Cool White Quote

Occasionally, James White knocks one out of the park. He saith:

"The traditional view of God the Creator is untenable now." What kind of hubris does one have to possess to come along at the beginning of the 21st century and decide that everyone else before you just didn't get it, and that your insights are so grand, so sweeping, that you can make such statements? Answer? The 21st century secular liberal, for whom there is no such thing as humility, let alone balance.

SNORT! Sorry, had to snort. Can't tell you the number of times somebody--lately, it's been a flock of atheists--has thrown up to me some argument that reveals that they either haven't bothered to read the material seriously, or that they aren't at all familiar with the centuries-old refutations of their centuries-old and still-sophomoric arguments. It's pitiful to watch, really; all they end up doing is making themselves look like 11-year-olds.

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For the inevitable person who will come along and say something stunningly ignorant, the context of Dr. White's remarks has, probably, nothing to do with your particular issue, ok? The reason it's quoted is because it's a funny commentary on the bloated sense of self that so many people have today.

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What I Believe About Non-Believers

Since the subject comes up from time to time, here it is.

I know some will find this ridiculously offensive. I honestly don't mean to be so. But on the other hand, this is exactly what I think. It'll be in the sidebar under "Popular and/or Important Posts," so casual passers-through won't have to search too hard.

There are many other verses along these lines, but these are enough to tell you what I think.

Psalm 14:1

...The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.
14:2 The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
14:3 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.

This is the natural state of man since the Fall. Even what he thinks is good is corrupted, and no one, on his own, seeks out God. The fool goes even further, saying to himself that there is no God. You can easily see, then, that when I hear someone say that there is no God, I immediately think that he is a fool. I may not say so out loud, but that is exactly what is going through my head.

Being a fool, in this sense, does not imply real stupidity, that is, mental retardation. The Scripture is not saying that that people who do not believe there is a God are suffering from a deficiency of gray matter. I have known highly intelligent atheists, and read of many more. But high intelligence does not prevent a man from believing and doing many, many foolish things, as most highly intelligent people can testify from personal experience.

Psalm 92:6

The stupid man cannot know; the fool cannot understand this:
92:7 that though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they are doomed to destruction forever;
92:8 but you, O LORD, are on high forever.

Again, this is not to say that the atheist is suffering a deficiency of gray matter. The idea here is that he is so blinded by his rejection of God that effectively he cannot know anything about Him. You can talk and talk and talk to such people, and you will never, on your own, get anywhere.

Luke 16:23

...and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.
16:24 And he called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.'
16:25 But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish.
16:26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.'
16:27 And he said, 'Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house--
16:28 for I have five brothers--so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.'
16:29 But Abraham said, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.'
16:30 And he said, 'No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.'
16:31 He said to him, 'If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.'"

As an aside, I have to mention that I can no longer read these verses without thinking of a discussion I had with another Christian blogger who stated that torture is never right. If it's never right, what was this fellow doing in torment? But I digress.

The atheist--I am not speaking here of the agnostic, or of people who say they're atheists because they think it's intellectually fashionable but actually are still wondering--is not, despite what he will tell you, open to being convinced by the evidence. Nothing on this planet will convince him, not even if someone rose from the dead before his eyes. He will try to explain away the evidence of his own eyes instead.

Knowing this, having been fully convinced of its validity through much experience, I have pretty much quit arguing with atheists on evidential grounds--on any grounds, period, actually. They simply don't care. The only reason they will ask you for evidence or argumentation is so they can reject it--often grossly contradicting themselves in the process--and then pretend to themselves that they are fair-minded.

Romans 1:19

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
1:20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
1:21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
1:22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
1:23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
1:24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,
1:25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
1:26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature;
1:27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
1:28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
1:29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,
1:30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
1:31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
1:32 Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

There's all kinds of stuff here, obviously, but what's important for this post is that I believe that atheists do, somewhere in the core of their beings, know that there is a God. They could hardly do otherwise. It is dreadfully obvious, so obvious that it requires willful blindness not to believe it. They simply hate Him, and do everything in their power to convince themselves that what they know to be true simply isn't.

These people are on a level with the fellow who will stand in a puddle and claim that he doesn't know that the water is making his feet wet. You can argue the nature of the evidence with them if you want, but it is pretty much a waste of time. The Bible describes such people as mockers and scoffers. They are, as I said in another post, less interested in real argumentation than they are in hooting out their derision in the streets and chucking feces at the church windows. If evidence was the only issue, they'd believe. Again, the words are:

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

Evidence isn't the issue. They see the evidence, know exactly what it points to, and make a deliberate decision to reject and suppress it.

How, exactly, a person goes from being a non-believer under those circumstances to being a believer is a topic for another post, but it starts in John 6:44:

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him...

No one comes to God simply because he figures things out. It may seem that way to him, but that is not actually what happens. Unless and until the Father draws that person, rather than figuring out the way to God, he will figure out his way from God. That's the real problem.

Now, then, that is what I believe about non-believers. Offensive as all get-out, I know, but now you know what I think.

Cool Burleson Post on Alcohol

God knows I don't agree with everything that Wade Burleson writes, but when he's right, he's right. This was cool. He even quoted John Gill.

Why Won't I Answer Them?

Most of the time, I don't get very many comments. Shoot, most of the time, I don't get very many readers, period.

Sometimes, people will ask a question, and, if I have the time, I generally try to oblige with an answer. But not always. There are times when I will either give a very short answer, or none at all.

Why?

Well, there are several reasons given in "On Comments," the link to which you can find on the right-hand sidebar, but here's the one that usually applies:

I may just be convinced that you're looking for a pointless fight, and that nothing I say short of wholesale public abandonment of my entire belief system will satisfy you. I see no point in messing around trying to convince the unconvinceable.

There are plenty of people in this world that fit that profile. When I become convinced that a commenter hasn't read the post with reasonable care before trying to dissuade from my position, when in his comments he reveals that he hasn't even realized that his question has been answered in the text on which he's commenting, when he's not fully engaged the answers he's already been given, when I have every reason in the world to believe, from the commenter's own words, that he hasn't bothered even to try to understand what is going on, when I am convinced that he is simply skimming what I have written so as to get more quickly to his rebuttal and not at all genuinely interested in understanding--when, in short, I am convinced that all the commenter is trying to do is pick a pointless fight and waste my time, not only, "No, I am not going to engage him," but "Heck no, I am not going to engage him."

Lately, it's been the atheists. Atheists are hooligans in the intellectual world, posing as genuine inquirers but, in reality, behaving like nothing so much as chimps interested only in throwing feces at the church windows. But there have been others. Believe it or not, some of them have been in the church.

The Clock is Ticking, Dudes...

Once in a great while, some atheist takes it upon himself to point out how stupid and ignorant I am, either in person or blogospherically.

I'm always a little amused in a sad sort of way. I don't particularly want them to wind up where they're headed, you know. But I'm still a little amused, somewhat bemused, really.

Because the clock is ticking.

When I tried selling life insurance back around '95, one of the things I was taught is that one out of three people does not make it to retirement age. If you make it to sixty-five in this country, the odds are excellent that you will live to about eighty-five or so. That's why the average is about 73-74. The oldest man in the world--the titleholder changes every few months, you know--is usually around 115 years or so old at time of death, so that seems, at this point, to be the outside limit to man's earthly life.

So, 115 years of earthly existence, max, and quite probably much of that in a state that you may not particularly care for. I deal with the elderly quite a lot, you know. It's true that if you have good genetics, take care of yourself, and are quite lucky, you may not wind up in a wheelchair with COPD and/or diabetes, stewing away in your own juices courtesy of an unchanged Depends undergarment, but then again, that just might be how you spend the last ten years of your life. Rather a lot of people do.

And, for the atheist, what, after that? Nothing. No consciousness, no nothing. No seeing what has happened to your descendants. No caring about anything. No existence. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Zip. Nada. In an atheistic universe, the dead cannot care. Therefore, any caring they may do must be done in this life, the only life they have.

And why might they care? About anything? To whom do their lives matter? And for how long? Does the cold, atheistic universe into which they arrived by complete accident care? Does that same universe have a purpose for them? The very thought provokes laughter. Even if someone misses them once they're gone, that will matter for less than a hundred years, too, probably less than fifty, since those people will die and not care about anything, either. And eventually, their country will pass away, then the planet, then everything, and none of it will have mattered, none of it at all. Their morality, such as it is, will have served no purpose other than to perpetuate the species before the planet is scorched when the sun turns red, and that, for no reason at all, it simply being what happened by sheer accident.

Atheists have a limited, very limited window of opportunity, a very short time in which to enjoy the accidentally-animated sack of protoplasm they walk around in, and absolutely no reason whatever not to do whatever they please, as long as they can get away with it.

And what do they choose to do with that limited period of time? An astonishing number seem to have arrived at the absurd conclusion that the best, most enjoyable (apparently) use of their limited time is to try convincing theists that they're wrong. That's right: their mission in life seems to have become convincing people about whom they will shortly cease to care, people who will, in turn, shortly cease to care about anything themselves, that there is no God.

Good luck with that one, atheists. Last time I checked, though they disagreed on much about God, you have a couple of billion people, at least, to convince of His non-existence. And for what? So that they will have--you think--better lives in the short period of time remaining to them on this miserable mudball? In the most literal sense possible, why care? It will matter to any particular individual for a maximum of 115 years, and then--poof.

In the meantime, the clock is ticking. I hope you enjoy your time. Because, as far as you know, pretty soon it's poof! for you, too.

A Moratorium on Immigration?

Pat Buchanan saith:

If jobs are available in the United States, Americans should go to the front of the line to get them, ahead of illegal aliens. And as there are six Americans out of work for every job opening, it is time to call a moratorium on immigration. Why are we bringing into the United States over a million legal immigrants a year to compete for jobs against 15 million to 25 million Americans who can't find work or full-time jobs to take care of their families?

Who is America for -- if not for Americans first?

Earlier in the column, Mr. Buchanan notes how, post-immigration-raids, jobs that illegal aliens were doing because Americans allegedly won't do them have, in fact, been filled quite handily by Americans.

I'm not going to talk extensively about illegal immigration today, save to say that I wish to high heaven our government would do what is indisputably part of its job and control our borders. I hardly ever meet anyone who favors unchecked illegal immigration. The only people who seem to support it are those on the left who see illegal immigrants as a huge source of Democratic voters (they're right; immigrants typically vote Democrat for two generations, last time I read anything about it) and those in big business (often putatively on the right) who realize that the presence of huge numbers of illegals results in a net drag on wages, thereby fattening their own bottom lines. The thinking on both sides is short-sighted, to say the least, and completely ignores what, as far as I can tell, are the views of of most Americans on the subject, and results in a situation wherein most of the country hates illegal immigration, yet seems unable to organize itself sufficiently to put a stop to it.

But Mr. Buchanan goes further than just calling for controlling the borders, to a call for an outright moratorium on immigration. And personally, I think he is right. A government's first responsibility is to its own country, to its existing citizens. The criterion for allowing, or not allowing, immigration should not be whether people just want to come, but whether or not their arrival will benefit the country. This has nothing to do with charity or the lack thereof to the oppressed or the economically desperate. It is merely the logical consequence of the idea that a government's first responsibility is to the people of its own country.

You should not get the idea that I dislike immigrants or oppose immigration per se, although I'm sure some will, since, as Pat Buchanan is regularly and falsely tarred as a xenophobe, agreeing with him on the subject will certainly get me tarred in similar fashion. The reality is that I rather like foreigners who come here. I take an almost childish delight in them. I find it flattering that they prefer to come to my country rather than stay in the land of their ancestors. There are few things I find more moving than when, in effect, a foreigner says, like Ruth:

Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.

I never had a problem hiring legal immigrants when I was in the restaurant business. If they were the most qualified applicants I could get for the price I was allowed to pay, I would hire them. My life would certainly be the poorer were it not for certain immigrants, especially considering my fascination with martial arts. America certainly has benefited enormously from the contributions of immigrants--but even to recognize that is also to recognize that that is why we have allowed immigration at some times and discouraged it at other times: because America benefits--or does not benefit.

Like I say, I love immigrants, always have. I don't care whether they're the almost blue-black of folks from Senegal, or the deep Mestizo brown of people from the south of Mexico, or the olive of folks from the Middle East, the lily white of people from Northern Europe, or the various brown shades of people from all over Asia. I have never asked but two things of them: first, that they come here in accordance with our laws, and second, that they come here with the aim of becoming Americans. That last is not to say that I am asking them to discard their cultural heritage altogether, just that they embrace the fundamentally American idea that government exists to protect man's legitimate, God-given rights, and learn how to function in and respect our dominant culture. Every Sunday night, I teach an ESL--English as a Second Language--class to a bunch of Mexican immigrants in an effort to help them do that very thing. I have enormous respect for the effort those people are making.

But none of that means that immigration should be allowed from every country at any time. There are times when it is wise to call a halt to it for a while, and it seems to me that this is one such time.

Edmund Burke Quote # 5

From "Speech Before the House of Commons in Support of Mr. Rose Fuller's Motion that the Commons Move to a Committee of the Whole in Order to Discuss the Threepence Tax on Tea":

...among vices, there is none which the House abhors in the same degree with obstinacy. Obstinacy, Sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues, constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness, are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so just an abhorrence, and, in their excess, all these virtues very easily fall into it.

One of the most amazing, and yet utterly unsurprising, aspects of political discourse in this age is the degree to which people are loyal to ideas that have absolutely no track record of actually producing the benefits which they were supposed to produce.

I'm never one hundred percent sure whether it's idiocy, ignorance, willful blindness, lying in shameless pursuit of power, obstinacy--as Burke suggests here--or some hideous combination of all of them.

Probably it's the hideous-combination-thing. Yeah, that's it.