On asking the right questions. Article from the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).
Category Archives: Politics and Public Policy
“Jesus Christ holds lawful title”
“The kingdom of God is the arena of God’s redemption. Jesus Christ redeemed the whole world — that is, He bought it back. He did this by paying the ultimate price for man’s sin: His death on the cross. The whole earth has now been judicially redeemed. It has been given “a new lease on life.” The lease that Satan gained from Adam has been revoked. The Second Adam (Jesus Christ) holds lawful title.
The world has not been fully restored in history, nor can it be; sin still has its effects, and will until the day of final judgment. But progressively over time, it is possible for the gospel to have its restorative effects. Through the empowering of God’s Holy Spirit, redeemed people are able to extend the principles of healing to all areas under their jurisdiction in life: church, family, and State.
All Christians admit that God’s principles can be used to reform the individual. They also understand that if this is the case, then the family can be reformed according to God’s Word. Next, the church is capable of restoration. But then they stop. Mention the State, and they say, “No; nothing can be done to restore the State. The State is inherently, permanently satanic. It is a waste of time to work to heal the State.” The Christian Reconstructionist asks: Why not?
They never tell you why not. They never point to a passage in the Bible that tells you why the church and family can be healed by God’s Word and Spirit, but the State can’t be. Today, it is the unique message of Christian Reconstruction that civil government, like family government and church government, is under the Bible-revealed law of God and therefore is capable in principle of being reformed according to God’s law.
This means that God has given to the Christian community as a whole enormous responsibility throughout history. This God-given responsibility is far greater than merely preaching a gospel of exclusively personal salvation. The gospel we preach must apply to every area of life that has been fouled by sin and its effects. The church and individual Christian evangelists must preach the biblical gospel of comprehensive redemption, not just personal soul-winning.’ Wherever sin reigns, there the gospel must be at work, transforming and restoring. The only area of life outside of the reach of Spirit-empowered restoration is an area that was not affected by the fall of man. This, of course, means no area at all.”
DeMar, Gary and North, Gary, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (revised Text), n.d.
When Humanists and Pietists Agree
“The humanists want Christians to stay out of politics as Christians. The pietists agree. The humanists deny that there are valid biblical blueprints that apply to this world. The pietists agree. The humanists argue that Old Testament laws, if applied today, would produce tyranny. The pietists agree. The humanists say that the civil government should be run in terms of religiously neutral laws. The pietists agree. The humanists deny that the God of the Bible brings predictable sanctions in history against societies that do not obey His law. The pietists agree. The humanists deny that the preaching of the gospel will ever fundamentally change the way the world operates. The pietists agree. The humanists say that Christians should sit in the back of cultural bus. The pietists agree. This is why both sides hate the message of Christian Reconstruction.”
DeMar, Gary and North Gary, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (revised Text), n.d.
Why Hillary Clinton's Statement on the Rights of Persons is Worse than it Sounds.
Hillary Clinton is in the news this weekend over comments she made regarding the rights of unborn persons, or, more to the point, that in her mind the unborn person does not have constitutional rights (video here).
The exact phrase is, “the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.” What makes this much worse than her usual pro-abortion position is that she admits that the unborn are persons. This means that there are persons who may or may not have constitutional rights, depending upon legislation or court decisions.
This may be a slip of the tongue, betraying a belief she really shouldn’t want the public to know. In law, everyone from birth to the grave are called “persons.” She has, identified the unborn as person, but a person who has no constitutional protection. Let that soak in a minute. There is, in her thinking, a group or class of persons who do not enjoy the protection of law.
The next questions must be, “Why only that particular class of person not protected by the Constitution? Why not the disabled, the very ill, infirm, elderly, or mentally ill?” Can not this class be expanded to include “persons” who are not good fits in society, or those who are too costly look after?
The argument has changed significantly–the pro-life people have always argued that the unborn are persons, and should be treated as such under the law. The pro-abortion people have resisted that terminology, because they know that to do so is to admit that some persons have no protection, and even the most ardent pro-choice advocates weren’t ready for that.
But this weekend, their champion has taken them to this new low point, dividing all human beings into two classes: those with rights and protections, and those without. They leave the distinction to human courts and politicians.
Dred Scott
Dred Scott. Oil on canvas by Louis Schultze, 1888. Acc. # 1897.9.1. Missouri Historical Society Museum Collections. Photograph by David Schultz, 1999. NS 23864. Photograph and scan (c) 1999-2006, Missouri Historical Society.
The infamous Dred Scott Decision of the 1857 US Supreme Court determined that a slave, taken by his master to a state (Illinois) where slavery was illegal, was still not free. This decision, reversed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, determined that as a slave, Dred Scott was chattel, or property, of his master. As such, he had no constitutional protection as a citizen, nor was he a person under the law. He had no Constitutional protection.
The Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973 has been likened to the Dred Scott case. After Roe vs. Wade, unborn children are not persons under the law, or protected as persons under the law. Francis Schaeffer addressed this problem in his How Should We Then Live? (quoting Joseph P. Witherspoon, 1916-1995, Jurisprudence Professor at Texas University School of Law):
Thus, the failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade [the abortion case] to have examined into the actual purpose and intent of the legislature in framing the fourteenth amendment and the thirteenth amendment to which it was so closely related and supplementary thereof when it was considering the meaning to be assigned to the concept of “person” was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it. Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case, or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and children, including the unborn from the time of their conception.
Francis A. Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, vol. 5 (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 222.
Clinton’s position is that unborn children are indeed persons, but some persons remain unprotected under the law. Where Witherspoon worried that the Supreme Court’s decision of 1973 might open the door for others be deemed “non-persons” (“slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded”), Clinton has determined that personhood makes no difference. Personhood does not intrinsically bestow legal protection upon anyone.
Since the US Constitution uses the term “person” (58 times), to include those it protects, it makes sense that if a court deemed someone a non-person (Dred Scott), the protections do not apply.
What Clinton does in this statement is to suggest, unequivocally, no person or class of person is protected by the constitution as an intrinsic right. Protection is bestowed upon, or removed from, a person or persons by legislation or court order.
This is a sure and certain path to tyranny: your rights are for others to determine.
Why Hillary Clinton’s Statement on the Rights of Persons is Worse than it Sounds.
Hillary Clinton is in the news this weekend over comments she made regarding the rights of unborn persons, or, more to the point, that in her mind the unborn person does not have constitutional rights (video here).
The exact phrase is, “the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.” What makes this much worse than her usual pro-abortion position is that she admits that the unborn are persons. This means that there are persons who may or may not have constitutional rights, depending upon legislation or court decisions.
This may be a slip of the tongue, betraying a belief she really shouldn’t want the public to know. In law, everyone from birth to the grave are called “persons.” She has, identified the unborn as person, but a person who has no constitutional protection. Let that soak in a minute. There is, in her thinking, a group or class of persons who do not enjoy the protection of law.
The next questions must be, “Why only that particular class of person not protected by the Constitution? Why not the disabled, the very ill, infirm, elderly, or mentally ill?” Can not this class be expanded to include “persons” who are not good fits in society, or those who are too costly look after?
The argument has changed significantly–the pro-life people have always argued that the unborn are persons, and should be treated as such under the law. The pro-abortion people have resisted that terminology, because they know that to do so is to admit that some persons have no protection, and even the most ardent pro-choice advocates weren’t ready for that.
But this weekend, their champion has taken them to this new low point, dividing all human beings into two classes: those with rights and protections, and those without. They leave the distinction to human courts and politicians.
Dred Scott
Dred Scott. Oil on canvas by Louis Schultze, 1888. Acc. # 1897.9.1. Missouri Historical Society Museum Collections. Photograph by David Schultz, 1999. NS 23864. Photograph and scan (c) 1999-2006, Missouri Historical Society.
The infamous Dred Scott Decision of the 1857 US Supreme Court determined that a slave, taken by his master to a state (Illinois) where slavery was illegal, was still not free. This decision, reversed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, determined that as a slave, Dred Scott was chattel, or property, of his master. As such, he had no constitutional protection as a citizen, nor was he a person under the law. He had no Constitutional protection.
The Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973 has been likened to the Dred Scott case. After Roe vs. Wade, unborn children are not persons under the law, or protected as persons under the law. Francis Schaeffer addressed this problem in his How Should We Then Live? (quoting Joseph P. Witherspoon, 1916-1995, Jurisprudence Professor at Texas University School of Law):
Thus, the failure of the Court in Roe v. Wade [the abortion case] to have examined into the actual purpose and intent of the legislature in framing the fourteenth amendment and the thirteenth amendment to which it was so closely related and supplementary thereof when it was considering the meaning to be assigned to the concept of “person” was a failure to be faithful to the law or to respect the legislature which framed it. Careful research of the history of these two amendments will demonstrate to any impartial investigator that there is overwhelming evidence supporting the proposition that the principal, actual purpose of their framers was to prevent any court, and especially the Supreme Court of the United States, because of its earlier performance in the Dred Scott case, or any other institution of government, whether legislative or executive, from ever again defining the concept of person so as to exclude any class of human beings from the protection of the Constitution and the safeguards it established for the fundamental rights of human beings, including slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded, and children, including the unborn from the time of their conception.
Francis A. Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, vol. 5 (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 222.
Clinton’s position is that unborn children are indeed persons, but some persons remain unprotected under the law. Where Witherspoon worried that the Supreme Court’s decision of 1973 might open the door for others be deemed “non-persons” (“slaves, peons, Indians, aliens, women, the poor, the aged, criminals, the mentally ill or retarded”), Clinton has determined that personhood makes no difference. Personhood does not intrinsically bestow legal protection upon anyone.
Since the US Constitution uses the term “person” (58 times), to include those it protects, it makes sense that if a court deemed someone a non-person (Dred Scott), the protections do not apply.
What Clinton does in this statement is to suggest, unequivocally, no person or class of person is protected by the constitution as an intrinsic right. Protection is bestowed upon, or removed from, a person or persons by legislation or court order.
This is a sure and certain path to tyranny: your rights are for others to determine.
Since It's Super-Tuesday
My previous post was about taking up Satan’s cause. This article shows how eager Christians are to do do just that.
Since It’s Super-Tuesday
My previous post was about taking up Satan’s cause. This article shows how eager Christians are to do do just that.
Planned Parenthood Sells Baby Body Parts–Whistleblowers Are Indicted
Planned Parenthood is a criminal organisation, but those who expose them face prison.
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20, ESV)
The following is from Doug Wilson’s blog. Video is disturbing–how can it not be?
“This last summer, the pro-abortion world was rocked by the release of a series of sting videos that showed Planned Parenthood illegally serving as merchants of baby parts. I hesitate in using that word illegally because their practices are ghoulish and appalling long before they become illegal. What they do is manifestly illegal, but that is not the heart of what is wrong with it.
In other words, we live in a country where it is perfectly legal to turn a healthy baby into baby parts.That part is okay. It is just that when you do this, you can’t sell any of the parts afterward. Selling them would be an indignity and grossly illegal, while throwing them into a furnace, dumpster or landfill is somehow consistent with American core values.
And it is, too, because American core values have come to include high levels of hypocritical hairsplitting.
Chopping little Billy or Sally into unmerchandisable bits is not an indignity. Being very careful in how you kill them, so that the kidney, heart, thymus, and femur remain usable, is against the law. This highlights pro-choice hypocrisy, even though the inconsistency was created through pro-life pressure that made the merchandising against the law.
Insisting on the arbitrary illegality of this is pro-life shrewdness, because it spotlights the central lie of the abortion industry. They got away with the killing itself because of their insistence that what we were dealing with was a nondescript lump of tissue. We were removing a cyst-like thing that later on becomes a human being. Okay, said an America that had never paid too much attention in high school biology. But now all the cyst-like characteristics have disappeared, and we discover that if Planned Parenthood could figure out how to make a buck selling tiny fingernails, they would most certainly be doing so.
The general public may not know rudimentary biology, but they do know enough to know that you can’t have it both ways. If you pass a law concerning lumps of tissue, you must treat the lumps of tissue as that thereafter. And if you go on to set up a big business selling parts that are highly valuable precisely because they are distinct human parts, you have undercut your whole project — and have not a shred of moral credibility left.
So the thing about hypocrisy is that it never knows when to quit. Knowledge of when to quit is called repentance, and so, failing that repentance, the hypocrisy just gets more and more bizarre. Less repentance, the only thing you can do is double down. And then, after that, you triple down. After that comes Hell.
Because we have banished the true God from the public square, we have in effect said that we only have to obey the laws established by the true god of our system, the god Demos, the god who serves as the voice of the people. If it is illegal, then we won’t do it. Cross our hearts. Promise. This is a democracy.
Ah, but they are doing it. How shall we account for this? Grandiose narcissism is always sold as the noble service of Us, but it always translates, by the end of the day, into the ignoble service of Me.
So however much it makes no sense within their larger system, it is illegal to sell baby parts, and Planned Parenthood in Houston was manifestly selling baby parts. So what happened? Texas has a pro-life governor and pro-life lieutenant governor. The prosecutor’s office was told to look into it. Were the sting videos reliable? They “looked into it” and came back with an indictment of Daleiden and Merritt, the investigative journalists who uncovered and documented the corruption of Planned Parenthood.
Correction: I am informed by a reader that a detail in the above is incorrect. The state investigation is ongoing. The indictment was the doing of the Houston prosecutor, trying to get out in front of things.
In response to this unconscionable indictment, the Center for Medical Progress has courageously released another video — and good on them. This is a showdown, and we need to not blink. We need to help the CMP to not blink.
If the indictment is not thrown out ipso pronto, to use the technical legal phrase, then Gov. Abbott of Texas should simply pardon them. Or rather, he should promise to pardon them if they are eventually convicted of anything — because while they are on trial they can use the process of discovery to perhaps uncover more than their videos ever did. The promise of a gubernatorial pardon will mean that the bad guys, regardless of what they do, will be in a lose/lose situation.
In addition, every candidate for president needs to be pressed on this same question. We are now in the midst of primary season, which means that many ordinary citizens will have opportunity to ask such questions. The question should have two parts — if Daleiden and Merritt are convicted, and if that case wends its way into the federal system, can you commit yourself to a presidential pardon for them? And secondly, would you be willing to consider awarding them the Medal of Freedom regardless of the status of their case?”
The Christian and Social Justice
“The doctrine of grace must also be found unacceptable by humanitarian-based theological pragmatists, because grace allows one to accept without guilt what is not deserved. To have something that another does not have, or to have something that is not earned, by inheritance, by ‘luck,’ by gift—in other words, by grace—is unsupportable for those theorists and requires the imputation of guilt. Only grace can expunge guilt. Social justice advocates are hostile toward Christianity precisely because the latter stands on grace, which the former hates. Christians taken in by the social justice argument have a social ethic at war with their deepest convictions and are, therefore condemned to futility. The only theology consistent with humanitarianism is works-righteousness, or Pelagianism.”
Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983, p 240
It is Possible
It seems that sides are being taken up, but I’m refusing to be a part of it.
It is possible to think this: that to bring refugees who are adherents of Islam (which is by design a violent religion) into Canada is a very bad idea. I think it is a very bad idea.
It is also possible to believe: that it is a cynical political ploy of of leaders in government to mask this immigration as “compassion.” I have no reason to think otherwise.
It is also possible, probably necessary, to know: that violence and terror will get into Canada, and be carried out here. I am afraid this will happen–this is the direction of history.
Again, it is also possible, while holding all of the above, to know: a number (small or large, majority or minority, I don’t know) of refugees are truly in need and escaping for their lives.
It is possible to be fully conscious of these things, and even to disapprove of our government’s actions, and yet also accept that nothing happens outside the will of God, and that He has written the end of this story. Whether or not we approve of it, the mission has arrived in Canada.
It is possible, at the same time and in the same head, to be skeptical of motives, cynical, fearful, concerned, realistic, angry, sympathetic, welcoming, loving, and Gospel-preaching. For this is the mind of the Christian.
I see no need to sign petitions welcoming or refusing refugees. Just be Christian, no matter what comes.