Do you fluff your pillow before you lie down? This dachshund does. In fact, he makes sure everything is 100% exactly right before he curls up to go to sleep.
How did dogs learn how to do this? There are no pillows in a state of nature. Adapting so well to a human-centered environment suggests a high level of intelligence.
I wonder if Adam and Eve had pets.
Benito Mussolini–“the patron saint of 20th century humanism,” according to Rushdoony
Fascism was defeated in World War II, but it’s alive and kicking today. In fact, said R.J. Rushdoony, “Fascism is socialism for the hypocrites”–people who want to do socialism, but call it freedom.
This essay, The Theology of Fascism, was published in 2006, five years after the author’s death.
https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/the-theology-of-fascism
Fascism, said Rushdoony, is “everywhere condemned, but everywhere imitated.” And, more trenchantly, “A Christian world without Christ is an impossibility.” So much for modern atheists’ claim that you can be “good without God.” Only by living off the capital of Christianity without acknowledging its source.
It’s an eye-opening essay, and ought to give you plenty to think over.
Yesterday I stumbled upon a bunch of atheist websites that mock Christians for “believing snakes can talk.” See, if we believe the Bible is true, then we must believe that Adam and Eve, in the Garden, had conversations with a serpent.
Oooooh–they’ve got us there! If we were Smart, we’d believe in Progress and World Government and Education. Stuff like that.
There were some timorous attempts to defend the Bible narrative as “a metaphor.” Like, of course it didn’t really happen as described, this was just how ancient people thought and we don’t think that way anymore because we’re so Smart, blah-blah.
I don’t think it’s a metaphor at all.
Satan, a spirit, wished to talk to Eve and lure her into disobedience to God. He chose to use a serpent as his vessel. Why not? You can’t do it, I can’t do it; but we’re not spirits. Satan has no physical body of his own. He has to use a body that’s already there.
There are things spoken of in the Bible that are far beyond our experience and understanding. The same fleshly beings that produced Let’s Make a Deal are never going to be hip to all that happens in the Bible. Anyone who tells you that he understands it all is just gassing you.
Fear the serpent if it speaks to you: ’cause it ain’t Charlie the Garter Snake talking, and you’d better not listen.
Nothing wrong with this sign, really–except for its location at the door of one of our local churches. (The actual sign says “Register For The Fall,” but I couldn’t find exactly the right image.)
I thought we all got registered for The Fall when Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden and got kicked out.
Shouldn’t we be signing up for The Redemption instead?
That fragmentary skeleton up there is all that remains of a creature which its discoverer says is the oldest known bird–so old, that birds couldn’t possibly have evolved from dinosaurs. This makes him a bad guy and his science “problematic.”
Mr. Nature here, on this extremely humid Fourth of July, along with the “Triassic bird,” Protoavis. Dr. Sankar Chatterjee was a good guy when he was just digging up dinosaurs and thecodonts in the Southwest: but if Protoavis really is a bird, like he says it is, and if it really lived alongside early dinosaurs in the Triassic Period, like he says it did, then a whole lot of pet scientific paradigms and just-so stories have to go down the drain–and scientists hate it when that happens.
As some of you know, I’m a radical agnostic about the age of the earth. Can’t help it: the Bible doesn’t say how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden before they sinned and got expelled, and were made subject to mortality. I suspect it was a very long time indeed.
But one thing’s sure: Protoavis has no business turning up in the Triassic fossil record, it’s unforgivably rude, and Dr. Chatterjee ought to be ashamed of himself. Why, he’ll be doing Climbit Change Denial next!
That funny little sound you hear in the background is Protoavis snickering.
Ben Shapiro thinks he has discovered “the single most illiterate piece ever written on the Biblical story of Adam and Eve,” (https://www.dailywire.com/news/26947/female-rabbi-publishes-single-stupidest-piece-ben-shapiro) and we must admit it would be hard to beat. “Its central thesis is that God somehow sexually harassed Eve, and that Eve is ‘the first case of #MeToo’.”
Quick, the barf bag!
How could there be any “too” when she was the first and only woman in the world?
This pure crapola has been written by some “female rabbi” who is soon to have a book out on “Walking the Way of the Divine Feminine.” As Shapiro himself admits, “Words fail.”
It’s hard enough to imagine this person as any kind of rabbi, but equally hard to imagine her congregation. She calls God “this man-made figurehead of the patriarchy [editor’s note: Oh, do please shut up!]…He is a fiction.” Really, what kind of congregation would sit through bilge like that? Had they nothing to throw at her?
She concludes, “Eve, our blessed mother, is saying ‘#MeToo’,” hashtag and all. With the hashtag, no less. Do any of you wonder why I say “#MeToo” is going to burn itself out?
Ben, Ben, faithful Orthodox Jewish brother, we feel your pain. We Christians are lumbered with the same profoundly grotesque feminist theology as are some hopefully small corners of Judaism. See my series of articles about paganism and goddess worship in the churches.
Blasphemy is a sin, and a serious sin at that. Being conformed to the inane and fleeting fashions of this world comes at a price: and there’s gonna be some howling and gnashing of teeth when it’s time to pay.
Former TV commentator Bill O’Reilly, bedeviled by assorted sexual harassment charges, now blames God for his problems.
So he says, “You know, am I mad at God? Yeah, I’m mad at him. I wish I had more protection.” (http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/bill-o-reilly-blames-god-sexual-harassment-allegations-article-1.3584246)
Adam could’ve told him that wouldn’t work. “Well, gee, Lord! The woman that you gave me, she gave me the forbidden fruit, and I did eat.” No dice, Adam: you’re out of the Garden of Eden.
O’Reilly has paid out $32 million to settle accusations made against him by several women, his co-workers at Fox News.
If we assume the charges aren’t true, we must also assume that a number of women conspired to tell these whopping lies about him so they could get their hands on his money. There aren’t many people who believe that. But even if that were so, then the blame ought to fall on the false accusers, not on God: who, having endowed us with free will, made it possible for us to disobey His commandments. Would O’Reilly rather God had created us without free will?
False accusations of this or that are an everyday tool of politics in our glorious 21st century. Is that God’s fault? Or ours? And He has, after all, given us a Savior who can take away our sins–without taking away our free will.
Bill O’Reilly isn’t the first to blame God for his problems, and he won’t be the last.
The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat… Genesis 3:12
“Y’see, Lord,” said Adam, “it’s really your fault that we broke your commandment and ate the forbidden fruit. I only did it because the woman that you gave me, she told me to do it! If you hadn’t put this woman in the garden with me–well, not this particular woman!–I never would’ve disobeyed you.” (Eve, at least, didn’t blame God as Adam did. She just blamed the Serpent.)
We hear this argument a lot, especially from liberal Christians who crave the secular world’s approval. We would think it strange if a car thief said, “All right, I’m a thief–so what? That’s how God made me! And Jesus loves me just the way I am! In fact, stealing cars isn’t even really a sin. It’s just the way I live my life. And I live a thief’s life because that’s my truth, that’s the life that God intended for me. So if I steal your car, don’t blame me, blame Him.”
We have not yet reached the stage of moral degeneration where we’ll accept this line of booshwa from a thief. But for every conceivable variety of sexual sin, it sells and a lot of us are buying.
I mean, really…
“Y’know what, Adam,” said the Lord, “I made a mistake! Yup, I see that now. Thank you for pointing out my error to me. It’s all my fault. Not yours, not Eve’s, not even the Serpent’s–gosh, I made a mess of things!”
But that’s not our theology–I hope.
See if you can follow this line of reasoning. I encounter it all the time.
“God does not exist, and the stories told in the Old Testament are not true.
“I hate God for all those terrible things he did in the Old Testament!”
Brilliant, isn’t it? I hate someone who doesn’t exist for doing things that never happened.
“God does not exist, and there never were any such people as Adam and Eve, and never any such place as the Garden of Eden–and I hate God for kicking Adam and Eve out of the Garden.”
What sleight of hand is this? And why do they always get away with it? Like the postmodern collidge prefessers who say, “There is no truth; there is only your truth and my truth and someone else’s truth. But if you don’t support ‘gay marriage,’ I’ll have you expelled from this university.” But why should we support sodomite “marriage,” or abortion, or amnesty for illegal aliens, or any other left-wing shibboleth if there is no truth? Left-wing causes are always treated as absolute truth by this crowd.
So God, who does not exist, was evil for blasting Sodom and Gomorrah, which never happened because the Bible is just a bunch of stories dreamed up by Jewish priests who wanted to fool people 2,500 years later… Welcome to the Alan Dershowitz school of theology.
People who think like this now control most of the institutions of our society. That’s why those institutions don’t work anymore.
O Lord Our God, remember that these things are done without our consent and against our will!
Here’s how Michelangelo painted it, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Successful fantasy author “Abner Doubleday” (not his real name) has, in the series of his novels that I’m reading–novels which he says are dedicated to the glory of God–committed almost every literary offense under the sun. And I’m only halfway through the second book.
But Abner is full of surprises, and yesterday he provoked me to cry out.
If any of you folks out there contemplates writing a fantasy novel, please be guided by these essays.
In addition to packing his novels chock-full of fantasy cliches, Abner has discovered, and indulged in, the vice of allowing the world of here and now to break in on the fantasy and control it.
See, he’s writing novels about the ancient world before the Flood, retelling the early chapters of the Book of Genesis as a comic book without pictures. The villainous evil bad guys (that’s how he’d say it) are supposed to be divine beings who rebelled against God and came to earth as false gods. They are devoid of redeeming features.
Abner has also made them modern, 21st century liberals, only stopping short of giving them names like Barbara Boxer or Barack Obama. But at every opportunity, these beings, these devils, yap about “hope and change” and “fundamental transformation” of the ancient world, do everything in their power to turn all human beings into welfare dependents, invent modern feminism and inflict it on the antediluvian world–I know it’s only a matter of time before he drags in the minimum wage.
As much as I detest liberalism, and loathe all its works, may I be fricaseed if I ever cram it into one of my novels. Our world’s political and social issues have no business cropping up in a fantasy world.
Why not?
Well, obviously, if you suddenly start writing about Climate Change or Income Inequality, the reader is going to remember that he’s not actually in a fantasy world but only reading a stupid book whose author is trying to lecture to him. Any reader with a modicum of self-respect will walk away from it.
But more importantly, the issues specific to our time, no matter how important they are right now, are only fleeting symptoms of the great disease–sin. The great problem is the Fall of Man, which has been with us from the beginning and has taken many forms. In my lifetime, for instance, it was communism in my younger days and Obamaism today.
It doesn’t matter what we call them. They are all aspects of the same thing.
By importing the Democrat Party agenda into the ancient world, Abner has trivialized the far greater issues raised by the Bible–issues which remain the same from Genesis through Revelation. Contemporary liberalism will pass away and be replaced by something else just as bad, and bad for the same reasons.
It all boils down to the same thing.
The Serpent told Eve, “Ye shall be as gods,” if only you’re smart enough to disobey God’s command not to eat of the forbidden fruit. And Eve believed him. And Adam believed Eve, and tried to blame the whole business on God Himself: “The woman that you gave me, Lord, she made me do it…” No wonder the pair of ’em got kicked out of Paradise.