The Truth Dude

Often we Christians place such emphasis on what it takes for salvation, by grace alone through faith, that we depict Jesus as begging us to “accept” him into a vague and complacent belief instead of an active call to follow him, to serve, to love, and to go. May we not stagnate but hunger for growth.

How is that we, the Church, sing songs about how, “with God everything is possible,” we quote verses that say “I can do all things through Christ,” and then think we need the government to do the church’s job of taking care of the poor, the hungry, the orphan, widow, etc? “The Church just doesn’t have the resources,” we say. So Christ is able to save my everlasting soul but is insufficient to meet my physical needs? What a puny, inconsiderate God. Do we really think that we, the body of Christ, the very hands of God, are impotent to care for his children? Is the church unable to do what it was created for? No! God has seen and experienced all of our physical needs and weeps with us in them. That is why Jesus forgave and healed, for he has pity on us. That is why we, the body are Christ, are here. We are here to be Gods arms wrapped around His children, showing His love, sharing His gospel, doing His will on earth as it is in heaven.

Instead, we say its too hard for God, its too difficult for the body of Christ, we just dont have the resources. So we look to the man made governmental bureaucracy to do God’s work, giving the least of these a check, leaving them and us worse. Jesus told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, and however we treated the least of these would be like how we were treating Jesus. Well something tells me Jesus doesn’t want a welfare check. The federal government spends 1.3 trillion every year on Health Care and Welfare. According to an approximate $40,000 median personal income, if nearly every person in America (300 million) gave just 10% of their income to their local church, ykno tithed, that would be $1.2 trillion. Cut out the bureaucracy and the waste, add the God-given talent and creativity of local charity, and you get less-expensive and real help. Yeah not everyone is gunna give to their church still, don’t tell me its impossible, that we don’t have the resources, that God is unable to equip His body to take care of His people.

Simply put, we don’t need Medicare or Welfare, we need people to actually care. Voting to take one person’s money and give it to another doesn’t make you compassionate or charitable.  And in case you think the Church and government could work together, any scheme which seeks to save a rich man or help a poor man through forced and impersonal benevolence only makes one dependent and the other resentful because loving your neighbor simply cannot be compelled.  Let the government focus on retributional justice, as they should, and the Church will worry about relational justice.  We need real, personal, voluntary charity and love from the Body of Christ to those who need help, creating local and sustainable growth that justly restores relationships and cures spiritual poverty through the Gospel of Jesus. Oh, that the Church may rise up and fill its role fully as the Body of Christ!

A people will always create laws that reflect their morality, wherever it may come from.  Throughout our history laws were based on the Judeo-Christian ethics and worldview.  Recently, this has started to shift toward more of a secular humanist morality.  I personally think this will have an ultimately negative result, but this is merely the nature of free and representative government.  It is true that for me to say that only Christian morality may influence law, and for the Christian minority to seize power, preventing the majority from articulating their morality through law, would be a hijacking of government by religion and violate the very nature of government and civil law. One must also concede, however, (and this was my main point) that the other side of the coin is also true.  For one to say only secular humanist morality may influence law, and that majority of people’s morality may not be reflected in law merely because it is from a religious perspective, also violates the purpose of and nature of a free civil government.  This is basically what the First Amendment was originally intended to articulate.  Congress shall make no law establishing one religion as the only true and official religion which informs all religious and civil decisions.  No, in the marketplace of ideas, various religious and non-relgious ideas should compete to inform the morality and politics of the civil society, with the winners shaping law within the constrains of the constitution.

Recently, I was recalling the joke that was the elections back in school for class president and whatnot.  As young as elementary school, they had us voting on our classmates, like we knew crap about democracy and leadership. Not to mention it was a joke, student government has no real power its just a farce by the administration to make us feel included. But I digress… Do you remember how we elected our so called representatives? It had nothing to do with who was most qualified or who had the best ideas.  It didn’t even have anything to do with who cared! It was all about who was coolest, who could make the best jokes, or who gave out free candy on election day.  It was a popularity contest, plain and simple.  Meanwhile, the poor kids who actually cared, nerds mostly, got defeated time and time again.  

I know all about this because I experienced it first.  No, I was not the nerd who got defeated you jerks.  My Junior year of High School I ran for Student Council Vice President against a well intentioned, very smart girl in my same class.  She had a plan, she was gonna change things, and really wanted to put VP on her transcript.  I, however, ran on a whim and spent about a month indoors (I was grounded) writing up my best stand up routine. I talked about combining the nutty Snickers faculty with the out of control Musketeers students to create the Milky Way democracy our school needed. I talked about my endorsement from the old drivers ed and golf coach.  I may have even promised free ice cream fridays.  Needless to say, I won. I won and then continued to not go to a single student body function the whole year. 

You see, first of all, I really didn’t care about creating a Milky Way Democracy, I only cared about winning the popularity contest, having the title, the power, and I would say whatever I needed to.  I was a demagogue, riling up the masses for my own personal interest.  Ok I was really just a punk (Sorry Genevieve) but there is a lesson there. 

But the biggest thing I learned from reflecting on this is how all of the students I grew up with, voting their representatives based on popularity, jokes, and free candy, are now voting for real representatives with real power at stake.  Those same students, my generation, my peers, took that same attitude into the voting booth last week.  Except now instead of free candy they’re being promised free condoms. Our presidential election has become nothing more than a big popularity contest.  Obama is cool, he plays basketball, he hangs out with Jay-Z, he’s handsome and has lots of friends.  Romney is a nerd.  If the presidents had a talent competition Obama would shoot threes and Romney would start a successful business.  Romney also advocated hard work and personal responsibility, Obama advocated free ice cream fridays. 

You see children will never vote against Santa Clause and middle schoolers will never vote against the cool kid.  I know there are intelligent, albeit misinformed, voters.  But the cool kid isn’t just running to put it on his resume, there is real power and money at stake here. The demagogue is very good at looking cool and the con-man doesn’t look like on until its too late.  So unless we grow up, America, the cool kid could end up being the bully after all and we just voted in our own wedgie.

We hold these “truths” to be socially constructed, that all men, women, transgender, and whatever else your heart leads you to be, are evolved equally, that they are endowed by their government with certain politically expedient rights, that among these rights are government provided food, clothes, housing, and healthcare.

From a book review by the famous evolutionist Richard Lewontin. Lewontin wrote the following:
“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Richard Lewontin (Harvard University geneticist), “Billions & Billions of Demons,” New York Times Book Reviews (9 Jan. 1997), p. 31 (italics in the original). The review is of Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
(Random House, 1997). Found this reference on Answersingenesis.com

In the prophetic 1915 book What’s Wrong with Germany? by William Harbutt Dawson I found this gem.  He quotes German thinker Dr. Freidrich Paulsen on how on earth nihilistic atheist philosopher Nietzsche gained such popularity in Germany.

“How comes it,” he asks, “that young Germany welcomes a writer of this kind as a revelation?  There must exist a condition of mind to which it responds; for Nietzsche can teach nobody; he would himself have laughed loud if anyone told him that he owed to him, the fugitivus errans [wandering exile], who never stood on firm ground himself, clear ideas and fixed convictions.  What is this mood? I think it is just that from which Nietzsche suffers—intellectual anarchism; and the cause of this mood of depression (for it is a pathological condition) I deem to be the excess of pressure and compulsion to correctness to which everybody is exposed from youth to age.  Intellectual anarchism if a reaction against the long-continued subjection imposed in the school, the Church, society, and the State.  The effect of this ceaseless discipline is that correct idea upon all matters, historical and political, religious and moral, literary and philological, of which we are trained by long schooling and many examinations, by public opinion and private admonitions, by patriotic festivals with their eternally reiterated eloquence, by seduction and threat, at last appear to us so stale, insipid, and intolerable that we tear up and throw from us everything, the correct opinions with the old truths, the conventional standards with the worn-out relics, and eventually logic and morality with them, give ourselves over to saturnalia [wild party] of paradox, and celebrate a very feast of intellectual topsy-turvydom.”

NOTE: This is the subjection which happens when we teach kids how to sit still in their desks instead of how to think, how to stay in line instead of how to create, and how to do enough to not get in trouble instead of how to excell.  They rebel against the systems which birthed them and, in turn, reality itself.  They look for answers in the stupefaction of strong drinks or in a populist tyrant.  It was the intellectually anarchist youth of 1915, spawned by “God is dead” Nietzsche, which voted for Hitler in 1933.  Proof that when there is no truth, liars will define it.