Month: November 2010

Knowing God, Crucial to Living as a Christian

Knowing God Packer
Eminent Christian theologian J.I. Packer’s best known book is Knowing God. In the book he emphasizes that a lifelong pursuit of knowing God should embody the Christian’s existence. According to Packer, however, Christians have become enchanted by modern skepticism and have joined the gigantic conspiracy of misdirection by failing to put first things first.

11/30/2010 – Chuck Colson –

According to Packer, studying the nature and character of God isn’t, as many Christians suppose, abstract and theoretical, but, instead, the most practical project we can undertake. This knowledge is crucial to living as a Christian.

In fact, attempting to live the Christian life without this knowledge isn’t only foolish, it’s a kind of self-cruelty—denying ourselves the riches of our own faith. [Read more…]

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The Immorality of Class Warfare

11/27/2010 – Henry Oliner –
Listening to the declarations of class warfare by congressmen who demonize wealth and the wealthy, I am reminded of these stories of the moral hypocrisy displayed by those who demand without respect. They require more and more, yet they blame these subjects for any setbacks caused by said subjects’ imperfections or unwillingness to bend to the will of those who scorn them. [Read more…]

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The Lost Lesson of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Communism Failureby John Stossel –
Had today’s political class been in power in 1623, tomorrow’s holiday would have been called “Starvation Day” instead of Thanksgiving. Of course, most of us wouldn’t be alive to celebrate it.

Every year around this time, schoolchildren are taught about that wonderful day when Pilgrims and Native Americans shared the fruits of the harvest. But the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn’t happen.

Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest European settlers gave us a dramatic demonstration of the fatal flaws of collectivism. Unfortunately, few Americans today know it.

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally. That’s why they nearly all starved. [Read more…]

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Curing the Human Condition

Regis Nicoll
Regis Nicoll

11/22/2010 – Regis Nicoll –

Albert Einstein, a man who was often ambiguous about his religious views, once admitted that he rejected the God of his Jewish heritage for that of Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher.

For Spinoza, “God” was not a supernatural Being but an omnipresent principle of cosmic order and harmony. His universe was one of matter and motion in which every outcome was pre-determined according to that primal physical essence. It was a thoroughly naturalistic worldview, leaving no room for free will.

Enamored of the ideas of Spinoza, Einstein rejected the notion of free will in favor of the belief that everything obeys the deterministic laws of nature. For folks who similarly take naturalism seriously, a human being is not an autonomous agent acting upon nature, but a biochemical machine ruled by Nature. [Read more…]

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Education: The Elephant in the Room

11/19/2010 – Karen Karacsony –
For the first two hundred years of America’s history, there was little in the way of public education. Thus, from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century, education was most often a family affair (though churches, literary societies, and apprenticeships also contributed to the education of early America’s youth).

As youngsters, our Founding Fathers were educated like most other children of early America. Of the six Founding Fathers, three were homeschooled: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Two were self-taught: Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin (though Franklin did attend primary school for two years). And one, John Adams, was both homeschooled and privately taught (at a very small school). [Read more…]

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Death Dignified by Christ

11/19/2010 – David Mills –
He was a dignified man suffering all the embarrassing ways cheerful young women the age of his granddaughter deal with the body’s failure as cancer begins shutting down the organs. Dying in a hospice, you lose all rights to modesty as you lose control of your body.

Few men could have found the indignities of those last few weeks more excruciating than did my father. But this was what dying of cancer is like, and my father, being the man he was, took it like a man. It was the hand he’d been dealt, and he was going to play it, as bad as it was. [Read more…]

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The Left and Energy Policy

11/18/2010 – Jeffrey Folks –
There are several factors that contribute to a nation’s future prosperity. One of the most important is an efficient and dependable supply of energy. A modern economy cannot function without adequate energy sources to power its electrical grid, supply its industries, heat its offices and homes, and fuel its transportation needs.

These facts are self-apparent, even to the left, so why is the left attempting to hamstring every promising new source of energy available to America? I can think of only one reason: because the left, as its main objective, wishes to bring America to its knees. From the left’s point of view, America is an imperialist nation that for too long has had its way in the world. Thus, for the left, the only moral position is to undermine American power and wealth. In the environmental movement as it exists today, the left has found the perfect vehicle for its assault on American power. [Read more…]

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The Glory of Humility

St. John the Baptist
St. John the Baptist

11/15/2010 – Deacon Douglas McManaman –
The word ‘human’ comes from the Latin ‘humus’, which means ‘dirt’ or ‘soil’. Man is from the earth.

I often tell my students that what they learn in the course of a semester, in their math class, for example, or in their chemistry classes, or physics, etc., took centuries for the most brilliant human beings to uncover. Once it has been uncovered, however, it appears to be so simple. Why did it take so long? This is true especially for philosophy. It takes years and years to dispose the intellect to learn such abstract truths, and from these truths it is possible to go on to demonstrate, through reason alone, the existence of God, and it is also possible, through reason alone, to show that God is one, eternal, the source of all that is good and beautiful, that He is Beauty Itself, Goodness Itself, and Truth Itself. And when we finally come to see it, we inevitably think: “This is so clear and simple; why did it take years to get this?”

The reason is that human beings, by nature, are slow. We are the highest beings on the hierarchy of material beings, but we are the lowest beings on the hierarchy of God’s intellectual creatures. [Read more…]

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Science-Based Morality?

Regis Nicoll
Regis Nicoll

11/12/2010 – Regis Nicoll –

Each of us believes that certain things are wrong, not because we believe they are wrong, but because they really are wrong. And that applies to the moral relativist as well.

If you want to see a relativist sink into a sophistic seizure, ask him about the “virtues” of cruelty, rape, cheating, bigotry, or exploitation. Even the most liberally minded among us believe such things are wrong, even if they don’t know why.

Take the University of Maryland professor who recently engaged a member of the Genocide Awareness Project. In a ten-minute exchange on moral ethics, the professor exhibited great difficulty with the concept of morality, including the terms of the debate: human essence, value, and rights. Nevertheless, she had no difficulty calling her interlocutor’s reference to “mankind” offensive and “wrong.” [Read more…]

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The Power of Negative Thinking

11/12/2010 – John Kelly –
Simply put, progressives feel that life isn’t fair. True enough, but there are endless other things that life isn’t as well. Life isn’t carefree, simple, eternal, digitally organized, or purple-green plaid. Yet we live. Most people can accept life’s troubles and have come to love life, as it is, including its frightful beauty. Yet for others, life’s summary judgment comes up negative, so they seek to force a remedy.

Life’s seeming unfairness is felt by young children who are only just sensing its deep, oceanic nature: If only mommy and daddy could always be here to hold me up. If only things weren’t so hard… [Read more…]

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