Posts

Here’s a repost of an article I wrote last year on the history of Christmas. Enjoy! It’s all too common this time of year to hear people bemoaning the commercialization of Christmas and how “the reason for the season” is being forgotten. Wrapped up in our rampant consumerism. People getting upset at department stores selling “Holiday Trees” as opposed to “Christmas Trees” or the State Department’s insistence that the tree on the White House lawn be known as a Holiday Tree. ...

Jacqueline Novogratz gives an insight of how lives can be radically altered if we stop looking at people in less developed nations as projects to work on and more like business partners to invest in. We help others escape poverty by giving them a hand up, not a hand out. Practically this means we help them earn money by providing them the capital they need to build their businesses. That capital can be education, equiptment, land, etc. These things give people hope, hope that their lives will be forever changed for the better. ...

Vocabulary enables us to interpret and to express. If you have a limited vocabulary, you will also have a limited vision and a limited future. -– Jim Rohn Darkness limits our freedom because it prevents us from moving around quickly. Consequently light gives us freedom because it allows us to see the world around us more clearly. Language is like a light bulb burning in the darkness of ignorance. The limits of our vocabulary are the limits of our communication and thoughts. So you could say that the greater our mastery of language is, the brighter the bulb. And the brighter the bulb, the further we can see. ...

There is no other winter holiday I hate more than Kwanzaa. And since my children keep being exposed to it in School, I figured I would help other parents out there understand what Kwanzaa is all about and why I hate it with every fiber of my being. Ancient roots Kwanzaa was not established in Africa. It is not an ancient tradition. Kwanzaa was established by Maulana Karenga, a convicted felon known for his involvement in several “black nationalist” groups that were quite prevalent in the 60s. Kwanzaa was invented upon Karenga’s release in 1966. Got that? Kwanzaa is a whopping 44 years old. Moreover, it was started in the ancient African metropolis known as Los Angeles. ...

A popular liberal refrain is that tax cuts have to “be paid for”. Tax cuts for the rich are often construed as handouts for millionaires, and people who advocate for less taxes all around are treated as fiscal miscreants who want something for nothing. Tea partiers are routinely chided as not paying their fair share. Stories like this one are meant to convey the idea that tax cuts are the same as the government writing a check. They are also meant to portray those in favor of tax cuts as economically ignorant about the ramifications of their actions. ...

A self-defeating argument or idea are propositional statements whose falsehood is a logical consequence of the act or situation of holding them to be true. Sometimes the best way to argue against a world view, like moral relativism or unbridled skepticism, is to simply show how the proponents’ propositional truth claims defeat themselves. Like the statement “there is no objective truth” when uttered by a post modernist is logically self defeating and should be exposed for what it is. Sloppy thinking. ...

A friend on Facebook pointed me to this lecture by Rodney Stark, author of the excellent book Victory of Reason. This lecture is titled " Religious Competition" Audio here I think most of what Stark says is spot-on. I disagree with him, of course, when He dogs the protestant movement and gives an unexcused free pass to the Roman Catholic Church. I would also add that I believe we (believers) are all called to be priests, or religious suppliers, in the NT. So it is incumbent on us to be well equipped to service the markets of unbelief all around us. ...

[HT NPR] A people’s commitment to free speech is not shown in how much they merely talk about it. It is shown in how much they tolerate speech they do not like. The recent debacle with WikiLeaks provides an excellent insight into the superficial lip service most Americans, on both sides of the isle, give to the issue. I think the former prime minister of Russia, Vladmir Putin, summed up the dilemma quite well: ...

[HT Matt Flannagan] Matt has an interesting approach to answering the objection often raised by critics regarding the apparent command of genocide in the OT. In a series of posts, the original “Did God Command Genocide in the Old Testament?”, and follow-ups part 1, part 2, Matt builds a case for a hyperbolic interpretation of these problematic passages. From his initial post: Perhaps the most perplexing issue facing Christan believers is a series of jarring texts in the Old Testament. After liberating Israel from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites arrived on the edge of the promised land. The book of Deuteronomy records that God then commanded Israel to “destroy totally” the people occupying these regions (the Canaanites); the Israelites were to “leave alive nothing that breathes.” The book of Joshua records the carrying out of this command. In the sixth chapter it states “they devoted the city to the LORD and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.” In the tenth and eleventh chapters the text states that Joshua “left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.” The text mentions city after city where Joshua, at God’s command, puts every inhabitant “to the sword” and “left no survivors.” If these passages are taken in a strict, literal fashion then it is correct to conclude that they do record the divinely authorised commission of genocide. In light of this critics of Christianity often ask how a good and loving God could command the extermination of the Canaanites? ...

Recently, a friend of mine posted a link to an article which details how Sweden views corporal punishment. KARLSTAD, Sweden, November 30, 2010 ( LifeSiteNews.com) – A Swedish district court has sentenced a couple to nine months each in prison and fined them the equivalent of US $10,650 after they admitted to spanking three of their four children as a normal part of their parenting methods. Corporal punishment of children by parents was made illegal in Sweden in 1979, an early step in what a U.S. parental rights lawyer called the nearly total take-over of parenting by the state in Sweden. Court documents, quoted by Sveriges Television, said that the parents, who have not been named in the press, “explained that they had used, what they themselves described as spanking, physical punishment as part of their methods for raising the children.” There is no indication of abuse by the parents in the released documents, with the court noting that the parents “had a loving and caring relationship with their children.” ...