Wonderful Matters

The other day I was surfing on the car radio as I often do, and came across NPR for just a moment. During that brief time of checking out the latest System bilge, there was a short promo for what I believe they said was their "Marketplace" show. Here is what they said: "We represent perspectives and realities that..." I don't exactly remember what followed, but I'm sure it was about how great they are at virtue-signaling so you'd continue to listen and get your hearts and minds filled with richly exploitive plap.  The point, though, is this. Realities? As in, plural realities? Realit ies ? What have we become to be so consumed by this postmodern dreck. Supposedly super smart people over at the NPR stupidity mill churning out the worst of World dominion mind-control, in one word revealing the core nature of their dissipation. But precisely what its listeners want to hear. So touching, so caring, so inclusive and tolerant and smarmy. So nice of them to ack...

I've recently seen a number of pieces at the online sites I visit along these lines: "What are we doing to our children forcing them to be vaxxed when it is so dangerous?!" There were two just yesterday at one I like, Off-Guardian .  While I agree with the concern as well as all those related to the continued insanity of overbearing lockdown protocols weighing on us all the time, I really don't think people are truly grasping what is happening when that critical mass of Generation Xers pretty-much dominate the public sphere with all of this. If I may. People born in the 60s and 70s have been steeped in Frankfurt School "Critical Theory" theology. It may be said to be "philosophy," but really it is a form of the way they think things should be transcendently . It is a religion.  Around that time Herbert Marcuse was bilging his stuff about sexual expression being a form of liberation from heteropatriarchal oppression, and Theodor Adorno was bilging ...

We saw a perfectly wretched motion picture last night, Everything Everywhere All at Once . It was about a woman bouncing through the multiverse being tossed from universe to universe, and while I believe it was trying to make a statement about how nice and non-dysfunctional a family could be, it was actually just a brainlessly meandering, sickeningly creepy, and painfully disturbing hot-mess. After I'd endured the 57th incident of pointless, tedious, and grotesquely bloody martial arts goofiness at just under an hour-&-a-half in, I was done. Turn this idiocy off. All of that wasn't even the most disturbing part. The most disturbing part was that there were so many who liked it, both reviewers and audience members. At Rotten Tomatoes alone: among over 300 reviewers it got a 95%, which seems pretty good (I know very little about the site). From the 2,500+ "verified ratings" among those posting with the popcorn icon it got an 89%. I could get deep into the film and ...

In a post a little while back I made a remark about praying for my enemies, and also praying for the mitigation of the effects of what legitimately powerful potentates do. I've thought a bit about that statement, the one about praying that people wouldn't suffer so much for the things they ask their lords to do. I've actually thought, huh, that may not be the best thing to pray for. Huh?  Now I know as you may know that praying for the very best for anyone is not a bad thing at all, I got that. The prayer is one of magnanimity, really, and who wouldn't want that spoken prayer on their behalf, I got it. I do want the ultimate best for anyone, and will always pray for that. But I look at what God does in Scripture.  His  ways are light years and light years beyond ours. It is so amazing what He does, even though the seasoned humanist would viciously revile such a move. But God has His reasons, perfectly just and righteous when you look carefully and get a real underst...

A couple months ago I blogged on the appearance of John Lennox before a packed hall at one of the Claremont colleges. In my own recent apologetics reading -- this one from Nancy Pearcey's Saving Leonardo  -- I'd come across a point made by a follower of Christ about seasoned apologists appearing to speak at colleges... They almost always pack the house. People do want to know the truth. People are seekers of truth. But the truth to them is based on all the shit poured into their souls by brilliant Roman agents working through the universities, sworn and powerful humanism-smothered operatives who have no idea who God is. Anyway, one of the questions asked of Mr. Lennox, was this one, and again I was somewhat surprised that he seemed to be a bit flummoxed about what to say when the question came up, one that I've seen asked a number of times by the radical skeptic. That question again: "What would be a proof to you that God does not exist?" As I pointed ...

In my last blog post I wrote about the time just last month I watched John Lennox share Christ in a lecture hall of about a hundred people, young and old, at a prominent secular science college. I spoke about a couple of the key things he missed, and no disrespect, Lennox is an amazing apologist. I'd like to think afterwards many in the audience genuinely considered making Christ their Lord and Savior. Not sure, though. Not being cynical, I just want truth to reign. One of those other things Lennox missed is the fact that the concept of justice upon which he based a core part of his address is a scientific concept . This thing justice is  testable and falsifiable. It is something that can be proven to affect all people in the same way all the time. In the same way photosynthesis is the way plants make energy, justice is the transcendent standard for people to treat other people and know how to treat other people, and it is so scientifically . That we don't know all the asp...

Recently Time magazine did a modern take on its famous cover from 1966, "Is God Dead?" At that time many were abandoning formal religion for the hinterlands of alternative spiritualities, what with the ability to travel to and communicate with other cultures becoming faster and easier. "Hey! Wow! Look at this cool spiritual thing here in India! Hmm, Hinduism  and all the karma and reincarnation and all that cool stuff! Or over here! Buddhism  where you can just let it all go because it's all nothing anyway! Cool!" A lot of these ideas wove their way into more liberal theological pronouncements consuming some of the more eminent seminaries, and quite a few people then headed off to Woodstock-like events rather than those stodgy old concrete churches. Today our "post-truth" society now wonders, "Is Truth Dead?" Funny, for that statement to be meaningful, truth must be alive . While it is easy to understand the sentiment, this is why ask...

Just thought I'd blog for a brief moment here to direct your attention to a piece in The Federalist  which I found to be a solid treatise on how the neo-progressive movement is animated today. I don't know anything about Peter Burfeind except that he is a Lutheran pastor with some kind of expansive ministry. This piece he wrote captured my attention because it definitively elucidates the nature of the god neo-progressives worship and serve quite zealously, even in their insistence they don't have a god. Fiercely push against the claim you have a god? That is part of your devotion to the God of Rejecting the Straw Man Civil Religion's God. What Burfeind isn't seeing is this virulently protracted movement is itself generated and sustained by the forces of Cain's agency charged with this task, none other than the exceptionally intelligent and deftly strategic men who populate the Society of Jesus, Cain's militant agency for the purpose of moving people to r...

The latest presidential election has come and gone, and there are no fewer than, oh, 18,000 different things that can be said about it. Much of it has been said, and more will be said. Donald Trump shocked everyone by winning. This is a gentleman who for years as "The Donald" was ridiculed as a boorish immature rich guy who regularly flaunted his persona to everyone's dismay -- or amusement as the case may have been. When he made the latest serious run for president he went up against a number of politician wimps who simply would not challenge the idiotic neo-progressive movement that has ravaged the U.S. His brash brutishness got him elected, really. Everyone has believed that he'll be the one to blow out all that stuff, but, sorry, don't hold your breath. Just after the election, barely a day or two later, he said he'll keep certain parts of the Affordable Care Act. His buddy Ben Carson -- beloved by evangelicals everywhere -- said he's already got p...

I am blogging yet again on a day when otherwise I'd be at work giving every once of attention to my job. I am blessed to do this now because I have time off from work for a while. I'm also committed to sharing more out of my latest home page piece in which I make the case that hate speech is indeed a crime, and that there should indeed be laws governing it. The twist is that just as much as the liberal politically correct crowd is obsessed with speech police enforcement of offensive language violations, they too are subject to the same laws. When someone screeches "You microaggressed me!" I am perfectly within my rights to insist right back, " You're  microaggressing me! You're the one who's violating healthy speech expectations!" Yesterday I went into a bit more detail about how sodomous behavior actually destroys those who engage in it and as such I am perfectly justified in speaking out against it, and indeed it is those openly and vocall...

I saw two movies the other night. My son and my wife picked up two movies from Red Box I actually wanted to see, and so I watched them. The first was War Room, the second was Mad Max: Fury Road . I'd recently seen that Mad Max  got an Oscar nomination for best picture. Hmm, maybe it's pretty good. So I watched them. War Room  was a powerful, engaging, touching, compelling drama about the beauty and wonder of prayer and fostering a relationship with a God who heals and saves. Yes it was predictable and melodramatic, yes. But it was a wonderful film that addressed real life concerns in a profoundly moving way. Mad Max , on the other hand, was a bloated, contrived, ridiculous waste of time. In the interest of trying to come up with the grandest hyperkinetic mega-dystopian thrill ride you'd ever see, you got a gruesome, psychotic, completely uninteresting pile of pap. 87% of it featured big bad-ass kick-ass-looking vehicles doing battle in the desert showcasing the wildes...

In the previous post I posed the following question: "Why do we care so much about what people think of who we are, authentically, but don't give God the same consideration?" The idea is simply that we are quite interested with what others think of us. No, I don't believe for a second anyone who says they can say with 100% verity "I really don't care what others think." They're lying. By definition, for anyone to have any meaningful relationship, who one is must be expressed to another in some way. Otherwise we are all just schizophrenics. Given this quite veritable premise, why then don't we give God the same consideration and at least work a bit to understand who He really is, if we hope to have relationship with Him? Many will say "Who are you to say who He is? How presumptuous." When these kind of people--and yes, there are many of them--say this, they are actually saying "I am a fool, for I presume that one cannot know who Go...

Benjamin Bush is a prolific blogger who recently made a foray to the "Jesus Creed" blog , a popular emergent church type forum that supposedly welcomes all views with all openness. What he found is that they aren't exactly so open as to hear views that would--heaven forbid-- perhaps close one's mind on something that is--oh my-- true . I enthusiastically encourage you to check out his eloquent narrative of this adventure. His blog is here, The Politics of Heaven . In today's Los Angeles Times there was a piece by columnist Joel Stein about how pointless Don Imus really is-- this in light of the recent hypocritical popular culture witch hunt of the guy. Not that I'm an apologist for him, for I feel pretty much the way Stein does. What is noteworthy is that the postmodern philosophy from which the emergent church movement takes its charge is all about rejection of truth as a weapon used by those who want to increase their power over others. With this in mind it ...

Just a quick heads-up about an editorial in the Los Angeles Times today, a piece by Martin Kaplan titled "National Debate--Who Needs It?" It's worth a read, just because he puts a mortal wound in the entire postmodern hegemony by firmly declaring that he's tired of talking. He just wants to know what's true . Ironically, if postmodernism is true, then talking, really, is pointless. We should all be sitting alone in our interpretive community corners sucking our thumbs comfortable with our stories . If I can't find out anything that's authentically, objectively true by speaking with someone, then what's the point? So then talking is invaluable . The key question Kaplan is concerned about is, what precisely is the truth that we should know from our discourse? Yes, it is true, talking just to talk is narcissism. Oh I'm not dismissing the truth of interactive engagement for the sake of vibrant relationship, but that itself is a truth . Okay, I've ...