What really drives my pessimism is a fear that the Argentinian people have been corrupted. It’s not easy to be hopeful, after all, if a majority of the people in a nation think that it’s okay to be moochers.
But perhaps I was wrong. Based on what happened yesterday, it seems that the voters of Argentina have woken up to the danger of “goldfish government.”
Here are excerpts from a report in the New York Times by Jack Nicas, Natalie Alcoba and Lucía Cholakian Herrera.
A far-right libertarian candidate won Argentina’s open presidential primary election on Sunday, a surprising showing for a politician who wants to adopt the U.S. dollar as Argentina’s official currency… Javier Milei, 52, a congressman, economist and former television pundit, secured 30 percent of the vote…, making him the front-runner for the presidency in the fall general election. Polls had suggested that Mr. Milei’s support was at about 20 percent, and political analysts had predicted that his radical policy proposals — including abolishing the country’s central bank — would prevent him from attracting many more voters.…Besides his ideas about the currency and the central bank, he has proposed drastically lowering taxes and cutting public spending, including by charging people to use the public health care system; closing or privatizing all state-owned enterprises; and eliminating the health, education and environment ministries. …The incumbent center-left party has held power in Argentina for 16 of the past 20 years and has been controlled largely by former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. “We’re not only going to end Kirchnerism, but we’re also going to end the useless, parasitic, criminal political caste that is sinking this country,” Mr. Milei told supporters. …He and his running mate…have suggested they would loosen gun laws…and even permit the sale of human organs, an example of commerce that Mr. Milei says the government has no business restricting.
Wow, what a great set of ideas!
Slashing taxes and spending is of vital importance, of course, but his plan for dollarization is also very important in a nation with a central bank that has been misused to finance bigger government.
And he wants to shut down various government departments and privatize state-owned enterprises, all of which is music to my ears.
He even supports gun rights and wants to help sick people by legalizing organ sales. I’m definitely getting a man crush on Milei!
For politically minded readers, here’s a closer look at the election results, courtesy of Reuters.
I’ll close by lowering my expectations. A first-place finish in a primary does not mean Milei will prevail in the election later this year (a libertarian-minded candidate in a previous election faded after some early momentum).
And even if Milei does win, there’s no guarantee that he’ll have enough supporters in the legislature to make necessary changes.
But if Milei wins and voters also elect libertarian-minded candidates to the legislature, those mistakes can be unwound and their country can once againbecome one of the richest nations in the world.
P.S. I joked in 2011 about Argentina being a “libertarian paradise.” Maybe, just maybe, that can become a reality.
If they really think politicians in Washington should have more money, they can easily volunteer extra money via a website maintained by the Treasury Department.
But they never seem to do that. Instead, all their moral posturing is focused on raising other people’s taxes.
Indeed, Emma Bubola of the New York Timesrecently reported on one of these neurotic people from Europe.
By the time her extraordinarily wealthy grandmother died last month, Marlene Engelhorn already knew who she wanted to be the ultimate beneficiary of the enormous inheritance coming her way: the tax man. “The dream scenario is I get taxed,” said Ms. Engelhorn, the co-founder of a group called Tax Me Now. …For more than a year, Ms. Engelhorn has been campaigning for tax policies that would redistribute her eight-figure windfall — and anyone else’s.…she entered the orbit of groups of pro-tax millionaires, whose members meet in person or on video calls to discuss their privileges — and how to get the state to strip them away. …members are expected to share how they are engaged in what they typically term “reparations” to society. …Its policy goal is to implement or to increase inheritance and wealth taxes (Austria, where Ms. Engelhorn lives, abolished its inheritance tax in 2008). …Ms. Engelhorn’s multiple radio and TV appearances have resulted in dozens of people reaching out to ask her directly for financial help. She said it wrecks her to say no, but she believes it should not be on her to decide who gets her money. “I would like tax justice to take this impossible decision off my hands,” she said.
This type of nonsense triggers three reactions from me.
First, I’m sure European governments have provisions in their law to accept voluntary payments. Strange how Ms. Engelhorn is not taking advantage of the opportunity.
Third, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read how it “wrecks her” to say no to people suffering hardship. She must be a sad joke of a person.
Though there was one part of the story that produced a genuine smile on my face.
It seems one of Ms. Engelhorn’s ancestors cleverly (and appropriately) did the German version of a corporate inversion.
It is not the first time a member of Ms. Engelhorn’s family has made headlines with tax-related issues. When her great-uncle and archaeology donor Curt Engelhorn sold Boehringer Mannheim, German tax authorities didn’t collect a dime because he had previously moved the company’s legal seat abroad.
Let’s close by looking at a different perspective.
In a column for the Foundation for Economic Education, Rainer Zitelmann opined on the existence of guilt-ridden rich people.
I know hundreds of multimillionaires and plenty of billionaires and conducted in-depth interviews with 45 of them for my doctoral dissertation The Wealth Elite. But I have yet to meet anyonewho felt they weren’t paying enough tax. The 100 millionaires and billionaires from nine countries who have signed the latest letter asking to pay more tax might sound like a lot, but there are 2,755 billionaires around the world. There are also more than 20 million millionaires in the world, so 100 is equivalent to 0.0005 percent.
Though I’m not sure I fully embrace Rainer’s optimistic numbers.
After all, there’s strong evidence that rich people are now a reliable leftist voting bloc. At least in the United States.
P.S. You can see me debate guilt-ridden neurotic leftists by clicking here and here.
I wrote yesterday about a controversy involving the Heritage Foundation and closed by wondering about the implications for those of us who favor small government.
Our third item also pokes fun at the logic (or lack thereof) of our leftist friends.
Next, the clever folks at Babylon Beeexplain various home-defense strategies for a gun-free world.
Guns are on their way out. And thank goodness! We can’t wait to return to the utopian paradise we lost when guns were invented…Still, once in a great while, you might need to defend yourself against a ne’er-do-well. When those ruffians come kicking your door down, you need to be ready. Here are seven great ways to defend your home against an armed burglar when your guns have all been confiscated.
Here are a few of those options.
Option #3 surely is the best, just as demonstrated in this video.
Yet never forget that there are people who think gun-free zonesare a real answer.
So here are some additions to our collection of communism humor.
I’m among the small minority of people who have never watched Game of Thrones, so I don’t know the backstory on these characters, but this meme has a very appropriate message about the nuclear-level naivete needed to believe Marx’s nonsense.
Though maybe the first frame should say “Readers of Teen Vogue.”
It’s bad news that we’re suffering from a coronavirus that has killed several million people globally, but there’s another virus that has butchered 100 million people.
This next image reminds me of the joke about communism and electricity.
Per my tradition, here’s my favorite item from today’s collection.
I’m always very impressed by the people who are clever enough to create these Venn diagrams, and this one is better than most.
Though I’m tempted to ask who is worse, the soulless Marxist who rambles and can’t be reasoned with, or the people who rationalize, glorify, and justify Marxism?
—-
November 24, 2020
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: Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm,”
I noticed you mentioned Herbert Marcuse, and I have read of his influence in Francis Schaeffer’s book How should we then live?:
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. … but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. … followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898-). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist.
Moral Support: “One Dimensional Man” author Herbert Marcuse accompanies Bettina Aptheker, center, and Angela Davis’ mother, Sallye Davis, to Angela Davis’ 1972 trial in San Jose. Associated Press
_
______________Francis Schaeffer is a hero of mine and I have posted many times in the past using his material. This post below is a result of his material..Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. TrueCommunism has never been tried is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Let me share with you the story of Paul Robeson and it demonstrates that he had to lie about how cruel communism was and the killing of his friend Itzik Feffer.
Paul Leroy Robeson (/ˈroʊbsən/ROHB-sən;[2][3] April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976) was an American bass baritone concert artist and stage and film actor who became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism
Robeson traveled to Moscow in June, and tried to find Itzik Feffer. He let Soviet authorities know that he wanted to see him.[207] Reluctant to lose Robeson as a propagandist for the Soviet Union,[208] the Soviets brought Feffer from prison to him. Feffer told him that Mikhoels had been murdered, and he would be summarily executed.[209] To protect the Soviet Union’s reputation,[210] and to keep the right wing of the United States from gaining the moral high ground, Robeson denied that any persecution existed in the Soviet Union,[211] and kept the meeting secret for the rest of his life, except from his son.[210]
DANIEL J. FLYNN tells a few details in this sad story: Why Did ESPN Showcase a Stalinist on Monday NightFootball?Stalin Peace Prize laureate Paul Robeson lauded on America’s No. 1 sports network. In 1949, Robeson again traveled to the Soviet Union, where he had sent his namesake to school during the 1930s. Robeson had met poet Itzik Feffer and actor Solomon Mikhoels at a Polo Grounds rally of 50,000 people — the largest pro-Soviet event in the history of the United States — that welcomed their Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1943. But by 1949 Stalin wished to kill Jews rather than use them for propaganda purposes. He murdered Mikhoels and later Feffer — but not before Robeson could visit his old friend the poet one last time.
David Horowitz describes this meeting in Radical Son:
In America, the question “What happened to Itzik Feffer?” entered the currency of political debate. There was talk in intellectual circles that Jews were being killed in a new Soviet purge and that Feffer was one of them. It was to quell such rumors that Robeson asked to see his old friend, but he was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually, he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was that Feffer had already been in prison for three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin’s police brought Feffer out of prison, put him the care of doctors, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. “They’re going to kill us,” he said. “When you return to America you must speak out and save us.”
Instead, Robeson, who later confessed what happened to his son, spoke out in praise of his friends’ murderer.
“Yes, through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage,” Robeson recalled of Stalin. “Most importantly — he has charted the direction of our present and future struggles. He has pointed the way to peace — to friendly co-existence — to the exchange of mutual scientific and cultural contributions — to the end of war and destruction. How consistently, how patiently, he labored for peace and ever increasing abundance, with what deep kindliness and wisdom. He leaves tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.”
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)
And I have specifically explained that you achieve this goal by limiting spending so that it grows slower than the productive sector of the economy.
A fringe benefit of spending restraint is that it has a proven track record of deficit reduction and fiscal balance.
By contrast, there are some people who think that balancing the budget is the best definition of good fiscal policy. Even if that means higher taxes.
In an article for the European Conservative, Sven Larson reviews these two different approaches.
…government needs to be fiscally responsible. This is a worthwhile goal in general…but what does it mean in practice? …There are commonly two definitions of what ‘fiscal responsibility’ means. Depending on which one we adopt, we get very different policy results in the other end: That government should concentrate its spending only to a set of core functions; or That government needs to balance its budget. In theory, these two definitions are not mutually exclusive, but in practice, they tend to crowd out one another.
In Europe, Sven explains the balanced-budget approach is dominant.
Europe has long suffered from a political consensus on government spending. …it is practically unheard of that conservatives anywhere in Europe raise questions about the welfare state and its role in society. …everyone from the far left to the far right accepts that government consumes 40-50% of the economy, and that 80% of that spending furthers a socialist agenda of economic redistribution. …A key reason for this is the implicit acceptance of ‘fiscal responsibility’ as meaning that government should not run excessive deficits. …there is no mention of the critical tie between the size of government and Europe’s perennial economic stagnation.
He then shows how that stagnation leads to very worrisome trends – and that tax increases don’t solve the problem.
…let us do a little experiment. …Suppose…that there is a slowdown in economic growth. In the third year of our time line it falls from 3% to 2.5%, and then to 2%, where it remains for the rest of the 12-year period. …Since tax rates are unchanged, government collects less tax revenue—they decline with GDP. …Government spending, on the other hand, does not decline. The welfare state has made spending promises to people… These promises of entitlement benefits are statutory and morally written in stone. …In short: we have a budget deficit. …Suppose now that the legislature decides to be fiscally responsible. They raise taxes in the third year, which leads to a boost in tax revenue in the following year. …The problem with this scenario is that the tax hikes have a depressing effect on the economy. Growth slows down further, to 1.5% in the fifth year and 1% from thereon. This depresses tax revenue; the budget surplus dwindles rapidly until the budget goes into the red again. …the post tax-hike surplus goes away is the decline in GDP growth that the tax hikes cause.
Here’s his chart, which shows that tax increases may initially raise revenue, but that revenue tends to dissipate because the economy grows slower.
Sven’s conclusion is very accurate.
…we have two ways to define what it means to be fiscally responsible: to balance the government budget or to shrink government spending. The former does not lead to the latter, but the latter facilitates the former.
Whenever I debate supposed conservatives who think higher taxes can somehow solve our fiscal problems, I acknowledge that tax increases theoretically could be acceptable if matched by spending reforms.
But that type of deal doesn’t exist in the real world. So I then ask them to look at these two charts and ask if they have any evidence in the other direction. I don’t know if it changes their minds, but I always win the debate.
In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court rules that the Second Amendment gives Americans the right to carry firearms in public places for self-defense. Pictured: Thomas speaks at a Heritage Foundation event Oct. 21 marking his 30 years on the high court. (Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Amy Swearer is a legal fellow in the Edwin Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
The Supreme Court on Thursday issued its first significant opinion in a Second Amendment case in well over a decade, striking down a New York state law that effectively denied ordinary residents the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.
This decision, in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, is a major victory for the sanctity of the Constitution, the integrity of the Supreme Court, and the personal safety of all Americans who choose to protect themselves with firearms.
In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, a majority of six justices affirmed that the Second Amendment means what it says—“the people” have a right not just to keep but to bear arms, including in public places for self-defense.
As a result, New York and other states with similar laws cannot continue treating this fundamental constitutional right as a unique privilege for the select few who government officials believe are sufficiently justified by a special “need” to protect themselves.
Background on New York’s Law
New York is one of only six states that have “may issue” licensing frameworks for the carrying of firearms in public, meaning that government officials have broad discretion to deny public carry permits for law-abiding applicants.
These six states also generally require—as New York does—that applicants demonstrate that they have “good cause” or “proper cause” for wanting to carry a firearm in public, which is often a demanding standard that ordinary residents rarely meet. New York City’s police department, for example, requires that applicants prove they are in “extraordinary personal danger, documented by proof of recurrent threats to life or safety.”
The petitioners in this case were two law-abiding New York residents who applied for unrestricted licenses to carry firearms in public, citing a general desire to defend themselves should they be violently victimized. Both had their applications denied because they did not “face any special or unique danger to [their] life.”
In other words, the government told the two residents they had no real reason to fear for their safety in public places, so the right to “bear arms” didn’t apply to them. They challenged the “good cause” requirement in federal court, claiming that it violated their Second Amendment rights.
The lower courts dismissed the complaint and cited two previous 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals cases that upheld the New York law as “substantially related to the achievement of an important governmental interest.”
The majority of justices held that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home, and that “good cause” requirements such as the one implemented by New York are unconstitutional because they “prevent law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising” this right in public.
In doing so, the high court explicitly rejected the interest-balancing approach relied upon by many lower courts when analyzing Second Amendment cases, which often results in gun control laws being upheld under a standard known as intermediate scrutiny.
Instead, the court spelled out an analytical framework that considers whether a challenged regulation is “inconsistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
Under this framework, the court determined that New York simply could not meet its burden of demonstrating an American tradition of “broadly prohibit[ing] the public carry of commonly used firearms for personal defense or generally requir[ing] law-abiding responsible citizens to ‘demonstrate a special need for self-protection … ’ to carry arms in public.”
What Does This Mean Going Forward?
So what does the Supreme Court’s decision in this case mean for gun owners, other gun laws, and the future of the Second Amendment?
First, it’s important to remember that only six states have laws like the one challenged in New York. The court clearly explained that the ruling “should not be interpreted to suggest the unconstitutionality” of laws in other states where “a general desire for self-defense is sufficient to obtain a [permit].”
Although the justices didn’t “rule out constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes” that are “put toward abusive ends,” the immediate impact is only for gun owners in the few states with “may issue” laws.
That still means, though, that for tens of millions of Americans residing in those states, the Second Amendment’s protections finally will become a practical reality. New York and other “may issue” states will have to reconfigure their laws to ensure that ordinary citizens are allowed some method of carrying firearms in public for self-defense.
But, as many commentators long suspected, the high court’s ruling does not immediately endanger the public carry permitting laws required by other states, nor does it signal that all states must adopt a permitless carry approach.
Second, the court’s clear rejection of intermediate scrutiny and use of a “text, history, and tradition” standard for analyzing Second Amendment cases sets a much-needed limit on lower courts’ future ability to undermine Supreme Court precedent with “means-end” and “interest-balancing” tests. Lower courts now have a much clearer road map for analysis, which means they will have less “wiggle room” to find any and every gun control law constitutional—a significant problem over the past decade.
Third, as Justice Samuel Alito suggests in his concurring opinion, residents in these six “good cause” states will finally be able to defend themselves more meaningfully in public when the government cannot—which is, sadly, most of the time.
The Second Amendment always has been centered on the natural right to self-defense, and, Alito added: “Today, unfortunately, many Americans have good reason to fear that they will be victimized if they are unable to protect themselves. And today, no less than in 1791, the Second Amendment guarantees their right to do so.”
For far too long, New York and states with similar laws have implemented a government monopoly on armed self-defense in public, often while boasting about failed criminal justice policies that routinely place law-abiding citizens in grave danger. Six justices spoke Thursday for the tens of millions of Americans residing in those states: The right to bear arms applies here, too.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
Our third item also pokes fun at the logic (or lack thereof) of our leftist friends.
Next, the clever folks at Babylon Beeexplain various home-defense strategies for a gun-free world.
Guns are on their way out. And thank goodness! We can’t wait to return to the utopian paradise we lost when guns were invented…Still, once in a great while, you might need to defend yourself against a ne’er-do-well. When those ruffians come kicking your door down, you need to be ready. Here are seven great ways to defend your home against an armed burglar when your guns have all been confiscated.
Here are a few of those options.
Option #3 surely is the best, just as demonstrated in this video.
Yet never forget that there are people who think gun-free zonesare a real answer.
So here are some additions to our collection of communism humor.
I’m among the small minority of people who have never watched Game of Thrones, so I don’t know the backstory on these characters, but this meme has a very appropriate message about the nuclear-level naivete needed to believe Marx’s nonsense.
Though maybe the first frame should say “Readers of Teen Vogue.”
It’s bad news that we’re suffering from a coronavirus that has killed several million people globally, but there’s another virus that has butchered 100 million people.
This next image reminds me of the joke about communism and electricity.
Per my tradition, here’s my favorite item from today’s collection.
I’m always very impressed by the people who are clever enough to create these Venn diagrams, and this one is better than most.
Though I’m tempted to ask who is worse, the soulless Marxist who rambles and can’t be reasoned with, or the people who rationalize, glorify, and justify Marxism?
—-
November 24, 2020
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: Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm,”
I noticed you mentioned Herbert Marcuse, and I have read of his influence in Francis Schaeffer’s book How should we then live?:
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. … but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. … followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898-). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist.
Moral Support: “One Dimensional Man” author Herbert Marcuse accompanies Bettina Aptheker, center, and Angela Davis’ mother, Sallye Davis, to Angela Davis’ 1972 trial in San Jose. Associated Press
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______________Francis Schaeffer is a hero of mine and I have posted many times in the past using his material. This post below is a result of his material..Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. TrueCommunism has never been tried is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Let me share with you the story of Paul Robeson and it demonstrates that he had to lie about how cruel communism was and the killing of his friend Itzik Feffer.
Paul Leroy Robeson (/ˈroʊbsən/ROHB-sən;[2][3] April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976) was an American bass baritone concert artist and stage and film actor who became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism
Robeson traveled to Moscow in June, and tried to find Itzik Feffer. He let Soviet authorities know that he wanted to see him.[207] Reluctant to lose Robeson as a propagandist for the Soviet Union,[208] the Soviets brought Feffer from prison to him. Feffer told him that Mikhoels had been murdered, and he would be summarily executed.[209] To protect the Soviet Union’s reputation,[210] and to keep the right wing of the United States from gaining the moral high ground, Robeson denied that any persecution existed in the Soviet Union,[211] and kept the meeting secret for the rest of his life, except from his son.[210]
DANIEL J. FLYNN tells a few details in this sad story: Why Did ESPN Showcase a Stalinist on Monday NightFootball?Stalin Peace Prize laureate Paul Robeson lauded on America’s No. 1 sports network. In 1949, Robeson again traveled to the Soviet Union, where he had sent his namesake to school during the 1930s. Robeson had met poet Itzik Feffer and actor Solomon Mikhoels at a Polo Grounds rally of 50,000 people — the largest pro-Soviet event in the history of the United States — that welcomed their Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1943. But by 1949 Stalin wished to kill Jews rather than use them for propaganda purposes. He murdered Mikhoels and later Feffer — but not before Robeson could visit his old friend the poet one last time.
David Horowitz describes this meeting in Radical Son:
In America, the question “What happened to Itzik Feffer?” entered the currency of political debate. There was talk in intellectual circles that Jews were being killed in a new Soviet purge and that Feffer was one of them. It was to quell such rumors that Robeson asked to see his old friend, but he was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually, he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was that Feffer had already been in prison for three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin’s police brought Feffer out of prison, put him the care of doctors, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. “They’re going to kill us,” he said. “When you return to America you must speak out and save us.”
Instead, Robeson, who later confessed what happened to his son, spoke out in praise of his friends’ murderer.
“Yes, through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage,” Robeson recalled of Stalin. “Most importantly — he has charted the direction of our present and future struggles. He has pointed the way to peace — to friendly co-existence — to the exchange of mutual scientific and cultural contributions — to the end of war and destruction. How consistently, how patiently, he labored for peace and ever increasing abundance, with what deep kindliness and wisdom. He leaves tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.”
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)
Price controls are a very obvious example of harmful intervention.
As explained in my three-part series (here, here, and here), market-determined prices give us the best quality at the best prices.
Just as John explains in the video when talking about bananas.
When politicians interfere by mandating prices too low or too high, however, we get shortages or surpluses (America’s idiotic farm programs being a painful example).
I’ll close with a few comments relating to John’s discussion of how Central Park was a mess before it was quasi-privatized.
Yes, the profit motive is key to a well-functioning private sector, but even private non-profit groups do a much better job than government.
After all, private non-profits generally are created to solve or reduce a problem (such as poverty), whereas government programs are created to maximize votes.
A new museum dedicated to the victims of communism worldwide was dedicated on Wednesday in Washington. Pictured: A Cambodian woman on Aug. 6, 2014, examines some of the thousands of skulls on display in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, of those killed during the 1970s “Killing Fields”-era by Pol Pot’s communist regime. (Photo: Omar Havana/Getty Images)
Remember these two numbers: 100 million and 1.5 billion.
Those were the two numbers emphasized at the dedication on Wednesday of the new Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C., which I was privileged to attend along with my family.
An estimated 100 million is the number of human beings slaughtered, massacred, and killed by Marxist, communist regimes in the past 100 years, from the Soviet Union to Red China to Castro’s Cuba. And 1.5 billion is the number of people still suffering under oppressive, tyrannical communist regimes today.
The museum has been more than 30 years in the making, starting with an idea from Anne Edwards, the wife of Lee Edwards, the prolific author, historian, biographer, and scholar at The Heritage Foundation who was the driving force behind the creation of the museum.
Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Museum, speaks at its dedication on Wednesday. (Photo: Hans von Spakovsky/The Heritage Foundation)
Lee Edwards, the chairman emeritus of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, received the foundation’s annual Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom at the grand opening for all of the work he has done, not only to bring the museum to fruition, but to help the victims of communism all over the world. The man at the podium is Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, president of the Victims of Communism Museum.
The attendees at the dedication were not the usual Washington crowd. The museum was full of individuals and families who not only fought against those murderous regimes, but helped lead the opposition. It included Wang Dan and Jianli Yang, who were student leaders in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the Chinese army brutally killed more than 2,000 peaceful protesters who wanted democracy and freedom in China.
A lone demonstrator stares down a column of tanks June 5, 1989, at the entrance to Tiananmen Square in Beijing on the day after Chinese troops fired on pro-democracy students who had been protesting there since April 15. (Photo: CNN/Getty Images)
There are artifacts from that protest in the museum, including some of the handmade freedom flags of the students.
There were also families of the freedom fighters who staged the first revolt against the Soviet Union in 1956 in Hungary, when NATO and the Allies simply stood by, ignoring their pleas for help as Russian tanks crushed the rebellion and ruthlessly arrested and killed everyone involved.
As I watched a video of the fighting in the streets of Budapest that’s in the museum, all I could think about was what a difference it would have made if those Hungarian patriots had been equipped with Javelin missiles and had destroyed the Soviet tank armadas the way the Ukrainians are doing today.
My own father was a White Russian officer who fought the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war.
In addition to remarks by Bremberg and Elizabeth Spalding, the president and a director, respectively, of the new museum, there were also speeches by Szabolcs Takacs, the Hungarian ambassador to the U.S., and professor Piotr Glinski, the deputy prime minister of Poland.
The presentations by the ambassador and the deputy prime minister were especially poignant, because they spoke from experience and know vividly and personally the evils of that vicious, deadly ideology. And that is exactly what communism is—an evil—as Glinski said repeatedly, contrary to the ignorant beliefs of the Marxist fools who inhabit too many of our academic institutions today.
Some of the most moving artifacts in the museum are a series of paintings that I first wrote aboutmore than a decade ago, and which finally have a home where they can be permanently displayed.
The Victims of Communism Museum is dedicated to the estimated 100 million people killed by the murderous ideology in the past century, as well as to the 1.5 billion others still living under its jackboot. (Photo: Hans von Spakovsky/The Heritage Foundation)
In 1953, a Ukrainian painter, Nikolai Getman, was released from the Soviet gulag, where he had spent eight years for being present at a meeting where someone had drawn a caricature of Josef Stalin.
The paintings were smuggled out of Russia in 1997 because Getman was afraid the post-Soviet Russian government would destroy them to hide a past it pretends never existed.
The paintings are haunting. They are the only visual counterpart to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings, which exposed this terrible system of mass imprisonment that Robert Conquest has rightly called “unexampled coldblooded inhumanity.”
The only difference between the Holocaust and the gulag is that the Soviet communists never got around to using gas to kill their prisoners—just old-fashioned bullets, beatings, starvation, and literally working them to death.
Getman’s stark paintings cover everything from the transportation of prisoners to the camps in unheated trucks and ships to the horrible and almost unspeakable living conditions in the gulag.
We see the routine brutality with which prisoners were treated. The fragile existence they led is captured in Getman’s paintings, which represent an enormous accomplishment, considering that all of the scenes were painted from memory.
One painting shows the despairing faces of a group of men taken from their barracks in the middle of the night and executed by the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), the secret police organization that ran the entire gulag system.
These kinds of executions occurred constantly and for no apparent reason. All of the prisoners knew that if you were taken out of your barracks in the middle of the night, you never came back.
And that’s happening today in places such as China, where the communist government has set up a gulag-type concentration camp system for the Uyghurs. There are millions of current victims being repressed, tortured, and killed in a country that big American companies, such as Nike and Apple, routinely do business in with no concern.
Raising money for the museum has been a long, hard task. Yet countries like Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia all contributed money to help establish this very important museum. And as I noted, there were speakers at the dedication ceremony from some of those countries.
Who was absent, and who hasn’t contributed a single cent? The U.S. government and the current administration. Representatives of the country that has been the leader of the free world, which led the fight against communist dictatorships starting with the hot war in Korea and during the 40 years of the Cold War, were nowhere to be seen on Wednesday.
The Victims of Communism Museum has long been needed. And every student in every college and university who thinks Marxism, communism, and socialism (which is just communism under another name) is a wonderful idea should pay a visit to this museum to understand what that evil ideology has imposed on the world.
So, remember: 100 million and 1.5 billion. We not only have a lot to remember; we still have a lot to do to bring the flame of liberty to the enslaved people of the world.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
In the first video below in the 14th clip in this series are his words and I will be responding to them in the next few weeks since Sir Bertrand Russell is probably the most quoted skeptic of our time, unless it was someone like Carl Sagan or Antony Flew.
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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Quote from Bertrand Russell:
Q: Why are you not a Christian?
Russell: Because I see no evidence whatever for any of the Christian dogmas. I’ve examined all the stock arguments in favor of the existence of God, and none of them seem to me to be logically valid.
Q: Do you think there’s a practical reason for having a religious belief, for many people?
Russell: Well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true. That’s quite… at least, I rule it out as impossible. Either the thing is true, or it isn’t. If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. And if you can’t find out whether it’s true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment. But you can’t… it seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful, and not because you think it’s true.
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Today I am not going to attack this quote above from Russell. I have done that enough in the past. Today I am going to look at Russell’s notes on communism and also examine his personal meeting with Lenin. Lenin just laughed when Lenin said that it was the plan for the poor peasants to hang the peasants that were a little better well off. This comment caught Russell off guard. Russell had already noted that Lenin was a “great man.” However, this embracing of violence caught Russell by surprise.
Then I will look at an examination of communism by Francis Schaeffer who will tell us why Communism ALWAYS fails to give the freedoms that it says it will and why so many young people are caught up in its idealistic promises.
“I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.”
In relation to any political doctrine there are two questions to be asked: (1) Are its theoretical tenets true? (2) Is its practical policy likely to increase human happiness? For my part, I think the theoretical tenets of Communism are false, and I think its practical maxims are such as to produce an immeasurable increase of human misery.
The theoretical doctrines of Communism are for the most part derived from Marx. My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred. The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus’s doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners. Marx’s doctrine that all historical events have been motivated by class conflicts is a rash and untrue extension to world history of certain features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago. His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology. His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process.
Marx’s doctrine was bad enough, but the developments which it underwent under Lenin and Stalin made it much worse. Marx had taught that there would be a revolutionary transitional period following the victory of the proletariat in a civil war and that during this period the proletariat, in accordance with the usual practice after a civil war, would deprive its vanquished enemies of political power. This period was to be that of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It should not be forgotten that in Marx’s prophetic vision the victory of the proletariat was to come after it had grown to be the vast majority of the population. The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore as conceived by Marx was not essentially anti-democratic. In the Russia of 1917, however, the proletariat was a small percentage of the population, the great majority being peasants. it was decreed that the Bolshevik party was the class-conscious part of the proletariat, and that a small committee of its leaders was the class-conscious part of the Bolshevik party. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus came to be the dictatorship of a small committee, and ultimately of one man – Stalin. As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to forced labour in concentration camps. He even went so far as to decree that the laws of heredity are henceforth to be different from what they used to be, and that the germ-plasm is to obey Soviet decrees but that that reactionary priest Mendel. I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.
I have always disagreed with Marx. My first hostile criticism of him was published in 1896. But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous. A minority resting its powers upon the activities of secret police is bound to be cruel, oppressive and obscuarantist. The dangers of the irresponsible power cane to be generally recognized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but those who have forgotten all that was painfully learnt during the days of absolute monarchy, and have gone back to what was worst in the middle ages under the curious delusion that they were in the vanguard of progress.
There are signs that in course of time the Russian régime will become more liberal. But, although this is possible, it is very far from certain. In the meantime, all those who value not only art and science but a sufficiency of bread and freedom from the fear that a careless word by their children to a schoolteacher may condemn them to forced labour in a Siberian wilderness, must do what lies in their power to preserve in their own countries a less servile and more prosperous manner of life.
There are those who, oppressed by the evils of Communism, are led to the conclusion that the only effective way to combat these evils is by means of a world war. I think this a mistake. At one time such a policy might have been possible, but now war has become so terrible and Communism has become so powerful that no one can tell what would be left after a world war, and whatever might be left would probably be at least as bad as present -day Communism. This forecast does not depend upon the inevitable effects of mass destruction by means of hydrogen and cobalt bombs and perhaps of ingeniously propagated plagues. The way to combat Communism is not war. What is needed in addition to such armaments as will deter Communists from attacking the West, is a diminution of the grounds for discontent in the less prosperous parts of the non-communist world. In most of the countries of Asia, there is abject poverty which the West ought to alleviate as far as it lies in its power to do so. There is also a great bitterness which was caused by the centuries of European insolent domination in Asia. This ought to be dealt with by a combination of patient tact with dramatic announcements renouncing such relics of white domination as survive in Asia. Communism is a doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife. Its spread can only be arrested by diminishing the area of poverty and hatred.
itself an excerpt from
“The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism” By Bertrand Russell.
Webmaster’s note
The last paragraph (especially) shows that Russell’s atheism has nothing in common with Marxist-Leninism. It refutes the idea that the USSR is a lesson against the rejection of religion, because it had exactly the faults that mar any dogmatic belief.
Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour’s conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well. An interpreter was present, but his services were scarcely required. Lenin’s room is very bare; it contains a big desk, some maps on the walls, two book-cases, and one comfortable chair for visitors in addition to two or three hard chairs. It is obvious that he has no love of luxury or even comfort. He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without a trace of hauteur.
If one met him without knowing who he was, one would not guess that he is possessed of great power or even that he is in any way eminent. I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory.
The MATERIALIST conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat.
When I suggested that whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, he waved aside the suggestion as fantastic. I got little impression of knowledge or psychological imagination as regards Great Britain. Indeed the whole tendency of Marxianism is against psychological imagination, since it attributes everything in politics to purely MATERIAL causes.
I asked him next whether he thought it possible to establish Communism firmly and fully in a country containing such a large majority of peasants. He admitted that it was difficult, and laughed over the exchange the peasant is compelled to make, of food for paper; the worthlessness of Russian paper struck him as comic. But he said—what is no doubt true—that things will right themselves when there are goods to offer to the peasant. For this he looks partly to electrification in industry, which, he says, is a technical necessity in Russia, but will take ten years to complete. He spoke with enthusiasm, as they all do, of the great scheme for generating electrical power by means of peat. Of course he looks to the raising of the blockade as the only radical cure; but he was not very hopeful of this being achieved thoroughly or permanently except through revolutions in other countries. Peace between Bolshevik Russia and capitalist countries, he said, must always be insecure; the Entente might be led by weariness and mutual dissensions to conclude peace, but he felt convinced that the peace would be of brief duration. I found in him, as in almost all leading Communists, much less eagerness than existed in our delegation for peace and the raising of the blockade. He believes that nothing of real value can be achieved except through world revolution and the abolition of capitalism; I felt that he regarded the resumption of trade with capitalist countries as a mere palliative of doubtful value.
He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the Government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing. He spoke as though the dictatorship over the peasant would have to continue a long time, because of the peasant’s desire for free trade. He said he knew from statistics (what I can well believe) that the peasants have had more to eat these last two years than they ever had before, “and yet they are against us,” he added a little wistfully. I asked him what to reply to critics who say that in the country he has merely created peasant proprietorship, not Communism; he replied that that is not quite the truth, but he did not say what the truth is.
The last question I asked him was whether resumption of trade with capitalist countries, if it took place, would not create centres of capitalist influence, and make the preservation of Communism more difficult? It had seemed to me that the more ardent Communists might well dread commercial intercourse with the outer world, as leading to an infiltration of heresy, and making the rigidity of the present system almost impossible. I wished to know whether he had such a feeling. He admitted that trade would create difficulties, but said they would be less than those of the war. He said that two years ago neither he nor his colleagues thought they could survive against the hostility of the world. He attributes their survival to the jealousies and divergent interests of the different capitalist nations; also to the power of Bolshevik propaganda. He said the Germans had laughed when the Bolsheviks proposed to combat guns with leaflets, but that the event had proved the leaflets quite as powerful. I do not think he recognizes that the Labour and Socialist parties have had any part in the matter. He does not seem to know that the attitude of British Labour has done a great deal to make a first-class war against Russia impossible, since it has confined the Government to what could be done in a hole-and-corner way, and denied without a too blatant mendacity.
I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith—religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr’s hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical. He has as little love of liberty as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when they acquired power. Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with whole-hearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world.
I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.
“When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of Mongolian cruelty and bigotry. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.”
Bertrand Russell, “Eminent Men I Have Known” (courtesy of Richard Brookhiser)
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Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. “True Communism has never been tried” is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.
Hope in Marxism-Leninism is a leap in the area of nonreason. From the Russian Revolution until 1959 a total of 66 million prisoners died. This was deemed acceptable to the leaders because internal security was to be gained at any cost. The ends justified the means. The materialism of Marxism gives no basis for human dignity or rights. These hold to their philosophy against all reason and close their eyes to the oppression of the system.
#02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer
WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?
Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Is Christianity at all like Communism?
Sometimes Communism sounds very “Christian” – desirable goals of equality, justice, etc but these terms are just borrowed from the New Testament. Schaeffer elsewhere explains by saying Marxism is a Christian heresy.
Below is a great article. Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
This article was published January 30, 2011 at 2:28 a.m. Here is a portion of that article below:
A final advantage is the mutation of socialism into so many variants over the past century or so. Precisely because Karl Marx was unclear as to how it would work in practice, socialism has always been something of an empty vessel into which would be revolutionaries seeking personal meaning and utopian causes to support can pour pretty much anything.
A desire to increase state power, soak the rich and expand the welfare state is about all that is left of the original vision. Socialism for young lefties these days means “social justice” and compassion for the poor, not the gulag and the NKVD.
In the end, the one argument that will never wash is that communismcan’t be said to have failed because it was never actually tried. This is a transparent intellectual dodge that ignores the fact that “people’s democracies” were established all over the place in the first three decades after World War II.
Such sophistry is resorted to only because communism in all of those places produced hell on earth rather than heaven.
That the attempts to build communism in a remarkable variety of different geographical regions led to only tyranny and mass bloodshed tells us only that it was never feasible in the first place, and that societies built on the socialist principle ironically suffer from the kind of “inner contradictions” that Marx mistakenly predicted would destroy capitalism.
Yes, all economies are mixed in nature, and one could plausibly argue that the socialist impulse took the rough edges off of capitalism by sponsoring the creation of welfare-state programs that command considerable public support.
But the fact remains that no society in history has been able to achieve sustained prosperity without respect for private property and market forces of supply and demand. Nations, therefore, retain their economic dynamism only to the extent that they resist the temptation to travel too far down the socialist road.
#02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer notes:
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with...Jurgen Habermas (1929-).
Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society” (1967)
Brannon Howse talks some about the Frankfurt School in some of his publications too.
During the 1960’s many young people were turning to the New Left fueled by Marcuse and Habermas but something happened to slow many young people’s enthusiasm for that movement.
1970 bombing took away righteous standing of Anti-War movement
Francis Schaeffer mentioned the 1970 bombing in his film series “How should we then live?” and I wanted to give some more history on it. Schaeffer asserted:
In the United States the New Left also slowly ground down,losing favor because of the excesses of the bombings, especially in the bombing of the University of Wisconsin lab in 1970, where a graduate student was killed. This was not the last bomb that was or will be planted in the United States. Hard-core groups of radicals still remain and are active, and could become more active, but the violence which the New Left produced as its natural heritage (as it also had in Europe) caused the majority of young people in the United States no longer to see it as a hope. So some young people began in 1964 to challenge the false values of personal peace and affluence, and we must admire them for this. Humanism, man beginning only from himself, had destroyed the old basis of values, and could find no way to generate with certainty any new values. In the resulting vacuum the impoverished values of personal peace and affluence had comes to stand supreme. And now, for the majority of the young people, after the passing of the false hopes of drugs as an ideology and the fading of the New Left, what remained? Only apathy was left. In the United States by the beginning of the seventies, apathy was almost complete. In contrast to the political activists of the sixties, not many of the young even went to the polls to vote, even though the national voting age was lowered to eighteen. Hope was gone.
After the turmoil of the sixties, many people thought that it was so much the better when the universities quieted down in the early seventies. I could have wept. The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions. How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents–personal peace and affluence. (How Should We Then Live, pp. 209-210
Aug. 24 marked the 41st anniversary of the Sterling Hall bombing on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Four men planned the bomb at the height of the student protests over the Vietnam War. Back then, current Madison Mayor Paul Soglin was one of the leaders of those student protests in the capitol city. This weekend, Soglin recalled the unrest felt by UW-Madison students.
“The anti-war movement adopted a lot of its tactics and strategies from the civil rights movement which was about ten years older,” said Soglin. “It was one of picketing, demonstration, and passive resistance.”
The four men who planned the bombing focused on the Army Mathematics Research Center housed in Sterling Hall because it was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and therefore, worked on weapons technology. Karl Armstrong was one of the four men and he recently spoke with CBS News in his first television interview detailing the moments right before the bomb was set off.
“He asked me, he says, ‘Should we go ahead? Are we gonna do this?’ I think I made a comment to him about something like, ‘Now, I know what war is about,'” remembered Armstrong. “And I told him to light it.”
The bomb killed one researcher and father of three, 33-year-old Robert Fassnacht, although Armstrong maintains they planned the attack thinking no one would get hurt. The four men heard about the death as they were in their getaway car after the bomb went off.
“I felt good about doing the bombing, the bombing per se, but not taking someone’s life,” recalled Armstrong.
The researcher’s wife told CBS News that she harbors no ill will toward Armstrong and the other bombers. Three of the four men were captured and served time in prison. Armstrong served eight years of a 23-year sentence.
The fourth man, Leo Burt, was last seen in the fall of 1970 in Ontario and is to this day, still wanted by the FBI, with a $150,000 reward for his capture.
Today we look at the 3rd letter in the Kroto correspondence and his admiration of Bertrand Russell. (Below The Nobel chemistry laureates Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley) It is with sadness that I write this post having learned of the death of Sir Harold Kroto on April 30, 2016 at the age of […]
On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said: …Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975 and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them. Harry Kroto _________________ Below you have picture of Dr. Harry Kroto: Gareth Stedman […]
Top 10 Woody Allen Movies __________ John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!! Monday, August 06, 2012 (More On) Woody Allen’s Atheism As I wrote in a previous post, I like Woody Allen. I have long admired his […]
______ Top 10 Woody Allen Movies PBS American Masters – Woody Allen A Documentary 01 PBS American Masters – Woody Allen A Documentary 02 __________ John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were two atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!! Monday, August 06, 2012 […]
THE MORAL ARGUMENT BERTRAND RUSSELL But aren’t you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good — the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you’re […]
Great debate Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, […]
Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of UK/BBC copyright. Pardon the hissy audio. It was recorded 51 […]
Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of […]
THE MORAL ARGUMENT BERTRAND RUSSELL But aren’t you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good — the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you’re […]
Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of […]
That argument is compelling when I’m speaking to conservatives (though not all of them, apparently!), but I need different arguments when talking to my friends on the left.
Fortunately, I now have some very persuasive data that hopefully will make left-of-center types much less likely to support a VAT.
Look at this graph, which clearly shows a strong relationship between higher value-added taxes and higher poverty.
The chart comes from a recent study by Manuel Schechtl for Social Policy and Society, published by Cambridge University Press.
He investigated the extent to which valued-added taxes push households into poverty.
Poor households spend a higher share of their disposable income on consumption simply because consumption does not increase proportionally with income. …This study aims to evaluate the change in poverty rates before and after deducting consumption taxes (consumable income poverty) and the increase in poverty (consumption tax induced poverty) across household types. …Figure 2 indicates the overall percentage point increase in poverty plotted against the implicit consumption tax rate. The pattern reveals a clear positive association between consumption tax and poverty increase – for instance, consumption taxes in Slovenia and Hungary lead to an increase in poverty of over ten percentage points compared to about four percentage points in Mexico or Switzerland (which have lower implicit consumption tax rates).
Very depressing findings, at least for those of us who don’t like high taxes.
But there is a big methodological flaw in the study.
It relies on a dishonest definition of poverty, one that is used by ideologues who want to exaggerate societal problems.
…poverty is measured as below fifty percent of median disposable household income.
For what it is worth, this approach measures the distribution of income in a society, not material deprivation or some other tangible definition of actual poverty.
Having pointed out this flaw, I don’t know if the author is trying to be dishonest. He may have simply relied on data from a group (like the OECD) that does have a dishonest agenda.
However, this methodological flaw does not undermine Schechtl’s core point. There’s no question that value-added taxes reduce the ability of poor people to consume. And I would not be surprised if a chart based on honest data looked very similar to the one shown above.
The moral of the story is that all good people – on the right and on the left – should reject the value-added tax.
P.S. One of the reasons I get upset about the Biden/Trump approach to entitlements is that I fear it would make a VAT more likely.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
I have attempted to respond to all of Dr. Kroto’s friends arguments and I have posted my responses one per week for over a year now. Here are some of my earlier posts:
In the first video below in the 14th clip in this series are his words and I will be responding to them in the next few weeks since Sir Bertrand Russell is probably the most quoted skeptic of our time, unless it was someone like Carl Sagan or Antony Flew.
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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Quote from Bertrand Russell:
Q: Why are you not a Christian?
Russell: Because I see no evidence whatever for any of the Christian dogmas. I’ve examined all the stock arguments in favor of the existence of God, and none of them seem to me to be logically valid.
Q: Do you think there’s a practical reason for having a religious belief, for many people?
Russell: Well, there can’t be a practical reason for believing what isn’t true. That’s quite… at least, I rule it out as impossible. Either the thing is true, or it isn’t. If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn’t, you shouldn’t. And if you can’t find out whether it’s true or whether it isn’t, you should suspend judgment. But you can’t… it seems to me a fundamental dishonesty and a fundamental treachery to intellectual integrity to hold a belief because you think it’s useful, and not because you think it’s true.
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Today I am not going to attack this quote above from Russell. I have done that enough in the past. Today I am going to look at Russell’s notes on communism and also examine his personal meeting with Lenin. Lenin just laughed when Lenin said that it was the plan for the poor peasants to hang the peasants that were a little better well off. This comment caught Russell off guard. Russell had already noted that Lenin was a “great man.” However, this embracing of violence caught Russell by surprise.
Then I will look at an examination of communism by Francis Schaeffer who will tell us why Communism ALWAYS fails to give the freedoms that it says it will and why so many young people are caught up in its idealistic promises.
“I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.”
In relation to any political doctrine there are two questions to be asked: (1) Are its theoretical tenets true? (2) Is its practical policy likely to increase human happiness? For my part, I think the theoretical tenets of Communism are false, and I think its practical maxims are such as to produce an immeasurable increase of human misery.
The theoretical doctrines of Communism are for the most part derived from Marx. My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred. The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus’s doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners. Marx’s doctrine that all historical events have been motivated by class conflicts is a rash and untrue extension to world history of certain features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago. His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology. His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process.
Marx’s doctrine was bad enough, but the developments which it underwent under Lenin and Stalin made it much worse. Marx had taught that there would be a revolutionary transitional period following the victory of the proletariat in a civil war and that during this period the proletariat, in accordance with the usual practice after a civil war, would deprive its vanquished enemies of political power. This period was to be that of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It should not be forgotten that in Marx’s prophetic vision the victory of the proletariat was to come after it had grown to be the vast majority of the population. The dictatorship of the proletariat therefore as conceived by Marx was not essentially anti-democratic. In the Russia of 1917, however, the proletariat was a small percentage of the population, the great majority being peasants. it was decreed that the Bolshevik party was the class-conscious part of the proletariat, and that a small committee of its leaders was the class-conscious part of the Bolshevik party. The dictatorship of the proletariat thus came to be the dictatorship of a small committee, and ultimately of one man – Stalin. As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to forced labour in concentration camps. He even went so far as to decree that the laws of heredity are henceforth to be different from what they used to be, and that the germ-plasm is to obey Soviet decrees but that that reactionary priest Mendel. I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.
I have always disagreed with Marx. My first hostile criticism of him was published in 1896. But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous. A minority resting its powers upon the activities of secret police is bound to be cruel, oppressive and obscuarantist. The dangers of the irresponsible power cane to be generally recognized during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but those who have forgotten all that was painfully learnt during the days of absolute monarchy, and have gone back to what was worst in the middle ages under the curious delusion that they were in the vanguard of progress.
There are signs that in course of time the Russian régime will become more liberal. But, although this is possible, it is very far from certain. In the meantime, all those who value not only art and science but a sufficiency of bread and freedom from the fear that a careless word by their children to a schoolteacher may condemn them to forced labour in a Siberian wilderness, must do what lies in their power to preserve in their own countries a less servile and more prosperous manner of life.
There are those who, oppressed by the evils of Communism, are led to the conclusion that the only effective way to combat these evils is by means of a world war. I think this a mistake. At one time such a policy might have been possible, but now war has become so terrible and Communism has become so powerful that no one can tell what would be left after a world war, and whatever might be left would probably be at least as bad as present -day Communism. This forecast does not depend upon the inevitable effects of mass destruction by means of hydrogen and cobalt bombs and perhaps of ingeniously propagated plagues. The way to combat Communism is not war. What is needed in addition to such armaments as will deter Communists from attacking the West, is a diminution of the grounds for discontent in the less prosperous parts of the non-communist world. In most of the countries of Asia, there is abject poverty which the West ought to alleviate as far as it lies in its power to do so. There is also a great bitterness which was caused by the centuries of European insolent domination in Asia. This ought to be dealt with by a combination of patient tact with dramatic announcements renouncing such relics of white domination as survive in Asia. Communism is a doctrine bred of poverty, hatred and strife. Its spread can only be arrested by diminishing the area of poverty and hatred.
itself an excerpt from
“The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism” By Bertrand Russell.
Webmaster’s note
The last paragraph (especially) shows that Russell’s atheism has nothing in common with Marxist-Leninism. It refutes the idea that the USSR is a lesson against the rejection of religion, because it had exactly the faults that mar any dogmatic belief.
Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour’s conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well. An interpreter was present, but his services were scarcely required. Lenin’s room is very bare; it contains a big desk, some maps on the walls, two book-cases, and one comfortable chair for visitors in addition to two or three hard chairs. It is obvious that he has no love of luxury or even comfort. He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without a trace of hauteur.
If one met him without knowing who he was, one would not guess that he is possessed of great power or even that he is in any way eminent. I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory.
The MATERIALIST conception of history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat.
When I suggested that whatever is possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, he waved aside the suggestion as fantastic. I got little impression of knowledge or psychological imagination as regards Great Britain. Indeed the whole tendency of Marxianism is against psychological imagination, since it attributes everything in politics to purely MATERIAL causes.
I asked him next whether he thought it possible to establish Communism firmly and fully in a country containing such a large majority of peasants. He admitted that it was difficult, and laughed over the exchange the peasant is compelled to make, of food for paper; the worthlessness of Russian paper struck him as comic. But he said—what is no doubt true—that things will right themselves when there are goods to offer to the peasant. For this he looks partly to electrification in industry, which, he says, is a technical necessity in Russia, but will take ten years to complete. He spoke with enthusiasm, as they all do, of the great scheme for generating electrical power by means of peat. Of course he looks to the raising of the blockade as the only radical cure; but he was not very hopeful of this being achieved thoroughly or permanently except through revolutions in other countries. Peace between Bolshevik Russia and capitalist countries, he said, must always be insecure; the Entente might be led by weariness and mutual dissensions to conclude peace, but he felt convinced that the peace would be of brief duration. I found in him, as in almost all leading Communists, much less eagerness than existed in our delegation for peace and the raising of the blockade. He believes that nothing of real value can be achieved except through world revolution and the abolition of capitalism; I felt that he regarded the resumption of trade with capitalist countries as a mere palliative of doubtful value.
He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the Government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing. He spoke as though the dictatorship over the peasant would have to continue a long time, because of the peasant’s desire for free trade. He said he knew from statistics (what I can well believe) that the peasants have had more to eat these last two years than they ever had before, “and yet they are against us,” he added a little wistfully. I asked him what to reply to critics who say that in the country he has merely created peasant proprietorship, not Communism; he replied that that is not quite the truth, but he did not say what the truth is.
The last question I asked him was whether resumption of trade with capitalist countries, if it took place, would not create centres of capitalist influence, and make the preservation of Communism more difficult? It had seemed to me that the more ardent Communists might well dread commercial intercourse with the outer world, as leading to an infiltration of heresy, and making the rigidity of the present system almost impossible. I wished to know whether he had such a feeling. He admitted that trade would create difficulties, but said they would be less than those of the war. He said that two years ago neither he nor his colleagues thought they could survive against the hostility of the world. He attributes their survival to the jealousies and divergent interests of the different capitalist nations; also to the power of Bolshevik propaganda. He said the Germans had laughed when the Bolsheviks proposed to combat guns with leaflets, but that the event had proved the leaflets quite as powerful. I do not think he recognizes that the Labour and Socialist parties have had any part in the matter. He does not seem to know that the attitude of British Labour has done a great deal to make a first-class war against Russia impossible, since it has confined the Government to what could be done in a hole-and-corner way, and denied without a too blatant mendacity.
I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith—religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr’s hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical. He has as little love of liberty as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when they acquired power. Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with whole-hearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world.
I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.
“When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of Mongolian cruelty and bigotry. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.”
Bertrand Russell, “Eminent Men I Have Known” (courtesy of Richard Brookhiser)
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Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. “True Communism has never been tried” is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.
Hope in Marxism-Leninism is a leap in the area of nonreason. From the Russian Revolution until 1959 a total of 66 million prisoners died. This was deemed acceptable to the leaders because internal security was to be gained at any cost. The ends justified the means. The materialism of Marxism gives no basis for human dignity or rights. These hold to their philosophy against all reason and close their eyes to the oppression of the system.
#02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer
WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?
Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Is Christianity at all like Communism?
Sometimes Communism sounds very “Christian” – desirable goals of equality, justice, etc but these terms are just borrowed from the New Testament. Schaeffer elsewhere explains by saying Marxism is a Christian heresy.
Below is a great article. Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
This article was published January 30, 2011 at 2:28 a.m. Here is a portion of that article below:
A final advantage is the mutation of socialism into so many variants over the past century or so. Precisely because Karl Marx was unclear as to how it would work in practice, socialism has always been something of an empty vessel into which would be revolutionaries seeking personal meaning and utopian causes to support can pour pretty much anything.
A desire to increase state power, soak the rich and expand the welfare state is about all that is left of the original vision. Socialism for young lefties these days means “social justice” and compassion for the poor, not the gulag and the NKVD.
In the end, the one argument that will never wash is that communismcan’t be said to have failed because it was never actually tried. This is a transparent intellectual dodge that ignores the fact that “people’s democracies” were established all over the place in the first three decades after World War II.
Such sophistry is resorted to only because communism in all of those places produced hell on earth rather than heaven.
That the attempts to build communism in a remarkable variety of different geographical regions led to only tyranny and mass bloodshed tells us only that it was never feasible in the first place, and that societies built on the socialist principle ironically suffer from the kind of “inner contradictions” that Marx mistakenly predicted would destroy capitalism.
Yes, all economies are mixed in nature, and one could plausibly argue that the socialist impulse took the rough edges off of capitalism by sponsoring the creation of welfare-state programs that command considerable public support.
But the fact remains that no society in history has been able to achieve sustained prosperity without respect for private property and market forces of supply and demand. Nations, therefore, retain their economic dynamism only to the extent that they resist the temptation to travel too far down the socialist road.
#02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer
Francis Schaeffer notes:
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with...Jurgen Habermas (1929-).
Herbert Marcuse, “Liberation from the Affluent Society” (1967)
Brannon Howse talks some about the Frankfurt School in some of his publications too.
During the 1960’s many young people were turning to the New Left fueled by Marcuse and Habermas but something happened to slow many young people’s enthusiasm for that movement.
1970 bombing took away righteous standing of Anti-War movement
Francis Schaeffer mentioned the 1970 bombing in his film series “How should we then live?” and I wanted to give some more history on it. Schaeffer asserted:
In the United States the New Left also slowly ground down,losing favor because of the excesses of the bombings, especially in the bombing of the University of Wisconsin lab in 1970, where a graduate student was killed. This was not the last bomb that was or will be planted in the United States. Hard-core groups of radicals still remain and are active, and could become more active, but the violence which the New Left produced as its natural heritage (as it also had in Europe) caused the majority of young people in the United States no longer to see it as a hope. So some young people began in 1964 to challenge the false values of personal peace and affluence, and we must admire them for this. Humanism, man beginning only from himself, had destroyed the old basis of values, and could find no way to generate with certainty any new values. In the resulting vacuum the impoverished values of personal peace and affluence had comes to stand supreme. And now, for the majority of the young people, after the passing of the false hopes of drugs as an ideology and the fading of the New Left, what remained? Only apathy was left. In the United States by the beginning of the seventies, apathy was almost complete. In contrast to the political activists of the sixties, not many of the young even went to the polls to vote, even though the national voting age was lowered to eighteen. Hope was gone.
After the turmoil of the sixties, many people thought that it was so much the better when the universities quieted down in the early seventies. I could have wept. The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions. How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents–personal peace and affluence. (How Should We Then Live, pp. 209-210
Aug. 24 marked the 41st anniversary of the Sterling Hall bombing on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Four men planned the bomb at the height of the student protests over the Vietnam War. Back then, current Madison Mayor Paul Soglin was one of the leaders of those student protests in the capitol city. This weekend, Soglin recalled the unrest felt by UW-Madison students.
“The anti-war movement adopted a lot of its tactics and strategies from the civil rights movement which was about ten years older,” said Soglin. “It was one of picketing, demonstration, and passive resistance.”
The four men who planned the bombing focused on the Army Mathematics Research Center housed in Sterling Hall because it was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and therefore, worked on weapons technology. Karl Armstrong was one of the four men and he recently spoke with CBS News in his first television interview detailing the moments right before the bomb was set off.
“He asked me, he says, ‘Should we go ahead? Are we gonna do this?’ I think I made a comment to him about something like, ‘Now, I know what war is about,'” remembered Armstrong. “And I told him to light it.”
The bomb killed one researcher and father of three, 33-year-old Robert Fassnacht, although Armstrong maintains they planned the attack thinking no one would get hurt. The four men heard about the death as they were in their getaway car after the bomb went off.
“I felt good about doing the bombing, the bombing per se, but not taking someone’s life,” recalled Armstrong.
The researcher’s wife told CBS News that she harbors no ill will toward Armstrong and the other bombers. Three of the four men were captured and served time in prison. Armstrong served eight years of a 23-year sentence.
The fourth man, Leo Burt, was last seen in the fall of 1970 in Ontario and is to this day, still wanted by the FBI, with a $150,000 reward for his capture.
Today we look at the 3rd letter in the Kroto correspondence and his admiration of Bertrand Russell. (Below The Nobel chemistry laureates Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley) It is with sadness that I write this post having learned of the death of Sir Harold Kroto on April 30, 2016 at the age of […]
On November 21, 2014 I received a letter from Nobel Laureate Harry Kroto and it said: …Please click on this URL http://vimeo.com/26991975 and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them. Harry Kroto _________________ Below you have picture of Dr. Harry Kroto: Gareth Stedman […]
Top 10 Woody Allen Movies __________ John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!! Monday, August 06, 2012 (More On) Woody Allen’s Atheism As I wrote in a previous post, I like Woody Allen. I have long admired his […]
______ Top 10 Woody Allen Movies PBS American Masters – Woody Allen A Documentary 01 PBS American Masters – Woody Allen A Documentary 02 __________ John Piippo makes the case that Bertrand Russell would have loved Woody Allen because they both were two atheists who don’t deny the ramifications of atheism!!! Monday, August 06, 2012 […]
THE MORAL ARGUMENT BERTRAND RUSSELL But aren’t you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good — the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you’re […]
Great debate Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, […]
Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of UK/BBC copyright. Pardon the hissy audio. It was recorded 51 […]
Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of […]
THE MORAL ARGUMENT BERTRAND RUSSELL But aren’t you now saying in effect, I mean by God whatever is good or the sum total of what is good — the system of what is good, and, therefore, when a young man loves anything that is good he is loving God. Is that what you’re […]
Fr. Frederick C. Copleston vs Bertrand Russell – Part 1 Uploaded by riversonthemoon on Jul 15, 2009 BBC Radio Third Programme Recording January 28, 1948. BBC Recording number T7324W. This is an excerpt from the full broadcast from cassette tape A303/5 Open University Course, Problems of Philosophy Units 7-8. Older than 50 years, out of […]
There are some unconventional ways of teaching economics, such as the two-part video series dramatizing the battle between Hayek and Keynes, first as a rap contest and second as a boxing match.
Today, let’s look at a comic book that explains the value of capital formation.
It starts with some guys who live on an island and feed themselves by hand-catching fish.
This is not a very productive approach.
One of the guys comes up with an idea, but it requires him to sacrifice in the short run.
Not only is he sacrificing short-run consumption, he is taking a risk.
Fortunately, this example of entrepreneurship is successful.
By creating a more productive way of catching fish, our entrepreneur now has time for other activities.
Unfortunately, some of the other guys on the island are envious.
The comic book concludes with the all-important point that a “capitalist” can only get richer by deploying wealth in ways that make others better off.
Amen. Just as Professor Nordhaus from Yale taught us back in 2004.
P.S. This is something that I’ve tried to explain in long – and probably boring – columns (here and here).
(Plus below in this post is my November 24, 2020 letter to Former President Obama about the weaknesses of COMMUNISM!!)
As reported by Alex Gangitano for the Hill, the president asserted that only “idiots” thought he was a socialist.
President Biden on Saturday said people holding signs calling him a socialist were idiots…he said in remarks at Jones Elementary in Joliet, Ill…“I love those signs when I came in — socialism. Give me a break, what idiots,” the president added. …The Illinois stop is another on a list of typically blue strongholds the president is visiting in the days before Election Day on Tuesday. He also traveled to New Mexico and California this week and will make stops in New York on Sunday and Maryland on Monday.
If you read the entire article, at no point does Biden explain why the signs were wrong. Or idiotic. Instead, he did his usual political routine, attacking Republicans for wanting to make changes to Social Security and Medicare (I wish!).
Since Biden dodged the issue, let’s look at whether the critics are right.
Is the president a socialist?
The answer depends on who is answering. For economists, socialism has a very specific definition. It does not simply mean big government.
As explained in this video by Dennis Prager, communism is an evil ideology that has led to the murder of more than 100 million people and the enslavement of hundreds of millions more.
All decent people should not only reject communism, but also ostracize anybody who offers support or sympathy for communism.
We are (or should be) nauseated by anybody who expresses sympathy for Nazism, and we should have the same approachfor those who express any support for its sister ideology of communism.
I raise this topic because the Biden Administration wants a Marxist sympathizer, Saule Omarova, to be the Comptroller of the Currency.
The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about this woman, who arguably is Biden’s worst nominee for any position.
President Biden checked off another progressive identity box last week by nominating Saule Omarova as Comptroller of the Currency. …The Cornell University law school professor’s radical ideas might make even Bernie Sanders blush. She graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. Thirty years later, she still believes the Soviet economic system was superior, and that U.S. banking should be remade in the Gosbank’s image.…”Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best,’” she tweeted in 2019. …Ms. Omarova thinks asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit should be dictated by the federal government. …As they like to say at the modern university, from each according to her ability to each according to her needs. …Ms. Omarova believes capital and credit should be directed by an unaccountable bureaucracy and intelligentsia. She has recommended a “National Investment Authority”…. Democratic Senators have rubber-stamped all but a few of Mr. Biden’s nominees, but Ms. Omarova is the wrong nominee for the wrong industry in the wrong country in the wrong century.
It’s not just the pro-market folks at the Wall Street Journal who have are warning about the impropriety of nominating a radical leftist to an important position.
In a column for the Washington Post, Charles Lane writes about Ms. Omarova’s bizarre views.
Omarova’s left-wing views on banking, and on the Fed’s economic powers, are…radical. Centrist Democratic senators could — and should — use this nomination to demonstrate the limits of their party’s progressive drift. …Omarova…concludes that we might as well resurrect Gosplan.…She proposes that the Fed, not banks, should take deposits from the public, then leverage them by “dramatically augmenting the flow of credit into the coordinated nationwide construction of public infrastructure that enables and facilitates structurally balanced, socially inclusive and sustainable economic growth.” In short, the Fed would replace private commercial banking. …Omarova…refers to her plan as a way to “democratize money.” A more plausible view is that…it would destroy the economy in the name of saving it.
But I also think she should be rejected for reasons of human decency.
We wouldn’t approve nominees who expressed support for Nazism, even if they tried to sanitize their views by pointing to policies such as Hitler’s autobahns or environmentalism.
The same moral standard should apply to people who express any type of support for the similarly evilideology of communism.
So here are some additions to our collection of communism humor.
I’m among the small minority of people who have never watched Game of Thrones, so I don’t know the backstory on these characters, but this meme has a very appropriate message about the nuclear-level naivete needed to believe Marx’s nonsense.
Though maybe the first frame should say “Readers of Teen Vogue.”
It’s bad news that we’re suffering from a coronavirus that has killed several million people globally, but there’s another virus that has butchered 100 million people.
This next image reminds me of the joke about communism and electricity.
Per my tradition, here’s my favorite item from today’s collection.
I’m always very impressed by the people who are clever enough to create these Venn diagrams, and this one is better than most.
Though I’m tempted to ask who is worse, the soulless Marxist who rambles and can’t be reasoned with, or the people who rationalize, glorify, and justify Marxism?
—-
November 24, 2020
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: Looking back, it’s embarrassing to recognize the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know: Marx and Marcuse so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm,”
I noticed you mentioned Herbert Marcuse, and I have read of his influence in Francis Schaeffer’s book How should we then live?:
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. … but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. … followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898-). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist.
Moral Support: “One Dimensional Man” author Herbert Marcuse accompanies Bettina Aptheker, center, and Angela Davis’ mother, Sallye Davis, to Angela Davis’ 1972 trial in San Jose. Associated Press
_
______________Francis Schaeffer is a hero of mine and I have posted many times in the past using his material. This post below is a result of his material..Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. TrueCommunism has never been tried is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Let me share with you the story of Paul Robeson and it demonstrates that he had to lie about how cruel communism was and the killing of his friend Itzik Feffer.
Paul Leroy Robeson (/ˈroʊbsən/ROHB-sən;[2][3] April 9, 1898 – January 23, 1976) was an American bass baritone concert artist and stage and film actor who became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism
Robeson traveled to Moscow in June, and tried to find Itzik Feffer. He let Soviet authorities know that he wanted to see him.[207] Reluctant to lose Robeson as a propagandist for the Soviet Union,[208] the Soviets brought Feffer from prison to him. Feffer told him that Mikhoels had been murdered, and he would be summarily executed.[209] To protect the Soviet Union’s reputation,[210] and to keep the right wing of the United States from gaining the moral high ground, Robeson denied that any persecution existed in the Soviet Union,[211] and kept the meeting secret for the rest of his life, except from his son.[210]
DANIEL J. FLYNN tells a few details in this sad story: Why Did ESPN Showcase a Stalinist on Monday NightFootball?Stalin Peace Prize laureate Paul Robeson lauded on America’s No. 1 sports network. In 1949, Robeson again traveled to the Soviet Union, where he had sent his namesake to school during the 1930s. Robeson had met poet Itzik Feffer and actor Solomon Mikhoels at a Polo Grounds rally of 50,000 people — the largest pro-Soviet event in the history of the United States — that welcomed their Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in 1943. But by 1949 Stalin wished to kill Jews rather than use them for propaganda purposes. He murdered Mikhoels and later Feffer — but not before Robeson could visit his old friend the poet one last time.
David Horowitz describes this meeting in Radical Son:
In America, the question “What happened to Itzik Feffer?” entered the currency of political debate. There was talk in intellectual circles that Jews were being killed in a new Soviet purge and that Feffer was one of them. It was to quell such rumors that Robeson asked to see his old friend, but he was told by Soviet officials that he would have to wait. Eventually, he was informed that the poet was vacationing in the Crimea and would see him as soon as he returned. The reality was that Feffer had already been in prison for three years, and his Soviet captors did not want to bring him to Robeson immediately because he had become emaciated from lack of food. While Robeson waited in Moscow, Stalin’s police brought Feffer out of prison, put him the care of doctors, and began fattening him up for the interview. When he looked sufficiently healthy, he was brought to Moscow. The two men met in a room that was under secret surveillance. Feffer knew he could not speak freely. When Robeson asked how he was, he drew his finger nervously across his throat and motioned with his eyes and lips to his American comrade. “They’re going to kill us,” he said. “When you return to America you must speak out and save us.”
Instead, Robeson, who later confessed what happened to his son, spoke out in praise of his friends’ murderer.
“Yes, through his deep humanity, by his wise understanding, he leaves us a rich and monumental heritage,” Robeson recalled of Stalin. “Most importantly — he has charted the direction of our present and future struggles. He has pointed the way to peace — to friendly co-existence — to the exchange of mutual scientific and cultural contributions — to the end of war and destruction. How consistently, how patiently, he labored for peace and ever increasing abundance, with what deep kindliness and wisdom. He leaves tens of millions all over the earth bowed in heart-aching grief.”
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)
So let’s look at what the leader of Poland’s first independent union said to them.
Lech Walesa. Of the giants who brought down the Iron Curtain — among them Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, Vaclav Havel — only Walesa is still with us. At 79, he still looks as vigorous as the young electrician who led a workers’ uprising against the “dictatorship of the proletariat”; forced Poland’s Marxist regime to recognize the first independent trade union in the communist world;was imprisoned under martial law only to later force his former jailers at the negotiating table to allow free elections… What is his message for young people who have no living memory of communism? “Many young people are actually fooled to accept communism as an idea,” he said, speaking through an interpreter. “There are beautiful sentences talking about equality, about justice. … But as soon as you start putting that system into practice, all sorts of serious disasters come about. But young people quite often don’t know it. We have experience [with socialism], so we really know something about it. So, I strongly recommend rejecting it.”
That’s very good advice.
Unless, of course, you have a very perverse desire to create more deprivation and misery in the world.
The Coutts bank in London features a Pride Month display on June 7, 2023. (Photo: Matthew Chattle/Future Publishing/Getty Images)
June 1 marked the advent of Pride Month—the most important sacrament of the American secular religious calendar.
During Pride Month, public schools across the nation teach small children the joys of alternative sexual practices and orientations; corporations plaster their stores in rainbow accoutrements of all sorts; and the federal government of the United States proclaims its fidelity to the LGBTQ+*&^% ideology.
The American public, for the most part, has historically taken Pride Month not for what it is but for what it sometimes purports to be: a call for tolerance of the marginalized. But that, of course, is not what Pride Month is or ever was.
Pride Month is not a call for equality but a call for revolution. The Pride movement was always a call for a replacement of historic, tried and true cultural norms with new, untried and risky cultural norms.
Heteronormativity is one such tried and true norm: the correct belief that any durable society rests on the basis of male-female dyads producing children. Such a norm ought to be promoted. But Pride suggests the opposite: that heteronormativity is an authoritarian and discriminatory standard that places artificial limits on the full flowering of human sexuality. Explode the norm and maximize human happiness!
This, of course, was precisely the case made by the original exponents of the sexual revolution.
Herbert Marcuse, author of “Eros and Civilization” (1955) called for a rewriting of all sexual norms in order to tear down the capitalist structure. He sought “a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”
Such a civilization could only be birthed by treating “the body in its entirety [as] an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure.” Sex would be unmoored from marriage and parenthood; Marcuse argued, “the barriers against absolute gratification would become elements of human freedom … This sensuous rationality contains its own moral laws.”
By 1970, feminist Shulamith Firestone argued that sexual revolution would bring about “not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.” Happiness would now be found in a “reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality—Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’—would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.”
We have now reached the dystopia sought by Marcuse and Firestone: a world in which all the elites in our society participate in the rewriting of durable societal norms in favor of unending sexual gratification. In order to maintain that dystopia, however, our societal elites require one more element: repression of the traditional norms.
A fair fight might leave traditional Judeo-Christian norms in place; they’ve proved rather durable over time. Marcuse had a solution for just such a problem: repression. Promotion of the new morality would require quashing the old. “[L]iberation of the Damned of the Earth presupposes suppression not only of their old but also of their new masters,” Marcuse wrote.
And so the culture war rages. Because, after all, old norms don’t die easily. They must be killed in order to achieve “Pride” in the alternative. And that revolution requires the exercise of cultural, governmental, and corporate power from sea to shining sea.
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Sea of Faith 4 – Don Cupitt – Documentary : (Marx, Kierkegaard)
Published on Nov 12, 2013
Prometheus Unbound’: Karl Marx & Soren Kierkegaard; the religuos individualism of Kierkegaard is contrasted with the socio-economic & political approach of Marx.
Here in Episode 4 of SoF, Cupitt looks the attempt to find an origin for values in a post enlightenment secular world.
SoF
In this thoughtful and discursive series Rev Prof Don Cupitt explores how Christian thought nurtured, and responded to an increasingly materialist/realist/rationalist modern world-view. Cupitt consideredly meanders through the works and lives of a miscellany of thoughtful coves including Galileo, Pascal, David Strauss, Kierkegaard, Jung, Schopenhaurer, Annie Besant, Vivekananda, Albert Schweitzer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and others. This learned, yet accessible, and frankly slightly odd series, is just the sort of thing you don’t see on TV anymore.
(Don Cupitt’s 1984 BBC documentary “Sea of Faith” complete, entire whole Episode 4 Prometheus Unbound)
~~~
History. Western Thought, Christianity, Christian Existentialism, Western thought, Marxism, Communism, Religion, Theology, Philosophy, God.
____________________
At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. … but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. … followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898-). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist.
Moral Support: “One Dimensional Man” author Herbert Marcuse accompanies Bettina Aptheker, center, and Angela Davis’ mother, Sallye Davis, to Angela Davis’ 1972 trial in San Jose. Associated Press
Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried. True
Communism has never been tried is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.WHY DOES COMMUNISM FAIL?
Communism has always failed because of its materialist base. Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.
Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.
1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.
Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.
2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).
Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.
3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.
How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?
Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).
Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).
WHY DOES THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM CATCH THE ATTENTION OF SO MANY IDEALISTIC YOUNG PEOPLE? The reason is very simple.
In HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, the late Francis A. Schaeffer wrote:
Materialism, the philosophic base for Marxist-Leninism, gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Where Marxist-Leninism is not in power it attracts and converts by talking much of dignity and rights, but its materialistic base gives no basis for the dignity or rights of man. Yet is attracts by its constant talk of idealism.
To understand this phenomenon we must understand that Marx reached over to that for which Christianity does give a base–the dignity of man–and took the words as words of his own. The only understanding of idealistic sounding Marxist-Leninism is that it is (in this sense) a Christian heresy. Not having the Christian base, until it comes to power it uses the words for which Christianity does give a base. But wherever Marxist-Leninism has had power, it has at no place in history shown where it has not brought forth oppression. As soon as they have had the power, the desire of the majority has become a concept without meaning.
Is Christianity at all like Communism?
Sometimes Communism sounds very “Christian” – desirable goals of equality, justice, etc but these terms are just borrowed from the New Testament. Schaeffer elsewhere explains by saying Marxism is a Christian heresy.
Below is a great article. Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
This article was published January 30, 2011 at 2:28 a.m. Here is a portion of that article below:
A final advantage is the mutation of socialism into so many variants over the past century or so. Precisely because Karl Marx was unclear as to how it would work in practice, socialism has always been something of an empty vessel into which would be revolutionaries seeking personal meaning and utopian causes to support can pour pretty much anything.
A desire to increase state power, soak the rich and expand the welfare state is about all that is left of the original vision. Socialism for young lefties these days means “social justice” and compassion for the poor, not the gulag and the NKVD.
In the end, the one argument that will never wash is that communismcan’t be said to have failed because it was never actually tried. This is a transparent intellectual dodge that ignores the fact that “people’s democracies” were established all over the place in the first three decades after World War II.
Such sophistry is resorted to only because communism in all of those places produced hell on earth rather than heaven.
That the attempts to build communism in a remarkable variety of different geographical regions led to only tyranny and mass bloodshed tells us only that it was never feasible in the first place, and that societies built on the socialist principle ironically suffer from the kind of “inner contradictions” that Marx mistakenly predicted would destroy capitalism.
Yes, all economies are mixed in nature, and one could plausibly argue that the socialist impulse took the rough edges off of capitalism by sponsoring the creation of welfare-state programs that command considerable public support.
But the fact remains that no society in history has been able to achieve sustained prosperity without respect for private property and market forces of supply and demand. Nations, therefore, retain their economic dynamism only to the extent that they resist the temptation to travel too far down the socialist road.
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1970 bombing took away righteous standing of Anti-War movement.
Francis Schaeffer mentioned the 1970 bombing in his film series “How should we then live?” and I wanted to give some more history on it. Schaeffer noted:
In the United States the New Left also slowly ground down,losing favor because of the excesses of the bombings, especially in the bombing of the University of Wisconsin lab in 1970, where a graduate student was killed. This was not the last bomb that was or will be planted in the United States. Hard-core groups of redicals still remain and are active, and could become more active, but the violence which the New Left produced as its natural heritage (as it also had in Europe) caused the majority of young people in the United States no longer to see it as a hope. So some young people began in 1964 to challenge the false values of personal peace and affluence, and we must admire them for this. Humanism, man beginning only from himself, had destroyed the old basis of values, and could find no way to generate with certainty any new values. In the resulting vacuum the impoverished values of personal peace and affluence had comes to stand supreme. And now, for the majority of the young people, after the passing of the false hopes of drugs as an ideology and the fading of the New Left, what remained? Only apathy was left. In the United States by the beginning of the seventies, apathy was almost complete. In contrast to the political activists of the sixties, not many of the young even went to the polls to vote, even though the national voting age was lowered to eighteen. Hope was gone.
After the turmoil of the sixties, many people thought that it was so much the better when the universities quieted down in the early seventies. I could have wept. The young people had been right in their analysis, though wrong in their solutions. How much worse when many gave up hope and simply accepted the same values as their parents–personal peace and affluence. (How Should We Then Live, pp. 209-210)
Aug. 24 marked the 41st anniversary of the Sterling Hall bombing on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Four men planned the bomb at the height of the student protests over the Vietnam War. Back then, current Madison Mayor Paul Soglin was one of the leaders of those student protests in the capitol city. This weekend, Soglin recalled the unrest felt by UW-Madison students.
“The anti-war movement adopted a lot of its tactics and strategies from the civil rights movement which was about ten years older,” said Soglin. “It was one of picketing, demonstration, and passive resistance.”
The four men who planned the bombing focused on the Army Mathematics Research Center housed in Sterling Hall because it was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and therefore, worked on weapons technology. Karl Armstrong was one of the four men and he recently spoke with CBS News in his first television interview detailing the moments right before the bomb was set off.
“He asked me, he says, ‘Should we go ahead? Are we gonna do this?’ I think I made a comment to him about something like, ‘Now, I know what war is about,'” remembered Armstrong. “And I told him to light it.”
The bomb killed one researcher and father of three, 33-year-old Robert Fassnacht, although Armstrong maintains they planned the attack thinking no one would get hurt. The four men heard about the death as they were in their getaway car after the bomb went off.
“I felt good about doing the bombing, the bombing per se, but not taking someone’s life,” recalled Armstrong.
The researcher’s wife told CBS News that she harbors no ill will toward Armstrong and the other bombers. Three of the four men were captured and served time in prison. Armstrong served eight years of a 23-year sentence.
The fourth man, Leo Burt, was last seen in the fall of 1970 in Ontario and is to this day, still wanted by the FBI, with a $150,000 reward for his capture.
E P I S O D E 9
T h e Age of Personal Peace and Affluence
I. By the Early 1960s People Were Bombarded From Every Side by Modern Man’s Humanistic Thought
II. Modern Form of Humanistic Thought Leads to Pessimism
Regarding a Meaning for Life and for Fixed Values
A. General acceptance of selfish values (personal peace and affluence) accompanied rejection of Christian consensus.
1. Personal peace means: I want to be left alone, and I don’t care what happens to the man across the street or across the world. I want my own life-style to be undisturbed regardless of what it will mean — even to my own children and grandchildren.
2. Affluence means things, things, things, always more things — and success is seen as an abundance of things.
B. Students wish to escape meaninglessness of much of adult society.
1. Watershed was Berkeley in 1964.
2. Drug Taking as an ideology: “turning on” the world.
3. Free Speech Movement on Sproul Plaza.
a) At first neither Left nor Right.
b) Soon became the New Left.
(1) Followed Marcuse.
(2) Paris riots.
4. Student analysis of problem was right, but solution wrong.
5. Woodstock, Altamont, and the end of innocence.
6. Drug taking survives the death of ideology but as an escape.
7. Demise of New Left: radical bombings.
8. Apathy supreme. The young accept values of the older generation: their own idea of personal peace and affluence, even though adopting a different life-style.
C. Marxism and Maoism as pseudo-ideals.
1. Vogue for idealistic communism which is another form of leap into the area of non-reason.
2. Solzhenitsyn: violence and expediency as norms of communism.
3. Communist repression in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
4. Communism has neither philosophic nor historic base for freedom. There is no base for “Communism with a human face.”
5. Utopian Marxism steals its talk of human dignity from Christianity.
6. But when it comes to power, the desire of majority has no meaning.
7. Two streams of communism.
a) Those who hold it as an idealistic leap.
b) Old-line communists who hold orthodox communist ideology and bureaucratic structure as it exists in Russia.
8. Many in West might accept communism if it seemed to give peace and affluence.
III. Legal and Political Results of Attempted Human Autonomy
A. Relativistic law.
1. Base for nonarbitrary law gone; only inertia allows a few principles to survive.
2. Holmes and sociological (variable) law.
3. Sociological law comes from failure of natural law (see evolution of existential from rationalistic theology).
4. Courts are now generating law.
5. Medical, legal, and historical arbitrariness of Supreme Court ruling on abortion and current abortion practice.
B. Sociological law opens door to racism, abrogation of freedoms, euthanasia, and so on.
IV. Social Alternatives After Death of Christian Consensus
A. Hedonism? But might is right when pleasures conflict.
B. Without external absolute, majority vote is absolute. But this justifies a Hitler.
V. Conclusion
A. If there is no absolute by which to judge society, then society is absolute.
B. Humanist thinking—making the individual and mankind the center of all things (autonomous) — has led to death in our culture and in our political life.
Note: Social alternatives after the death of Christian consensus are continued in Episode Ten.
Questions
1. What was the basic cause of campus unrest in the sixties? What has happened to the campus scene since, and why?
2. What elements — in the life and thought of the communist and noncommunist world alike — suggest a possible base for world agreement?
3. “To prophesy doom about Western society is premature. We are, like all others who have lived in times of great change, too close to the details to see the broader picture. One thing we do know:
Society has always gone on, and the most wonderful epochs have followed the greatest depressions. To suggest that our day is the exception says more about our headache than it does about our head.” Debate.
4. As Dr. Schaeffer shows, many apparently isolated events and options gain new meaning when seen in the context of the whole. How far does your own involvement in business, law, financing, and so on reveal an acquiescence to current values?
Key Events and Persons
Oliver Wendell Holmes: 1841-1935
Herbert Marcuse: 1898-1979
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 1917-
Hungarian Revolution: 1956
Free Speech Movement: 1964
Czechoslovakian repression: 1968
Woodstock and Altamont: 1969
Radical bombings: 1970
Supreme Court abortion ruling: 1973
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago: 1973-74
Further Study
Keeping one’s eyes and ears open is the most useful study project: the prevalence of pornographic films and books, more and more suggestive advertising and TV shows, and signs of arbitrary absolutes.
The following books will repay careful reading, and Solzhenitsyn, though long and horrifying, should not be skipped.
Os Guinness, The Dust of Death (1973).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: Parts I-II (1973), Parts III-IV (1974).
Carla Fernández was born in 1973 in Saltillo, Mexico, and is based in Mexico City. Drawing inspiration from the geometric shapes of Mexican textiles and patterns, Fernández works closely with communities of indigenous artisans and craftspeople to create her clothing, textiles, and housewares for her eponymous fashion label. Guided by the ethos that tradition is not static and fashion is not ephemeral, Fernández travels throughout Mexico, visiting artisans who specialize in centuries-old techniques—such as weaving, handlooming, embroidery, mud dyeing, and leather working—and employs them to contribute in the production of new pieces and collections. Fernández’s practice serves as a reconceptualization of the ways in which cultural heritage and tradition can thrive in a globalizing, homogenizing world.
Professional Golfer Amy Olson (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
Professional golfer Amy Olson captured a wave of media attention last month when she competed at the 2023 U.S. Women’s Open at Pebble Beach while seven months pregnant with her first child. However, one story about Olson never made the news.
Steve Eubanks, a former senior writer at Global Golf Post and former managing editor of Global Golf Post+, told TheBlaze that he “resigned on the spot” when the executive editor and publisher insisted that his interview with Olson would only run “if we take out the abortion and the Christian stuff,” referring to the golfer’s comments about her faith and pro-life views.
According to Olson and Eubanks, the interview was ultimately withheld from publication on two separate occasions involving different media outlets.
What are the details?
Eubanks, an Atlanta-based author and columnist, was asked to write a preview story covering the U.S. Women’s Open, which was held at Pebble Beach in California this year for the first time. For the subject of his piece, Eubanks chose Olson, who would be competing in the July event while expecting her first child with husband Grant Olson.
The interview with the LPGA professionalcovered a wide range of topics, but Eubanks knew that one part of their conversation, in particular, would make the news.
When asked about the recent surge in media attention because of her decision to compete while pregnant, Olson pointed out the “irony” of the situation.
Olson: I’ve been honored that people have picked up the story and been interested. I feel like everyone has been supportive. Nothing but goodwill has come toward me, and I’ve so appreciated that.
I will say that the irony is not lost on me that, one year ago, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was playing in a major championship outside Washington, D.C., and women from around the world, and even on tour, were outraged. Now, a year later, people are celebrating that I’m going to be playing a major championship with an unborn child that they recognize as a life.
Even on Golf Channel, one of the hosts said that instead of 156, this year there will be 157 players in the field, recognizing that our child is a human being who will be out there with me.
That irony is not lost on me. I celebrate that our general humanity and common sense knows why this is something special.
Eubanks invited Olson to share how she navigated the media in June 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Olson: I had a number of private conversations and I made a public statement, which was the first public statement I’d ever made on something that was quote-unquote political, although I think it’s so much more than political. It’s really reductionist to call it a political issue.
Like anything, you have to handle it with compassion and truth. A lot of people had emotional reactions and really misunderstood, to an extent, what Dobbs did. I always tried to bring it back to what the court actually said. Yes, to an extent it was about life. But the court said, “Hey, we made the wrong decision in saying that courts should decide issues of abortion. This should be decided by elected officials who can be voted in and out of office.” So the court passed it back to state legislators, people who are accountable to the people.
Regardless of where you stand on the issue, things got terribly misrepresented, especially in the media where they often do. But for me it was certainly an interesting time.
When asked whether it is challenging being a Christian today, Olson opened up about her faith.
Olson: It’s very tough. Being a Christian has always been political because Christianity is supposed to touch every aspect of your life. I believe in comprehensive Christianity. It dictates how you treat people, how you think about the world, and the decisions that you make. There’s nothing in my life that isn’t affected by faith. To think that there is a realm out there not affected by my faith is something I can’t even fathom.
But over the last decade it’s become extremely difficult because a lot of the things that Christianity stands for have become political battlegrounds. Christ hasn’t changed His view on any of those things, but the culture has changed. So it’s a lot less acceptable to be an open Christian and to believe what Christianity has stood for the last 2,000 years.
Eubanks: Are you comfortable with the stands you’ve taken, even today as you say these things?
Olson: Absolutely, because, ultimately, I don’t stand before a human court. I stand before God. It’s why I do what I do and say what I say. Those around me will also have to stand before God, so if I ever say anything that is quote-unquote “offensive” I don’t do it to offend; I do it as a mission. Everyone stands before God in the end. I don’t want anyone to meet that moment unprepared.
I think the most unloving thing you can do is remain silent while someone you love and care about is walking down a path that is ultimately going to hurt them.
Eubanks told TheBlaze that when he filed the story with Global Golf Post’s editorial team, the staff “went ballistic.”
“About five hours into the editing process, I got calls from the editor saying, in his exact words, ‘The staff is going nuts. They’re saying we can’t run this,'” Eubanks said. “I was fighting very vociferously to get it run, saying, ‘It’s news; we’re a news outlet.’ And the point I wanted to make — if she had said exactly the opposite, I still would have fought to put it in.”
The piece was supposed to run the morning of the first day of the Women’s Open at Pebble Beach, he stated.
“Several back-and-forth phone calls took place on this, and finally, the editor in chief called and said, ‘The only way we will run this piece is if we take out the abortion and the Christian stuff,'” Eubanks continued. “That last line did it for me.”
After working at Global Golf Post since its launch 12 years ago, Eubanks “resigned on the spot.”
He noted that he would have understood pulling the story if the outlet had decided that the topic was too political for a sports publication.
“I would have fought like the devil to get it in, but it wouldn’t have been that big a deal,” Eubanks explained. “The last line showed me that not only were they anti-news, but they were decidedly anti-Christian. And I just couldn’t accept that.”
Eubanks’ interview with Olson never ran.
When contacted for a comment, Global Golf Post’s executive editor referred TheBlaze to the outlet’s founder and publisher, Jim Nugent. Nugent did not respond to a request for comment.
It doesn’t end there
While Olson was competing at the U.S. Women’s Open in early July, a writer with USA Today’s Golfweek picked up the story, Eubanks said.
The writer planned to publish a piece about “the interview that never ran,” he stated. Eubanks noted that Golfweek “spoke to Amy about what she’d said and interviewed me about my decision to resign.” To his knowledge, Golfweek’s article was written up and approved by its editorial team but was subsequently killed by editors at USA Today.
Eubanks and Olson told TheBlaze that Golfweek did not reach out to tell them why the story was not published.
Neither Golfweek nor USA Today responded to multiple requests for comment.
It is unclear why the story never ran.
Olson: ‘I lived through the outrage and also the celebration’
Olson told TheBlaze that she was excited for her interview to be published in Global Golf Post, noting that it was “an opportunity to share something about two experiences that I’d lived through.”
“Here’s been my experience in two major championships one year apart,” Olson stated. “One of them was complete outrage that a baby could have value while it’s still inside its mother’s womb. And then my second experience was playing Pebble Beach while seven months pregnant and the world celebrating the fact that there’s a life inside of me. And I lived through both of those. I lived through the outrage and also the celebration.”
“I wanted to comment on the irony of that,” she added.
Olson noted that Eubanks was not looking for her to comment on the topic but that she had brought it up herself while “trying to process the world that we’re living in right now” and was “shocked” when the story never ran.
“Then I think when I took a step back, I wasn’t quite as surprised when I thought about it a little bit more,” Olson remarked regarding the interview that was not published in Global Golf Post. “One of the things that stood out to me the most was just the fact that they had asked Steve to remove some of my specific comments, and then they would publish. And that is such a lack of journalistic integrity to remove certain aspects of a conversation, especially when it’s provided in transcript form.”
Olson was optimistic that her story would finally run when Golfweek reached out to her because she had always had positive experiences with that outlet in the past. She explained that when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the outlet had contacted her to share her opinion on the decision.
“There were other opinions shared because the article was basically just LPGA players’ reactions to Roe v. Wade being overturned,” she told TheBlaze. “To Golfweek’s credit, they had published comments of a conservative nature in the past, so honestly, I was really optimistic that they really wanted to get to the bottom of this and figure out why that other article got stopped.”
According to Olson, the day the Golfweek article was supposed to be published, it never ran.
“I didn’t fully understand why it didn’t get published,” Olson said regarding the Golfweek piece. “They didn’t know if it was because of my comments being Christian or conservative. They didn’t know if that was why it had gotten killed, and so they didn’t want to go forward with it being published. To me, it was a bit of a cop-out answer instead of really trying to get to the bottom of it.”
In the 10 years Olson has been playing professionally, she has never participated in an interview that did not get published, she noted.
“This is such an important issue,” Olson continued. “Not even necessarily the comments that I specifically made in the original article, but the fact that certain viewpoints are being censored. And it just makes me wonder, what other viewpoints are being censored?”
“I honestly just wanted to talk about my experience and make that public,” she added. “That was my intention and hope for people to be able to hear my two experiences that I’d lived through.”
The state of the media
Eubanks told TheBlaze that he has witnessed the political bias in the media become considerably worse, particularly within the last six to seven years.
He remarked that journalism is in a “sad state of affairs” and that he is “heartbroken to be in this position.”
“I don’t want this to sound like I’m trying to throw anybody under the bus or that I’m coming across as in any way bitter — I’m not,” he continued. “It’s just gotten to the point where the people who are in charge of these things don’t want to make waves. You have staffers who are going ballistic and who are kind of running the show. And so, you have an editor in chief and publisher who are saying — ‘Do I just let this story go or do I fight this battle with my staff going nuts?'”
Editorial teams at various media outlets are caving under the pressure from staffers to drop stories that go against the accepted narrative, Eubanks explained.
“Anyone who does not toe the left-leaning line now is shunned,” he added. “A lot of news that really should be out there is completely ignored because people have an agenda that they want to have out.”
Eubanks stated that many legacy media outlets have become “fan sites for their subscriber base” that provide viewers with “affirmation for their existing beliefs.”
“In sports, at least, which is my area of expertise, the leagues themselves are actually providing the most insightful and accurate coverage,” he said. “At the LPGA sites, the features and event coverage are the best in the business. The same is true for PGA.com and PGA magazine. Even sites like MLB.com get it right more often than the independent outlets ostensibly covering the sport.”
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Abortion: When Does Life Begin? – R.C. Sproul
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)
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 5 | Truth and History (20…
Abortion: What Is Your Verdict? – R.C. Sproul
John MacArthur Abortion and the Campaign for Immorality (Selected Scriptures)
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Arizona Dem gov nominee Katie Hobbs appears to support abortion up to birth
Hobbs accused her Republican opponent Kari Lake of misconstruing her position on late-term abortion, saying the procedure is ‘extremely rare’
Democratic Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs, during a Sunday appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” appeared to suggest that she was in favor of no limits on abortion.
Host Major Garrett noted that her Republican opponent Kari Lake has labeled Hobbs as an “extremist” for her view on abortion. He asked Hobbs whether she supported the current 15-week ban in Arizona or would seek a higher limit as governor.
Hobbs, who currently serves as Arizona’s Secretary of State, said Lake had misconstrued her position and said late-term abortion is “extremely rare.”
FILE: Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs speaks at a roundtable event in Phoenix, Monday, Sept. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
“If it’s being talked about, it’s because something has gone incredibly wrong in the pregnancy. A doctor’s not going to perform an abortion late in pregnancy just because somebody decided they want one. That is ridiculous,” Hobbs said before suggesting that Arizonans would have “government-mandated forced births that risk women’s lives” under a Kari Lake administration.
Asked what her administration’s week limit for abortion access would be, Hobbs evaded answering directly saying that abortion “is a very personal decision that belongs between a woman and her doctor.”
“The government and politicians don’t belong in that decision,” Hobbs said. “We need to let doctors perform the care that they are trained and take an oath to perform.”
“So, if an Arizona voter were to conclude from your previous answer that you do not favor any specific week limit on abortion, would they be correct?” Garrett asked.
Hobbs repeated her initial answer: “I support leaving the decision between a woman and her doctor and leaving politicians entirely out of it.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to Hobbs’ campaign for comment.
Arizona gubernatorial candidates Katie Hobbs (D), left, and Kari Lake (R), right. (Reuters)
Arizona doctors stopped performing abortions late last month after a judge in Tucson ruled that prosecutors can enforce a law dating to 1864 that bans abortion unless it’s necessary to save a woman’s life. Arizona also has a law passed this year that bans abortion after 15 weeks, creating speculation about what’s allowed.
Democrats have seized on the ruling, which revived the issue ahead of next month’s midterm elections. Democratic lawmakers sent a letter on Tuesday asking Republican Gov. Doug Ducey to call a special session of the Legislature to repeal the 1864 abortion ban.
Lake has spoken positively of Arizona’s total ban on abortion, which she called “a great law that’s already on the books.” She has called abortion “the ultimate sin,” said abortion pills should be illegal and that she would sign a bill banning abortion as soon as fetal cardiac activity can be detected, usually around six weeks gestational age and before many women know they’re pregnant.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bradford Betz is a breaking news reporter for Fox News Digital and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to bradford.betz@fox.com and on Twitter: @Bradford_Betz.
Edith Schaeffer with her husband, Francis Schaeffer, in 1970 in Switzerland, where they founded L’Abri, a Christian commune.
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September 25, 2021
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.
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 WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? which can be found on You Tube. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.
Today I want to respond to your letter to me on July 9, 2021. Here it is below:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2021
Mr. Everette Hatcher III
Alexander, AR
Dear Mr. Hatcher,
Thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts on abortion. Hearing from passionate individuals like me inspires me every day, and I welcome the opportunity to respond to your letter
Our country faces many challenges, and the road we will travel together will be one of the most difficult in our history. Despite these tough times, I have never been more optimistic for the future of America. I believe we are better positioned than any country in the world to lead in the 21st century not just by the example of our power but by the power of our example.
As we move forward to address the complex issues of our time, I encourage you to remain an active participant in helping write the next great chapter of the American story. We need your courage and dedication at this critical time, and we must meet this moment together as the United States of America. If we do that, I believe that our best days still lie ahead.
Sincerely
Joe Biden
Mr. President, my wife was born in JEFFERSON MEMORIAL HOSPITAL in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and Adrian Rogers tells a story about another lady that was born in that same hospital: “They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF?”
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 was blessed with the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Sagan, and in his December 5, 1995 letter Dr. Sagan went on to tell me that he was enclosing his article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. I am going to respond to several points made in that article. Here is a portion of Sagan’s article (here is a link to the whole article):
(both Adrian Rogers and Francis Schaeffer mentioned Carl Sagan in their books and that prompted me to write Sagan and expose him to their views.
For the complete text, including illustrations, introductory quote, footnotes, and commentary on the reaction to the originally published article see Billions and Billions.
The issue had been decided years ago. The court had chosen the middle ground. You’d think the fight was over. Instead, there are mass rallies, bombings and intimidation, murders of workers at abortion clinics, arrests, intense lobbying, legislative drama, Congressional hearings, Supreme Court decisions, major political parties almost defining themselves on the issue, and clerics threatening politicians with perdition. Partisans fling accusations of hypocrisy and murder. The intent of the Constitution and the will of God are equally invoked. Doubtful arguments are trotted out as certitudes. The contending factions call on science to bolster their positions. Families are divided, husbands and wives agree not to discuss it, old friends are no longer speaking. Politicians check the latest polls to discover the dictates of their consciences. Amid all the shouting, it is hard for the adversaries to hear one another. Opinions are polarized. Minds are closed.
Is it wrong to abort a pregnancy? Always? Sometimes? Never? How do we decide? We wrote this article to understand better what the contending views are and to see if we ourselves could find a position that would satisfy us both. Is there no middle ground? We had to weigh the arguments of both sides for consistency and to pose test cases, some of which are purely hypothetical. If in some of these tests we seem to go too far, we ask the reader to be patient with us–we’re trying to stress the various positions to the breaking point to see their weaknesses and where they fail.
In contemplative moments, nearly everyone recognizes that the issue is not wholly one-sided. Many partisans of differing views, we find, feel some disquiet, some unease when confronting what’s behind the opposing arguments. (This is partly why such confrontations are avoided.) And the issue surely touches on deep questions: What are our responses to one another? Should we permit the state to intrude into the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives? Where are the boundaries of freedom? What does it mean to be human?
Of the many actual points of view, it is widely held–especially in the media, which rarely have the time or the inclination to make fine distinctions–that there are only two: “pro-choice” and “pro-life.” This is what the two principal warring camps like to call themselves, and that’s what we’ll call them here. In the simplest characterization, a pro-choicer would hold that the decision to abort a pregnancy is to be made only by the woman; the state has no right to interfere. And a pro-lifer would hold that, from the moment of conception, the embryo or fetus is alive; that this life imposes on us a moral obligation to preserve it; and that abortion is tantamount to murder. Both names–pro-choice and pro-life–were picked with an eye toward influencing those whose minds are not yet made up: Few people wish to be counted either as being against freedom of choice or as opposed to life. Indeed, freedom and life are two of our most cherished values, and here they seem to be in fundamental conflict.
Let’s consider these two absolutist positions in turn. A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth. There ‘s good evidence that a late-term fetus responds to sound–including music, but especially its mother’s voice. It can suck its thumb or do a somersault. Occasionally, it generates adult brain-wave patterns. Some people claim to remember being born, or even the uterine environment. Perhaps there is thought in the womb. It’s hard to maintain that a transformation to full personhood happens abruptly at the moment of birth. Why, then, should it be murder to kill an infant the day after it was born but not the day before?
As a practical matter, this isn’t very important: Less than 1 percent of all tabulated abortions in the United States are listed in the last three months of pregnancy (and, on closer investigation, most such reports turn out to be due to miscarriage or miscalculation). But third-trimester abortions provide a test of the limits of the pro-choice point of view. Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?
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End of Sagan Excerpt
When I was in high school the book and film series named WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? came out and it featured Doctor C. Everett Koop and Francis Schaeffer and they looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and youth euthanasia and they looked at comments from such scholars as Peter Singer and James D. Watson.
C. Everett Koop pictured above and Peter Singer below
Peter Singer, an endowed chair at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, said, “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
James D.Watson
In May 1973, James D. Watson, the Nobel Prize laureate who discovered the double helix of DNA, granted an interview to Prism magazine, then a publication of the American Medical Association. Time later reported the interview to the general public, quoting Watson as having said, “If a child were not declared alive until three days after birth, then all parents could be allowed the choice only a few are given under the present system. The doctor could allow the child to die if the parents so choose and save a lot of misery and suffering. I believe this view is the only rational, compassionate attitude to have.”
Carl Sagan
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case:
An excerpt from the Sunday morning message (11-6-83) by Adrian Rogers in Memphis, TN.
I want to tell you that secular humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together. We have been taught that our bodies and our children are the products of the evolutionary process, and so therefore human life may not be all that valuable to begin with. We have come today to where it is legal and even considered to be a good thing to put little babies to death…15 million little babies put to death since 1973 because of this philosophy of Secular Humanism.
How did the court make that type of decision? You would think it would be so obvious. You can’t do that! You can’t kill little babies! Why? Because the Bible says! Friend, they don’t give a hoot what the Bible says! There used to be a time when they talked about what the Bible says because there was a time that we as a nation had a constitution that was based in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but today if we say “The Bible says” or “God says “Separation of Church and State. Don’t tell us what the Bible says or what God says. We will tell you what we think!” Therefore, they look at the situation and they decide if it is right or wrong purely on the humanistic philosophy that right and wrong are relative and the situation says what is right or what is wrong.
This little girl just 19 years old went into the doctor’s office and he examined her. He said, “We can take take of you.” He gave her an injection in her arm that was to cause her to go into labor and to get rid of that protoplasm, that feud, that little mass that was in her, but she wasn’t prepared for the sound she was about to hear. It was a little baby crying. That little baby weighed 13 ounces. His hand the size of my thumbnail. You know what the doctor did. The doctor put that little baby in a grocery sack and gave it to Maria’s two friends who were with her in that doctor office and Said, “It will stop making those noises after a while.”
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
Pine Bluff, Arkansas
My wife was born in main hospital in Pine Bluff, Arkansas
They took that grocery sack and Maria home and one hour passed and two hours passed and that baby was still crying and panting for his life in that grocery sack. They took that little baby down to the hospital there in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and they called an obstetrician and he called a pediatrician and they called nurses and they began to work on that little baby. Today that baby is alive and well and healthy, that little mass of protoplasm. That little thing that wasn’t a human being is alive and well. I want to tell you they spent $150,000 to save the life of that baby. NOW CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THEY CAN SPEND $150,000 TO SAVE THE LIFE OF SOMETHING THAT SOMEBODY WAS PAYING ANOTHER DOCTOR TO TAKE THE LIFE OF? The same life!!! Are you going to tell me that is not a baby? Are you going to tell me that if that baby had been put to death it would not have been murder? You will never convince me of that. What has happened to us in America? We have been sold a bill of goods by the Secular Humanists!
Carl Sagan was elected the HUMANIST OF THE YEAR in 1982 by the AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION
Carl Sagan asked, “Does a woman’s “innate right to control her own body” encompass the right to kill a near-term fetus who is, for all intents and purposes, identical to a newborn child?”
This message “A Christian Manifesto” was given in 1982 by the late Christian Philosopher Francis Schaeffer when he was age 70 at D. James Kennedy’s Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church.
Listen to this important message where Dr. Schaeffer says it is the duty of Christians to disobey the government when it comes in conflict with God’s laws. So many have misinterpreted Romans 13 to mean unconditional obedience to the state. When the state promotes an evil agenda and anti-Christian statues we must obey God rather than men. Acts
I use to watch James Kennedy preach from his TV pulpit with great delight in the 1980’s. Both of these men are gone to be with the Lord now. We need new Christian leaders to rise up in their stead.
To view Part 2 See Francis Schaeffer Lecture- Christian Manifesto Pt 2 of 2 video
The religious and political freedom’s we enjoy as Americans was based on the Bible and the legacy of the Reformation according to Francis Schaeffer. These freedoms will continue to diminish as we cast off the authority of Holy Scripture.
In public schools there is no other view of reality but that final reality is shaped by chance.
Likewise, public television gives us many things that we like culturally but so much of it is mere propaganda shaped by a humanistic world and life view.
_____________________________
I was able to watch Francis Schaeffer deliver a speech on a book he wrote called “A Christian Manifesto” and I heard him in several interviews on it in 1981 and 1982. I listened with great interest since I also read that book over and over again. Below is a portion of one of Schaeffer’s talks on a crucial subject that is very important today too.
A great talk by Francis Schaeffer:A Christian Manifesto by Dr. Francis A. SchaefferThis address was delivered by the late Dr. Schaeffer in 1982 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is based on one of his books, which bears the same title._________
Infanticide and youth enthansia ———So what we find then, is that the medical profession has largely changed — not all doctors. I’m sure there are doctors here in the audience who feel very, very differently, who feel indeed that human life is important and you wouldn’t take it, easily, wantonly. But, in general, we must say (and all you have to do is look at the TV programs), all you have to do is hear about the increased talk about allowing the Mongoloid child — the child with Down’s Syndrome — to starve to death if it’s born this way. Increasingly, we find on every side the medical profession has changed its views.
The view now is, “Is this life worth saving?”I look at you… You’re an older congregation than I am usually used to speaking to. You’d better think, because — this — means — you! It does not stop with abortion and infanticide. It stops at the question, “What about the old person? Is he worth hanging on to?” Should we, as they are doing in England in this awful organization, EXIT, teach older people to commit suicide? Should we help them get rid of them because they are an economic burden, a nuisance? I want to tell you, once you begin chipping away the medical profession…
The intrinsic value of the human life is founded upon the Judeo-Christian concept that man is unique because he is made in the image of God, and not because he is well, strong, a consumer, a sex object or any other thing. That is where whatever compassion this country has is, and certainly it is far from perfect and has never been perfect. Nor out of the Reformation has there been a Golden Age, but whatever compassion there has ever been, it is rooted in the fact that our culture knows that man is unique, is made in the image of God. Take it away, and I just say gently, the stopper is out of the bathtub for all human life.
______________________________________
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 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 […]
The Texas State Library & Archives Commission (TSLAC) reportedly decided to leave the American Library Association (ALA) after Republican Texas State Rep. Brian Harrison called out the ALA for pushing “dangerous Marxist ideology” on Texans and their children.
“Less than one month after I requested the Texas State Library & Archives Commission to cut ties with the American Library Association,” Harrison wrote in a statement, “I am excited to report that they just informed me they will not renew their contract with them!”
“This is a win for all Texans, and I applaud the courageous and decisive decision by Chairwoman Martha Wong,” Harrison continued. “Texas should be leading the fight against dangerous Marxist ideology – not subsidizing it with my constituents’ hard earned tax dollars. I’ll continue fighting to protect Texans from having their money weaponized against them, their values, and their children.”
The Texas State Library & Archives Commission (TSLAC) reportedly decided to leave the American Library Association (ALA) after Texas State Rep. Brian Harrison called out the ALA for pushing “dangerous Marxist ideology” on Texans and their children. (Tamir Kalifa/Getty Images)
Chairwoman Wong was appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2020 and has also served “two terms in the Texas House,” according to the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.
But Harrison had less praise for Emily Drabinski, whom he described as a “self-proclaimed ‘Marxist lesbian’ and member of the Democratic Socialists of America” in a letter from July that was addressed to Wong.
“Taxpayer funded indoctrination has no place in Texas,” Harrison wrote, “yet Ms. Drabinski has promised to radicalize the ALA to ‘advance a public agenda that puts organization for justice at the center of library work.’”
“The ALA works against parents by fighting to keep pornographic materials in public libraries under the guise of opposing ‘censorship,'” Harrison claimed.
Chairwoman Wong was appointed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in 2020 and has also served “two terms in the Texas House,” according to the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)
Texas, like many other states in the country, have become part of the culture wars in the battle over what books should or shouldn’t be allowed in the classroom.
In July, a group of booksellers and publishers filed a lawsuit to oppose a law that was signed by Abbott and intended to remove the “trash out of our schools.”
A book would be rated “sexually explicit” if the material is deemed offensive and not part of the required curriculum. Those books would be removed from school bookshelves. Critics of the Texas bill predicted when it was signed into law that the new standards would mostly likely be used to target materials dealing with LGBTQ+ subject matter.
TSLAC, the ALA and Drabinski did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital. Harrison also did not respond to a request for comment.
“The ALA works against parents by fighting to keep pornographic materials in public libraries under the guise of opposing ‘censorship,'” GOP Texas state Rep. Harrison claimed. (iStock)
For more Culture, Media, Education, Opinion, and channel coverage, visit foxnews.com/media
Jeffrey Clark is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. He has previously served as a speechwriter for a cabinet secretary and as a Fulbright teacher in South Korea. Jeffrey graduated from the University of Iowa in 2019 with a degree in English and History.
Since April 17, 2023 when this resolution was passed you would think that something horriblehad happened if you read the local press reports!!! Read it for yourself:
SALINE COUNTY RESOLUTION NO. 2023-_______
A RESOLUTION REQUESTING THE SALINE COUNTY LIBRARY ENSURE THAT MATERIALS CONTAINED WITHIN THE CHILDREN’S SECTION OF THE LIBRARY ARE SUBJECT MATTER AND AGE APPROPRIATE.
WHEREAS, the Saline County Library (“Library”) has been an integral part of the Saline County community for decades; and
WHEREAS, the Library is visited by individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and beliefs; and
WHEREAS, the Library currently has many children visit who may be exposed to materials that are not subject matter or age appropriate for children, such as sexual content or imagery, that their parents or the public do not deem to be appropriate; and
WHEREAS, the Library Board of Directors and Library employees have a responsibility to ensure that materials contained at the Library, particularly within the children’s section, regardless of the legal definition of obscenity, are age appropriate for children; and
WHEREAS, while the Arkansas Legislature passed Senate Bill 81, now Act 372 of 2023, which may have an impact on the Library, and the Library should proactively take steps to ensure that materials that are not subject matter or age appropriate, such as those that contain sexual content or imagery, are not located in areas where children’s materials are located; and
NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SALINE COUNTY QUORUM COURT THAT:
SECTION I: The Library should enact policies to relocate materials that are not subject matter or age appropriate for children, due to their sexual content or imagery, to an area that is not accessible to children.
SECTION II: That this Resolution shall be in full force and effect from and after its passage and approval.
THIS RESOLUTION adopted this 17 th day of April 2023 APPROVED: ______________________ SPONSORS: JIM WHITLEY, CLINT CHISM, EVERETTE HATCHER
MATT BRUMLEY DISTRICT #10 SALINE COUNTY JUDGE
I have read articles for years from Dan Barker, but recently I just finished the book Barker wrote entitled LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which was prompted by Rick Warren’s book PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE which I also read several years ago.
Dan Barker is the Co-President of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, And co-host of Freethought Radio and co-founder of The Clergy Project.
On March 19, 2022, I got an email back from Dan Barker that said:
Thanks for the insights.
Have you read my book Life Driven Purpose? To say there is no purpose OF life is not to say there is no purpose IN life. Life is immensely meaningful when you stop looking for external purpose.
Ukraine … we’ll, we can no longer blame Russian aggression on “godless communism.” The Russian church, as far as I know, has not denounced the war.
db
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In the next few weeks I will be discussing the book LIFE DRIVEN PURPOSE which I did enjoy reading. Here is an assertion that Barker makes that I want to discuss:
Think about sexuality. The bible says that “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). It is assumed that Adam and Eve were heterosexual, because they were commanded to “replenish the earth.” Jesus made the same assumption: “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?” (This is also sexist, from the male point of view.)
Sexiest? Sounds like you are modern day woke and you will end up turning on your buddy Richard Dawkins?
TRANSGENDERISM SEEN BELOW
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After Life 2 – Man identifies as an 8 year old girl
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I was referred this fine article by Robyn E. Blumner in defense of her boss at the RICHARD DAWKINS FOUNDATION by a tweet by Daniel Dennett.
As an evangelical I have had the opportunity to correspond with more more secular humanists that have signed the Humanist Manifestos than any other evangelical alive (at least that has been one of my goals since reading Francis Schaeffer’s books and watching his films since 1979). Actually I just attended the retirement party held for my high school Bible teacher Mark Brink of EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN SCHOOL of Cordova, Tennessee on May 19th and he introduced me to the works of Francis Schaeffer and it was Schaeffer’s works that eventually help topple ROE v WADE!!! Ironically Mr Brink had a 49 year career that spanned 1973 to 2022 which was the same period that ROE v WADE survived!!!
Let me make a few points about this fine article below by the humanist Robyn E. Blumner.
Robyn is trying to use common sense on people that “GOD GAVE THEM OVER to a depraved mind.” Romans 1 states:
28 And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, GOD GAVE THEM OVER to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, 29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are…inventors of evil,
Identitarian:A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit.(Source: Urban Dictionary)
“The Affirmations of Humanism”:We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.(Paul Kurtz,Free Inquiry, Spring 1987)
The humanist project is at a dangerous crossroads. I fear that our cohesion as fellow humanists is being torn apart by a strain of identitarianism that is making enemies of long-standing friends and opponents of natural allies.
Just at a time when it is essential for all of us to come together to work arm-in-arm against Christian Nationalism and the rise of religious privilege in law, humanism is facing a schism within its own movement. It is heartbreaking to watch and even more disheartening to know that the continued breach seems destined to grow.
The division has to do with a fundamental precept of humanism, that enriching human individuality and celebrating the individual is the basis upon which humanism is built. Humanism valorizes the individual—and with good reason; we are each the hero of our own story. Not only is one’s individual sovereignty more essential to the humanist project than one’s group affiliation, but fighting for individual freedom—which includes freedom of conscience, speech, and inquiry—is part of the writ-large agenda of humanism. It unleashes creativity and grants us the breathing space to be agents in our own lives.
Or at least that idea used to be at the core of humanism.
Today, there is a subpart of humanists, identitarians, who are suspicious of individuals and their freedoms. They do not want a free society if it means some people will use their freedom to express ideas with which they disagree. They see everything through a narrow affiliative lens of race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic category and seek to shield groups that they see as marginalized by ostensible psychic harms inflicted by the speech of others.
This has given rise to a corrosive cultural environment awash in controversial speakers being shouted down on college campuses; even liberal professors and newspaper editors losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; the cancellation of great historical figures for being men of their time; and a range of outlandish claims of microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and other crimes against current orthodoxy.
It has pitted humanists who stand for foundational civil liberties principles such as free speech and equal protection under the law against others on the political Left who think individual freedoms should give way when they fail to serve the interests of select identity groups. The most important feature of the symbol of justice is not her sword or scales; it is her blindfold. Identitarians would pull it off so she could benefit certain groups over others.
Good people with humanist hearts have been pilloried if they don’t subscribe to every jot and tittle of the identitarian gospel. A prime example is the decision last year by the American Humanist Association (AHA) to retract its 1996 award to Richard Dawkins as Humanist of the Year. The man who has done more than anyone alive to advance evolutionary biology and the public’s understanding of that science, who has brought the light of atheism to millions of people, and whose vociferous opposition to Donald Trump and Brexit certainly must have burnished his liberal cred became radioactive because of one tweet on transgender issues that the AHA didn’t like.
Apparently decades of past good works are erased by 280 characters. Just poof. No wonder a New York Times poll1 recently found that 84 percent of adults say it is a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem that some Americans do not speak freely because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism.
This is what identitarians have wrought. Rather than lifting up individuals and imbuing them with autonomy and all the extraordinary uniqueness that flows from it, identitarians would divide us all into racial, ethnic, and gender-based groups and make that group affiliation our defining characteristic. This has the distorting effect of obliterating personal agency, rewarding group victimhood, and incentivizing competition to be seen as the most oppressed.
In addition to being inherently divisive, this is self-reinforcing defeatism. It results in extreme examples, such as a draft plan in California to deemphasize calculus as a response to persistent racial gaps in math achievement.2 Suddenly a subject as racially neutral as math has become a flashpoint for identitarians set on ensuring equality of outcomes for certain groups rather than the far-more just standard of equality of opportunity. In this freighted environment, reducing the need for rigor and eliminating challenging standards becomes a feasible solution. The notion of individual merit or recognition that some students are better at math than others becomes racially tinged and suspect.
Not only does the truth suffer under this assault on common sense, but we start to live in a Harrison Bergeron world where one’s natural skills are necessarily sacrificed on the altar of equality or, in today’s parlance, equity.
Of course, the identitarians’ focus is not just on racial issues. Gender divisions also play out on center stage. I was at a secular conference recently when a humanist leader expressed the view that if you don’t have a uterus, you have no business speaking about abortion.
Really? Only people with female reproductive organs should be heard on one of the most consequential issues of the day? Such a call, itself, is a form of lamentable sexism. And it seems purposely to ignore the fact that plenty of people with a uterus are actively opposed to the right to choose, while plenty of people without a uterus are among our greatest allies for abortion rights. Why should those of us who care about reproductive freedom cut fully half of all humanity from our roster of potential vocal supporters and activists?
As has been said by others perplexed and disturbed by such a narrow-minded view, you don’t have to be poor to have a valid opinion on ways to alleviate poverty. You don’t have to be a police officer to have a valid opinion on policing. And, similarly, you don’t have to be a woman to have a valid opinion on abortion rights.
If the Affirmation quoted at the beginning of this article that rejects “divisive parochial loyalties” based on facile group affiliations isn’t a rejection of identitarianism, I don’t know what is. In his 1968 essay “Humanism and the Freedom of the Individual,” Kurtz stated bluntly:
Any humanism that does not cherish the individual, I am prepared to argue, is neither humanistic nor humanitarian. … Any humanism worthy of the name should be concerned with the preservation of the individual personality with all of its unique idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. We need a society in which the full and free development of every individual is the ruling principle. The existence of individual freedom thus is an essential condition for the social good and a necessary end of humanitarianism.
The individual is the most important unit in humanism. When our individuality is stripped away so we can be fitted into prescribed identity groups instead, something essential to the humanist project is lost. Those pushing for this conception of society are misconstruing humanism, diminishing human potential and self-actualization, and driving a wedge between good people everywhere.
Robyn E. Blumner is the CEO of the Center for Inquiry and the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason &, Science. She was a nationally syndicated columnist and editorial writer for the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times) for sixteen years.
FRANCIS SCHAEFFER LGBTQ+ SCHISM
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Francis Schaeffer later in this blog post discusses what the unbelievers in Romans 1 were rejecting, but first John MacArthur discusses what the unbelievers in the Democratic Party today are affirming and how these same activities were condemned 2000 years ago in Romans 1.
Christians Cannot And MUST Not Vote Democrat – John MacArthur
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A Democrat witness testifying before the HouseJudiciary Committee on abortion rights Thursday declared that men can get pregnant and have abortions. This reminds of Romans chapter 1 and also John MacArthur’s commentary on the 2022 Agenda of the Democratic Party:
25 For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…26 For this reason (M)GOD GAVE THEM OVER to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error.28 And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, GOD GAVE THEM OVER to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, 29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are…inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; 32 but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.
Now, all of a sudden, not only is this characteristic of our nation, but we now promote it. One of the parties, the Democratic Party, has now made Romans 1, the sins of Romans 1, their agenda. What God condemns, they affirm.
I know from last week’s message that there was some response from people who said, “Why are you getting political?”
Romans 1 is not politics. This has to do with speaking the Word of God through the culture in which we live….it’s about iniquity and judgment. And why do we say this? Because this must be recognized for what it is–sin, serious sin, damning sin, destructive sin.
Dem witness tells House committee men can get pregnant, have abortions
‘I believe that everyone can identify for themselves,’ Aimee Arrambide tells House Judiciary Committee
A Democrat witness testifying before the HouseJudiciary Committee on abortion rights Thursday declared that men can get pregnant and have abortions.
Aimee Arrambide, the executive director of the abortion rights nonprofit Avow Texas, was asked by Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., to define what “a woman is,” to which she responded, “I believe that everyone can identify for themselves.”
“Do you believe that men can become pregnant and have abortions?” Bishop asked.
“Yes,” Arrambide replied.
The remarks from Arrambide followed a tense exchange between Bishop and Dr. Yashica Robinson, another Democrat witness, after he similarly asked her to define “woman.”
Aimee Arrambide testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on May 11, 2020. (YouTube screenshot) (Screenshot/ House Committee on the Judiciary)
“Dr. Robinson, I noticed in your written testimony you said that you use she/her pronouns. You’re a medical doctor – what is a woman?” Bishop asked Robinson, an OBGYN and board member with Physicians for Reproductive Health.
“I think it’s important that we educate people like you about why we’re doing the things that we do,” Robinson responded. “And so the reason that I use she and her pronouns is because I understand that there are people who become pregnant that may not identify that way. And I think it is discriminatory to speak to people or to call them in such a way as they desire not to be called.”
“Are you going to answer my question? Can you answer the question, what’s a woman?” Bishop asked.
Donna Howard and Aimee Arrambide speaks at Making Virtual Storytelling and Activism Personal during the 2022 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Austin Convention Center on March 14, 2022 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Hubert Vestil/Getty Images for SXSW)
“I’m a woman, and I will ask you which pronouns do you use?” Robinson replied. “If you tell me that you use she and her pronouns … I’m going to respect you for how you want me to address you.”
“So you gave me an example of a woman, you say that you are a woman, can you tell me otherwise what a woman is?” Bishop asked.
“Yes, I’m telling you, I’m a woman,” Robinson responded.
“Is that as comprehensive a definition as you can give me?” Bishop asked.
“That’s as comprehensive a definition as I will give you today,” Robinson said. “Because I think that it’s important that we focus on what we’re here for, and it’s to talk about access to abortion.”
“So you’re not interested in answering the question that I asked unless it’s part of a message you want to deliver…” Bishop fired back.
Wednesday’s hearing, titled, “Revoking your Rights,” addressed the threat to abortion rights after the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion signaled the high court is poised to soon strike down Roe v. Wade. John MacArthur explains God’s Wrath on unrighteousness from Romans Chapt…
18 For (A)the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who (B)suppress the truth [a]in unrighteousness, 19 because (C)that which is known about God is evident [b]within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For (D)since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, (E)being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not [c]honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became (F)futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 (G)Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and (H)exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and [d]crawling creatures.
24 Therefore (I)God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be (J)dishonored among them. 25 For they exchanged the truth of God for [e]a (K)lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, (L)who is blessed [f]forever. Amen.
26 For this reason (M)God gave them over to (N)degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is [g]unnatural, 27 and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, (O)men with men committing [h]indecent acts and receiving in [i]their own persons the due penalty of their error.
28 And just as they did not see fit [j]to acknowledge God any longer, (P)God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, 29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are(Q)gossips, 30 slanderers, [k](R)haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, (S)disobedient to parents, 31 without understanding, untrustworthy, (T)unloving, unmerciful; 32 and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of (U)death, they not only do the same, but also (V)give hearty approval to those who practice them.
Now, all of a sudden, not only is this characteristic of our nation, but we now promote it. One of the parties, the Democratic Party, has now made Romans 1, the sins of Romans 1, their agenda. What God condemns, they affirm. What God punishes, they exalt. Shocking, really. The Democratic Party has become the anti-God party, the sin-promoting party. By the way, there are seventy-two million registered Democrats in this country who have identified themselves with that party and maybe they need to rethink that identification.
I know from last week’s message that there was some response from people who said, “Why are you getting political?”
Romans 1 is not politics. The Bible is not politics. This has nothing to do with politics. This has to do with speaking the Word of God through the culture in which we live. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s not about personalities; it’s about iniquity and judgment. And why do we say this? Because this must be recognized for what it is–sin, serious sin, damning sin, destructive sin.
WHAT HAS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY REJECTED? THE ANSWER IS THE GOD WHO HAS REVEALED HIM SELF THROUGH THE BOOK OF NATURE AND THE BOOK OF SCRIPTURE!
God Is There And He Is Not Silent Psalm 19 Intro. 1) Francis Schaeffer lived from 1912-1984. He was one of the Christian intellectual giants of the 20th century. He taught us that you could be a Christian and not abandon the mind. One of the books he wrote was entitled He Is There And He Is Not Silent. In that work he makes a crucial and thought provoking statement, “The infinite- personal God is there, but also he is not silent; that changes the whole world…He is there and is not a silent, nor far-off God.” (Works of F.S., Vol 1, 276). 2) God is there and He is not silent. In fact He has revealed Himself to us in 2 books: the book of nature and the book of Scripture. Francis Bacon, a 15th century scientist who is credited by many with developing the scientific method said it this way: “There are 2 books laid before us to study, to prevent us from falling into error: first the volume to the Scriptures, which reveal the will of God; then the volume of the creation, which expresses His power.” 3) Psalm 19 addresses both of God’s books, the book of nature in vs 1-6 and the book of Scripture in vs. 7-14. Described as a wisdom Psalm, its beauty, poetry and splendor led C.S. Lewis to say, “I take this to be the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world” (Reflections on the Psalms, 63). Trans. God is there and He is not silent. How should we hear and listen to the God who talks? I. Listen To God Speak Through Nature 19:1-6 God has revealed himself to ever rational human on the earth in two ways: 1) nature and 2) conscience. We call this natural or general revelation. In vs. 1-6 David addresses the wonder of nature and creation
Helen Pashgian on Georges de La Tour | Artists on Art
FEATURED ARTIST IS DE LA TOUR
GEORGES DE LA TOUR (1593-1652)
The influence of Caravaggio is evident in De la Tour, whose use of light and shadows is unique among the painters of the Baroque era.
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Francis Schaeffer
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1984 SOUNDWORD LABRI CONFERENCE VIDEO – Q&A With Francis & Edith Schaefer
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 […]
In this post we are going to see that through the years humanist thought has encouraged artists like Michelangelo to think that the future was extremely bright versus the place today where many artist who hold the humanist and secular worldview are very pessimistic. In contrast to Michelangelo’s DAVID when humanist man thought he […]
_________ Antony Flew on God and Atheism Published on Feb 11, 2013 Lee Strobel interviews philosopher and scholar Antony Flew on his conversion from atheism to deism. Much of it has to do with intelligent design. Flew was considered one of the most influential and important thinker for atheism during his time before his death […]
Hugh Hefner Playboy Mansion 10236 Charing Cross Road Los Angeles, CA 90024-1815
Dear Mr. Hefner,
This is the seventh letter I have written you and I have chosen to write it on the 10th anniversary of the passing of one of the most influential people in my life. My hometown pastor at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis, Adrian Rogers, was my pastor from 1975 to 1983 when I was 14 to 21 years old and he influenced me in this crucial time of my life.
I attended his funeral and I was touched by speakers such as my youth choir director James Whitmire, my College Director Ken Whitten, our family friend Bob Sorrell and current Bellevue pastor Steve Gaines.
Two other notable people who spoke were James Dobson,founder of Focus on the Family and by video the Evangelist Billy Graham. Graham noted, “We need for ministers of the Gospel to defend the Bible as the infallible Word of God…I believe in my heart that Adrian Rogers was such a man. I knew him personally. I had walked with him and prayed with him…I know God’s hand was upon Adrian Rogers as he proclaimed the Bread of Life from his church and through radio and television…I praise God for his ministry.”
Later in this letter I will return to this subject of the historical accuracy of the Bible. Adrian Rogers actually was remembered among other things for his contribution in this area in Southern Baptist life. In fact, one of my favorite sermons by him is called, HOW YOU CAN BE CERTAIN THE BIBLE IS THE WORD OF GOD and you can watch this message on You Tube.Just two days ago it was Friday the 13th which is a pretty spooky day usually, and I wanted to talk to you about a subject that most people would consider very scary but it is the subject that Billy Graham has chosen for the last book he will ever write. I was privileged to hear Billy Graham speak both in Memphis in 1978 and in Little Rock in 1989.On Sunday November 8, 2015, I was in Memphis at my parents’ home getting ready to go to church when I saw the “Keeping the Faith” segment on Fox News with Franklin Graham. Speaking of his father Billy Graham he noted:He just turned 97 on Saturday and he is still with us and his mind is still sharp and he received about a dozen cakes and he took a bite out of everyone of them. He has no ailments than other his age. He doesn’t hear well or see well but his mind is clear and he can understand you and can communicate with him.This book was 90% completed by his 95th birthday but he got sick right after that and we didn’t think he would live to Christmas that year and we put the book aside but then last year when he doing pretty good we got it back out so he could finished it when he was doing pretty good.At 97 he is getting close to eternity (in the afterlife) he knows that and he wants people to know there is a heaven and a hell.In “Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity and Our Life Beyond,” Billy Graham asserted, “As a Christian and a preacher of the Gospel, I am always grieved to have to interrupt a marvelous picture, such as eternal life in Heaven, to talk about another eternal place that Jesus calls Hell…It has no similarities to what is typically called home, nor is Hell a resting place, a holding place, or a graveyard. Hell is a burning inferno…I can say with certainty that if there is no literal fire in Hell, then God is using symbolic language to indicate something far worse…Just as there are no words to adequately describe the grand beauty of Heaven, we cannot begin to imagine just how horrible the place called Hell is.”But there is hope if one repents and puts his or her faith in Christ alone for eternal life.“We need to say either yes or no. But some of us say maybe. Some of us try to straddle the fence and live in both worlds, but Jesus will not compromise with us. The Gospel plan is all set. We must accept His Son if we are to enter into His eternal kingdom. If your answer is not yes, then the choice is made.”
When people think of Hell, they picture the devil as a comical character wearing a red suit with horns, a tail and a pitchfork, making people shovel coal. Satan loves that image because we laugh at it.
Satan promotes laughter about Hell because if people don’t understand the teaching of Hell, they’ll not prepare to go to Heaven, to give their hearts to Christ.
It makes no difference if all the scholars, preachers, scientists, statesmen, politicians and liberal theologians put together say there is no Hell, it wouldn’t change one letter of what the Word of God says.
Often the minister who preaches on Hell is accused of being unloving. With a sneer the world loves to call him a “hell-fire and damnation preacher.” The late, great Dr. Robert G. Lee said,
I know some people call the preacher who stands squarely upon the teaching of Christ and His apostles narrow, harsh, and cruel. As to being narrow, I have no desire to any broader than was Jesus. As to being cruel, is it cruel to tell a man the truth? Is a man to be called cruel who declares the whole counsel of God and points out to men their danger?Is it cruel to arouse sleeping people to the fact that the house is on fire? Is it cruel to jerk a blind man away from the rattlesnake in the coil? Is it cruel to declare to people the deadliness of disease and tell them which medicine to take? I had rather be called cruel for being kind, than to be called kind for being cruel.
The cruelest thing we could do would be to fail to warn people about Hell and what the Bible has to say about it. To ridicule a preacher who warns of Hell is like ridiculing a doctor who warns of cancer. Hell is not a pleasant subject, but it is a reality.
HUGH DON’T YOU WANT TO TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT BECOMING A CHRISTIAN SO YOU CAN GO TO HEAVEN AND AVOID PUNISHMENT. IT IS NOT TOO LATE.
“But as it is written: ‘Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.’” (1 Corinthians 2:9)
When I was governor, Billy came to Little Rock for another crusade, and we traveled together to visit my pastor, W.O. Vaught, who was dying of cancer. I’ll never forget their conversation – about faith and fears, life and death. It was my first real glimpse of Billy the private man. He went to the home of my pastor and offered him comfort, saying that he too had lived a long life, and would see him again soon “just inside the Eastern Gate.” He lived his faith when no one was looking.
In 1974 in an interview with R. Couri Hay YOU NOTED:
Beyond a certain point a person would be a fool to suggest that he really knows the answers and I don’t. In other words, I have no idea what we are doing here, but we are here and that wasn’t just man’s invention. I mean there is something beyond all of this and whether it has a purpose or a point, grander plan. I don’t know. No one knows and those who pretend to know strike me as being rather pompous.
THREE POINTS YOU ARE MAKING.
YOU DON’T HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS. 2. THERE IS SOMETHING BEYOND ALL OF THIS BUT YOU DON’T KNOW IF THERE IS A PURPOSE OR NOT. 3. THOSE WHO PRETEND TO KNOW ARE POMPOUS.
Number one, thank you for admitting that you don’t have all the answers.
Number two, the scientist Blaise Pascal in his book Penséesgave the reason for your second observation:
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”
Ecclesiastes 3:11a Amplified Bible (AMP)
11 He has made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except God]
Number three, those Christians like me who claim that God has spoken truth in the Bible do have evidence to back up that view and below is some of that evidence.
The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. Below is a piece of that evidence given by Francis Schaeffer and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop concerning the accuracy of the Bible.
The following is an excerpt from TRUTH AND HISTORY (chapter 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?, under footnote #94):
So the story goes on. We have stopped at only a few incidents in the sweep back to the year 1000 B.C. What we hope has emerged from this is a sense of the historical reliability of the Bible’s text. When the Bible refers to historical incidents, it is speaking about the same sort of “history” that historians examine elsewhere in other cultures and periods. This borne out by the fact that some of the incidents, some of the individuals, and some of the places have been confirmed by archaeological discoveries in the past hundred years has swept away the possibility of a naive skepticism about the Bible’s history.And what is particularly striking is that the tide has built up concerning the time before the year 1000 B.C. Our knowledge about the years 2500 B.C. to 1000 B.C. has vastly increased through discoveries sometimes of whole libraries and even of hitherto unknown people and languages.
There was a time, for example, when the Hittite people, referred to in the early parts of the Bible, were treated as fictitious by critical scholars. Then came the discoveries after 1906 at Boghaz Koi (Boghaz-koy) which not only gave us the certainty of their existence but stacks of details from their own archives!
The Hittites played a prominent role in Old Testament history. They interacted with biblical figures as early as Abraham and as late as Solomon. They are mentioned in Genesis 15:20 as people who inhabited the land of Canaan. 1 Kings 10:29 records that they purchased chariots and horses from King Solomon. The most prominent Hittite is Uriah the husband of Bathsheba. The Hittites were a powerful force in the Middle East from 1750 B.C. until 1200 B.C. Prior to the late 19th century, nothing was known of the Hittites outside the Bible, and many critics alleged that they were an invention of the biblical authors.
In 1876 a dramatic discovery changed this perception. A British scholar named A. H. Sayce found inscriptions carved on rocks in Turkey. He suspected that they might be evidence of the Hittite nation. Ten years later, more clay tablets were found in Turkey at a place called Boghaz-koy. German cuneiform expert Hugo Winckler investigated the tablets and began his own expedition at the site in 1906.
Winckler’s excavations uncovered five temples, a fortified citadel and several massive sculptures. In one storeroom he found over ten thousand clay tablets. One of the documents proved to be a record of a treaty between Ramesses II and the Hittite king. Other tablets showed that Boghaz-koy was the capital of the Hittite kingdom. Its original name was Hattusha and the city covered an area of 300 acres. The Hittite nation had been discovered!
Less than a decade after Winckler’s find, Czech scholar Bedrich Hronzny proved the Hittite language is an early relative of the Indo-European languages of Greek, Latin, French, German, and English. The Hittite language now has a central place in the study of the history of the Indo-European languages.
The discovery also confirmed other biblical facts. Five temples were found containing many tablets with details of the rites and ceremonies that priests performed. These ceremonies described rites for purification from sin and purification of a new temple. The instructions proved to be very elaborate and lengthy. Critics once criticized the laws and instructions found in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy as too complicated for the time it was written (1400 B.C.). The Boghaz-koy texts along with others from Egyptian sites and a site along the Euphrates called Emar have proven that the ceremonies described in the Jewish Pentateuch are consistent with the ceremonies of the cultures of this time period.
The Hittite Empire made treaties with civilizations they conquered. Two dozen of these have been translated and provide a better understanding of treaties in the Old Testament. The discovery of the Hittite Empire at Boghaz-koy has significantly advanced our understanding of the patriarchal period. Dr. Fred Wright summarizes the importance of this find in regard to biblical historicity:
Now the Bible picture of this people fits in perfectly with what we know of the Hittite nation from the monuments. As an empire they never conquered the land of Canaan itself, although the Hittite local tribes did settle there at an early date. Nothing discovered by the excavators has in any way discredited the Biblical account. Scripture accuracy has once more been proved by the archaeologist.4
The discovery of the Hittites has proven to be one of the great archaeological finds of all time. It has helped to confirm the biblical narrative and had a great impact on Middle East archaeological study. Because of it, we have come to a greater understanding of the history of our language, as well as the religious, social, and political practices of the ancient Middle East.
Hefner family below:
I read about your mother Grace being a Bible-believing Christian. Al Mohler of Southern Baptist Seminary noted, “Hefner’s Methodist mother wanted him to be a missionary. In a very real sense, she got her wish in reverse. Hefner became a missionary all right, but a missionary that preached a rejection of the Christian sexual ethic.”
It is not too late for anyone to seek forgiveness. II Peter 3:9: The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
Growing up in church you probably memorized John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
In this letter I have attempted to demonstrate to you that the Biblical Christianity that your parents brought you up in is based on revealed truth and the Bible is historically accurate. In a previous letter I quoted you portions of the great sermon PAYDAY SOMEDAY by Robert G. Lee and in today’s letter I quoted both Billy Graham and Adrian Rogers on hell. But I wanted to end with just a portion of that quote by Lee that Adrian Rogers used:
Is a man to be called cruel who declares the whole counsel of God and points out to men their danger? Is it cruel to arouse sleeping people to the fact that the house is on fire?
Thank you again for your time and I know how busy you are.
PS: I plan to write you again and will be responding to your past statements like I did today. Today I responded to three points that you made about those who say they know that God has spoken truth in the Bible. I would very interested in any feedback you may have.
William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981–82). Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms.
Using film, drawing, sculpture, animation, and performance, he transmutes sobering political events into powerful poetic allegories. In a now-signature technique, Kentridge photographs his charcoal drawings and paper collages over time, recording scenes as they evolve. Working without a script or storyboard, he plots out each animated film, preserving every addition and erasure. Aware of myriad ways in which we construct the world by looking, Kentridge uses stereoscopic viewers and creates optical illusions with anamorphic projection, to extend his drawings-in-time into three dimensions.
Kentridge has had major exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2009); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2008); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, (2007); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2004); among others. He has also participated in Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); the Sydney Biennale (1996, 2008); and Documenta (1997, 2002). His opera and theater works, often produced in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company, have appeared at Brooklyn Academy of Music (2007); Standard Bank National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa (1992, 1996, 1998); and Festival d’Avignon, France (1995, 1996).
His production of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose, premiered in 2010 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in conjunction with a retrospective organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. William Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa
Ecclesiastes 2-3 Published on Sep 19, 2012 Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 16, 2012 | Derek Neider _____________________________ I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Is Love All You Need? Jesus v. Lennon Posted on January 19, 2011 by Jovan Payes 0 On June 25, 1967, the Beatles participated in the first worldwide TV special called “Our World”. During this special, the Beatles introduced “All You Need is Love”; one of their most famous and recognizable songs. In it, John Lennon […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
___________________ Something happened to the Beatles in their journey through the 1960’s and although they started off wanting only to hold their girlfriend’s hand it later evolved into wanting to smash all previous sexual standards. The Beatles: Why Don’t We Do It in the Road? _______ Beatle Ringo Starr, and his girlfriend, later his wife, […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
__________ Marvin Minsky __ I was sorry recently to learn of the passing of one of the great scholars of our generation. I have written about Marvin Minsky several times before in this series and today I again look at a letter I wrote to him in the last couple of years. It is my […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
Why was Tony Curtis on the cover of SGT PEPPERS? I have no idea but if I had to hazard a guess I would say that probably it was because he was in the smash hit SOME LIKE IT HOT. Above from the movie SOME LIKE IT HOT __ __ Jojo was a man who […] By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
It’s difficult to have the albums created by the most important band in the history of music ranked from worst to best. After all, it’s unlikely that you’ll find any band or musical artist unwilling to share their admiration for the Fab Four. Their fingerprints are over everything created in popular music.
The Liverpool quartet recorded albums at a significant pace between 1963 and 1970. Many of these are classics that redefined what pop-rock could be. Most of these are tremendously experimental, adventurous affairs.
Still, which one’s the best? Is there any one album worth avoiding?
I’ve looked at the evidence and listened to the whole discography once more, and I think that I have an answer or two.
For simplicity’s sake, I have only included official UK releases. That means that the early US-released records aren’t on here. Neither are compilations such as “Anthology,” “Rarities,” or “Hey Jude.” “Yellow Submarine” is included as it included mostly unreleased material and was crafted as a studio album.
With this in mind, here’s a quick initiation into the musical world created by John, Paul, George, and Ringo, The Beatles albums ranked.
13. “Yellow Submarine” (1969)
The Beatles had built an entire world since releasing their debut. It was populated by colorful characters and by exotic philosophies. Best of all, millions of folks in the real world knew everything about it.
“Yellow Submarine” is a soundtrack album by The Beatles. It was released in 1969 to accompany the animated film of the same name. The album features songs from the film, as well as a number of previously released tracks.
The colored submarine had, of course, already been added to the band’s cosmos. Smartly, it serves as the entry point for the story presented in this movie. It would become one of the most beloved animated films of all time.
It’s a good showcase for the band’s catchy melodies and clever lyrics. Standout tracks include the title track, “Yellow Submarine,” and the infectious “All You Need Is Love.”
This Beatles album also includes a number of instrumental tracks, which add to the playful and lighthearted mood of the album.
The album is a perfect introduction to The Beatles for those unfamiliar with their music and a must-have for any fan of the band. In fact, it acted as the debut Beatles record for many children familiar with the film.
Despite this, it should be noted that while the animated Beatles are characters in the film, their voices are dubbed by actors taking their best stab at a Scouse accent.
With all this being said, it’s not an album constructed with the same level of attention as some of the others in The Beatles’ discography.
Come Together – John Lennon (Live In New York City)
‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ has become synonymous with John Lennon. The portion of New York’s Central Park where fans celebrate his memory is named for the 1967 song — a giant psychedelic leap forward for a band that had been holding girls’ hands and loving them eight days a week just a few years prior. The song gets its drippy, droney melody from then-futuristic Mellotron keyboard, and it features absurdest lyrics that at one point place the narrator in a “tree” he figures “must be high or low.” There’s no “or” there, buddy. You’re just high.
“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream / It is not dying.” That’s how the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows,’ on 1966’s ‘Revolver,’ kicks off. It’s the “This is your captain speaking” moment, delivered by Capt. John of the Airship High. Yes, folks, you’re eight miles high, flying at an altitude unknown to your parents — your head is spinning right ’round like a record on your friend’s sofa, your eyes following the needle as it creates a strange, warm, crackling sound in the black groove on the circular disc that’s turning, turning, turning. This was a new sound to say the least, and all these years later, it still has the power to amaze.
Lennon always claimed ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ has nothing to do with LSD (or Lysergic Acid Diethylamide), and that it was his son that came up with the idea for the song’s title. But come on — this ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ classic is obviously about psychedelic drug use. No sober person could have written something this bizarre. It’d be like asking Salvador Dalí to paint a watercolor of a house and a yard with a lemon-yellow sun. Not gonna happen.
A full-page advertisement appeared in The Times newspaper on this day, signed by 64 of the most prominent members of British society, which called for the legalisation of marijuana. Among the signatories were The Beatles and Brian Epstein.
The advertisement was instigated as a response to the nine-month prison sentence for possession received on 1 June 1967 by John Hopkins, founder of International Times, the UFO Club and the 24 Hour Technicolour Dream. The following day an emergency meeting was held at the Indica Bookshop, during which Steve Abrams of drug-research organisation SOMA suggested bringing the issue into public debate by running a full-page advertisement.
Abrams agreed to organise the signatures, but the question of financing the advertisement proved temporarily problematic. None of The Beatles were present at the Indica, but the bookshop’s co-owner Barry Miles telephoned Paul McCartney, who agreed to finance the advertisement.
On 3 June Miles and Abrams visited McCartney’s house in Cavendish Avenue. McCartney listened to the plans, told Abrams that all The Beatles and Epstein would put their names to it, and told them how to contact the rest of the group for their signatures.
On 23 July, the day before publication, the ad was mentioned in The Sunday Times’ Atticus column, written by Philip Oates. Behind the scenes, however, The Times’ advertising manager, R Grant Davidson, nervously insisted on checking that all the people had indeed agreed for their names to be associated with the article.
Davidson also insisted on advance payment. Steve Abrams contacted Peter Brown at Brian Epstein’s office, and shortly afterwards received a personal cheque for £1,800 made out to The Times. At the time the amount was twice the average annual wage.
Although McCartney had wanted to keep the funding a secret, in fear of negative publicity, it soon proved impossible. The day after the advertisement appeared, the information appeared in the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary.
Within a week of its appearance, the advertisement led to questions being asked in the House of Commons, and began a public debate which eventually led to liberalisation in the laws against cannabis use in Britain.
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This advertisement is sponsored by SOMA* The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice.
“All laws which can be violated without doing anyone any injury are laughed at. Nay, so far are they from doing anything to control the desires and passions of man that, on the contrary, they direct and incite men’s thoughts toward these very objects; for we always strive toward what is forbidden and desire the things we are not allowed to have. And men of leisure are never deficient in the ingenuity needed to enable them to outwit laws framed to regulate things which cannot be entirely forbidden. …He who tries to determine everything by law will foment crime rather than lessen it.”- Spinoza
The herb Cannabis sativa, known as ‘Marihuana’ or ‘Hashish’, is prohibited under the Dangerous Drugs Act (1965). The maximum penalty for smoking cannabis is ten years’ imprisonment and a fine of £1,000. Yet informed medical opinion supports the view that cannabis is the least harmful of pleasure-giving drugs, and is, in particular, far less harmful than alcohol. Cannabis is non-addictive, and prosecutions for disorderly behaviour under its influence are unknown.
The use of cannabis is increasing, and the rate of increase is accelerating. Cannabis smoking is widespread in the universities, and the custom has been taken up by writers, teachers, doctors, businessmen, musicians, scientists, and priests. Such persons do not fit the stereotype of the unemployed criminal dope fiend. Smoking the herb also forms a traditional part of the social and religious life of hundreds of thousands of immigrants to Britain.
A leading article in The Lancet (9 November, 1963) has suggested that it is “worth considering … giving cannabis the same status as alcohol by legalising its import and consumption … Besides the undoubted attraction of reducing, for once, the number of crimes that a member of our society can commit, and of allowing the wider spread of something that can give pleasure, a greater revenue would certainly come to the State from taxation than from fines. …Additional gains might be the reduction of inter-racial tension, as well as that between generations.”
The main justification for the prohibition of cannabis has been the contention that its use leads to heroin addiction. This contention does not seem to be supported by any documented evidence, and has been specifically refuted by several authoritative studies. It is almost certainly correct to state that the risk to cannabis smokers of becoming heroin addicts is far less than the risk to drinkers of becoming alcoholics.
Cannabis is usually taken by normal persons for the purpose of enhancing sensory experience. Heroin is taken almost exclusively by weak and disturbed individuals for the purpose of withdrawing from reality. By prohibiting cannabis Parliament has created a black market where heroin could occasionally be offered to persons who would not otherwise have had access to it. Potential addicts, having found cannabis to be a poor escape route, have doubtless been tempted to try heroin; and it is probable that their experience of the harmlessness and non-addictive quality of cannabis has led them to underestimate the dangers of heroin. It is the prohibition of cannabis, and not cannabis itself, which may contribute to heroin addiction.
The present system of controls has strongly discouraged the use of cannabis preparations in medicine. It is arguable that claims which were formerly made for the effectiveness of cannabis in psychiatric treatment might now bear re-examination in the light of modern views on drug therapy; and a case could also be made out for further investigation of the antibiotic properties of cannabidiolic acid, one of the constituents of the herb. The possibility of alleviating suffering through the medical use of cannabis preparations should not be dismissed because of prejudice concerning the social effects of ‘drugs’.
The Government ought to welcome and encourage research into all aspects of cannabis smoking, but according to the law as it stands no one is permitted to smoke cannabis under any circumstances, and exceptions cannot be made for scientific and medical research. It is a scandal that doctors who are entitled to prescribe heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and barbiturates risk being sent to prison for personally investigating a drug which is known to be less damaging than alcohol or even tobacco.
A recent leader in The Times called attention to the great danger of the “deliberate sensationalism” which underlies the present campaign against ‘drugs’ and cautioned that: “Past cases have shown what can happen when press, police and public all join in a manhunt at a moment of national anxiety”. In recent months the persecution of cannabis smokers has been intensified. Much larger fines and an increasing proportion of unreasonable prison sentences suggest that, the crime at issue is not so much drug abuse as heresy.
The prohibition of cannabis has brought the law into disrepute and has demoralized police officers faced with the necessity of enforcing an unjust law. Uncounted thousands of frightened persons have been arbitrarily classified as criminals and threatened with arrest, victimisation and loss of livelihood. Many of them have been exposed to public contempt in the courts, insulted by uninformed magistrates and sent to suffer in prison. They have been hunted down with Alsatian dogs or stopped on the street at random and improperly searched. The National Council for Civil Liberties has called attention to instances where drugs have apparently been ‘planted’ on suspected cannabis smokers. Chief Constables have appealed to the public to inform on their neighbours and children. Yet despite these gross impositions and the threat to civil liberties which they pose the police freely admit that they have been unable to prevent the spread of cannabis smoking.
Abuse of opiates, amphetamines and barbiturates has become a serious national problem, but very little can be done about it so long as the prohibition of cannabis remains in force. The police do not have the resources or the manpower to deal with both cannabis and the dangerous drugs at the same time. Furthermore prohibition provides a potential breeding ground for many forms of drug abuse and gangsterism. Similar legislation in America in the ‘twenties brought the sale of both alcohol and heroin under the control of an immensely powerful criminal conspiracy which still thrives today. We in Britain must not lose sight of the parallel.
MEDICAL OPINION
“There are no lasting ill-effects from the acute use of marihuana and no fatalities have ever been recorded. … The causal relationship between these two events (marihuana smoking and heroin addiction) has never been substantiated. In spite of the once heated interchanges among members of the medical profession and between the medical profession and law enforcement officers there seems to be a growing agreement within the medical community, at least, that marihuana does not directly cause criminal behaviour, juvenile delinquency, sexual excitement, or addiction.”
Dr. J. H. Jaffe, in The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, L. Goodman and A. Gillman, Eds., 3rd Ed. 1965
“Certain specific myths require objective confrontation since otherwise they recurrently confuse the issue, and incidentally divert the energy and attention of police and customs and immigration authorities in directions which have very little to do with the facts and much more to do with prejudiced beliefs. The relative innocence of marijuana by comparison with alcohol is one such fact, its social denial a comparable myth.”
Dr. David Stafford-Clark, Director of Psychological Medicine, Guy’s Hospital. The Times, 12 April 1967.
“Marijuana is not a drug of addiction and is, medically speaking, far less harmful than alcohol or tobacco … It is generally smoked in the company of others and its chief effect seems to be an enhanced appreciation of music and colour and together with a feeling of relaxation and peace. A mystical experience of being at one with the universe is common, which is why the drug has been highly valued in Eastern religions. Unlike alcohol, marijuana does not lead to aggressive behaviour, nor is it aphrodisiac. There is no hangover, nor, so far as it is known, any deleterious physical effect.”
Dr. Anthony Storr, Sunday Times, 5 February 1967
“The available evidence shows that marijuana is not a drug of addiction and has no harmful effects … (the problem of marijuana) has been created by an ill-informed society rather than the drug itself.”
Guy’s Hospital Gazette, 17, 1965
“I think we can now say that marijuana does not lead to degeneration, does not affect the brain cells, is not habit-forming, and does not lead to heroin addiction.”
Dr James H. Fox, Director of the Bureau of Drug abuse Control, U.S. Food and Drug administration. Quoted Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette, 25 August 1966
“Cannabis is taken for euphoria, reduction of fatigue, and relief from tension, … (it) is a valuable pleasure-giving drug, probably much safer than alcohol.”
Dr. Joel Fort, Consultant on Drug Addiction to the World Health Organisation, Lecturer in School of Criminology, University of California. From Blum, Richard Ed., Utopiates 1965
“(Smoking cannabis) only occasionally is followed by heroin use, probably in those who would have become heroin addicts as readily without the marijuana.”
Dr L. Bender, Comprehens. Psychiat. 1963, 4, 181-94
The signatories to this petition suggest to the Home Secretary that he implement a five point programme of cannabis reform:
1 THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD PERMIT AND ENCOURAGE RESEARCH INTO ALL ASPECTS OF CANNABIS USE, INCLUDING ITS MEDICAL APPLICATIONS.
2 ALLOWING THE SMOKING OF CANNABIS ON PRIVATE PREMISES SHOULD NO LONGER CONSTITUTE AN OFFENCE.
3 CANNABIS SHOULD BE TAKEN OFF THE DANGEROUS DRUGS LIST AND CONTROLLED, RATHER THAN PROHIBITED, BY A NEW AD HOC INSTRUMENT.
4 POSSESSION OF CANNABIS SHOULD EITHER BE LEGALLY PERMITTED OR AT MOST BE CONSIDERED A MISDEMEANOUR, PUNISHABLE BY A FINE OF NOT MORE THAN ukp10 FOR A FIRST OFFENCE AND NOT MORE THAN ukp25 FOR ANY SUBSEQUENT OFFENCE.
5 ALL PERSONS NOW IMPRISONED FOR POSSESSION OF CANNABIS OR FOR ALLOWING CANNABIS TO BE SMOKED ON PRIVATE PREMISES SHOULD HAVE THEIR SENTENCES COMMUTED.
Jonathan Aitken
Tariq Ali
David Bailey
Humphrey Berkeley
Anthony Blond
Derek Boshier
Sidney Briskin
Peter Brook
Dr. David Cooper
Dr. Francis Crick, F.R.S.
David Dimbleby
Tom Driberg, M.P.
Dr. Ian Dunbar
Brian Epstein
Dr. Aaron Esterson
Peter Fryer
John Furnival
Tony Garnett
Clive Goodwin
Graham Greene
Richard Hamilton
George Harrison, M.B.E.
Michael Hastings
Dr. J.M. Heaton
David Hockney
Jeremy Hornsby
Dr. S. Hutt
Francis Huxley
Dr. Brian Inglis
The Revd. Dr. Victor E.S. Kenna, O.B.E.
George Kiloh
Herbert Kretzmer
Dr. R.D. Laing
Dr. Calvin Mark Lee
John Lennon, M.B.E.
Dr. D.M. Lewis
Paul McCartney, M.B.E.
David McEwen
Alasdair MacIntyre
Dr. O.D. Macrae-Gibson
Tom Mashler
Michael Abul Malik
George Melly
Dr. Jonathan Miller
Adrian Mitchell
Dr. Ann Mully
P.H. Nowell-Smith
Dr. Christopher Pallis
John Piper
Patrick Procktor
John Pudney
Alastair Reid
L. Jeffrey Selznick
Nathan Silver
Tony Smythe
Michael Schofield
Dr. David Stafford-Clark
Richard Starkey, M.B.E.
Dr. Anthony Storr
Kenneth Tynan
Dr. W. Grey Walter
Brian Walden, M.P.
Michael White
Pat Williams
DISCLAIMER – Signatures should in no way be taken to imply affiliation to SOMA or support of its aims or objectives.
*SOMA is applying for recognition as a company limited by guarantee with Charitable Trusts. It is being formed to examine without prejudice the scientific, medical, legal, moral, social, and philosophical aspects of heightened mental awareness, with special reference to the effects of pleasure-giving drugs. SOMA will sponsor research and discussion on the mechanisms, potentialities and dangers of heightened mental awareness and will publish its findings. Contributions can now be accepted. Cheques and postal orders should be made payable to SOMA, and sent to Michael Henshaw, Accountant, 20, Fitzroy Square, W.1.
The Daily Hatch 
