Tag: CULTURE

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YOUR TRUTH, MY TRUTH

A good Christian friend of mine posted on Facebook some thoughts about the nature of truth, and immediately received a negative response. “Your truth is your truth, and mine is mine”, was the thrust of the response, a very common view. I’ve written a lot about the nature of truth, and it almost seems like a tired old topic now. But there’s an incurable conflict here, ever-present in our culture and our daily lives.

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The conflict, if we’re all honest with ourselves and each other, really boils down to the fact that some people want to follow the ways of God and some don’t. The ones who are keen to dismiss the whole concept that there is any absolute truth do so because they want truth to be fluid, bendable and changeable, in order to feel free to do what they think they should be able to do without feeling guilty, and in order to purge the Christian God from our world. They don’t want to think that there might be any supreme authority which might cramp their style or that of their favorite people. It’s like the man or the woman (sorry those in the middle) who tells his or her mate or lover that he thinks they should have an “open relationship”. This little warm-sounding euphemism is really an excuse not to be faithful and not to be committed. It’s not love, it’s selfishness.

Granted, we can argue or discuss what any absolute truth might entail, and where it might emanate from. But I can tell you one thing: without God at the center of our culture, government will inevitably become God. It will be the ultimate authority. It will dictate what is right and what is wrong; what you can and cannot do; where you can and cannot go; how long you should live; what your value is; what you can have and what you must part with, and so on. And anyone living with the thought that we can hold government accountable and shape it to our own will is living in a dream world-a false utopia which history proves over and over again cannot ever be.

Who would decide what this God has said in regard to truth? That’s a good rhetorical question. I don’t want any of the known religious organizations of the world telling me what God has said: I don’t trust any of them. The beauty of the Establishment clause in the US constitution is that it hands freedom of religious thought, and even freedom from it, to the people. Yes, the clause says that government must not establish a religion, but it also states that government cannot prevent the free exercise of religion-the part of the clause which is always ignored by secularists. Therein is balance and freedom.

God, from the start, from the beginning, has given us the dignity of free will, and the dignity to seek him by our own choice and not coercion, in contrast to the dictates of one or two world religions we could name. However, there are certain principle and laws at work in our universe which are undeniably fixed and unchangeable. If our planet did not follow the laws of space-time and gravity in its fixed orbit around the sun, there would be no life. And it seems obvious to me that the God who has established fixed laws to govern the universe and all of nature, would also have fixed ideas of truth, and of what’s right or wrong. I’m convinced that the Bible is our guide book for life. It contains our Creator’s expression of Truth for us to live by.

Most of the peoples of the world have a commonly-held set of ethics and beliefs to live by. It’s only in the West that absolute and universal truths are being rejected, a phenomenon which the Bible calls “lawlessness” and “sin”. The West cannot survive without those fixed principles, a fact known by some who are at work internally to bring the West down. To them, the West and its Judaeo-Christian roots and values must be destroyed. The West of D-Day was for the most part united with shared truths and beliefs and principles. By demolishing Truth, and inviting a flood of “truths”, we are not fostering unity, but division and decay.

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I AM A MAN!

There’s a movement in the United States, and I suspect in most of the Western World, to overturn the created order of things…

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It’s such an anti-God, anti-Christ, anti West and anti-anything-it-can-get-its-hands-on movement, that the determination is to supplant masculinity with just about anything else which can be cooked up. The goal is no longer “equality” between men and women, but the denigration of manhood, maleness, and male exceptionalism in any aspect of life you can think of. That’s of concern to me, not least because I am a man, as are my two sons.

The movement has gained such influence in the media, in education-particularly higher education, and in politics, that freedom of speech, once pushed as a vital goal by people wanting to overturn God’s order, is being rejected and stifled. I wouldn’t be surprised if this blog post were blocked and never seen again after about five minutes.

I am in no way a “misogynist” as I and many others are being labelled-simply by not falling in line with the goose-step march of the movement. It’s interesting and probably not coincidental that the Bible calls the devil our “accuser”, because the anti-maleness movement attempts to hack its way to ascendancy partly by accusing any opposition of many ugly things, in order to silence as many as possible, including the God of the Bible. Other gods are free to these people, including the one which truly denigrates women, and which wishes to assert total male authority over women. This movement, then, is not really a pro-women movement at its core, it is instead an anti-God of the Bible  movement.

There goes freedom of speech and freedom of conscience and civility, along with God’s natural order of things. However, I know from simple logical deduction and observation that I am a man, and no college professor or extreme activist politician is going to convince me otherwise, or talk me out of my natural proclivities. I also know that God’s will and not that of the usurper will prevail when the time is right. I just feel for all those poor kids in school and college now, being indoctrinated and brainwashed out of their maleness and their natural attraction to women, and being fed a heavily revised version of history, biology, society and philosophy, .

I’m sorry to say this, rest of the world, but this powerful movement in the United States is turning over all the things the West has claimed to stand for. You may be on your own very soon, if it succeeds in gaining total power. One last position for its proponents to win is the presidency, and they’re working at that with all their might.

However, as scripture says, “But God…”

 

 

THE UNPREPARED PILGRIMS

I’ll confess I’m not an authority on churchy affairs, but perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps it’s time political correctness within the church faced a little more opposition from those who aren’t under its power…

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I’ve no doubt that many or most church ministers are working hard and doing their best for their congregations and for their God. But my experience and my observation of today’s church world, overall, is that the flock is not being prepared for what it already faces, or for what may be coming…

We don’t have to go any further than our television or our web-based news feeds to see the direction our world is heading in. Here in the US we’re becoming more and more polarized as the haters crawl out of the closet and make their intentions clear. Our culture is being torn because those who are most intent on changing it have the power of most of the media on their side.

POLITICS AND RELIGION

Of those who take a Biblical view of culture and politics in the Church how many are talking about it? Alright, we don’t have to side openly with either major political party, but we absolutely should be discussing the issues, because they affect all of us and all our children. We don’t live in a theocracy or a church state, and I wouldn’t want to. But we all, in a so-called “democracy” or “republic” or “democratic republic” have a right and a duty to shape it, rather than just handing it over to those who want to tear down all the principles our Creator created us to live by, and even the obvious principles of nature itself.

 

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SEX

Another but not unrelated subject is sex and romance. Without these none of us would be here, right? But how many churches and their ministers discuss the hows and the whys of love: the principles God expects us to live by? How many discuss that stuff which the Bible calls “sin”? “Sin” is such a little word, but it’s so profoundly important. How many young people are being told what sin is and what its consequences are? How many are being told that the things now being forced onto the Western world regarding morality and sexuality are enough to bring eternal consequences?

…those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God (Galatians 5:19-21 NIV).

ORIGINS

Some in the Church regard the subject of our origins as being insignificant. Where we came from isn’t important, they say. What did Jesus say about origins? He said:

If you believed Moses, you would believe me…but if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? (John 5:46).

The writing of Moses, and the prophets, and the apostles, all speak of our creation: not our evolution. We’re made by God in the image of God, not by chance, random mutations and billions of years of time in the image of a lemur or an ape-like creature. Calling into question our creation is calling into question our salvation from sin, and our eternal destiny. If all the writers are wrong about creation, so are they wrong about salvation.

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Our kids are being taught that they evolved from soup. The church which is not working to correct this view is not, I repeat not, caring for its flock.

WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD

I believe in the rapture of the Church. However, what many ministers in churches and on the radio and internet are teaching is that before all that’s foretold in Revelation and elsewhere occurs we’re all going to be taken to heaven…

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Why did our God go to so much trouble to foretell last days events if we aren’t going to see them or experience them? Why do so many prophecy “experts” make a living at what they do if all the time we’re going to disappear before it all happens? Why are so many in the Church sticking their heads in the sands of rapture, when half way across the world many of their believing brothers and sisters are already being martyred for their faith? We are not all going to escape what is to come. We are not all going to get out of here, without some very serious opposition first. So why are the churches passing out buckets full of sand when they should be equipping the saints for what may come and for what has already come in many parts of the world?

FELLOWSHIP AND WORSHIP

One powerful way to prepare the Church for what it has to deal with and for what it may have to face is through fellowship and worship. Sadly, I see very little. I see cliques and little groups who like each other and turn their noses up at the rest. I see very few Bible studies where the  Bible is studied and where it’s not just another opportunity for someone to give a sermon rather than openly discuss Scripture in relation to today’s world. And I see a kind of worship where if you don’t like or accept a very specific genre of music, i.e. Christian “contemporary” music-an innocuous and generic form of pop-you’re out of luck and probably out of any possibility of fellowship.

APOLOGIES

We all get bombarded with lies from every direction. And who did Jesus say was the father of all lies? The devil.

Our history is being revised and scrubbed out by our education establishments and our media. Our “news” feeds are not giving us news at all any more but propaganda, gossip, slander and fakery. Our schools and universities are teaching that we all evolved out of nothing, that there’s no truth to Christian “myths”, and that the Christian Church is the cause of all that’s wrong in the world. Our entertainment world is stuffing gross immorality and extreme violence down our throats, sometimes dressed in special effects, and always with attractive people, to get our attention. Our politicians are (generally) out of touch with reality, with their own voters, and with any sense of Godly wisdom, and our judges are making laws and ignoring others to suit their own agendas.

So how is the Church countering all the lies and deceit we all face every day? I’ll rephrase that last question. Is the Church countering all the lies and deceit?

 

 

 

IS THIS THE AGE OF ANTI-TRUTH?

Truth was once a universally-accepted standard which was “out of style”*. Then truth became whatever you wanted it to be. Now political correctness is attempting to muscle out of existence all opposing views of truth, in order to impose its own…

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Many people have written and commented on post-modernism, and on the “post-truth” age, as have I in my own small, humble, bumbling way. I asked, rhetorically, if anything is objectively true, or is truth only that which we personally or as a society imagine or decide for ourselves is true? Does the answer matter anyway?

In post-modernism, apart from an Almighty God as our Western world now is, nothing is objectively true. There’s no Truth with a capital “T”.  Nothing is incontrovertibly factual, and nothing is set in stone to measure all standards and opinions and decisions by: such truth is out of style. Law, belief, standards and truth itself, are now all, to use a popular euphemism, “fluid”. This is also why the US Constitution is increasingly under attack, or at least being bent out of shape for convenience.

Without that ultimate measuring stick of the Word of God-the removal of which was and is one of the aims of the anti-Church, anti-Christ movement, you’ve got your truth and I’ve got mine, and even if both views are in total opposition it doesn’t really matter, because we can still both be “right” and happy.

I here repeat an assertion of a colleague of mine who calls himself an atheist and a “rationalist”. To demonstrate just how rational he is, he told me that given enough time “anything” can happen, and gave an example by saying that in any universe, due to “the laws of probability” a man would somewhere eventually do backward somersaults through a hoop while being both swallowed and spat out by a whale.

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Of course, there’s no way of disproving my friend’s theory, but my point is that people-many people now-are prepared to believe patent nonsense, simply because it tickles them, appeals to their view of what truth ought to be like, and might I say, provides a colorful deviation from that measuring stick known as Almighty God.

There are, of course, downsides to this approach to truth. For example, under this kind of logic a politician or celebrity and his compliant media representatives can adjust, hide, twist and manipulate the facts and give a totally different story to the real one, but still be telling the truth- as he sees it. We all know out-workings of that little fallacy.

But it seems to me that those pushing for “fundamental change” in our society have already had some success in taking us all one step further, to a time in which the rest of us are being coerced into accepting one view of things; their rough road to Utopia. What they say is true is to their minds now objective truth-they being the gods of the new age, and any criticism of it is struck down with a hail of insults and accusations. It’s no longer enough for them just to have a wildly differing take on truth: any opposition to their opinion must now be destroyed.

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Political correctness, so-called “hate-speech”, and the accompanying self-righteous inquisition work to push the now old multiverse of truths out of existence: there can be only one acceptable view of things. Any dissension will land you, they intend, out of a job, out of business, and in prison.

What the rest of us are convinced is unquestionably true, such as the fact that men are born men and women women (barring physical mutation) they insist is an old lie-an oppressive construct of dark ages past. Old lies must be buried, burned, knocked down, abolished and forgotten. Truth as seen by all of humanity for all of the several thousand years of civilization is under attack. What most of us have known logically, instinctively, physically and empirically are the things which, opponents are determined, must be abolished and forgotten. We are in the age of Anti-truth.

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However, here’s some good news: the good news. Jesus Christ said,

I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me  (John 14:6).

Yes, dear reader, no matter what may or may not be thrust upon our culture and our time by the enemies of Truth, there is an end in sight to all this madness and foolishness, and it begins with our acceptance of God’s only Son, Jesus Christ.

*  https://nickyfisher.com/2014/05/17/truth-is-out-of-style/

 

 

 

 

FAUX: THE NEW REAL

In my higgorance and naivety I’ve fallen for the fancy synonym for “fake” too many times, and in this case, once is too many times…

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All kinds of things are advertised as being “faux” these days, the word being paraded as though “faux” were something chic, valuable and amazingly desirable. And of course many things are fake without giving any such warning as the four-letter “f” word in my title.

We have fake leather, fake wood, fake flowers, fake glass and fake metal. Fake organs, fake fruit, chocolate, leather, tans, news, scientists, hair, teeth, nails, boobs, men, women, trees, pottery, religion, healing, prophets, apostles, Republicans, beggars, music, promises, names, I.D., money…and the list goes on for as long as you can list anything pertaining to human beings.

The first five readers who’ve read this far will receive a Ferrari…

…but not a real one.