From The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible

Emphasis, where present, is mine and in bold:

The most secular, rationalistic, and self-consciously non-Christian of all the Founders of the United States--the aristocratic Virginian and slave-owner Thomas Jefferson--ended up writing the most biblically charged words ever enshrined in a political document:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," he wrote, "that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it."

Once again, we moderns are so brainwashed and asleep, we fail to appreciate the radical, unprecedented quality of those seventy-nine words--still often denied by totalitarians, judges, and college professors the world over.

As described in the Declaration of Independence, human rights are not privileges dispensed or withdrawn at the discretion of the State. Rather, they are gifts from God which no prince or potentate, no State or sovereign, may take away.

That is the key insight behind the American revolution, not democracy or majority rule--and it is derived not from secular philosophy, but from biblical religion.

"The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records," said Alexander Hamilton. "They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power."

This is a sentiment as old as Genesis: God declared that he made the human being (adam) in his image (tselem) and after his likeness (damut) and gave to him authority to rule over all the earth.

This is also what St. Paul was referring to, writing to the Romans, when he said that knowledge of God can be seen through creation and his law, the knowledge of good and evil, is written on the human heart:

"For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them," Paul said. "Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks" (Rom 1:19-20).

Thus, the concept of "self-evident" truths did not originate with the French enlightenment or Rene Descartes but actually dates back at least to the Apostle Paul, writing in 60 AD.

Paul adds that, even though the Gentiles did not have the benefit of the Torah (instruction), certain basic standards of morality can be known even without special divine revelation.

"For when the Gentiles who do not have the (Roah) law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts" (Rom 2:14).

Modern secularists believe that the idea of a self-evident human equality that pervades the U.S. Declaration of Independence came primarily from the agnostic intellectuals of the French Enlightenment; and that the theistic sentiments expressed by Jefferson and other Founders were mere rhetoric, designed to curry favor with Christian colonists.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

While some of the Founders (like Jefferson or Ben Franklin) were not orthodox Christians by any stretch of the imagination, neither were they atheists.

They were steeped, from childhood, in the stories and values and ideas of the Bible; and most believed that, as John Adams put it, "the Bible contains the most profound philosophy, the most perfect morality, and the most refined policy, that ever was conceived upon earth. It is the most republican book in the world."

Men like Washington and John Adams, Ben Franklin and James Madison, were warriors and farmers, writers and statesmen, not parsons.

But a raw religious faith was important to them. George Washington, for example, upon taking command of the Continental Army, ordered that each day begin with a formal prayer in every unit.

"The General commands all officers, and soldiers, to pay strict obedience to the Orders of the Continental Congress, and by their unfeigned , and pious observance of their religious duties, incline the Lord, and Giver of Victory, to prosper our arms," the Order went.

As philosopher Michael Novak argues in his remarkable 2002 book, On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, the revolutionary political philosophy that gave birth to government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" was based on two primary sources:

1) A simple but deeply rooted biblical religiousity that saw human rights as self-evident and "unalienable" gifts of a benevolent and almighty Creator.

2) A "plain reason" that grew out of rugged, practical experience in self-government.

Revolution based solely on "plain reason," without the moral restraint of religious experience and the fear of God in rulers and legislators, gave birth to the nihilistic atheism, cold calculation, and ultimately bloody massacres of the French Revolution.

The American Founding was different.

It was, as the Great Seal of the United States found on every dollar bill puts it, to be a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. It was a bold, unprecedented attempt to work out a system of self-government and political freedom that recognized the "unalienable rights" endowed by the Creator and bestowed upon "all" men--not just upon a favored class.

Without the fear of God that religion bestowed upon arrogant and powerful men, the Founders knew, tyranny was never far away.

"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?" Thomas Jefferson asked.

George Washington agreed.

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensible supports," Washington said in his Farewell Address. "Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion."

The widespread, stubborn, not always orthodox or churchgoing but sincere religious faith of ordinary Americans--that Europeans and media elites find so childish and unsophisticated--has been a hallmark of the American republic since the very beginning.

According to Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who penned Democracy in America in 1830, "for the Americans, the ideas of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the other."

I have often been amused by people who, reading Jefferson's words in the Declaration--let's look at them again, shall we?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...

are at no inconsiderable pains to explain them away. They so obviously and naturally refer to God that those who opine that the United States is without a Christian foundation must somehow explain them away or ignore them. So far, the "explanation" that I have found most amusing is the simple assertion that he must not have really meant it.

Oh. Perhaps he didn't "mean it" when it came to the rest of the Declaration, too.

But leaving idiotic explanations for Jefferson's words aside, there you have it, right there in the Declaration of Independence: precisely what I have been saying ad nauseam for months: the purpose of government is to secure man's God-given rights. That's what it's for.

Government's job is not to make you comfortable. It is not to make you financially secure. It is not to take care of your health. It is not to "spread the wealth around." Its job is to protect your God-given rights. This is not something I am making up. It's right there in one of our two most crucial founding documents.

Why so insistently hammer on "God-given rights?" Very simple: without God, you have no rights! Look yet again:

...men...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...

Strike out "Creator" and what do you have?

...men...are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...

You have squat, that's what you have. Without the Creator, without God, where do those rights come from? Other men? Who gave them the authority? Who do they think they are? Do "rights" even exist under those circumstances? I think not. If other men--society, that is--determines what rights you do and do not have, ultimately, you don't have any rights. What society determines is law. If society can grant rights--"rights" to health care, for example--it can take those "rights" away.

A "right" that can be taken away--not simply ignored, mind you, but taken away--by a dictator's decree or a public vote is no right at all. It is simply a temporary privilege, misnamed so as to mislead the rubes. And a view of government that doesn't recognize the concept of God-given rights and that government's job is to protect them is a view of government that ultimately puts them at risk.

To Answer Mr. Buchanan's Question

Well, actually, I'm pretty sure that he knows the answer, but here's the question:

There is no American Melting Pot anymore. It was discarded by our elites as an instrument of cultural genocide. Now we celebrate America as the most multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural country on earth, the Universal Nation of Ben Wattenberg's warblings.

And, yet, we are surprised by ethnic espionage in our midst, the cursing of America from mosques in our cities, the news that Somali immigrants are going home to fight our Somali allies, and that illegal aliens march under Mexican flags to demand American citizenship.

Eisenhower's America was a nation of 160 million with a Euro-Christian core and a culture all its own. We were a people then. And when we have become, in 2050, a stew of 435 millions, of every creed, culture, color and country of Earth, what holds us together then?

The answer is, of course, an idea. I, at least, think of it as the idea fundamental to America, though it was not born in America. You can quite easily trace elements of it back--at least in terms of formal political statements--to Rutherford's Lex, Rex. It is the idea that men are created in the image of God, that they have, as part of their nature and as gifts of God, certain rights that, having not been given by men or their institutions, cannot be legitimately denied by men or their institutions, and that the role of government is to protect those rights. The idea is that law is king, not that the king (government) is law.

Government's role is not to serve as an instrument of plunder, but to protect its citizens from being plundered. Government may not legitimately do whatsoever those who hold the reigns of power wish it to do. It is kept within bounds by its obligation to protect man's God-given rights.

It is, of course, an idea that follows inexorably from the pages of the Bible. It is a Christian, or at the very least, a Judeo-Christian idea. It is a very powerful idea, so powerful that I am quite sure (partly on the basis of personal experience) that it can unify a country made up of people from diverse backgrounds.

Of course, we don't teach it anymore. The worldview on which it is based is widely disparaged and ridiculed, and we attempt, now, to talk about having "rights" without having any sort of basis for them other than the authority of the majority--that is, we now act on the idea that man has the rights that society says he has, which is, ultimately, a recipe for either dictatorship or mob rule.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard perfectly well-meaning people say, in effect, "Hey, this is America! Majority rules, right?"

Wrong. The whole point of being a republic instead of a democracy is to avoid being at the mercy of the majority, to avoid having one's inalienable rights being subject to the will of the mob. When we lose this concept, the question rapidly becomes: just how long, under those circumstances, will it take America to balkanize?

Peggy Noonan's Diagnosis and the Big American Idea

She saith, emphasis mine and in bold where present:

While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don't see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they've never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don't have the habit of worry. They talk about their "concerns"—they're big on that word. But they're not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa's lap.

They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.

A few thoughts, just as they occur to me:

"Mindless?" I am pretty close to agreeing. Too many people--I will admit to this being true of both sides of the political aisle, though I think it is worst on the Far Left side--no longer think. They do not evaluate the facts of the current situation in light of man's nature and the historical record. Instead, they rearrange and regurgitate sound bites, trying to define the terms of the debate so as to make themselves look better. Whether they are right or wrong matters less to them than whether they can lob a zinger at you.

Yes, I definitely am aware that this thing we call America is fragile in some ways. It is very fragile indeed. Sometimes, I wonder if people really understand what America, the real America is, or was, and what it is now turning into.

I'm not unaware of the realities of cultural and racial backgrounds when it comes to nationhood. Indeed, when it talks about "the nations," the Bible isn't really talking about the modern political state at all. It's talking about what the missionaries call "people groups" today. A nation is bound together by language, by shared experiences and cultural values, by shared history and ritual--but in America's case, at least, that is not all, or was not all, it is bound together by. America, more than any other nation in the history of the world, is, or was, bound together by an idea: the idea, drawn from Biblical thinking, distilled over six hundred years or so of Scots/Anglo/American political thinking and experience, that men are created equal by and before an almighty God, that they have intrinsic rights granted by that God which cannot be legitimately denied by any institution of man, since they were not granted by and do not proceed from any institution of man. I am always somewhat pained to have to point out to modern audiences that I am not at all making this up. Our history is shot through with it. You can start with Lex, Rex and follow the trail all the way up to our Declaration of Independence, which states the idea in terms as flat and stark as those I have just used, even though penned by the most deistic of our Founding Fathers. If there is a genuinely American Idea, this is it. It is an idea big enough to allow people from widely disparate backgrounds and with terrifically different cultures to come together as a nation. No doubt having a common language, having the same heroes, telling the same stories, etc., is important, but for America, the American Idea is the most important element in national unity.

Big ideas can unify people. I have seen this over and over again. But when I say, "big," I am talking about "big," not what some idiot politician thinks of as "big," but really, genuinely and truly big. When a politician talks about big ideas, he may be thinking of universally guaranteed health care, or a particular scheme of taxation. That is not really big. Nations do not coalesce around tax ideas or health care plans. Those are not national raisons d'etre. But the idea that you--yes, you--stand in the same status before God as any wealthy man, any ruler of nations, that has ever lived? That you have the same intrinsic rights, by the nature of your being, as any other man, that those rights cannot be taken away, not legitimately, by anyone? That all men bear the imago Dei, the image of God, and can all relate to one another on that basis?

Those are big ideas. Those can provide a basis for national unity amongst people from diverse backgrounds. But we are losing those big ideas. They are not taught in our government schools. Fewer and fewer people teach them at home. Publicly mentioning them will only get you ridiculed. And as these ideas fade into the background, as fewer and fewer people appreciate them for what they are and what they do, the nation--our nation, the American nation, a nation unique in the world's history--splinters. As a nation, we no longer have a vision of man that allows us to resist the pressures of disparate backgrounds.

Yes, America is strong--strong as long as it holds firmly to the idea that undergirds it. But when that idea is abandoned, when it is no longer taught, no longer understood by the mass of people born in this country, it will be very fragile indeed.

As to the rest of Ms. Noonan's remarks, I have to agree: much of what is going on now reflects a very shallow view of history. These people seem not to have realized that there has never, not once in human history, been a nation so strong, so stable, so utterly invincible as not to be capable of self-immolation and self-destruction. They don't seem to realize that they have the power to destroy the country, or that the practices they are now advocating have greatly damaged other countries, if not destroyed them outright. They are guilty of hubris of a very high order, and they worry me.

Dreadfully Disappointed

I'm dreadfully disappointed to find that Dr. James White has not seen fit to identify me as "The Smartest Southern Baptist Alive."

I guess I'll just have to settle for being the best-looking.

Or perhaps not.

How Delightful

Much to my surprise, apparently someone else thought this was the best line delivered in the movies in a long time. I may put this in the sidebar.

From A Scandal in Bohemia

'Quite so,’ he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. ‘You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.’

‘Frequently.’

‘How often?’

‘Well, some hundreds of times.’

‘Then how many are there?’

‘How many! I don’t know.’

‘Quite so. You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.

People are, I swear, continually doing this very thing. They look right at something, and it's as though it doesn't exist. Or, rather, it does exist, but they don't bother to notice anything in particular about it. It's as though our society has collectively refused to so much as begin to think.

I'm not telling you that I go around counting the steps on the stairs I climb. Far from it. But I am telling you that the number of times that I become aware, in mid-discussion, that my conversational partner has made up his mind without bothering to pay attention to the evidence, is growing all the time. Occasionally, they will even admit it! "I don't care what the transcript shows, so-and-so is still mean!"

From Dr. Bruce Clayton's Shotokan's Secret

I found Dr. Bruce Clayton's Shotokan's Secret fascinating. Not that I agree with him on a great many things; I don't. He is so obviously sold on the idea that Shotokan is the ultimate fighting art, that its linear punch is so overwhelmingly powerful as almost to vitiate the need for careful targeting, that saying there is a certain amount of bias in what he writes is a considerable understatement. Also, there are some things about which, at least according to what I have heard from other sources I know to be reliable, he is simply wrong. And there are places where I know from personal experience that he is simply wrong.

On the other hand, it seems to me that there is a certain element of, shall we say, bold speculation in his writing that sometimes generates some of the most interesting insights. He asks questions like, "What tasks should we reasonably expect the martial art practiced by the Okinawan Royal Guard to be able to accomplish? And knowing that kata was the principle means by which those guards got their practice, what movements in those kata might accomplish those tasks?" In answering those questions, he has come up with kata applications that, frankly, I'm not sure I ever would have--but many of them look like they could work.

Kata's weird that way. I have seen several different methods of interpreting kata and unlocking the techniques within, and the weird thing is that all of them seem to produce at least some practical and useful techniques. Dr. Clayton's method is no exception. He writes, at one point:

The real bunkai of the Shuri-te kata is so vicious it quite takes your breath away. It breaks necks. It breaks arms. It incapacitates multiple people in a single move. It rips out eyes. It crushes throats. It destroys knee joints. It targets and breaks critical bones. It ruptures vital organs. People hiss and flinch when you demonstrate.

Bunkai, for those who don't practice karate, are the applications drawn from the movements of the kata--the dancelike routines you see people performing in karate classes. And you might be wondering, if all you've ever seen of "karate" is the stuff that kids and teenagers do, wearing pillows on their heads and hands and attempting to score two points by walloping each other upside the head with their metatarsals, if karate really can be so nastily effective as Dr. Clayton paints it.

The answer is yes. Yes, it can. I take issue with his description of those techniques as "the real bunkai," for the reality is that all of those motions have more than one application (almost the first thing I was taught was that all the movements can be applied as strikes, as blocks, and as tuite), but it is nevertheless true that some of those applications really can do those things, at least with sufficient training.

Break necks? Yes, you can find neck breaks--or at least movements that can effectively break necks--in the kata.

Break arms? Yes. Mostly at the elbow. Elbows are not all that hard to break. What is difficult is overcoming the resistance of the muscles around the elbows, the muscles that are protecting the elbow joint itself. But there are ways...

Incapacitate multiple people in a single move? I suppose it might depend on what you mean by "incapacitate." But Dr. Clayton does give at least one example, and I have seen more than a few demonstrations on Youtube of people tying two, or even three people up in knots with martial arts techniques.

Rip out eyes? Of course you can.

Crush throats? You can. Might not need to. Simply punching the throat might very well send it into spasms severe enough to make your opponent pass out.

Break knees? You kidding? Of course.

Rupture vital organs? I don't know how easily, but I do know that if you know where an organ is, and can hit darn hard, an ability that classical karate certainly purports to develop, you can hit it hard enough to really hurt. You might not even have to rupture the organ. There's a nerve right around the kidney that will certainly get an attacker's attention, for example. Hit that with the tip of your thumb, and "rupture" isn't exactly necessary.

One of the things that, to my mind, characterizes realistic applications is that people really do shudder, or "hiss and flinch," when you start showing them. When you've got a real application, you don't really have to convince people that it would work. They can see it, and it's so obvious--"intuitively obvious," as my own instructor put it once--that contemplating it will send a shiver down your spine. They may never have thought of putting a hurt on a human being that way, but once they've seen it, there's a part of them that's thinking, "Sweet Honey Mustard! What demented freak thought that up?!"

And the answer is: the sort of demented freak that was determined to go home alive and mostly unharmed to his wife and family. Period.