Wonderful Matters

Today is the 80th anniversary of the death of Leon Trotsky. It's not that I had this date marked on my calendar for a long time -- I just happened to come across that fact the other day. Eighty years ago Trotsky succumbed to wounds suffered the day before when he was summarily pick-axed in the head by a Stalinist agent. Huh. Don't see many people commemorating the event. Oh there are a few brief notes in a handful of Marxist sites, they're there. But the less you know about the real history of Marxist thought and practice as a legitimate tool of Cain's hegemony, the better. That's the idea anyway, except the way things are going now I'm starting to see it doesn't much matter anymore. For you see, Trotsky is quite the heroic figure to those holding a more purist form of Marxist sentiment. He was more of a "democratic socialist," you know, fighting for a gentler, kinder form of economic totalitarianism. That baaad man  Stalin -- no, he just wants a r...

"You asked, 'Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?' Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, too wonderful for me to know." This blog effort is titled Wonderful Matters because of the words in the 131st Psalm, but these words from Job apply just as much. Too often we try to figure out things without the full counsel of God, and I am often quite guilty of that. That is Job confessing to God there about something God told Job after he and his friends just spent thirty-plus chapters in the book spouting about things God has not said or done. Oh they got some of it right. Job and his friends do bring up a few things that are legitimate concerns about life and reasonable thoughts about the way things are. But for the most part we just don't know what God is doing with whatever it is that is happening out there . The reason I am all about wonderful matters in spite of that truth, is that even though: God has indeed let us in on many of His w...

I continue to be saddened by how many have such a dearth of economic wisdom. More thoughtful people discover how insignificant the covid-19 health risk actually is, the more economically illiterate people listen to the interminable hysterics of the mainstream mass media and react accordingly putting into policy extraordinarily dangerous things like mandatory isolation for all and $1,000 payments to everything that breathes. Straight away I'd like to direct you to an article written by Joy Pullmann , so far the very best I've seen on this whole thing. There you will see that people who just aren't thinking carefully enough refuse to understand the economic costs are just as lethal as the medical costs. Note how often you hear talking heads who get lots of airplay say things like, "Oh but the human costs!" as if "Better safe than sorry" solves the problem. Sorry, but in this instance their cure is far worse than the disease. Some people are fearful t...

I've long felt that there is only one thing that has true intrinsic value. He is God. He is it -- in and of Himself, irrespective of anything else. The only intrinsically valued thing. Everything else has instrumental value, that is, anything else has value in the perspective of the one doing the valuing. There is one qualified exception to that, however, and it is an important one. It is that one thing that is instrumentally valued by God, and in a sense does have a certain amount of intrinsic value if we see that for what it is. That other thing? The human soul. If we see the human soul the way God does, we can see it too has a measure of intrinsic value. From that we can value lots of things in lots of ways. We can value things the way we  want to, but that leads to all kinds of evil. We can also value things the way God  does, and that requires some measure of understanding of His will and purposes particularly when it comes to the way He loves us while at th...