C.S. Lewis and Materialism

C.S. Lewis and Materialism by John G. West –
“You say the materialist universe is ‘ugly,’” wrote C. S. Lewis to a young skeptic in 1950. “…If you are really a product of the materialistic universe, how is it you don’t feel at home there?”

Nearly half-a-century later, Lewis’s question still resonates. Modern society continues to operate largely on the materialistic premises of such thinkers as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Yet few today feel at home in the materialist universe where God does not exist, where ideas do not matter, and where every human behavior is reduced to non-rational causes.

C. S. Lewis spent much of his life debunking the sterility of materialist thinking; and his insights are as relevant now as when they were first offered, because our culture remains dominated by four of materialism’s most deadly legacies.

(1) Rejection of Reason and Truth
Materialism’s first deadly legacy is the rejection of reason and objective truth. Nineteenth-century materialists depicted our thoughts as the irrational products of environment or heredity or brain chemistry. [Read more…]

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The Left’s War on Profit

Democrats Communists War on Profitby John Hayward –
A good deal of the Obama campaign is dedicated to the proposition that “profit” is evil. The quintessential Marxist formulation holds that capitalist profit is the theft of surplus labor value from workers. Obama sometimes modifies Marx to portray excessive profit as theft, while fair and reasonable profits are acceptable.

Of course, he’s the one who gets to decide what constitutes a reasonable profit margin – an entirely arbitrary decision that changes based on the nature of the industry in question, and how it intersects with political agendas. You’ll never see a chart that would bind the Left to a commitment that this industry can make 40 percent profit, while that industry is “greedy” if it shoots for more than 35 percent. [Read more…]

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‘God,’ ‘Jerusalem,’ and the DNC

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
The most important event at either national convention was the “vote” taken by the Democratic delegates on a last-minute resolution to reinsert the words “God” and “Jerusalem” into the Democratic-party platform.

Regarding God: Since Karl Marx, the aim of the Left, everywhere on earth, has been a godless society. And the Democratic party has evolved over the last half century from a liberal party into a leftist one. So much so that it is now indistinguishable from any of the leftist parties in Western Europe.

Yes, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a left-wing president — as concerned the size of the state and its role in the economy. That is of great importance, of course. But an ever-expanding state is only half of the Left’s agenda. A thoroughly secular society is the other half. And in that regard, Franklin Roosevelt was no man of the Left. [Read more…]

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Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record

Antarctic Sea Ice Iceberg by James Taylor –
Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.

National Public Radio (NPR) published an article on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. [Read more…]

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Fallacy Of Redistribution Has Grave Economic Impact

Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
by Thomas Sowell –
The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago.

But the tape’s surfacing may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about the consequences of redistribution.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design.

But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended. [Read more…]

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Marriage: The Greatest Weapon Against Child Poverty

Marriage is Greatest Weapon Against Child Povertyby Ken McIntyre –
The collapse of marriage, along with a dramatic rise in births to single women, is the most important cause of childhood poverty—but government policy doesn’t reflect that reality, according to a special report released today by The Heritage Foundation.

Nearly three out of four poor families with children in America are headed by single parents. When a child’s father is married to his mother, however, the probability of the child’s living in poverty drops by 82 percent.

Robert Rector, Heritage’s senior research fellow in domestic policy, provides a brief overview of each state with unique data and 14 charts per state, [Read more…]

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Hobby Lobby’s Christian Owners Fight $1.3 Million-Per-Day HHS Mandate Fine

Hobby Lobby CEO David Green and his wife Barbara
Hobby Lobby CEO David Green and his wife Barbara
by Kathleen Gilbert –
The Obama administration is set to levy as much as a $1.3 million per day fine against a Christian retail business based on their religious objection to abortifacient drugs, according to a lawsuit filed this week.

Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., with more than 500 arts and crafts stores in 41 states and over 22,500 employees, is reportedly the largest for-profit business yet to file suit over the Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate requiring businesses to provide free abortion-causing drugs, such as the “week-after” pill Ella, as non-negotiable “preventive services.”

Lawyers for the private retail chain filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, where the company is based. [Read more…]

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The Tedium of Leftism

Leftists Socialists communists democratsby Bruce Walker –
Leftism is not an ideology. No sane person thinks “soaking the rich” or “investing tax dollars” achieves any particular objective. The creation of predefined bogeymen is an ancient and unsavory strategy for seizing and then holding power — the Jewish people can testify to that grim fact — and there is nothing more to it than that. Leftist leaders today are simply the barbarian warlords of centuries ago who promised to steal and to share the spoils of what others have worked to produce.

Marxism is only one of several contemporary mantras dreamed up to let party bosses rob and loot. [Read more…]

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The Church and Secularism – part 1

Family Under Attack in Americaby Peter Kreft –
I’m told that in medical school they tell you that there are four indispensable steps to any medical analysis of a patient’s condition. And these four steps are the basic logic of all practical problem-solving in every field — medicine, business, detectives, whatever — because, there are two variables: there’s something good or desirable and something bad or undesirable. And then there’s the cause and the effect. So you can have the bad effect, the bad cause, the good effect, or the good cause. So the four steps of a medical analysis are first, an observation of the symptoms, which are the bad effects; then a diagnosis of the disease that is causing the symptoms — that’s the bad cause; then a prognosis of the hope for a healing, which is the good effect; and then a prescription for the treatment, which is the good cause. …

So I’d like to address the problem of the decline of Western Civilization in terms of (1) Symptoms, (2) Diagnosis, (3) Prognosis, and (4) Prescription. [Read more…]

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Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Us

Government Entitlements Are Corrupting Usby Nicholas Eberstadt –
The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined. [Read more…]

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