning: the Fall.  The world is not how it was supposed to be, and all the king's horses and all the king's men...

The worst aspect of progressivism shows up in a Romantic view of the world.  The Romantic says sensation is the best guide, experience is the best mode of learning, and human maturity is measured by how much depravity you have been exposed to.  Today, young people are surrounded with media (books, tv, movies, internet, social media) that are considered "edgy," "dark," "cool" based mainly on how far they are willing to use foul language, on how many extreme experiences they address (such as cutting, rape, incest, drug use, suicide, et c.), and generally on how frequently they offer subjects that their parents would oppose.  Without cultural events that celebrate a young person's entrance into adulthood (getting a driver's license, or reaching the drinking age are seemingly the best we can do), it is not surprising that it seems to a teen that "pushing the envelope" is the normal course of maturity.

But isn't this just how the entire culture thinks?  To progress we think we need to try the newest thing, the newest stimulant, sexual perversion, expensive toy, sensational movie, get-rich scheme, restaurant, slim-down plan, fashion, definition of marriage, faddish scientific theory?  Some say that if we stand for nothing we will fall for anything.  When we find our culture falling for anything can we assume that we are standing for nothing?  If we leave God our of our cultural calculations, we have no sense of direction, our reasoning won't give us much guidance either, and we are left with being led by our sensations.  Even those who claim to follow Jesus can be swept up in the overwhelming current of the current.

So are we left with the "tragic" view?  Why is it called tragic?  Because it DOES take the Fall seriously.  There was a real fall, things are not the way they are supposed to be, and it doesn't take long to come to the conclusion that there is nothing we can do about it.  So the gospel is actually good news, but only to those who have accepted the tragic view of things.  Didn't Jesus say that he didn't come to heal the healthy but the sick?  Eliot puts it this way, "Our only health is the disease/if we obey the dying Nurse/ whose constant care is not to please/but to remind of our and Adam's curse./ And that to be restored, our sickness must grow worse."

Some want to say that our greatest need is to overcome poverty.  We couldn’t agree more.  However to say that poverty is simply a lack of money is to misunderstand poverty altogether.  “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  We need to minister to more than the lack of money.  IF we believe that this world is all there is, then a lack of money is the worst thing that can happen - it makes life in this world less comfortable.  But to live for comfort is to live the life of death.  But if this world is NOT all there is, there must be more to life than gaining wealth.  If we teach the poor that they somehow deserve as much wealth as their neighbors, and that are being oppressed because they don't have as much as their neighbors, we are only making them twice as fit for hell as we are ourselves.

It never pays in the long run to leave your Creator out of your equations.  We may be seeing a financial meltdown of the world's strongest economy.  One of the reasons is that we are spending more than we can possibly tax.  It doesn't matter if we raise taxes on the rich, we can't possibly tax people enough to pay for a budget that spends over 20% of our GDP.

One of the reasons the debt is so high is that welfare and medicare/aid payments increase each year as more of the baby-boomers reach retirement age.  These programs were put in place in Europe and the US when legislators couldn't imagine a declining birth rate, BUT for the last 3.5 decades we have been aborting our children.  We have aborted more than 50 million of our children in the US between 1973 and 2008.

We are arrogant to the point of insanity.  We make decisions about who we will love, where we will work, what laws we will pass, what medical decisions we will make, and how many children we will have all without considering what God thinks of it all -- and then we are surprised when we find that our calculations don't reflect the realities of life.

What is more, the rich themselves will become poor if they scorn marriage vows, as that results in unwanted pregnancies that end fatherless children or abortion.  It is secure families with responsible fathers that make for wealthy and stable communities.  We are literally destroying our future generations through debt and abortion, and only now does it dawn on us that the two are related.  If we abort our children, why shouldn't we find one day that there are not enough workers to pay for our government programs, or manage our debt service?

So, we covet, murder, and dishonor our parents, overspend to have all the creature comforts we want, then when we feel guilty instead of repentance and love of neighbor, we turn and offer the same materialist life to those who are less fortunate:  we demand that the government pay for comforts for everyone, which runs our government into bankruptcy.  But then we control the future generations through abortion in order to save ourselves the shame, duty, cost, or trial of caring for the children we have conceived.  This is the very definition of madness.   Could this be our lot when we decide to leave God out of our decision process?  Read Romans 1 again.

"It does not do to leave a dragon out of your calculations if you live near him."  said JRR Tolkien.

God is much closer than any dragon, and ignoring Him is infinitely more dangerous.

“Seven Stanzas at Easter”
from Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

(ed note - this version is a better reproduction of Updike's original layout).

ON ABORTION AND RIGHTS

The abortion debate seems to be the conflicting interests of two groups of individuals: the woman and her rights, vs. the unborn baby and his rights. When a government legalizes abortion on demand, it is saying that the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the unborn child, and that legalization doesn’t REQUIRE anyone to go against his conscience, so has no power to coerce anyone against his conscience.

There are several problems with this approach, of course. First, it seems obvious that there is no one to stand up for the rights of the child. If we are to consider individual rights, don’t we need to consider those? But could it be that this argument assumes the PUBLIC approach to the question? By assuming the highest good is to protect the rights of the individual, we pit the right of one against another and can’t win (of course, the woman’s “right to choose” is itself an example of begging the question as it assumes its conclusion in its premises. If the question is, “Is abortion on demand moral?” we assume the answer is affirmative when we claim the inherent good of “a woman’s right to choose” -- a woman may have many rights, but she has no right to do evil. We don’t say that robbing a liquor store is something a woman has a right to choose, so there is a category of actions that are not allowable -- we are trying to decide if THIS is one of them or not. To claim that a woman’s right to choose is an argument in favor of abortion on demand is to claim that the abortion itself is NOT in that category of disallowable actions.)

The other problem is that we may be giving too much ground to the PUBLIC approach over that of the COMMUNITY (to use Wendell Berry’s terms). The PUBLIC assumes that the rights of the individual are paramount, the rights of families are secondary. But the COMMUNITY, a collection of individuals who have exercised their freedom of choice to define marriage in a biblical fashion, holds that the family is the smallest unity and as such, deserves protection. In the case of the COMMUNITY, the argument against abortion is far more than a debate between the right of mother as an individual and the right of the child as one. It is between the survival of the family and its extinction. The argument against abortion on demand may be better put by addressing it as one part of a larger and more multi-faceted attack against families in general. It absolves men and women of the responsibility to raise are care for a child, it ends any responsibility on the part of the father altogether, and it encourages the mother to pursue the level of responsibility allowed the father. In other words, abortion undermines the basic structure of the family, and through it, the family’s significance in the Community, thus ending the Community.

All the statistics about crime, school dropout rates, poverty, sexual promiscuity (and more) stem from broken families - why can’t we argue that anything that undermines the family will have the result of undermining the culture at large?

The reason is clear - to buy this definition of family without buying into the rest of the Christian view of the world is next to impossible. The moral restrictions seem too binding to lead to personal happiness, is the entire thing is rejected. Without a definition of marriage that has authority, we will (as a culture) embrace self-centeredness and each become an individual and expect the government to defend the rights of individuals against any choice the Community might make (and think they are doing a good thing when they do so.) If we Christians buy into this and attempt to argue pro-life law from a position of individual rights (of the baby) we may have already lost the war as we have assumed the individual rights argument is the only one that is valid.

Once there was a man who died and was offered a chance to visit both heaven and hell before he took up his eternal residence. First he was shown hell. There, he saw a great round supper table which sat many people. At the center of the table was a pot full of beef stew that smelled delicious. Each person around the table had a long-handled spoon that could reach the pot of stew easily, and there was plenty there to go around for everyone. However, there was a problem. A spoon handle that was long enough to reach all the way to the food was too long to reach your mouth, and as a result, everyone in the room was in a state of eternal starvation and all within a few feet of a feast. This scene was not for the man, who asked to be shown heaven. On arrival there, the man was astonished to see the exact same scene: a table, delicious food, and long-handled spoons longer than your arm. But here, everyone was eating and fully satisfied with as much as they wanted. The only difference was that they were feeding each other.

We are told that the Kingdom of God is not of this world, and that it has come to this world - it is all around us if we can but see it. It is like a mustard seed that is the smallest of seeds but grows into a tree that is large enough that birds can nest in it. We are told it is like a little bit of yeast that slowly works its way through the whole batch of dough. CS Lewis said that the point of death is not the beginning of life in heaven or hell, it starts right now, in every moment we live. We will look back from our eternal resting place and realize that we have always been there. That we experienced aspects of heaven or hell even while we lived.

The story above (like Lewis’ The Great Divorce) is a story not about life after death, but about heaven and hell, which are available not only after death but today, now, here. The one difference is that the ability to choose between them is available only before death.

Look around you and you can see hell. You see people with the ability to do many things. They can cook food, sell life insurance, tell stories, practice medicine, but they use their abilities for themselves, and find that they don’t want to cook for themselves, there is no need for life insurance if it is only for yourself, stories are meant to be shared, and physicians can’t heal themselves...

Look around you and you can see heaven. You see people with the ability to do many things, but they know that their abilities were never intended to provide for themselves. They cook food, sell life insurance, tell stories, practice medicine, but they do so in order to care for others, not worrying about how God is going to choose to care for them. These are the ones who live now in heaven already, and are clearly enjoying its freedom and joy now. Here. Today. They live in community with others to share their abilities with others, not only to get their own needs met. The only difference between heaven and hell is the selflessness of the redeemed, not the circumstances or gifts and abilities of each.

The socialist is the one who thinks that the people in hell are being wronged by the Cook who set the table. The leadership who made the stew and set the table must go, and allow us to take over the entire operation ourselves. Should the socialist ever get his way, he would set the table with proper spoons so that the people can feed themselves. Those who want to retain their long-handled spoons would have to first be shouted down, and eventually “liquidated” so that the rest would move into the new day of short spoons. (They would argue, “How can those long-handled guys be so cruel and heartless? Don’t they see how their insistence on long-handled spoons causes everyone to starve?”) However, once the spoons are shortened, everyone finds that the food is now too far away to reach. Their next step is to change the shape of the table, and when they find that it requires that some lose their seats at the table, they argue that it is a small price to pay for the majority to be able to eat. After some time redesigning the table again and again, only a very few seats at the table can both reach the food and feed themselves. As a result, only the strongest are able to take and hold a seat long enough to eat before being unseated by someone else, and the darkness called the “law of the jungle” descends.

The capitalist is the one who sees the truth that no one is equipped to feed himself, but attempts to make a profit for himself when he feeds others. This will work for a while, but eventually he will be tempted to think that he is surviving due to his own cleverness or business sense, and will become blind to the reality that he survives only because of the generosity of others, the same way they do, and that unless he uses his ability to feed others only for their good and not secretly for his own, he will find that he is increasingly hungry. His solution will be to raise his prices, and increase his “marketing.” If he is able to convince everyone else that they too should charge for their work of feeding others because then everyone would be able to provide for himself through money, he will unseat the spirit of selflessness. Inevitably this leads to a socialist uprising because while everyone needs food, only the most clever will make any money to buy it, and this will seem very unfair to the majority.

God has placed within the hearts of men the notion that selflessness is the path to life. The socialist and the capitalist use this notion to gather support for their respective causes. The socialist claims that “we” are being selfless, but “they” are not. We are the majority, but they have control over the food, the table, the size of the spoon handles...if they really cared about us, they would build it all differently so that we would not starve. (don’t ask HOW they should build it differently - the fact that it is not working right now is enough proof that our leaders are selfish and need to be replaced with us.)

The capitalist also sees this notion, but tries to convince everyone that in order to help others you must first help yourself. This works for a while, because it is true that you can’t give away what you haven’t got, so first grow your crops, then you can give them to your neighbors. But a seed of self-centeredness can be sown there. The problem comes when we begin to think about how much we want for ourselves. Why don’t I keep a bit for myself first, to be sure I have enough, then I’ll give away the rest. Let’s say, 30% for me, then give away the other 70%. Then, well let’s make it 40/60% or 50/50%. Heck - why do I have to give ANY of it away? I have enough for myself, so I don’t need to ask anything of anyone else. That’s a good thing, right? Not being a burden on my neighbors? So, why don’t they do the same? Aren’t they the selfish ones when they demand that I feed them?

In both cases, the internal notion that selflessness is inherently good is used to justify “our” actions as selfless, and condemn “theirs” as not. It is the very definition of irony to use a law written in our hearts by God to justify our sin. It is almost as though we are unable to save ourselves. It seems that on our own, self-centeredness is all that we can know and experience. Who will save us from this body of sin and death?

How do we offer heaven to the world? It seems it is true that the only way to live -- truly live -- is to die to yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus. That to die is gain. That to join and build a community of people who are willing to trust God for their needs really IS what it is all about. To be anxious about what we will eat or wear is how the pagans live, we are told. To worry is to give up on the one question that matters, and to be in hell already. Live it out yourself. Be the example of trust. Be fearless. Be selfless. What does it matter if we die in the attempt? We have already died. (Gal 2:20).