Tag: cultural musings

Today’s Settled Science

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Scientific racism

Science says… Don’t let those inferior people reproduce!

What do phlogiston, the miasma theory, and eugenics all have in common?

Each, once upon a time, was Settled Science. And each is now considered poppycock.

“Phlogiston” was a substance which scientists in the 17th century thought was contained in combustible bodies and released during combustion. So when you burned a lump of coal, it lost phlogiston. This theory died out by the end of the 18th century.

Phlogiston, in fact, does not exist.

Miasma theory, over many centuries, stated that diseases were caused by “bad air,” or “miasma,” given off by rotting organic matter. By 1880 it had been demonstrated that diseases are caused by germs. Stinky air can’t hurt you unless there are germs floating around in it.

And eugenics! Eugenics claimed that all the troubles of the world were due to allowing inferior people to breed, and not getting enough breeding out of superior people. Boy, howdy, was this ever Settled Science! Everybody who mattered–scientists, heads of state, judges, philosophers, literary giants, all the smartest people in the world–believed in eugenics, and the unlimited progress of the human race via selective breeding. Well, at least not allowing “the feeble-minded,” criminals, or the poor to breed. Even here in America, a lot of defenseless individuals were sterilized, by court order, in the mistaken belief that eugenics was true. And anyone who dared question it, was pilloried, scorned, and denounced as an enemy of the people. As “anti-science,” if you like.

Unfortunately for eugenics, Heinrich Himmler and the rest of the Nazis gave it a really bad reputation when they tried to put its recommendations into rigorous practice: so after WWII it was kind of hard to find anyone who would admit he’d ever supported eugenics. But it was still floating around in school textbooks during the 1950s.

Did I mention that one of the cornerstones of eugenics was the insistent claim that certain races are intractably inferior–yeah, whole races–and ought to be kept from reproducing?

And so, we learn from history that today’s Settled Science is tomorrow’s poppycock. Just because a scientific doctrine lasts a long time doesn’t mean it lasts forever.

Thank God!

Aaaugh! Aaaugh! Aaaugh!

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Image result for man screaming

So you want to be a writer…

Today I really needed to finish polishing and typing a set of chapters of The Silver Trumpet, a task requiring a certain amount of concentration.

I had no sooner started when an enormous truck pulled up next door and some guys with real loud voices got out. Twenty feet (at most) from our door, they broke out the chain saws and the mulching machine and settled in for hours of fun, sawing and chipping a great big tree that had absolutely nothing wrong with it.

And of course the phone rang several times, and a bit of this, and a bit of that–everything, it seemed, except an oompah band jamming in my living room, and maybe an escaped black mamba or two.

I hope my work turned out okay.

Reality ‘4’ Dummies

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Here are a few basic principles of reality that are often ignored. They bear repeating. But be warned: you can’t embrace reality and still be a liberal.

1. Government has no money of its own. It only has what it can extract from us in taxes. All the money that comes out of government–stuff like food stamps, housing subsidies, state and federal aid to education–came in to the government through somebody’s paycheck. Yours, for instance.

2. If you can’t make a profit, you can’t do the business. The 2016 Democrat party platform calls for reining in those dadburned profits. How dare they make a profit? But the non-negotiable truth is that if a business cannot make a profit, it cannot exist. And don’t bother with the clever riposte, “Oh yeah?? What about the non-profits? Huh? How come they do just fine? Huh? Huh?” The non-profits survive because the government supports them–with your money.

3. No one can afford to pay anyone $15 an hour to pick up litter in the parking lot. Democrats–sorry to be picking on them, but they’re the ones who declare war on reality–want the minimum wage to be $15 an hour. If that ever happens, there will be no jobs, none at all, for young or unskilled labor.

4. Reality is real and it doesn’t matter what you think or say to the contrary. Try walking over an open manhole that you say isn’t really there, and see what happens. Really, this whole “social construct” business has gone more than far enough. Men are men and women are women no matter what you do to them surgically or pharmacologically: every cell of a man’s body will continue to have none but male chromosomes, and a woman’s cells will have only female chromosomes. That cannot be changed.

Libs like to call themselves “reality-based” because they believe in Evolution, whatever it is, and other Scientific Truths. Pathetic, isn’t it? But liberalism is an amusement that has a very high price tag for the rest of us, and it’s time we started refusing to pay.

 

‘He’s Not a Tame Lion’

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A reader chided me (on another site) yesterday to “leave the sermonizing out of it” and stick to “newsworthy” stuff. Stop talkin’ about God and just give us the nooze!

Well, here’s some news for you, sunshine: God really is God, this whole shebang belongs to Him, we are truly provoking Him to anger, and when He gets mad, watch out.

God is not an adjunct to the news. People think He’s only to be found inside a church, where you can go and visit Him once a week, as if He were a patient in a nursing home. No, not so. Actually, He’s everywhere.

So you can’t leave Him out of it, and civilization can’t just go about its business as if there were no God. Because there is.

In C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, the children from our world are admonished, again and again, that Aslan the Great Lion, Lord of all Narnia–and for Aslan read “Jesus Christ,” the Lion of the Tribe of Judah–cannot be anticipated, manipulated, controlled, outsmarted, or, of all things, taken for granted. “He’s not a tame lion!”

No, He is not a tame lion. He will not go when we wish Him to go, nor will He stay away when we wish Him to stay away. He is not our bellhop at Hotel Earth!

He is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, ruler and origin of all Creation; and if you think the news, if you think that what’s happening in this world that He created, sustains, and owns has nothing to do with Him–

Well, think again.

Oops… Your Phone Blew Up

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People use their cell phones for all sorts of things–taking pictures, watching movies, playing video games, pretending to be secret agents, and so on. Some folks just can’t live without their phones.

Except if you have a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone. Then it might blow up. ( http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/samsung-galaxy-note7-users-urged-turn-off-phones/story?id=41983208 )

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has urged people to “stop charging or using them” and, whatever you do, don’t bring one of these phones on board a plane with you! See, sometimes the battery overheats, and next thing you know, ka-boom. See the poor guy who left his Galaxy Note 7 in his SUV, and it torched his car.

Several hundred thousand of these units have been sold. The feds say 35 of them have gone bang-bang for no apparent reason. The Samsung Co. has initiated a “product exchange program” which lets you turn in your blammo for a phone that won’t blow up: this in advance of an anticipated recall. We ought to applaud Samsung for not trying to pretend there’s nothing wrong.

But what do I know? I don’t have a cell phone. Never had one. I have no desire to own one. It’s not like trying to get by without air conditioning, or a refrigerator.

Not to make too big a deal of it: but doesn’t it make you wonder whether anybody really needs some of these hot new trendy hi-tech baubles?

Christ **Is** the Answer

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Image result for images of christ entering jerusalem

It’s part of my job to track the daily news–not a nice part. Watching the bad guys cha-cha around the bases, Team Satan running up the score like nothing I’ve ever imagined in my life. You don’t need me to describe it for you. It’s bad out there.

This morning my regular Bible reading landed me, successively, in Job, Jeremiah, and Revelation. Whoa! Someone throw me a lasso, that’s my spirit running away!

Oh, but there’s an answer to all this! Yes, there is. Matthew hinted at it, citing Isaiah: “The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.” (Matthew 4:16) And Isaiah 9:6-7 says it plainly enough for anyone:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.

For that is the answer. We can’t overcome the evils of this world; but Jesus Christ can, and will. If we could straighten ourselves out, we wouldn’t have needed a Savior. If we could set up a righteous kingdom on our own, we wouldn’t need a King of Kings.

The answer is Jesus Christ. No matter how many points they put up on the scoreboard, He will trample them underfoot. What the Lord says He will do, He will do. The mighty empires of the world are only a drop of water in His bucket.

Go back to the last post and listen again to The Hallelujah Chorus–for Jesus Christ is indeed the answer.

When Fools Play God

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Image result for the golden calf

What do all of these have in common–safe space, hate speech laws, “affirming” and “celebrating” whatever aberrant “lifestyle” anyone can think of, vaccinating infants for every disease under the sun, and claiming that government action and policies can control the earth’s natural processes and prevent “Climate Change”?

All of these, and more, flow naturally, inevitably, from the cockeyed humanist project to set man up in place of God: and for “man” read “government.”

To out-do God in being God, these people seek to remove any and all challenges from life. Don’t take my word for it: read “the Humanist Manifesto II.” (http://americanhumanist.org/Humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_II) “Using technology wisely,” we can wipe out disease, direct the course of human evolution, end war and poverty, and blah-blah-blah.

They can’t promise eternal life and forgiveness of sins (“Not yet, not yet–but we’re working on it!”), but for the time being they can transform the world into a secular paradise in which nothing bad ever happens–not even bad weather. And if perchance it does, well, it must be somebody’s fault it happened, and the government will soon take care of it.

This from people who would be hard-put to organize a softball tournament.

This is what we get from leaders and wise men who abandon God–now they’re the ones who have to be God! But don’t worry, it’s just bound to work: because they’re so smart, their intentions are so good, and anyhow human beings are naturally good and that will become apparent as soon as our masters engineer all the bugs out of the system. The problem is not original sin, oh, no! It’s just that our environment has been so screwed up by capitalism, racism, sexism, White Privilege, and yes, you bet, by Religion in general and Christianity in particular… and once we get rid of all that stuff, you’ll see heaven on earth.

But they have to prove they can do it–hence all these policies and programs to take all the struggle, all the stress, all the pain, and all the disappointment out of life: because if God were half as smart as they are, He never would’ve created such a defective world.

It started in the Garden of Eden and it’s still going strong today.

And Heaven help us if we’re fool enough to trust these people.

 

Why Do They Teach B.S.?

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When I was a boy, people used to poke fun at the Russians for making ridiculous lies (“The Soviet Union invented baseball, comrade!”) that everybody knew were lies.

Now our own schools and colleges teach ridiculous lies that everybody knows to be lies–but they repeat them anyway, because you’ll be called a racist or a biggit if you don’t. So you’ve got people saying gender is a state of mind, microaggression depresses your immune system, Hillary Clinton is a defender of women who have suffered sexual harassment–one after another, just stupid and insultingly untrue.

Well, there’s no downside to this, for our friends on the Left. If they really can get you to believe any of this garbage, then in you they’ve got a dimwit who will never be a threat to them.

But even better: if they can get you to say you believe it, when of course you know it’s hogwash, then, voila, they have humiliated you! Chipping away at your integrity, chipping away at your courage and your self-respect, day after day, is not going to equip you to stand up and say “Enough!” But it’s great practice in knuckling under and sucking up a lot of booshwa so that they’ll leave you alone, sort of.

I realize that here I am surely giving college prefesser and teacher union types way too much credit for being able to do something on purpose. They teach twaddle because it’s become their way of life. They’ve spouted so much of it, they’ve come to believe it themselves. The real credit goes to clever sods like Lenin and Stalin and Gramsci who invented this art and honed it to perfection.

America, you’re educating yourself to death.

Another Big Piece of the Story

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As you’ll know if you’ve been following this blog, I write my Bell Mountain novels piece by piece, as God gives them to me. I don’t dope them out beforehand; instead, I wait for what He gives me. This can lead to a certain amount of artistic uncertainly, but it’s also very exciting.

For years, now, I’ve been wondering why the people of Obann shun the sea, but are unable to explain why. What happened to make the sea so dreadful to them? It must have been something to do with the Day of Fire, in which God destroyed their civilization a thousand years ago. But what could it have been?

As of today, I know!

I never expected this to be any part of the book I’m writing now, The Silver Trumpet: but suddenly I see that it really has to be. History, even ancient history, never dies; like it or not, the past is always part of the present. It has shaped the present and will shape the future. It’s a continuum of everything that’s happened, and can nowhere be cut off.

I can hardly wait to get to work on this tomorrow.

They’re Not Just Idiots…

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Image result for images of the dog in the manger

What would you think of someone who went into a church and then complained  that he saw people praying?

Each morning I visit youtube, looking for a hymn that I can post here. These hymns are to be found on pages that have been set up to display them. Those pages are the work of Christians who wish to share the hymns with other Christians, and anyone else who might come along.

How often do I find comments by atheists, complaining about “religious utterances” made by Christians on a page set up by Christians to display a Christian hymn! Like, man, that’s religion, man! And it shouldn’t be allowed! It violates the separation of church and state!

Only two things wrong with that argument. 1) The words “separation of church and state” are not in the Constitution. 2) If you can’t have “religious utterances” in a forum set up by religious believers for that very purpose, where can you have it? But then for libs and progs–atheists are mostly libs and progs–the state is an all-devouring mass that knows no boundaries.

Well, you can accuse these atheists of a lot of things, but you can never say they have good manners. No “live and let live” for them. They are aggressive, they are intrusive, and for whatever inconceivable motivation  that keeps their fire burning hot, they try to stamp out all religious expression, all religious feeling, wherever they can find it. To what end? I very much doubt they know.