Beyond Cynicism: America Fumbles Towards Kafka’s Castle | The American Conservative - By JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER

On America's 'long emergency' of recession, globalization, and identity politics.

Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic. — Tom McGuane

Can a people recover from an excursion into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the burdens of empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change.

A sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency, persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the public to process. It manifested itself first in finance because that was the most abstract and fragile of all the major activities we depend on for daily life, and therefore the one most easily tampered with and shoved into criticality by a cadre of irresponsible opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot of households were permanently wrecked after the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008, despite official trumpet blasts heralding “recovery” and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of capital markets since then.

With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis and dysfunction and the public’s trust in them is at epic lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a freebooting freak elected by accident, “a disrupter” of the status quo at best and at worst a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire. A state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people. 

Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they actually dominate the scene on every side. A species of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies that promise to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that makes up the armature of “normal” life in the USA. They chatter about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics—especially entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats.

The non-technocratic cohort of the thinking class squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy the remnant of an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization they blame for the failure in our time to establish a utopia on earth. By the logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms. Sexuality is declared to not be biologically determined, yet so-called cis-gendered persons (whose gender identitycorresponds with their sex as detected at birth) are vilified by dint of not being “other-gendered”—thereby thwarting the pursuit of happiness of persons self-identified as other-gendered. Casuistry anyone?

The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called “intellectuals-yet-idiots,” hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the hijinks on campus—the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves—here is the key take-away: it’s not about ideas or ideologies anymore; it’s purely about the pleasures of coercion, of pushing other people around. Coercion is fun and exciting! In fact, it’s intoxicating, and rewarded with brownie points and career advancement. It’s rather perverse that this passion for tyranny is suddenly so popular on the liberal left.

Until fairly recently, the Democratic Party did not roll that way. It was right-wing Republicans who tried to ban books, censor pop music, and stifle free expression. If anything, Democrats strenuously defended the First Amendment, including the principle that unpopular and discomforting ideas had to be tolerated in order to protect all speech. Back in in 1977 the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march for their cause (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43).

The new and false idea that something labeled “hate speech”—labeled by whom?—is equivalent to violence floated out of the graduate schools on a toxic cloud of intellectual hysteria concocted in the laboratory of so-called “post-structuralist” philosophy, where sundry body parts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze were sewn onto a brain comprised of one-third each Thomas Hobbes, Saul Alinsky, and Tupac Shakur to create a perfect Frankenstein monster of thought. It all boiled down to the proposition that the will to power negated all other human drives and values, in particular the search for truth. Under this scheme, all human relations were reduced to a dramatis personae of the oppressed and their oppressors, the former generally “people of color” and women, all subjugated by whites, mostly males. Tactical moves in politics among these self-described “oppressed” and “marginalized” are based on the credo that the ends justify the means (the Alinsky model).

This is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which these days, the quest for “social justice,” is to present a suit against white male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A peculiar feature of the social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is actually promulgated by white college professors and administrators, and white political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this concerted campaign might appear puzzling to the casual observer.

I would account for it as the psychological displacement among this political cohort of their shame, disappointment, and despair over the outcome of the civil rights campaign that started in the 1960s and formed the core of progressive ideology. It did not bring about the hoped-for utopia. The racial divide in America is starker now than ever, even after two terms of a black president. Today, there is more grievance and resentment, and less hope for a better future, than when Martin Luther King made the case for progress on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The recent flash points of racial conflict—Ferguson, the Dallas police ambush, the Charleston church massacre, et cetera—don’t have to be rehearsed in detail here to make the point that there is a great deal of ill feeling throughout the land, and quite a bit of acting out on both sides.

The black underclass is larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated than it was in the 1960s. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the civil rights legislation of 1964 and ’65, which removed legal barriers to full participation in national life, induced considerable anxiety among black citizens over the new disposition of things, for one reason or another. And that is exactly why a black separatism movement arose as an alternative at the time, led initially by such charismatic figures as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Some of that was arguably a product of the same youthful energy that drove the rest of the Sixties counterculture: adolescent rebellion. But the residue of the “Black Power” movement is still present in the widespread ambivalence about making covenant with a common culture, and it has only been exacerbated by a now long-running “multiculturalism and diversity” crusade that effectively nullifies the concept of a national common culture.

What follows from these dynamics is the deflection of all ideas that don’t feed a narrative of power relations between oppressors and victims, with the self-identified victims ever more eager to exercise their power to coerce, punish, and humiliate their self-identified oppressors, the “privileged,” who condescend to be abused to a shockingly masochistic degree. Nobody stands up to this organized ceremonial nonsense. The punishments are too severe, including the loss of livelihood, status, and reputation, especially in the university. Once branded a “racist,” you’re done. And venturing to join the oft-called-for “honest conversation about race” is certain to invite that fate.

Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class—the lower-middle class—which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor. Hung out to dry economically, this class of whites fell into many of the same behaviors as the poor blacks before them: absent fathers, out-of-wedlock births, drug abuse. Then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 wiped up the floor with the middle-middle class above them, foreclosing on their homes and futures, and in their desperation many of these people became Trump voters—though I doubt that Trump himself truly understood how this all worked exactly. However, he did see that the white middle class had come to identify as yet another victim group, allowing him to pose as their champion.

The evolving matrix of rackets that prompted the 2008 debacle has only grown more elaborate and craven as the old economy of stuff dies and is replaced by a financialized economy of swindles and frauds. Almost nothing in America’s financial life is on the level anymore, from the mendacious “guidance” statements of the Federal Reserve, to the official economic statistics of the federal agencies, to the manipulation of all markets, to the shenanigans on the fiscal side, to the pervasive accounting fraud that underlies it all. Ironically, the systematic chiseling of the foundering middle class is most visible in the rackets that medicine and education have become—two activities that were formerly dedicated to doing no harm and seeking the truth!

Life in this milieu of immersive dishonesty drives citizens beyond cynicism to an even more desperate state of mind. The suffering public ends up having no idea what is really going on, what is actually happening. The toolkit of the Enlightenment—reason, empiricism—doesn’t work very well in this socioeconomic hall of mirrors, so all that baggage is discarded for the idea that reality is just a social construct, just whatever story you feel like telling about it. On the right, Karl Rove expressed this point of view some years ago when he bragged, of the Bush II White House, that “we make our own reality.” The left says nearly the same thing in the post-structuralist malarkey of academia: “you make your own reality.” In the end, both sides are left with a lot of bad feelings and the belief that only raw power has meaning.

Erasing psychological boundaries is a dangerous thing. When the rackets finally come to grief—as they must because their operations don’t add up—and the reckoning with true price discovery commences at the macro scale, the American people will find themselves in even more distress than they’ve endured so far. This will be the moment when either nobody has any money, or there is plenty of worthless money for everyone. Either way, the functional bankruptcy of the nation will be complete, and nothing will work anymore, including getting enough to eat. That is exactly the moment when Americans on all sides will beg someone to step up and push them around to get their world working again. And even that may not avail.

James Howard Kunstler’s many books include The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation, and the World Made by Hand novel series. He blogs on Mondays and Fridays at Kunstler.com.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/beyond-cynicism-america-fumbles-towards-kafkas-castle/

Washington’s Fantasies Are Not People’s Reality - By Victor Davis Hanson

The Beltway’s sober and judicious foreign-policy establishment laments Donald Trump’s purported dismantling of the postwar order. They apparently take the president’s words as deeds and their own innate dislike of him as disinterested analysis.

But is the world really imploding after 70 years of supposed “calm”? (Disregarding the Korean and Vietnam wars; Chinese, Cambodian, Rwandan, and Balkan genocides; at least six Middle East conflicts; 9/11; a dozen U.S. interventions; a nuclear Pakistan and North Korea; the Cuban and Berlin nuclear standoffs; 20 years of Palestinian terrorism followed by 20 years of radical Islamic successors; a European Union financial and border meltdown; the Russian absorption of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, to name just a few “hot spots.”)

In other words, Trump did not inherit an especially stable world. So has any elite expert over the past two years attempted to make sense of how some positive and much-needed change abroad was guided by Trump, someone without political and military experience and with a flawed character—and how and why that sometimes happens in history?

Correction, Not Chaos
In truth, after 2016, the United States is increasing its financial commitments to NATO. Several European members of the alliances may finally be addressing their prior unmet obligations and increasing defense spending.

The United Nations at least understands from Ambassador Nikki Haley that the United States will call out, rather than aid and abet, its occasional anti-Semitic lunacy. The president did not arbitrarily cancel the North American Free Trade Agreement. Instead, the agreement is up for renegotiation on terms other than the expectation that the United States will always accept asymmetrical deals as part of its required role as the continent’s superpower.

The world itself is not in chaos as alleged. It seems a far safer place than it was between 2009 and 2016. ISIS is no longer a viable threat, promising to establish a new caliphate, in between beheading, burning alive, and drowning the innocent on video.

Israel is once again a strong U.S. ally. Saudi Arabia for the first time in its history is considering real reform. The Palestinians are beginning to understand that they can still damn, even threaten the United States, but not necessarily with U.S. aid money.

Iran is no longer harassing or hijacking U.S. ships. It is not so frequently boasting about what it will do to the Great Satan and Israel, much less sending missiles near U.S. carriers. The world did not fall apart when the U.S. moved its embassy to Jerusalem or withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. That fact instead exposed so-called elite predictions of Armageddon as the hysteria.

Syria expects to be bombed each time it uses chemical weapons that were declared “nonexistent” by an outgoing Obama Administration. North Korea is not boasting any longer of incinerating American West Coast cities, but at least feigning consultation with China about denuclearizing the peninsula.

China understands that for two decades a naïve West has let it cheat at will on trade agreements, on the spurious idea it would become more pro-Western and democratic, the more that the West subsidized its breakneck modernization. Now it is at least talking about discussing its asymmetrical relationships with all its trading partners.

America Remains the Best and Only Option
Europe offers no alternative paradigm to a supposedly renegade United States. The German model of open borders and economic mercantilism no longer works all that well for Germany. The EU is more fearful of dissolution than preening of expansion.

Mexico understands that the era of exporting its human capital to avoid social justice reform at home is coming to a close. So, too, is the ruse of championing its poor only when they are long gone. America is tiring of the strange gymnastics of illegal immigration. Millions are subsidized by the U.S. social services safety net to send back to Mexico $30 billion in annual remittances, as their home government gratuitously tars their benefactor as racist and imperialist.

The U.S. economy did not implode in early 2017 and take down the world with it. The stock market did not crash. Our labor non-participation rate did not spiral. Instead, the country may be on its way to achieving its first 12-month period of 3 percent growth in 12 years. The stock market is at record highs, despite a few bumps, and unemployment at near-record peacetime lows.

There is also not so much talk of always increasing electricity rates, destroying the coal industry, banning more fracking, and subsidizing more Solyndra-like crony “green” companies. Instead, the United States is now the world’s largest energy producer. Soon we may be our own largest petroleum producer. U.S. natural gas production will likely reduce world carbon emissions more than will European windmills and American solar panels. American companies are more likely to come home than to keep pulling up and moving abroad. Silicon Valley tech companies have never done so well under a president they hate so much.

Leading from the Front—Again
The U.S. military for the first time in eight years is recovering its former strength. One way or another, there will likely be no more Bowe Bergdahl deals, decreased security at U.S. embassies and consulates in the Middle East, Iran Deals, or “strategic patience” and “lead from behind” doctrines. When outnumbered Americans are trapped in a shootout abroad, it is more likely help will be on the way than the requests of the beleaguered would be put on hold. 

The Obama “reset” doctrine has long been humiliated and buried. Likewise, the Obama finger shaking of “cut it out” to Putin seems to be recalibrated by expelling Russian diplomats, hitting back at Russian mercenary attackers in the Middle East, and arming Ukrainian defense forces, as the U.S. tries to improve its missile defenses and upgrade its nuclear forces. No one is talking any more about bargaining with Vladimir Putin to slash the American nuclear umbrella. I don’t think new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is aiming for a Nobel Prize. James Mattis and John Bolton likely disagree on a lot, but probably not on unchanging human nature and how to react to it.

Japan and South Korea certainly do not think America has abandoned them. They seem so far more eager to show the United States that they are strategic partners. They may well believe that the Trump Administration is more likely to come to their aid in extremis than were its mellifluous but otherwise inert Obama predecessors.

The Establishment is Still Willfully Blind
The above is the reality. To the degree it has been achieved in 16 months by a president who shouts, pouts, cajoles, threatens, exaggerates, and proves unpredictable and mercurial is a commentary on the establishmentarians and their own grasp of human nature. Donald Trump’s postwar order did not give us alienated allies in the Middle East, a rubbery NATO, North Korean intercontinental missiles, Iran on an ascendant arc in the Middle East, China’s new Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Putin unbound, and bewildered enemies like Cuba and Iran wondering why they were courted as friends.

This same strange Washington disconnect between fantasy and reality reigns at home. After nearly two years of hysteria, there has never been proof adduced of Trump-Russian collusion. Robert Mueller’s legal team—the party affiliations of its lawyers, their past involvements with players in contemporary scandals, and their leaking and scurrilous behaviors and communications—is a textbook example of how to create conflicts of interest and ensure an absence of public support.

The more Washington journalists scream of collusion, the more they are willfully blind to one of the most disturbing scandals in American history brewing right under their noses. Many in the hierarchy of the Obama FBI, Justice Department, and national security team likely were involved in illegally spying on U.S. citizens. They were massaging and warping the FISA courts to issue their warrants, unmasking many of the names of those surveilled, and then leaking them improperly and illegally to the media. Nearly a dozen top Justice Department and FBI officials already have been fired, reassigned, or retired. None, except James Comey, are now gone because of what Donald Trump did to them. They’re out as a result of their misguided zeal and careerist miscalculations, for what they tried to do to the duly elected president of the United States.

The resistance to getting to the bottom of the Uranium One scandals, the Hillary Clinton illegal private email server, the trafficking in classified documents, the Clinton Foundation façade, and the politicization and weaponization of Obama-era U.S. intelligence services is not because there was no wrongdoing.

Rather, the silent fear is more that a disinterested investigation would lead to discoveries of such a magnitude of wrongdoing by some of the most influential Americans of the present age, that to seek their indictments would undermine the structures of the Washington establishment.

How, after all, could the U.S. Department of Justice indict now-retired Hillary Clinton for giving false testimony, for illegally using a private email server, for unleashing her husband to do quid pro quo Clinton Foundation deals—or for hiring a foreign national to compile a hit dossier of gossip and rumor, much of its gleaned through the active and bought collusion of Russian operatives, and empowered by the Obama FBI and Justice Department to undermine the credibility of the Trump 2016 campaign, and later his transition and presidency?

Life in Two Worlds
It is one thing for several in the FBI and the Justice Department to be relieved of their jobs. But it is quite another to investigate why the likes of John Brennan, James Clapper, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, and others were apparently trafficking in the surveillance of American citizens, or to reexamine whether Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills, James Comey, or Andrew McCabe misled investigators or perjured themselves or made up things to Congress, or to reexamine what exactly ex-President Bill Clinton was doing with Russian interests to prompts such huge gifts to the Clinton Foundation and such generous largess to himself—lucre that mysteriously has ceased to flow since November 2016.

The media likewise for the last year has joined the stampede. It is apparently unaware that its shock at Donald Trump’s rhetoric, behavior, and comportment had nothing to do with the reality of his governance. In all its self-righteous exclamation that the new journalism meant reporters had to be advocates of social justice and opponents of the likes of Donald Trump, the American media almost turned into a propaganda ministry of 90 percent negative coverage of the president. Yet by any fair standard, he had not as president done things 90 percent wrong.

The longer, like Captain Ahab, they hunt down the mythical white Trump whale, the more they are ruining the very reputation of journalism as they once inherited it.

So, we live in two worlds. One is the material cosmos of concrete action and deeds. The other reality is little more than the unfiltered fears, anxieties and fantasies of ill-informed television talking heads, groupthink opinion journalists, and progressive zealots who have conflated a sometimes-uncouth president with all their own apprehensions, and called the result Nazism and fascism.

When this depressing period in American news and commentary is over, the liberal order will not like the verdict.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

About the Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars – How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).

https://amgreatness.com/2018/03/30/washingtons-fantasies-are-not-peoples-reality/

Mentoring Moment – April 1, 2018 - Christian Action Project (CAP) – Study 5 – Kingdom of God – Delegating Authority

On the day we celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, it is appropriate to remember His commandment to us - Matthew 28:18-20 New International Version (NIV)

¹⁸ Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” 

If this is the first time you have seen one of the CAP Lessons, you can backtrack from here.

In this study, Gary North makes the case that we have been delegated to carry out God’s dominion assignment on earth. This involves every institution.

·         God is sovereign and Christ is the only link between heaven and earth.

·         Our delegated system on earth has complementary authorities. None is absolute.

·         Decentralized self-government is God’s model for mankind.

·         God delegates authority to man.

·         Men have created ‘theologies of despair’ which nullify God’s model.

·         In effect, men have actively shown they don’t trust God’s judgment of putting them in charge of ruling His creation.

·         God’s sheep must become shepherds.

In order to transition from Study 4, I will repeat the closing paragraph from it as a lead-in to Study 5, so there is no misunderstanding as to what Gary North is asserting here. Very simply, this study is an accusation of our dereliction of duty as delegates of God. We have to repent and return to His way.

Excuses, excuses, excuses: man never runs short of excuses. The problem is: God never accepts them. Adam and Eve didn't escape, just because each of them blamed somebody else for the problem. God holds His people responsible for laboring continually to subdue the earth to His glory by means of the grace of law. That responsibility is with every generation, and God expects His people to extend the dominion of His kingdom, generation by generation, culture by culture. He has told us that Christians can do it, and that eventually His people will do it. It may take a thousand years, but they will do it. Man was created for this very purpose, and Satan will not successfully thwart God's plan. Angels will not take the credit for Satan's long-term retreat into his last stronghold; the redeemed adopted sons of God will take the credit, under the sovereignty of God.

The following is from Gary North’s “Unconditional Surrender”:

Delegating Authority As we have seen in earlier chapters, God's institutional outline provides for both centered and local decision-making. God is both one and many. His rule gives equal ultimacy to the unity and diversity of life. But it should be obvious that God is the head. He is the final authority. He is the absolute sovereign. He is the only true source of commands. Christ, as the Incarnate God, who was fully human and fully divine, two natures in one Person, in union but without mixture, is the only link between heaven and earth. No other being, no other institution can legitimately assert a claim to divinity. No other institution is perfect. No other person or institution is infallible. None! Not the family, not the institutional church, not the civil government, not the economy.

Therefore, we have a system of complementary, competing authorities. The Bible tells us: "Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety" (Proverbs 11:14). In a multitude of lawful sovereignties there is also safety, in time and on earth. Each authority has its assignments, defined by God's law, but no single authority has absolute authority in any given sphere of life. Only God has absolute sovereignty. Therefore, the Bible establishes a system of checks and balances, and God's law provides the pivot point.

There must be a major authority in any given institution, but that authority can be challenged by other lawful authorities. A father must rule his household, but a wife can sometimes override him, as Rebekah overrode Isaac's choice of evil Esau as the son to receive the blessing. (She did have God's promise to guide her [Genesis 25:23; 27:1-17].) A father may not murder his children, either. The civil government can legitimately defend them from death. Parents may choose to abort an unborn child, but the Bible says this is murder, and the criminals must be executed, which would include the physician who was a participant (Exodus 21:22-25).

The authority structure in any institution is hierarchical, but it is never absolute. It faces lawful challenges from other ordained institutions. It also faces the possibility of appeal from one lower on the chain of authority to a higher institutional authority. The proper structure of responsibility is upward, from the responsible individual to a supervisor. The man beneath is to exercise self-government, but the man above may establish terms of performance, if they are in conformity to God's law, and he may supervise performance. Each institution acts as a miniature court. There is an executive function with the head of the institution to establish general rules, goals, and standards of performance, as well as to establish punishments and rewards. But any functioning system which is top-heavy becomes bureaucratic, lethargic, and unproductive. No man is omniscient. No man is God.

Therefore, a wise man decentralizes authority, making each subordinate fully responsible for his own performance, and a wise ruler sets up a reward system which encourages self-motivation and self-government. Since no man can police everything under his authority, the wise ruler acknowledges this fact and delegates authority downward. He delegates precisely because he wants to extend his own dominion. Delegating authority is not a retreat from responsibility, but the essence of responsibility. Few decisions in life are more difficult, more laden with responsibility, than the selection of a subordinate to take over a particular task. (Selecting a wife is one example.) Yet it must be done if institutions are to grow. Any institution which relies on a central governing committee to achieve its goals is going to be a bumbling, blind, and woefully inefficient organization.

God delegates authority to man. He tells man to subdue the earth. If a sovereign, omniscient, omnipotent God delegates authority to a creature, then it is imperative that men follow God's lead. Most government should be self-government. In fact, most government is already self-government, and a system that isn't built on this assumption cannot hope to succeed in the long run.

By creating theologies of despair, men have encouraged the creation of a huge central government, meaning the State or the institutional church, or a combination of the two. If we insist that God failed in His choice of a competent subordinate when He delegated authority to man, then we become hesitant to delegate authority ourselves. If God Almighty selected man to subdue the earth, and man was not only immediately deflected from his assignment, but was permanently deflected, despite the grace of God, then what possible hope can mere men have in locating subordinates who will become dominion-minded and reliable self-governors? If God's plan for man to subdue the earth was permanently deflected by Satan, then only a fool would delegate much authority to a subordinate. A wise man under such a theological assumption would hold onto every shred of power he had, as if his future depended upon it. He would never develop institutional arrangements that foster independence among subordinates. He would delegate only as a man delegates to a machine or a totally submissive servant. He would choose only breathing robots, rotting machines, known as bureaucrats, to fulfill his purposes.

This is basically the kind of blueprint for the millennium that millions of Christians have today. God supposedly chose the wrong being to exercise dominion. Satan rules in power on earth, and poor, pathetic man even (we might say especially) regenerate man cannot hope to triumph, in time and on earth. So Christ will just have to intervene directly in the historical process, remove man from all ruling authority, and return physically to start giving orders to His servants. If God has to intervene directly in the process of history, and change the rules of history to establish His kingdom on earth (for example, by intermingling Christians in transformed bodies with Christians converted after Christ's return, not to mention the devil's servants tares who never were removed from history), then we should expect a bureaucratic kingdom on earth, the likes of which mankind has never seen. Egypt's bureaucratic consolidation becomes a joke in comparison with Christ's supposed coming kingdom. No more delegated authority. No more responsible individuality. No more personal maturity through self-government. Just a massive, unquestioning system of bureaucratic government - the hierarchy to end all hierarchies - the pyramid to end all pyramids!

All this follows directly from a particular theology of despair. This theology of historical defeat, this cosmic pessimism regarding the abilities of regenerate men under God's sovereignty, leads inescapably to the acceptance of bureaucracy. Those who hold this theology of historical defeat and who also belong to some non-denominational church, which has no institutional chain of command or which any one will admit to anyway, have become pessimistic with regard to reversing the socialist world's march into bureaucracy. Satan is a consummate bureaucrat, who wants direct power, but who has no law structure that is reliable and no subordinates who can be trusted. Yet his kingdom in this century has pushed around Christian cultures, precisely because the Christians have become reconciled to the idea of the triumph of bureaucracy. They see no defense against it, except a bigger and better bureaucracy to be established by Jesus when He comes to rule in person for a thousand years. "It you can't beat the system, join it. If you can't join it, imitate it."

Because Christians just don't trust God's judgment in selecting them to rule the earth, without God's physical presence, they don't trust themselves. They don't trust in their own judgment. They have no faith in their own dependent and responsible efforts to subdue the earth, under God and by means of His law. They want directions. They want to be told what to do. They are afraid of responsible self-government.

We are sheep. The Bible calls us sheep. But we are to be obedient sheep, and we are to strive to become shepherds, as the apostles become shepherds. Because of self-government under God's law and under God's lawfully constituted authorities, we sheep can become shepherds. We can then become rulers. As sheep, we must never forget the voice of the Good Shepherd (John 10). He is the source of our strength. The means of advancing from sheep to shepherds is through self-government under God and in terms of His law. We are not to become spiritual bureaucrats the ultimate human sheep but law-abiding shepherds (John 21:15-17). We must learn to trust the judgment of those who assign us new responsibilities, just as deacons are supposed to trust the judgment of elders who assign them responsibilities (Acts 6). The way to advance from sheep to shepherds is by continual delegation of responsibility downward, not by the continual expansion of centralized, bureaucratic power at the top.

The Anti-Christian Movement - By E.M. Cadwaladr

(You might also want to read this by Vox Day - The war against God - CL)

I used to be an atheist.  My understanding of "atheism" was simply that it is the belief that there is no God.  I was an empiricist: I believed in what could be seen – the material world and nothing more.  I did not hate Christians.  At worst, I thought they were naïve and foolish for their religious beliefs, but I knew many Christians I respected, including for their insight and intelligence.

Today, "atheism" means something entirely different from a simple lack of belief in God.  What atheism has become can be more accurately described as "the anti-Christian movement."  It is a movement that assumes that Christianity isn't merely naïve and false, but a major cause of social ills, something worth the effort to actively ferret out and purge from our society.  This anti-Christian crusade has been both supported by, and a natural outgrowth of, the much larger program of cultural Marxism.

Anti-clericalism is nothing new, but many atheists of the past were at least coherent.  They believed that the complex triune God of Christianity was silly, but they didn't think Shiva, Allah, or Zeus was any better.  Like me, they simply believed in the here and now and not in the unseen and scientifically unverifiable.  The new atheists are different.  They are not really bound by cold, materialist, scientific facts.  Although they claim that science and reason are on their side, they often are not very knowledgeable about either.  More often, they are interested only in co-opting the human authority science has acquired.  Science is a brand for today's atheists, not a discipline.  The new atheism is generally forgiving toward Hinduism and can be almost reverent regarding Buddhism.  While I grant that Buddhism is essentially godless, it's a long way from being a collection of empirical facts.  Buddha's claims are certainly no more objectively verifiable than Christ's.  Nirvana is no easier to find on a star chart than the Christian Heaven.

Uninterested in hard materialism, today's atheists believe in an emotional narrative invented and reinvented at the whim of politically motivated human beings.  Today's atheism is not a philosophical position, but a political one.  Superficially, the anti-Christian movement espouses the view that Christianity is uniquely evil in its intolerance – their word for the fact that we have standards.  Christianity, like Western civilization, is squeezed into the usual Marxist mold as just another instrument of oppression.  But without batting an eye, many of today's atheists manage to believe that Islam, an objectively more intolerant, more misogynistic, and far more bloodthirsty system of beliefs than Christianity – is somehow forgivable, or even a net social boon.  In truth, the new atheism isn't about helping the "oppressed" – any more than it is about the non-belief in God or the exclusive belief in the world we can grasp with our senses.  It is about being a vocal part of the identity group of avid Christian-haters.  A political entity.  It is about inventing yet another substitute sense of identity and purpose to replace the Christian sense of identity and purpose that it struggles to destroy.

The anti-Christian movement of today, like all other Marxist or neo-Marxist splinter groups, draws its strength from a simple, if unstated, promise: All the world's aggrieved can acquire social acceptance and the unholy grail of victim status by denouncing someone else as an oppressor and working for his destruction.

In the preface of Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion, we find the following revealing statement:

I suspect – well, I am sure – that there are lots of people out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in it, don't believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents' religion and wish they could, but just don't realize that leaving is an option.

This is a Marxist meme on the time-honored pattern.  Marx himself was less whiney in tone, the product of more forthright times: "Workers of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chains!"

What Dawkins is saying, perhaps without even fully understanding the meme that he himself has swallowed, is that if you've been raised in a Christian household, you're a victim.  By telling you this, Richard Dawkins makes himself a kind of revolutionary hero.  If gold medals were awarded for virtue-signaling, The God Delusion would have won the prize for 2006.  Am I being unfair?  Perhaps where Dawkins lives, people who turn away from God are burned alive as witches.  Perhaps – but I doubt it.  The last time I checked, death sentences for apostasy were rather rare outside the Muslim world, where Dawkins's book is ineffective, being banned.  Or maybe he was talking about only the sad fate of atheists being shunned by other people – the unspeakable emotional trauma of "stigma."  Try openly declaring your Christian faith at all but a handful of universities in America, and you will find out exactly what intolerance and vindictive outrage is.  Nor is it merely Dawkins who plays this tune.  Other authors have likened a Christian upbringing to child abuse.  This is a thinly veiled threat, since child abuse is punishable by law.  Overall, the message is clear:

Renounce your faith and you'll have instant standing as a victim; keep it, and you will be counted as one of the few groups liberals are encouraged to hate – and potentially persecute as well.

While I'm not an advocate of affirmative action, it is telling that practically all new atheists are white, and most of them are men.  This is probably no coincidence.  If you are black, Latino, female, or any foreigner with solid non-white credentials, you have ready-made victim status that will charm the neo-Marxist heart.  You don't need atheism to get your ration of liberal street cred.  If you happen to be a white man, though, you have to make up something to earn your right to exist.  Not all white men looking for a victim group to hide in are willing to emasculate themselves as anything from beta males to "transwomen," so anti-Christian militancy has been, for some, the painless alternative.  As the tone of cultural Marxist rhetoric becomes more strident, however, the new atheism has lost most of its value as a refuge.  Unlike being non-white, atheism is perceived as a matter of choice.  It doesn't really count.  Unlike being a surgically altered transsexual, mere Christian-hating isn't much of a commitment.  In the weird and wondrous world of continuous social upheaval driven by social Marxist critical theory, atheists, like gay men, are yesterday's heroes – thrown into the liberal lake of fire as more radical departures from traditional society are concocted.  God forgives – but Marxism has no room for either gratitude or forgiveness.  Only the collective matters.  The individual is a mere means.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/04/the_antichristian_movement.html

The Day that Transformed the World Forever - By Scott S. Powell

Of all holidays, Easter is the one that celebrates a single event that transformed the world forever.  There are many religions with different founders, prophets, and teachers going back thousands of years, but only one of them has a founder who professed to be the messiah – the son of God who could save mankind.

Jesus was born in a Jewish family and lived and walked among the people of Israel.  Every year, Jesus's parents took his family to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover.  On one such occasion, when he was twelve, Jesus got separated from his parents and made his way to the temple, where he sat with the esteemed teachers – listening, asking questions, and teaching.  According to Luke 2:47, "[e]veryone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers."  Later, when his adult ministry began, Jesus drew thousands upon thousands who flocked to hear him.

No one else in human history made the claims Jesus did to be able to deal with every last problem of the human heart.  One primary reason the Bible is a perennial bestseller is that it's the most complete owner's manual to the most complex creation of all – the human species.  Nowhere else can one find as succinct yet comprehensive an explanation of what God's love is all about than in the Bible's Psalms and Jesus's teaching through parables.

Another unique quality about Jesus is that he welcomed people whom no other religious leader would be caught dead with – society's rejects, reviled tax collectors, and prostitutes.  By caring for outcasts and the disenfranchised, Jesus showed a radical level and standard of mercy and love never seen before.  Once, when Jesus was having dinner with a Jewish Pharisee, a woman convicted by her own sin came to Jesus to wash his feet with her tears and hair and then apply expensive perfume.  His host was aghast at the immoral woman's presence, but Jesus responded that God's work is to forgive sinners, and that those who are forgiven much can then love much.

Utterly unique in other ways, Jesus performed many miracles, healing the sick, blind, crippled, and deaf – the news of which traveled throughout the land, prompting many more to seek him out.  And he healed them all.  Jesus also confronted evil head on and drove demonic spirits out of people dangerously possessed and abandoned by society. 

His work did not stop with miraculous healing.

Because God himself became flesh in the person of Jesus to save people through their own faith, he went on to demonstrate his love and power in an ultimate way that could not be missed or denied: bringing the dead back to life.  One such resurrection miracle was that of Lazarus, who was irrefutably dead and entombed for four days.  Upon Jesus's command, Lazarus got up and walked out of the tomb – that people would know beyond a shadow of a doubt who Jesus was.

All other religions require works to achieve enlightenment and salvation.  Christianity turns that on its head: faith in Christ and all his teachings transforms the heart, from which good works naturally follow.  In saying, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light," Jesus presents an ingeniously compelling appeal that even the most hardened cynic can't easily refuse.

Skeptics of the Bible's truth and the reality of Jesus need understand that there's actually much more reliable historical evidence for his life, teachings, miracles, death, and resurrection than there is evidence for any other historical figure of ancient times.

Consider that no one doubts the authenticity of the life and acts of Alexander the Great.  Yet there are only two original biographical accounts of his life, which were written by Arrian and Plutarch some four hundred years after Alexander died.  The manuscripts of Virgil and Horace, both of whom lived within a generation of Christ, were written more than four centuries after their deaths, yet no one doubts that they lived and authored poetic masterpieces.  Looking at the big picture, there are about 1,000 times as many manuscripts preserving the New Testament (about 25,000) than other classical ancient works with the exception of Homer, whose Iliad is backed by 1,800 manuscripts (but still less than one tenth of the New Testament number).  

We know the historical Jesus mainly through four different accounts known as the Gospels – Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John – all written within a generation or two of Jesus's life.  Matthew and John provide eyewitness accounts from their years of walking with Jesus as disciples.  Mark also had eyewitness experience.  Luke, the doctor, learned about Jesus from his friend Paul, the apostle who wrote most of the letters of the New Testament.

Easter is the commemoration of the single event that transformed the world forever – the resurrection of Jesus after his death on the cross.  That God would send his Son to die as a sacrifice for the sin of all who would believe in Him is an unbelievable gift – beyond most people's comprehension.  That a resurrection and a joyous eternal life await believers is beyond anything anyone could imagine.  That is the promise and essence of Easter.

Scott Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute in Seattle.  Reach him at scottp@discovery.org.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/04/the_day_that_transformed_the_world_forever.html

Vox Popoli: Christ is risen - And, as he warned, the world continues to hate him and those who follow him.

And, as he warned, the world continues to hate him and those who follow him.

As Christians around the world prepare to observe the holy weekend of Easter, many will be asked at their services to pray for the persecuted around the world. After years of advocacy groups raising awareness, the plight of the Christians of the Middle East, particularly in the former Islamic State territories, has become common knowledge among American Christians. Yet they are far from the only group that will celebrate Easter this year in defiance of state persecution, mob violence, and repressive cultural norms imposed by groups threatened by the spread of the Christian faith.

Below, six countries where Christians struggle to practice their faith freely against systematic institutional and cultural pressure.

China: Xi Jinping has led a systematic crackdown on “unauthorized” Christianity that has worsened year after year since he became “president” in 2013. Xi has led a movement to “sinicize” Christianity, forcing the legal Christian churches to deliver sermons extolling the virtues of his regime. “Unauthorized” Christianity is deemed a “national security threat,” and Christians who dare worship in their homes face severe law enforcement reprimand.

Venezuela: Dictator Nicolás Maduro and his subordinates have struggled for years to submit the Christian faith to their whims – publishing socialist Christmas carols, identifying their policies with the Gospels, and proclaiming that “Christ is Chavista.”

India: In India, the repression faced by many Christians is not at the hands of the government, but at the hands of violent Hindu nationalist mobs. According to Open Doors, an organization that tracks the persecution of the Christian faithful worldwide, the permissive attitude of a Hindu nationalist government has allowed for the exacerbation of violence against these communities, some of the oldest Christian congregations on earth. In one incident this year, a mob tortured and hanged a Christian pastor after six months of loudly disturbing Sunday services. Local police ruled the death a suicide, triggering thousands to protest for justice.

Nigeria: Nigeria’s population is 40 percent Christian, with many practicing freely in the nation’s south. In the north, however, Christians face severe persecution from jihadist groups like Boko Haram and violence by the majority-Muslim Fulani herdsmen against Christian farmers. The herdsmen are believed to be conducting raids targeting Christians and have killed an estimated thousands of civilians.

Sudan: Sudan, a nation run by Muslim tyrant wanted for genocide, is one of the most repressive states in the world, a Muslim-majority tyranny where Christians face destruction of property and arbitrary arrest if they are too visible. Open Doors ranks Sudanese Christians in the top five most persecuted Christian nationalities in the world.

Indonesia: Indonesian Christians are under growing public scrutiny. While Christians have long coexisted in the world’s most populous Islamic country, they have increasingly fallen victim to radical Islamic mobs.

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.
- Luke 6:22

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/04/christ-is-risen.html

Iraq's Christians: Eighty Percent Have "Disappeared" - by Giulio Meotti

April 1, 2018 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12076/iraq-christians-disappeared

§  Tragically, Christians living in lands formerly under the control of the "Caliphate" have been betrayed by many in the West. Governments ignored their tragic fate. Bishops were often too aloof to denounce their persecution. The media acted as if they considered these Christians to be agents of colonialism who deserved to be purged from the Middle East. And the so-called "human rights" organizations abandoned them.

§  The West was not willing to give sanctuary to these Christians when ISIS murdered 1,131 of them and destroyed or damaged 125 of their churches.

§  We must now help Christians rebuild in the lands where their people were martyred.

Persecution of Christians is worse today "than at any time in history", a recent report by the organization Aid to the Church in Need revealed. Iraq happens to be "ground zero" for the "elimination" of Christians from the pages of history.

Iraqi Christian clergymen recently wore a black sign as a symbol of national mourning for the last victims of the anti-Christian violence: a young worker and a whole family of three. "This means that there is no place for Christians," said Father Biyos Qasha of the Church of Maryos in Baghdad. "We are seen as a lamb to be killed at any time".

A few days earlier, Shiite militiamen discovered a mass grave with the bodies of 40 Christians near Mosul, the former stronghold of the Islamic State and the capital of Iraqi Christianity. The bodies, including those of women and children, seemed to belong to Christians kidnapped and killed by ISIS. Many had crosses with them in the mass grave. Not a single article in the Western mainstream media wrote about this ethnic cleansing.

French Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia made an urgent plea to Europe and the West to defend non-Muslims in the Middle East, whom he likened to Holocaust victims. "As our parents wore the yellow star, Christians are made to wear the scarlet letter of nun" Korsia said. The Hebrew letter "nun" is the same sound as the beginning of Nazareen, an Arabic term signifying people from Nazareth, or Christians, and used by the Islamic State to mark the Christian houses in Mosul.

Now a new report by the Iraqi Human Rights Society also just revealed that Iraqi minorities, such as Christians, Yazidis and Shabaks, are now victims of a "slow genocide", which is shattering those ancient communities to the point of their disappearance. The numbers are significant.

According to the report, 81% of Iraq's Christians have disappeared from Iraq. The remaining number of Sabeans, an ancient community devoted to St. John the Baptist, is even smaller: 94% have disappeared from Iraq. Even 18% of Yazidis have left the country or been killed. Another human rights organization, Hammurabi, said that Baghdad had 600,000 Christians in the recent past; today there are only 150,000.

These numbers may be the reason Charles de Meyer, president of SOS Chrétiens d'Orient, has just spoken of the "extinction of Christians". Father Salar Kajo of the Churches' Nineveh Reconstruction Committee just spoke of the real possibility that "Christianity will disappear from Iraq".

Many ancient Christian churches and sites have been destroyed by Islamic extremists, such as Saint George Church in Mosul; the Virgin Mary Chaldean Church, attacked by car bomb, and the burned Armenian Church in Mosul. Hundreds of Christian homes have been razed in Mosul, where jihadists also toppled bell towers and crosses. The Iraqi clergy recently warned, "The churches are in danger".

Tragically, Christians living in lands formerly under the control of the "Caliphate" have been betrayed by many actors in the West. Governments ignored their tragic fate. Bishops were often too aloof to denounce their persecution. The media acted as if they considered these Christians to be agents of colonialism who deserved to be purged from the Middle East. And the so-called "human rights" organizations abandoned them.

European public opinion, supposedly always ready to rally against the discrimination of minorities, did not say a word about what Ayaan Hirsi Ali called "a war against Christians".

Some communities, such as the small Christian enclaves of Mosul, are now lost forever. Syriac Orthodox Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II said there is a "real danger" Christianity could just become a "museum" in the Middle East. He noted that Iraq has lost 80-90% of its Christian population.

A few Christian villages have begun a slow and painful process of reconstruction with funds donated mainly by international relief organizations such as the US Knights of Columbus and Aid to the Church in Need. US Vice President Mike Pence recently promised to help these Christians. Action now must follow words. Christians who escaped and survived ISIS cannot depend today only on aid from churches and private groups.

Among European governments, only Hungary took a principled position and openly committed itself to save Iraqi Christianity from genocide. Recently, the Hungarian government opened a school for displaced Christians in Erbil; Hungary's Minister of Human Resources, Zoltan Balog, attended the event.

Imagine if all the other European countries, such as France and Germany, had done the same. The suffering of Christians in Iraq would today be much less and their numbers much higher.

The West was not willing to give sanctuary to these Christians when ISIS murdered 1,131 of them and destroyed or damaged 125 of their churches. We must now stand by their side before it is too late. After the mass displacements and the mass graves, we must help Christians rebuild in the lands where their people were martyred. Otherwise, even the smallest hope of hearing the sound of Christian church bells in the ancient lands of the Bible will be forever lost.

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.