Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Apologetics

So often I have heard it said that apologetics can't do a whole lot for people and that only the gospel can turn a heart.

When I say "but I find this and that really helpful and I find it quite convincing", then they say that is only so because I believe already.

That could be.

What changes a mind?

I don't find that I am really so much in the business of trying to change a mind, but to learn and to bolster and to analyze.  You may take from it what you will and what you like.  You have a mind and a heart.

So, why "apologetics"?

I don't know. -- It does help me.

When I listen to Swineburn, or read David Berlinksy, as I did recently, or contemplate the complexity of a single cell, and the impossibility of getting organic life from rocks without a miracle, it does help me believe.  I find it profound.  If I find it profound, would I not think that there are others who find it profound?  Am I not supposed to talk about it?

And then there is all this opposition.  Don't talk about this.  Don't talk about that.  Keep it in the church, don't bother me with it. And so on.  It makes one think.  It makes one think that it is convincing other people, too, but they just don't want to admit it.  Otherwise, they would refute it.  But they don't.  They just throw rocks or walk away.

Richard Dawkins proposed that life might have been seeded on earth by aliens.  Now there is something that does not convince.  Creation has to be excluded from all discussion because it is not "scientific".  Science will find the answer, it is always asserted.  There is a faith. -- Science will find an answer how we got life from inorganic material?  Science will find the answer how we got the big bang from Nothing?  Science will find an answer to the question of the incredible complexity of living things and the fine tuning of the universe?  Physics will make sense of the incomprehensible revelations it is finding out about and can't really compute?  We will get answers that will make sense to us?  Even if we find answers to some of these questions, will we know how mind, consciousness, sensory perception, love, emotion, justice, and such essential intangibles come to be?



Monday, May 23, 2016

Trans vs. autisitic and vs. women / insurance fraud



http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/435752/most-heartbreaking-post-day-transgender-edition?utm_source=NR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=May23French

https://4thwavenow.com/2016/05/06/social-work-prof-speaks-out-on-behalf-of-her-ftm-autistic-daughter/

http://www.femaleerasure.com./

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Fiery Beasts and Fiery Blessings

Last night, I slept fairly well, but something I watched on Facebook/Youtube was busy in my head. I went to sleep with it and I woke up with it.  There was a panel of distinguished looking men who were very erudite and well-spoken explaining the threat of Islam to Europe. It was international with Swedes and Englishmen sitting together.  The cataclysm coming is civil war, apparently.   Sweden is already lost, and England must fight for its life.  America must never let it happen on the North American continent.  The demographic time-bomb is ticking in Great Britain, as the Muslim population doubles every so often and has children early on in young marriages and plural marriages, on top of that. --So much about what the gentlemen had to say.

In regards to shared humanity, we know that Muslims are dear and precious people, loved by God and neighbors, but the ideology is one of terrorism and submission of everything in its path.--And this is in the Koran.  We have read it. --Also, Muslims are exhorted to dissimulate and so you can't be sure if your neighbor is your friend or foe, that is if Muslims even attempt to assimilate so much as to live outside an enclave.  The police, the media, the elites, the authorities are folding in face of the onslaught of hostility and assertiveness.  On whose shoulders will it fall to defend the nation and the culture?--It seems it falls up on the population itself together with some brave spokespeople.  So-called populism is on the rise in many European countries and one wonders what kinds of beasts are being birthed with some of these movements.  Slovenia has a neo-nazi governor, now.

All this continues to unfold rapidly.  Before 2014 we had hardly worried about these developments.  ISIS changed everything.  The cruelty before our eyes is so despicable and the refrain that Islam has nothing to do with it rings very hollow.  We don't believe it and we don't believe those who keep repeating it.  This explains the rise of Donald Trump to me.  We are sick of lies and we worry about our nations.  Barack Obama still reigns as the prince of peace, but ideas have brought told and untold disasters upon whole populations.

Meanwhile, the fire rages in Northern Alberta.  The call it "the beast."  It is huge now.  It did not get dealt with soon enough.  Dry conditions, old forests, led to this inferno that keeps on adding to the population of evacuees.  There are places for them to go.  Where will Europeans go?

Europe is like the dried up forest in the North.  It is ripe for a burn.  The burn will come, sometime, like an earthquake at a fault line will surely come.  It is inescapable.  Will it burn to the ground so new seeds can sprout or will it be like the Middle East, where Christianity has been displaced from its cradle of birth almost completely?

It is like a Biblical size punishment, something like Noah's flood, something like the tower of Babel, something like slavery in Egypt, something the exile, something like the death of the first-born, something like a crucifixion, something like the destruction of Jerusalem where only a few stones remain.

God always preserved for himself a remnant.  From the root and a shoot a tree can grow again.

Thus the Jews have always survived, though few in numbers, as Jesus predicted, and Christianity grows in the underground quite well.  It is like a fire under the ground.  You think you have stamped it out, but it smolders and glows.  Still, the Lord says often enough:  smarten up or I will turn over your lamp, too.  We can lose all the oil in our lamps and the Lord can also throw them over.  And the darkness will be dark and there will be gnashing of teeth.  Fear the One who can make this happen.

The beast of the fire in the North is being fought with a thousand firefighters.  It won't go out and stop consuming everything before it until the weather changes and rains come.  The weather has changed some.  Without the firefighters it will continue to destroy homes.  Spiritually, we are the same.  Destruction will reign without the help of the Lord without the Word of the Lord.  And if we are complacent, we will surely be engulfed.  Maybe the Christian West will wake up.  May it be so.

There is a fire, a different fire which is good.  It is often kindled when things look very bleak.  A spiritual zeal and need can arise and new work is done.  It is the fire of Pentecost, of Babel undone.  We speak to each other in a language we understand. It is the gift of fire from above.

In Berlin and Hamburg people are worried to walk the streets now, in places.  People don't want to send their children out unsupervised any more.  You could always do this in Germany.  Put your child on the public bus, let it roam in the forest, walk down the street to see grandma, without a worry.  It was a safe country.  But also in Berlin and Hamburg, Muslims are becoming Christians in considerable numbers.  These Christians are severely tested in the refugee homes living among those who pray how many times a day for all to see toward Mecca.  Through lack of participation in this worship, they stick out.  The enmity is more than palpable.

May the Spirit of the Lord turn us all to Him and his love.


See:  "Das Wunder von Stiegliz" in German language
http://www.bibeltv.de/mediathek/video/das-wunder-von-steglitz-5225/


http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2016/may/christian-refugees-in-germany-report-high-levels-of-religio.html?&visit_source=facebook

















Friday, May 20, 2016

Wanting to be a woman vs. being a woman / inconsistencies

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435638/transgender-identity-biology-gender-social-construct-anatomy-binary

"There would seem to be an unbridgeable knowledge gap between such a person and the object of his desire. He reports a longing for the first-person experience of being a woman, but it is an experience he has never had. No number of observations of womanhood can amount to a first-person knowledge of being a woman. Hormone treatments and surgery might ape some aspects of being female, but he would receive these after his initial gender-dysphoric symptoms, not before. Though the psychological states of transgender persons are real, some of their reports seem not just troubled, but utterly unintelligible. Maybe, however, this transgender person means that he wishes to live as if he were a woman, rather than to be a woman. Nonetheless, living as if one is a woman is not the same as being a woman, which is what gender identity is taken to mean. Living “as if” one is a woman appears to conflict with the idea that one’s gender is determined by one’s deepest self-perception. Surely the very concept of identity is what one is, not what one pretends or wishes to be."

------------

As a woman, I take very, very, very great exception that any such male would have the slightest clue as what it means to be a woman.  The whole idea makes me furious and I don't get furious that often.  



Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Selection of reading material on transgender issues of the day

http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2016/05/16/beware-of-trans-movement-as-patriarchy-in-disguise/

http://www.therebel.media/thousands_of_albertans_rally_for_parental_rights_lgbt_counter_protesters_behave_badly_who_s_hateful

http://time.com/transgender-men-sexism/

http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/18/why-transgender-advocates-dont-believe-anything-they-say/

http://thefederalist.com/2016/05/18/why-transgender-advocates-dont-believe-anything-they-say/

https://blogs.lcms.org/2014/ctcr-releases-paper-on-gender-identity-disorder

http://www.desaction.org/documents/SCOTTKERLINRpt2005.pdf

http://www.acpeds.org/the-college-speaks/position-statements/gender-ideology-harms-children

http://www.wsj.com/articles/paul-mchugh-transgender-surgery-isnt-the-solution-1402615120

Monday, May 16, 2016

Social media are not social and do not produce lasting cultures. Biedenkopf.

"The process of increasing fragmentation of society is further increased by the electronic media.  Indeed, the so-called 'social media' are not social.  No true communities develop in them that are stable and can bear loads, no true camaraderie and no love of neighbor.  The social media are a way of removing boundaries.  As long as boundaries are missing, a culture, and the society in which this culture lives, are not durable.  They will die at some point in time.  This has happened many times before."


http://www.wiwo.de/politik/europa/kurt-biedenkopf-der-westen-ist-nicht-mehr-weit-vom-chaos-entfernt/12999954.html?share=fb

Verstärkt wird der Prozess mit der zunehmenden Fragmentierung der Gesellschaft durch die elektronischen Medien. Tatsächlich sind die so genannten sozialen Netzwerke nicht sozial. In ihnen entstehen keine Gemeinschaften, die stabil und belastbar sind, keine Brüderlichkeit und Nächstenliebe. Sie sind Formen der Entgrenzung. Solange es an Begrenzungen fehlt, sind eine Kultur und die Gesellschaft, die in dieser Kultur lebt, nicht nachhaltig. Sie gehen irgendwann ein. Das ist schon oft passiert.

Never heard of the author, Kurt Biedenkopf.  He seems to be google-able.  Maybe later...


I wonder.

We need the physical that orders us into individuals, families, homes, churches, towns and countries.   Then we have culture and then we have durability and then we have what we really want:  love. 

Social media.  Why do we want them and why do we get addicted to them? -- The dialogue is often good.

The relationships that have lasted for me were more those where we met also in person, and where we have a basic respect for the individual because of the love of Christ.  The love of God in Christ is fundamental to everything.  Dialogue without respect will also die.  





Friday, May 13, 2016

I am reading a book by David Berlinski / also a video

I am reading a book:

The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions


by David Berlinski


Very, very good.  The ironies and the occasional and very funny sarcasm are so well perceived and communicated, you must cheer for the man.  I will actually read the book twice, I think--something I never do--and underline afterward. 

Also see this video of an event "Socrates in the City" with Berlinsy and Metaxas. 





Wednesday, May 11, 2016

Brilliant Fools: the story of America's liberal elite

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/435224/ben-rhodes-liberal-elites-spin-stories-deny-truth

I have got to know some of these elite "fools".  

Post-modernism sucks.  My fiction versus what really goes on in the world.  If you counter them, you are ridiculed.

There is also this:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-of-liberal-intolerance.html?_r=1

Friday, May 6, 2016

For progressives, no issue is too small to address...

"For progressives, no issue is too small to address and there is no such thing as just letting an injustice pass. The result is an unrelenting, grinding, one-way campaign of social change, conducted with an air of moral superiority and cultural condescension. It remains daunting right up until enough people put aside their cowardice and reasonable resistance prevails."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434827/individual-cowardice-killing-american-culture?FyDfM1QldsVfrxGb.01

Monday, May 2, 2016

Award

A former professor of mine won an award for a short article on Martin Luther.

http://www.canadianlutheran.ca/martin-luther-father-of-the-reformation/

Spring is happening

It's a hot day, and the trees are seriously wanting to leaf out.  It is also dry.

I have not blogged much, and have not felt like doing it either.  The whole on-line thing is neither here nor there.  It was exciting in the beginning and it still can accomplish much, but something essential is lost in it, too.  Too many "relationships" turn sour because the communication is one-dimensional.  People fall out over the craziest things.

I have started a business and it has kept me occupied to get it going.   It also has kept me somewhat stressed out, but the learning curve is coming along--and I am operating in the black!  It's been lots of fun and people appreciate the service, but I am wanting to apply the things I have learned to a Christian application somehow.  There is a real sense of loss that the music I am making is not Christ-centered, though there is nothing wrong with regular human themes in themselves.

There have been many dissatisfying developments in the world, but one need hardly report on them or dwell on them, as this is being done far and wide, these days.  Even the oldest Seniors in the choir seem to be up on the latest news, some of them confessing themselves to be "news-junkies".  The American election campaign is giving them lots of think about.  Well, I hope it helps with the stemming of the dementia onset.  Personally, speaking, I try to avoid most of that topic, as one, as per usual, pretty much gets one's fill quite quickly.

So let's put that aside.

I had also given up a long-term discussion partner, and I have just now celebrated four months of having given up so-called "dialectic".  It was not really dialectic, at all, but it got to be a habit.  It got to be a bit like needing your joint of weed, or something (not that I know what I am talking about, there.)  From there, I had gone to reading Bo Giertz, who helped me over the time, and lately husband and I are just reading out loud from St. Paul.  It occurs to me with all the addictions to media, news, politics, books, poetry, dialectics...  we have gained a certain distance from scripture, which is not really a "gain".  Perhaps, in returning to it, we are bringing a renewed appetite and new angles to it.

So presently, we are reading the letter to the Romans.  What a challenging time it was for all parties:  Paul preaching and getting flogged and jailed (and killed).  Jewish Christians, Roman and Greek Christians living together in congregations, persecutions, dispersion, gifts and fruits of the Spirits, and Love the greatest of all, which will allow them to live together in a stimulating and joyful community.

Here is a picture of the Ohio Buckeye, I planted last year.  I loved sitting under it.  It had languished some after the planting but we hope this will be a wonderful year for it.  This is from just now: