This is going on as we speak, they have been doing it since Lee wrote the first article. A lot of people are having second thoughts, but there’s a lot of gas buried under lake Decatur already.
Category: Articles
REPRINT My Newswithviews Column, Jan. 25 (‘The Ultimate Political Steel Cage Match’)
From January 25, 2018
It wouldn’t surprise me to find others writing up this scenario: it just naturally springs to mind.
Of course, this is just a way-out satire that could never, ever happen in real life…
We keep saying that, and keep finding out we’re wrong.
Our Murdered Cities and the Freedom-Eaters REPRINT
From May 1, 2012
“Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana. Let me say it again. Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana, Gary, Indiana. That’s the town that ‘knew me when’…”
Most of us have heard that song. It’s from “The Music Man.” It’s a famous song, and it made the city famous. How many American cities are the subjects of a famous song?
But Gary, Indiana, for all practical purposes, is no more.
There are still some 80,000 people living there, according to the 2010 census—a decrease of almost 17% from the 2000 census. In 1960 Gary had a population of over 178,000; so today’s population figure represents a decrease of about 55%.
To get a better feel for what those numbers mean, you have to see the pictures. You can take an online tour of Gary, Indiana, on the “Forbidden Places” website.
Yes, the pictures tell the story. Schools, hospitals, the Methodist Church; post offices, factories, office buildings, and the Jackson Five Theater—all abandoned, all quietly rotting away. Broken windows, floors covered with debris, and peeling ceilings. Tons and tons of equipment, furniture, and accessories: desks, hospital beds, wheelchairs, file cabinets, electrical fixtures. And outside, mile after mile of empty streets—no cars, no pedestrians. When 80,000 people inhabit a city that once, and not so long ago, housed 178,000, it leaves a lot of unused space. One is reminded of Isaiah’s prophetic vision of the ruins of Babylon:
“It shall never be inhabited… But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.” (Isaiah 13:20-21)
Continue Reading “Our Murdered Cities and the Freedom-Eaters REPRINT”
So Now I’m ‘Dangerous’? REPRINT
From August 11, 2016
A Newswithviews.com reader has just informed me that my NWV column this week, on “College–the Brain Masher,” has been tagged by Google with an “ALL RED Dangerous Web Page Warning.” ( http://newswithviews.com/Duigon/lee367.htm ) I don’t see that when I go to the NWV page, so I’d be interested to know whether any of you have seen it. But certainly I have no reason not to believe the reader.
So… I said America’s university system needs to be shrunk, not expanded, and that our colleges indoctrinate their students with left-wing piffle and addle their brains–and that’s supposed to be dangerous? Hey, I went to college and it threw me off the track for more than thirty years: and it wasn’t anywhere near as awful, back then.
It seems I have become a menace to society. I guess Joe Collidge is right about me. I suppose I ought to be proud of having earned this distinction; but, in fact, it doesn’t give me all that nice a feeling. All I’m doing is calling it like I see it. That’s dangerous?
Oh, well, at least I’m in good company.
No, Google, it’s not this unimportant blogger who’s dangerous. It’s our college system that is dangerous. But I suppose you’ll want to live in the world these confused young people make, when it’s their turn to take over from the grownups: very probably because you and your cohorts expect to rule that world.
I would rather not see that happen.
Rushdoony on ‘Invisible Rulers’
When R.J. Rushdoony wrote this essay, thirty years ago or so, the Western intellectual mind (pardon the oxymoron) had not yet degenerated to “your truth, my truth, no truth.” But as he so often did, he saw exactly where it was heading and could tell you exactly where it came from.
https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/invisible-rulers
There’s a lot of meat to this essay, but stick with it–because it tells us how we got here and points us back to God.
Postmodern poop that rests on such philosophical gems as “I is reality” has no future.
What’s Missing from the Easter Message? REPRINT
From April 5, 2012
The Episcopal Church has sent me a copy of the annual Easter Message from Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori. It’s 383 words long, in eight paragraphs.
Not once in this message has the Presiding Bishop seen fit to mention the name of Jesus Christ.
Oh, she drops hints that Easter maybe sort of, kind of, have something to do with Jesus. In the next-to-last paragraph she says, “I would encourage you to look at where you are finding new life and resurrection, where life abundant and love incarnate are springing up in your lives and the lives of your communities.” It is just conceivable that this could be a roundabout approach to Jesus—albeit an approach that never quite gets there. And she concludes, “Give thanks for Easter. Give thanks for Resurrection. Give thanks for the presence of God incarnate in our midst.” God makes it into the very last line of the message.”
Continue Reading “What’s Missing from the Easter Message? REPRINT”
You Don’t Believe In Adam and Eve?
By Lee Duigon
January 12, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
Christian ‘intellectuals’ turn against the Bible
St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, “[L]et God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:4). In other words, folks, who are you going to believe—God, or a human being infected with Original Sin, possessing incomplete and only partly accurate information filtered through his personal prejudices, and subject to every temptation in the world?
Thanks to a heads-up from General T.C. Pinckney’s Baptist Banner, we have heard of a number of “Christian intellectuals”—why is it that every time you hear the word “intellectual,” you know the next thing you’re going to hear will be something really stupid?—who have decided that “science”—another badly abused word—is right, and Evolution is the truth, and that the Bible is hopelessly, totally wrong about the origin of the human race.
As Calvin College theology professor John Schneider put it, before the college sacked him, there never was an Adam, no Eve, no Garden of Eden, no serpent, and no Fall of man. “Evolution,” he told National Public Radio, invoking the magic word, “makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost.”
Don’t let the door hit you in the can on your way out, professor.
There are, of course, just a few little bitty things that Evolution does not make clear at all.
*How does non-living material suddenly start living in the first place? This has never been observed in nature, and although scientists have tried innumerable times to make it happen in the laboratory, all of those attempts have failed.
*If evolution is a force or a pattern permeating all of nature, why do so many forms of life—most of them, if you count bacteria—never seem to evolve at all? Horseshoe crabs, ferns, cockroaches, etc., have all had, supposedly, jillions of years to evolve into intellectuals, and yet stubbornly persist in being horseshoe crabs, ferns, and cockroaches. (And please, no nasty cracks about intellectuals evolving into cockroaches…)
*As, say, an animal’s forelimb gradually “evolves” into a flipper, at what point does it become useless as either a foreleg or a flipper? Wouldn’t such “halfway-there” animals be gravely handicapped? And if the change happens all at once, how does the mother animal with legs raise a bunch of baby animals with flippers? And where do they find mates so they can reproduce? Really, the whole thing is just too silly for words.
Conspiracy Theories and Fantasies
I recently published a column, “Have They Skinned the Rattlesnake?” (you can see it on Lee’s Twitter), in which I posed rhetorical questions. My purpose was to move readers to think about the sorry state of our country and the world–not to solicit information from my readers.
Somehow the point of the column slipped past a lot of people, and I was snowed under with emails from readers eager to provide me with the reasons why America is going to the dogs. One and all, they trotted out conspiracy theories.
Far be it from me to deny that conspiracies exist. They always have, they always will. But the ones offered by my readers are truly grand conspiracies: top-secret plots that everybody on the Internet seems to know about, involving tiny cabals of all-powerful, all-knowing puppet-masters who micro-manage everything that happens in the world. All of our history, our politics, our economics–it’s all an illusion created by the Illuminati, or the “bankers,” or the Trilateral Commission, or the Masons, or even reptiloid space aliens who wear latex masks to make us think they’re human. The ranks of the all-powerful Lizard People include Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush, and Boxcar Willie. If you flip a coin and it comes up heads, some conspiracy made it do that; if it comes up tails, the same conspiracy arranged for that. Let me add that a disproportionate amount of this conspiracy theorizing is virulently anti-Semitic.
The great thing about all this stuff is that none of it can be proved. You have to take the conspiracy theorist’s word for it all, because somehow he has become privy to top-secret information that the world’s most powerful plotters and schemers have successfully hidden from everyone except him and his like-minded friends. With the conspiracy in total control of all the information, it will always be impossible to prove the case. And prove it to whom? The conspiracy controls the courts, the media, the legal profession, and also rigs wrestling matches when it’s not busy faking moon landings. (A few believe that pro wrestling alone is immune to the baleful influences of the conspiracy.)
I am a fantasy writer, and I know fantasy when I see it. And a lot of this stuff is 100% pure fantasy.
Meanwhile, I am soooo sorry that I ever wrote that column!
From March 28,2012
How to Write a Fantasy Novel
In reclaiming cultural ground for Christ’s Kingdom, even small gains count. Besides, one never knows what even the smallest victories might lead to.
Fantasy literature has long been popular, especially among young readers, twelve years old and up. When J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series made publishing history, it gave birth to a boom in fantasy. Here, at last, was something that young people really wanted to read!
But an examination of the shelves in any bookstore will show that fantasy, for all its popularity, has a major downside for Christian readers. The market is dominated by unwholesome content—books glamorizing witchcraft, vampirism, zombies, etc.
C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien have long held the fort for Christianity in the realm of fantasy. It’s time they received some reinforcements.
Religion For Atheists? REPRINT
As civilization corrodes before our very eyes, even intellectuals have begun to say, “Uh-oh…”
Not many intellectuals, I grant you: most of them are out there rejoicing that “the Left has won the Culture War,” and made the world safe for abortion, sodomy, euthanasia, gender-bending, and out-of-wedlock births and fatherless homes. This is going to be the way it is for humanity from now on, they believe, and they are tickled pink.
But in a recent Wall Street Journal article, written to herald the publication of his new book, Religion for Atheists, Euro-intellectual Alain de Botton seems to be getting cold feet. Maybe, he suggests, the secularization of society has gone too far. In nailing down our freedom to fornicate without restriction, maybe we’ve thrown out some things we should have kept.