Category Archives: Weekly Column

The World Tomorrow Weekly Column with Jeff Patton

A new definition for “anxiety”: re-drawing the map in the Middle East!

Turmoil in Egypt. President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Brotherhood who was fairly elected by a majority of the electorate, is deposed from office in a coup d’état that no one wants to call a coup d’état. This unexpected over throw of the government was engineered by the Egyptian army, and about 20 million disgruntled ordinary Egyptians, secularists, and Coptic Christians. For the immediate future the most populous Sunni Arab nation in the Middle East will be pre-occupied by its domestic turmoil.

And then there is the on-going bloodbath in Syria that is fast devolving into a vicious, wide-ranging regional, sectarian conflict between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Are you feeling a little anxious yet about what this 21^st Century religious war in the Middle East could mean for us who live in the secular West?

There is a very real possibility that what started as a call for peaceful change in the tightly controlled political status quo of Syria, and then morphed into a vicious civil war conflict between Assad’s minority Alawite/Shi’ite ethnic group and the majority Sunni population of Syria, will now entangle Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey in a broader regional struggle between Shi’ites and Sunnis that could force a bloody re-drawing of the political map of the Middle East. The last time such a profound collapse in the Middle East’s equilibrium occurred was following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I. At that time the British and the French drew up much of the political map of the region as we now recognize it.

Perhaps you might say, so what. Let the Arabs kill each other. Who cares? Why should I feel anxious about this?

But what if the grand Shi’ite coalition involving Assad’s Alawite/Shi’ites supplied with Russian military hardware, Hezbollah Shi’ite fighters from Lebanon, Shi’ite dominated Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ special forces, and Iraq’s Shi’ite militia volunteers should manage to defeat the Sunni rebels in Syria, what then? The consequences for us in the West might be completely life-altering. The potential is just that significant.

For starters, a Shi’ite victory in Syria would put enormous pressure on Saudi Arabia’s ruling Sunni monarchy. The northeastern part of Saudi Arabia near Kuwait is that country’s major oil producing region, and by coincidence it also just happens to have a majority Shi’ite population. Unrest if not outright revolt in this region could translate overnight into a doubling of the spot price of a barrel of oil in the world markets to more than $200.00! A collapse of the fat-cat Saudi monarchy would also mean the collapse of the petro-dollar arrangement between the Saudi monarchy and the United States government and lead to the inevitable demise of the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency

You see, since the Second World War, Saudi Arabia has agreed to only sell its oil for U.S. dollars. And because of Saudi Arabia’s dominant position in the world’s trade in oil, this has helped shore up the U.S. dollar’s global pre-eminent status for the last 70 years.

Without the petro-dollar staked in the heart of the world’s petroleum addicted economy, the U.S. dollar becomes just one more fiat currency issued by a bankrupt government that has a debt to G.D.P. level greater than 100% and that has to continually borrow more and more every year because it can’t balance its budget. If the Saudi monarchy and the petro-dollar collapse, you can expect that the standard of living in North America will take an enormous hit—perhaps worse than what happened in Greece. Now that’s anxiety!

What to do? Jesus of Nazareth made this recommendation that will soon be even more relevant than when he spoke it:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles [the nations] seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Matthew 6:25-34 English Standard Version

For a long time now, the god we’ve been trusting has been the U.S. dollar. But this false god won’t help you much in the soon-coming future. Don’t you think it’s about time you became acquainted with the real God? Discover how to have a real relationship with the Bible’s God at www.cogwebcast.com.

There Be Monsters Amongst Us! A Mother’s Day Message

It would seem that some people will do just about anything to satisfy their sexual lusts. The latest horrific installment of this dark human weakness occurred in Cleveland, Ohio. Yes, the infamous case of Ariel Castro is just the latest manifestation of this fact of life, that there be indeed monsters amongst us! Having kidnapped and held captive three young women—Gina Dejesus, Amanda Berry, and Michelle Knight—Castro used them as his sex slaves for almost a decade.

As if rape, threats, chains and ropes are not enough of a nightmare, according to Michelle Knight, when her pregnancies became noticeable, Castro would starve and the beat her, hitting her womb to induce an abortion.

But it would appear that Castro was not a total monster. I suppose even Frankenstein’s monster had his softer moments. After all, Castro wanted a baby girl born to Amanda Berry to live. Michelle Knight recounted that Castro threatened to kill her if she did not successfully play the midwife to Amanda Berry as she gave birth in a plastic kiddie pool. This child was named Jocelyn and she too escaped with her Mom from Ariel Castro’s house. The little girl now 6 years old has known nothing but the society of her captor-father and his sex slaves. I doubt that without God’s healing the psychological scares inflicted on these women will never fully be healed short of that peace that can only be bestowed by God’s Holy Spirit.

I pray that God our Father and Christ Jesus our Savior will be kind to you and will bless you with peace! Titus 1:4

The families in this poor Cleveland neighbourhood are stunned. Castro was a well-known integral part of that tight-knit Puerto Rican immigrant community. Ariel Castro is even remembered as having helping out during the search for one of his kidnapping victims and even went so far as to comfort the mother of Gina Dejesus at another occasion. Quite the act. The family of Ariel Castro, including his children and his two brothers Onil and Pedro, are also revolted at his kidnappings and rape and have publicly denounced him asserting, “We don’t have monster in our blood.” But as concerns the human race is that wholly true?

The two brothers of the Cleveland man accused of holding three women captive for about a decade say they have no sympathy for him. One called him a “monster” who he hopes “rots in jail.” http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/05/13/i-dont-care-if-they-even-feed-him/

Ohio prosecutor Tim McGinty said he plans to seek aggravated murder charges that could carry the death penalty:

I fully intend to seek charges for each and every act of sexual violence, rape, each day of kidnapping, every felonious assault, all his attempted murders, and each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies that the offender perpetuated against the hostages during this decade-long ordeal.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22475771

The public has been rightly horrified by this extraordinary Cleveland monster, Ariel Castro. But don’t we tolerate our own mundane, nameless monsters who lead seemingly “normal lives” yet commit offenses equally worthy of “aggravated murder charges for terminating pregnancies.” Aren’t we, as a society, being hypocritical?

These mundane monsters, on an annual basis, terminate the pregnancies of about 100,000 unborn children in Canada and about 1,000,000 per year in the United States, albeit at the request of their own mothers! But are these “bio-waste” children any less children for being unwanted by their mothers? Just because such hard-hearted people don’t care about the innocents in utero, does that give them the right to torture and kill at will for their own convenience? Did you know that babies in utero feel pain?

This lack of a moral conscience, this ethical black hole when it comes to empathy was also the mindset of Ariel Castro, the “Cleveland Monster.” He didn’t want to be burdened by any unwanted children that came from satisfying his lust with Gina Dejesus, Amanda Berry, and Michelle Knight.

In Canada there is no law regulating abortion. A child in the womb can be legally killed up to the day he or she is actually born. Shouldn’t we as a society re-consider giving anyone the right to kill an innocent for the sake of her own personal convenience? I hope you wished your Mum a Happy Mother’s Day, yesterday! She kept you despite the inconvenience you inevitably caused her.

“As close to Satan as can be”

So, for your entertainment pleasure the American TV network NBC is offering you a new series called Hannibal. The new program is about the duplicitous Dr. Hannibal Lecter—psychologist, connoisseur, and gourmet cannibal. I suppose one of the “charms” of this new series will be the constant stream of new guest stars who make short on-camera appearances before being transformed into gourmet entrées for the “good” doctor’s dinner parties.

Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has been cast as the TV version of Hannibal Lecter. Mikkelsen confessed to some initial reluctance to take on the role when first offered it because he thought Anthony Hopkins had turned in such a consummate portrayal of the Hannibal character in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. But it would seem that the Danish actor found some thespian, if not spiritualist, inspiration to bring the TV Hannibal Lecter “as close to Satan as can be,” according to journalist Frazier Moore of the Associated Press. For Mads Mikkelsen, Hannibal the cannibal isn’t your classic psychopath or serial murderer. No, no, no! This is your charming, sophisticated fallen angel who sees beauty in murder and dining pleasure through cannibalism.

But what the heck, in Canada we don’t have to watch NBC to satisfy our inner cannibal. All we have to do is pick up the newspaper and read about the trial of Luka Magnotta, the Montreal gay pornographic actor, who murdered and chopped up a the Chinese student Lin Jun in May 2012, and then mailed the victim’s body parts to the several Canadian political parties and schools.

When police figured out through surveillance footage that the “perp” was Magnotta, they searched his apartment and found plenty of gruesome evidence. Written in red ink in his closet was the chilling statement: “If you don’t like the reflection. Don’t look in the mirror. I don’t care.”

Discovered, Magnotta had fled the country to Europe, but eventually German police apprehended him at an Internet café in Berlin while he was killing some time reading online news stories about himself. Like Mads Mikkelsen, Magnotta, was also trying to get “as close to Satan as can be.”

It beats the life out of me trying to figure out why the NBC executives gave a green light to the TV series Hannibal. But obviously they are convinced that a mass audience will find it entertaining to watch someone act “as close to Satan as can be.” Why are these TV big shots doing this? Don’t they understand the simple concept “monkey see, monkey do”? Can’t they understand what will result from promoting this spiritual darkness to their audience of millions of viewers? But that’s the point. Perhaps, they do understand.

Think about the moral darkness possessing the gatekeepers of America’s major entertainment corporations. Think about how these gatekeepers have used and are continuing to use the media as a tool for the changes they want to see. What do you think? Will you watch Hannibal on NBC? Or will you take your cues from another source. Jesus of Nazareth said this:

Your eye is the lamp of the body. When your eye is good, your whole body is also full of light. But when it is bad, your body is also full of darkness. Take care then, that the light in you is not darkness. Luke 11:34-35 Holman Christian Standard Bible

Can a new Pope bring repentance to the Church of Rome?

In a CBC radio interview I listened with interest to an intelligent, young, American Jesuit seminarian who prayerfully called on whoever might be the new Roman Catholic Pope “to lead us into a new age of integrity and to deliver us from hypocrisy—so that we can really be who we say we are!”

This aspiring priest believes it’s imperative for the Roman Catholic Church to really become faithful to Jesus Christ. To achieve this would require dramatic changes in order to bring that church into conformity with the way of life that the Son of God taught in both word and deed as recorded in the Scriptures.

Mission impossible? Well, that man’s not asking for much, is he? Repentance and change! Not easy but essential to both experiencing and living authentic Christianity as described in the pages of your Bible. But repentance/change is, after all, the profession of every individual Christian and every group of people who want to be a church “of God” in reality and not merely in self-promoting advertising.

A new pope is going to have his work cut out for him if he wants to bring the Roman Catholic Church to the biblical repentance that would please Christ. What with seemingly unending bad news arising from its on-going flood of clerical pedophile sex cases, and the Vatican Bank’s (the ironically named Institute for Religious Works) stinky reputation in banking circles as a go-to-place for money laundering by traditionally Catholic Mafioso types.

Also, one can’t neglect to add to this new pope’s to-do-list, actions to get to the bottom of the ongoing allegations of various forms of ecclesiastical corruption that include ugly bureaucratic turf battles among the Curia’s Cardinals, and—surprise, surprise—scandalous allegations that some of the papal staff formerly close to Pope Benedict XVI were embracing homosexual practices more enthusiastically than their vows of celibacy.

Wow, what a revolution of change and repentance would occur in the above situation if a new pope actually took his policy and doctrinal cue from biblical teaching about clerical marriage such as found in 1 Timothy 3:2 in order to get at the root of what’s causing that church to be rife with sexual abuse and perversion. But, don’t hold your breath.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Massimo Franco, a columnist for Italy’s leading daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera, describes the Vatican as being utterly dysfunctional in his new book “The Crisis of the Vatican Empire.” No wonder every employee working at the Vatican and all the Cardinals locked up in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new Pope are required to take vows of secrecy. What goes on at the Vatican must stay at the Vatican!

But then, what can you expect from an organization that would not even tolerate an individual’s religious freedom of conscience until the Vatican II Council in the early 1960s. Remember that the Roman Catholic Church has a long and bloody history written by its popes’ decrees. Those men who styled themselves as the successor of the Apostle Peter ordered Crusades to slaughter those they saw as “infidels” whether Muslim, Jew, or especially non-conformist Christian.

It makes you wonder when you compare Christ’s teaching to his disciples to the reality revealed by the Catholic Church’s own history.

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” John 13:34-36 English Standard Version

Following the crusades, these same popes also formulated and launched a network of terrorism throughout the world, which persisted for almost 600 years and was known as the Inquisition. The Roman popes even authorized various forms of horrific torture by a papal bull entitled Ad Extirpanda in 1254 that would make the CIA’s use of waterboarding for interrogations look like playing tag football. Bloody, harsh, and violent were the Inquisitorial methods! The Roman Catholic Popes employed these tactics in order to enforce their monopoly on power and their domination over the expression of all individual Christians’ faith.

Is there something inherently flawed about the Roman Catholic Papacy—whether we’re talking about the office itself and/or its doctrinal claim to authority over Christianity—so that it can’t be reformed, no matter the initial decent nature of the man who might occupy the so-called “seat of St. Peter”? We all know this saying about the human condition: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Check out this series of four presentations discussing the foundations of church authority. Did Christ give the Apostle Peter and his successors authority as “vicars of Christ”? Does the Pope have the authority “to bind and loose” in all matters of doctrine and tradition? Where did Sunday/Easter worship originate and why? How has Christianity changed from what was practiced by the original Jerusalem Church of God during the first 100 years after the crucifixion of Jesus? All these questions and more are discussed and examined in four in-depth streaming video presentations on this subject.

Just click on: http://cogwebcast.com/sermons/video-archives/a-changed-christianity/

Will the “right” man be elected as the new Pope?

So Pope Benedict XVI, born Joseph Ratzinger, is resigning at the end of this month due to old age. Papal spokesmen assure us, repeatedly, that the still living and kicking but soon-to-be former Pope will not participate in the cardinals conclave in March to select his successor at this second-oldest, on-going “Christian franchise,” the Roman Catholic Church (RCC). Ah yes, we hear from the authorized sources the strict observance of the explicit “letter of the law”—the RCC’s canon law—in public.

But how should we weigh the “spirit of the law” aspects of such a statement? After all, such pre-emptive assurance of Pope Benedict’s non-interest in handpicking his successor is being conveniently offered to us by the employees of the same man who long-ran that secretive multi-national church corporation’s Holy Office of the Inquisition (better known more recently as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) before becoming Pope!

Should we trust a church hierarchy that still officially denies that it systemically covered up and “managed” for hundreds and hundreds of years the fall-out arising from its numerous priestly pedophiles? Granted, however, that we must acknowledge that the RCC will now apologize publicly for their priests’ licentious behaviour and pay compensation to victims. But still, should we trust them?

Actually, I admire Pope Benedict for this pro-active initiative to assure an orderly succession to the top job at the RCC. By resigning now while his mind is still sharp he can make a strong effort to influence the outcome of the cardinals’ vote. And it goes almost without saying that the “right” man to become the new Pope will be the one who will continue Pope Benedict’s conservative policies. Actually those policies are really just a continuation of those of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

Conservative Catholics are probably relieved by Pope Benedict’s succession gambit. They, like their last two popes, are wary of the moral relativism that is dominating the Western world at this point in time. They don’t believe that all is just a matter of personal preference and opinion. They believe that Truth with a capital “T” really does exist.

Since they also believe that the Pope has the authority to define doctrine in their church, and to make definitive statements concerning truth and falsehood; it is essential, from their point of view, that the “right” man be elected as the next Pope.

I don’t fault them for their logic. After all, if a new Pope was elected who had a secret agenda to institute “reforms” allowing gay marriage, ordination of women, abortion, euthanasia, and easy divorce—well, all would be lost for those supporting conservative values in the RCC. And that’s the flaw in the Catholic tradition of Christianity.

Catholics believe that the Pope is the Vicar of Christ—that he rules as a substitute for Christ and has final authority. In essence, the RCC makes a man and that man’s opinions the arbiter of what is Truth or falsehood.

The gospel of Jesus Christ, however, teaches something else:

Sanctify them [that is to say: purify, consecrate, separate them for Yourself, make them holy] by the Truth; Your Word is Truth. John 17:17 Amplified Bible

When Satan tried to tempt Jesus Christ to enact something, to follow a policy that would, in essence, make an accommodation to a personal preference or desire, Jesus rebutted the Adversary, making this statement on the real source of authority:

But Jesus told him, “No! The Scriptures say, “People do not live by bread alone [by any material or human means alone], but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Matthew 4:4 New Living Translation

The part of the Judeo-Christian scriptures that Jesus was quoting to Satan on this issue of the real authority to decide questions of Truth or falsehood is found in Deuteronomy 8:3. Godly authority to decide questions of church policy and all other questions of what is right or wrong is by Sola Scripture, which in Latin means by Scripture Alone. It is the Judeo-Christian Scriptures alone that reveal the Truth. It is never a question of merely any man’s or woman’s personal opinion or preference, whether that person is elected a Pope or not!

All Catholics, all Protestants all secular people, and all believers in other religions are eventually going to learn the answer to this question about where ultimate, legitimate authority rests. Most will learn the hard way at some time in the future. You can learn this right now and act on it to become consecrated to God as His own son or daughter—a higher spiritual office than any earthly Pope— if you will allow the Word of God to direct you into living in and by His Truth.

In defense of our most ancient values & ideals

Towards the end of President Barak Obama’s second inaugural address he argued:

“You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.”

I wholly agree with this inspiring proposition by the President. Barak Obama is indeed one of the most accomplished speakers of our time. Yet, I discovered as perhaps you did also that not all of Obama’s inaugural speech was equally inspiring. Nevertheless, believing the President to be a fair and open-minded man, I lift up my voice in defense of my brethren’s most ancient values and enduring ideals and call upon the President to re-consider the logic and the spirit of some of the positions he has taken.

The United States of America is at a crossroads. Time is quickly running out for the world’s dominant superpower and number one economy to set its house in order. There are several startling trends afoot in the nation that will humble it, if not bring it down completely, if not effectively resolved.

But as you begin your second term in office, Mr. President, you seem to give every indication that you misunderstand just how gravely wounded the nation is financially and politically, certainly— but especially, morally. The secular press tends to overlook the fact that it will be of the Spirit if the Flesh [the nation’s material well-being & future] is to be saved from the gathering crisis. After all, what was it that sustained Abraham Lincoln and the Union in their time of trial? Was it just their rifles and canons? Was it not the righteousness of their cause?

David Brooks, a conservative journalist working for the liberal New York Times, made this comment about your second inauguration speech:

I also think Obama misunderstands this moment. The Progressive Era, New Deal and Great Society laws were enacted when America was still a young and growing nation. They were enacted in a nation that was vibrant, raw, under-institutionalized and needed taming.

We are no longer that nation. We are now a mature nation with an aging population [Why we might ask? Is it because the vibrant potential of so many millions of our white, black, and Latino youth and their potential children have been sacrificed on abortion’s pagan altar of selfish convenience?].

Far from being under-institutionalized, we are bogged down with a bloated political system, a tangled tax code, a byzantine legal code, and a crushing debt [not to mention an appalling amount of fiscal corruption at the highest levels of American society]. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/22/opinion/brooks-the-collective-turn.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1358883569-pQYbbD/j2/ypooIiqVZgIg

Mr. President, what are you going to do to address this harsh, on-going, destructive reality sapping America’s strength?

Next is the urgently needed healing of the nation’s bitter political divide. Do you remember what Abraham Lincoln said: a House divided will fall? [Actually, Lincoln was just quoting Jesus Christ from Matthew 12:25]. Good will and a spirit of collaboration with a generous sprinkling of patriotism are absolutely necessary to enact desperately needed reforms. I sense that your speech fell short in this regard. It seems to me that it failed to reach across the blue vs. red divide. It did, however, stoke up the partisan spirit of your so-called “progressive wing” of the Democratic Party. Maybe that’s all your speech was intended to do.

Still, I consider it a failure to rekindle the spirit of collaboration desperately needed throughout America. This failure was symbolically evident by who was NEITHER present NOR accounted for at your swearing in. Where were former President George W. Bush, and the 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney? Why weren’t they seated on the speaker’s platform beside you for the whole nation to see even a semblance of unity or brotherhood among the nation’s leaders? Couldn’t you find a few gracious words to speak in order to persuade them to come? Was extending the olive branch just too hard? Must it always be a zero-sum game? Is pride getting in the way of taking care of the nation’s urgent business? You know what they say about pride going before a….

The bad blood is obviously such that, ominously, most of the Republican delegation from the House of Representatives wouldn’t come to your big bash—even have a few free drinks! Such political bitterness in Washington, D.C. is systemically weakening America’s ability to meet the long-term challenge posed by a rising geo-political competitor like China.

As for addressing the nation’s moral problems, The Washington Times newspaper noted in its January 22, 2013 editorial:

Though the theme of Inauguration Day 2013 was “faith in America’s future,” the United States has seldom chosen a president more determined to separate the nation from its traditional reverence for faith, family and freedom. The proposition that individuals “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, is harder to see in the vision of Mr. Obama’s America where administrative agencies make choices for individuals, even down to the details of dictating the design of everyday household appliances….

The signature achievement of his first term, Obamacare, established the precedent whereby the White House can force citizens to purchase a service that had previously been a matter of personal choice. The health care mandate goes so far as to override the distinct choices of religious organizations, forcing them to provide contraception and abortion coverage against their will. This is a clear attempt to undermine the previously sacrosanct respect for religious freedom in American political culture.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jan/22/inaugurating-leviathan/#ixzz2IjlLTXSy

Now please, carefully consider this final point Mr. President. When you swore your oath of office with your left hand placed on the Bibles once used by Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln, you said:

My fellow Americans, the oath I have sworn before you today, like the one recited by others who serve in this Capitol, was an oath to God and country, not party or faction – and we must faithfully execute that pledge during the duration of our service.

You pointed out in your inaugural speech following this oath that the nation’s “freedom was a gift from God” though it “must be secured by His people here on Earth.”

And like previous American presidents, at the close of his inaugural address you invoked a blessing from America’s historic God, upon both people and nation, saying: “God Bless you, and may He forever bless these United States of America.”

I don’t think it would be too controversial to assert that the God you officially referred to was in fact the God of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. Not Allah. Not Buddha. Not one of the millions of the Hindu gods. Not John Lennon of the Beatles who once boasted that he was more popular than Jesus Christ, nor even the latest re-incarnation of some Marilyn Monroe Hollywood sex idol. America’s Founding Fathers and patriots overwhelmingly claimed the Bible’s God as America’s God. I’m sure you must know that.

But did you realize, Mr. President, that when you took this oath of office calling publicly upon the Bible’s God to be a witness and to hold you accountable, and claimed in your inaugural speech to want to govern our people by “our most ancient values and enduring ideals,” that there would be negative consequences if you did all this just for show—hypocritically.

And make no mistake about it, the Bible’s ancient values and ideals are indeed enduring because they are the Truth and are essential reading for anyone who wants the Bible’s God to give him or her a blessing of hope and peace in this life and, eventually, the fullness of eternal life—rather than a cursing, heart-ache, and futility in this life and then the emptiness of eternal death. As Jesus of Nazareth said:

Sanctify them [purify, consecrate, separate them for Yourself, make them holy] by the Truth; Your Word is Truth (John 17:17 Amplified Bible)

And…

“Man shall not live by bread [materialistic means] alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God [spiritual means]” (Matthew 4:4 English Standard Version).

In the Judeo-Christian Scriptures we see that there is a clear and repeated historic pattern of bad consequences that come when either leaders or people hypocritically claim God as their God, take oaths and invoke blessings using His name, but do not do what He commands. God does not consider such people to be guiltless even though they just say what they say because of tradition and the fact that they want to look good in public (Exodus 20:7). There are unpleasant consequences for such hypocrisy.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, freedom—we’re talking political, economic, and religious freedom—is always presented as being conditional upon obedience by the nation or leader who calls upon the Bible’s God. In other words, a leader or a nation that calls upon the Bible’s God as their God must be found living within the ancient values and ideals expounded in His law or face the consequences.

Consider, Mr. President Obama, this statement that you made in your second inaugural speech:

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

Is the physical expression of homosexual love in a marriage allowed by man’s law truly equal to that of a heterosexual one, which is sanctioned by the Scriptures, in the eyes of the Bible’s God? Does the Bible’s God have a preference, or none at all?

The New Covenant Scriptures tell us this: “For the whole law [God’s law] is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” Galatians 5:14 English Standard Version

Well, someone might argue, surely this Scripture justifies your proposition, Mr. President, because of what that person may subjectively feel about someone else. But does it? Is God’s standard of Truth based on subjective human feeling? Is it correct to say that as long as I just feel “love” for my neighbour then surely I’m okay in God’s sight whatever I do homosexually or heterosexually—that it’s all equal?

To answer this question one needs to know just how the word “love” is defined by the Bible’s God in the original languages in which the Scriptures were written and in its actual usage. To answer this question, if you really want to know, check out my online, streaming archived sermon series on love at:

http://cogwebcast.com/sermons/video-archives/finding-true-love-love-your-neighbour/

and

http://cogwebcast.com/sermons/video-archives/finding-true-love-self-love-or-selfishness/

and

http://cogwebcast.com/sermons/video-archives/finding-true-love-our-love-for-god/

You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.

Have we lost our “Dear Abby” minds?

I opened the newspaper today and read about the death of Pauline Phillips a.k.a. Abigail Van Buren of “Dear Abby” fame. While I was growing up the “Dear Abby” syndicated column was as much of interest to me as the thoughts expressed on the editorial page, and sometimes it was even more interesting than the front page for that matter.

But I doubt that today the views of “Dear Abby” or of her sister in advice-giving “Ann Landers” would be picked up as content suitable for publication by today’s mass media empires. You see, the Abby and Ann type of advice with its emphasis on moral absolutism—stuff like adultery, promiscuous sex, and lying always being wrong—is no longer fashionable among the “politically correct,” the elite gatekeepers of society who exercise considerable control over what is perceived as acceptable or not today.

You see for the power elite setting society’s agenda these days the advice of poor Abby and Ann are just too 1950ish. They are seen as being too judgmental. Why, they had the brazen nerve to write that pleasure and “doing your own thing” ARE NOT the final arbiters in determining what is right or wrong. Abby and Ann thought personal integrity and sexual responsibility actually counted for something. How foolish and naïve of them!

The passé commonsense preached by those Jewish ladies is perceived as being stuck in a time when actual biblical values were still taught in the churches and synagogues; and the Holy Scriptures were actually read even in the public schools— and portrayed in the movies and on television. Horrors! How antediluvian! How backwards!

But now in 2013 society has “progressed” or at least, moved on. Consider this sample of the post-modern enlightened social values being fostered at one of Canada’s most influential universities:

The University of Toronto, you will be edified to know, is “kicking off its annual Sexual Awareness Week” next Monday at a downtown Toronto club, the Oasis Aqua Lounge, where swingers are welcome. Facilitating the adventure is the university’s Sexual Education Centre (SEC), which arranged for students to pay only $5 a person instead of the $40 per person Oasis usually charges.

An exuberant Reddit user posted the information in a University of Waterloo forum thus: “U of T is holding an orgy, and you’re invited! You just need your student ID….”

As I said of Yale’s sex week, this tarted-up promotion of voyeurism “strikes me as nothing more than a forum conceived to proselytize the student body on the cultural virtue of dumbing deviancy down, and to shame students who adhere to traditional moral standards of reasonable restraints on sexual gratification.” http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2013/01/16/barbara-kay-university-of-torontos-pimps-r-us-program-offers-discounts-to-sex-party/

The Sexual Education Centre at the University of Toronto “is an affiliated levy group of the University of Toronto Students Union. Undergraduate students pay 25 cents a term for the services, and can opt out if they choose.

The group’s mission is to foster a sex-positive attitude in the greater U of T area, by offering information, programming, safer-sex supplies, and peer counselling in a welcoming environment. Their sexual awareness week includes a discussion on sex positivity, an interactive sex toy demonstration and an afternoon of pornography. The first event is the party at Oasis [Aqua Lounge]: the organization rented the club and lowered the price to $5 a person. http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1315033–university-of-toronto-student-group-hosts-epic-sex-club-adventure

It would seem that a great many of us have lost, indeed, our “Dear Abby” minds. Our society hasn’t progressed. It’s merely degenerated down to the level of pagan Rome and its infamous orgies under the modern deceitful word-disguise of practicing a “sex-positive attitude” and having a healthy “sexual awareness.”

“I’ve got something to say. Is anybody listening? I’ve a warning to post. Will anyone notice? It’s hopeless! Their ears are stuffed with wax—deaf as a post, blind as a bat. It’s hopeless! They’ve tuned out God. They don’t want to hear from me. But I’m bursting with the wrath of God. I can’t hold it in much longer. “So dump it on the children in the streets. Let it loose on the gangs of youth. For no one’s exempt: Husbands and wives will be taken, the old and those ready to die; their homes will be given away—all they own, even their loved ones— When I give the signal against all who live in this country.” God’s Decree. “Everyone’s after the dishonest dollar, little people and big people alike. Prophets and priests and everyone in between twist words and doctor truth. My people are broken—shattered!—and they put on Band-Aids, saying, ‘It’s not so bad. You’ll be just fine.’  But things are not ‘just fine’! Do you suppose they are embarrassed over this outrage? No, they have no shame. They don’t even know how to blush. There’s no hope for them. They’ve hit bottom and there’s no getting up. As far as I’m concerned, they’re finished.” God has spoken. God’s Message yet again: “Go stand at the crossroads and look around. Ask for directions to the old road, the tried-and-true road. Then take it. Discover the right route for your souls. But they said, “Nothing doing.” Jeremiah 6:10-16 The Message.

Isn’t it funny that a message written almost 2,600 years ago is just as relevant today as it was to the people to whom it was first delivered? Human nature hasn’t changed much.

The people who scoff at the moral, ethical values taught by the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are creating their own future black hole of despair into which they are being sucked. Sex can be extremely pleasurable, which is why the earth’s human population has tended to grow rather than shrink over the millenia. But such pleasure without morality is just plain old-fashioned lust—not love!

Lust is a sinful behaviour, spiritually speaking according to the Judeo-Christian perspective. And in the end, those who become slaves to sin—yes, sin is addictive—lose all chance at finding the intimate happiness that flows from being with one’s true love, one’s soul mate. And, as it is written, anyone who becomes such a slave to lust also loses out on any chance of God’s gift of living eternally in His Kingdom of truth and light, because the wages of sin is death. Death is not living in an ever-burning hell (God is not a bondage freak), but rather death is the complete termination of consciousness and being, the end of all life (Romans 6:23).

Your average person is reluctant to consider his or her convictions, prejudices, and even superstitions. It is the rare person who has the curiosity and courage to look through the so-called “progressive” attitudes popular in this present society and turn away from them. In the Scriptures this is called repentance. Anyone who has been caught up in the sin of lust must repent of it to become part of God’s family and to take up what He offers to those who obey Him (Luke 8:21).

While the example of the University of Toronto student association that I cited here is an extreme—variations on, or echoes of that theme can be found reverberating throughout our society and its forms of entertainment. What starts on university campuses today becomes social mainstream behaviour tomorrow. This degeneration of sexual morals is the future of this society, a future that will be dark and violent due nation-wide moral bankruptcy.

As a whole, human beings are reluctant to admit error and so most embrace willful blindness to avoid doing so. But like the prophet Jeremiah, I would encourage you to take to the tried-and-true road of personal integrity and sexual responsibility as taught by the Scriptures. If you do this, you will keep both your “Dear Abby” mind and your happiness while others will lose whatever they think they have.

Canada’s “Indian” problem refuses to go away

In Canada it is no secret that far too many of our Aboriginal reserves—the so-called “First Nations”—which are governed by the Canadian federal government’s Indian Act of 1876, are dysfunctional places governed by a form of Aboriginal communism.

These “Indian” reserves are far too often places suffering a host of epidemics: substance abuse, sexual abuse, broken families, band-owned decrepit mouldy housing, tainted water, and bleak economies that provide few real, actually productive jobs. As a result of such a severe collection of seemingly intractable social ills, there exists on far too many of these reserves a staggering amount of state-funded welfare dependency and its corresponding emotional despondency.

These First Nations reserves are places where the youth suicide rates are far higher than those found among other Canadian youth. Far too many Aboriginal people living on such reserves have lost hope and are sunk in the backwaters of depression that are both out of sight and out of mind until some new crisis makes the mainstream evening news.

Under the Indian Act, Canada’s federal government has exclusive authority to enact legislation in relation to “Indians and Lands Reserved for Indians.” While the original Indian Act has been tinkered with many times over the years to remedy a variety of problems, the 21^st Century reality continues to be that many Aboriginals still live in an appalling, grinding poverty that touches every aspect of their lives.

Overall, Aboriginal people are dissatisfied with the reality of their “Indian status” existence, and this has recently flared into a series of what are called “Idle No More” protests, blocking some railroad tracks, border crossings, highways, ferry terminals, etc.

Without a doubt the lightening rod of the present Aboriginal protest has been the Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence, who set up her teepee on an island in the Ottawa River in mid-December near the nation’s capital. She’s fasting on fish broth and tea as part of a hunger strike that she proclaims will go on until Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, and Queen Elizabeth II’s personal representative to Canada, the Governor General David Johnstone, come to meet her face-to-face and discuss the Aboriginal people’s historic treaty rights, in general, and the government’s failure to solve the problems of Attawapiskat in particular.

No one seriously doubts that our federal government is without some blame for the pathetic state of such Aboriginal reserves like Attawapiskat. BUT the old cliché that it takes two to tango is also without doubt. After all, for a very long time the Canadian government has been spending mountains of dollars trying to remedy some of the worst problems at Aboriginal communities like Attawapiskat. But the miserable status quo of deprivation and poverty, both materially and spiritually, persists. Why? Well, for example, let’s consider what has been going on in Attawapiskat.

To [Chief Therese Spence’s] chagrin, someone leaked an audit on Attawapiskat’s financial records, which reflected badly on her and her co-manager and romantic partner, Clayton Kennedy. It found that tens of millions of dollars can’t be tracked, due to faulty record-keeping. Although more than $100-million was poured into the community [of about 1200 people] over a six-year period, it’s hard to track where it all went because there’s little or no record. Though a lack of records doesn’t necessarily mean fraud, it also can’t be dismissed if the money can’t be traced. If there is no fraud, losing track of money on that scale suggests a worrying degree of sloppiness with tax dollars (Kelly MacFarland, “Theresa Spence’s careful woven cause starts to unravel,” National Post, Jan. 9. 2013).

The reality of the situation is that the present Aboriginal system of governance bears a major share of the blame for the situation on the reserves. Incompetence? Corruption? Selfishness?

A year ago CBC’s investigative reporter Adrienne Arsenault visited Attawapiskat and came away with these conclusions:

The idea that the destitution of far-flung First Nations such as Attawapiskat is a result of Ottawa’s neglect is wrong.
Ms. Arsenault’s reporting suggests that the real problem in Attawapiskat is Ms. Spence’s own incompetent leadership
In economic terms, Attawapiskat exists as a pure sinkhole for resources produced elsewhere.
We are always told that the preservation of reserves is a great way to maintain First Nations culture. But the opposite is true: The best way to destroy a group’s spirit of civic solidarity is to turn the economy into an outsider-funded cargo cult.
Ironically, Ms. Spence is far more popular with naïve, white Naomi Klein types who venerate her from afar as a sort of Gaian [pagan goddess] martyr than with the people who actually have suffered under her incompetence.
We have gotten to the stage in First Nations politics whereby you no longer even have to string a logical sentence together to connect a problem on the ground with Ottawa’s blundering or malfeasance (Cited from Jonathan Kay, “Six lessons from a brilliant, scathing, year-old CBC report on Attawapiskat’s mismanagement,” National Post, Jan. 7, 2013).

The Aboriginal leaders and their peoples who tolerate them must accept a good deal of the responsibility for their own problems. They are leading actors in this tragedy. They are not merely supporting actors or just passive victims of circumstances over which they have no active, decisive role.

If we in Canada are to truly change the situation on these Aboriginal reserves, then they must be transformed into genuine Canadian communities that live by the same rule of law and adopt the same best governance practices that are the standard or ideal of the rest of Canadian society. And this includes the requirement for transparency and appropriate accounting practices in Aboriginal communities.

Also, Aboriginal individuals should be freed to have the same opportunity to own their own homes, land, real estate, and businesses just like the average Canadian. It should be obvious that the present form of dysfunctional Aboriginal communism, as presently practiced, whereby no band member on a reserve can own his or her home is utter foolishness.

There is a solid moral case from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures for the elimination of the double standard that presently exists between what goes on at Aboriginal reserves and the greater Canadian society. We would do well to heed it!

You shall have one law for the sojourner and for the native; for I am the Lord your God” Leviticus 24:22 Revised Standard Version.

“You shall appoint judges and officers in all your towns which the Lord your God gives you, according to your tribes; and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. You shall not pervert justice; you shall not show partiality; and you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you, Deuteronomy 16:18-20 Revised Standard Version.

Are you missing the lessons taught by the Sandy Hook massacre?

“When there are no words in any dictionary to describe what happened in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut Friday, when things happen that surely not even the cruelest imagination could comprehend [oh yeah?], it is certainly time to go back to some kind of cultural Square One and reconsider everything to which we have somehow become inured.”

Those are the words of a regular columnist who writes for our local newspaper. He’s right! But that certainly isn’t going to be what happens, obviously. Rather it seems American society is going to have another round in the culture wars between Democrats and Republicans over gun control. It is only politically correct to focus on the tools used in the Sandy Hook slaughter and other massacres rather than looking more deeply into why North American society is spawning these young mass murderers. The guns are not creating the mentality and willingness to do such evil. They are just the means.

If the politicians really wanted to help our society become more peaceful they might instead peel off a few layers from our dysfunctional post-modern society in order to get a little closer to our cultural Square One—to discover the truth about why things are going wrong.

For instance why not consider the omnipresent use of violence in its many forms as our “entertainment.” Media producers are practically addicted to featuring conflict and fighting, blood and gore in our movies, TV, video games and in what passes as “sports.”

Or then again, maybe our public guardian angels might find the courage to turn over a few rocks to investigate the scurrying prescription drug bugs who are pushing their wares onto truly astounding numbers of youth and adults in order to “cure” them of mental disorders like depression, hyper-activity, schizophrenia, anxiety, and much more.

These days if our witch doctors can conjure up some term to describe an undesirable mental state, then some big pharma firm will soon have a potent psycho-active drug to sell to cheaply dope up the person with the new label. This makes private and public health care providers happy because it keeps their costs down. But have you ever read the extensive list of nasty, dangerous side-effects of these drugs? The economic-political commentator Doug Casey makes this observation about the use of these psycho-active drugs among those who have committed mass murder:

I predict that they’ll find that the 20-year-old killer, Lanza, was on Ritalin, Zoloft, Prozac, or some similar psychiatric drug. Most mass murders are proven to have been on these drugs, and the medical records are sealed for many other killers, so we can’t find out (Casey Daily Dispatch, “Doug Casey on the Fiscal Cliff,” Dec. 19, 2012, http://www.caseyresearch.com/cdd/doug-casey-fiscal-cliff).

But whether we’re talking about the pervasive presence of violence in entertainment, Prozac nation, or the American fetish for guns galore—these are just the outer layers of the onion. They are merely consequences. Side shows. Perhaps contributing causes, but not the deep down rotten root that led to the massacre at Sandy Hook.

But really, for the Western world, where do we find our cultural Square One? The real cause for what’s going wrong in our society? To find out we need to go back to the Bible. In the past a preacher might have said, “Blow off the dust on your Bible.” But, I dare say, that now many people no longer even have a copy of the Bible in their homes and even if they do, they don’t know—or care—what it says.

The Bible is a revelation. Which is to say, it contains divinely revealed knowledge that would otherwise be impossible for us to discover on our own. And this Bible begins with a book of beginnings called Genesis. This is our cultural Square One:

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man [and eventually, his wife, too] whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life [symbolizing spiritually discerned revelation] was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil [symbolizing materially discerned understanding]. The Lord God took the man [Adam, that is to say Mr. Dust who was Adam Lanza’s namesake] and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die….” Genesis 2:8-9, 15-17 English Standard Version

The serpent [the Devil] was the shrewdest of all the wild animals [an insult] the Lord God had made. One day he asked the woman, “Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?” [Here the Devil uses a classic red herring ploy to deceive.]

“Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,” the woman replied. “It’s only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that we are not allowed to eat. God said, ‘You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, you will die.’” [This tree meant humanity was taking to itself the prerogative to determine what was “right” and what was “wrong” in their own eyes apart from God and His revelation that was then directly given to them, but which is now preserved for us in the Holy Scriptures.]

“You won’t die!” the serpent replied to the woman [Big lies are the easiest ones to swallow. A snake first covers its victim with saliva before swallowing it whole. Neither our bodies nor our souls are immortal. See Ezekiel 18 verses 4, 20, and 27. We are merely physical beings subject to eventual death, cessation of all life unless God should intervene]. “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.” Genesis 3:1-5 New Living Translation

Humanity as whole ever since has built societies based on their own material understanding, determining for themselves what is right or wrong apart from God’s revelation. The only exception being that of a man called Abraham and those relatively few of Abraham’s descendants who were illuminated by the divine revelation given to them. These individuals would become known as the “children of God” who took their inspiration from their Heavenly Father to, firstly, love Him with all their hearts, souls, and minds, and, secondarily, to love their fellow human being, their “neighbours,” as themselves.

A society that forgets to put a love for the God of the Bible in first place among all their priorities will most certainly soon forget to prioritize a genuine love for their human neighbours as well.

Those who take to themselves the right to determine right from wrong in opposition to the revelation of God—they have as their “father” the Devil—the being that first tricked their ancestors into eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good but also of Evil. The result is our present society, which is an inseparable, delusion having aspects that are both evil and good. The Sandy Hook massacre is a prime evil result that comes from one who rejects the divine revelation about loving with all his heart the God who created him. Adam Lanza also forgot if he ever knew that he was made in the Creator’s own image and likeness with a job here on Earth: to love his little and big neighbours as himself.

Those who have eaten the wrong “fruit” just don’t and won’t get it. They can’t get at the root of what caused the massacre at Sandy Hook and all the other mass murders going on. Jesus of Nazareth put it this way when arguing with those who insisted on rejecting divine revelation:

Why can’t you understand what I am saying? It’s because you can’t even hear me! For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies. So when I tell the truth, you just naturally don’t believe me! John 8:43-45 New Living Translation

God gives us all free moral agency. From which Tree in the garden will you eat?

Words Spoken in “fun” Result in a Suicide

It was just supposed to be good fun. Something to entertain their audience with a laugh. And, besides, they really doubted that it would work. Surely the receptionist at King Edward VII hospital in London, who answered their call at 5:30 a.m., would recognize their Australian accent. But the impersonation of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles by Aussie DJs Mel Greig and Michel Christian of 2Day FM fooled both the nurse/receptionist, Jacintha Saldanha, and the ward nurse who gave out a personal health update about the Duchess of Cambridge’s acute morning sickness.

I can imagine Greig and Christian high-fiving each other while on the air, for successfully pulling off their hoax. Of course, they aren’t the first to pull off such a “royal” hoax. In 1995 Canadian DJ, Pierre Brassard, fooled the Queen into thinking he was the then Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, for about 15 minutes.

However, Greig and Christian put out a public apology for impersonating the royals and invading their privacy, probably at the prodding of their radio station’s management. But, they hadn’t thought about the possible repercussions that their “fun” might have had on the two nurses they had tricked.

The royals know they are the objects of pursuit by clever paparazzi who chase them in order to feed the ever-hungry, personality-driven entertainment media. So being people in the public eye means they know they must roll with unexpected and perhaps laugh along with it. However, sometimes the dance between publicity hunters and the celebrity hunted ends tragically, as it did with Princess Diana.

Ordinary people trying to do their jobs the best they can, like you or I, aren’t schooled in the art of being held up to public ridicule or mocking. Sometimes words spoken in “fun” can be taken badly by the objects of that “fun.”

Today, we learned that one of the two nurses taken in by Mel Greig and Michel Christian’s hoax, Jacintha Saldanha, apparently committed suicide. Jacintha was a married woman with two children. Tragic. Sad. Heart-breaking. Who could have known she would take it so hard? Who could have known that words spoken in “fun” by another could hurt so much that it would cause such a reaction.

The royals William and Kate say they didn’t complain and have publicly said they are “deeply saddened” by this apparent suicide. The hospital management said they had been trying to help the two nurses through this difficult situation.

Unfortunately, words can and do kill even if the intention was all in jest. As the Apostle Paul once pointed out:

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers (Ephesians 4:29 King James Version).

This was the error of the Australian DJs Mel Greig and Michel Christian of 2Day FM. They spoke a corrupt communication with a deceptive purpose. I’m sure they regret the whole thing. From their pictures these two are quite young, which means they’ll have a long time to think about what they did.

It is easy to say the wrong thing, or to say something the other person takes the wrong way. Or maybe what is said is right, but the timing is all-wrong. The end result is that someone is hurt even if our intention was just to have a bit of “fun.”

How hard it is to ensure that what comes out of our mouths “minsters grace unto the hearers.” But this is the goal we all should have. When we speak and when we listen to our friends speak, let’s keep in mind the vital importance of considering the consequences of what we say. Unfortunately Greig and Christian didn’t help each other out in this way.

The right word at the right time  is like a custom-made piece of jewelry, and a wise friend’s timely reprimand  is like a gold ring slipped on your finger (Proverbs 25:11-12 The Message).

General Petraeus, did you Betray Us?

Mark Twain once wryly remarked—essentially—that to not keep up with the news was to be un-informed. But to slavishly believe all that the news media puts out means only that one becomes mis-informed. How much can we really believe about the various news reports concerning the General David Petraeus affair?

I mean, really, what am I to think of the fact that the nation’s former top spy, CIA director Petraeus, didn’t know how to keep secret his adulterous affair with Paula Broadwell?

And Broadwell herself wasn’t an ordinary—married—civilian biographer type who just fell in love with the object of her literary obsession. She was also a former U.S. Army intelligence officer! And she is also accused of having a “substantial” quantity of classified government data on her home computers.

General Petraeus, did you betray us? The American president assures us, “No.”

Can I really believe that Petraeus and Broadwell were, in fact, just silly and hormonal, acting like adolescent kids in high school? And, the timing of the Petraeus affair hitting the news, is it just a coincidence, what with Barak Obama just re-elected as president, and Congress wanting Petraeus to testify about the recent Benghazi terrorist attack that killed the American ambassador to Libya as well as several other American operatives? As Shakespeare might have penned in an updated version of Hamlet if he was alive and now writing: Something is rotten in America!

What’s really going on? Can we really know? What are we to make of the scent of skullduggery and adultery going on amongst the power elite of Washington? Is anyone among these leaders passionate about their people’s welfare and their people’s business rather than their own sexual and/or political passions?

Consider this warning from the prophet Isaiah about what lies ahead if we continue on the present path of collapsing morals and crumbling ethics exemplified by the Western world’s leader—America:

Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly! They have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are utterly estranged. Why will you still be struck down? Why will you continue to rebel? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but bruises and sores and raw wounds….

Your country lies desolate; your cities are burned with fire; in your very presence foreigners devour your land; it is desolate, as overthrown by foreigners….

Except the LORD of hosts had left us a very small remnant, we would have been as Sodom; we would have become like Gomorrah (Isaiah 1:4-7 English Standard Version, v. 9 Coulter translation).

Has Petraeus betrayed us? President Obama and the FBI assure us that it doesn’t seem the general passed any secrets to his lover—at least that’s what the paper trail seems to say, according to press releases from this power elite. But how about the pillow talk?

Regardless of national security matters, Petraeus the adulterer is no longer a good role model that Americans and their friends in the West can look up to for inspiration. Why even the Taliban is having a good laugh right now at the mighty Petraeus’ feet of clay. The shame of it all! Giving such a misogynistic enemy a reason to mock the former point man in the West’s battle against backward, vicious, Islamists!

Sadly, the Petraeus affair is just the tip of an iceberg that merely hints at the enormous danger lurking just out of sight under the official, politically correct waterline: the wide spread decay of the West’s morals and ethics, rotting the heart and soul of our Western civilization from the inside out.

For some time this soul rot has been spreading widely among both the leaders and the led. Throughout history, the loss of noble virtues and high moral standards of conduct have always been the accurate indicators of a societal weakness leading to a political entity’s decline and eventual collapse. Trouble and danger come because moral rot provides the ideal growth medium for tyranny and oppression to flourish. This holds true whether we’re talking about the imaginary Empire of Star Wars fame or today’s American Empire as well as the European Union.

But all is not lost. Hope remains. A small remnant yet perseveres and stands in opposition to this moral landslide. If you resist willful blindness and listen carefully, you might hear the few voices quietly speaking, giving this warning:

Beware! Those who promise you freedom from biblical morality and ethics offer you a politically correct license to commit sexual immorality. Be these seducers high and mighty or low and humble, they are but deceitful pied pipers who desire to lead you to a wasteland devoid of inner peace, intimacy, and personal happiness. They led Petraeus. And they are leading America also into utter ruin and disaster. Consider this warning by the Apostle Peter about such cunning pied pipers:

They have wandered off the right road and followed the footsteps of Balaam son of Beor, who loved to earn money by doing wrong. But Balaam was stopped from his mad course when his donkey rebuked him with a human voice.

These people are as useless as dried-up springs or as mist blown away by the wind. They are doomed to blackest darkness. They brag about themselves with empty, foolish boasting. With an appeal to twisted sexual desires, they lure back into sin those who have barely escaped from a lifestyle of deception. They promise freedom, but they themselves are slaves of sin and corruption. For you are a slave to whatever controls you. And when people escape from the wickedness of the world by knowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and then get tangled up and enslaved by sin again, they are worse off than before (2 Peter 2:15-20 New Living Translation).

U.S.A.—already off the cliff and falling from greatness?

The financial market looked into the crystal ball when trading began the morning of Election Day, November 6, 2012, and predicted an Obama victory. The market’s prediction came about 12 hours before the TV networks made their predictions that evening. So how did the market decide that Obama was going to win? Well, it just looked at the money. And I’m not talking about flipping a coin.

After several soft weeks of declining, weak gold prices, in one hour during the morning of Election Day the rustless yellow metal spiked upwards $31.50 an ounce. This signaled that the market believed the Obama government’s inflationary, deficit-spending, quantitatively easing fiscal policies would continue as our status quo. While Obama’s slogan focused on change, and on protecting change, from the market’s perspective very little, if anything, was going to change.

It is ironic that while the majority of Americans want a change for the better, what they actually voted for is the preservation of a status quo characterized by many as divided, gridlocked government that’s failing to deliver that change for the better.

Despite the Obama administration having one of the poorest economic and unemployment records among all U.S. administrations over the last 100 years, a narrow majority of the American people decided to give Barak Obama another four years so that he could improve upon his prior failure. And, to insure this outcome, Americans also re-elected most of the incumbent Republicans as the majority in the House of Representatives. And, of course, they will assuredly “help” Obama achieve what Obama thinks is best for the nation?

Duh! Seems like Hollywood writer and director Peter Farrelly was being prophetic when he created the 1994 movie Dumb and Dumber. I’ll let you figure out which of the two American political parties is dumb and which is dumber. Why is this happening? Because the heart is sick, the head is foolish.

And, what did the obscene $6 billion spent by big American money on this last election really buy or accomplish, besides turning the U.S. of A. into a “bastardized democracy,” according to the Canadian MP Pat Martin?

Well, a political cartoon that appeared in today’s Times-Colonist newspaper (Victoria, B.C.) sums it up nicely. In 2008, America was divided almost equally between smug Democrats and angry Republicans. The 2012 American political map is now divided between very smug Democrats and very angry Republicans. Wow! So U.S.$ 6 billion can only buy in 2012 a couple of adverbs on negativity?

There have been times over the course of the American republic during the last two hundred years when strong leadership would have been nice, but it wasn’t really essential for the nation’s growth, much less its survival. Almost as if it was on automatic pilot, the American nation grew noticeably more prosperous and qualitatively stronger year after year. America’s ascendency to greatness seemed unstoppable, a genuine manifest destiny.

But that’s not the situation any more. Now America is in decline. See Sarah Boesveld’s article in the National Post: Canada rises to Top Five in Economic Freedom ranking as U.S. plummets to 18th http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/09/18/canada-rises-to-top-five-in-world-economic-freedom-ranking-as-u-s-plummets-to-18th/ Accessed Nov. 8, 2012

America is living on borrowed money and borrowed time. And far too many very smug Americans are living in denial about the seriousness of their situation. America, now, is more like Wiley Coyote who has just run off the cliff but his legs are still churning furiously in the air—while outside observers wait breathlessly for the inevitable to happen: the sudden plunge that always ends with a violent crash on the rocks at the bottom of the canyon.

Media commentators are talking about what is called the “financial cliff.” But Rep. Ron Paul, who unsuccessfully ran for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party during this last election cycle thinks we’re already over the cliff. We’re broke, he says. And beyond that, the nation can’t fill its leadership positions with enough people who will do the wise things necessary to avoid complete disaster. According to Rep. Paul:

People do not want anything cut. They want all the bailouts to come. They want the Fed to keep printing the money. And they don’t believe that we’ve gone off the cliff or are close to going off the cliff. They think we can patch it over, that we can somehow come up with some magic solution. But you can’t have a budgetary solution if you don’t change what the role of government should be. As long as you think we have to police the world and run this welfare state, all we are going to argue about is who will get the loot.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/ron-paul-on-fiscal-cliff-and-vows-to-compromise-MYkAiqYBTaiHwXZL9Tvxkw.html Accessed Nov. 8, 2012

During his victory speech on Election Night, Barak Obama insisted that the best days for America are yet in the future. Well, maybe. But not if the nation’s political leadership remains gridlocked and frustrated from formulating real solutions to America’s massive problems: its uncontrollable appetite for racking up more than U.S.$ one trillion of debt every ten months, its trade imbalance with the rest of the world, and its lack of energy independence. And that’s just for starters.

Most media commentators today aren’t talking about the massive and rapid growth in the nation’s deficit in morals and ethics. Even the phrase “social conservatism” seems to be anathema to the very smug among the governing class these days.

There was a period of time in America’s past, about 150 years ago, when Democrats and Republicans and the nation as a whole were similarly embittered and divided. We call that period of time the American Civil War. The occupant of the White House at that time was trying to hold a divided America together. Abraham Lincoln, however, unlike most of the 21^st Century’s hypocritical American politicians, got his inspiration about the right things to do in his personal as well as public life from the Judeo-Christian Bible. He understood the truth and wisdom of the following the principles taught by the Scriptures. One of those principles that Lincoln was fond of is particularly pertinent at this exact moment to the America of the 21^st Century:

Then some people brought to Jesus a man who was blind and could not talk because he had a demon. Jesus healed the man, so that he was able to talk and see. The crowds were all amazed at what Jesus had done. “Could he be the Son of David?” [the Messiah who will rule in the prophesied Kingdom of God] they asked.

When the Pharisees heard this, they replied, “He drives out demons only because their ruler Beelzebul gives him power to do so.” Jesus knew what they were thinking, and so he said to them, “Any country that divides itself into groups which fight each other will not last very long. And any town or family that divides itself into groups which fight each other will fall apart. So if one group is fighting another in Satan’s kingdom, this means that it is already divided into groups and will soon fall apart! (Matthew 12:22-26 Good News Translation)

It is neither money, military strength nor “political correctness” that makes a nation great. To back away from the edge of the cliff, America’s leaders and people need to change their vicious partisan spirit that has infected the whole nation with bitterness, rancor and backbiting. The whole political dialogue needs to change. As Jesus of Nazareth said to the political slanderers and mudslingers of his day,

You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. (Matthew 12:34 English Standard Version)

The American people and its leaders need to re-embrace the motto that their ancestors once believed in so strongly that they even had it inscribed on their money: In God We Trust. Unless the nation returns to its roots, America like Wiley Coyote, will eventually plummet and crash on the rocks below, being bankrupt not only financially but also morally. And the world will marvel at how the leaders of what was once the greatest nation on Earth destroyed it bit by bit foolishly, all by themselves, as Abraham Lincoln warned so long ago.

For the full text of Abraham Lincoln’s House Divided speech see: http://www.angelfire.com/my/abrahamlincoln/HouseDivided.html

Amanda, Jesus, and the bullies

One week ago an almost 16-year-old Amanda Todd committed suicide in a Vancouver, B.C. suburb and Canada has been talking about it ever since. Amanda killed herself about one month after she had posted a YouTube video detailing the torment she had received online and in person for several years from her adolescent peers.

The B.C. premier, Christie Clark, has spoken out about this. The members of the federal parliament in Ottawa have debated what should be done about bullying on the house floor. The media is full of opinion pieces, reporting, and letters to the editor about the Amanda Todd trajedy.

Perhaps the most shocking thing about this whole incident is the behaviour of far too many people who in the immediate aftermath of her suicide posted vile comments and inappropriate images on the Amanda Todd memorial Facebook page and elsewhere on social media.

How can some contemporary human beings sink so low in pursuit of the perceived gains that come from bullying others? And why didn’t Amanda’s peers step in to help her rather than pile on to hurt her over that last few years?

Social psychologist and assistant professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University Brenda Morrison asserts that the Amanda Todd suicide is just another piece of evidence making the case that Canada has “raised a generation of passive bystanders,” (Misty Harris, “Bullying backlash,” Times Colonist, Oct. 14, 2012).

Professor Mossison’s point is that if Todd’s peers in school—who now mostly say on social media that they “cared about Amanda”—if they really did care, then why didn’t they actually stand up and do something in solidarity to help the poor girl deal with the bullying? The fact is that there is a real culture of fear to be found in far too many of Canada’s schools. It is a fear of peer-to-peer bullying that inflicts its pain in cyberspace and in the real world by both words and deeds.

Far too many students in our schools treat their classmates with nastiness and cruelty. They lack heart. They lack basic spiritual understanding on how to ethically treat other humans. They lack love. If one cares about another person that means standing shoulder to shoulder with the bullied and being willing to be unpopular, too. It means being willing to pay the price to do what’s right in spite of the consequences of being pushed out of a status-craving, extreme peer-oriented, “cool” crowd.

Most of today’s school population rarely attends any sort of Christian church. They won’t even darken the doors of one of those theologically liberal churches that are obsessed with political correctness in their own peculiar striving for worldly popularity. Consequently many of today’s school-aged generation have never heard of, much less internalized, the most important biblical teachings about how you should treat other people. Prior generations knew about what is called the “golden rule.” But there are serious gaps in the spiritual, Christian knowledge of the majority of the adolescents in school these days. So why should we be surprised at the amount of bullying going on? We can hardly expect young people to act like Christians when they aren’t even superficially committed to its values like previous generations of Canadians.

In the wake of the Amanda Todd suicide I read in the newspaper one evolutionary biologist’s opinion piece stating that bullying is in actuality a “normal” human behaviour. It’s “normal” because it increases the bully’s status/dominance within a group. According to this view, people bully because it gets desired results such as more opportunity to access desirable sexual partners in a group by eliminating competition. Bullying is seen by evolutionary biologists as a means to the “survival of the fittest.” In its gross form this secular worldview would conclude that Amanda Todd wasn’t adequately fit to bully back in order to secure her ranking within the group. So she was cast out and couldn’t survive on her own. It just makes good evolutionary sense.

The divine narrative revealed through the Judeo-Christian Bible would agree with the biological evolutionists that bullying is indeed “normal” behaviour—but only for carnal, fleshly, sinful human beings. Such people, however “normal” they might be in the opinion of evolutionary biologists, are cut off from the life of God.

Why? Because they are naturally hostile to keeping the Holy Scriptures’ two golden rules. And just what exactly are these golden rules? The most popularly remembered and cited golden rule is the one that Jesus of Nazareth gave during his famed Sermon on the Mount:

Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the Law and the Prophets (Matthew 7:12 New Living Translation).

When Jesus gave that golden rule teaching it was at the beginning of his ministry. He wanted to give the public an easy to remember sound bite that neatly summarized the essential message about how to get along with other people as taught in much greater detail and length by the 39 books of the Hebrew, Old Covenant Scriptures, which are the foundational teachings of the divine narrative revealed to humanity.

Later, close to the end of his ministry, just before he was murdered by his enemies, Jesus presented a fuller version of the Bible’s executive summary in response to critics who were trying to find something to pick on in what he was teaching. It’s like today’s students turning on a teacher. They simply wanted to put Jesus down and bully him in public in order to build themselves up. They thought they could increase their own status and power within the community by bullying Jesus. But Jesus’ response shut them down because of its elegant simplicity, completeness, and accuracy in what is really important in living life in this world. Here’s the account:

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees with his reply, they met together to question him again. One of them, an expert in religious law, tried to trap him with this question: “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?”

Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments,” (Matthew 22:34-42 New Living Translation).

Obviously our society does not keep the first so why should our children bother to keep the second? This idea of loving God and loving others is amplified by teachings throughout the Scriptures. But the social elite and gatekeepers of our society don’t want to hear about it. And anyone in the media who wants to present its messages is generally ostracized and pushed out of the inner circles of power. I suppose you could call it bullying.

The writer Allan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind made this relevant point that applies equally to Canada’s power elite and this present generation of school children and adolescents:

I do not believe that my generation, my cousins…all of whom are M.D.s or PH.D.s have any comparable learning [to that of his grand parents spiritually rich understand of the Bible]. When they [Allan Bloom’s peers] talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but clichés, superficialities, the material of satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the materials for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.

Bullying will stop when we all truly come to believe that God is love and that we are all made in the image and likeness of God.

[Comment for those who are interested: the New Testament Greek word for “Law” is Nomos while the Old Testament Hebrew word for “Law” is Torah. Neither Nomos nor Torah refer only to explicit, codified laws, but to ALL of the normal rules and forms people take for granted in day to day activities. The Torah or Nomos is that complete way of life that one lives in covenant with God. The “Law” Jesus was talking about in Matthew 22 is merely the complete divine lifestyle that produces love, peace of mind, and liberty from the consequences of sinful human behaviour. And this “Law” is taught throughout the Bible by explicit statements, case examples, prophetic allegories, and even by poetry.]

Searching for love by the numbers

Statistics Canada released a wave of statistics this week derived from its 2011 census, revealing the trends in the evolution of the Canadian family.

Essentially the stats show that the sanctity of traditional marriage between a man and a woman remains the gravitation pull for most Canadian families though it is gradually weakening. Nevertheless, for the time being it remains, according to Stats Canada, the predominant form of “social organization.”

Of the total 9,389,700 family “social units” counted in Canada by the 2011 census, about two-thirds were still headed by married, opposite sex couples—some 67 percent or about 6.3 million couples.

When the stats for heterosexual common-law (1.6 million) couples are added to those of heterosexual married couples—the traditional coupling between the opposite sexes (7.9 million couples) is revealed to be vastly more attractive to the average Canadian than homosexual coupling options—of which there were only 64,575 same-sex couples representing just 0.3 percent of all Canadian couples in this last census!

This leads one to wonder why the gatekeepers of our Canadian media organizations give so much coverage and attention to such an unpopular, tiny minority viewpoint on social organization, that represents only about one-third of one percent of all Canadians!

Wouldn’t it be a more profitable use of the media’s time and effort to focus on the needs of average Canadians—to talk about how to improve the relationships of heterosexual couples and their families? Sometimes it seems the media is more interested in dishing out a special interest group’s propaganda rather than rendering service on the more pressing needs of the nation.

And heterosexual couple’s relationships do need attention if we are going provide the nourishing emotional and material environments needed to rear a new generation prepared to move forward or even just to sustain our nation.

Fifty years ago in 1961, 91.6 percent of our family households were based on married couples. These people engendered a generation that was able to carry Canada to the prosperity we enjoy today. Will the present generation of couples who are having fewer children [1.9 in 2011 instead of 2.7 in 1961] be able to do as well or even better than their predecessors?

The significant decline in the number of couples willing to publically commit to each in marriage has significant implications that touch both the public and private domains of life.

By their very nature common-law relationships are formed by people who are unwilling to make a public and legal profession of commitment to each other. This means that the families founded by such people are more inherently unstable than those from the ranks of the committed. Common-law couples in Canada now account for 16.7 per cent of all families or 1.6 million couples—an increase of 13.9 percent since the last census.

This statistical growth of uncommitted common-law couples is mirrored by the statistical growth of single-adult households, 80 percent of which are headed up by women. These one-parent families now represent 16.3 percent of all Canadians families. That’s 1.5 million households.

While some common-law couples and single parent households do a good job rearing children, many do less than a stellar job. This is why teachers working at schools with catchment areas full of common-law and single parent households have classes in which a high percentage of their students come to school lacking the emotional maturity, self-discipline, and even material resources needed to make the most of their educational opportunities.

The Maclean’s magazine issue of Sept. 10, 2012 features the cover story: “Crisis on Campus—The Broken Generation—A shocking number of Canadian students feel depressed, even suicidal. Why our best and brightest are so troubled.”

Educators use all sorts of euphemisms to describe this dysfunctional situation that is a growing problem in elementary, secondary, and post-secondary educational institutions. But it all comes down to the declining numbers of Canadian families willing to tie the knot and make it hold tight in order to do the hard work needed to prepare their children for the difficult business of living in this challenging world.

Perhaps this growing Canadian reluctance to commitment in our personal sexual relationships also mirrors our decline in spiritual commitment to the God of the Bible? People wonder why they don’t sense the presence of God in their lives. Perhaps this is one reason.

You cry out, “Why doesn’t the Lord accept my worship?” I’ll tell you why! Because the Lord witnessed the vows you and your wife made when you were young. But you have been unfaithful to her, though she remained your faithful partner, the wife of your marriage vows.

Didn’t the Lord make you one with your wife? In body and spirit you are his. And what does he want? Godly children from your union. So guard your heart; remain loyal to the wife of your youth. “For I hate divorce!” says the Lord, the God of Israel. “To divorce your wife is to overwhelm her with cruelty,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. “So guard your heart; do not be unfaithful to your wife.” Malachi 2:14-16 NLT

Statistical Deceit & Moral Hazard

The Economist (February 25, 2012) in its article “Don’t lie to me, Argentina” encouraged its readers to try for a moment and imagine a world without reliable statistics.

Governments would fumble in the dark, investors would waste money and electorates would struggle to hold their political leaders to account.

What would happen to the financial/stock markets if nations and publicly held companies acknowledged that they no longer published reliable statistics? Obviously the consequences would be immediate and dramatic. Most private investment would dry up for any non-compliant firms that refused to open or certify the accuracy of their books.

We know this when it comes to money statistics. But that doesn’t mean governments and corporations don’t try to “selectively” improve, massage or just plain suppress certain disturbing or disconcerting statistics in order not to upset or even panic the public about what’s really happening. It’s human nature to try to make a bad situation look better than it really is in order to protect one’s power.

So should we be surprised that the Ontario provincial government recently decided it was too dangerous to share with the public the statistics about abortion.

The provincial Ministry of Health responded in a statement to the National Post: “Records relating to abortion services are highly sensitive and that is why a decision was made to exempt [suppress] these records”….

Why? Well, because they’re “sensitive.” And indeed they are. As are figures on gun crime, incest, spousal abuse, child abuse, rape, infanticide – crimes of all sorts, as a matter of fact. You’d also have to concede that information related to racial, cultural, or ethnic issues can be, and often is, highly sensitive. Is anything more delicate, given the cultural, religious and political ramifications, than the issue of honour killings? Should Ontarians be allowed access to figures related to immigration, given how touchy the matter can be? Perhaps data related to education and health care should be lumped in as well, given the heated arguments that often break out over policies and practices related to those topics (Kelly McParland: Ontario judges abortion statistics too sensitive to share, The National Post, Aug. 10, 2012).

Tens of thousand of tax-payer funded “medical procedures” are occurring yearly in Ontario. The government, obviously, wants to prevent researchers from discovering those abortion statistics that would probably make Canadians with tender consciences uncomfortable.

Of course, it’s not just the political beasts who want to avoid unsettling the great unwashed public. The Canadian Medical Association in their annual general council meeting on August 15^th resolved. as an organization, to work against opening a parliamentary inquiry into the current science of when does human life really begin. They are terrified that the motion Conservation MP Stephen Woodworth (Ontario) into parliament this past Spring might bring into question the doctor’s comfortable assumptions and profitable business in performing “medical procedures.”

If governments and corporations incur “moral hazard” by playing fast and lose with sovereign debt issues and its accounting sleight of hand, how much more “moral hazard” do the dark hearts of government politicians and medical professionals incur by trying to suppress the statistics about the numbers and the reasons for this huge loss of innocent life.

They are judged by this fact: The Light has come into the world, but they did not want light. They wanted darkness, because they were doing evil things (John 3:19 New Century Version).

The State now coerces Religion in America: the Culture War intensifies

Since the very beginning of the American republic the founders of the United States insisted on a short series of amendments to that nation’s constitution in order to protect critical areas of personal liberty and freedom from being infringed or stepped on by the power of their newly created federal state.

In particular, the First Amendment to the Constitution forbids the U.S. Congress to prohibit the free exercise of religion. The Constitution also forbids the establishment of an official State church, as was and continues to be the case in many European nations.

The reasons for the enactment of the First Amendment had a lot to do with the historical reasons many people hazarded their lives in the struggle to create new homes and communities in the original 13 colonies of British North America in the first place. People wanted to escape State coercion in all matters of the conscience and its peaceful expression in religious matters. They wanted to be able to live their lives without Big Brother, the State, telling them what they had to do religiously.

There was a certain tension at that stage of development in the history of Western Civilization as the Founders of the United States tried to balance what Conrad Black called “Faith” and “Reason” in his recent excellent National Post column on this subject:

The central struggle, in France [during its Revolution] and in most of the West, was over the role of the state, and more generally, over the cohabitation in Western civilization of the forces of Faith and the forces of, broadly speaking, Reason (http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/08/03/conrad-black-church-state-and-barack-obama/ accessed Aug. 3, 2012).

This balanced point of view was, for the most part, embraced by Americans and other modern democracies until the Rise of the Faith of Militant Secularism, beginning in the 1960s. Now, many zealous secularists not only want any reference to the Bible’s God removed from public sphere, including state and community institutions like schools, but they also want to coerce private businesses and religious institutions who still have a worldview informed by the Divine Narrative rather than by the new Secular Narrative of political correctness.

It is not enough now to just “live and let live” or “you do your thing while I do my thing.” Now the secularist zealots want to force the religiously minded to knuckle under, accept, and conform to their flavour-of-the-day, politically correct dogmas—especially on anything touching sex and the family.

The militant secularists are, in essence, seeking to establish a new coercive State Church of Materialism that will require everyone to bow down before their idolatrous altar of Political Correctness while they teach humanity to worship themselves as the only true gods who can decide what is good and evil.

As Conrad Black put it in his column “Church, State, and Barak Obama,”

The Enlightenment, the coruscation of the Age of Reason, implied that the whole concepts of divinity and of spirituality were, to say the least, questionable, and that each day, as the march of empirical knowledge progressed, the plenitude of knowledge was being approached. While God was a dodgy concept, man might be perfectible (man as God), and, though a heavenly paradise was a superstitious or wishful confection, an earthly paradise might be attainable by the implementation of a political program.

The religiously minded, of course, are resisting this political program in usually peaceful ways at present. This conflict is sometimes labeled, the “Culture Wars.”

Evidence to back up this assertion? In the United States consider the struggle by the U.S. Catholic church and other churches to resist the Obama administration’s mandatory health insurance policies that demand religious institutions—not withstanding their long-standing moral opposition to these types of birth control procedures and abortion-inducing drugs— to offer and pay for such “benefits” for their employees.

Or consider the secularists outrage when Chick-fil-A restaurant chain president Dan Cathy told the Baptist Press in July that the company was “guilty as charged” for backing “the biblical definition of a family.” Secular rights activists and others called for a boycott and put pressure on some municipal politicians to not approve new Chick-fil-A outlets in their cities.

What started as a strident demand by the militant secularist for “their rights” has now shifted to an unrelenting demand by them that the religiously minded submit and conform to their idolatrous assertion that they have the right to determine both good and evil and that we must all think, speak, and behave as they dictate. It is reminiscent of the old line that an erudite and cagey adversary of the God of Creation spoke to our first ancestors.

Now the snake was more able to fool others than any animal of the field, which the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say that you should not eat from any tree in the garden?” 2 Then the woman said to the snake, “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden. 3 But from the tree which is in the center of the garden, God has said, ‘Do not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You shall not surely die. 5 For God knows that on the day you both eat from it, then your eyes will be opened and you both shall be like gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:1-5; vv. 1-3 New Life Version, vv. 4-5 Lexham English Bible).

The freedom of conscience to live according to the Divine Narrative in America and the rest of the Western democracies is under attack by those who would fool us into believing that they are our gods who have the right to tell us what is right or wrong. Don’t fall for it.

America’s Midwest cursed with drought; B.C. overly blessed with water

I recently returned from a visit to my dad who lives in the irrigated farming area of southern Idaho’s Snake River Valley. After leaving a very green and lush British Columbia, once I drove south into Washington State and then over the pass through the coastal Cascade mountain range immediately east of Seattle, the dominant impression is one of a heat-blasted, parched-brown countryside. As we drove through northeastern Oregon the temperatures soared to 43 degrees Celsius, which translates into 110 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot! I got a good tan without even trying due to the blazing sun.

My son, Jeremiah, who accompanied me to Idaho, then caught a flight to St. Louis, Missouri, where he was volunteering as a youth camp counselor and photographer. While visiting America’s Midwestern heartland of grain production (more than 75 per cent of the corn and soybeans grow there), my son experienced more roasting temperatures along with high humidity—up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit! Only a snake could like such hellish weather. It was so hot that the teenage campers participating in my son’s “adventure” races were only allowed to walk from hydration station to hydration station lest they suffer heatstroke.

Much of the American heartland is literally baking. The implications of devastating drought in the world’s breadbasket are serious.

“We’re moving from a crisis to a horror story,” said Purdue University agronomist Tony Vyn. “I see an increasing number of fields that will produce zero grain.”

The drought scorching the U.S. Midwest is the worst since 1956, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a report posted on its website on Monday. Drought is affecting 55% of the land mass in the lower 48 states (http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/17/americas-worst-drought-since-56-threatens-world-food-supply/)

Already, prices for corn and soybeans are up more than 50 percent over the last four weeks. The coming food price sticker shock is going to affect all of us. For nations that import large amounts of grain to feed their populations, these higher prices is going to mean a good deal of personal hardship and national political instability.

Is all this heat and blasting mere coincidence? Just part of the normal weather cycle?

Meanwhile, here in British Columbia, our water reservoirs are critically full due to big melting snowpacks in the mountains and torrential rains in June and July. For the first time in 50 years, all of B.C.’s major dams are having to spill water in increasing amounts just to keep the dams from breaking. Dam managers have never seen anything like what’s happening this year at B.C.’s water reservoirs.

How strange. Here in B.C. we have a super-abundance of water, while just south of us the American heartland is bone dry. It sounds like some sort of ironic biblical curse. We have way too much but the Yanks have way too little. All the water that should have gone to America’s grain-growing Midwest has been dumped on us Pacific Canadians. What gives?

Actually, the Bible’s God, whom the Old Covenant scriptures referred to as YHVH (see Exodus 3:14-15, that is to say I am the One who was, is, and will be) and the New Covenant scriptures identified as Jesus Christ (see John 8:58), did promise to mess up the normal weather if those who claim to be His people fail to live according to His revealed way of life and belief. Americans, after all, make their boast even on their money “In God We Trust.” But do they really? Is the Bible’s God sufficiently fed up with North American hypocrisy to take action to punish us? Consider this prophecy:

“But if you will not obey the voice of the Lord your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field. Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Cursed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, the increase of your herds and the young of your flock. Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out.

“The Lord will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and perish quickly on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken me.

And the heavens over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you shall be iron. The Lord will make the rain of your land powder. From heaven dust shall come down on you until you are destroyed (Deuteronomy 28:15-20, 23-24).

Americans have long proudly exclaimed, “God bless America.” And for the longest time it seemed so. But what happens when a nation’s leaders and its people no longer believe in living so as to receive a blessing but rather stubbornly and rebelliously live in such a way that earns a curse instead? If God can bless can’t He also curse? Is a drought and soaring food prices a blessing or a curse? What do you think?

Rather outspoken on who controls your news

For better than 40 years Dan Rather worked in mainstream journalism. In fact he was a “star” reporter among his fellow journalists from the early 1960s to 2005. Rather worked as the evening news anchor for the elite media outlet—the CBS News network—during a time when the TV news supplanted the newspapers and radio as the most important source of the news that Americans depended upon to keep them up to date with what was going in their nation and world.

For Rather, quality journalism demands grit. Why? Because good reporting and worthwhile news requires the courage to ask of the powerful the tough questions despite the costs. Most of the public doesn’t realize the high price that some journalists must occasionally pay to report the truth. In Mexico reporting truthful news about the drug cartels and the legion of corrupt governmental officials has meant a bullet in the back of the head for dozens of Mexican journalists while others have had to flee into exile to avoid the same fate.

This type of violence and threats is not common for American and Canadian journalists. However, Dan Rather’s personal experience illustrates that journalistic freedom is more illusion than fact in the 21^st Century as entire nation’s news organizations are owned by just a handful of multi-national corporate media giants. Any North American journalist who fails to understand that it’s not smart—professionally speaking—to ask tough questions that embarrass the political and/or economic elite, will soon be looking for a new job.

After all, some of Rather’s controversial coverage—such as the news story about the sadistic operation at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq—resulted in “so much heat,” in lost money and influence, in Washington D.C. that Rather was forced out of the CBS Evening News anchor chair by his corporate masters.

Was reporting a controversial truth worth the risk of cutting short a long and distinguished career? Two years ago Rather reflected about the importance of the Abu Ghraib story in a Newsweek magazine feature story about the top ten news story’s of the 21^st Century’s first ten years:

“Abu Ghraib has opened our eyes, serving as a dark icon that reminds us our fiercest enemies – hubris [pride], cruelty, and ignorance – wage war from within.”

Rather’s observation is practically biblical:

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. It is better to be of a lowly spirit with the poor  than to divide the spoil with the proud (Proverbs 16:18-19 English Standard Version).

It bears remembering Dan Rather’s main point: the mainstream news organizations in the 21^st Century are not operating in the public service. They are large, usually multi-national corporations, working hand in glove with political/economic powers to determine what we see, hear, and read. The corporate masters of these news organizations are in business to make big profits and to earn fat bonuses for themselves. Telling the truth is okay, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of the bottom line.

That’s why the World Tomorrow is different. We are in the public service to tell the truth, which as it turns out has always been a dangerous enterprise:

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the [religious/political elite in the employ of a group of rapacious, violent overlords]. But my kingdom is not from the world.” 37 Then Pilate said to him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” (John 18:36-38 English Standard Version).

Some news stories—and that is what the gospel is… truthful good news—are never stale or out of date. Just remember that a great price had to be paid to tell you that story as well.

Julian Assange brazenly rips off the World Tomorrow name

The infamous Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, has started up on Russia’s state-funded RT (formerly Russian Times) cable broadcaster a weekly talk show program, The World Tomorrow. To many it is apparent that Assange ripped off the name of the long-running religious program called The World Tomorrow TV broadcast. Wow, Assange has a real load of hutzpah, but then we already knew that!

(http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/17/wikileaks-julian-assange-interviews-hezbollah-chief-hassan-nasrallah-for-debut-of-his-russian-talk-show/)

According to Wikipedia’s write up about this name:

The World Tomorrow was a radio and television half-hour program which had been sponsored by the Radio Church of God (later renamed Worldwide Church of God (WCG) while under the direction of Herbert W. Armstrong). It originally ran from 1934 to 1994. A 15-minute version of the radio program (but under varied translations of The World Tomorrow name), was broadcast by various speakers in the French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish languages. The World Tomorrow television program is in current production after having resumed in 2004, and airs in Atlanta, Georgia and Knoxville, Tennessee. The rights to the name were obtained by the Church of God, Worldwide Ministries of Sevierville, Tennessee, through the United States Patent and Copyright office. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Tomorrow_(1934)

The trademarked The World Tomorrow TV broadcast was revived in 2004 by the World Tomorrow Evangelistic Association and is in current production and airs weekly in Denver, Atlanta, Knoxville, and Orlando.

Back in the mid-1970s I worked as a writer for The World Tomorrow program, which was then presented by Garner Ted Armstrong. When I decided to write this blog a few years ago, my sons when searching for a name urged me to pay for and secure the Internet domain name www.theworldtomorrow.ca since it was vacant. It made sense to do this, rather than let someone else like Julian Assange who is out of synch with the name’s historic message, squat on it.

Of course, with TV broadcasts here in North America any network worth its salt will require that an entertainment attorney do a name search for any newly commissioned series. Julian Assange could have even done a Wikipedia search and discovered that Church of God people and organizations had long used the World Tomorrow name.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Assange, on the first program of his new talk show interviewed one of the world’s leading terrorists or “freedom fighters” depending on your point of view, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

For his last question in his talk show, The World Tomorrow, Assange asked Nasrallah this very interesting question:

You have fought against a hegemony of the United States of America, isn’t Allah, the notion of a god the ultimate superpower. And shouldn’t you as a freedom fighter seek to liberate people from the totalitarian concept of a monotheistic god?”

Actually, I’ll give Nasrallah some credit for responding with a relatively decent answer that acknowledged the Creator of the Heavens, the Earth, and humanity. Nasrallah credited the Creator as the source of our unique moral conscience that helps us distinguish good from evil, such as the evil murder/assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri on February 14, 2005. Not bad, really. Though Nasrallah ought to pay a bit more attention to his own preaching. Julian Assange really didn’t have too much to say in response.

But the Apostle Paul has this to say about any who would presumptuously step on the good name, reputation, and message so-long taught under the World Tomorrow banner:

God’s anger is shown from heaven against all the evil and wrong things people do. By their own evil lives they hide the truth. God shows his anger because some knowledge of him has been made clear to them. Yes, God has shown himself to them. There are things about him that people cannot see—his eternal power and all the things that make him God. But since the beginning of the world those things have been easy to understand by what God has made. So people have no excuse for the bad things they do. They knew God, but they did not give glory to God or thank him. Their thinking became useless. Their foolish minds were filled with darkness. Romans 1:18-21 New Century Version

When Does the Other Shoe Fall?

Last week the most astonishing news came out of Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put together, unexpectedly, a much larger governing Likud coalition for the State of Israel by bringing into the government the middle-of-the –road, politically speaking, Kadima party. This new unity government controls a little more than 78 percent of the votes in the Israeli parliament. Very few governments in the Western, democratic world can match that sort of consensus. In fact, the weighty impact of this majority is described by one Israeli columnist as a “hundred tons of solid concrete” (Charles Krauthammer, Netanyahu’s unity government prepares the ground for May 1967, National Post, May 11, 2012). What does Netanyahu’s move mean?

Oh yawn, you think. Another boring news story about byzantine coalition-building? I mean, over the weekend all we heard about was how the Greeks have been unable to cobble together enough similarly minded parties to run a government that would either go along with the German-imposed austerity plan or reject it. This political deadlock will most certainly force that nation back to the polls in another 3 or 4 weeks to see if the Greek nation can achieve a majority consensus one way or the other.

But what is happening in Israel, today, is diametrically the opposite of what is happening in Greece. Yet these opposites are part of a continuum of change that is going to dramatically rock the world in the near future. How? Why?

In Israel it is clear that Netanyahu in making his coalition deal with Kadima turned down an opportunity to call elections for this fall at a time when the polls clearly indicated Likud would win another mandate for four more years of government and do it in a manner that would increase the number of the Likud seats in the Knesset. So why make a big tent coalition that at the most has only 17 more months in power before parliamentary elections must be held? The math doesn’t make sense on the face of it. Why pick 17 months of governing authority instead of 48?

Well, Netanyahu isn’t doing the coalition deal to force concessions from his right-wing religious coalition partners about requiring the ultra-orthodox Israeli Jews to actually do their compulsory army service like all the rest of the Israelis. Though it will help.

Nor is he doing it to be able to make painful concessions to the Palestinians in peace talks. The Palestinians really can’t bring themselves to make a deal that Netanyahu could live with. After all, deep down, the Palestinians are holding out for the whole Canaan pie not just a slice of the pie in the West Bank and Gaza. Peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis are a zero-sum game. That’s why no solution has been able to be found ever since the United Nations split up the old British mandate of Palestine in 1947. Netanyahu understands this. So that is not a reason for his new super-majority coalition.

The reason for this “hundred tons of solid concrete” is to make a crucial, nationally existential decision within a rather narrow window of five months beginning now and running to shortly before the U.S. elections on November 11, 2012: Does Israel stop Iran in its headlong drive for nuclear weapons or not?

Israel must act during this time while Egypt and Syria are still divided and in confusion. Israel must act while Barak Obama still needs the votes of American Jews and those of many other Americans who are both friends of Israel and democrats. Once Obama is re-elected this fall, which is likely, Netanyahu doubts his tiny nation could expect much help from what was once its most important ally.

Israelis have had to learn the hard way that it is foolish to ignore the threats of annihilation uttered long and loud by their enemies. The effects of such a conflict as a catalyst will be profound, and unsettling, leading to many unanticipated consequences in both the European Union, the United States, and other nation states.

It is amazing to think that here we are in the 21^st Century and still a little nation called Israel and the Jews continue to play a central role in the theatre that is Western civilization. Consider this prophecy that is as current today as when it was originally penned about 520 B.C by the Prophet Zechariah:

I have decided that Jerusalem will become a bowl of wine that makes the neighboring nations drunk. And when Jerusalem is attacked, Judah will also be attacked. But I will turn Jerusalem into a heavy stone that crushes anyone who tries to lift it.

When all nations on earth surround Jerusalem, I will make every horse panic and every rider confused. But at the same time, I will watch over Judah. Then every clan in Judah will realize that I, the Lord All-Powerful, am their God, and that I am the source of their strength.

At that time I will let the clans of Judah be like a ball of fire in a wood pile or a fiery torch in a hay stack. Then Judah will send the surrounding nations up in smoke. And once again the city of Jerusalem will be filled with people (Zechariah 12:2-6 Contemporary English Version).

Punishing the message and the messenger

The news media in Canada over the last few days has been covering the story of the five-day suspension from a Nova Scotia high school of a 19-year-old senior, William Swinimer. His offense was wearing a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Life is wasted without Jesus.”

According to the superintendent of the South Shore Regional School Board, Nancy Pynch-Worthylake, Swinimer was kicked out of school because the message on his T-shirt offended the beliefs and/or feelings of some other students. The superintendent, however, refused to give any specifics about the complaints that the school authorities had received.

So what was so offensive about William Swinimer’s mild, profanity-free positive affirmation of the Christian faith?

What has happened to our Canadian right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion? Well, this effort by the school authorities to deprive William Swinimer of his freedom to quietly express his faith in a public arena is just one more indication that Canada is well on the way to transforming itself into an aggressive, secular state that insists on uniform compliance with political correctness. Militant secularists progressively attempt to sideline, minimize, label, ridicule, and then suppress the expression of Christian ideas, morality, and ethics in the media and all other arenas of public life.

Why do the secularists do this? Well, it’s obvious. The spiritual worldview taught by the Bible and faith and the secular worldview of materialism and unbelief are diametrically opposed to each other.

When Tory MP Stephen Woodworth introduced his Motion 312 in Ottawa—asking for a parliamentary committee to be formed to review scientific evidence about when human life actually begins so that our 400-year-old definition in the criminal code might be updated—all hell broke loose. The secularists called Woodworth’s motion “an insulting and offensive attack on women’s rights.” They’ve labeled him a “misogynist” and an “ultra-conservative.”

The secularists and pro-abortion people, of course, don’t want a public investigation, or—horrors—a debate on what the scientific evidence on the subject might reveal about when a human being actually becomes a human being. They want to suppress any such parliamentary investigation at all costs. They shudder at the idea that a review of the evidence and a discussion about the morals and ethics of when it’s okay to kill a human fetus might make them look hard-hearted and selfish. Of course, Christianity’s long-held position is that a “good” society promotes loving one’s neighbour—even the most powerless, weak, and vulnerable neighbour of them all.

So, when an audacious teen-ager wears to public school a T-shirt saying, “Life is wasted without Jesus,” uneasy consciences convict the secularists who are indeed upset at the profound implications of that slogan. So, they must suppress the message and punish the one standing in for the Messenger.

The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It’s written, I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head, I’ll expose so-called experts as crackpots. So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn’t God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb—preaching, of all things!—to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation (1 Corinthians 1:18-21 The Message paraphrase).

Eco-terrorist or hero? Did Wiebo Ludwig make the right choice?

How should you save the Earth?

On Earth Day this past Sunday, I decided to do something good for the environment—-and for my family and myself. I took up a large big box retailer’s offer to trade in my rusting, ancient of days, gasoline-powered, emissions-spewing lawn mower for a discount off the price of an environmentally friendly classic 20” push reel mower. So it was “no” to creating weekly a small amount of greenhouse gases and “yes” to another anti-obesity habit, i.e. physical exercise.

Of course, in my neighbour’s eyes, this will just be another confirming proof of my eccentricity. They are certain I’m strange—but harmless. After all, I NEVER spray the lawn with toxic herbicides to get rid of those cheerful, well-established dandelions. And I actually go out and regularly commune with my dandelions in order to pick the leaves to steam up for dinner. I’m sure my neighbours have concluded that I’m fraternizing with the weed enemy. But besides doing a little to save the Earth by this small gesture, it also saves me from paying for a bunch of spinach at the supermarket.

My neighbours just don’t understand what they are missing out on. Being Earth friendly can even help you improve your teenagers work habits. Why my almost 15-year-old was so enthused by the novelty of my new push mower that he even volunteered to cut the grass all by himself. And after the job was finished, he began openly musing about starting up his own entreprenurial business selling a “green” lawn cutting service using my new mower. Ah, what unexpected dividends could arise as a green technology transforms a video game-playing, couch potato into a go-get-her Canadian eco-warrior with biceps.

Yet is such a non-violent, stand-up-for-the-Earth choice (apologies to the occasional slugs and bugs that get cut up) in how one exercises appropriate environmental stewardship a better one than that made by the confrontational, Canadian eco-warrior Wiebo Ludwig, who died this year on April 9? Some people call Ludwig an “eco-terrorist.”

Which is the better, more effective path in the long run: A peaceful approach? Or, a more confrontation, violent approach?

Ludwig honestly earned his “eco-terrorist” reputation by blowing up sour gas wells in northwest Alberta in the late 1990s. He was making a statement to the oil and gas industry and the regulatory governmental agencies that they couldn’t ignore. Of course, they didn’t. So Wiebo eventually ended up in jail. He paid a high personal price to open up the conversation about the steep price that is being paid by aquifers, rural families, and their livestock in order to make possible the wealth and power of Western Canada’s oil and gas companies. Oil and gas development is not a completely win-win proposition for all.

But was Wiebo Ludwig right in the way he confronted the dark side to the oil and gas development of northern B.C. and Alberta?

Wiebo sincerely believed that the sour gas wells were causing his daughter’s miscarriages, as well as, the ill-health and even death of some of the livestock on his farm located near Hythe, Alberta. But because industry and government seemingly turned a deaf ear to Wiebo Ludwigs’s environmental complaints and even denied that there really was a problem to be resolved or mitigated, the man chose to act violently in response to his frustration. The legacy of Wiebo Ludwig is full of controversy and, in some quarters, opprobrium. Did he make the right choice?

Wiebo Ludwig was a complicated man. He had good qualities and bad ones, such as his capacity for anger. The Scriptures warn us about the danger of being an angry person:

And “don’t sin by letting anger control you.” Don’t let the sun go down while you are still angry, for anger gives a foothold to the devil (Ephesians 4:26-27 New Living Translation).

Wiebo also had a degree in Christian theology and was ordained as a minister for the Dutch Reformed Church. Consequently, he knew the Apostle Paul’s list of obligatory character requirements for the ministry:

An elder is a manager of God’s household, so he must live a blameless life. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered; he must not be a heavy drinker, violent, or dishonest with money. Rather, he must enjoy having guests in his home, and he must love what is good. He must live wisely [sound-minded] and be just. He must live a devout and disciplined life [self-controlled]. He must have a strong belief in the trustworthy message he was taught; then he will be able to encourage others with wholesome teaching and show those who oppose it where they are wrong (Titus 1:7-9 New Living Translation).

The “sound-mindedness” that the Apostle Paul was requiring meant having an spiritual inner outlook that correctly balanced outward behaviour. While “self-controlled” meant that a minister must master himself from within. But the concluding point in this passage by Paul is that the servant of the Creator must use his talents and the situations that arise in life in the most productive means possible so as to change or persuade those who oppose “wholesome teaching.” One can’t accomplish this change with threats or force.

Wilber Wilberforce struggled within the British parliament for over 30 years in order to extinguish human chattel slavery. By peaceful means he changed a great deal of the social policy of the 19th Century’s superpower, the British Empire. And Wilberforce did it with amazing grace, though for decades he faced seemingly insurmountable roadblocks and reversals.

The Apostle Paul in writing to Timothy, amplified the qualifications of a servant of God, including the importance of a good reputation with non-Church members:

Also, people outside the church must speak well of him so that he will not be disgraced and fall into the devil’s trap (1 Timothy 3:7 NLT).

Wiebo Ludwig failed in this regard—however accurate his environmental complaint.

In the 21st Century there will be an increasing amount of environmental pollution that will negatively impact areas as small as a single neighbourhood, or as large as an entire geographical region—remember the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico due to BP’s massive oil spill. Environmental disasters will continue to occur because far too many corporate CEOs in their pursuit of profits and bonuses do not practice the golden rule — loving one’s neighbour as oneself So there will always be plenty of work for environmental organizations who protest such abuse of the Earth.

However, for those who would make a profession of Christianity, we must live and act according to the Scriptures when dealing with those who are polluting the environment. Our methodology as individuals should set the right example. With peaceful, persistent persuasion, we must make the changes needed to preserve God’s Creation, this rare blue and green planet that sustains our existence in the midst of the blackness of inhospitable space.
The Christian profession precludes the possibility of any form of political or environmental confrontation that employs some form of violence that might injure others — that is not the Christian way. A good end can never justify a violent means. No matter how egregious the environmental sin, it remains the Creator’s sole personal prerogative—NOT ours—to punish or to exact retribution upon those who are unwittingly or knowingly destroying the Earth (see Revelation 11:18).

Canada’s great new business opportunity: prostitution!

By a weird twist of irony, Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms is now being interpreted by the Ontario Court of Appeal some 30 years after its immaculate conception by Pierre Trudeau as enshrining the inalienable human right of a certain sort of business people, who carry whips and dress in black leather, to run right proper bordellos that provide good security for their sex slaves—sorry, I mean “sex workers.”
As Raymond de Souza, a columnist at the National Post, wrote concerning this court decision:

In the euphemisms employed by the plaintiffs, prostitutes are “sex workers,” as if they were selling real estate or peddling cosmetics. A more accurate term is “sex slaves” — women forced to turn tricks by their drug dealers, the violent gang culture of the streets, or even abusive boyfriends.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/26/father-raymond-j-de-souza-if-prostitution-is-a-tragedy-why-make-it-easier/

Yes, of course, the court just knew how we, Canadians, have been chaffing at our previously appalling lack of legal rights to conveniently run our own little whorehouses on the prairie, as it were, in our neighbourhood strip malls! Why heck, don’t bother any more with those stuffy sex-ed classes at Billy and Meghan’s elementary school. It would be much easier to have the teachers plan a field trip to their local House of the Rising Sun for an educational show-and-tell that the kids will never forget.

I’m just so impressed with these judges’ seductive powers of legal reasoning. And, what a clever blow below the belt performed on all those moralistic Canadians who just can’t seem to get it through their heads that being a prostitute in a whorehouse is just as good a career choice as, well, being a judge in a court house. Anywise, it’s getting too hard these days to tell the judges and the whores apart anymore. After all, they both seem to be professionally working in a sort of well-paid position.

But prostitution is not like other professions. Most women cannot be said to “choose” a line of work they have been forced into, and find so disgusting, most of them need drugs to numb their misery (assuming they weren’t addicts beforehand). Those championing the rights of “sex workers” base their arguments on theory, and the word of a small minority of confident, articulate, happy or heart-of-gold hookers who know how to manipulate credulous elites. They would get a very different story from Tania Fiolleau, as I did in a recent telephone interview. Tania got into prostitution when an acrimonious custody battle over her two sons left her penniless and desperate. She eventually ran several brothels, serving as madam to 500 prostitutes. On the outside she seemed to have it all: good looks, money and power, but inside “I was the walking dead,” and “a shell of a woman.”

Tania pours scorn on the liberal image of the prostitute as a working gal like any other. Of the hundreds of girls that worked for her, she says, “not a single one ever said that she did not regret it.” She says many of her former workers are homeless or hopelessly drug addicted; some have been murdered or committed suicide.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2011/08/03/barbara-kay-prostitution-is-an-affliction-not-a-profession/

Of course, don’t blame the judges for upsetting the nation’s sexual apple cart. The judges could only work with what parliament handed them. Our politicians have refused, so far, to make the actual act of a human being prostituting herself or himself illegal. Why? Well, maybe some of our politicians would feel a little hypocritical about debating the legality of prostituting oneself.

So, our elected representatives have only passed the type of laws that regulate the business aspects of prostitution, such as running a bawdy house or living off the proceeds of prostitution, and word of mouth advertising (“communicating”). But the act of human prostitution itself has long been legal in Canada. We haven’t seemed to care if people prostitute themselves as long as they haven’t been able to run a regular business that easily and legally profits from sexual fiddle-faddle.

But now, with this judgment by the Ontario appeal court, all this changes. Now, the judges proclaim, Canada is open to fully exploit exciting business opportunities in prostitution. I wonder how long it will be before some big corporations get into the sex business, opening franchises throughout Canada. It’s probably an easy fit for the hospitality business. Talk about room service! Why Canadian prostitution pros could easily recruit a steady stream of new cheap whores from among the pool of secondary school girls, who are over the legal age to give consent for sexual intercourse (maybe 16 rather than 18 since prostitution is now a legal business), by offering to pay twice as much as competing employers like fast food joints and retail. What a great new Canadian business model. Perhaps, I need to pitch my idea to the Dragon’s Den producers!

Now, you might ask, how does this new profitable business model fit in with other Canadian cultural stakeholders like the Churches, Synagogues, or Mosques? The answer lies in the fact that Canada is officially multi-cultural. It’s been generations since we’ve thought of ourselves as a Christian nation. So if all religions are the same, why shouldn’t Canadians adopt the old Canaanite Fertility religion to go along with our new progressive take on prostitution? If we do this, then the whorehouses could do double duty and serve as house of worship as well as a business.

Prostitution was a big business in the ancient Grecian and Roman empires. But mostly the whores back then were enslaved women or boys. So the trick for the modern prostitution business model will be to get young women and men to voluntarily debase themselves for the least amount of money possible. Who knows? Maybe social media could be a useful tool?

Can you tell I’m angry!? I’m so disgusted with our making black white and white black. It is abhorrent to call prostitution a “career choice” or a “charter right.”

The Bible’s God has something to say to parents when advising their daughters about a career choice:

 “Do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute, lest the land fall into prostitution and the land become full of depravity (Leviticus 19:29 English Standard Version).

To our nation’s parliamentarians and judges the ancient prophet calls out a warning:

Woe to those who call evil good  and good evil, who put darkness for light  and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet  and sweet for bitter!…. for they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts, and have despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against his people, and he stretched out his hand against them and struck them, and the mountains quaked; and their corpses were as refuse  in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still. (Isaiah 5:20, 24-25 ESV)

And Isaiah adds:

Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression… What will you do on the day of punishment, in the ruin that will come from afar?  To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth? Nothing remains but to crouch among the prisoners  or fall among the slain. For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still (Isaiah 10:1, 3-4 ESV).

Has the Bible’s LORD God changed His mind about what nourishes the human spirit and what crushes it? Do you think God has changed his mind even a little bit about prostitution? Or the personal consequences incurred by those who promote and profit from what He hates? As the Apostle Paul once wrote:

Unjust people who don’t care about God will not be joining in his kingdom. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9 The Message).

The Arab Spring’s Blossoms of Hate

On Monday March 12th, the new Islamist-dominated Egyptian parliament unanimously voted to expel Israel’s ambassador in Cairo and to stop all natural gas exports. Secondarily, the Egyptian parliamentarians resolved that Egypt would never [no longer?] be a friend, partner or ally of the “Zionist entity.” [Note: Islamists can’t bring themselves to say the word “Israel” because it contradicts their worldview.] Thirdly, that unmentionable neighbouring nation with whom they currently have a legally binding peace treaty is to be labeled henceforth as Egypt’s “number one enemy.” Finally, the parliament requested the governing military administration review all agreements with the “Zionist entity” with the implied desire to repudiate them. This news report by the Associated Press was filed by Hamza Hendawi this week.

So, here we are! About a year after the “Arab Spring” in Egypt resulted in the overthrow of the authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarak, the flowers of ethnic hate and future conflict are beginning to blossom once again in the land of the pharaohs.

For 33 years Egypt and Israel have been at peace following the treaty signed by the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. For this diplomatic good work both leaders were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as the world breathed a sigh of relief. During Sadat’s acceptance speech for his Nobel recognition, Sadat emphasized the importance of rejecting the way of hate and violence in the Middle East:

Let us put an end to wars, let us reshape life on the solid basis of equity and truth. And it is this call, which reflected the will of the Egyptian people, of the great majority of the Arab and Israeli peoples, and indeed of millions of men, women, and children around the world that you are today honoring. And these hundreds of millions will judge to what extent every responsible leader in the Middle East has responded to the hopes of mankind.”

Though genuinely popular with many Egyptians at the time it was signed, the peace treaty, however, remained deeply unpopular among Egyptian Islamists who darkly nursed their grudges against Israel and the Jews during the last three decades that they were out of power. They were persecuted by the Sadat and Mubarak government and left idly sitting on their hands. Some even cooled their heels in prison. But you know what they say, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

About 2 ½ years after the signing of the peace treaty with Israel, Egyptian Islamists hatched a plot and assassinated Anwar Sadat. They murdered Egypt’s only Nobel peace prize-winner. This murder was encouraged by an Islamic religious legal interpretation written by a Muslim cleric who hated Sadat for violating Islamic precedent by making a real peace treaty with an enemy.

Obviously, the founder of Islam, Mohammad, neither said, nor taught, nor believed the spiritual concepts of “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God” and “Love your enemies” (Matthew 5:9, 44). The historical record and even the testimony of Islam’s own “sacred writings” reveal that Mohammad was a bloody man who waged war against and slaughtered many thousands who opposed him and his religious ideas. And he encouraged his followers to do exactly the same murderous things.

Mohammad and his followers are not the Arabic equivalent of Jesus and his disciples. One of Jesus’ most important followers was the Jew known to us as the Apostle Paul. When it came to the subject of using violence to deal with enemies, Paul wrote this:

If someone has done you wrong, do not repay him with a wrong. Try to do what everyone considers to be good. Do everything possible on your part to live in peace with everybody. Never take revenge, my friends, but instead let God’s anger do it. For the scripture says, I will take revenge, I will pay back, says the Lord. Instead, as the scripture says: If your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them a drink; for by doing this you will make them burn with shame. Do not let evil defeat you; instead, conquer evil with good (Romans 12:17-21 Good News Translation).

This subject is but one of the many that reveal how greatly the teachings of Jesus and his disciples differ from those of Mohammad and his followers.

Miniaturized marvels of design

A team of German and American biologists working in Madagascar recently announced that they had discovered the world’s smallest chameleon, which they named Brookesia micra. The minature lizard grows to a maximum length of just 29 millimeters, or just over one inch.

While the phenomenon known as “island dwarfism” is well known, Brookesia micra takes this generalization to an extreme. According to the biologists announcing this discovery:

“The extreme miniaturization of these dwarf reptiles might be accompanied by numerous specializations of the body plan, and this constitutes a promising field for future research,” said herpetologist Frank Glaw, lead author of the study, in a press release. “But most urgent is to focus conservation efforts on these and other microendemic species in Madagascar which are heavily threatened by deforestation.” Cited from “Rivaling the World’s Smallest Reptiles: Discovery of Miniaturized and Microendemic New Species of Leaf Chameleons (Brookesia) from Northern Madagascar.” Frank Glaw, Jorn Kohler, Ted M. Townsend, Miguel Vences, PLoS ONE, Vol 7, Issue 2, http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0031314

Though extremely tiny, this creature speaks big things about its Bio-Engineer. Just think about the complex miniaturization that is involved to create a living, reproducing, self-healing, self-directed fruit fly eating machine that can camouflage itself for protection by changing its skin colour automatically to match its surroundings. An absolute marvel of design. I wonder how much the brain of Brookesia micra weighs? Would it be the size of a grain of sand? Yet hard-coded into the miniscule bit of a body is its own special DNA software code that directs everything that this tiny lizard has needed to survive for thousands and thousands of years if not time out of mind when it comes to humanity. Quite an achievement, eh?

After all, it’s not a bio-engineering feat that all the scientists in the world working together could duplicate much less surpass. We humans just don’t have the brain power to match the Creator of Brookesia micra.

Of course, the human brain of itself is a remarkable piece of work. Weighing only about 1. 36 kilos or 3 pounds, it is a marvel of miniaturization that packs a remarkable wallop of computing power for its size due to some 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) and the one million billion synaptic connections linking those neurons.

We can do a wide variety of remarkable stuff with this brain. But making living things, whether miniaturized chameleons or awesomely large blue whales, is not one of them.

Perhaps a little humility before the great Creator of Brookesia micra is in order in the scientific community. Would it really be that painful to acknowledge His creative genius on university campuses? Well, it would seem so. When it comes to acknowledging the Intelligent Design of the Universe and the living things in it, many academicians prefer willful blindness.

Now the holy anger of God is disclosed from Heaven against the godlessness and evil of those men who render truth dumb and inoperative by their wickedness. It is not that they do not know the truth about God; indeed he has made it quite plain to them. For since the beginning of the world the invisible attributes of God, his eternal power and divinity, have been plainly discernible through things which he has made and which are commonly seen and known, thus leaving these men without a rag of excuse. They knew all the time that there is a God, yet they refused to acknowledge him as such, or to thank him for what he is or does. Thus they became fatuous in their argumentations, and plunged their silly minds still further into the dark.
22-23 Behind a facade of “wisdom” they became just fools, fools who would exchange the glory of the eternal God for an imitation image of a mortal man, or of creatures that run or fly or crawl (Romans 1:18-22 J.B. Phillips New Testament).

This entry was posted in Weekly Column and tagged Apostle Paul, Brookesia micra, dwarf cameleon, Frank Glaw, God, Iintelligent design, Jeff Patton, Madagascar, world's smallest reptile, world's smallest reptiles on February 27, 2012 by Jeff.

Censoring God out of our culture

Today many in the Western world are uncomfortable or even hostile when it comes to any mention of God’s name in any way but as an angry curse or as a mindless exclamatory expression (OMG). The latest example of this comes from Canada.

As part of the preparations for an end of year student concert at an elementary school near Sorel-Tracy, Que., a town near Montreal, the music teacher was planning on having his students sing the classic “Hymne à l’amour,” (Ode to Love), which was first performed by the late iconic French singer Edith Piaf in 1949. But the Saint-Gabriel-Lalemant School teacher decided to censor the last line of the song, “God reunites those who love” because he didn’t want to answer any questions the students might have about God. The local school board say the censorship was the personal decision of the teacher and was not ordered by the school or district policy.

What an offensive, politically incorrect idea that God will reunite those who love! How far has our culture degenerated that we can no longer bear to have the children sing about the author of love? As the apostle John taught:

He who does not love does not know God, for God is love (1 John 4:8 New King James Version).

Our society seems extraordinarily eager to promote media themes talking about sexual lust, selfishness, violence, and such like. But to recall God’s loving kindness has become controversial among elementary school teachers? We are heading for big, big trouble. What a people sows, they will also reap.

This entry was posted in Weekly Column and tagged Canada, Edith Piaf, God, Jeff Patton, love, love unites, politically correct, Quebec, Saint-Gabriel-Lalemant School, Sorel-Tracy on February 16, 2012 by Jeff.

Hey Assad! Prepare to make yourself at home with the dead

News reports today, like every other day this week, are telling a gruesome tale of slaughter and brutality in the Syrian civil conflict. These reports are shocking, but not surprising, as the Syrian army uses its heavy weapons ostensibly purchased to fight with the Israeli army to now indiscriminately bombard and kill its own citizens living in the city of Homs and elsewhere in that country.

So the news features stories about the wholesale murder of men, women, and children who happen to be living in neighbourhoods where the popular sentiment is against the government. Any doctors or medical personnel who attempt to treat these wounded civilians in these areas under government bombardment are summarily executed as well. The government is determined to kill all who oppose it, armed or unarmed, as well as their entire families whether young or old. The Assad government is going to make an example of Homs.

Former friends and allies of the Syrian government of Bashar Assad, such as Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf states, are now seeking regime change. The Arab League tried to get the United Nations to pass some sort of resolution condemning the indiscriminate bloodshed. But the Russians and the Chinese, who have their own dirty laundry, vetoed the resolution because they don’t want to set a “bad” precedent that might somehow diminish the absolute right of a sovereign power to slaughter rebels as that government sees fit. Iran and Hezbollah are also backing up the Assad government, providing whatever assistance that government requests of them.

The rule of law? Human rights? Elemental civilized behaviour? Not a chance. Power comes out of the barrel of a smoking gun. What we are seeing in Syria is the mere continuance of a millennia-old Middle Eastern custom in which a ruler may use any and all means to assert his authority and punish his enemies.

For instance, the ancient Assyrians enjoyed decapitating the whole population of a rebellious city and then making a pyramid out of their victims’ heads at that city’s main entrance. This would serve as an ancient sort of twitter message to everyone else living in the region: submit or die you scum! The Assyrians liked this message so much they would even decorate their kings’ palaces with graphic portrayals of it.

Unfortunately carnal human nature has not changed much since antiquity. This is one reason the Bible is just as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago. Even though it was written so long ago, the book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible succinctly nails the nature of Bashar Assad this way:

A wicked ruler over a helpless people  is like a roaring lion or a charging bear (Proverbs 28:15 Holmen Christian Standard Bible)

Unfortunately, it would appear that at this time the Syrian people are going to receive little if any help from other nations to help stop the Assad government from murdering them by the thousands.

Nevertheless the Syrian regime should know that they will eventually lose power and then be held to account for their blood guilt. Perhaps this prophetic word of deliverance given by a Jewish prophet to his oppressed people thousands of years can lend a little comfort and hope to today’s hard-pressed people of Syria and elsewhere in the world. Let all the wicked rulers of the earth know that the God of Justice has not changed:

When God has given you time to recover from the abuse and trouble and harsh servitude that you had to endure, you can amuse yourselves by taking up this satire, a taunt against the king [of Syria]:
Can you believe it? The tyrant is gone! The tyranny is over!  God has broken the rule of the wicked, the power of the bully-rulers  that crushed many people.
A relentless rain of cruel outrage  established a violent rule of anger rife with torture and persecution.
And now it’s over, the whole earth quietly at rest.  Burst into song! Make the rafters ring!
 Ponderosa pine trees are happy, giant Lebanon cedars are relieved, saying, ”Since you’ve been cut down, there’s no one around to cut us down.” 
And the dead are all excited, preparing to welcome you when you come.  Getting ready to greet you are the ghostly dead, all the famous names of earth.  All the buried kings of the nations will stand up on their thrones  with well-prepared speeches, royal invitations to death:  “Now you are as nothing as we are! Make yourselves at home with us dead folks!” (Isaiah 14:3-10 The Message version).

This entry was posted in Weekly Column and tagged Bashir Assad, Chinese, Homs, Jeff Patton, Jew, murder, Prophet Isaiah, Russians, Scriptures, Syria, United Nations, World Tomorrow on February 10, 2012 by Jeff.

Twisted Honour

The lead story in Canada for the last couple of days has been about the guilty verdicts for four first-degree murders that the jury brought down on Mohammad Shafia, his polygamous second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and his oldest son, 21-year-old Hamed Mohammad Shafia.

They murdered Mohammad’s barren number one wife Rona, and Mohammad and Tooba’s three daughters. From the perspective of the heartless Shafia family killers, the four family members they slew, (Zainab 19, Sahar 17, and Geeti 13 and step-mom Rona 50) deserved what they got because they had “betrayed Islam”, and sullied the family’s honour. Mohammad Shafia, who was in his own eyes a devout Muslim man devoid of those weak infidel Christian virtues like mercy, kindness, patience, and forgiveness was dishonoured by the “perverse” behaviour of those he killed.

Self-righteous man that he was, Mohammad Shafia was even caught on a police wiretap after the four murders wishing out loud that the devil would crap on his reviled daughters’ graves.

But more specifically, how had Shafia’s daughters offended him? It seems Zainab offended by marrying in the family’s mosque (but the Imam Ali Falih Altaie never registered the marriage) a young Muslim man from a family who did not meet with the Shafia’s approval. Sahar deserved death because she had a Christian boyfriend and had some pictures taken of her wearing short skirts. Geeti, apparently, was murdered because she was rebellious, skipped some classes at school, and was breaking the family’s code of silence by asking school authorities to be taken into the foster child care system.

As for the spurned wife, Rona, maybe Mohammad Shafia just got tired of using her for a punching bag? Maybe he thought she was too old or too expensive or taking up too much room in the family’s Montreal house? It’s hard to tell because I haven’t read anything in the various news stories that satisfactorily explains to me just what was Mohammad’s evil motive in her case.

Maybe it was just like a farmer knocking off the heads of a few annoying chickens in the coop. If you’re going to kill three birds what’s the big deal about doing a fourth? After all, a lot of Muslim men just think of their women as chattel. Do with them what you will, as Islam plainly teaches that women are inferior to men. However, thank God, we don’t have Islamic Sharia law in Canada. So at this new year’s opening session in parliament, Canada’s justice minister, Rob Nicholson, during question period, called the Shafia murders “barbaric” and “unacceptable,” and pledged to protect women and other vulnerable people from such violence.

The Shafia family Imam, Ali Falih Altaie, in an effort to deflect any impression that he, his congregation, or Islam in general would support the practice of honour killing as carried out by the bloody Shafias said:

It’s unforgivable, actually, and unacceptable by any religion.
Only people who have lost their brain do that… It’s unbelievable.

I don’t want to put down the Imam, Altaie, as his on-the-record comments about the murders are to his credit, but I must contradict him. Why? Because in reality, honour killing though perhaps unacceptable in Western Islam, is indeed widely practiced in the rest of the Muslim world.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimates that perhaps as many as 5,000 women and girls a year are killed by members of their own families. But according to the journalist Robert Fisk, numerous women’s groups in the Middle East and Southwest Asia suspect the number of victims is about 20,000 women and girls annually. See Robert Fisk: The crime wave that shames the world,” London: The Independent. Retrieved 8 September 2010.

Fisk notes the gruesome nature of these murders in Muslim-dominated areas:

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man – this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt – who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the “honour” of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for “befriending boys”? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied…

Or the young woman found in a drainage ditch near Daharki in Pakistan, “honour” killed by her family as she gave birth to her second child, her nose, ears and lips chopped off before being axed to death, her first infant lying dead among her clothes, her newborn’s torso still in her womb, its head already emerging from her body? She was badly decomposed; the local police were asked to bury her. Women carried the three to a grave, but a Muslim cleric refused to say prayers for her because it was “irreligious” to participate in the namaz-e-janaza prayers for “a cursed woman and her illegitimate children.”

This horrific practice of “honour killing,” according to some sources is increasing in those parts of the world heavily influenced by Islamic-Arabic-South Asian cultures.

The founder of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth made a point of strongly teaching against “honour killings.” By deed as well as by words he made the point in John 8:1-12 (New Living Translation):

Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd. “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?”
They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust. When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.
Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?”
“No, Lord,” she said.
And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.” Jesus spoke to the people once more and said, “I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life.”

For any Muslims reading this, here is the truth about “honour killings” in Arabic:

8:1-12 John
Arabic Bible: Easy-to-Read Version (ERV-AR)
ﻳﻮﺣﻨﺎ 8
المَرْأةُ الَّتِي أُمْسِكَتْ فِي الزِّنا
1 أمّا يَسُوعُ فَذَهَبَ إلَى جَبَلِ الزَّيْتُونِ. 2 وَفِي الصَّباحِ الباكِرِ ذَهَبَ إلَى ساحَةِ الهَيْكَلِ ثانِيَةً حَيْثُ جاءَ إلَيْهِ الجَمِيعُ، فَجَلَسَ وَبَدَأ يُعَلِّمُهُمْ. 3 وَأحضَرَ مُعَلِّمُو الشَّرِيْعَةِ وَالفِرِّيْسِيُّونَ امْرأةً أُمْسِكَتْ وَهِيَ تَزْنِي. وَجَعَلُوها تَقِفُ وَسَطَ النّاسِ. 4 ثُمَّ قالُوا لِيَسُوعَ: «يا مُعَلِّمُ، أُمْسِكَتْ هَذِهِ المَرْأةُ مُتَلَبِّسَةً بِجَرِيْمَةِ الزِّنا.» 5 وَقَدْ أوْصانا مُوسَى فِي الشَّرِيْعَةِ بِأنْ نَرْجُمَ مِثلَ هَذِهِ المَرْأةِ، فَماذا تَقُولُ أنتَ؟» 6 قالُوا هَذا لِيَمْتَحِنُوهُ، فَيَكُونَ لَهُمْ ما يَتَّهِمُونَهُ بِهِ.
لَكِنَّ يَسُوعَ انْحَنَى وَبَدَأ يَكْتُبُ عَلَى الأرْضِ بِإصْبِعِهِ. 7 وَلَمّا ألَحُّوا فِي السُّؤالِ، وَقَفَ وَقالَ لَهُمْ: «حَسَناً! مَنْ كانَ مِنْكُمْ بِلا خَطِيَّةٍ، فَلْيَكُنِ البادِئَ بِرَمْيِها بِحَجَرٍ.» 8 وَانحَنَى مَرَّةً أُخْرَى وَأخَذَ يَكْتُبُ عَلَى الأرْضِ.
9 فَلَمّا سَمِعُوا هَذا، بَدَأُوا يُغادِرُونَ المَكانَ واحِداً بَعْدَ الآخَرِ بَدْءاً بِالأكْبَرِ سِنّاً. وَبَقِيَ يَسُوعُ وَحْدَهُ مَعَ المَرْأةِ الواقِفَةِ أمامَهُ. 10 فَوَقَفَ يَسُوعُ وَقالَ لَها: «أيْنَ هُمْ؟ ألَمْ يَحكُمْ عَلَيْكِ أحَدٌ؟» 11 قالَتْ: «لا أحَدَ يا سَيِّدُ.» فَقالَ لَها يَسُوعُ: «وَلا أنا أحكُمُ عَلَيْكِ. فَاذْهَبِي وَلا تَعُودِي إلَى الخَطِيَّةِ فِيما بَعْدُ.»
يَسُوعُ هُوَ النُّور
12 ثُمَّ وَاصَلَ يَسُوعُ كَلامَهُ لِلنّاسِ فَقالَ: «أنا هُوَ النُّورُ لِلعالَمِ. مَنْ يَتْبَعُنِي لا يَمْشِي أبَداً فِي الظُّلْمَةِ، بَلْ يَكُونُ مَعَهُ النُّورُ الَّذِي يَقُودُ إلَى الحَياةِ.»

This entry was posted in Weekly Column and tagged Ali Falih Altaie, Devil, Geeti, Hamed, honor killings, honour killings, Islam, Jeff Patton, Jesus of Nazareth, justice minister, Mohammed Shafia, Muslim, Rob Nicolson, Robert Fisk, Rona Shafia, Sahar, Shafia girls, sin, Tooba Yahya, Zainab on January 30, 2012 by Jeff.

What to Watch for in 2012!

If the single word that typified the zeitgeist of 2011 was uncertainty, then the spirit of 2012 will probably be just more of the same piled higher and deeper. Are we at a turning point, a crossroads in our present social/political order that has prevailed since the end of the Second World War?

There is so much that is at play in the world today. For the last few weeks there have been many commentators who have written predictions about what will actually happen during the next 12 months. Predicting the future, even by the world’s most outstanding analysts, remains a remarkably complex, error-prone task—perhaps akin to trying to solve a “triazzle.”

In a triazzle each piece of the puzzle has three sides that all can be mixed and matched with the other pieces of the game in a number of seemingly logical ways. After being induced by visual clues to pursue one particular hunch, a gamer may initially find that the pieces do seem to easily fit the desired pattern until—while holding the very last piece of the puzzle —the gamer discovers that it’s all wrong! And the seemingly sound, logical assumptions based on what seemed like solid evidentiary clues turned out to be in reality a misleading tease that kept the triazzle gamer from seeing how the pieces to the puzzle really fit together.

What we do know will happen in 2012 is that four of the five most powerful nations of the world—four of the five permanent U.N. Security Council member—will see some type of leadership changes. America and France have elections this year that may not return the incumbants to office. Russia also is holding presidential elections although they are mostly for show. Vladamir Putin will continue to run the nation and is just changing offices after playing a little game of musical chairs, moving back to the Kremlin offices of the presidency from the prime minister’s more humble offices. In China, Xi Jinping is considered the most likely person to take over the presidency from Hu Jintao. And, it is estimated that around 70% of the rest of China’s leadership will also change during the upcoming Chinese Communist Party’s congress this fall.

As for the “Arab Spring,” look for the steady rise to political power of Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt and in other newly “un-dictatored” countries of that region. Watch as the values held dear by the secular Western liberal democracies fail to thrive in the lands where the majority hold that Mohammed is the only sort of prophet that counts.

Regarding the European Union, look for more financial bad news that will put the euro and consequently the various euro-zone governments under increasing pressure. Look for the weakest of the weak European nations to seriously consider jumping the EU ship, or perhaps be pushed over the railing by Germany and the European Central Bank. The stronger euro-zone nations, however, will probably feel more heat to circle the wagons and cede additional financial/political sovereignty to a central E.U. authority, as that will be touted again, by Germany and the ECB, as being the only way to defend themselves from an increasingly bleak financial situation.

Yes, we all know that the developed world’s public and private finances will continue to wallow in a morass of public and private debt. Presently, the value of the U.S. Treasury Bonds and the U.S. dollar have strengthened remarkably in recent months due to massive influxes of global capital seeking a safe haven from the uncertainties posed by the European Union’s tottering euro. The U.S. dollar is still seen for the most part by financiers as the world’s reserve currency.

But the question is for how long? The U.S. dollar at present is only the best of the worst in comparison to the Japanese yen or the E.U.’s euro. There is an on-going move by global central bankers to diversify away from holding too many U.S. dollars in their reserves. They are making major purchases of gold bullion. And the Chinese have been striking deals with their south-east Asian trading partners so that they will no longer use the U.S. dollar as their mutual medium of exchange for business. Instead these Asian tigers are agreeing to facilitate their mutual importing/exporting by directly exchanging their own national currencies, cutting out the previously essential middleman role formerly held by the U.S. dollar.

The United States government has an extremely serious problem of annual budget deficits now running in the trillions of dollars. Watch as this annual operating deficit inexorably adds to an already obscene mountain of American federal government debt that will soon be more than 80% of the entire nation’s annual gross domestic product.

The only possible solutions to this coming U.S. budgetary Armageddon are to heavily depreciate the value of the dollar in order to allow exports to surge and/or to severely cut a wide variety of expenditures, including medicare and social security. But watch in 2012 as America fails to find a charismatic leader with a sound, convincing vision for the nation that can muster enough political will to do what needs to be done before it is too late.

Consequently, you should look for American public opinion to remain about evenly divided. And, thus, the financial and political reforms needed to effectively, and calmly turn around this looming national catastrophe in a timely rational manner, will be stymied.

Look for inflation to increase significantly as the stresses caused by too much debt, too much money printing, and not enough real economic growth continue. The savings and standard of living of millions of Americans will erode dramatically as a vampire inflation sucks the life out of the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.

Did your grandpa or grandma ever pass on to you any of the old worthless Confederate paper dollars or Confederate bonds that the family got stuck with during the Civil War? Did any of your old folks pass on the stories of what it was like when the money was no good and what the family did to survive when hungry and desperate? Metaphorically speaking, the value of the U.S. dollar is presently propped up more by the Fed’s push up bra, rather than by naturally abundant sound financial fundamentals.

So, watch for the continuing, slow decline of the American Empire in 2012. Unless, of course, an unexpected black swan event occurs. War with Iran and a subsequent oil shock? A horrendous natural disaster that destroys a major American city or a critical agricultural crop or energy production and distribution? If something really bad happens to the U.S.A. then all bets are off about the decline being slow!

But most of all, you should watch out for your own spiritual state in 2012. Most of us have very little influence over what does go on in this world. In geo-politics and macro-economics we are merely spectators. We watch and make our plans accordingly. But in our own personal life we do have a great influence on what we think about, and the type of character, morals, and ethics we choose to live by. Over such things we have power and are accountable for how we exercise it. I’m not responsible for the government’s finances, but I had better take care of my own state of affairs. In 2012, I repeat, we should be very watchful of our own spiritual state. As the Apostle Paul advises us:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 2 Timothy 3:1-5; 13-15 (NKJV)

Jesus of Nazareth himself advised us to be spiritually alert and ready to serve him in sincerity and truth at such a time when he decides to once again intervene in world affairs to save humanity from the consequences of our own collective stupidity:

Be dressed, ready for service, and have your lamps shining. Be like servants who are waiting for their master to come home from a wedding party. When he comes and knocks, the servants immediately open the door for him. They will be blessed when their master comes home, because he sees that they were watching for him. I tell you the truth, the master will dress himself to serve and tell the servants to sit at the table, and he will serve them. Those servants will be blessed when he comes in and finds them still waiting, even if it is midnight or later.
“Remember this: If the owner of the house knew what time a thief was coming, he would not allow the thief to enter his house. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at a time when you don’t expect him!” Luke 12:35-40 New Century Version

So don’t forget to watch your own spiritual state while keeping an eye on 2012’s many uncertainties.

This entry was posted in Weekly Column and tagged Arab Spring, Euro, European Union, Germany, Hu Jintao, inflation, Jeff Patton, Jesus of Nazareth, morals, Putin, U.S. dollar, uncertainty, World Tomorrow, Xi Jinping on January 4, 2012 by Jeff.

Remembering Those Who Were Good or Evil

They couldn’t have lived more disparate lives or set more vastly different examples for their people. Perhaps the only things they shared in common were that they both recently died and they were both well-known heads of state of nations who repeatedly made the news during the last 20 years or so. Outside of that, Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, and KimJong-il, North Korea’s “dear leader” dictator, held values and led lives that were as different as light from darkness, good from evil.

Havel lead his people in a bloodless “velvet revolution” that not only freed his nation from communism but also helped pull the entire Central-Eastern European region back into the civilized world that cherishes human rights, personal freedom, economic opportunity and a chance for individual fulfillment.

Kim Jong-il on the other hand, was a renowned communist tyrant. He oppressed his own people and any other poor unfortunates who fell into his hands. He treated his people like mongrels, despised dogs – inadequately fed and frequently kicked in order to keep them in fear and cringing submission. Hundreds of thousands have died and are dying of hunger in a country that is nothing but one large concentration camp populated by guards and prisoners.

As the Scriptures say:

When the righteous triumph, there is great rejoicing, but when the wicked come to power, people hide themselves (Proverbs 28:12 Holmen Christian Standard Bible).

And…

The memory of the righteous is a blessing, but the name of the wicked will rot (Proverbs 10:7 English Standard Version).

This entry was posted in Weekly Column and tagged dictator, human rights, Jeff Patton, Kim Jong-il, leadership, righteous rulers, tyranny, Vaclav Havel, velvet revolution, wicked rulers, World Tomorrow on December 29, 2011 by Jeff.

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