I found Dr. Barlow to be a true gentleman and he was very kind to take the time to answer the questions that I submitted to him. In the upcoming months I will take time once a week to pay tribute to his life and reveal our correspondence. In the first week I noted:
Today I am posting my first letter to him in February of 2015 which discussed Charles Darwin lamenting his loss of aesthetic tastes which he blamed on Darwin’s own dedication to the study of evolution. In a later return letter, Dr. Barlow agreed that Darwin did in fact lose his aesthetic tastes at the end of his life.
In the third week, I look at the life of Brandon Burlsworth in the November 28, 2016 letter and the movie GREATER and the problem of evil which Charles Darwin definitely had a problem with once his daughter died.
On the 4th letter to Dr. Barlow looks at Darwin’s admission that he at times thinks that creation appears to look like the expression of a mind. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words in 1968 sermon at this link.
My Fifth Letter concerning Charles Darwin’s views on MORAL MOTIONS Which was mailed on March 1, 2017. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning moral motions in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
6th letter on May 1, 2017 in which Charles Darwin’s hopes are that someone would find in Pompeii an old manuscript by a distinguished Roman that would show that Christ existed! Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning the possible manuscript finds in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link
7th letter on Darwin discussing DETERMINISM dated 7-1-17 . Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning determinism in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
8th letter responds to Dr. Barlow’s letter to me concerning Francis Schaeffer discussing Darwin’s own words concerning chance in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
9th letter in response to 11-22-17 letter I received from Professor Horace Barlow was mailed on 1-2-18 and included Charles Darwin’s comments on William Paley. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning William Paley in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
10th letter in response to 11-22-17 letter I received from Professor Horace Barlow was mailed on 2-2-18 and includes Darwin’s comments asking for archaeological evidence for the Bible! Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning His desire to see archaeological evidence supporting the Bible’s accuracy in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
11th letterI mailed on 3-2-18 in response to 11-22-17 letter from Barlow that asserted: It is also sometimes asked whether chance, even together with selection, can define a “MORAL CODE,” which the religiously inclined say is defined by their God. I think the answer is “Yes, it certainly can…” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning A MORAL CODE in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
12th letter on March 26, 2018 breaks down song DUST IN THE WIND “All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
In 13th letter I respond to Barlow’s November 22, 2017 letter and assertion “He {Darwin} clearly did not lose his sense of the VALUE of TRUTH, and of the importance of FOREVER SEARCHING it out.”
In 14th letter to Dr. Barlow on 10-2-18, I assert: “Let me demonstrate how the Bible’s view of the origin of life fits better with the evidence we have from archaeology than that of gradual evolution.”
In 15th letter in November 2, 2018 to Dr. Barlow I quote his relative Randal Keynes Who in the Richard Dawkins special “The Genius of Darwin” makes this point concerning Darwin, “he was, at different times, enormously confident in it,
and at other times, he was utterly uncertain.”
In 16th Letter on 12-2-18 to Dr. Barlow I respond to his letter that stated, If I am pressed to say whether I think belief in God helps people to make wise and beneficial decisions I am bound to say (and I fear this will cause you pain) “No, it is often very disastrous, leading to violence, death and vile behaviour…Muslim terrorists…violence within the Christian church itself”
17th letter sent on January 2, 2019 shows the great advantage we have over Charles Darwin when examining the archaeological record concerning the accuracy of the Bible
In the 18th letter I respond to the comment by Charles Darwin: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive….The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words on his loss of aesthetic tastes in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In 19th letter on 2-2-19 I discuss Steven Weinberg’s words, But if language is to be of any use to us, we ought to try to preserve the meanings of words, and “God” historically has not meant the laws of nature. It has meant an interested personality.
In the 20th letter on 3-2-19 I respond to Charles Darwin’s comment, “At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep [#1] inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons...Formerly I was led by feelings such as those…to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that [#2] whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. [#3] But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning his former belief in God in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In the 21st letter on May 15, 2019 to Dr Barlow I discuss the writings of Francis Schaeffer who passed away the 35 years earlier on May 15, 1985. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words at length in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
__________________________
Tribute for Horace
Michael Bach @MichaelBach99
Sadly, I have never met him in person, but his work has influenced me! Grateful.
—-
Letter May 15, 2019
May 15, 2019
Dr. Horace Barlow, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, Downing Street,Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge , United Kingdom,
Dear Dr. Barlow,
On May 15, 1984 Francis Schaeffer passed away (35 years ago today) and on May 15, 1994, the tenth anniversary, I wrote almost every living Nobel Prize winner (in Science categories) asking them if they could refute the nihilistic message of the song DUST IN THE WIND and I included a cassette tape. (If you google “stephen jay gould francis schaeffer” then you can read a copy of the letter I sent out to Dr. Stephen Jay Gould which was divided in 4 parts [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4] ). That tape started off with the 3 minute song DUST IN THE WIND by the rock group KANSAS and it was followed by the message by Adrian Rogers on Evolution. The song asserts, “All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the wind, All we are is Dust in the wind.”
—
—
In the light of evolution in a closed system, is Kerry Livgren the author of the song right about humans ultimate future?
I wanted to respond to something you wrote in your November 22, 2017 letter:
Many thanks for your copious and charmingly expressed correspondence about Charles Darwin’s religious views, and about his descriptions of losing his sense of reverence, awe, and beauty in his old age. Notice, however, that he clearly did not lose his sense of the value of truth, and of the importance of forever searching it out.
One of the scholars who wrote me back was Carl Sagan and this is what he said in his December 5, 1995 letter:
Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)
This response by Sagan was prompted probably by my August 30, 1995 letter which included these words below concerning Charles Darwin losing his sense of awe and beauty in his old age.:
Is man special or not?
Douglas Futuyma has said “Whether people are explicitly religious or not they tend to imagine that humans are in some sense the center of the universe. We are just one product of a very long historical process that has given to an enormous amount of organisms, and we are just one of them. So in some sense there is nothing special about us.”
The following comments were taken from the chapter called “”The Basis for Human Dignity which is in the book and film series co-aurthored by Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop called “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?”
Section 1 Materialistic Humanism: The Worldview of our Age
The West has adopted a worldview which says that all reality is made up only of matter. In this view the universe did not get here because it was created by a “supernatural “ God.
Rather, the universe has existed forever in some form, and it’s present form just happened as a result of chance events way back in time.
Section 2 The search for an adequate worldview
Any worldview must answer 2 basic questions satisfactorily if it is to provide a real base for life and morals. The first is what we will call “the universe and it’s form,” and the second is the “mannishness of man.” The first draws attention to the fact that the universe around us is like an amazing jigsaw puzzle. We see many details, and we want to know how they fit together. That is what science is all about. Scientists look at the details and try to find out how they all cohere. So the first question that has to be answered is: Hiw did the universe get this way? How did it get this form, this pattern, this jigsawlike quality it now has?
Second, “The mannishness of man” draws attention to the fact that human beings are different from all other things in the world. Think, for example, of creativity. People in all cultures of all ages have created many kinds of all things, from “high art” to flower arrangements, from silver ornaments to high-technology supersonic aircraft. This is in contrast to the animals about us. People also fear death, and they remember the past and make projections into the future. One could name other factors, but these are enough to differentiate people from the other things in the world.
What worldview adequately explains the remarkable phenomenon of the distinctiveness of human beings? There is one worldview which explains the existence of the universe, it’s form, and the uniqueness of people— the worldview given to us in the Bible.
Section 3 The humanist base leads to meaningless
An overwhelming number of modern thinkers agree that seeing the universe and man from a humanist base leads to meaningless, both for the universe and for man—not just mankind in general but for each of us as individuals. Professor Steven Weinberg wrote these words in his book THE FIRST 3 MINUTES: A MODERN VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE while he was looking down from an airplane:
It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning. … It is very hard to realize that this is all just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realise that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
(1993), Epilogue, p. 154
When Weinberg says that the universe seems more “comprehensible,” he is, of course, referring to our greater understanding of the physical universe through the advance of science. But it is an understanding, notice, within a materialistic framework, which considers the universe solely in terms of physics and chemistry—-simply machinery.
If everything “faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat,” all things are meaningless.
Section 4 Tension results when you have an inadequate worldview
The greatest dilemma for those who hold an inadequate worldview is that it is impossible to live consistently within it. The playwright Samuel Beckett can “say” that words do not communicate anything—and that everything, including language, is absurd—yet he must use words to write his plays, even plays about meaninglessness. The list of contradictions can be extended endlessly. The truth is that everyone who rejects the Biblical worldview must live in a state of tension between ideas about reality and reality itself. If a person believes that everything is only matter or energy and carries this through consistently, meaning dies, morality dies, love dies, hope dies. Yet! The individual does love, does hope, does act on the basis of right and wrong. This is what we mean when we say that everyone is caught , regardless of his worldview, simply by the way things are.
Section 5 The Bible is God’s revealed truth and it tells us about our origin.
The scriptures tell us that the universe exists and has form and meaning because it was created purposefully by a personal creator. This being the case, we see that, as we are personal, we are not something strange and out of line with an otherwise impersonal universe. Since we are made in the image of God, we are in line with God. There is a continuity, in other words, between ourselves, though finite, and the infinite creator who stands behind the universe as its final source of meaning. Unlike the evolutionary concept of an impersonal beginning plus time plus chance, the Bible shows how man has personality and dignity and value. Our uniqueness is guaranteed, something which is impossible in the materialistic system!!!!!!
LETTER TO HUMANIST MAGAZINE IN 1994:
Francis Schaeffer once said, “If a man takes a certain non-christian set of presuppositions he will be forced eventually to be in a place of tension. The more consistent he is to his non-christian presuppositions the further he is away from the real world.” In “Ape and Essence,” (July/ August 1994) Edd Doerr is consistent with his humanistic presuppositions when he says “The bottom line is that the great apes are so much like us that there is no logical reason not to treat them as ‘persons’.”
Because Mr. Doerr has embraced evolution, he has been forced to ask himself this logical question: “When in the course of evolution did our ancestors qualify as persons?” But does this type of logic square with what we know to be true in the real world?
Genesis chapter one tells us that man is to rule over all animals because man is made in the image of God. Can animals make moral choices, enjoy poetry, appreciate music, worship God or recognize the beauty of the world around them? Humanism reduces man to a machine, but man’s conscience causes him to fell a tension.
As a young man Charles Darwin believed that the world was created by God, and at that time he was an enthusiastic admirer of fine paintings, classic music and Shakespeare. Furthermore, during a trip to Brazil he was do captivated by the beauty of nature that he later recalled how sure he was at the time that God had to be the designer of this grand and wondrous universe. However, later his presuppositions changed and he said, “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
(END OF JUNE 15, 2019 LETTER TO DR BARLOW)
There are 3 videos in this series and they have statements by 150 academics and scientists and I hope to respond to all of them. Wikipedia notes Horace Basil BarlowFRS was a British visual neuroscientist.
In 1953 Barlow discovered that the frog brain has neurons which fire in response to specific visual stimuli. This was a precursor to the work of Hubel and Wiesel on visual receptive fields in the visual cortex. He has made a long study of visual inhibition, the process whereby a neuron firing in response to one group of retinal cells can inhibit the firing of another neuron; this allows perception of relative contrast.
In 1961 Barlow wrote a seminal article where he asked what the computational aims of the visual system are. He concluded that one of the main aims of visual processing is the reduction of redundancy. While the brightnesses of neighbouring points in images are usually very similar, the retina reduces this redundancy. His work thus was central to the field of statistics of natural scenes that relates the statistics of images of real world scenes to the properties of the nervous system.
Barlow and his co-workers also did substantial work in the field of factorial codes. The goal was to encode images with statistically redundant components or pixels such that the code components are statistically independent. Such codes are hard to find but highly useful for purposes of image classification etc.
His comments can be found on the 3rd video and the 128th clip in this series. Below the videos you will find his words.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
_______________
Interview of Horace Barlow – part 1
Published on Jun 18, 2014
Interviewed and filmed by Alan Macfarlane on 5 March 2012
______________________
Interview of Horace Barlow – part 2
Horace Barlow’s quote taken from interview with Alan Macfarlane:
HAS RELIGION EVER BEEN IMPORTANT TO YOU? IS IT IMPORTANT TO YOU? No, it is not important to me. Saying you don’t believe in God is a very foolish thing to say as it doesn’t explain why so many people talk about it, there has got to be more to it than that; also I think one has to respect what some godly people say and some of the things they do; I wish one could make more sense of it but I don’t think the godly people have done a very good job; I was never baptized or confirmed so have never been a practitioner, and I don’t miss it; DO YOU THINK THAT SCIENCE HAS DIS-PROVEN RELIGION AS DAWKINS ARGUES? I think it [science] provides some hope of acting rationally to handle the social and political problems we have to deal with on a personal level and one a worldwide level. Religion is a way of perpetuating a way of thought that might have otherwise been lost, and I imagine that is fine.
Dr. Barlow’s only three solid claims in this response to Alan Macfarlane is that science is #1 the best help today with our social problems,(which is in the original clip), #2 Saying you don’t believe in God (position of atheism) is foolish, and #3 we need an explanation for why so many people talk about [God.]
My response to #1 is to look at how the secular humanists have messed up so many things in the past and I include Barlow’s personal family friend Margaret Mead in that. My responses to #2 and #3 were both covered in my earlier response to Roald Hoffmann.
(Roald Hoffmann is a Nobel Prize winner who I have had the honor of corresponding with in the past. Pictured below)
(This July 1933 photo shows [left to right] anthropologist Gregory Bateson with Margaret Mead)
Horace Barlow’s words from interview conducted by Alan Macfarlane:
I don’t ever remember going to Bateson’s house in Granchester as a child; William Bateson’s wife was a friend of my mother’s; when Gregory Bateson was out in Bali he met Margaret Mead; Beatrice Bateson, his mother, felt she was too old to go out and inspect her so she sent my mother instead; she flew off in an Imperial Airlines plane and we saw her off from Hendon; that must have been 1937-8; my mother got on very well with Margaret Mead – she was not altogether convinced by her, but very impressed by her breadth of knowledge and energy; she came and stayed with us many times; I was even more sceptical than my mother and thought she was a very impressive person; Gregory was born 1904 and my mother, in 1886, so there was quite a big age difference between them; I never got on close intellectual terms with Gregory even though we were to some extent interested in the same sort of thing, both in cybernetics and psychology, and his ideas were always interesting; however, my model of a scientist was taken from my mother and not from Gregory; my mother was interested in genetics and the paper for which she was famous was on the reproductive system in plants like cowslips; my mother reasoned like a scientist whereas Gregory was a guru – he liked to think things out for himself; he obviously influenced many others too; I saw him once or twice when I went to Berkeley
Postscript:
I was sad to see that Jon Stewart is stepping down from the DAILY SHOW so I wanted to include one of the best clips I have ever seen on his show and it is a short debate between the brilliant scientists Edward J. Larson (an evolutionist), William A. Dembski (an Intelligent Design Proponent), and then he threw in a nutball in for laughs, Ellie Crystal (a metaphysical theorist). Dembski gives several great examples of design and it reminded me of many of the words of Darwin show above in my letter to Horace Barlow.
William Dembski on The Jon Stewart Show
Uploaded on Nov 15, 2010
Wednesday September 14, 2005 – Jon Stewart’s “Evolution, Schmevolution” segment with panelists Edward J. Larson (an evolutionist), William A. Dembski (an Intelligent Design Proponent), and Ellie Crystal (a metaphysical theorist).
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […]
At the end of this post is a message by RC Sproul in which he discusses Sagan. Over the years I have confronted many atheists. Here is one story below: I really believe Hebrews 4:12 when it asserts: For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the […]
In today’s news you will read about Kirk Cameron taking on the atheist Stephen Hawking over some recent assertions he made concerning the existence of heaven. Back in December of 1995 I had the opportunity to correspond with Carl Sagan about a year before his untimely death. Sarah Anne Hughes in her article,”Kirk Cameron criticizes […]
I found Dr. Barlow to be a true gentleman and he was very kind to take the time to answer the questions that I submitted to him. In the upcoming months I will take time once a week to pay tribute to his life and reveal our correspondence. In the first week I noted:
Today I am posting my first letter to him in February of 2015 which discussed Charles Darwin lamenting his loss of aesthetic tastes which he blamed on Darwin’s own dedication to the study of evolution. In a later return letter, Dr. Barlow agreed that Darwin did in fact lose his aesthetic tastes at the end of his life.
In the third week, I look at the life of Brandon Burlsworth in the November 28, 2016 letter and the movie GREATER and the problem of evil which Charles Darwin definitely had a problem with once his daughter died.
On the 4th letter to Dr. Barlow looks at Darwin’s admission that he at times thinks that creation appears to look like the expression of a mind. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words in 1968 sermon at this link.
My Fifth Letter concerning Charles Darwin’s views on MORAL MOTIONS Which was mailed on March 1, 2017. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning moral motions in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
6th letter on May 1, 2017 in which Charles Darwin’s hopes are that someone would find in Pompeii an old manuscript by a distinguished Roman that would show that Christ existed! Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning the possible manuscript finds in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link
7th letter on Darwin discussing DETERMINISM dated 7-1-17 . Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning determinism in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
8th letter responds to Dr. Barlow’s letter to me concerning Francis Schaeffer discussing Darwin’s own words concerning chance in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
9th letter in response to 11-22-17 letter I received from Professor Horace Barlow was mailed on 1-2-18 and included Charles Darwin’s comments on William Paley. Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning William Paley in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
10th letter in response to 11-22-17 letter I received from Professor Horace Barlow was mailed on 2-2-18 and includes Darwin’s comments asking for archaeological evidence for the Bible! Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning His desire to see archaeological evidence supporting the Bible’s accuracy in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
11th letterI mailed on 3-2-18 in response to 11-22-17 letter from Barlow that asserted: It is also sometimes asked whether chance, even together with selection, can define a “MORAL CODE,” which the religiously inclined say is defined by their God. I think the answer is “Yes, it certainly can…” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning A MORAL CODE in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
12th letter on March 26, 2018 breaks down song DUST IN THE WIND “All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
In 13th letter I respond to Barlow’s November 22, 2017 letter and assertion “He {Darwin} clearly did not lose his sense of the VALUE of TRUTH, and of the importance of FOREVER SEARCHING it out.”
In 14th letter to Dr. Barlow on 10-2-18, I assert: “Let me demonstrate how the Bible’s view of the origin of life fits better with the evidence we have from archaeology than that of gradual evolution.”
In 15th letter in November 2, 2018 to Dr. Barlow I quote his relative Randal Keynes Who in the Richard Dawkins special “The Genius of Darwin” makes this point concerning Darwin, “he was, at different times, enormously confident in it,
and at other times, he was utterly uncertain.”
In 16th Letter on 12-2-18 to Dr. Barlow I respond to his letter that stated, If I am pressed to say whether I think belief in God helps people to make wise and beneficial decisions I am bound to say (and I fear this will cause you pain) “No, it is often very disastrous, leading to violence, death and vile behaviour…Muslim terrorists…violence within the Christian church itself”
17th letter sent on January 2, 2019 shows the great advantage we have over Charles Darwin when examining the archaeological record concerning the accuracy of the Bible
In the 18th letter I respond to the comment by Charles Darwin: “My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive….The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words on his loss of aesthetic tastes in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
In 19th letter on 2-2-19 I discuss Steven Weinberg’s words, But if language is to be of any use to us, we ought to try to preserve the meanings of words, and “God” historically has not meant the laws of nature. It has meant an interested personality.
In the 20th letter on 3-2-19 I respond to Charles Darwin’s comment, “At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep [#1] inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons...Formerly I was led by feelings such as those…to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that [#2] whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. [#3] But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind.” Francis Schaeffer discusses Darwin’s own words concerning his former belief in God in Schaeffer’s 1968 sermon at this link.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
__________________________
Tribute for Horace
Michael Bach @MichaelBach99
Sadly, I have never met him in person, but his work has influenced me! Grateful.
—-
April 2, 2019 letter
Francis Schaeffer pictured below:
Adrian Rogers pictured below:
Bill Elliff pictured below Carl Sagan pictured below:
Charles Darwin pictured below
_
April 2, 2019 Dr. Horace Barlow, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge, Downing Street,Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge United Kingdom,
Dear Dr. Barlow,
Back in 1994 I sent two letters to Carl Sagan and two more in 1995. One of the cassette tapes I sent to him included three messages (“How I know the Bible is the Word of God,” Adrian Rogers, Sept 1972; “The Final Judgement,” Adrian Rogers,Sept 1972; “How to get a pure heart,” Bill Elliff, 1992.) On Dec 5, 1995 Carl Sagan while suffering from cancer took time to finally answer the 4 letters I had written to him up to that point.(I don’t know if he ever listened to the tapes I had sent him.) Here is his response:Thanks for your recent letter about evolution and abortion. The correlation is hardly one to one; there are evolutionists who are anti-abortion and anti-evolutionists who are pro-abortion.You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness. But if you think God is necessary to understand the world, then why do you not ask the next question of where God came from? And if you say “God was always here,” why not say that the universe was always here? On abortion, my views are contained in the enclosed article (Sagan, Carl and Ann Druyan {1990}, “The Question of Abortion,” Parade Magazine, April 22.)
I responded with a two page letter on Jan 10, 1996 and I never heard back again from Dr. Sagan and he died on Dec 20, 1996. His wife Ann Druyan reported that many people of faith reached out to Sagan in last few months of his life, but he never left his agnosticism. In my January 10th letter, I included these words below: What two pieces of evidence did Charles Darwin wrestle with? If you want evidence then you will only be given the same evidence that Darwin had. I am going to quote 2 passages, and they both have a common message.
That message has 3 points: 1) The conscience tells us of God’s existence. 2) Creation tells us the same. 3) If we reject both of those then God will eventually remove conviction from our hearts. Don’t hold this against me, but I got this first passage out of the current issue of CREATION MAGAZINE: At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep [#1] inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons...Formerly I was led by feelings such as those…to the firm conviction of the existence of God, and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that [#2] whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, ‘it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.’ I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body. [#3] But now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind…(Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1911, Vol. a, page 29). Romans 1:18-21 Amplified Bible: 18 For [God does not overlook sin and] the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who in their wickedness suppress and stifle the truth, 19 because that which is known about God is [#1] evident within them [in their inner consciousness], for God made it evident to them. 20 For ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, [#2] being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made],so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense. 21 For even though [a]they knew God [as the Creator], they did not [b]honor Him as God or give thanks [for His wondrous creation]. On the contrary, they became worthless in their thinking [godless, with pointless reasonings, and silly speculations], and their [#3] foolish heart was darkened. (End of letter to Carl Sagan) __
____ Christ came and laid his life down to die for our sins and there is evidence that indicates the Bible is true!!!!! Some 400 years before crucifixion was invented, both Israel’s King David and the prophet Zechariah described the Messiah’s death in words that perfectly depict that mode of execution. Further, they said that the body would be pierced and that none of the bones would be broken, contrary to customary procedure in cases of crucifixion (Psalm 22 and 34:20; Zechariah 12:10). Again, historians and New Testament writers confirm the fulfillment: Jesus of Nazareth died on a Roman cross, and his extraordinarily quick death eliminated the need for the usual breaking of bones. A spear was thrust into his side to verify that he was, indeed, dead.
Psalm 22 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
A Cry of Anguish and a Song of Praise.
For the choir director; upon [a]Aijeleth Hashshahar. A Psalm of David.
22My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?[b]Far from my deliverance are the words of my [c]groaning.2 O my God, I cry by day, but You do not answer; And by night, but [d]I have no rest. 6 But I am a worm and not a man,
A reproach of men and despised by the people. 7All who see me [g]sneer at me;They [h]separate with the lip, they wag the head, saying,8 “[i]Commit yourself to the Lord; let Him deliver him; Let Him rescue him, because He delights in him.”
12 Many bulls have surrounded me;Strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me.13 They open wide their mouth at me, As a ravening and a roaring lion. 14 I am poured out like water,And all my bones are out of joint; My heart is like wax; It is melted within [l]me. 15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd,And my tongue cleaves to my jaws; And You lay me [m]in the dust of death. 16 For dogs have surrounded me;[n]A band of evildoers has encompassed me;[o]They pierced my hands and my feet.17 I can count all my bones. They look, they stare at me;18 They divide my garments among them, And for my clothing they cast lots.
Francis Schaeffer ended HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Episode 7 with these words:
When we think of Christ of course we think of his substitutionary death upon the cross when he who claimed to be God died in a substitutionary way and as such his death had infinite value and as we accept that gift raising the empty hands of faith with no humanistic elements we have that which is real life and that is being in relationship to the infinite personal God who is there and being in a personal relationship to Him. But Christ brings life in another way that is not as often clearly thought about perhaps. He connects himself with what the Bible teaches in his teaching and as such he is a prophet as well as a savior. It is upon the basis of what he taught and the Bible teaches because he himself wraps these together that we have life instead of death in the sense of having some knowledge that is more than men can have from himself, beginning from himself alone. Both of these elements are the place where Christ gives us life.
I hope you have time to visit a church this Easter. My brother-in-law Brian Sayle lives in Memphis,Tennessee where I grew up but his brother Craig Sayle is the pastor of Loughton Baptist Church, Bradwell Road, Loughton, Milton Keynes MK5 8AJ, and when I told him I was going to invite you to the Easter service he responded, “He may not be able to make it to us, but if he is interested in talking more I will be glad to go see him. My phone number for him would be 07860784252.” You and Craig would have a good visit. Like you he has several daughters, and he likes to visit with people. Did you know that Charles Darwin’s closest friend arguably was the Reverend John Brodie Innes (1815 – 1894), who served at the Anglican Church in Farnborough? The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted.
There are 3 videos in this series and they have statements by 150 academics and scientists and I hope to respond to all of them. Wikipedia notes Horace Basil BarlowFRS was a British visual neuroscientist.
In 1953 Barlow discovered that the frog brain has neurons which fire in response to specific visual stimuli. This was a precursor to the work of Hubel and Wiesel on visual receptive fields in the visual cortex. He has made a long study of visual inhibition, the process whereby a neuron firing in response to one group of retinal cells can inhibit the firing of another neuron; this allows perception of relative contrast.
In 1961 Barlow wrote a seminal article where he asked what the computational aims of the visual system are. He concluded that one of the main aims of visual processing is the reduction of redundancy. While the brightnesses of neighbouring points in images are usually very similar, the retina reduces this redundancy. His work thus was central to the field of statistics of natural scenes that relates the statistics of images of real world scenes to the properties of the nervous system.
Barlow and his co-workers also did substantial work in the field of factorial codes. The goal was to encode images with statistically redundant components or pixels such that the code components are statistically independent. Such codes are hard to find but highly useful for purposes of image classification etc.
His comments can be found on the 3rd video and the 128th clip in this series. Below the videos you will find his words.
50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 1)
Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 2)
A Further 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God (Part 3)
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Interview of Horace Barlow – part 1
Published on Jun 18, 2014
Interviewed and filmed by Alan Macfarlane on 5 March 2012
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Interview of Horace Barlow – part 2
Horace Barlow’s quote taken from interview with Alan Macfarlane:
HAS RELIGION EVER BEEN IMPORTANT TO YOU? IS IT IMPORTANT TO YOU? No, it is not important to me. Saying you don’t believe in God is a very foolish thing to say as it doesn’t explain why so many people talk about it, there has got to be more to it than that; also I think one has to respect what some godly people say and some of the things they do; I wish one could make more sense of it but I don’t think the godly people have done a very good job; I was never baptized or confirmed so have never been a practitioner, and I don’t miss it; DO YOU THINK THAT SCIENCE HAS DIS-PROVEN RELIGION AS DAWKINS ARGUES? I think it [science] provides some hope of acting rationally to handle the social and political problems we have to deal with on a personal level and one a worldwide level. Religion is a way of perpetuating a way of thought that might have otherwise been lost, and I imagine that is fine.
Dr. Barlow’s only three solid claims in this response to Alan Macfarlane is that science is #1 the best help today with our social problems,(which is in the original clip), #2 Saying you don’t believe in God (position of atheism) is foolish, and #3 we need an explanation for why so many people talk about [God.]
My response to #1 is to look at how the secular humanists have messed up so many things in the past and I include Barlow’s personal family friend Margaret Mead in that. My responses to #2 and #3 were both covered in my earlier response to Roald Hoffmann.
(Roald Hoffmann is a Nobel Prize winner who I have had the honor of corresponding with in the past. Pictured below)
(This July 1933 photo shows [left to right] anthropologist Gregory Bateson with Margaret Mead)
Horace Barlow’s words from interview conducted by Alan Macfarlane:
I don’t ever remember going to Bateson’s house in Granchester as a child; William Bateson’s wife was a friend of my mother’s; when Gregory Bateson was out in Bali he met Margaret Mead; Beatrice Bateson, his mother, felt she was too old to go out and inspect her so she sent my mother instead; she flew off in an Imperial Airlines plane and we saw her off from Hendon; that must have been 1937-8; my mother got on very well with Margaret Mead – she was not altogether convinced by her, but very impressed by her breadth of knowledge and energy; she came and stayed with us many times; I was even more sceptical than my mother and thought she was a very impressive person; Gregory was born 1904 and my mother, in 1886, so there was quite a big age difference between them; I never got on close intellectual terms with Gregory even though we were to some extent interested in the same sort of thing, both in cybernetics and psychology, and his ideas were always interesting; however, my model of a scientist was taken from my mother and not from Gregory; my mother was interested in genetics and the paper for which she was famous was on the reproductive system in plants like cowslips; my mother reasoned like a scientist whereas Gregory was a guru – he liked to think things out for himself; he obviously influenced many others too; I saw him once or twice when I went to Berkeley
Postscript:
I was sad to see that Jon Stewart is stepping down from the DAILY SHOW so I wanted to include one of the best clips I have ever seen on his show and it is a short debate between the brilliant scientists Edward J. Larson (an evolutionist), William A. Dembski (an Intelligent Design Proponent), and then he threw in a nutball in for laughs, Ellie Crystal (a metaphysical theorist). Dembski gives several great examples of design and it reminded me of many of the words of Darwin show above in my letter to Horace Barlow.
William Dembski on The Jon Stewart Show
Uploaded on Nov 15, 2010
Wednesday September 14, 2005 – Jon Stewart’s “Evolution, Schmevolution” segment with panelists Edward J. Larson (an evolutionist), William A. Dembski (an Intelligent Design Proponent), and Ellie Crystal (a metaphysical theorist).
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
On March 17, 2013 at our worship service at Fellowship Bible Church, Ben Parkinson who is one of our teaching pastors spoke on Genesis 1. He spoke about an issue that I was very interested in. Ben started the sermon by reading the following scripture: Genesis 1-2:3 English Standard Version (ESV) The Creation of the […]
At the end of this post is a message by RC Sproul in which he discusses Sagan. Over the years I have confronted many atheists. Here is one story below: I really believe Hebrews 4:12 when it asserts: For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the […]
In today’s news you will read about Kirk Cameron taking on the atheist Stephen Hawking over some recent assertions he made concerning the existence of heaven. Back in December of 1995 I had the opportunity to correspond with Carl Sagan about a year before his untimely death. Sarah Anne Hughes in her article,”Kirk Cameron criticizes […]
Under the Impoundment Control Act, the president can propose that Congress rescind, or cancel, specific unspent budget authority from programs he has determined are unneeded. Pictured: President Donald Trump presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dan Gable in the Oval Office on Dec. 7, 2020. (Photo: Doug Mill/ Pool/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump is right: There’s a lot of ridiculous gimmicks and wasteful projects in the new massive spending bill.
And the good news is there’s something that Trump can do about it, even though he recently signed the huge COVID-19 stimulus and omnibus spending bill into law.
While signing the bill, the president released a statement announcing that he would use his authority to request that Congress rescind wasteful spending from the bill.
Stand for your principles in 2021—even in the face of Congress, the media, and the radical Left ganging up on conservatives and our values. Learn more now >>
Under the Impoundment Control Act, the president can propose that Congress rescind, or cancel, specific unspent budget authority from programs he has determined are unneeded.
The rescission package would be considered by the House and Senate under expedited procedures, without being subject to a filibuster in the Senate, and with protections for a minority of members to prevent the bill from getting bottled up in committee proceedings.
This makes sense. The 5,593-page behemoth spending package was loaded with overspending, gimmicks, and dozens of unrelated other legislative provisions. It was written behind closed doors and voted on within hours of it being made public, preventing any member of Congress or the American people from understanding what was actually in it.
Here are nine wasteful programs funded by the omnibus, which has $1.4 trillion in spending, that should be rescinded:
1. Washington Metro: $150 Million
The omnibus provides $150 million for grants to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the D.C. Metro.
This is yet another example of the capital city getting special benefits at the expense of the taxpayers from around the country. No other local transit system gets its own line-item appropriation. The Heritage Foundation has previously recommended this funding be eliminated.
2. DC Tuition Assistance Grants: $40 Million
The omnibus provides $40 million for federal payment for resident tuition support, which funds the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant program to subsidize the out-of-state tuition for D.C. residents attending college in other states.
Simply put, it is wrong for taxpayers across the county to provide a special subsidy for residents of Washington, D.C., who are also eligible for all the other federal college benefit programs. This program has not even been authorized by Congress since 2012. The president’s budgetrecommended the program be eliminated.
3. Kennedy Center: $40.4 Million
The omnibus provides a total of $40.4 million for operations and maintenance and capital repair and restoration for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Using taxpayer funds to subsidize D.C.’s swanky opera house is one of the least defensible items in the entire federal budget. The Kennedy Center already received an additional $25 million as a part of the CARES Act. The Heritage Foundation has previously recommended eliminating this funding.
4. National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities: $335 Million
The omnibus provides $167.5 million each to the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
These two programs use federal tax dollars to make grants supporting arts and humanities projects, something that is much better done by private contributions. The two programs also received an additional $75 million from the CARES Act. Both the president’s budget and The Heritage Foundation have recommended these programs be eliminated.
5. Wilson Center: $14 Million
The omnibus provides $14 million for the Wilson Center, a federally subsidized think tank. Federal subsidies make up about half of the center’s budget, and the dedicated appropriation is not needed nor is it appropriate. The president’s budget and The Heritage Foundation have recommended federal funding for this center be ended.
6. Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Training: $93.9 Million
The omnibus provides $93.9 million for the Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Training program, a $2 million increase from the fiscal year 2020 level.
This program is supposed to provide job training for migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Even if this was appropriate for American taxpayers to subsidize, it is duplicative of other job training programs. The president’s budget and The Heritage Foundation have recommended this program be eliminated.
7. Senior Community Service Employment Program: $405 Million
The omnibus provides $405 million for Community Service Employment for Older Americans, which funds the Senior Community Service Employment Program.
This program provides grants meant to subsidize part-time community service activities by the elderly. The program is duplicative of other existing programs, is not cost effective, and nearly half of participants do not complete the program. The president’s budget and The HeritageFoundation have recommended eliminating the program.
8. McGovern-Dole Food for Education: $230 Million
The omnibus provides $230 million for the McGovern-Dole Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, which uses taxpayer dollars to send American food to schools in foreign countries. The president’s budget has recommended this program be ended.
9. Corporation for Public Broadcasting: $495 Million
The omnibus provides $495 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, most of which is an advance appropriation for fiscal year 2023.
Funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has already been provided for the upcoming fiscal year in prior appropriations bills. The organization also received an additional $75 million as a part of the CARES Act.
The federal government should not use taxpayer funds to subsidize television and radio service, a task which is not needed nor appropriate. The president’s budget and The Heritage Foundation have recommended eliminating this funding.
These are just a small handful of examples of wasteful spending in the $1.4 trillion spending package. Even if all of the wasteful or unnecessary spending from the omnibus is rescinded, much more needs to be done in order to have a responsible budget.
Trump proposing a robust rescission package and Congress passing it would be an important first step toward making controlling spending a priority.
One of America’s leading public intellectuals, Walter Williams, has passed away.
In 2014, I shared a teaser for Suffer No Fools, a video biography of his life. To commemorate the life of this great man, here’s the full video.
I first got to know Walter when I was a Ph.D. student at George Mason University in the 1980s, where my then-wife was his research assistant, but I was fortunate to become a friend later in life when I got to become a member of the “Politically Incorrect Boys Club” with Walter, Ed Crane, and Richard Rahn. This meant lots of fun dinners featuring everything from juvenile humor to grousing about the foolishness of ever-expanding government.
I had an opportunity to reminisce about Walter for WMAL this morning, and you can hear my remarks by clicking here.
Then I recalled a left-leaning friend once telling me that Walter must be some sort of “Uncle Tom” because he opposed racial preferences and the welfare state.
This statement struck me as ludicrous because Walter was a take-no-prisoners troublemaker who got in trouble as a young man (everything from arrests to a court martial) because he refused to tolerate racism.
Here are some excerpts from his must-read autobiography, Up from the Projects, staring with this passage about his time at Fort Stewart after getting drafted.
Numerous forms of troublemaking made me unpopular with many of the soldiers, including black ones. Some warned that was going to get into a lot of trouble, to which I’d flippantly reply, “What kind of trouble? Is somebody going to paint me black and send me to Georgia?”
And here’s some of what he wrote about his assignment to South Korea.
We had been told to fill out forms that contained vital personal information such as blood type, race, religion, next of kin, etc. …I had checked off “Caucasian.” A warrant officer told me I had made a mistake. …He wanted to know why I would say Caucasian when I was actually a Negro. “I’m not stupid,” I replied. “If I checked off ‘Negro,’ I’d get the worst job over here.
Here’s a passage from his time as a Ph.D. student at UCLA.
My fellow students were in awe of someone who’d challenge Professors Alchian and Hirschleifer as I did. One notable challenge occurred when Professor Alchian said to me in class, “Williams, I bet you’re against discrimination.” I replied that no, I favored discrimination. Smiling, he asked whether that included racial discrimination. “Yes,” I said. “I practiced it a lot when I was dating.”
I should point out that while he believed in freedom of association (including the right to discriminate), Walter also noted that capitalism was the best way of punishing bad types of discrimination.
He appreciated that his professors didn’t relax their standards because of his race.
Flunking economic theory the first time around, I later realized, did have a benefit. It convinced me that UCLA professors didn’t care anything about my race. …The university’s economics professors weren’t practicing affirmative action with me. …Sometimes I sarcastically, perhaps cynically, say that I’m glad I received virtually all of my education before it became fashionable for white people like black people. …I encountered back then a more honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses.
Walter also had the self-confidence to deal with white mistakes, such as this anecdote from when he lived in a rich suburb of D.C.
Being among the very few blacks in Chevy Chase taught me a lesson about racial relationships. Living in a corner house…prompted a Saturday chore of picking up trash that people discarded from passing cars. One Saturday, while doing that, an elderly white neighbor approached me to ask me whether, when I completed my tasks, I would be interested in working that afternoon in his yard. I told him very nicely that I would be spending that afternoon putting the final touches on my Ph.D. dissertation. The man’s face turned red with embarrassment and he apologized profusely. Some blacks might have been insulted and charged the man with racism. But I realized that the man was a Bayesian…, meaning that if a black person was spotted in Chevy Chase, picking up trash, the overwhelming probability was that he was a worker as opposed to a homeowner. Playing racial odds doesn’t make one a racist.
Here’s a final excerpt showing how he enjoyed shocking people.
At the leftist reception, …the questioner asked, “How do you feel about the enslavement of your ancestors?” They were all shocked by my response… I started off by saying that slavery is one of the most despicable abuses of human rights. …But I went further to tell them that I, Walter E. Williams, have benefited enormously from the horrible suffering of my ancestors. …my wealth and personal liberties are greater having been born in the United States than in any African country.
Indeed, Walter relished the opportunity to tease his white friends and colleagues, often granting them a pardon for their skin color.
The bottom line is that Walter was a man, not a victim. He fought and achieved.
Since I’ve cited so many of his columns over the years, it would be impractical to list everything. But I definitely recommend the moral arguments he made in videos on capitalism and profits.
P.S. I also can’t resist suggesting that you watch Walter’s conversation with his Nobel Prize-winning colleague, Jim Buchanan.
Author Biography
Eric Schurenberg is Editor-in-Chief of BNET.com and Editorial Director of CBS MoneyWatch.com. Previously, Eric was managing editor of MONEY. As managing editor, he expanded the editorial focus to new interests including real estate, family finance, health, retirement, and the workplace. Prior to MONEY, Eric was deputy editor of Business 2.0. He was also the managing editor of goldman.com, a Web site for Goldman Sachs Group’s personal wealth management business, and an assistant managing editor at Fortune magazine. Schurenberg has won a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business journalism, a National Magazine Award, and a Page One Award.
Social Security isn’t the only cause of America’s fiscal problems, but it is Exhibit A in why it is so hard to fix them. No serious solution to our debt can ignore a program that will tax and spend about 4.8% of GDP this year and account for about 20% of all federal spending-and that within a few decades will count almost a third of the population as beneficiaries. But whenever I write about Social Security here at CBS MoneyWatch, I’m always struck by how much disagreement there is about how the system really works.
A handful of misconceptions tend to crop up repeatedly-often having to do with that fiscal fun-house mirror, the Social Security trust fund. And despite the efforts of writers like Allan Sloan and experts like the Urban Institute’s Eugene Steuerle, the myths won’t die. This column won’t kill them either, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take a whack. Here goes:
Myth: Social Security benefits are earned; reducing them amounts to confiscation
It’s not hard to see why this illusion exists, since Social Security’s own website refers to “earned credits” and sometimes refers to payroll taxes as contributions. But despite Social Security’s fetish for language that echoes private pensions, no one ever vests in Social Security. You don’t own your benefits until you cash the check.
It’s more accurate to say your benefits are an entitlement granted by act of Congress and subject to change at any time by another act of Congress. As long as voters consider benefits inviolate, they will be. When voters decide fiscal responsibility is more important, then Social Security benefits- “earned” or not-will be up for review.
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Professor Williams explains what’s ahead for Social Security
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
I can provide the exact quote here, because in the audience that night was a freelance writer who was recording me. To her mind, my answer risked reinforcing negative stereotypes some Californians already had about working-class white voters and was therefore worth blogging about on Huffington Post. (It’s a decision I respect, by the way, though I wish she had talked to me about it before writing the story. This is what separates even the most liberal writers from their conservative counterparts—the willingness to flay politicians on their own side.)
Francis Schaeffer in his 1983 book A CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO discusses the problem of liberal bias in the media:
The First Track is the fact of the conservative swing in the United States in the 1980 election. With this there is at this moment a unique window open in the United States. It is unique because it is a long, long time since that window has been open as it is now. And let us hope that the window stays open, and not on just one issue, even one as important as human life—though certainly every Christian ought to be praying and working to nullify the abominable abortion law. But as we work and pray, we should have in mind not only this important issue as though it stood alone. Rather, we should be struggling and praying that this whole other total entity—the material-energy, chance world view—can be rolled back with all its results across all of life. I work, I pray that indeed the window does stay open. I hope that will be the case.
Now the window is open and we must take advantage of it in every way we can as citizens, as Christian citizens of the democracy in which we still have freedom. We must try to roll back the other total entity. It will not be easy to roll it back because those who hold the other total world view of reality have no intention that it will be rolled back. Those who hold this view are deeply entrenched, they have had their own way without opposition for a long time, and they will use every means to see that the momentum they have achieved, and the results they have brought forth in all fields, will be retained and enlarged.
For example, all you have to do is to consider the way the media treated Dr. C. Everett Koop. Dr. Koop is one of the foremost pediatric surgeons in the United States, and among other honors, he was given the highest honor of the French government for his pioneering work in pediatric surgery. But when he was nominated for the position of Surgeon General, he was attacked by the secular media with total disregard for objective reporting—and with total disregard for his brilliant humanitarian record as a surgeon. Those in the media holding the humanist world view could not tolerate Dr. Koop’s voice to be heard—they could not tolerate his articulate defense of the sanctity of human life to be expressed.
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The press is not balanced but is left leaning in the biggest way because of secular humanism!!!
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
Ronald Reagan was a firm believer in the Balanced Budget Amendment and Milton Friedman was a key advisor to Reagan. Friedman’s 1980 film series taught the lesson of restraining growth of the federal budget.
Vital changes needed to keep road to further reforms open
There is a problem brewing in the House of Representatives of which most conservatives in and outside Congress are largely unaware. It has to do with H.J. Res. 1 – the balanced budget amendment – soon to be voted on per the debt-ceiling “deal” struck by Congress and the president. While H.J. Res. 1 is a solid first effort – and we have urged support for it as a symbolic vote – it is possibly fatally flawed and should be revised.
After years of indifference to constitutional fiscal discipline, Congress is once again stirring. In 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan, convened a federal amendment drafting committee led by Milton Friedman, Jim Buchanan, Bill Niskanen, Walter Williams and many others, and fashioned Senate Joint Resolution 58, a tax limitation-balanced budget amendment, which garnered 67 votes in the Senate under the able leadership of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, Utah Republican. After a successful discharge petition forced a House vote, the amendment failed to achieve the two-thirds vote necessary in a Tip O’Neill-Jim Wright-controlled House. In 1996, Newt Gingrich and company came within one vote of passing a fiscal amendment in the House.
Currently, H.J. Res. 1 is designed as a classic balanced budget amendment in which outlays can be as great as, but no more than, receipts for that year. However, it requires an estimate of receipts, which is notoriously faulty, and it does not necessarily produce surpluses with which to pay down our massive debt. Furthermore, it contains a second limit on outlays – “not more than 18 percent of the economic output of the United States” – without defining such output or resolving the inevitable conflict between the outlay calculations in the two provisions.
This could be fixed by restructuring the amendment as a spending or outlay limit based on prior year receipts or outlays (known numbers), adjusted only for inflation and population changes. This will produce surpluses in most years with which to pay down debts and will reduce government spending as a share of gross domestic product over time, right-sizing government and increasing the rate of economic growth for the benefit of all citizens, especially those least able to compete.
Section 4 of H.J. Res. 1 might best be described as a supreme example of the law of unintended consequences. This section imposes on the president a constitutional responsibility to present a balanced budget. Surely, the drafters were saying to themselves “We’ll fix that guy in the White House. Now he will have to fess up and either propose specific tax increases or specific spending cuts. He won’t be able to duck reality any longer.” The only problem is that this section is at odds with our Constitution in that it gives the president a constitutional power over fiscal matters never intended by the Founders.
For much of our history, the president did not propose a budget. In the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, which established the Bureau of the Budget, now the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office, the president was statutorily authorized to propose a budget. Presidents have always shaped the budget and spending using their negotiating opportunities and veto pen. Wearing their chief administrator hat, earlier presidents sought to save money from the amounts appropriated by Congress, getting things done for less, impounding funds they did not think essential to spend. Congress‘ ceiling on an appropriation was not also the spending floor for the president, as it is now.
Section 4 appears to give the president co-equal power with Congress not only to present a budget but to shape it, in conflict with congressional budget authority. At a minimum, it is likely to create a conflict over the amount of allowed annual spending. The president surely will be guided by his own Office of Management and Budget, whose budget and receipts calculations will undoubtedly differ from the Congressional Budget Office’s numbers that will direct Congress. We should not start the budget process each year with this kind of conflict.
It would be better to restore the historic role of the president to impound and otherwise reduce expenditures by repealing and revising appropriate portions of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 so a fiscally conservative president is a revitalized partner in cutting the size of government.
Section 5 requires a supermajority vote for “a bill to increase revenues.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with making tax increases more difficult, this language is troublesome because it requires some government bureaucrat or bureaucracy to make a calculation or estimate of the effect of tax law changes on revenues. Proponents of a bill to increase cash flow to the government will argue that their tax law changes are “revenue neutral” and will likely persuade the Joint Committee on Taxation or Congressional Budget Office to back them up. Once again, estimators would be in control.
If we ever expect to convert our income-based tax system to a consumption tax, better not to require a two-thirds vote as liberals will use such a supermajority voting rule to stymie tax system reform.
There are other issues, as well, with debt limit and national emergency supermajority votes and definitions. While this balanced budget amendment – H.J. Res. 1 – has deserved a “yes” vote as a demonstration of commitment to constitutional fiscal discipline, it can and must be revised before the showdown vote in the House this fall.
Lewis K. Uhler is president of the National Tax Limitation Committee.
_________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
This one sentence summed up Michael Hutchence’s life: We are always wanting Things we cannot find!
I will believe you
If you say it’s true
Girl you know I need you
More than any word spoken
I’ve seen you before
Turn and walk away
You say you won’t come back
It’s a game anyway
We are hoping, yes and we’re praying
This time will be the last time
That we will fight like this
This time will be the last time
That we will fight like this…hey!
We are always wanting Things we cannot find
You know that we are always wasting time
We are hoping, yes and we’re praying
This time will be the last time
That we will fight like this
This time will be the last time
That we will fight like this
You know I can forget
We have fought before
I’ve seen inside your heart
And I know it’s breaking
We are hoping, yeah and we’re praying
Maybe this time will be the last time
That we will fight like this
This time will be the last time
That we will fight like this
This time will be the last time
INXS frontman Michael Hutchence lived a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. He dated famous models and pop stars, and accounts of his drug and alcohol use are widespread. According to friends and bandmates, the singer found the dark allure of rock star excess irresistible.
“I’m surprised I’ve survived and so are a lot of my friends,” Hutchence said in 1995. “I’m sure some of them are pissed off, because one thing about me is that I always manage to have my cake and eat it, too, whereas people love to see f–k-ups. That’s the industry. Welcome to the party. Jimi Hendrix is upstairs. But coming through it is fantastic.”
Hutchence might have survived numerous wild nights, but he wouldn’t outlive the passionate, but rocky, relationship he began in the mid-’90s with TV host Paula Yates. As a music star, Hutchence had known the British presenter since the ’80s. Yates also had a foot in the rock world, as the wife of Boomtown Rats singer and Live Aid organizer Bob Geldof. She was married to Geldof, with three daughters, when she began an affair with the Australian rocker, following a particularly flirtatious television interview.
Not long after she divorced Geldof in 1996, Yates gave birth to Hutchence’s child, a daughter that they named Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily (in keeping with her mother’s propensity for outlandish names). Although the couple were building a family of their own, all was not well. While friends said that Geldof kept Yates’s addiction problems in check, Hutchence was often ready to indulge. In the meantime, the three members of this love triangle squared off in a battle over custody of Yates and Geldof’s daughters.
During this tumultuous period, Hutchence reportedly began treatment for depression. Perhaps it didn’t help that INXS were no longer the global superstars they had been in the late ’80s. After a hiatus, the Aussie rockers reconvened to make a new album in 1997, titled Elegantly Wasted. The band toured overseas, then planned a 20th anniversary trek in Australia in late November and December.
Hutchence, who had been spending the bulk of his time in England with Yates and daughter Tiger, returned to his hometown of Sydney to rehearsewith his bandmates for the tour, set to begin on November 25. Yates was expecting to visit Australia with Tiger and the three daughters from her marriage when Geldof got a court injunction to prevent his daughters from traveling. In the early morning hours of November 22, 1997, Yates called her boyfriend to tell him that the custody hearing had been pushed back to December 17, and so she could no longer bring the kids.
The singer had been awake all night in his Ritz Carlton hotel room, reportedly drinking with friends and doing a little cocaine, in anticipation of receiving news about his lover and the children. When it turned out to be bad news, he phoned Geldof, in a manner that Bob characterized as“hectoring and abusive and threatening.” A woman staying in the next room heard yelling and swearing coming through the walls in the early morning hours.
A few hours later, Hutchence made a few more phone calls, to a former girlfriend Michelle Bennett and to business manager Martha Troup. The two said that the musician sounded like he was in a dark place. He left a voicemail for Troup, saying, “I’ve f–king had enough” and had a conversation with Bennett that startled her into coming to check on him at the hotel. She knocked on his door, but there was no answer.
Hutchence’s body would be discovered by a maid at 11:50 a.m. He was found naked and in a kneeling position behind the door, after a belt around his neck (and attached to the door-closing mechanism) had broken. He had choked to death in a case of apparent suicide. Hutchence was 37 years old.
“Bob Geldof murdered Michael Hutchence,” Yates told The Daily Express upon her arrival in Sydney. “That bastard killed Michael. He is called Saint Bob. That makes me sick. He killed my baby. We have had three years of this.”
A little while later, Paula Yates began suggesting that Hutchence’s death might not have been a suicide. Yates, and others, thought it must have been an accident because he left no note or any last words for his daughter. A rumor began to circulate that this was the tragic result of auto-erotic asphyxiation (or the practice of depriving the brain of oxygen to heighten orgasm). Yates backed the theory in interviews.
“Such was her determination to make her point about this to police that when she arrived in Australia following his death she shouted at the detectives in a restaurant while giving graphic details of the sex games she and Hutchence played,” former Detective Inspector Michael Gerondis told The Daily Mail. “‘He would strangle me during sex,’ she told them.”
Although Michael’s brother, his friends and former lovers had given credence to the possibility that Hutchence died from risky sexual behavior, there was no evidence to support such claims. The Australian authorities continue to reject the theory.
Hutchence received a funeral in the days following his death, with his INXS bandmates and brother Rhett as pallbearers. Michael’s family was in attendance, along with Yates, former girlfriend Kylie Minogue and other famous friends from Diana Ross to Tom Jones. Nick Cave sang “Into My Arms” as a tribute to Hutchence. A few years later, Bono wrote U2’s “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” as an imaginary conversation he wished he’d had with his friend and fellow rock star.
Following Hutchence’s death, Yates went into a tailspin of distress and drug addiction. She lost custody of her children to Geldof and succumbed to an accidental heroin overdose in 2000. She was 41. Her ex-husband then took custody of Tiger Lily, and began raising the four-year-old as his own daughter. He has since lost one of his and Yates’s children, Peaches, to another heroin overdose in 2014.
“It’s all awful. It’s all awful,” Geldof told 60 Minutesyears later. “And there’s nothing good came out of it. Nothing. Where’s the upside?”
——
This post includes a lot of material that is very depressing, but don’t stop reading until you get to the end of this long post. There is hope.
Nihilism is the only conclusion when you have no hope of an afterlife. Many have turned to drugs, alcoholism or even suicide. (Don’t stop reading until you get to the end of the post and read the uplifting story of Kerry Livgren!!!)
Solomon was searching for meaning in life in what I call the 6 big L words in the Book of Ecclesiastes. He looked into learning (1:16-18), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). After searching in area of luxuries Solomon found them to be “vanity and a striving after the wind.”
Ecclesiastes 2:7-11 English Standard Version (ESV)
7I had also great possessions of herds and flocks, more than any who had been before me in Jerusalem. 8I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. 9 So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem…10 And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them.11 Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained UNDER THE SUN.
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36 (Christ’s words)
God put Solomon’s story in Ecclesiastes in the Bible with the sole purpose of telling people like you that without God in the picture you will find out the emptiness one feels when possessions are trying to fill the void that God can only fill.
Then in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes Solomon returns to looking above the sun and he says that obeying the Lord is the proper way to live your life. The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. If you need more evidence then go to You Tube and watch the short videos “Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1),“(3 min, 5 sec) and “Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2),” (10 min, 46 sec
Francis Schaeffer noted:
I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.”
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Francis Schaeffer pictured below in 1971 at L Abri
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Francis Schaeffer noted:
I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.”
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“They are the natural outcome of a change from a Christian World View to a Humanistic one…
The result is a relativistic value system. A lack of a final meaning to life — that’s first. Why does human life have any value at all, if that is all that reality is? Not only are you going to die individually, but the whole human race is going to die, someday. It may not take the falling of the atom bombs, but someday the world will grow too hot, too cold. That’s what we are told on this other final reality, and someday all you people not only will be individually dead, but the whole conscious life on this world will be dead, and nobody will see the birds fly. And there’s no meaning to life.
As you know, I don’t speak academically, shut off in some scholastic cubicle, as it were. I have lots of young people and older ones come to us from the ends of the earth. And as they come to us, they have gone to the end of this logically and they are not living in a romantic setting. They realize what the situation is. They can’t find any meaning to life. It’s the meaning to the black poetry. It’s the meaning of the black plays. It’s the meaning of all this. It’s the meaning of the words “punk rock.” And I must say, that on the basis of what they are being taught in school, that the final reality is only this material thing, they are not wrong. They’re right! On this other basis there is no meaning to life and not only is there no meaning to life, but there is no value system that is fixed, and we find that the law is based then only on a relativistic basis and that law becomes purely arbitrary.
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OUTLINE OF ECCLESIATES BY SCHAEFFER
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William Lane Craig on Man’s predicament if God doesn’t exist
Read Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. During this entire play two men carry on trivial conversation while waiting for a third man to arrive, who never does. Our lives are like that, Beckett is saying; we just kill time waiting—for what, we don’t know.
Thus, if there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless. Man and the universe are without ultimate significance.
Francis Schaeffer looks at Nihilism of Solomon and the causes of it!!!
Notes on Ecclesiastes by Francis Schaeffer
Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes and he is truly an universal man like Leonardo da Vinci.
Two men of the Renaissance stand above all others –Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and it is in them that one can perhaps grasp a view of the ultimate conclusion of humanism for man. Michelangelo was unequaled as a sculptor in the Renaissance and arguably no one has ever matched his talents.
The other giant of the Renaissance period was Leonardo da Vinci – the perfect Renaissance Man, the man who could do almost anything and does it better than most anyone else. As an inventor, an engineer, an anatomist, an architect, an artist, a chemist, a mathematician, he was almost without equal. It was perhaps his mathematics that lead da Vinci to come to his understanding of the ultimate meaning of Humanism. Leonardo is generally accepted as the first modern mathematician. He not only knew mathematics abstractly but applied it in his Notebooks to all manner of engineering problems. He was one of the unique geniuses of history, and in his brilliance he perceived that beginning humanistically with mathematics one only had particulars. He understood that man beginning from himself would never be able to come to meaning on the basis of mathematics. And he knew that having only individual things, particulars, one never could come to universals or meaning and thus one only ends with mechanics. In this he saw ahead to where our generation has come: everything, including man, is the machine.
Leonardo da Vinci compares well to Solomon and they both were universal men searching for the meaning in life. Solomon was searching for a meaning in the midst of the details of life.His struggle was to find the meaning of life. Not just plans in life.Anybody can find plans in life. A child can fill up his time with plans of building tomorrow’s sand castle when today’s has been washed away. There is a difference between finding plans in life and purpose in life. Humanism since the Renaissance and onward has never found it and it has never found it since. Modern man has not found it and it has always got worse and darker in a very real way.
We have here the declaration of Solomon’s universality:
1 Kings 4:30-34
English Standard Version (ESV)
30 so that Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt.31 For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol, and his fame was in all the surrounding nations.32 He also spoke 3,000 proverbs, and his songs were 1,005.33 He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.34 And people of all nations came to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and from all the kings of the earth, who had heard of his wisdom.
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Here is the universal man and his genius. Solomon is the universal man with a empire at his disposal. Solomon had it all.
Ecclesiastes 1:3
English Standard Version (ESV)
3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
Schaeffer noted that Solomon took a look at the meaning of life on the basis of human life standing alone between birth and death “under the sun.” This phrase UNDER THE SUN appears over and over in Ecclesiastes.
(Added by me:The Christian Scholar Ravi Zacharias noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term UNDER THE SUN — What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system and you are left with only this world of Time plus Chance plus matter.” )
Man is caught in the cycle
Ecclesiastes 1:1-7
English Standard Version (ESV)
All Is Vanity
1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 3 What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? 4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.
8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us.
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Solomon is showing a high degree of comprehension of evaporation and the results of it. Seeing also in reality nothing changes. There is change but always in a set framework and that is cycle. You can relate this to the concepts of modern man. Ecclesiastes is the only pessimistic book in the Bible and that is because of the place where Solomon limits himself. He limits himself to the question of human life, life under the sun between birth and death and the answers this would give.
Ecclesiastes 1:4
English Standard Version (ESV)
4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
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Ecclesiastes 4:16
English Standard Version (ESV)
16 There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind.
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In verses 1:4 and 4:16 Solomon places man in the cycle. He doesn’t place man outside of the cycle. Man doesn’t escape the cycle. Man is only cycle. Birth and death and youth and old age. With this in mind Solomon makes this statement.
Ecclesiastes 6:12
12 For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow. For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?
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There is no doubt in my mind that Solomon had the same experience in his life that I had as a younger man. I remember standing by the sea and the moon arose and it was copper and beauty. Then the moon did not look like a flat dish but a globe or a sphere since it was close to the horizon. One could feel the global shape of the earth too. Then it occurred to me that I could contemplate the interplay of the spheres and I was exalted because I thought I can look upon them with all their power, might, and size, but they could contempt nothing and I felt as man as God. Then came upon me a horror of great darkness because it suddenly occurred to me that although I could contemplate them and they could contemplate nothing yet they would continue to turn in ongoing cycles when I saw no more forever and I was crushed.
THIS IS SOLOMON’S FEELING TOO. The universal man, Solomon, beyond our intelligence with an empire at his disposal with the opportunity of observation so he could recite these words here in Ecclesiastes 6:12, “For who knows what is good for a man during his lifetime, during the few years of his futile life? He will spend them like a shadow. For who can tell a man what will be after him under the sun?”
Lack of Satisfaction in life
In Ecclesiastes 1:8 he drives this home when he states, “All things are wearisome; Man is not able to tell it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor is the ear filled with hearing.” Solomon is stating here the fact that there is no final satisfaction because you don’t get to the end of the thing. THERE IS NO FINAL SATISFACTION. This is related to Leonardo da Vinci’s similar search for universals and then meaning in life.
In Ecclesiastes 5:11 Solomon again pursues this theme, “When good things increase, those who consume them increase. So what is the advantage to their owners except to look on?” Doesn’t that sound modern? It is as modern as this evening. Solomon here is stating the fact there is no reaching completion in anything and this is the reason there is no final satisfaction. There is simply no place to stop. It is impossible when laying up wealth for oneself when to stop. It is impossible to have the satisfaction of completion.
Pursuing Learning
Now let us look down the details of his searching.
In Ecclesiastes 1: 13a we have the details of the universal man’s procedure. “And I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven.”
So like any sensible man the instrument that is used is INTELLECT, and RAITIONALITY, and LOGIC. It is to be noted that even men who despise these in their theories begin and use them or they could not speak. There is no other way to begin except in the way they which man is and that is rational and intellectual with movements of that is logical within him. As a Christian I must say gently in passing that is the way God made him.
So we find first of all Solomon turned to WISDOM and logic. Wisdom is not to be confused with knowledge. A man may have great knowledge and no wisdom. Wisdom is the use of rationality and logic. A man can be very wise and have limited knowledge. Here he turns to wisdom in all that implies and the total rationality of man.
Works of Men done Under the Sun
After wisdom Solomon comes to the great WORKS of men. Ecclesiastes 1:14, “I have seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is [p]vanity and striving after wind.” Solomon is the man with an empire at this disposal that speaks. This is the man who has the copper refineries in Ezion-geber. This is the man who made the stables across his empire. This is the man who built the temple in Jerusalem. This is the man who stands on the world trade routes. He is not a provincial. He knew what was happening on the Phonetician coast and he knew what was happening in Egypt. There is no doubt he already knew something of building. This is Solomon and he pursues the greatness of his own construction and his conclusion is VANITY AND VEXATION OF SPIRIT.
Ecclesiastes 2:18-20
18 Thus I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me.19 And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will have control over all the fruit of my labor for which I have labored by acting wisely under the sun. This too is vanity.20 Therefore I completely despaired of all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun.
He looked at the works of his hands, great and multiplied by his wealth and his position and he shrugged his shoulders.
Ecclesiastes 2:22-23
22 For what does a man get in all his labor and in his striving with which he labors under the sun?23 Because all his days his task is painful and grievous; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is vanity.
Man can not rest and yet he is never done and yet the things which he builds will out live him. If one wants an ironical three phrases these are they. There is a Dutch saying, “The tailor makes many suits but one day he will make a suit that will outlast the tailor.”
God has put eternity in our hearts but we can not know the beginning or the end of the thing from a vantage point of UNDER THE SUN
Ecclesiastes 1:16-18
16 I said to myself, “Behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge.”17 And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly; I realized that this also is striving after wind.18 Because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.
Solomon points out that you can not know the beginnings or what follows:
Ecclesiastes 3:11
11 He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart, yet so that man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.
Ecclesiastes 1:11
11 There is no remembrance of earlier things; And also of the later things which will occur, There will be for them no remembrance among those who will come later still.
Ecclesiastes 2:16
16 For there is no lasting remembrance of the wise man as with the fool, inasmuch as in the coming days all will be forgotten. And how the wise man and the fool alike die!
You bring together here the factor of the beginning and you can’t know what immediately follows after your death and of course you can’t know the final ends. What do you do and the answer is to get drunk and this was not thought of in the RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KAHAYYAM:
Ecclesiastes 2:1-3
I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure. So enjoy yourself.” And behold, it too was futility.2 I said of laughter, “It is madness,” and of pleasure, “What does it accomplish?”3 I explored with my mind how to stimulate my body with wine while my mind was guiding me wisely, and how to take hold of folly, until I could see what good there is for the sons of men to do under heaven the few years of their lives.
You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse
I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Translation by Edward Fitzgerald)
A perfectly good philosophy coming out of Islam, but Solomon is not the first man that thought of it nor the last. In light of what has been presented by Solomon is the solution just to get intoxicated and black the think out? So many people have taken to alcohol and the dope which so often follows in our day. This approach is incomplete, temporary and immature. Papa Hemingway can find the champagne of Paris sufficient for a time, but one he left his youth he never found it sufficient again. He had a lifetime spent looking back to Paris and that champagne and never finding it enough. It is no solution and Solomon says so too.
Ecclesiastes 2:4-11
4 I enlarged my works: I built houses for myself, I planted vineyards for myself;5 I made gardens and parks for myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees;6 I made ponds of water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees.7 I bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem.8 Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I provided for myself MALE AND FEMALE SINGERS AND THE PLEASURES OF MEN–MANY CONCUBINES.
9 Then I became great and increased more than all who preceded me in Jerusalem. My wisdom also stood by me.10 All that my eyes desired I did not refuse them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart was pleased because of all my labor and this was my reward for all my labor.11 Thus I considered all my activities which my hands had done and the labor which I had exerted, and behold all was vanity and striving after wind and there was no profit under the sun.
He doesn’t mean there is no temporary profit but there is no real profit. Nothing that lasts. The walls crumble if they are as old as the Pyramids. You only see a shell of the Pyramids and not the glory that they were. This is what Solomon is saying. Look upon Solomon’s wonder and consider the Cedars of Lebanon which were not in his domain but at his disposal.
Ecclesiastes 6:2
2 a man to whom God has given riches and wealth and honor so that his soul lacks nothing of all that he desires; yet God has not empowered him to eat from them, for a foreigner enjoys them. This is vanity and a severe affliction.
Can someone stuff himself with food he can’t digest? Solomon came to this place of strife and confusion when he went on in his search for meaning.
Oppressed have no comforter
Ecclesiastes 4:1
Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun. And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them.
Between birth and death power rules. Solomon looked over his kingdom and also around the world and proclaimed that right does not rule but power rules.
Ecclesiastes 7:14-15
14 In the day of prosperity be happy, but in the day of adversity consider—God has made the one as well as the other so that man will not discover anything that will be after him.
15 I have seen everything during my lifetime of futility; there is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness.
Ecclesiastes 8:14
14 There is futility which is done on the earth, that is, there are righteous men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked. On the other hand, there are evil men to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I say that this too is futility.
We could say it in 20th century language, “The books are not balanced in this life.”
Pursuing Ladies
If one would flee to alcohol, then surely one may choose sexual pursuits to flee to. Solomon looks in this area too.
Ecclesiastes 7:25-28
25 I directed my mind to know, to investigate and to seek wisdom and an explanation, and to know the evil of folly and the foolishness of madness.26 And I discovered more bitter than death the woman whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are chains. One who is pleasing to God will escape from her, but the sinner will be captured by her.
27 “Behold, I have discovered this,” says the Preacher, “adding one thing to another to find an explanation,28 I have looked for other answers but have found none. I found one man in a thousand that I could respect, but not one woman. (Good News Translation on verse 28)
One can understand both Solomon’s expertness in this field and his bitterness.
I Kings 11:1-3 (New American Standard Bible)
11 Now King Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women,2 from the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the sons of Israel, “You shall not associate with them, nor shall they associate with you, for they will surely turn your heart away after their gods.” Solomon held fast to these in love.3 He had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines, and his wives turned his heart away.
An expert but also the reason for his bitterness. Certainly there have been many men over the centuries who have daydreamed of Solomon’s wealth in this area [of women], but at the end it was sorry, not only sorry but nothing and less than nothing. The simple fact is that one can not know woman in the real sense by pursuing 1000 women. It is not possible. Woman is not found this way. All that is left in this setting if one were to pursue the meaning of life in this direction is this most bitter word found in Ecclesiastes 7:28, “I have looked for other answers but have found none. I found one man in a thousand that I could respect, but not one woman.” (Good News Translation on verse 28) He was searching in the wrong way. He was searching for the answer to life in the limited circle of that which is beautiful in itself but not an answer finally in sexual life. More than that he finally tried to find it in variety and he didn’t even touch one woman at the end.
Relative truth/ Chance and time/ death comes to fool and wiseman/ tried pagan religions
He plunged in such a scientific procedure finally into the thought of final relative truth.
Ecclesiastes 8:6-7
6 For there is a time and a way for everything, although man’s trouble lies heavy on him.7 For he does not know what is to be, for who can tell him how it will be?
In such a setting he is led into misery. Relative truth is also expressed in Ecclesiastes 3:1, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven…” He is not saying this in a positive sense, but it is in a negative sense here. Relative truth in light of Ecclesiastes 8:6-7. When you come to the concept of relative truth only one more step remains and that is that chance rules. Chance is king.
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Ecclesiastes 9:11
11 Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
Chance rules. If a man starts out only from himself and works outward it must eventually if he is consistent seem so that only chance rules and naturally in such a setting you can not expect him to have anything else but finally a hate of life.
Ecclesiastes 2:17-18a
17 So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and a striving after wind. 18 I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun…
That first great cry “So I hated life.” Naturally if you hate life you long for death and you find him saying this in Ecclesiastes 4:2-3:
2 And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive.3 But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.
He lays down an order. It is best never have to been. It is better to be dead, and worse to be alive. But like all men and one could think of the face of Vincent Van Gogh in his final paintings as he came to hate life and you watch something die in his self portraits, the dilemma is double because as one is consistent and one sees life as a game of chance, one must come in a way to hate life. Yet at the same time men never get beyond the fear to die. Solomon didn’t either. So you find him in saying this.
Ecclesiastes 2:14-15
14 The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet I perceived that the same event happens to all of them.15 Then I said in my heart, “What happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise?” And I said in my heart that this also is vanity.
The Hebrew is stronger than this and it says “it happens EVEN TO ME,” Solomon on the throne, Solomon the universal man. EVEN TO ME, even to Solomon.
Ecclesiastes 3:18-21
18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.[n]20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?
What he is saying is as far as the eyes are concerned everything grinds to a stop at death.
Ecclesiastes 4:16
16 There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind.
That is true. There is no place better to feel this than here in Switzerland. You can walk over these hills and men have walked over these hills for at least 4000 years and when do you know when you have passed their graves or who cares? It doesn’t have to be 4000 years ago. Visit a cemetery and look at the tombstones from 40 years ago. Just feel it. IS THIS ALL THERE IS? You can almost see Solomon shrugging his shoulders.
Ecclesiastes 8:8
8 There is no man that hath power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither hath he power in the day of death: and there is no discharge in that war; neither shall wickedness deliver those that are given to it. (King James Version)
A remarkable two phrase. THERE IS NO DISCHARGE IN THAT WAR or you can translate it “no casting of weapons in that war.” Some wars they come to the end. Even the THIRTY YEARS WAR (1618-1648) finally finished, but this is a war where there is no casting of weapons and putting down the shield because all men fight this battle and one day lose. But more than this he adds, WICKEDNESS WON’T DELIVER YOU FROM THAT FIGHT. Wickedness delivers men from many things, from tedium in a strange city for example. But wickedness won’t deliver you from this war. It isn’t that kind of war. More than this he finally casts death in the world of chance.
Ecclesiastes 9:12
12 For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.
Death can come at anytime. Death seen merely by the eye of man between birth and death and UNDER THE SUN. Death too is a thing of chance. Albert Camus speeding in a car with a pretty girl at his side and then Camus dead. Lawrence of Arabia coming up over a crest of a hill 100 miles per hour on his motorcycle and some boys are standing in the road and Lawrence turns aside and dies..
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Woody Allen has embraced NIHILISM but he continues marching on.
In the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS the idea of nihilism is clearly taught.
(Disclaimer: I am friends with atheists who live very good lives and have embraced life. I am not accusing all atheists of embracing nihilism, but just that some like Woody Allen have nihilistic tendencies. However, a few have taken the logic of NIHILISM a step further and that could possibly lead to SUICIDE.)
Adriana and Gil Pender in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
In the movie Gertrude Stein says to Gil, “Now, about your book,it’s very unusual, indeed.I mean, in a way, it’s almost like science fiction….The artist’s job is not to succumb to DESPAIR,but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.You have a clear and lively voice. Don’t be such a defeatist.”
Also in the film we find this exchange:
ADRIANA: I can never decide whether Paris is more beautiful by day or by night.
GIL PENDER: No, you can’t. You couldn’t pick one. I mean,I can give you a checkmate argument for each side.You know, I sometimes think,”How’s anyone gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony or a sculpture that can compete with a great city?”You can’t, ’cause, like,you look around, every…every street, every boulevard is its own special art form.And when you think that in the cold,violent, meaningless universe,that Paris exists, these lights…I mean, come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune,but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafe’s, people drinking, and singing…I mean, for all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe.
Annie Hall – The Opening Scene [HD]
Manhattan
Francis Schaeffer two months before he died said if he was talking to a gentleman he was sitting next to on an airplane about Christ he wouldn’t start off quoting Bible verses. Schaeffer asserted:
I would go back rather to their dilemma if they hold the modern worldview of the final reality only being energy, etc., I would start with that. I would begin as I stress in the book THE GOD WHO IS THERE about their own [humanist] prophets who really show where their view goes. For instance, Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize winner from France, in his book NECESSITY AND CHANCE said there is no way to tell the OUGHT from the IS. In other words, you live in a totally silent universe.
The men like Monod and Sartre or whoever the man might know that is his [humanist] prophet and they point out quite properly and conclusively what life is like, not just that there is no meaningfulness in life but everyone according to modern man is just living out some kind of game plan. It may be knocking 1/10th of a second off a downhill ski run or making one more million dollars. But all you are doing is making a game plan within the mix of a meaningless situation. WOODY ALLEN exploits this very strongly in his films. He really lives it. I feel for that man, and he has expressed it so thoroughly in ANNIE HALL and MANHATTAN and so on.
Francis Schaeffer is correct about Woody Allen and that Allen has embraced nihilism. I hope that many will read below at the bottom of this post about the men Dave Hope and Kerry Livgren of the rock group KANSAS who also came to the end of themselves but they turned away from nihilism and found meaning to their lives.
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A suicide attempt appears in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS when Zelda Fitzgerald goes to the Seine River with the intention of jumping and Gil Pender stops her. It seems the nihilist worldview of Woody Allen keeps him putting suicides into his films.
Remember Professor Levy from the movie CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOR? After addressing the question IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? Levy jumps out a window!!!
After Levy committed suicide, Cliff reviewed a clip from the documentary footage in which Levy states: “But we must always remember that when we are born we need a great deal of love to persuade us to stay in life. Once we get that love, it usually lasts us. But the universe is a pretty cold place. It’s we who invest it with our feelings. And under certain conditions, we feel that the thing isn’t worth it anymore.”
Hearing the news of Levy’s death, Halley says, “No matter how elaborate a philosophical system you work out, in the end it’s got to be incomplete.”
So some humanists act as if they have a great advantage over Christians. They act as if the advance of science and technology and a better understanding of history (through such concepts as the evolutionary theory) have all made the idea of God and Creation quite ridiculous.
This superior attitude, however, is strange because one of the most striking developments in the last half-century is the growth of a profound pessimism among both the well-educated and less-educated people. The thinkers in our society have been admitting for a long time that they have no final answers at all.
Take Woody Allen, for example. Most people know his as a comedian, but he has thought through where mankind stands after the “religious answers” have been abandoned. In an article in Esquire (May 1977), he says that man is left with:
… alienation, loneliness [and] emptiness verging on madness…. The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. It’s absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless. As Camus wrote, it’s not only that he (the individual) dies, or that man (as a whole) dies, but that you struggle to do a work of art that will last and then you realize that the universe itself is not going to exist after a period of time. Until those issues are resolved within each person – religiously or psychologically or existentially – the social and political issues will never be resolved, except in a slapdash way.
Allen sums up his view in his film Annie Hall with these words: “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”
However, our intention here is neither to go into the history of irrationalism, nor to examine the proponents of existentialism in our own century, but rather to concentrate on its main thesis. It is this that confronts us on all sides today, and it is impossible to understand modern man without understanding this concept.
Because we shall be using several terms a great deal now, we would ask the reader to attend carefully. When we speak of irrationalism or existentialism or the existential methodology, we are pointing to a quite simple idea. It may have been expressed in a variety of complicated ways by philosophers, but it is not a difficult concept.
Imagine that you are at the movies watching a suspense film. As the story unfolds, the tension increases until finally the hero is trapped in some impossible situation and everyone is groaning inwardly, wondering how he is going to get out of the mess. The suspense is heightened by the knowledge (of the audience, not the hero) that help is on the way in the form of the good guys. The only question is: will the good guys arrive in time?
Now imagine for a moment that the audience is slipped the information that there are no good guys, that the situation of the hero is not just desperate, but completely hopeless. Obviously, the first thing that would happen is that the suspense would be gone. You and the entire audience would simply be waiting for the axe to fall.
If the hero faced the end with courage, this would be morally edifying, but the situation itself would be tragic. If, however, the hero acted as if help were around the corner and kept buoying himself up with this thought (“Someone is on the way!” – “Help is at hand!”), all you could feel for him would be pity. It would be a means to keep hope alive within a hopeless situation. The hero’s hope would change nothing on the outside; it would be unable to manufacture, out of nothing, good guys coming to the rescue. All it would achieve would the hero’s own mental state of hopefulness rather than hopelessness.
The hopefulness itself would rest on a lie or an illusion and thus, viewed objectively, would be finally absurd. And if the hero really knew what the situation was, but consciously used the falsehood to buoy up his feelings and go whistling along, we would either say, “Poor guy!” or “He’s a fool.” It is this kind of conscious deceit that someone like Woody Allen has looked full in the face and will have none of.
Now this is what the existential methodology is about. If the universe we are living in is what the materialistic humanists say it is, then with our reason (when we stop to think about it) we could find absolutely no way to have meaning or morality or hope or beauty. This would plunge us into despair. We would have to take seriously the challenge of Albert Camus (1913-1960) in the first sentence of The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”92 Why stay alive in an absurd universe? Ah! But that is not where we stop. We say to ourselves – “There is hope!” (even though there is no help). “We shall overcome!” (even though nothing is more certain than that we shall be destroyed, both individually at death and cosmically with the end of all conscious life). This is what confronts us on all sides today: the modern irrational-ism.
(Scott and Zelda pictured below)
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)
Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)
Ernest Hemingway and both his good friend Scott Fitzgerald and Scott’s wife Zelda tried to blot it all out with alcohol and later in the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS we see Zelda trying to commit suicide. She actually was in different stages of mental distress the last 15 years of her life which ended at age 48 when a fire killed 9 people at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina (according to Wikipedia). Unfortunately her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald died 8 years earlier in 1940 from alcoholism. Ernest Hemingway ended his life on July 2, 1961 by shooting himself with his favorite shotgun.
(An older Zelda in 1942 seen below)
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(Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald with friend Ernest Hemingway, left)
midnight in paris – Fitzgeralds and Hemingway
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ZELDA FITZGERALD: You look lost!-
GIL PENDER: Oh, yeah!- You’re an American?-
ZELDA FITZGERALD: If you count Alabama as America, which I do.I miss the bathtub gin. What do you do?-
GIL PENDER: Me? I’m a writer.-
ZELDA FITZGERALD: Who do you write?-
GIL PENDER: Oh, right now I’m working on a novel.- Oh, yes?
ZELDA FITZGERALD: I’m Zelda, by the way. Oh, Scott! Scott!- Yes, what it is, sweetheart?- Here’s a writer, from, um… where?-
GIL PENDER: California.–
SCOTT FITZGERALD: Scott Fitzgerald, and who are you, old sport?
GIL PENDER: Gil…the… You havethe same names as…As what? Scott Fitzgerald and…Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
SCOTT FITZGERALD:The Fitzgeralds. Isn’t she beautiful?
GIL PENDER: Yes. Yes! Yeah, that’s… that’sa coincidence…like….uh…
ZELDA FITZGERALD: You have a glazed look in your eye. Stunned.Stupefied. Anesthetized. Lobotomized
GIL PENDER: I…I…keep looking at the man playing piano, and I believe it or not, recognize hisface from some old sheet music.
ZELDA FITZGERALD: I know I can be one of the great writers of musical lyrics- not that I can write melodies, and I try,and then I hear the songs he writes, and then I realize: I’ll never write a great lyric,- and MY TALENT REALLY LIES IN DRINKING.-
SCOTT FITZGERALD: Sure does.
Later in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS we find Zelda attempting to jump in the Seine river and end her life.
GIL PENDER:God, is that who I think it is?
ADRIANA: What is she doing here,staring into the water?Oh my God! Zelda, what are you doing?!- Please?
ZELDA: I don’t want to live!-
ADRIANA: Stop!- What is it?-
ZELDA: Scott and that beautiful countess.They were– It was so obvious they were whispering about me,and the more they drank, the more he fell in love with her!
GIL PENDER: He…Scott loves only you.- I can tell you that with absolute certainty.-
ZELDA: No.- He’s tired of me!-
GIL PENDER: You’re wrong. You’re wrong. I know.-
ZELDA: How?-
GIL PENDER: Trust me. I know.- Sometimes you get a feel for people, and I get…-
ZELDA: My skin hurts!-
ADRIANA: What do you mean?-
ZELDA: I don’t wanna…I hate the way I look!
ADRIANA:Don’t do that!-
GIL PENDER: Here. Take this.-
ZELDA:What is this?
GIL PENDER: It’s a Valium. It’llmake you feel better.-
ADRIANA:You carry medicine?-
GIL PENDER: No, not normally.It’s just since I’vebeen engaged to Inez,I’ve been having panic attacks, but I’msure they’ll subside after the wedding.
ADRIANA: I’ve never heard of Valium. What is this?
GIL PENDER:It’s the…pill of the future.
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I have posted this article below earlier but I wanted to include a portion of it today.
People interested in truth often look to philosophy for answers. However, atheist philosophies offer more questions than answers, and this has serious consequences. Statistics show that atheists end up more prone to suicide than people who have a spiritual foundation.[1] One woman, Sharon Rocha, ended up committing suicide after reading an article at the Raving Atheists blog. In her suicide note, Rocha stated “I have been stripped of my delusions… The universe is a cold, uncaring place in which life is short, meaningless and full of suffering.”[2] If you are an atheist thinking of suicide or just seriously interested in the meaning of life, I recommend reading Solomon’s book Ecclesiastes. The book outlines the deceptions of a false perception of reality and the delight of knowing the God who created the universe for a good purpose.
The name Ecclesiastes is translated from Latin into The Preacher. So what exactly is the connection between philosophy and a preacher preaching the gospel? Well, as I’ve written various articles on Christianity, I’ve found that few atheists are interested in reading them. However, when I’ve pointedly challenged the philosophical roots of atheism, I’ve found some atheists eager to step up and defend their beliefs through dialogue and debate. Philosophical questions and challenges are at the core of the book of Ecclesiastes and there is an undertone of evangelism. There’s a saying “You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar.” But, as we’ll see in Ecclesiastes, you can attract even more bees by prodding the beehive. But you’d better be prepared for what you’re getting into.
Ecclesiastes 12.11 states: “The words of the wise are like goads, their collected sayings like firmly embedded nails–given by one Shepherd.” (NIV)
Goads are pointed prods that are used to help direct cattle and sheep. Words of truth prick the conscience and help to guide people towards moral and ethical reason. The firmly embedded nails signify the fixed principles of logic and the reality of absolute truth. Words of logic help to pin down people who have developed a false paradigm and a false view of reality. Logic helps people to see that their beliefs are not in harmony with reality.
Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)
Meaninglessness and Materialism
There is a wealth of insight in the book of Ecclesiastes, but you can break down the main philosophical aspects into three main points:
1. The Emptiness of Worldly Pre-occupations – Eccl. 2:1-11
2. The Brevity of Life – Eccl. 12:1-8
3. The Only Logical Purpose in Life – Eccl. 12:13-14[9]
Solomon begins Ecclesiastes 1.2-3 announcing “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Teacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’ What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?” How discouraging can you get? The key to understanding the book of Ecclesiastes is to understand that he makes many false statements based upon a materialist perspective, in viewing everything “under the sun” as meaningless. Solomon addresses common materialist idols in society and shows why these are meaningless and empty pursuits. Solomon tries learning, laughter an liquor in an attempt to find satisfaction, but he’s left empty.
Solomon was the perfect candidate to dispel the illusion that wealth and physical pleasure can bring the kind of deep fulfillment we’re searching for in life. As the wealthiest man in history he had everything available at his fingertips. Whatever he desired, he could have. But time after time he was struck by the emptiness of all these material allurements.
Common folks don’t have the money to be able to fulfill whatever whim we may have. In society we are led to believe that if we just had a bigger house, a better job, a more pleasant husband or wife, or whatever it may be, then we would be happy. For us common folks, happiness may seem as though it’s always just around the corner. If only… then I’d be happy. But Solomon became the ultimate object lesson in this regard because he was able to try anything and everything he wanted and he finding out first-hand that materialism represents a sad and vacuous existence compared to theism.
King Solomon of Israel wrote the book of Ecclesiastes after he had backslidden to a certain degree. He had known what was right, but disobeyed God in his life and took on many wives, horse stables and wealth, though these things were forbidden for a king of Israel. Deuteronomy 17:16-17 outlines:
“Only he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he may multiply horses; because Yahweh has said to you, You shall henceforth return no more that way. Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart not turn away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold.”
It seems Solomon allowed his great wisdom get to his head, so to speak, and to fill him with pride. His heart gradually became dulled to God’s presence and purpose. But, nevertheless, God disciplined him and allowed him to see his folly. Though he had made mistakes, Solomon offers that truth is still truth and a person should continue to teach the truth as God guides:
“And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs.”[10]
Though he learned lessons the hard way, Solomon gave “good heed” to present the truths that he learned and to help teach people his wisdom. It seems he may have been the first “life coach.” In the United States the “pursuit of happiness” is considered a fundamental right from the Declaration of Independence. But this pursuit, in and of itself, can become destructive when relativism rules. A 2011 study shows the 10 countries with the highest suicide rates tend to be countries where atheism has predominated. Most on the list are countries of the former Soviet Union where atheism was enforced by the state for over 70 years.[11] Other statistics bear out the fact that atheists are more prone to suicide than theists. The American Journal of Psychiatry published an article December 2004, Religious Affiliation and Suicide Attempt, with some basic conclusions:
“CONCLUSIONS: Religious affiliation is associated with less suicidal behavior in depressed inpatients. After other factors were controlled, it was found that greater moral objections to suicide and lower aggression level in religiously affiliated subjects may function as protective factors against suicide attempts. Further study about the influence of religious affiliation on aggressive behavior and how moral objections can reduce the probability of acting on suicidal thoughts may offer new therapeutic strategies in suicide prevention.”[12]
Two key aspects were cited in the AJP article: less aggressive behavior and a moral objection to suicide. The decrease of aggression in spiritual people may have to do with the knowledge that there is in-fact deep meaning in life. Sometimes intellectuals are prone to suicide. Solomon confirmed that materialist knowledge without spiritual truth brings grief: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”[13]
(Alan Sandage below)
Like Solomon, people who have large IQs can tend to have inflated egos. In 2010, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Stephen Hawking declared that heaven is a “fairy tale” for fearful people.[14] He is correct in one sense that Christians are fearful in that we fear God with a sense of awe and wonder at his majestic wisdom and power. In contrast to Hawking, the Jewish physicist Alan Sandage was an atheist most of his life but simply could not dispel all the evidence he had seen in the cosmos pointing to God’s necessary existence. He became a Christian at age 60, explaining, “I could not live a life full of cynicism. I chose to believe, and a peace of mind came over me.”[15] One of the reasons Sandage believed was the complexity of the universe: “The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone.”[16]
(Stephen Hawking below in black and white and then a picture from recent movie about Hawking)
It doesn’t take a great mind to understand what Solomon and Sandage knew, it only takes an open mind. Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking declared humanity was on the verge of discovering the “theory of everything”with a 50 per cent chance of knowing it by 2000. But by 2010 Hawking had given up hope.[17] If only Hawking had read the book of Ecclesiastes, he could have saved a lot of wasted time: “He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”[18] Hawking is a good example showing that intelligence and wisdom are two very distinct things.
(King Solomon author of Ecclesiastes below
The “one shepherd” mentioned in Ecclesiastes 12.9 seems to portray Jesus. In John 10.11, Jesus is quoted as saying “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” NIV Jesus is also referred to as the “word made flesh.” In this sense Jesus is the source of all truth and spiritual satisfaction, as implied by Psalm 81:16. “I would satisfy you with wild honey from the rock”, Jesus being the rock of our salvation.The Logical Conclusions One of the conclusions of Ecclesiastes is that we can live a live of true joy when God is the foundation of our lives:“It is good and fitting for one to eat and drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labor in which he toils under the sun all the days of his life which God gives him; for it is his heritage. As for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, and given him power to eat of it, to receive his heritage and rejoice in his labor—this is the gift of God. For he will not dwell unduly on the days of his life, because God keeps him busy with the joy of his heart.”[19]Another conclusion is that there is ultimate justice in the world and this knowledge has ramifications for a healthy personal life and for a healthy society:
“Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.”[20]
We will be less prone to bitterness when we realize God will address all injustice in the future. And we understand why corruption is rampant today in society because many people do not believe there is any kind of accountability to our Creator. People assume that they can do anything they can get away with. Hopefully more people will recognize that atheism neither works as a personal philosophy nor as a good basis for society.
Even Communist China sees that theism is pragmatically more effective and beneficial than an atheistic model of society: “The officially atheist Chinese government is surprisingly open to Christianity, at least partially, because it sees a link between the faith and economic success, said a sought after scholar who has relations with governments in Asia.”[21] Dr. William Jeynes, senior fellow of The Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., outlined this fact. But the truth is a dangerous thing and has a way of shaking up deceptive paradigms: “Jeynes concluded by saying that the key message he wants to convey is that China is both open to Christianity and nervous about the religion because of the potential problems it could bring to the communist government.”[22]
If we are left with only time and chance and the view of the UNIFORMITY OF NATURAL CAUSES in a closed system then our only choice is NIHILISM. TWO OTHER ALSO HELD THIS SAME view of uniformity of natural causes in a closed system in 1978 when their hit song DUST IN THE WIND rose to the top 10 in the music charts.
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IF WE ARE LEFT WITH JUST THE MACHINE THEN WHAT IS THE FINAL CONCLUSION IF THERE WAS NO PERSONAL GOD THAT CREATED US? Examine the song DUST IN THE WIND by Kerry Livgren of the group KANSAS which was a hit song in 1978 when it rose to #6 on the charts because so many people connected with the message of the song. It included these words, “All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see, Dust in the Wind, All we are is dust in the wind, Don’t hang on, Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky, It slips away, And all your money won’t another minute buy.”
Kerry Livgren himself said that he wrote the song because he saw where man was without a personal God in the picture. Solomon pointed out in the Book of Ecclesiastes that those who believe that God doesn’t exist must accept three things. FIRST, death is the end and SECOND, chance and time are the only guiding forces in this life. FINALLY, power reigns in this life and the scales are never balanced. The Christian can face death and also confront the world knowing that it is not determined by chance and time alone and finally there is a judge who will balance the scales.
Both Kerry Livgren and the bass player Dave Hope of Kansas became Christians eventually. Kerry Livgren first tried Eastern Religions and Dave Hope had to come out of a heavy drug addiction. I was shocked and elated to see their personal testimony on The 700 Club in 1981 and that same interview can be seen on You Tube today. Livgren lives in Topeka, Kansas today where he teaches “Diggers,” a Sunday school class at Topeka Bible Church. DAVE HOPE is the head of Worship, Evangelism and Outreach at Immanuel Anglican Church in Destin, Florida.
(Kerry Livgren in front and Dave Hope in background)
About the film:
In 1973, six guys in a local band from America’s heartland began a journey that surpassed even their own wildest expectations, by achieving worldwide superstardom… watch the story unfold as the incredible story of the band KANSAS is told for the first time in the DVD Miracles Out of Nowhere.
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Let me close by talking to you about the ROMAN ROAD TO CHRIST.
Rom. 3:10, “As it is written, ‘There is none righteous, not even one . . . “
Rom. 3:23, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Rom. 5:12, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.”
Rom. 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Rom. 5:8, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Rom. 10:9-10, “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.”
Rom. 10:13, “For whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Woody Allen believes that we live in a cold, violent and meaningless universe and it seems that his main character (Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson) in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS shares that view. Pender’s meeting with the Surrealists is by far the best scene in the movie because they are ones who can […]
In the last post I pointed out how King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN and that Bertrand Russell, and T.S. Eliot and other modern writers had agreed with Solomon’s view. However, T.S. Eliot had found a solution to this problem and put his faith in […]
In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Gil Pender ponders the advice he gets from his literary heroes from the 1920’s. King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN and many modern artists, poets, and philosophers have agreed. In the 1920’s T.S.Eliot and his house guest Bertrand Russell were two of […]
Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald left the prohibitionist America for wet Paris in the 1920’s and they both drank a lot. WINE, WOMEN AND SONG was their motto and I am afraid ultimately wine got the best of Fitzgerald and shortened his career. Woody Allen pictures this culture in the first few clips in the […]
In the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Woody Allen the best scene of the movie is when Gil Pender encounters the SURREALISTS!!! This series deals with the Book of Ecclesiastes and Woody Allen films. The first post dealt with MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT and it dealt with the fact that in the Book of Ecclesiastes Solomon does contend […]
In the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Woody Allen is really looking at one main question through the pursuits of his main character GIL PENDER. That question is WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT? This is the second post I have […]
I am starting a series of posts called ECCLESIASTES AND WOODY ALLEN’S FILMS: SOLOMON “WOULD GOT ALONG WELL WITH WOODY!” The quote from the title is actually taken from the film MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT where Stanley derides the belief that life has meaning, saying it’s instead “nasty, brutish, and short. Is that Hobbes? I would have […]
Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds A Tale of Three Cities Episode:2 Paris 1928 BBC Documentary 2014
Published on Aug 28, 2014
Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds A Tale of Three Cities Episode:2 Paris 1928 BBC Documentary 2014
Dr James Fox tells the story of Paris in 1928. It was a city that attracted people dreaming of a better world after World War I. This was the year when the surrealists Magritte, Dali and Bunuel brought their bizarre new vision to the people, and when emigre writers and musicians such as Ernest Hemingway and George Gershwin came looking for inspiration.
Paris in 1928 was where black musicians and dancers like Josephine Baker found adulation, where Cole Porter took time off from partying to write Let’s Do it, and where radical architect Le Corbusier planned a modernist utopia that involved pulling down much of Paris itself.
Gil, who once lived in Paris briefly, longs for the era of great writing that was the 1920s, when the city was populated by great artists intermingling and collaborating and drinking, like Hemingway, Picasso, Fitzgerald, Dali, and so on. One night after having suffered through another one of Inez’s pseudo-intellectual friend Paul’s (a squirmingly awkward and hilarious turn by Michael Sheen) speeches about art, instead of going dancing with the group, Gil decides to walk back to the hotel and wander the streets at night, gathering some fresh and air and inspiration. He gets lost during this sojourn, and picked up, half drunk, by a couple in an old Peugeot. The people are Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and soon Gil is hobnobbing with everyone from Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso to Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, and having his novel read and critiqued by Gertrude Stein.
Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a successful screenwriter who wants more from life. While on holiday in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her stuffy, conservative parents, Gil’s finds himself at a creative impasse, working on his novel about nostalgia. Goaded by Inez to stick to money-making movies, Gil separates himself from the group one night – lost and drunk – and at the stroke of twelve, finds himself back in 1920′s Paris. There, he runs into all the greats including Cole Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. When he meets Picasso’s girlfriend Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Gil’s got to choose between the past and present.
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Kansas – Dust In The Wind
Ecclesiastes 1
Published on Sep 4, 2012
Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 2, 2012 | Pastor Derek Neider
Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race? Co-authored by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop)
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
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March 13, 2020
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. I know that you don’t agree with my pro-life views but I wanted to challenge you as a fellow Christian to re-examine your pro-choice view. Although we are both Christians and have the Bible as the basis for our moral views, I did want you to take a close look at the views of the pro-life atheist Nat Hentoff too. Hentoff became convinced of the pro-life view because of secular evidence that shows that the unborn child is human. I would ask you to consider his evidence and then of course reverse your views on abortion.
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Nat Hentoff is an atheist, but he became a pro-life activist because of the scientific evidence that shows that the unborn child is a distinct and separate human being and even has a separate DNA. His perspective is a very intriguing one that I thought you would be interested in. I have shared before many cases (Bernard Nathanson, Donald Trump, Paul Greenberg, Kathy Ireland) when other high profile pro-choice leaders have changed their views and this is just another case like those. I have contacted the White House over and over concerning this issue and have even received responses. I am hopeful that people will stop and look even in a secular way (if they are not believers) at this abortion debate and see that the unborn child is deserving of our protection.That is why the writings of Nat Hentoff of the Cato Institute are so crucial.
by Nat Hentoff
The Washington Post, October 29, 1994
For years, women who identify themselves as pro-choice have told me with absolute assurance that it is impossible for a woman to be both pro-life and a feminist. Yet, in various parts of the country, I keep meeting women who indeed are both.
Some of them like to quote a heroine of the women’s liberation movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the first women’s rights meeting in 1848. “When we consider that women are treated as property,” Stanton said, “it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
Pro-life feminism has finally achieved mainstream attention in Glamour magazine. Glamour had asked to hear from readers who are pro-life. Three thousand women answered, and as indicated in the February 1994 issue, many of them are feminists who resent the stereotypes of pro-lifers by journalists. Said one of them: “We are painted as fanatical zealots, usually male, and often hung up about sexual matters.”
Also often part of that stereotype is that they are poorly educated. Answering Glamour’s invitation were pro-life women university professors, legal analysts and an organizer of Science Students for Life.
One, a middle-school counselor is “a non-practicing Catholic … who disagrees with her church’s stand against birth control, premarital sex, homosexuality and women as clergy.” She contributes to Amnesty International.
Another voted a straight Democratic ticket until Bill Clinton appeared on the presidential line. (So did a good many pro-choice people I know.) The former Democrat emphasizes that ” abortion denies civil rights to unborn children.”
A woman who became pregnant after being raped at knife point brought the pregnancy to term and then gave the child up for adoption. “It is not a sin to be raped,” she told the magazine, “but it is a sin to kill your child. Killing your child doesn’t help you get over the rape.”
This disdain for self-deception in matters of life and death became familiar to me years ago as I got to know the liveliest group of pro-life feminists in the country — Feminists for Life of America, now headquartered in Washington. Most of those I met in the 1980s were veterans of the civil rights and antiwar movements. One had been arrested 11 times — demonstrating at missile bases and in front of abortion clinics.
With chapters throughout the United States and Canada, Feminists for Life belong to — among other antiviolence organizations — the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. A few years ago, the Minnesota chapter blocked a death penalty measure in that state’s legislature. (And polls have indicated that a majority of pro-lifers at large are against the death penalty.) The credo of Feminists for Life — which hardly fits the media’s coverage of pro-lifers — is: “We oppose all forms of violence, including abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment, as they are inconsistent with the core feminist principles of justice, non-violence and non-discrimination.”
In their characteristically pungent magazine, the American Feminist, they further define themselves: “We believe in a woman’s right to control her body, and she deserves this right no matter where she lives, even if she’s still living inside her mother’s womb.”
Earlier this year, Feminists for Life joined in an unprecedented coalition with such long-established pro-choice groups as Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and the ACLU to fight the “child exclusion provision” in the Clinton welfare plan. The provision allows states to cut off any additional benefits to women who have more children while receiving welfare.
NARAL points out that “putting women into circumstances where they are forced to choose abortion is every bit as wrong as denying women access to abortion services.” Speaking from the pro-life position, Serrin Foster, executive director of Feminists for Life, says that the Clinton welfare plan “would force mothers to chose between aborting pregnancies and accepting further impoverishment for their children.”
While this coalition may form again on matters of urgent common ground, the fundamental differences will remain. In a recent issue of the American Feminist, Barbara Newman makes that division clear: “If it is wrong to kill with guns, bombs, or poison, with the electric chair or the noose, it is most tragically wrong to kill with the physician’s tools.”
But is abortion killing? Newman answers: “Euphemism kills.”
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have. Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.
Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION
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Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)
Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)
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Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband. Now after presenting the secular approach of Nat Hentoff I wanted to make some comments concerning our shared Christian faith. I respect you for putting your faith in Christ for your eternal life. I am pleading to you on the basis of the Bible to please review your religious views concerning abortion. It was the Bible that caused the abolition movement of the 1800’s and it also was the basis for Martin Luther King’s movement for civil rights and it also is the basis for recognizing the unborn children.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 1) ABORTION OF THE HUMAN RACE Published on Oct 6, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ________________ Picture of Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith from the 1930′s above. I was sad to read about Edith passing away on Easter weekend in 2013. I wanted to pass along this fine […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
I have been writing President Obama letters and have not received a personal response yet. (He reads 10 letters a day personally and responds to each of them.) However, I did receive a form letter in the form of an email on April 16, 2011. First you will see my letter to him which was mailed around April 9th(although […]
ABORTION – THE SILENT SCREAM 1 / Extended, High-Resolution Version (with permission from APF). Republished with Permission from Roy Tidwell of American Portrait Films as long as the following credits are shown: VHS/DVDs Available American Portrait Films Call 1-800-736-4567 http://www.amport.com The Hand of God-Selected Quotes from Bernard N. Nathanson, M.D., Unjust laws exist. Shall we […]
When I think of the things that make me sad concerning this country, the first thing that pops into my mind is our treatment of unborn children. Donald Trump is probably going to run for president of the United States. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council recently had a conversation with him concerning the […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
It is truly sad to me that liberals will lie in order to attack good Christian people like state senator Jason Rapert of Conway, Arkansas because he headed a group of pro-life senators that got a pro-life bill through the Arkansas State Senate the last week of January in 2013. I have gone back and […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
Sometimes you can see evidences in someone’s life of how content they really are. I saw something like that on 2-8-13 when I confronted a blogger that goes by the name “AngryOldWoman” on the Arkansas Times Blog. See below. Leadership Crisis in America Published on Jul 11, 2012 Picture of Adrian Rogers above from 1970′s […]
In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented against abortion (Episode 1), infanticide (Episode 2), euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]
E P I S O D E 1 0 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode X – Final Choices 27 min FINAL CHOICES I. Authoritarianism the Only Humanistic Social Option One man or an elite giving authoritative arbitrary absolutes. A. Society is sole absolute in absence of other absolutes. B. But society has to be […]
E P I S O D E 9 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IX – The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence 27 min T h e Age of Personal Peace and Afflunce I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads […]
E P I S O D E 8 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VIII – The Age of Fragmentation 27 min I saw this film series in 1979 and it had a major impact on me. T h e Age of FRAGMENTATION I. Art As a Vehicle Of Modern Thought A. Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, […]
E P I S O D E 7 Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode VII – The Age of Non Reason I am thrilled to get this film series with you. I saw it first in 1979 and it had such a big impact on me. Today’s episode is where we see modern humanist man act […]
E P I S O D E 6 How Should We Then Live 6#1 Uploaded by NoMirrorHDDHrorriMoN on Oct 3, 2011 How Should We Then Live? Episode 6 of 12 ________ I am sharing with you a film series that I saw in 1979. In this film Francis Schaeffer asserted that was a shift in […]
E P I S O D E 5 How Should We Then Live? Episode 5: The Revolutionary Age I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Francis Schaeffer noted, “Reformation Did Not Bring Perfection. But gradually on basis of biblical teaching there […]
Dr. Francis Schaeffer – Episode IV – The Reformation 27 min I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer makes three key points concerning the Reformation: “1. Erasmian Christian humanism rejected by Farel. 2. Bible gives needed answers not only as to […]
Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 3 “The Renaissance” Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 3) THE RENAISSANCE I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer really shows why we have so […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 2) THE MIDDLE AGES I was impacted by this film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 1970′s and I wanted to share it with you. Schaeffer points out that during this time period unfortunately we have the “Church’s deviation from early church’s teaching in regard […]
Francis Schaeffer: “How Should We Then Live?” (Episode 1) THE ROMAN AGE Today I am starting a series that really had a big impact on my life back in the 1970′s when I first saw it. There are ten parts and today is the first. Francis Schaeffer takes a look at Rome and why […]
Office of Barack and Michelle Obama P.O. Box 91000 Washington, DC 20066
Dear President Obama,
I wrote you over 700 letters while you were President and I mailed them to the White House and also published them on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org .I received several letters back from your staff and I wanted to thank you for those letters.
I have been reading your autobiography A PROMISED LAND and I have been enjoying it.
Let me make a few comments on it, and here is the first quote of yours I want to comment on:
But with that came a corollary lesson: an awareness of what we risked when our actions failed to live up to our image and our ideals, the anger and resentment this could breed, the damage that was done. When I heard Indonesians talk about the hundreds of thousands slaughtered in a coup—widely believed to have CIA backing—that had brought a military dictatorship to power in 1967, or listened to Latin American environmental activists detailing how U.S. companies were befouling their countryside, or commiserated with Indian American or Pakistani American friends as they chronicled the countless times that they’d been pulled aside for “random” searches at airports since 9/11, I felt America’s defenses weakening, saw chinks in the armor that I was sure over time made our country less safe. That dual vision, as much as my skin color, distinguished me from previous presidents. For my supporters, it was a defining foreign policy strength, enabling me to amplify America’s influence around the world and anticipate problems that might arise from ill-considered policies. For my detractors, it was evidence of weakness, raising the possibility that I might hesitate to advance American interests because of a lack of conviction, or even divided loyalties. For some of my fellow citizens, it was far worse than that. Having the son of a black African with a Muslim name and socialist ideas ensconced in the White House with the full force of the U.S. government under his command was precisely the thing they wanted to be defended against.
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Thomas Sowell rightly noted:
In his recent trip to India, President Barack Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his – denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a president of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.
In his recent trip to India, President Barack Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his – denigrating the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even now, “terrible poverty.”
Make no mistake about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten people. But for a president of the United States to be smearing America in a foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and immature.
Years after the last lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India’s own government was still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the Untouchables, including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of “National Geographic” magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against Untouchables in India in the 21st century.
Nothing that happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii, or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the appalling treatment of Untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.
The history of the human race has not always been a pretty picture, regardless of what part of the world you look at, and regardless of whatever color of the rainbow the people have been.
If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other reason to be rotten to you.
The question is whether you want to deal with such episodes at the time they occur or whether you want to nurse your grievances for years and look for opportunities for “payback” against other people for what somebody else did. Much that has been said and done by both President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder suggests that they are in payback mode.
Both have repeatedly jumped into local law enforcement issues, far from Washington, and turned them into racial issues, long before the facts came out. These two men – neither of whom grew up in a ghetto – have been quick to play the role of defenders of the ghetto, even when that meant defending the kinds of hoodlums who can make life a living hell for decent people in black ghettos.
Far from benefitting ghetto blacks, the vision presented by the Obama administration, and the policies growing out of that vision, have a track record of counterproductive results on both sides of the Atlantic – that is, among low-income whites in England as well as low-income blacks in the United States.
In both countries, children from low-income immigrant families do far better in schools than the native-born, low-income children. Moreover, low-income immigrant groups rise out of poverty far more readily than low-income natives.
The Jan. 31 issue of the distinguished British magazine “The Economist” reports that the children of African refugees from Somalia do far better in school than low-income British children in general.
“Somali immigrants,” it reports, “insist that their children turn up for extra lessons at weekends.” These are “well-ordered children” and their parents understand that education “is their ticket out of poverty.”
Contrast that with the Obama administration threatening schools with federal action if they do not reduce their disciplining of black males for misbehavior.
Despite whatever political benefit or personal satisfaction that may give Barack Obama and Eric Holder, reducing the sanctions against misbehavior in school virtually guarantees that classroom disorder will make the teaching of other black students far less effective, if not impossible.
For black children whose best ticket out of poverty is education, that is a lifelong tragedy, even if it is a political bonanza to politicians who claim to be their friends and defenders.
The biggest advantage that the children of low-income immigrants have over the children of native-born, low-income families is that low-income immigrants have not been saturated for generations with the rhetoric of victimhood and hopelessness, spread by people like Obama, Holder and their counterparts overseas.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733 everettehatcher@gmail.com
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, I know that you receive 20,000 letters a day and that you actually read 10 of them every day. I really do respect you for trying to get a pulse on what is going on out here. There have […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit |Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at war with religion in our public life. Lillian Kwon quoted somebody […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
President Obama Speaks at The Ohio State University Commencement Ceremony Published on May 5, 2013 President Obama delivers the commencement address at The Ohio State University. May 5, 2013. You can learn a lot about what President Obama thinks the founding fathers were all about from his recent speech at Ohio State. May 7, 2013, […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, President Obama | Edit | Comments (0)
Dr. C. Everett Koop with Bill Graham. Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (1)
America’s Founding Fathers Deist or Christian? – David Barton 4/6 There have been many articles written by evangelicals like me who fear that our founding fathers would not recognize our country today because secular humanism has rid our nation of spiritual roots. I am deeply troubled by the secular agenda of those who are at […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Tagged governor of connecticut, john witherspoon, jonathan trumbull | Edit | Comments (1)
3 Of 5 / The Bible’s Influence In America / American Heritage Series / David Barton There were 55 gentlemen who put together the constitution and their church affliation is of public record. Greg Koukl notes: Members of the Constitutional Convention, the most influential group of men shaping the political foundations of our nation, were […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I do not think that John Quincy Adams was a founding father in the same sense that his father was. However, I do think he was involved in the early days of our government working with many of the founding fathers. Michele Bachmann got into another history-related tussle on ABC’s “Good Morning America” today, standing […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in David Barton, Founding Fathers | Edit | Comments (0)
I have gone back and forth and back and forth with many liberals on the Arkansas Times Blog on many issues such as abortion, human rights, welfare, poverty, gun control and issues dealing with popular culture. Here is another exchange I had with them a while back. My username at the Ark Times Blog is Saline […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit |Comments (0)
I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Francis Schaeffer: “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” (Episode 4) THE BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY Published on Oct 7, 2012 by AdamMetropolis ____________ The 45 minute video above is from the film series created from Francis Schaeffer’s book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” with Dr. C. Everett Koop. This book really helped develop my political […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
No outrunning his past, Alabama’s Steve Sarkisian ready for another head-coaching job
Nov 4, 2020
Alex ScarboroughESPN Staff Writer
Editor’s Note: This story ran on Nov. 4. With Steve Sarkisian winning the Broyles Award, which annually goes to college football’s top assistant coach, we are bringing it back.
Steve Sarkisian had a decision to make in February. An offer from Colorado was on the table. Five-and-a-half years after his career went off the rails, he could sign on the dotted line and become a head coach again, and he could do it closer to home and within the familiar confines of the Pac-12.
The timing wasn’t right. There were other opportunities, other interviews he could have taken, but he wasn’t ready to leave Alabama — not after he left so quickly the first time around.
Yes, Alabama agreed to increase his salary to $2.5 million per year, but he also valued the stability of his role as offensive coordinator. He was learning so much. Of coach Nick Saban, he said, “I’m with a really good mentor.”
The old Steve Sarkisian might not have looked at it quite the same way. He might have jumped at the chance to strike out on his own — never mind how difficult it is to win at Colorado — and take the next step in rewriting the story of a career that once seemed all but lost. But the old Steve Sarkisian is gone. Lane Kiffin looks at his friend today and calls him “Sark Nowadays.”
Sark Nowadays doesn’t yell so much. The fire’s still there, but he has mellowed. His blood pressure is a little lower, Kiffin said.
Sark Nowadays, Kiffin said, is better suited than he ever was to handle working alongside the prickly Saban. So far, there hasn’t been a single public blowup.
Kiffin and Sarkisian still joke about the good old days when they were hotshot assistants under coach Pete Carroll at USC and how Kiffin once asked Sarkisian to pick up his laundry. He’ll never live that down. They grew up in coaching together and ended up competing as head coaches three times. Kiffin is proud that he went 2-1 in those contests, but he added, “And then he got my job when I was fired at USC.”
Sarkisian lasted less than two seasons in L.A. before his alcohol abuse became apparent, and he was let go. Eleven months later, Kiffin helped get Sarkisian on staff at Alabama.
Kiffin, who is back in the SEC as head coach at Ole Miss, said of himself and Sarkisian: “It’s been a wild ride.”
“He’s done a remarkable job,” Kiffin added. “I thought after the year with Tua [Tagovailoa] and all the records last year, I thought he was going to go take that Colorado job.
“I wish he would have. Maybe we would have beaten Alabama if he wasn’t there. But he stayed, and that says a lot.”
It says that Sarkisian has changed. It also says that he’s willing to be patient.
Because if Colorado was ready to make Sarkisian a head coach in February, it’s safe to say that what he has done since then, coaching a quarterback in the thick of the Heisman Trophy race and orchestrating one of the best offenses in college football, will have even more suitors calling.
There’s no outrunning his past, but Sarkisian seems to be on the verge of getting a second chance. An industry source told ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg just last month, “Sark is a lot more hirable. I don’t think anybody will have a lot of questions.”
Sark Nowadays isn’t the same person Kiffin connected with in the early 2000s at USC. Back then, Kiffin coached receivers, Sarkisian the quarterbacks. They were together constantly, ragging on each other. They even carpooled to work.
Kiffin came from coaching royalty as the son of defensive guru Monte Kiffin. Sarkisian, on the other hand, was just a kid from Torrance, California, who went to El Camino College and BYU. He was out of the Canadian Football League and working in a cubicle in the software industry when offensive coordinator Norm Chow brought him to USC as a grad assistant.
But it was as if Sarkisian and Kiffin shared a football mind. When they were co-coordinators, they’d draw up 10 plays each for the week’s game plan, and at least eight of them would be the same, Kiffin recalled.
“They were best friends,” former USC quarterback John David Booty said.
Sarkisian would sit beside Kiffin on the bus ride home after games, slumped over and exhausted. Kiffin would ask, “What’s up?” And Sarkisian would tell him it felt as if he’d competed in the game himself.
Kiffin was more the laid-back type. Sarkisian, Booty said, was intense and approached every snap in practice as if it could be the last.
“He’s going to push you and push you and push you,” Booty said. “And at the end of the day, we’re glad he did.”
Mark Sanchez knows that side of Sarkisian well. But Sanchez, who played quarterback at USC from 2005 to ’08, said Sarkisian knew when to dial it back, too. If you were having a bad day, Sarkisian would pull your face mask in close and whisper so other players couldn’t hear.
This practice, Sarkisian would say, is slow and stinks.
Sanchez recalled the rest of the conversation.
“There’s one guy that can fix this, and I’m talking to him right now,” Sarkisian would say. “You get it? Fix it, please. Now you’re going to run wrist band, red seven. Go!”
Having played the quarterback position, Sarkisian understood the pressure that came with it and made it about having fun. Yogi Roth, an assistant on staff, said Sarkisian would tell quarterbacks, “You don’t have to be the guy who has a statue outside the stadium.”
He wanted them to let it rip, to play with confidence. If he asked about throwing a slant, he wanted them to say they wanted to throw a slant-and-go and take that shot deep. “All gas, no brakes,” was a familiar phrase Sarkisian tossed out in meeting rooms.
Sanchez would walk in late at night and watch Sarkisian drawing up plays.
“He would go through different series,” Sanchez said. “Like, ‘Oh, s—, we’re going to hit them with the A-12 divide for Z getaway. Oh, God, Ronald Johnsonis going to blow the top off these motherf—ers. And if it’s not there, you can dump it down to your comeback. That would be Patrick Turner. That would be No. 1 for the USC Football Trojans. And if he doesn’t get it, we’ll just dump it down to another five-star guy.'”
It was like Jon Gruden grinning wildly about running Spider 2, Y Banana. In fact, Sanchez said Sarkisian reminds him some of Gruden, and Kiffin added that Sarkisian does a killer Gruden impersonation.
If Sarkisian thought you weren’t as amped as he was, he’d call you out. Sanchez remembers Sarkisian challenging him once, “Hey, bro, if I’m talking too fast for you, you want to take a break? You want to get a Mountain Dew or something? You OK? You gettin’ a little sleepy?”
Then he’d dive back into the play sheet.
“That’s a touchdown if you throw a dime like I would,” Sanchez remembered Sarkisian saying. “If not, you have Anthony McCoy running the wheel. And if not, you can dump it down to Stafon Johnson. How about that? Let him scamper off. See, what we’re doing here is throwing four guys into one area. We are flooding and overflowing the defensive side. They can’t cover all four. Trust your eyes. Trust your feet. Boom! We’re in!'”
Said Sanchez: “You’re just like, whaaaat? This is so awesome.”
When Sarkisian got his first head-coaching job at Washington, he was the same way. Doug Nussmeier was offensive coordinator, and it was clear to him early on that Sarkisian knew exactly where he wanted to go and what the organization should look like.
They took over an 0-12 program that hadn’t gone to a bowl game in seven years. Nussmeier said Sarkisian was confident and infused everyone with that feeling.
“He’s one of the sharpest X’s and O’s coaches I’ve ever been around,” Nussmeier said. “When you get in a room with him, he’s going 180 miles per hour. He has an infectious personality. It’s go, go, go. You can see his mind working and how he’s always a step ahead.
“It’s fun, and it’s energizing. It’s wide-open.”
The Huskies beat USC. They beat Nebraska. They went to three straight bowl games. In five seasons, they finished with a record of 34-29.
Then USC fired Kiffin, and the Trojans brought back Sarkisian.
Then everything started falling apart.
They didn’t know, Kiffin said, just how good they had it. Back when they were young coaches at USC, they didn’t look around and recognize that double-digit wins weren’t a given, that two Heisman Trophy quarterbacks in three years wasn’t the norm, that competing in three consecutive national championships wasn’t how most seasons would end.
They didn’t know that it wasn’t real life they were experiencing. It was history.
“And then, when you get to the top and it’s taken away, it hits you,” Kiffin said. “You spend your whole life, and you don’t ever get a job like that, and it’s gone. And that’s hard to deal with because you don’t ever know if you’re going to get back there again.”
But perspective comes from failure, whether you’re ready for it or not. And failure forces you to confront your ego, Kiffin said.
Kiffin got a head start on that process when USC athletic director Pat Haden called him off the team bus and fired him on a tarmac midseason in 2013. Two years later, Sarkisian suffered a similar fate. But there weren’t airplanes taxiing when Haden told Sarkisian that he was out at USC; it was worse than that. There were reports and troubling video of Sarkisian showing up to work drunk, and just like that, his career prospects were nil.
Sarkisian later revealed in a lawsuit filed against USC that he had undergone “intensive” treatment, and in 2017, he told reporters that his alcoholism was “something I have to work on every single day, and I do work on it every single day.” (Sarkisian and Alabama assistants are not permitted to speak to the media during the season.)
Picking up the pieces, Sarkisian was ready to go into TV as an analyst. Then Kiffin told his boss at the time, Saban, that Sarkisian might be worth bringing in as an analyst — a low-profile, off-the-field position that Saban has made a habit of offering to recently fired head coaches looking for fresh starts.
Sarkisian said no at first. To this day, Kiffin doesn’t know what made him change his mind. But Kiffin said there are two types of coaches: those who can make the transition to the periphery of the game and those who eat, sleep and breathe ball and can’t stand not being at the center of it all. Sarkisian is the latter — someone who thrives on the schematics of the game. “He’s brilliant,” Kiffin said.
The deal was finished for Sarkisian to join Alabama before the season opener against USC that year, but Saban held off making it official until a few days after the game. Right away, Sarkisian got to work as Kiffin’s right-hand man in charge of game-planning for first-down and red zone situations.
William Vlachos, a former Alabama offensive lineman-turned-analyst, said it took only four days for Sarkisian to learn all the offensive terminology. What’s more, Sarkisian sat in on meetings and learned all of the team’s defensive verbiage.
You could tell right away, Vlachos said, how much trust existed between Sarkisian and Kiffin. That first game in the coaches box, Sarkisian was “on fire,” Vlachos said.
“He knew what plays to recommend to Lane and knew the words: You need to do this, this and this,” Vlachos recalled. “Then he’s looking back at me like, ‘They brought this blitz.’ It was unbelievable how he could regurgitate and process that quickly.”
Vlachos, who’s on staff at Colorado now, saw a lot of former head coaches come through Tuscaloosa to learn at the feet of Saban. If you’re looking to become a head coach again, being an analyst who makes five figures at Alabama can be more valuable long-term than earning seven figures as a coordinator elsewhere. Kiffin calls it getting the “Saban Stamp.”
“I don’t think Sark was there for Sark necessarily,” Vlachos said. “You get two different kind of mindsets in those roles, and I’ve been in most of them. Some people are there just for them. But, dude, I think Sark was there to help us. This guy was grinding on tape. This guy was there early as heck in the morning watching this, going over that, drawing this up, drawing that up.”
When Kiffin left a week before the national championship game to start his duties as head coach at Florida Atlantic, Saban could have turned to any of his on-field assistants to take over as playcaller. He tabbed Sarkisian.
Alabama lost to Clemson 35-31, but looking back, it was a difficult situation, shifting gears that suddenly. Even so, Sarkisian managed to produce 473 yards and 31 points with a true freshman quarterback he hadn’t coached hands-on all season.
And isn’t Alabama supposed to win every game under those circumstances? Before Deshaun Watsondid his thing, Alabama was 50-1 in games under Saban in which it had at least 30 points and 450 yards of offense.
“It’s hard to be prepared for something like that,” Vlachos said. “He did as good a job as you could have done from that spot.”
Saban thought enough of Sarkisian that he promoted him to offensive coordinator. When Sarkisian left to join the Atlanta Falcons and was then let go after two seasons, Saban brought him right back to Alabama, where he has been ever since.
Roth has become a fixture of the Pac-12 Network as an analyst, but given that there has been no Pac-12 football to watch this season, he has found himself tuning in to a lot of SEC games.
“It’s like a video game: Which star receiver am I going to get the ball to?” Roth said.
Alabama is averaging 555.2 yards and an FBS-best 47.2 points per game. Jones, who entered the season with only four career starts, is the Heisman front-runner, with 2,196 yards, 16 touchdowns and two interceptions through six games. His 77.4 completion percentage is six points higher than Tagovailoa’s career high last season.
Roth said the only difference now is how Sarkisian is pulling the strings. Sark Nowadays is almost statuesque on the sideline. Sanchez insists that the juice is still there, but he’s not so in-your-face about it.
Some of that is the result of Sarkisian’s fitting in with the more buttoned-up style of Saban. There’s little doubt, though, that it’s also a function of growing older and evolving.
Whether you ask Sanchez or Booty or Roth or Kiffin, they share pride in the way Sarkisian went through a tough time at USC and has come out on the other side. He didn’t tell them what he was going to do or how he was going to change. He just put his head down and did it, Sanchez said.
The only question now is what will happen next. When Saban tested positive for COVID-19 the week of the Georgia game, he chose Sarkisian to handle all the head-coaching duties until he could return. There’s some talk that Sarkisian might be in line to replace Saban.
Although Kiffin might wish Sarkisian would leave Alabama for selfish reasons, he has no doubt that his friend is ready to be a head coach again. Remember, Kiffin said, Sarkisian was a good coach before all of this happened. He took over a winless Washington and beat No. 3 USC in his first year.
“I know he’ll be great,” Kiffin said, “and he’ll be even better from being with Coach [Saban] over these years. He’ll be one of the elite college coaches in America.”
Editor’s Note: This is the second in a four-part series about Frank Broyles, the former Arkansas head football coach and athletic director, whose career at Arkansas came to an end earlier this month with his retirement in Fayetteville. Part one is available here.
As a college football player, Frank Broyles had the kind of career that, had he been an Arkansas Razorback, would make him still one of the most talked about Hogs of all time. However, when Broyles was 21 during the 1946 football season he was as far away from being a Hog as possible — Arkansas probably didn’t enter his mind at all.
He was such a football star at Georgia Tech, then in the Southeastern Conference, in 1944 that he was named the SEC’s player of the year, playing single-wing quarterback and setting all kinds of passing records. His single-game Orange Bowl passing stats lasted until Tom Brady came around in 2000 with Michigan to finally break them.
Broyles could have continued with his football career in the pros — the NFL’s Chicago Bears drafted him after the 1946 season — but he already knew that coaching was in his blood.
He had been the coach on the field for Georgia Tech’s legendary Bobby Dodd and he was ready to continue that on the sidelines. Arkansas’ sidelines, however, were still probably furthest from his mind. Arkansas football was still not something talked about beyond perhaps Southwest Conference borders until 1946, when John Barnhill took his first Razorback team to the Cotton Bowl and tied LSU 0-0 in a game that followed an ice storm that hit the Dallas area before New Year’s.
To understand Broyles as a coach, one must look at the coaches under whom he learned the game, starting with Dodd, who had excelled as a player under Gen. Bob Neyland at Tennessee and took that vast knowledge to Atlanta to turn Georgia Tech into a power through the 1950s.
Arkansas, tasting some SWC success in the 1930s, made its first serious move to be a football power in hiring John Barnhill, who had been Neyland’s aide-de-camp at Knoxville and took over as Vols head coach when Neyland went to war. When Neyland returned from WWII, Barnhill had to find an open head coaching job to continue serving in that role, and Arkansas beckoned.
This would begin the change that brought Broyles to Fayetteville and started the Hogs on their greatest run of football success.
After Broyles’ playing career ended, he was hired by former Neyland assistant Bob Woodruff as his offensive coach at Baylor. It was in 1948 that Broyles would see Fayetteville on a football sideline for the first time, and in the SWC he’d already begun to witness what was happening in Arkansas as Barnhill’s program took hold and what was possible there.
Woodruff, after turning Baylor into a winner, would take Broyles, who was already gaining a strong reputation as an offensive mind, to Florida in 1950. This was not the Florida Gator program that we know of today, but rather one that needed some solid foundation established. Woodruff would be the man who did that over the next decade. Broyles was there for year one before Dodd summoned him back to Atlanta to coach the Yellow Jackets’ offense.
During his time back at Georgia Tech, Broyles would be credited with inventing the “belly” series or running, utilizing an option between the quarterback and fullback at the point of attack that was difficult for defenses to read or defend (that “belly” series would become instrumental piece of the vaunted Wishbone offensive attack beginning in the late ’60s). Georgia Tech also would be to college football what Florida State later became in the 1990s, as it dominated the bowl season with win after win during the 1950s. One of those came against Arkansas in the 1955 Cotton Bowl, 14-6, giving Broyles another glimpse of what an excited Razorback fan base could look like. The 1954 Hogs that ended up in Dallas were Bowden Wyatt’s second and last team before he would light out for Tennessee and the Vols’ head coaching job. Wyatt ignited strong passion about the Hogs, taking the “25 Little Pigs” from a 3-7 team the year before (and a run of four straight non-winning seasons) to 7-3 and SWC champions, as well as 6-0 upset winners of SEC powerhouse Ole Miss.
When Broyles finally got the Arkansas job, after one year at Missouri, in 1958, he quickly assembled a coaching staff that included Little Rock Central icon Wilson Matthews, who had probably hoped to one day be Arkansas’ coach after his incredible high school coaching run. Matthews would end up being Broyles’ “bad cop” to the head coach’s “nice cop” style — a perfect pairing, it turned out. (Matthews would later be Broyles’ man, when Broyles became athletic director, to build the football donation system that became the Razorback Foundation. Again, Broyles as the politician with would-be boosters, while Matthews was the tough-guy chief of staff, and eventually no one could say “no” to their requests.)
Broyles espoused all the ideals that Neyland had won with at Tennessee, that Dodd had won with at Georgia Tech and that Woodruff had succeeded with at Baylor and Florida — defense and the kicking game came first. Broyles did not outright copy the General’s famed “Seven Maxims,” but it ran through every aspect of the Hogs’ program beginning in 1958 — such as, the team that made the fewest mistakes would win. Broyles played the game with a focus on field position and capitalizing on an opponents’ errors. His offensive ingenuity also kept the Razorbacks a step ahead of most of the competition and allowed them to match all-powerful Texas at times.
Just as Neyland’s, Dodd’s and Woodruff’s staffs produced legendary coaches to follow, Broyles’ Arkansas coaching staffs became a tree that would seed a forest of future powerhouses or restore to greatness the fallen ones.
Try to imagine today any Arkansas staff producing a coach who immediately would become the head coach at Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Iowa State, SMU, Clemson, Virginia Tech or North Carolina State. That’s the type of coaching talent Broyles’ staffs contained. Broyles could point to one of his previous hires, such as Doug Dickey in the early 1960s, and could interest a coach on the way up that spending some time at Fayetteville, even at low wages, was the ticket to a nice head coaching gig.
One of those hires was Hayden Fry, who had played quarterback for Woodruff and Broyles at Baylor and who took over when Dickey went from the UA to Tennessee. Fry, later as the coach who would turn Iowa around after successful stops at SMU and North Texas, would take a walk-on from Illinois and turn him into a solid defensive lineman and team captain, and then get him started in the coaching business: Hogs current head coach Bret Bielema.
Broyles’ coaching legacy stretched to the pros, with former assistants Jimmy Johnson, Joe Gibbs and Barry Switzer winning Super Bowls, while Raymond Berry coached a Super Bowl contender in New England. Many other assistants left after tutelage from Broyles to eventually land at college powerhouses where they either won titles or became coaching icons in their own right, such as Johnny Majors and Jackie Sherrill.
Broyles’ own 1964 defensive and punt returning star, Ken Hatfield, would answer Broyles call to bring his innovative “flexbone” offense from Air Force, where he had turned a floundering program with built-in talent deficiencies completely around, to lead the Hogs from 1984-89, winning consecutive SWC championships at the end of that run. One of Broyles’ last recruits as a head coach, Little Rock prep quarterbacking sensation Houston Nutt, would later return as Razorback head coach in December 1997 and immediately reestablish the excitement in the Razorback football brand in 1998, the same way Bowden Wyatt had done in his short tenure in Fayetteville. Nutt would be Broyles’ last football hire.
But the great coach’s legacy as the mentor to top assistants remains every year in the form of the Broyles Award, presented to the nation’s top assistant coach as determined by nominations from FBS head coaches and with the finalists and winner chosen by a select crew of former national coaching greats. The award is best defined by the trophy, showing the typical Broyles sideline pose of the 1960s with his chief assistant, Wilson Matthews, beside him and bent at the hips, hands on the knees, intently watching the action. The trophy could easily feature Broyles at the side of Bobby Dodd or Bob Woodruff, too, as an able assistant coach with a great mind making a huge difference on the sideline; because before he was one of the winningest coaches in college football history and a Hall of Famer, Broyles was clearly one of the best assistants.
Perhaps we will know Arkansas football has returned to its zenith of the Broyles’ days when Hog assistant coaches again are being pursued by college football’s biggest names to be not just part of their staffs, but hired as their head coaches.
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My recent three-part series (here, here, and here) explained why policy makers should seek to reduce poverty rather than inequality.
I want to expand on that point today by showing why growing the pie is more important than how it is sliced.
I’ve previously opined on why economic growth is important, showing that the United States today would be almost as poor as Mexico if our rate of economic growth since 1895 was just one-percentage point less than it actually was.
Moreover, I also showed in that 2017 column how much smaller increments of additional growth over time can mean thousands of dollars of additional income for an average household.
For today’s column, I want to expand on this point using the economic growth page from Max Roser’s great site, Our World in Data. We’ll start with this chart showing how per-capita economic output dramatically increased a few hundred years ago.
This kind of data won’t be news to regular readers. I’ve already shared great videos from Deirdre McCloskey and Don Boudreaux that make the same point about the explosion of prosperity in the modern era.
And if anyone somehow thinks this growth doesn’t matter, Roser’s page shows that there are countless ways of graphing the relationship between economic output and good outcomes, such as how long we live, child mortality, access to electricity, hunger, and literacy.
The bottom line is that we are unimaginably rich compared to prior generations, largely thanks to the rule of law, expanded trade, and limited government.
That recipe for growth and prosperity works anywhere and everywhere it is tried. Here’s another chart showing how other parts of the world are being to prosper thanks to economic liberalization.
I want to cite two additional charts from Roser’s page.
First, here’s a chart showing productivity rates in selected nations. Why is this important? Because economic prosperity is basically driven by how much we work and how productive we are.
There are all sorts of interesting things embedded in the above chart.
Productivity is vitally important, which is why it is so misguided to have tax systems that punish saving and investment.
Western nations can enjoy more prosperity over time, but they won’t catch the United States so long as they are burdened with too much government.
Singapore shows that full convergence is not only possible, but also that laissez-faire countries can even surpass the United States.
P.S. I can’t resist recycling my “never-answered question” in hopes of getting any of my left-leaning friends to cite a single example of their policies producing mass prosperity.
Open letter to President Obama (Part 702)
(Emailed to White House on 6-25-13.)
President Obama c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Some people doubt that Ronald Reagan conservatism still works today like it did in the 1980’s and that those kind of conservatives can still win today but they can!!!! That is the message that the USA loves.
Among the right-leaning policy wonks and intellectuals in Washington, there’s a lot of attention being given to the something called “reform conservatism.”
Underlying this school of thought is the notion that the Reagan-era message no longer works since Republicans have lost the popular vote in five out of the last six elections.
But before digging into his column, I think that some of the angst on the right is misplaced. Why blame a Reagan-era message for GOP electoral problems when all the Republicans presidential nominees in recent years have favored big government? Does anybody really think that Bush 41, Dole, Bush 43, McCain, and Romney were Reaganites?!?
Could any of those candidates have given these remarks, at least with any credibility?
President Reagan on Big Government and Personal Freedom
Uploaded on Dec 23, 2010
The surge in nostalgia for President Reagan over the past two years is no surprise. When the American people are faced with tyrannical government, arrogant leadership, and failed policies, they tend to cling to good memories (along with their guns and religion). They also tend to take action, hence the Tea Party movement and the 2010 revolution. Watch this clip from 1982 and remember.
The Founding Fathers fought tyranny, we must come together to fight again. Ronald Reagan believed that it was individual freedom that made America great
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It’s much more plausible to say that Republicans have lagged because they didn’t have candidates with a Reagan-style message.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Republicans would have fared poorly even if Reaganites had been nominated. Does “reform conservatism” offer a path to electoral salvation.
Here’s what Douthat identifies as the “two major premises” of reform conservatism.
1. First, he writes that the “core economic challenge facing the American experiment is not income inequality per se, but rather stratification and stagnation — weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder and wage stagnation for the middle class.” Conservatives, he says, should strive to make “family life more affordable, upward mobility more likely, and employment easier to find.”
2. Second, he warns that the “existing welfare-state institutions we’ve inherited from the New Deal and the Great Society, however, often make these tasks harder rather than easier: Their exploding costs crowd out every other form of spending, require middle class tax increases and threaten to drag on economic growth.”
I’m not an expert on income mobility, so I’m not sure I would identify stratification and stagnation as the nation’s core economic challenge, but he may be right. Regardless, it’s definitely a good idea to have more mobility.
And I definitely agree that the welfare state hinders upward mobility by creating dependency. And he’s right that this is a drag on growth. That being said, I disagree with his assertion that rising entitlement expenditures crowd out other spending and lead to middle class tax hikes. Those things may happen at some point, particularly once we get into the peak years for retiring baby boomers, but they haven’t happened yet.
The more important question, at least to me, is what sort of policies do reform conservatives embrace? Here’s Douthat’s list, bolded, followed by my thoughts.
a. A tax reform that caps deductions and lowers rates, but also reduces the burden on working parents and the lower middle class, whether through an expanded child tax credit or some other means of reducing payroll tax liability. I obviously like the idea of lowering rates and reducing deductions since that moves the system closer to a flat tax. That being said, it’s difficult to reduce the tax burden on the lower middle class since they pay very little income tax under the current system (see accompanying table from CBO). But I like the idea of addressing the payroll tax, though I disagree with their approach (see section “c” below).
b. A repeal or revision of Obamacare that aims to ease us toward a system of near-universal catastrophic health insurance, and includes some kind of flat tax credit or voucher explicitly designed for that purpose. I fully agree with repeal of Obamacare, and I think an unfettered marketplace would evolve into a system of near-universal catastrophic insurance, but I don’t want the federal government subsidizing or coercing that approach (though current healthcare policy has far more subsidies and coercion, so Douthat’s plan would be a big improvement over the status quo).
c. A Medicare reform along the lines of the Wyden-Ryan premium support proposal, and a Social Security reform focused on means testing and extending work lives rather than a renewed push for private accounts. I’m glad they embrace Medicare reform, but I’m puzzled by the hostility to personal retirement accounts. If you increase the retirement age and/or means test, youforce people to pay more and get less, yet Social Security already is a bad deal for younger workers. So why make it worse? How can that be good for those with low mobility? Personal accounts would be akin to a tax cut for such workers since the payroll tax would be transformed into something much closer to deferred compensation.
d. An immigration reform that tilts much more toward Canadian-style recruitment of high-skilled workers, and that doesn’t necessarily seek to accelerate the pace of low-skilled immigration. As I noted in this interview, I very much favor bringing more high-skilled people into the country.
e. A “market monetarist” monetary policy as an alternative both to further fiscal stimulus and to the tight money/fiscal austerity combination advanced by many Republicans today. I try to avoid monetary policy. That being said, I’m a bit skeptical of “market monetarism.” No nation has ever tried this system, so it’s uncharted territory, and I’m reluctant to embrace an approach which is premised on the notion that bubbles can’t exist (what about the tech bubble of the late 1990s or the housing bubble last decade?!?). I’m also suspicious of a system which requires an activist central bank. Watch this George Selgin video if you want to know why.
f. An attack not only on explicit subsidies for powerful incumbents (farm subsidies, etc.) but also other protections and implicit guarantees, in arenas ranging from copyright law to the problem of “Too Big To Fail.” Amen. I fully agree.
Since I’m a tax policy wonk, let me address in greater detail some of the tax reform proposals put forward by reform conservatives.
Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute is identified in the column as a reform conservative, and he recently expressed skepticism about the flat tax in a column for National Review.
It’s an elegant, compelling model that might work splendidly if you were creating a tax code ex nihilo. …America, however, is in a much different place. Millions of individuals and businesses have made long-term plans based on expectations that the tax code will remain more or less the same. Half the nation, thanks to all those deductions and credits, pays no income tax. …it’s unlikely the U.S. can keep spending down at historical levels of 20 percent to 21 percent of GDP while also maintaining a floor for defense spending at 4 percent of output. The best a group of AEI scholars could manage was limiting spending to 23 percent of GDP by 2035.
Pethokoukis also says the flat tax is politically unrealistic. Since I’m not expecting a flat tax in my lifetime, I obviously can’t argue with that statement. But he then proposes another plan that would be far less popular – and far more dangerous.
One solution is to take the essentially flat consumption tax devised by economists Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka and give it a progressive rate structure. Or we could combine a consumption tax with a flat income tax on wealthier Americans, as suggested by Yale’s Michael Graetz.
So we should keep the income tax as a vehicle for class warfare and augment it with a VAT?!? Yeah, good luck trying to sell that idea. And Heaven help us if it ever succeeded since politicians would have another major source of tax revenue.
Another plan, which Douthat explicitly cites in his paper, was put together by Robert Stein, a former Bush Treasury official. He thinks traditional supply-side policies today are either irrelevant or unpopular.
Lowering tax rates today could still enhance the incentives to invest, particularly in the corporate sector. But the distortions caused by marginal tax rates are not nearly as great as they were in 1980. And attempts to solve other problems caused by the tax code itself — like the biases in favor of consumption over saving, or home building over business investment — could never in themselves garner the public support necessary for a major overhaul.
As I noted, I’m not holding my breath for a flat tax, so I can’t disagree with Stein’s prognostication.
He also has a very novel way of defining the problem we should be trying to fix.
…it is time to rethink how the tax code treats parents. …raising children is hardly just another pastime: It is one of the most important services any American can perform for our country. …even as Social Security and Medicare depend on large numbers of future workers, they have created an enormous fiscal bias against procreation, undermining an important motive for raising children: to safeguard against poverty in old age. ……our system of taxes and entitlements not only fails to reward parents — it actively discourages Americans from having children. …Recent studies (especially work by Michele Boldrin, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Larry Jones and by Isaac Ehrlich and Jinyoung Kim) show that Social Security and Medicare actually reduce the fertility rate by about 0.5 children per woman. In European countries, where retirement systems are larger, the effect is closer to one child per woman.
As a libertarian, the beginning section of that passage grated on me. My children are individuals, not a “service” to prop up entitlement programs. I agree with Stein that these programs are a problem, but the solution is to reform entitlements, not to rejigger the tax code in hopes of pumping out more taxpayers.
Stein disagrees.
Unfortunately, these negative effects on fertility cannot be cured simply by converting old-age entitlement programs into mandatory savings programs, as the Bush administration proposed for Social Security in 2005. After all, requiring workers to save for retirement through private financial instruments would also crowd out the traditional motive to raise kids.
Instead, he wants to change the tax system based on the notion that today’s kids are tomorrow’s taxpayers.
…the present value of future Social Security and Medicare contributions for a typical worker born today is about $150,000. Rewarding parents for creating these future contributions suggests annual tax relief of about $8,500 per child. To correct for this inadequate treatment of households with children, the existing dependent exemption for children, the child credit, the child-care credit, and the adoption credit should be replaced with one new $4,000 credit per child that can be used to offset both income and payroll taxes. (This amount is set much closer to the $3,250 figure than the $8,500 one mostly to reduce the plan’s negative impact on federal revenue.)
I have no philosophical objection to some form of exemption – or even credit – based on family size. Almost all flat tax systems, for instance, have some sort of family allowance.
And Stein, unfortunately, would “pay” for his credits by raising marginal tax rates on a significant share of taxpayers.
Some of these costs would be offset by eliminating itemized deductions (other than mortgage interest and charitable contributions). The rest would have to be offset by allowing the top rate of 35% to touch more taxpayers than it currently affects. …who pays more? Primarily high-income workers, but also upper-middle-class taxpayers who do not have children in the home (either because they have decided not to raise children at all, or because their children have already turned 18). To be blunt, the plan is a tax hike on the rich and makes the tax code even more progressive than it is today.
To be fair, Stein also proposes some good policies such as AMT repeal and reductions in double taxation, so he’s definitely not in the Obama class-warfare camp. But it’s also fair to say that his plan won’t do much for growth. Some tax rates are lowered but others are increased.
Yet if you really want families to be in stronger shape, more growth is the only long-run solution.
Moreover, it’s not clear that Stein’s agenda would be terribly popular. Though I confess that’s just a guess since no politician has latched onto the idea in the years since the proposal was unveiled.
Returning to the broader issue of “reform conservatism,” it’s difficult to assign an overall grade to the movement since I’m not sure whether we’re supposed to interpret it as a political strategy or an economic plan.
Regardless, I guess I’m generally sympathetic. I assume the RCers want government to be smaller than it is today and I don’t think you have to be a 100 percent libertarian to be my ally in the fight to restrain excessive government. And I also think it’s a good idea for people to be thinking of how to best articulate a message of smaller government. Heck, I do that every time I go on TV or give a speech.
So I reserve the right to object to any of the specific proposals that reform conservatives put forward (such as the tax plans discussed above), but I like the project.
_____________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733, lowcostsqueegees@yahoo.com
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Below is a discussion from Milton Friedman on Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. February 10, 1999 | Recorded on February 10, 1999 audio, video, and blogs » uncommon knowledge PRESIDENTIAL REPORT CARD: Milton Friedman on the State of the Union with guest Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in […]
Below is a discussion from Milton Friedman on Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. February 10, 1999 | Recorded on February 10, 1999 audio, video, and blogs » uncommon knowledge PRESIDENTIAL REPORT CARD: Milton Friedman on the State of the Union with guest Milton Friedman Milton Friedman, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution and Nobel Laureate in […]
I really enjoyed this article. A Constitutional President: Ronald Reagan and the Founding By Edwin Meese III , Lee Edwards, Ph.D. , James C. Miller III and Steven Hayward January 26, 2012 Abstract: Throughout his presidency, Ronald Reagan was guided by the principles of the American founding, especially the idea of ordered liberty. In the opening of his first inaugural address in 1981, […]
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Ronald Reagan Talks About Balancing the Budget on “The Tonight Show” Uploaded by johnnycarson on Jul 30, 2011 Ronald Reagan talks about balancing the budget on “The Tonight Show” in 1975. _____________ Ronald Reagan was one of my favorite presidents. Mike Lee is one of my favorite lawmakers of today!!! Look at what he says about […]
Remarks at a Rally Supporting the Proposed Constitutional Amendment for a Balanced Federal Budget For more information on the ongoing works of President Reagan’s Foundation, please visit http://www.reaganfoundation.org _______________ Ronald Reagan was a firm believer in the Balanced Budget Amendment and Milton Friedman was a key advisor to Reagan. Friedman’s 1980 film series taught the […]
Carl Sagan pictured below:
The Daily Hatch 
