A Review of Two Movies

I’d like to give the story lines of two movies being shown at my local theater. And yours. And everyone else’s on the planet. I’ll give away a bit of the plot, but guessing the titles of these movies will be up to you.  I’d like to know which you think you’d like better.

The first begins with literally everything being blown away from what would be a single point in the middle of nowhere except that there is literally no where for it to be in the middle of. But soon the infinitely small particles that are everything begin forming bonds, some strong enough to eliminate practically all space between them, others setting some particles in orbit around other particles. Soon the smaller glomerations conglomerate, and so on, until there are glomerations so large that the viewer’s mind can comprehend neither the number of such glomerations nor their sizes.

For nine billion years, there is literally no life anywhere in this vast existence. Things change—the distances between the largest glomerations expand, and the structures of the smallest glomerations change, but because literally nothing that exists thinks, these changes are not thought of as progress. Nothing cares what happens: what happens, happens, and that’s that. For nine billion years this goes on.

After the nine billion years, on one glomeration that orbits another, larger glomeration that is one of incomprehensibly many such larger glomerations in one incomprehensibly super-glomeration that is one of an incomprehensibly large number of such super-glomerations, some small glomerations suddenly do something different. The camera doesn’t catch what they do, but they begin to combine in new, complex ways, and within a billion years these new agglomerations engage in processes totally unlike any previously seen anywhere in the universe: beginning as a small, extremely complex cluster of glomeration, each increases in size and complexity until some part of the complexity breaks down for any of a number of reasons, at which point the component glomerations return to simpler structures. That is, life appears: organisms begin life and die.

Before long some of these organisms consume other organisms, breaking them down into components that enable the consuming organisms to increase in complexity, and as time goes on, some consumers arise that not only grow more complex by consuming other organisms, they are able to maintain their current complexity only by consuming others. For billions of years organisms maintain their complexity by consuming—eating—others. Those that are successful in avoiding being eaten while eating others become more complex and numerous, having added such characteristics as the habit of reproducing themselves, the practice of transmitting abstract ideas like food and danger from one to another, and the ability to hide from predators. Those unable to avoid being eaten or killed for other reasons disappear.

For the first three billion years in which there is life on earth, the rule is simple: the stronger kill and often eat the weaker. But at some point—again, this event happens off camera—some members of this species—some humans—develop a unique means of self-preservation by inventing what they call morality and getting at least some of the strong to believe that even though they are able to kill the weak and would benefit from doing so, it is wrong for them to do so. Then to the degree the idea catches on, weaker humans are able to survive in human society by wielding morality the same way skunks, weaker as they are than the bobcat, can walk fearlessly through bobcat territory once bobcats understand the power of the stink gland.

In time, as human life depends less on physical labor, the idea of morality enables physically weak people to contribute to not only their own welfare but also to the welfare of humans stronger than they. And so it is that the idea of right and wrong, and the disregard of the might-makes-right ethos that had governed the entire history of life in the universe to that point, a survival strategy differing from those of other species only in that it applies exclusively to relationships between humans, makes it possible for humans to dominate the entire planet.

But the might-makes-right ethos never entirely disappears, and more powerful humans are still able to engage in zero-sum relationships with each other: wars to the death, enslavement of losers in wars, taxation of losers of elections, and pollution and government debt passed on to future generations. Wars and pollution eventually raise the planet’s level of toxicity to the point that the humans then living, who are also saddled with the debts incurred by the previous generations, which have also depleted the planet’s natural resources, do not have the wherewithal to return the planet to human habitability. Humans die off, beginning with the weak, but as the accumulated poisons destroy their genes, the stronger first mutate into a transitional species, which itself soon becomes unviable and dies off.

After the death of the last humans and their domesticated animals, all memory of them disappears, and, no other species having developed morality, the earlier zero-sum, might-makes-right ethos alone rules the planet for the next untold billions of years until its sun becomes a supernova and consumes it, ending all life. After billions or trillions or quadrillions of years—it’s hard to tell—the gravitational attraction of the galaxies overcomes the momentum of the initial explosion and they begin to come together. Eventually all particles in the universe converge on one spot, and the movie ends leaving the viewer wondering if the entire process will be repeated.

So we have a universe unaware of its own existence, no aspect of which is aware of its own existence, with the exception of a few complex agglomerations of otherwise insentient matter whose history spans an imperceptible fraction of that of the otherwise dead universe. These organisms die off to the regret of no one, and death reigns until all matter is completely destroyed. Maybe.

The second movie, unlike the first, has a protagonist, but he never comes on camera. In fact, though the viewer knows that he exists, the story line consists of what happens to the characters as they try to decide whether or not he does and act out that decision.

God, the protagonist, creates the universe because he is by nature community and he wants to enjoy the company of beings unlike himself in that they are not God, but like him in being good, generous, and loving. However, he also desires to show himself to be forgiving and self-sacrificial, and this provides the basis for the conflict: he creates an incomprehensibly wide variety of beings, the weaker with mass and volume, the more powerful without, but these creatures, fully aware that he is good and that rebellion against him is inexcusably evil, rebel against him.

This rebellion becomes the central point of the story, as the creatures do everything they can to avoid the death that is the creator’s recompense for rebels, while refusing his offer to forgive those who repent of their rebellion. The guiding principle of the societies built by the rebels is that might makes right. On a personal level this plays out in murder and other forms of assault, theft and vandalism, adultery and fraud, and perjury and slander. On a larger level it is seen in war, slavery, taxation, eminent domain, and other forms of oppression.

The story’s turning point is where God himself intervenes by sending the being he loves most, his son (yes, you read that right), to show his goodness, generosity, love, forgiveness, and willingness to sacrifice himself by living among the species he created in his own image and allowing those people to kill his son. He then makes his son come alive, and promises to forgive the unforgivable and give eternal life to those who make his son their master.

The son’s slaves begin as a small community, but they eventually conquer the world through deeds of love and mercy. Some of them are killed for their obedience to the son, some disobey the son in horrible ways, not everyone joins them, and sometimes whole areas that were in at least some semblance of submission to the son turn away from him, but eventually the whole earth in some sense acknowledges the mastery of the Son and so is characterized by justice and peace.

Later God gathers his son’s slaves together and graciously allows them, undeserving as they are, to live with him forever in a new, resplendent universe, and to give those who have rejected his son the eternal punishment they deserve.

So we have two stories that could not be more different. One begins with lifeless disorder, proceeds into order and eventually life in which might almost without exception makes right, swallows that life up in death, and ends when the lifeless order again descends into nothingness. The other begins with life, passes through a brief period in which death first thrives and then is conquered, and ends with a look forward to eternal life.

I know which one I would like to see. How about you?

Is Libertarianism a Christian Political Philosophy? A Response to Kenneth Gary Talbot

Is libertarianism (or anarchy, or whatever it is you want to call what I am promoting in the short term) a Christian political philosophy?

No, it is not.

Nothing—whether a model for society or a birthday cake—that does not have Jesus Christ at its center is Christian. Only what consciously glorifies Jesus as Son of God, ruler of the world, and giver of life is Christian. When I support “anarchy,” it is only as a strategy for the short term: my long-term goal is theocracy, by which I mean that Jesus will visibly rule the world according to biblical law for centuries—the millennium—before the consummation of all things at the second coming. I believe that during the millennium men will be ruled by God’s Word and law in their hearts, from the individual to the societal level, not from the top down by a putative omniscient, omnipotent state. My advocacy for anarchy and against statism is aimed at Christians who act as though they believe that God’s Kingdom can be brought about by top-down behavior modification by today’s secular powers rather than the heart-first transformation described in Romans 12:1–2.

So I’m not sure why Kenneth Gary Talbot bothered to post his article Libertarianism vs. Theocracy. Isn’t the question of whether libertarianism is a Christian political philosophy a no brainer? After all, many if not most Christians who sympathize with libertarianism have come to do so through the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and other atheists; just as no salt spring can give fresh water, atheist economists and social theorists cannot produce a Christian view of society.

Or is the question irrelevant after all? If liberals, conservatives, and libertarian anarchists are all human, we all share the desire to be as God, determining good and evil for ourselves independent of God’s will. As a sinful human, don’t I think my sins look horrible on others but OK on myself? Perhaps I need to be reminded that I can condone rebellion against God as easily as can my conservative and liberal brethren. So yes, the short answer is a no brainer, but the question is worth asking because I can easily forget that answer.

So let’s look at the question. Talbot seems to be asking it because he objects to secular libertarian sexual ethics.

Humanistic libertarianism … warps its own position too commonly by replacing the power of the state with the power of the individual to be lawless sexually; homosexual freedom has become basic to all too many libertarians.

We theonomic postmillennialists who presently identify ourselves with libertarianism do indeed need to deal with the conflict between the sexual ethics of God’s rule and libertarianism’s lack of aggression against sexual promiscuity.

The question is theological, not economic, sociological, or even political: how will sexual misconduct be dealt with in the millennium, and how do we get there from here? When Christ rules visibly through his people, what will be the legal status of prostitutes, others who engage in heterosexual activity outside of marriage, adulterers, and active homosexuals? Will Christians continue evangelizing them—which includes loving them, serving them, and calling them to leave their lives of sin—as we do gossips and alcoholics? Or is the truth that we have only been “loving such people as fellow sinners” for now because we’re not allowed to kill them, but once our grandchildren acquire sufficient political power, they will execute them? Or is it OK to promise not to use the sword on them and to woo them with the quality of our own lives?

I would suggest the latter, and I see an example of just that taking place in our own time. As I write, the “affordable health care” act is proving to be an embarrassment to all but its most ideological supporters: many who supported it or took a “wait and see” attitude are being unpleasantly surprised by their health insurance costs becoming unaffordable. Meantime Christian health-share organizations like Samaritan Ministries and Christian Care  are seeing membership growth beyond anything they had anticipated. These two groups require their members to be members in good standing of Bible-preaching churches; an official of Samaritan Ministries told me in personal correspondence that it is the Christian character of SM members and even more importantly the element of prayer that makes SM work. In his view others might start organizations with similar structures—SM would be happy to help them do so—but they will be less effective.

What is now happening in health care could be expanded to protection of property, education, transportation, and every other aspect of daily life: Christians “building better mousetraps,” some of which benefit only Christian members, others open to the public, some even to known sexual deviants. I see no reason why those institutions open only to church members in good standing could not be a cut above those open to nonbelievers by virtue of the blessing of God on his covenant with his people.

If we will not be commanded in the millennium to execute sexual deviants—and I think this possibility is worth a serious look—I see nothing that would prevent sexual deviants from starting their own health-share and other organizations. It would then be up to us to build the better organizations that deviants would be willing to give up their deviance to join. Their ability to come to Christ and so qualify to join would be up to God, but I would expect him to be able to work through us better if we were offering to serve them than if we were threatening to kill them.

The only alternative I see is to acknowledge publicly that God hates fags and adulterers implacably, and the proper way to “evangelize” them is to let them know that if we ever gain political power, we will use the omniscient, omnipotent surveillance-police state to pursue them to the ends of the earth and kill them. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, but even if top-down, command-and-control, might-makes-right, end-justifies-the-means government hadn’t proven itself much worse than any social evil it supposedly exists to oppose, it seems to me I’ve got enough of my own sins to deal with that I don’t have time to hound others to death for theirs.

The Christmas Truce: What a Joke!

You know the story of the Christmas truce: on Christmas Eve, 1914, German troops started celebrating Christmas. The British joined in, eventually the trenches emptied, and for more than twenty-four hours nationality took second place to shared humanity. Eventually, however, "sanity" was restored, and the boys went back to shooting at each other.

A sympathetic account of the incident is here.

The story of the Christmas truce is about as heart wrenching as it gets. Trenches on both sides were full of men who had been conscripted -- i.e., they were slaves -- on the basis of lies: not only "you'll be home by Christmas" but "the war to end all wars" and "our nation is in mortal danger." It was the father of lies, not God, that had those men in those trenches.

Further, commanding officers on both sides were under orders to shoot "deserters" -- anyone who remained in the trenches when orders were given to attack. I don't know about you, but I'm guessing that when those guys got out of the trenches, they were shooting to protect their lives -- Mom, apple pie, and country were far behind just staying alive -- and remembering the Christmas truce as they shot, hoping that the guys shooting at them felt the same way.

"Shoot first and ask questions later" is the modus operandi of any military power that thinks it can get away with it. If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, there is no clearer symptom than the tendency of stay-at-home warmongers to send other people's kids off to war instead of working things out diplomatically.

The author of the article linked to above doesn't state the obvious conclusion to the first part of the article: Government destroyed the peace of Christmas. The war went on for almost four more years, and the horrific number of deaths he mentions mostly took place after the Christmas truce.

From President Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury:

A hodgepodge of cultural and religious values provides no basis for law – except the raw power of the pre-Christian past.

All Americans have a huge stake in Christianity. Whether or not we are individually believers in Christ, we are beneficiaries of the moral doctrine that has curbed power and protected the weak. Power is the horse ridden by evil. In the 20th century the horse was ridden hard, and the 21st century shows an increase in pace. Millions of people were exterminated in the 20th century by National Socialists in Germany and by Soviet and Chinese communists simply because they were members of a race or class that had been demonized by intellectuals and political authority [Emphasis mine - HW]. In the beginning years of the 21st century hundreds of thousands of Muslims in seven countries have already been murdered and millions displaced, because their religion does not submit to Washington’s hegemony.

Power that is secularized and cut free of civilizing traditions is not limited by moral and religious scruples. V.I. Lenin made this clear when he defined the meaning of his dictatorship as “unlimited power, resting directly on force, not limited by anything.” Washington’s drive for hegemony over US citizens and the rest of the world is based entirely on the exercise of force and is resurrecting unaccountable power.

If we fly the flag of raw, unaccountable power in our sanctuaries, we can expect "the republic for which it stands" to obliterate our peacemaking efforts as the Brits and Germans made a mockery of the Christmas truce.

Government: The End of Basic Human Decency

Would you consider me a good neighbor if I were to come into your house and tell you that you had 105 days to account for every dollar you had had anything to do with for the last year or I would break into your house in the middle of the night and haul you off to a cage?

Under what conditions would you want me asking you how much money you made last year and what you did with it?

Yet this is how government funds its activities every January first: forcing its agents into others’ private lives the way no good neighbor would think of doing, demanding answers that will be checked by April 15.

What good could government possibly do that would make up for this breach of human decency? And if the end could never justify this means, what would?

How does treating one’s neighbor this way differ from enslaving him? How much of my tangible assets and my privacy and my freedom do I have to lose before I am a slave? If someone else decides where the line is, am I not thereby already his slave?

Now we have our tax money—money the government extorts from us after asking us questions no decent person would ask us—going to have our rulers watch absolutely everything we do. As one commenter put it, if this is what they tell us they’re doing, what are they doing that they’re not telling us about? How long before we are being watched in the shower?

I have a hard enough time understanding how people who resent the idea that a supreme being would watch everything they do would be OK with fellow mortals doing the same thing. I find it incomprehensible that Christians would support these violations of human decency in the name of him who commands us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Of Policemen and Court Stenographers

Take a quick look at these articles from my local newspaper. Do you notice anything interesting about them?

http://www.thereporteronline.com/general-news/20131209/lansdale-police-sergeant-injured-saturday-during-assault-after-vehicle-stop

http://www.thereporteronline.com/general-news/20131210/father-of-two-brothers-charged-over-the-weekend-in-connection-with-assault-of-lansdale-police-officer-is-arrested

I do.

In the first article I count sixteen instances where either the police or the affidavit they filed are cited, and eighteen in the second article. I don’t see one instance in either article where the defendants or other eyewitnesses are given an opportunity to present their side of the story. Why is this?

Do the defendants have any right to be heard? I hear you say no, a human being was beaten. He’s in the hospital and unable to work. There is no doubt who beat him. So who cares what the defendants have to say? This reminds me of a famous trial from long ago:

The high priest tore his clothes. "Why do we need any more witnesses?" he asked.  "You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?" They all condemned him as worthy of death. (Mark 14:63-64)

I’m not equating a bunch of inebriates with the sinless Son of God, but isn’t there a biblical principle being violated here when only one side of the story is presented?

The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him. (Prov 18:17)

Though nowhere stated in so many words in Scripture, one can hardly argue with the stated custom of the Romans:

It is not the custom of the Romans to hand over any man before the accused meets his accusers face to face and has an opportunity to make his defense against the charges. (Acts 25:16)

So why is there no interest shown in the other side of the story in Lansdale’s newspaper of record?

OK, you say, but this is a newspaper article, not a court of law.

To which I reply, how many people will bother to find out how the defendants respond in the court trial? How much of their testimony will The Reporter include in its account? If the paper gives thirty-four times as much weight to the policemen’s testimony that it gives to the defendants’, will the defendants have been given a fair trial in the court of public opinion? If not, does it matter?

I heard about this assault a few minutes after a Christian brother told me that on Sunday morning as he was driving to a worship service he was detained by a policeman, who ran his paperwork through the system and then told him he needed to slow down.

Let’s take a look at this all-too-common situation. He was traveling on an almost empty road, one recently opened and so well paved, which could easily and safely accommodate a lone car at 70 mph. My miscreant brother was doing something in the 50s, inconveniencing absolutely no one, putting absolutely no one in danger, and so causing no one any harm.

Yet he was stopped and detained by a policeman. While he was allowed to continue having lost only his time, had he not been properly obsequious, he would have been given a ticket.

Put another way, a man whose salary is extracted from taxes and who, as a member of a labor union, can go on strike and prevent anyone from providing what true service he does provide for less payment (and does so at all times by virtue of taxing money from people who might otherwise use that money to buy the services of another), has the discretionary power (and the approval of society) to extort money from people who have not endangered or even inconvenienced, let alone injured, anyone.

You say the government owns the roads and so can dictate the terms under which people use them. To which I reply that that “ownership” is a function of taxation, eminent domain, and armed enforcement, which are what they are: violations of the property rights of the less powerful by the more powerful. If you say that the more of these things a society has the better off it is, then we have no basis for conversation: your side is winning, and I hope you enjoy your victory. But if God agrees with you, I would say heaven will be better than hell only because it lacks flames that do not consume: at least “our God is a consuming fire.”

Let’s take the notion of broad discretionary police power over those who have harmed no one to the incident at the bar, even the official version of which shows the dangerous level of injustice our society is willing to tolerate.

In act one, Richard Noboa’s car “nearly hit a Lansdale police car” as he backed out of the bar’s parking lot; had the police car belonged instead to a Mundane, the driver would probably have considered Noboa a jerk and left it at that. But being policemen, the occupants of the car—I find it strange, though consistent with propaganda practice, that they are never named, though the “perps” are—took it upon themselves to chase down the driver and detain him. That a man with glassy eyes and a down zipper would have been driving with less than his full skill set is true, but it is also statistically probable that he would have made it home without causing an accident.

In act two, the policemen conduct a sobriety test, which Noboa fails. Having established that Noboa was in no shape to drive, the police could have gone to the bar and urged members of his family to drive him home. One of the policemen could have offered to drive the car himself. Or they could have confiscated the car keys and either given them to someone who could pass the sobriety test or taken them to the police station five blocks away and promised to give them back to Noboa when he was sober. These are but three of the options a Mundane could have exercised.

Instead, in act three, they “attempted to place Richard Noboa inside the vehicle.” Did they do so calmly and gently? Or, knowing they could do so with impunity, did they “give the goddamn motherfucking spic what he has coming to him”? I don’t know. But is there no reason to ask if the beating were a reasonable, if not excusable, response to the treatment Richard Noboa was undergoing? Unfortunately, our intrepid reporter Michael Goldberg doesn’t tell us the “perps’” side of the story, so unless we hunt them down, we are left to conclude that it doesn’t matter what they were thinking—they beat up a police officer.

Again, tax-fed labor union members in uniform abduct a man who has to that point not harmed anyone, presumably to begin a process that will cost that man thousands of dollars and time in jail. There is good reason to at least ask whether they were treating the man decently at the time. The course of action they were taking, however prescribed by law it may be, was more violent than others that were available to them (and that would have been the only options available to Mundanes).

Add to this the editorial slant of The Reporter, which always favors big government: the police are part of the government, and what they say is not to be questioned. We need them today, so the saying goes, to protect us from the likes of Richard Noboa; we need to reinforce their legitimacy in cases like this because they will need popular support when they go after gun owners, hemp growers, Bible thumpers, or whoever the next bogeyman is.

And their version of reality is not to be questioned. This doesn’t concern you?

It may well be that the men who beat the policeman attacked without provocation. Certainly the Noboa family gives little evidence of being good neighbors. If so, they deserve to make restitution for his injuries, his medical care, and his time off work. But don’t bet that that will be their punishment: expect rather that the taxpayers will be forced to pay to incarcerate the assailants as well as to recondition the policeman. That is, the best we can expect from the current “justice” system is injustice. More important, though, is the likelihood that innocent people have been, are currently, and in the future will be railroaded into similar “convictions,” first in the court of public opinion and later in the “real courts.” (Can you say, “Jim Crow”?)

Note that we already have tax-paid agents—that is, agents whom we have no option to not pay—whose job it is to arrest people whose actions have harmed no one: not only those who drive illegally but those who grow certain plants (including otherwise legal plants), or produce or trade or consume certain substances (again including otherwise legal substances), or visit certain voluntarily produced Web sites. If “what’s yours is yours” does not operate in those cases, what logic or precedent stops those agents from arresting people who own, read, or teach from the Bible?

Once such people are arrested, the “journalists” of the mainstream media will dutifully parrot what the police tell them, rarely if ever allowing the accused to defend themselves. Then the court system will sentence them to unbiblical punishments. And when, dear brother in Christ, it comes to be your turn, your neighbors will read the paper’s one-sided account, nod in agreement, and turn to the sports page.

The famous anti-Christian skeptic H. L. Mencken wrote, “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”

I have nothing good to say about a man who would drive drunk. But I find the system supposedly designed to protect us from such as him to be much more dangerous in the long term.