My name is Everette Hatcher III. I am a businessman in Little Rock and have been living in Bryant since 1993. My wife Jill and I have four kids (Rett 24, Hunter 22, Murphey 16, and Wilson 14).
More than 12 years ago, I shared this video containing lots of data and research on the negative relationship between government spending and economic performance.
Now it’s time for me to directly contribute to this debate.
In a study just published by the Club for Growth Foundation, co-authored with Robert O’Quinn (former Chief Economist at the Department of Labor), we estimated the likely economic impact of President Biden’s so-called Build Back Better plan to expand the welfare state.
Here are our main findings.
What’s especially noteworthy about our study is that we based our analysis on research published earlier this year by the Congressional Budget Office. In other words, a very establishment source.
And here are some excerpts from what we wrote.
President Biden has proposed to increase the burden of federal spending substantially over the next 10 years, diverting nearly $5.5 trillion from the private sector to the government… Most, but not all, of this new spending would be financed with higher tax rates on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. …Based on scholarly academic research, including new findings from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Biden’s tax-and-spend agenda contained in his reconciliation bill will accelerate America’s fiscal decline and undermine economic performance.…the Biden’s reconciliation bill, which increases the spending burden by 1.9 percent of GDP, will reduce the economy’s growth rate by about 0.2 percent each year. That…translates into more than $3 trillion less national income over the next decade. And the nation’s economic output will be $613 billion lower in 2031 compared to what it would be in the absence of President Biden’s fiscal agenda. …The cumulative loss of employee income over the next 10 years will exceed $1.6 trillion. Some of that will be in the form of lower wages and some of that will be a consequence of lost jobs. On average, each worker in a nonfarm job will lose $10,391 in total compensation.
These results shouldn’t be a surprise.
Biden’s fiscal agenda would made the United States more like Europe and the economic data unambiguously demonstrate that Europeans suffer from significantly lower living standards.
P.S. I especially like the CBO study because it shows the amount of damage caused by more spending varies based on how the outlays are financed.
As this chart illustrates, class-warfare taxation is the worst way of financing a bigger burden of government.
P.P.S. The good news is that Biden probably won’t be able to convince Congress to approve all of his proposals for new spending and higher tax rates. The bad news is even approving half of the Biden’s plan would cause considerable damage to American prosperity and competitiveness.
P.P.P.S. For policy wonks, there are two main types of research involving the economic impact of government spending. For those focusing on short-run economic results, there’s a debate about Keynesian economics – whether more government spending can artificially generate some growth, particularly if the outlays are financed with data.
I’m skeptical of the Keynesian argument, but it’s not relevant for today’s column, which focuses on how government spending impacts long-run economic results. And when looking at long-run data, most of the research suggests that government is too big. Indeed, it’s worth noting that there’s even research supporting my view from generally left-leaning international bureaucracies such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the European Central Bank.
Which is why there should be no tax on capital gains, and a few nations sensibly take this approach.
But they’re outnumbered by countries that do impose this pernicious form of double taxation. For instance, the Tax Foundation has a new report about the level of capital gains taxation in Europe, which includes this very instructive map.
As you can see, some countries, such as Denmark (gee, what a surprise), have very punitive rates.
However, other nations (such as Switzerland, Belgium, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Luxembourg, and Slovenia) wisely don’t impose this form of double taxation.
If the United States was included, we would be in the middle of the pack. Actually, we would be a bit worse than average, especially when you include the Obamacare tax on capital gains.
But if Joe Biden succeeds, the United States soon will have the dubious honor of being the worst of the worst.
The Wall Street Journalopined this morning about the grim news.
Biden officials leaked that they will soon propose raising the federal tax on capital gains to 43.4% from a top rate of 23.8% today. …Mr. Biden will tax capital gains for taxpayers who earn more than $1 million at the personal income tax rate, which he also wants to raise to 39.6% from 37%.Add the 3.8% ObamaCare tax on investment, and you get to 43.4%. And that’s merely the federal rate. Add 13.3% in California and 11.85% in New York (plus 3.88% in New York City), which also tax capital gains as regular income, and you are heading toward the 60% rate range. Keep in mind this is on the sale of gains that are often inflated as assets are held for years without adjustment for inflation. Oh, and Mr. Biden also wants to eliminate the step-up in basis on capital gains that accrues at death.
Beating out Denmark for the highest capital gains tax rate is bad.
But it’s even worse when you realize that capital gains often occur because investors expect an asset to generate more future income. But that future income gets hit by the corporate income tax (as well as the tax on dividends) when it actually materializes.
And I also recommend these columns (here, here, and here) for additional information on why we should be eliminating the capital gains tax rather than increasing it.
P.S. Don’t forget that there’s no indexing to protect taxpayersfrom having to pay tax on gains that are due only to inflation.
President Biden c/o The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
Is our country learning from history? California keeps raising their taxes on the wealthy and people keep moving from California to Texas. What does our federal government do? They also have been raising taxes on the wealthy lately. Take a look at this excellent video below and then read a great article by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute on what is happening in California right now.
Will Higher Tax Rates Balance the Budget?
Published on Apr 11, 2012
As the U.S. debt and deficit grows, some politicians and economist have called for higher tax rates in order to balance the budget. The question becomes: when the government raises taxes, does it actually collect a larger portion of the US economy?
Professor Antony Davies examines 50 years of economic data and finds that regardless of tax rates, the percentage of GDP that the government collects has remained relatively constant. In other words, no matter how high government sets tax rates, the government gets about the same portion. According to Davies, if we’re concerned about balancing the budget, we should worry less about raising tax revenue and more about growing the economy. The recipe for growth? Lower tax rates and a simplified tax code.
Like most people, I’m a sucker for a heartwarming story around the holidays.
Sometimes, you get that nice feeling when good things happen to good people, like you find at the end of a classic movie like “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
But since I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, I also feel all warm and fuzzy when bad things happen to bad people.
That’s why I always smile when I read stories about taxpayers moving across borders, thus preventing greedy tax-hiking politicians from collecting more revenue.
I smile because I envision the moment when some budget geek tells these sleazy politicians that projected revenues aren’t materializing and they don’t have more money to spend.
So I wish I could be a fly on the wall when this moment of truth happens to California politicians. They convinced voters in the state to enact Prop 30, a huge tax increase targeting those evil, awful, bad rich people.
Governor Brown and his fellow kleptocrats in Sacramento doubtlessly are salivating at the thought of more money to waste.
But notwithstanding a satirical suggestion from Walter Williams, there aren’t guard towers and barbed-wire fences surrounding the state. Productive people can leave, and that’s happening every day. And they take their taxable income with them.
Usually in ways that don’t attract attention. But sometimes a bunch of them leave at the same times, and that is newsworthy. Here’s an example of that happening, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Chevron Corp. will move up to 800 jobs – about a quarter of its current headquarters staff – from the Bay Area to Houston over the next two years but will remain based in San Ramon, the oil company told employees Thursday. …The company already employs far more people in Houston – about 9,000 full-time employees and contractors – than it does in San Ramon.
We don’t know a lot of details, but these were positions at the company’s headquarters and they were “technical positions dealing with information and advanced energy technologies…tied to Chevron’s worldwide oil exploration and production business.”
Let’s assume these highly skilled employees earn an average of $250,000. I imagine that’s a low-ball estimate, but this is just for purposes of a thought experiment. Now multiply that average salary by 800 workers and you get $200 million of income.
And every penny of that $200 million no longer will be subject to tax by the kleptocrats in the state’s capital.
What’s happening in a big way with Chevron is happening in small ways every single day with investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other “rich’ people.
That’s good for the people escaping. And it also will warm my heart when California’s despicable politicians discover next year that there’s an “unexpected” revenue shortfall.
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733
(Emailed to White House on 12-21-12.) 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 […]
(Emailed to White House on 12-21-12.) 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 […]
(Emailed to White House on 12-21-12) 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 […]
The federal government has a spending problem and Milton Friedman came up with the negative income tax to help poor people get out of the welfare trap. It seems that the government screws up about everything. Then why is President Obama wanting more taxes? _______________ Milton Friedman – The Negative Income Tax Published on […]
I was sad to read that the Speaker John Boehner has been involved in punishing tea party republicans. Actually I have written letters to several of these same tea party heroes telling them that I have emailed Boehner encouraging him to listen to them. Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ),Justin Amash (R-MI), and Tim Huelskamp (R-KS). have been contacted […]
Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute in his article, “Hitting the Ceiling,” National Review Online, March 7, 2012 noted: After all, despite all the sturm und drang about spending cuts as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, federal spending not only increased from 2011 to 2012, it rose faster than inflation and population growth combined. […]
Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute in his article, “Hitting the Ceiling,” National Review Online, March 7, 2012 noted: After all, despite all the sturm und drang about spending cuts as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, federal spending not only increased from 2011 to 2012, it rose faster than inflation and population growth combined. […]
Some of the heroes are Mo Brooks, Martha Roby, Jeff Flake, Trent Franks, Duncan Hunter, Tom Mcclintock, Devin Nunes, Scott Tipton, Bill Posey, Steve Southerland and those others below in the following posts. THEY VOTED AGAINST THE DEBT CEILING INCREASE IN 2011 AND WE NEED THAT TYPE OF LEADERSHIP NOW SINCE PRESIDENT OBAMA HAS BEEN […]
I hated to see that Allen West may be on the way out. ABC News reported: Nov 7, 2012 7:20am What Happened to the Tea Party (and the Blue Dogs?) Some of the Republican Party‘s most controversial House members are clinging to narrow leads in races where only a few votes are left to count. […]
Rep Himes and Rep Schweikert Discuss the Debt and Budget Deal Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute in his article, “Hitting the Ceiling,” National Review Online, March 7, 2012 noted: After all, despite all the sturm und drang about spending cuts as part of last year’s debt-ceiling deal, federal spending not only increased from 2011 […]
Adrian Rogers tells a story in one of his sermons about a player for Coach Bear Bryant who got into the doghouse with the coach and in a game at Arkansas he threw an interception after playing a pitiful game and then was able to run down the Arkansas player even though the Razorback had a clear path to the end-zone. Bryant’s team hung on for the win and after the game when the coaches shook hands this exchange occurred. The Arkansas coach asked, “Coach Bryant I don’t understand something. Our player who intercepted the ball was our fastest player and according to our scouting report your player was one of the slowest players on your team. So how did he catch him?”
Bryant responded, “Your player was running for 6 points and my player was running for his life!!!!”
Kerry Osborne tells a story about his father the Texas A&M quarterback and the 1957 game at Arkansas!
My dad (Roddy Osborne) got inducted into the Texas A&M Sports Hall of Fame a couple of months ago. My dad played for Bear Bryant back in the late 50’s. I knew he was a quarterback, but I didn’t realize that he played fullback his sophmore year. Turns out he was also the punter and the punt return guy (who knew). Oh yeah, and did I mention, in Bear Bryant’s system, the quarterback played middle linebacker too! He got drafted by the Cleveland Browns and played a couple of seasons there. (I think there was a guy by the name of Jim Brown playing there then).
The first one occurred during a game between Texas A&M and Arkansas in 1957. The story has been repeated many times over the years (often incorrectly). I once heard a preacher tell the story in a sermon and he had it completely messed up. I had to straighten him out after the service. Anyway, here’s how I remember it:
The Aggies were ahead by one point with a couple of minutes to go in the game. They were driving and close to scoring. Back in those days, the coach didn’t call the plays. The quarterback was responsible for calling the plays. So coach Bryant sends in a substitute with a message to not throw the ball, just to run out the clock. My dad calls a roll out, expecting to burn some clock with a long, slow developing play, but not intending to throw the ball. So he rolls out and lo and behold, a receiver (I think he said it was Gene Stallings) is wide open in the end zone. He told me that the guy was so open he just couldn’t help himself and so he throws the ball. Well one of the Arkansas defensive backs (Donny Horton) is a sprinter on the track team and he breaks on the ball along the sidelines and intercepts it. And there is nobody between him and the end zone 90+ yards away. Well somehow, my dad catches this guy from behind, and my dad is reportedly one of the slowest guys on the Aggies team. That tackle saves their undefeated season (they were 7-0 at the time and #1 in the nation). Later Bear Bryant was asked about the play and he says, “The difference was that Horton was running for a touchdown. Osborne was running for his life.”
___________________
I got this below off the internet:
This is a family friend, the late Dr. Adrian Rogers –-former pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis– with Coach Bryant either before or after Coach Byrant’s last game at the Liberty Bowl. Thought some of you would enjoy it.
They both hold special memories to me for different reasons.
“We just gotta stop that lil’ inside trap.” – Joe Kines
John David Crow said his favorite moment of his Heisman season in 1957 was the Aggies’ 7-6 win over the Razorbacks. Crow scored A&M’s only touchdown and came up with an interception late with Arkansas driving.
Posted: Saturday, September 28, 2013 12:00 am | Updated: 1:00 am, Sun Oct 13, 2013.
It’s not easy actually getting into the town of Fayetteville, Ark. on a game day, whether you’re traveling from Fort Smith or Bentonville.
With two-lane roads surrounding the home of the Arkansas Razorbacks, it can be virtually impossible.
Looking back at Texas A&M’s history, it’s been even harder for the Aggies to get out of town with a victory.
A&M has won only six times in 20 tries in Fayetteville. And prior to 1990, the Aggies had won only once since Paul “Bear” Bryant roamed the sidelines.
“It’s a great football setting,” said former coach R.C. Slocum. “They have a very vocal crowd and you were always incredibly happy to get out of there with a win.”
Slocum would know. He was the last A&M coach to bring a team to Arkansas, winning its 1990 matchup. At the time, the Razorbacks had already announced they would be joining the Southeastern Conference in 1992, ending historic rivalries with both the Aggies and Longhorns.
The Aggies wouldn’t play the Razorbacks again until the two schools began a nonconference series at Cowboys Stadium, now AT&T Stadium, in 2009, which became a conference game with the Aggies joining the SEC for the 2012 season.
Longtime Arkansas beat writer Wally Hall of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said that the Razorbacks used to always look at the Aggies as their second-biggest rival behind the Longhorns and that they’re excited to have them back in Fayetteville.
“This is the only game of the year that’s sold out, so that should tell you something,” he said.
Saturday marks the final time the Aggies will travel to Fayetteville for at least a decade, as the two programs will continue their series at AT&T Satidum in Arlington in 2014.
Slocum said he wishes the programs would just stick with a home-and-home series. He said he always looked forward to the trip up north.
“We always played them in the fall and there was a hint of the fall weather with the colors changing,” Slocum said. “It really was beautiful. I loved that trip.”
Slocum also enjoyed leaving Fayetteville with a win against the defending Southwest Conference champions in 1990 after a tough loss the previous season.
The year prior, Slocum’s first as head coach, the battle between the ranked teams at Kyle Field ended with a controversial call. With Arkansas down 20-17 with 8:14 left in the fourth quarter, the Razorbacks faced a fourth-and-3 inside the A&M 20-yard line. Arkansas quarterback Quinn Grovey threw to tight end Billy Winston, but the pass was broken up by A&M’s Larry Horton. However, line judge Ron Underwood, who played at Arkansas in the mid-1950s, threw a flag on Horton for pass interference. Five plays later, Barry Foster scored from 2 yards and Arkansas escaped Kyle Field with a 23-22 win and a second straight SWC title and Cotton Bowl berth.
“I still feel like that is one championship we didn’t get that we should have,” Slocum said. “The way that game turned out meant a lot more motivation for us [going into the 1990 game].”
Though the two teams were pegged as the favorites to win the SWC going into the 1990 season, Arkansas had fallen on hard times. The Razorbacks were 2-7 and had yet to win a conference game. A&M cornerback Kevin Smith didn’t feel sorry for the Aggies’ rival, though.
“They’re dying and we have a chance to go in there and jump on them,” he told The Eagle.
Slocum remembers how scrappy Arkansas was that game.
“They weren’t going to give up,” he said. “That was a hard fought game.”
A&M got the Razorbacks’ best shot, but came out victorious, winning 20-16. Wide receiver Gary Oliver caught eight passes for 101 yards as part of an efficient A&M offense that compiled 429 yards and held the ball for 32 minutes.
“A&M hadn’t won [in Fayetteville] in a long time, and that makes this a little sweeter,” Slocum said after the game.
Slocum had been a part of one of the Aggies’ losing efforts as defensive coordinator in a 1984 blowout.
The Aggies were 4-4 that year heading into the Arkansas game, having lost four out of five games following a 3-0 start.
The Razorbacks shut the Aggies down, 28-0, in a game played in a sleet storm, but head coach Jackie Sherrill faced just as tough a challenge just getting the team to the stadium.
In hindsight, Sherrill said one of his biggest faults that game was with the team’s travel arrangements.
He got the team rooms at a resort near Bentonville, when he now thinks they should have stayed in Fort Smith the night before the 11 a.m. kickoff. He said the players were spread out all over the hotel and it wasn’t ideal for a night before a game.
More problems arose getting the team fed on the way to the stadium.
Sherrill said they stopped on the way in Springdale for the pregame breakfast at “some pancake house” — one problem, though.
“They didn’t have enough people to serve us and they didn’t have enough cooks,” Sherrill said. “So instead of going in and eating your pregame meal, it took us almost an hour to get our players fed.”
The day got even worse due to the freezing temperatures.
“I think half of their stadium had left by halftime,” Sherrill said.
He would say after the game that those were probably the worst conditions one of his teams has ever played in.
But something positive did come out of the thumping in Fayetteville.
“That was probably the turning point of our season,” Sherrill said. “There were an awful lot of the players [who] were embarrassed by the way they played.”
The Aggies would rally from the Arkansas loss to close their season with wins over two ranked teams — TCU and Texas — and claim their third straight SWC title.
Nearly 30 years earlier, another freezing showdown in Fayetteville would decide another SWC championship. In November 1957, the No. 1 Aggies took on the No. 11 Razorbacks in a game that was thought to decide the conference title and a trip to the Cotton Bowl. It was there that John David Crow said he had his “favorite Heisman moment.”
The Razorbacks trailed 7-6 late in the fourth, when defensive back Donnie Horton intercepted Roddy Osborne and took it all the way down to the A&M 27-yard-line. Arkansas moved the ball to the 17-yard-line and was in field-goal range, but opted to pass, which surprised Crow.
Crow, who had scored the Aggies’ lone touchdown earlier in the game, picked off George Walker’s pass in the end zone to seal the victory and keep A&M undefeated.
“I just remember that game being exhausting,” Crow said.
Following the game, Arkansas coach Jack Mitchell called Crow “a great one.”
That season, Crow would become the first Aggie to win the Heisman Trophy.
Much has changed since the last time the Aggies traveled to Fayetteville more than two decades ago. Hall said the mobile-home brigade surrounding Reynolds Razorback Stadium has been replaced by top-notch tailgating, and while he said, “it’s not as hostile an environment as LSU or Alabama,” Hall still believes it’s a top-five atmosphere.
“It’s a really loyal crowd,” Hall said.
“Once the stadium expanded, it gets full and loud. And with this being a night game, they’ll be in good form.”
For those making the trip for Saturday’s game, Sherrill offered some advice.
“Get ready to hear a lot of ‘Wooo Pig Sooie,'” he said.
_____________
___
Special to The Eagle Former Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant lifts Texas A&M coach Gene Stallings after the Aggies beat the Crimson Tide in the 1968 Cotton Bowl.
Priceless. ___
U.S. President John F. Kennedy, center, poses with, from left, University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, White House Army Signal Agency John J. Cochran, All-American UA quarterback Pat Trammell, UA President Frank Rose, sportscaster Mel Allen, UA sports Hall of Famer Young Boozer Jr., Birmingham News sports writer Benny Marshall and Alabama businessman Tom Russell at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in December 1961. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)
January 26, 1983
Paul W. “Bear” Bryant was born in 1913 in rural Cleveland County, Arkansas. He played football at nearby Fordyce High School and got his nickname for taking on a sideshow challenge to earn a dollar a minute for wrestling a bear. When the animal’s muzzle popped off during the struggle, the story goes, the hulking teenager jumped out of the ring and never collected his winnings. But there would be plenty of wins later. During his playing time at the University of Alabama, the team racked up 23 victories, three losses and two ties, and was named national champion in 1934. His college coaching career included stints at Union College, Alabama, Maryland, Vanderbilt, Kentucky and Texas A&M before he became head coach of the then-struggling Crimson Tide in 1958. Over 25 years in Tuscaloosa, he compiled a record of 232-46-9, with six national titles and 15 conference championships. Bryant was named College Football Coach of the Year three times. He retired in December 1982, his last game a 21-15 victory over the University of Illinois in the Liberty Bowl. He was then the winningest college football coach in history, with a record 323 victories. Just 28 days later on Jan. 26, 1983, Bryant, who had suffered from heart problems for years, was admitted to Tuscaloosa’s Druid City Hospital with chest pains. He died that afternoon after suffering a heart attack. The Navy veteran of World War II was 69. A month later, then-President Ronald Reagan posthumously awarded Bryant the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Bryant is buried at Birmingham’s Elmwood Cemetery.
Texas A&M’s John David Crow (#44) gets by Arkansas’ quarterback to score the winning touchdown as he intercepts a pass and returns it for the lone Aggie score defeating Arkansas 7-6.
Dan Hampton at the Little Rock Touchdown Club Part 2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCPWDMKzVs4 Dan Hampton told about the year with the Chicago Bears when they took on the Vikings and they sacked Archie Manning 11 times. In October on 1984 the Bears beat the Vikings but in the process Dan Hampton got to play against one of […]
Dan Hampton at the Little Rock Touchdown Club Part 1 Dan Hampton I really enjoyed the Little Rock Touchdown Club today when Dan Hampton was our speaker. Hampton said that Jimmy Johnson was a great defensive coordinator for him to learn under when he played for Frank Broyles in 1975. Then when Lou Holtz came […]
Rex Nelson impersonates Houston Nutt at LRTC 08 27 12 Published on Oct 2, 2012 Little Rock Touchdown Club has Rex Nelson do the stats for the games played that week. Rex does a lot of impersonations of different people but I like his Houston Nutt the best. Video by Popeye Video – Mrpopeyevideo I have […]
I have written about my past visits to the Little Rock Touchdown Club many times and I have been amazed at the quality of the speakers. Frank Broyles was one of my favorites but Phillip Fulmer, Paul Finebaum, Mike Slive, Willie Roaf, Randy White, Howard Schnellenberger, John Robinson, Mark May, Gene Stallings, Bobby Bowden, Lloyd […]
I have written about my past visits to the Little Rock Touchdown Club many times and I have been amazed at the quality of the speakers. (Yesterday I talked about Phillip Fulmer.)Frank Broyles was one of my favorites but Phillip Fulmer, Paul Finebaum, Mike Slive, Willie Roaf, Randy White, Howard Schnellenberger, John Robinson, Mark May, […]
Rex Nelson impersonates Houston Nutt at LRTC 08 27 12 Published on Oct 2, 2012 Little Rock Touchdown Club has Rex Nelson do the stats for the games played that week. Rex does a lot of impersonations of different people but I like his Houston Nutt the best. Video by Popeye Video – Mrpopeyevideo ______________ I […]
I really enjoyed hearing Gus Malzahn speak at the final Little Rock Touchdown meeting on Nov 19, 2012. He covered several subjects that he covered a few days earlier at a touchdown club in Huntsville. Here are some of his comments from that meeting: But reports that he could be the next coach at Auburn, […]
______________ Published on Oct 2, 2012 Little Rock Touchdown Club has Rex Nelson do the stats for the games played that week. Rex does a lot of impersonations of different people but I like his Houston Nutt the best. Video by Popeye Video – Mrpopeyevideo ______________________I got to hear Houston Nutt speak on 9-23-13 at […]
______________________ On 9-23-13 I got to hear Houston Nutt speak at the Little Rock Touchdown Club and he pointed out that one of the most proud accomplishments of his Arkansas Coaching span was a great record in overtime games. You got to respect a lot of the results that Houston Nutt got while he […]
Tom Osborne at the Little Rock Touchdown Club Part 8 Tom Osborne on ESPN Up Close ~1998 Pt2 Uploaded on Sep 26, 2006 Interview with Tom Osborne on his career coaching the Nebraska Cornhuskers (2/2) ___________ I really enjoyed the speech that Tom Osborne made on 9-9-13 at the Little Rock Touchdown Club. He noted […]
Tom Osborne at the Little Rock Touchdown Club Part 7 Tony Dungy on the Influence of Tom Osborne Uploaded on Oct 11, 2011 Former Golden Gopher football player and NFL head coach Tony Dungy talks about how as an up-and-coming coach he watched Tom Osborne coach a practice and that day single handedly changed his […]
Mitch Mustain I really enjoyed hearing Mitch speak at the Little Rock Touchdown Club on 10-14-13 and he did a great job. I really liked the story he told about always dreaming about playing for the Razorbacks when he grew up and constantly listening to Paul call the games on the Razorback Radio Network. Paul […]
Gene Chizik does a great job at Little Rock Touchdown Club Part 2 Gene Chizik spoke at the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Sept 30, 2013 and he did a great job. He talked about his faith and how he was delivered from bitterness after he got fired at Auburn and he still makes his […]
Back in 2003 I had one son playing for the Bryant Hornets Senior High Football team and one son playing for Baptist Prep so I spent my Friday nights between those two schools.
However, in 2003 I remember attending on a Saturday the Hootens Arkansas Double Hitter with the first game between Benton Panthers (our friend Jon Chris Roberts was All-State Panther WR) and Shiloh Christian and the second game between Pulaski Academy (coached by Kevin Kelley) and Springdale (coached by Gus Malzahn) and I remember thinking when Springdale won 63-0 that Kevin Kelly was not ready for the big time, but I was wrong. Back on September 9, 2011, I was attending the Baptist Prep game at Bigelow but I was listening on the radio to the Pulaski Academy at Cabot game and Pulaski got ahead by 4 touchdowns before Cabot ever touched the ball!!!!! Since then I have been able to attend about one Pulaski Academy a year and Coach Kelley has never ceased to amaze me!!! This story below tells the story in a great way. Enjoy!
Even in the best of times, some of the doubters mocked Kevin Kelley and liked to tell him that what he was doing would never work. And if it was working, well — it was only a matter of time, they’d say, before he’d be exposed.
Too crazy. Too gimmicky. Too out there. Too this. Too that.
Kelley, 52 and stout, with a linebacker’s build, is the football coach who never punts, except on those very rare occasions when he does. He’s the coach who always goes for two, except when his team is winning by so much that it’d be unsportsmanlike to do so. He’s the coach who pretty much always onside kicks — unless, again, the margin is too wide in his team’s favor. In following these rules — never punt, always go for two, onside kick all the time — Kelley became arguably the most successful high school football coach in America. His teams at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas, won nine state championships.
That’s how he became the head coach at Presbyterian College, which hired Kelley in May, and that’s how Kelley came to find himself on Saturday night in Buies Creek, about 35 miles south of Raleigh, where in the dark humidity of a muggy late-summer night he stood near his team’s buses and tried to find perspective in defeat. Presbyterian had just suffered a 72-0 loss at Campbell and it’d been one of the worst losses Kelley had ever experienced. Now he knew what, or who, was coming: the people who took joy whenever he’d fail, the naysayers who’d never believe.
Hadn’t it always been that way, even when his teams rarely lost?
There was the time several years ago, Kelley remembered Saturday, when one of his Pulaski teams endured a rare defeat, and in those days at Pulaski a loss came along about as often as rain in the desert. At the time Pulaski was in the midst of four consecutive state championships, but the team had lost, for once, and it was like the critics had been waiting for it. As Kelley told it, a woman approached his wife in the bathroom after the game.
“It’s time for you all to leave,” the woman said. “It’s time to play normal football around here.”
If something like that could happen then, in the midst of so much success, Kelley, in his first months at Presbyterian in small-town Clinton, South Carolina, knew what was waiting for him Saturday night. The Blue Hose — that’s the Presbyterian mascot, for the uninitiated — had just lost by about 10 touchdowns, and if the messages streaming into his Twitter DMs and email were any indication, people were already jumping off the bandwagon, if they were ever on it to begin with.
Kelley took a quick look at his phone after the defeat, in part to get it over with and in part because he feels an obligation to accept and even embrace the consequences of his choices. He does not hide from the criticism as much as soak it in, as if its absorption will make that much sweeter the success he believes is inevitable. And besides, if his way had brought him great success and a measure of celebrity — and it has — then he could accept the derision that came with a 72-0 loss, too.
“I’ll listen to the haters,” Kelley said in a matter-of-fact way, resigned to the influx of incoming messages informing him that his strategy is too insane to work in college football, and moments later he walked toward the bus. It was going to be a long ride home, and only three games into his tenure as a college coach he knew some had already written him off — if not before the season than certainly now. Kelley had heard it all before, and had always answered the cries that his strategy would fail with proof that it wouldn’t.
He’d won more than 80 percent of the time in high school. He’d won so much, and in such a unique way, that he had become a panelist at MIT’s sports analytics conferences, and a motivational speaker when a company or business organization wanted the perspective of a disruptor. He’d won so often that he’d earned the admiration of Bill Belichick, whom Kelley and his son counted as a friend.
(Bill Belichick below with Pulaski Academy Grad Hunter Henry)
“He told me and my dad, we were talking to him … he said, ‘Football’s football,’” said Zack Kelley, who’s on his father’s coaching staff. “It’s going to work. It doesn’t matter if it’s high school, college, NFL — he said ‘Football’s football and a good coach is going to make it happen.’”
But now Kevin Kelley had lost like he hadn’t in a long time, and afterward he said he offered his team his apology and told his players that this was his fault, but that there was even a precedent for this.
“I told the guys after the game, in 2003, in the first game of the year, Guz Malzahn was the head coach at Springdale (High School),” Kelley said, referencing the time before Malzahn went on to coach at Auburn before becoming the head coach at UCF. “And his team beat my team 63-0. And that felt very much like this one did.
“And then we went on to win the state championship game that year.”
But that was high school football in Arkansas and this was college football. Lower-level, FCS college football, but Division I, nonetheless. Kelley walked onto the bus and took his seat for the four-hour ride back to Clinton.
“I hope you’ll keep watching the rest of the season,” he said before he did, and whether Presbyterian recovered from this humbling evening or not, its journey during Kelley’s first year promised to be among the most interesting in college football. Could Kelley’s approach be crazy enough to work at a higher level? Or was it just crazy?
Presbyterian head football coach Kevin Kelly congratulates Campbell running back Michael Jamerson (21) after their victory.r The Presbyterian Blue Hose and the Campbell Fighting Camels met in a non-conference football game in Buies Creek, N.C. on September 18, 2021. Steven Worthy NEWSOBSERVER.COM
HOW KEVIN KELLEY DEVELOPED NO-PUNT STRATEGY
Football is not necessarily a sport known for spawning innovation or risk-taking, and so tied is it to routine and tradition that any change stands out against the familiar. More than a century later, the forward pass remains perhaps the sport’s great invention, football’s version of the lightbulb or printing press — though it’s fair to question why such a simple thing wasn’t obvious from the start.
It’s a sport whose offenses remained mired in a three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust mentality for decades and one that, at the highest level, was slow to embrace wide-open offenses until only recently. The most successful football coaches are sometimes described as geniuses, though many of them do things the same way, as if that way is the only acceptable way.
Pretty much always punting on fourth down; pretty much always kicking the extra point; pretty much always kicking off the normal way — which is to say kicking downfield, instead of attempting an onside kick — is just the way the game has been played, and forever. Few coaches have ever routinely done any one of those things differently, let alone all three of them at the same time.
Kelley realized he needed to try something new before his first season as the head coach at Pulaski. As he remembers it, “it hit me really hard” that he couldn’t play the game in an ordinary way and expect extraordinary results, and that if he did stick to the routine his teams would never reach their potential. A self-described numbers guy — he studied accounting and briefly considered a career in it — Kelley in the early 2000s encountered a report from a Harvard professor who’d analyzed thousands of football games. One of the takeaways: teams punt way too much.
The rationale was that coaches undervalued possessions, and that simply giving the ball away in the form of a punt was a poor strategic choice. The data suggested that the potential reward of scoring after successful fourth-down conversions was more than worth the risk of failing to convert those fourth downs and giving up field position.
His first season as head coach at Pulaski, Kelley punted 21 or 22 times, he said. He saw a benefit on the field but off of it, too, given that he used less practice time on punting and more on other parts of the game he found more important to winning. A few years later, he watched Moneyball, the film version of the bestselling book by the same name, and became more enamored with data and analytics. He devoured Freakonomics, a book about seeing the world differently, and similar ones by Malcolm Gladwell, including Outliers and David and Goliath, which Kelley cited during a lengthy recent phone interview.
“It’s vastly different than people think,” Kelley said of the Biblical story that for centuries has inspired underdogs to believe that they, too, can defy the odds against a more formidable opponent. Yet Kelley argued, referencing Gladwell’s book, that people have had it all wrong.
“David would have been the favorite if Vegas had a line on David and Goliath fighting,” he said. “Because David was a military guy that was a slingshot specialist that was never going to get into hand-to-hand Goliath. He just wasn’t going to do it.”
Kelley’s approach, then, is something like his version of becoming a slingshot sharpshooter and engaging an opponent from a distance. The never punting, the going for two, the onside kicks — they became his way to tilt the advantage in his teams’ favor. And yet it takes a certain type of individual to be willing to try something that so defies the norm.
He wasn’t born with a natural inclination to embrace risk, Kelley said. He wasn’t a daredevil. Yet as a boy growing up in and around Hot Springs, Arkansas, Kelley found himself in circumstances that required improvisation. He didn’t have it easy, and the consistency that some of his peers could count on — a stable environment at home, for instance — Kelley could not.
“Football probably saved my life,” he said. “I had a bad, movie-like childhood at times. There was some alcoholism, there were things — there were times I didn’t think I wanted to keep going, and I would be in a position where I could have easily ended it. And I wanted to go to football the next day, because I felt like that was something I loved being a part of.”
Kelley’s first job as a teenager involved working atop railroad bridges, dismantling crossties and carrying them with a partner off the bridge. They weighed 200 or 300 pounds each, he said, and it was a narrow walk back to safety and “there were no harnesses, no anything. We might be 150 feet above a creek that was a foot deep, where if you fall off, it’s over with.”
So how risky, really, is not punting or going for two after you’ve done that kind or work? Kelley survived that, and a troubled home that at times in his younger years had him contemplating whether he wanted to keep living. It’s no wonder then, perhaps, that he decided he couldn’t go through life punting — that he was going to take chances. That sometimes it might not work, and that had to be OK because at least he’d given himself what he believed to be the best opportunity.
Presbyterian made it look easy his first two games, both against overmatched schools from lower levels of college football. The Blue Hose ran away from St. Andrews, an NAIA school, and from Fort Lauderdale, which is not an NCAA school but one in the NCCAA (National Christian College Athletic Association). The 2-0 start created a bit of buzz, though Kelley last week acknowledged the reality of the competition.
Still, he argued, what he does would work. It worked in high school and it would work at Presbyterian, which competes in a non-scholarship league with Dayton and Davidson and others, and it would work at a higher level of college and even the NFL.
“I hope since I’m being honest with you, you don’t put this in a context that makes me look like a complete idiot,” Kelley said, before making his case of why his approach could work at any level. “… That all said, I mean, I think that there’s a level of what I’m doing that they would be better off using in the NFL.”
“This is going to sound really, really stupid,” he went on, “especially if we go up there and get killed by Campbell … but I believe you shouldn’t spend nearly as much time on blocking tackling as everybody does.”
By then, last week, ESPN was making plans to send a crew to Presbyterian’s game at Campbell to shoot a segment for GameDay, to air next week. After his team’s loss Saturday night, Kelley recalled the pregame conversation he shared with one of the show’s producers: “Just don’t get beat 72-0.”
Presbyterian head football coach Kevin Kelly talks with referees before the start of the game with Campbell. The Presbyterian Blue Hose and the Campbell Fighting Camels met in a non-conference football game in Buies Creek, N.C. on September 18, 2021. Steven Worthy NEWSOBSERVER.COM
A RARE PUNT BUT, “WHY NOT PRESBYTERIAN COLLEGE?”
Kelley’s team did something Saturday night that none of his teams had done in years. Three years? Four? Kelley’s son, Zack, the receivers coach at Presbyterian, couldn’t remember. All Zack knew was this: “He hates punting.”
When the call to punt came in from the sideline, one thought kept playing over in Zack’s mind.
“I can’t believe it,” he said later, repeating it
Neither, apparently, could the Blue Hose. For even despite the circumstances — the offense faced a 4th-and-20 from its own 4-yard line — the players were so discombobulated by the directive to punt that they didn’t get the play off in time. Delay of game. So now it was 4th and 22 from the 2. Presbyterian lined up in the shotgun and it was a quick kick — only 23 yards, and that was with a generous roll.
“Whenever that happens,” Zack Kelley said of his father being forced to punt, “he’s just completely beat down.”
Zack played wide receiver for his father at Pulaski, his final season in 2015, and during his four years there he could recall only one time when the team punted.
“He called timeout just so he could yell at us, and then go punt,” he said. “And then as a player you feel terrible like, wow — I can’t believe I made him punt. I made that guy punt.’”
There was only that one punt for Presbyterian Saturday night. The Blue Hose often threw an interception or fumbled before it reached fourth down: 10 turnovers in all. True to Kevin Kelley’s form, though, Presbyterian attempted an onside kick to start the second half — its lone kickoff of the game, given it never scored — despite facing a 56-point deficit at the time.
It was long over by then, though there was still another half to play, and it might have been easy for anyone to look at the score and make judgments about Kelley’s system. In reality, though, Campbell, a scholarship team from the Big South Conference, held a significant physical advantage; the Camels simply overpowered the Blue Hose along both lines of scrimmage, and even without all the turnovers Presbyterian likely wouldn’t have had much of a chance.
And yet still, the game took on the feeling of a perverse football experiment. Could a team that plays the game in such an unconventional way find success in college? Could Kelley continue to prove the doubters wrong, as he’d done throughout his 17 years at Pulaski? In many ways, Presbyterian offers the perfect setting for such an experiment. It is the smallest school, by enrollment (a little more than 1,000), of any Division I football-playing school.
It is removed from the glare of any media spotlight. The expectations are low, at least externally.
Yet internally, said Rob Acunto, the Presbyterian athletic director, there’s a mentality of, “just because we are the smallest school in Division I, there’s no reason why we can’t walk with some swagger.”
“And so we never looked at it from the standpoint of, we’re doing things oddly but just saying, you know — why not Presbyterian College?” he said. “We’re small, we may not have the resources other schools do. But what can we do to gain an advantage and be successful? And so Kevin was a good fit for that mentality, which was, ‘Let’s find a way to play with the big boys, so to speak.’ ”
In 2017, Presbyterian began transitioning to non-scholarship football, a move that required a transition from the Big South to the Pioneer League. The school in April fired Kelley’s predecessor, Tommy Spangler, after he won 12 games in four seasons. It will be difficult for the Blue Hose to compete against those schools that offer football scholarships, and the difference — in both size and talent — was noticeable Saturday night.
But, Kelley insisted, “Our team is not 72-0 worse than Campbell.”
“I was,” he said, after a pause.
He knew the defeat, and its margin, would be fodder for the doubters. That people would see the score and say: Yes — told you so. Told you it’d never work beyond high school. But Kelley knows it’s early, yet. He’s only been the head coach at Presbyterian for three full months; he’d only just met about half his players in early August. And besides, he had 17 years of results that his way could work, that it would.
Yes, it’s different now. This isn’t high school anymore. Before he stepped on the bus Saturday night, he acknowledged that there probably isn’t much room for anything in between. He understood that this was either going to be a great success, one that maybe could revolutionize football, or that it would be a colossal failure. No margin. He was OK with that. He’d made his choice long ago, and refused to go through life punting.
This story was originally published September 20, 2021 10:08 AM.
On November 18, 2011 the Arkansas Baptist Eagle football team went to 11-1 for the year with a hard fought 26-6 victory at Camden Harmony Grove. Before this game Barry Groomes of Hootens Arkansas Football picked Camden to win over the eagles because Arkansas Baptist had never won a playoff game on the road. Actually before this year Arkansas Baptist was 3-7 in the playoff with two victories coming in 1998 and one in 2004.
Is the 2011 Eagle team the best ever?
1. The 1998 team featured a huge line with the Witcher brothers (Sam and Ben) in the secordary and the eagles tied Harding and Carlisle for the conference championship. Knocked out of the playoffs by Gus Malzahn’s first state championship team at Shiloh (Gus has won championships at higher levels since, ask Arthur Bennett about that).
2. The 2004 team like the 1998 team also advanced in the playoffs and is the only Arkansas Baptist team to secure sole possession of a conference championship, and it included the most all-conference players (10) in Eagle history on one team.
3. The juniors and seniors on the 2011 team can claim to have more Arkansas Baptist victories in a two year span than any other team (a total of 20 over last two years, the 2003-2004 teams previously held the most).
My final conclusion is very simple: If the 2011 eagles get three victories in the playoffs this year then they have to be considered the best Arkansas Baptist team ever. The problem is they are going up against the Barton Bears who hold more state championships than any other 3A team. We will be pulling for this group of Eagles and we know they can do it.
All State Receiver Greg Bowie catches game winning pass
against Bauxite in the final seconds of the game.
“THE PROBLEM OF MODERN MAN IS A FEELING OF COSMIC ALIENATION, INCLUDING THE AREA OF MORALS. MAN HAS A FEELING OF MORAL MOTIONS, YET IN THE UNIVERSE AS IT IS, IT IS COMPLETELY OUT OF LINE WITH WHAT IS THERE.”
– FRANCIS SCHAEFFER
As we consider man’s finiteness and his cruelty, it would certainly seem that these things are not one, but two. Mankind has always thought of these things as being different. Man’s finiteness is his smallness; he is not a sufficient reference point to himself. But his cruelty has always been considered as distinct from his finiteness. Yet we must notice something. If we accept the impersonal beginning, finally we will come to the place where man’s finiteness and his cruelty become the same thing.
With an impersonal beginning, everything is finally equal in the area of morals. With an impersonal beginning, eventually morals is just another form of metaphysics, of being. Morals disappear and there is only one area rather than two. Left in this position, we can talk about what is antisocial, or what society does not like, or even what I do not like, but we cannot talk about what is really right and what is really wrong.
Hence, what is left may be worded in many different ways in different cultures, but it is only the relative – that which is sociological, statistical, situational – nothing else. You have situational, statistical ethics – the standard of averages – but you cannot have morality . . . we are just the little against the big, and nothing that has meaning in right and wrong.
Now let us look at the opposite answer – the personal beginning. In this answer, there is a possibility of keeping morals and metaphysics separate. This is a profound thing, though it may sound simple. Whereas the impersonal beginning leads us to a merging of morals and metaphysics, the personal beginning provides the possibility of keeping them separate. In other words, man’s finiteness may be separated from his cruelty. God’s character is the moral absolute of the universe. Plato was entirely right when he held that unless you have absolutes morals do not exist.
Again, as in the area of metaphysics, we must understand that this is not simply the best answer – it is the only answer in morals for man. The only answer in the area of morals, as true morals, turns upon the fact of God’s being there. If God is not there (not just the word “God,” but God himself being there), there is no answer and at all to the problem of evil, and morals.
(These selections are from the book, He is there and he is not silent, Chapter 2, “The Moral Necessity” where this is further discussed.)
“I JUST WANTED TO ILLUSTRATE IN AN ENTERTAINING WAY THAT THERE’S NO GOD, THAT WE’RE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE, AND THAT THERE IS NOBODY OUT THERE TO PUNISH YOU, THAT THERE’S NOT GOING TO BE ANY KIND OF HOLLYWOOD ENDING TO YOUR LIFE IN ANY WAY, AND THAT YOUR MORALITY IS STRICTLY UP TO YOU.”
– WOODY ALLEN, COMMENTING ON THE FILM, “CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS.”
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 Biblical Archaeology, Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry King’s Show. One of two most popular posts I […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Current Events | Tagged Bible Prophecy, john macarthur | Edit | Comments (0)
Prophecy–The Biblical Prophesy About Tyre.mp4 Uploaded by TruthIsLife7 on Dec 5, 2010 A short summary of the prophecy about Tyre and it’s precise fulfillment. Go to this link and watch the whole series for the amazing fulfillment from secular sources. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt4mDZUefo ________________ John MacArthur on the amazing fulfilled prophecy on Tyre and how it was fulfilled […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit | Comments (1)
John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 2) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
John MacArthur on the Bible and Science (Part 1) I have posted many of the sermons by John MacArthur. He is a great bible teacher and this sermon below is another great message. His series on the Book of Proverbs was outstanding too. I also have posted several of the visits MacArthur made to Larry […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit | Comments (0)
Adrian Rogers – How you can be certain the Bible is the word of God Great article by Adrian Rogers. What evidence is there that the Bible is in fact God’s Word? I want to give you five reasons to affirm the Bible is the Word of God. First, I believe the Bible is the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Biblical Archaeology | Edit | Comments (0)
Is there any evidence the Bible is true? Articles By PleaseConvinceMe Apologetics Radio The Old Testament is Filled with Fulfilled Prophecy Jim Wallace A Simple Litmus Test There are many ways to verify the reliability of scripture from both internal evidences of transmission and agreement, to external confirmation through archeology and science. But perhaps the […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology, Current Events | 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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
Here is some very convincing evidence that points to the view that the Bible is historically accurate. Archaeological and External Evidence for the Bible Archeology consistently confirms the Bible! Archaeology and the Old Testament Ebla tablets—discovered in 1970s in Northern Syria. Documents written on clay tablets from around 2300 B.C. demonstrate that personal and place […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Biblical Archaeology | Edit | Comments (0)
The John Lennon and the Beatles really were on a long search for meaning and fulfillment in their lives just like King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). He fount that without God in the picture all […]
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s archbishop chastised Catholic politicians Tuesday for supporting a radical pro-abortion bill that promotes “child sacrifice.”
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco urged Catholics to pray and fast for the defeat of the deceptively named Women’s Health Protection Act, according to the Catholic News Agency.
“This proposed legislation is nothing short of child sacrifice,” Cordileone said in a statement. “[It] is surely the type of legislation one would expect from a devout Satanist, not a devout Catholic.”
Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat who claims to be Catholic, is expected to bring the bill to the House floor for a vote later this week. If it passes, the legislation would erase basically all restrictions on abortion and prevent states from enacting even modest protections for unborn babies.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other pro-life organizations have been warning Americans about just how radical the legislation is.
In a recent statement, the bishops said the bill would override all “meaningful” limits on late-term abortions and allow viable unborn babies to be aborted for basically any reason up to birth. It would force taxpayers to pay for abortions, too.
LifeNews depends on the support of readers like you to combat the pro-abortion media. Please donate now.
“Any reasonable person with a basic sense of morality and inkling of decency cannot but shudder in horror at such a heinous evil being codified in law,” Cordileone said.
He criticized pro-abortion politicians who profess to be Catholic for supporting the legislation. Pelosi is one, President Joe Biden another, though Cordileone did not mention any politician by name.
“To Catholic politicians in particular, I implore you to listen to the words of Pope Francis who just last weekend, during his flight back to Rome from Slovakia, said: ‘Abortion is more than a problem. Abortion is homicide…. It is a human life, period. And this human life must be respected,’” the archbishop continued.
Pope Francis also compared aborting an unborn baby to hiring a hitman to murder someone.
In the U.S., Catholic bishops are urging people to pray and support the lives of all people, born and unborn. Cordileone joined them in telling Congress that killing unborn babies is not a way to solve any problem.
“A child is not an object to be thrown away, and neither is a mother’s heart,” he said. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The answer to a woman in a crisis pregnancy is not violence but love. This is America. We can do better.”
Democrat leaders, angered by the life-saving Texas heartbeat law, hope to appease their pro-abortion supporters by passing the pro-abortion legislation in Congress. They are portraying the bill as a mere “codification” of Roe v. Wade, rather than admitting that it will force states to allow unborn babies to be aborted without limits up to birth.
The bill may pass the Democrat-controlled House, but it likely will be blocked in the Senate.
If passed, the bill would:
Eliminate all state and federal parental consent laws in relation to abortion
Eliminate all state informed consent laws, including those that allow women to view an ultrasound prior to abortion
Prevent states from passing laws to protect babies at 20 weeks, thereby joining countries like North Korea, China, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, and the Netherlands in not protecting unborn children later in development
Force doctors and nurses opposed to abortion to lose their jobs, and Catholic hospitals could lose public funds unless they perform abortions
Eliminate decades-long limitations on direct taxpayer funding of abortion – including the popular Hyde Amendment, which has saved over 2 million lives since enacted
In short, overturn all federal and state pro-life laws, and go further to make it illegal for elected officials to even introduce pro-life legislation
Polls consistently show strong opposition to the measures in the bill, including taxpayer-funded abortions. A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 65 percent of Americans think most or all abortions should be illegal in the second-trimester and 80 percent think most or all should be illegal in the third trimester.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says Thursday that she feels “blessed” to have five children “as a devout Catholic,” but that “poor women” need taxpayer-funded abortion. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that she was “blessed” to have five children “as a devout Catholic,” but “poor women” need taxpayer-funded abortion.
On Capitol Hill, Pelosi also said falsely that Democrats have not blocked Republicans’ attempts to ban taxpayer-funded abortions, before describing taxpayer-funded abortion as “an issue of health, as an issue of fairness.”
“It’s an issue of health of many women in America, especially those in lower-income situations, and different states, and it is something that has been a priority for many of us a long time,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said.
The House speaker then echoed a popular media description of President Joe Biden’s faith.
“As a devout Catholic and mother of five in six years, I feel that God blessed my husband and me with our beautiful family; five children in six years almost to the day,” she said. “But it’s not up to me to dictate that that’s what other people should [do], and it is an issue of fairness and justice for poor women in our country.”
San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, who is in charge the archdiocese to which Pelosi belongs, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in May that he has had “conversations” with her about abstaining from receiving Holy Communion at Mass because she is a pro-abortion Catholic.
“Because we are dealing with public figures and public examples of cooperation in moral evil, this correction can also take the public form of exclusion from the reception of Holy Communion,” Cordileone wrote in the document called “Before I Formed You in the Womb, I Knew You,” adding:
When other avenues are exhausted, the only recourse a pastor has left is the public medicine of temporary exclusion from the Lord’s Table. This is a bitter medicine, but the gravity of the evil of abortion can sometimes warrant it.
“I have had such conversations with Speaker Pelosi, she knows that I stand by church teaching, and I know she’s respectful enough not to do anything so provocative,” the archbishop said in May.
“In the case of President Biden or any other prominent Catholic, I think what I would do is if I knew that they were coming into the area here and planned to attend Mass, I would try to have those conversations as well ahead of time,” Cordileone added.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
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.
—
June 23, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I wanted to reach out to you because of some of the troubling moral issues coming out of your administration.
Over and over on my blog I have written about your efforts as Vice President and President to attack legally the rights of our unborn babies in the USA. These views of yours are due to your allegiance to the humanist worldview which Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHaye exposed in their books. Your vast support from humanist groups in the 2020 election proves my point. No wonder we have seen criminals let go and an effort by Democrats (namely VP Harris) to defund the police. The Bible recognizes the sinful nature of humans and calls for the authorities to have the power of the sword in Romans 13! However, there have been times when the IRS has been used against freedom of expression such as the past persecution of the Tea Party. The Founding Fathers did NOT think the King was above the law! Unfortunately many lawmakers today don’t care about the law very much it seems which is a result of loss of a Christian Consensus influence in our society!
America’s second-ever Catholic president supports abortion rights, leaving the bishops unsure about how to move forward.By Emma Green
MARCH 14, 2021
Archbishop Joseph Naumann is anxious about President Joe Biden’s soul. The two men are in some ways similar: cradle Catholics born in the 1940s who witnessed John F. Kennedy become America’s first Catholic president. Both found a natural home in the Democratic Party—in Naumann’s midwestern family, asking Catholics if they were Democrats was a redundancy. Naumann became a priest and Biden became a politician, but their paths really diverged over the issue of abortion. Now in his 70s, Naumann watched Biden—America’s second Catholic president—transform into a vocal supporter of abortion rights while competing for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Naumann runs the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and also leads what the Catholic bishops describe as their pro-life activities. He has suggested that Biden should no longer call himself a devout Catholic. At the very least, Naumann says, Biden should stop receiving Communion, a holy sacrament in Catholic life.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently convened a working group to discuss how the bishops should interact with Biden, and how they should deal with the challenge of having a visibly Catholic president who defies Church teachings on a central issue. Naumann was part of that group. Conflicts have already arisen: Naumann recently co-authored a statement expressing moral concerns about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was developed and tested using cell lines from aborted fetal tissue. He also joined a statement from a group of the country’s top bishops celebrating the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, but called it “unconscionable that Congress has passed the bill without critical protections needed to ensure that billions of taxpayer dollars are used for life-affirming health care and not for abortion.”
John MacArthur gave a sermon in June of 2021 entitled “When Government Rewards Evil and Punishes Good” and in that sermon he makes the following points:
INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION OF ROMANS 13
GOVERNMENT CAN FORFEIT ITS AUTHORITY
THE WORLD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOSPEL
ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY IS PROGRESSING TOWARD A GLOBAL KINGDOM UNDER THE POWER OF SATAN
ONE FALSE WORLD RELIGION IS FINAL PLAY BY SATAN
REAL PERSECUTION CAN ONLY BE DONE BY GOVERNMENT
PERSECUTION IN BOOK OF DANIEL
THE LAW IS KING AND NOT THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
THERE IS A PLACE FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DOES GOVERNMENT WIN?
Let me just share a portion of that sermon with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
One New Testament writer says that Romans 13 has “caused more unhappiness and misery . . . than any other . . . verses in the New Testament by the license they have given to tyrants . . . used to justify a host of horrendous abuses of individual human rights.” Hitler’s Holocaust, racism in the apartheid of South Africa, Cantrell says, “Both the Jews in Germany and blacks in South Africa were viewed as a threat to public health and national security. . . . “‘Trust us,’ said government . . . ‘we truly have your best interests at heart. All we want to do is help . . . keep you safe.’”
Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion; elevating the LGBTQ agenda, the bizarre transgender deception. The culture has become anti-truth, we all know that. The truth is the biggest threat to lies. William Pitt, well-known name in English history, said this: “Necessity (i.e., public health, common good) is the plea [of] every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants. “Get people afraid, and they’ll do whatever you want. A fearful society will always comply; panicking people will believe anything” [(Cantrell)].
“During the gruesome and bloody days of the French Revolution, when 40,000 innocent [people] lost their heads,” you would be interested to know who was operating the guillotine: the Committee for Public Safety [(Cantrell)]. One writer says, “Governments now get voted into power by promising to oversee housing, education, medicine, the economy, [the] currency, a minimum income, food, water, land, and the list goes on. The government become a parent, and the citizens are dependents. The government in this role becomes a monstrous juggernaut of bureaucracy, devouring taxes and trying to regulate every detail of life.” And they definitely want to regulate the church and silence its proclamation.
In his book The Glorious Body of Christ, Kuiper wrote, “Our age is one of ecclesiastical passivism. . . . When a church ceases to be militant it also ceases to be a church of Jesus Christ. . . . A truly militant church stands opposed to the world both without its walls and within. . . . Time and again in its history the church has found it necessary to assert its sovereignty over against usurpations by the state.” And Kuiper gave some biblical examples, like when King Saul or King Uzziah usurped the priesthood, stating, “In both cases a representative of the state was severely punished for encroaching [on] the sovereignty of the church.”
“Lord Macaulay of England summed up the Puritan reputation this way” [(Cantrell)]. He said of the Puritans, “He bowed himself in the dust before his Maker; [as] he set his foot on the neck of his king.” Kuiper says, “Ours is an age of state totalitarianism. All over the world statism is [rising] . . . . In consequence, in many lands the church finds itself utterly at the mercy of the state whose mercy often proves cruelty, while in others the notion is rapidly gaining ground that the church exists and operates by the state’s permission.” We do not operate by the state’s permission; we operate by the Lord’s command.
—-
Francis Schaeffer discusses this more in his fine book CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO:
PAGE 437
CHAPTER 3 THE DESTRUCTION OF FAITH AND FREEDOM
And now it is all gone!
In most law schools today almost no one studies William Blackstone unless he or she is taking a course in the history of law. We live in a secularized society and in secularized, sociological law. By sociological law we mean law that has no fixed base but law in which a group of people decides what is sociologically good for society at the given moment; and wha they arbitrarily decide becomes law. Oliver Wendall Holmes (1841-1935) made totally clear that this was his position. Frederick Moore Vinson (1890-1953), former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.” Those who hold this position themselves call it sociological law.
As the new sociological law has moved away from the original base of the Creator giving the “inalienable rights,” etc., it has been natural that this sociological law has then also moved away from the Constitution. William Bentley Ball, in his paper entitled “Religious Liberty: The Constitutional Frontier,” says:
i propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for two reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the “higher law”; second, because, that being so, secularism tends toward decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the “higher” criteria of a constitution.
This moving away from the Constitution is not only by court rulings, for example the First Amendment rulings, which are the very reversal of the original purpose of the First Amendment (see pp. 433, 434), but in other ways as well. Quoting again from the same paper by William Bentley Ball:
Our problem consists also, as perhaps this paper has well enough indicated, of more general constitutional delegation of legislative power and ultra vires. The first is where the legislature hands over its powers to agents through the conferral of regulatory power unaccompanied by strict standards. The second is where the agents make up powers on their own–assume powers not given them by the legislature. Under the first, the government of laws largely disappears and the government of men largely replaces it. Under the second, agents’ personal “home-made law replaces the law of the elected representatives of the people.
Naturally, this shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty. Mr. Ball closes his paper:
Fundamentally, in relation to personal liberty, the Constitution was aimed at restraint of the State. Today, in case after case relating to religious liberty, we encounter the bizarre presumption that it is the other way around; that the State is justified in whatever actions, and that religion bears a great burden of proof to overcome that presumption.
It is our job, as Christian lawyers, to destroy that presumption at every turn.
As lawyers discuss the changes in law in the United States, often they speak of the influence of the laws involved in the reentrance of the southern states into the national government after the Civil War. These indeed must be considered. But they were not the reason for the drastic change in law in our country. This reason was the takeover by the totally other world view which never have given the form and freedom in government we have had in Northern Europe (including the United States). That is the central factor in the change.
PAGE 439
It is parallel to the difference between modern science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and the materialistic science which took over the last century. Materialistic thought would never have produced modern science. Modern science was produced on the Christian base. That is, because an intelligent Creator had created the universe we can in some measure understand the universe and there is, therefore, a reason for observation and experimentation to be pursued.
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
There is exactly the same parallel in law. The materialistic-energy, chance concept of final reality never would have produced the form and freedom in government we have in this country and in other Reformation countries. But now it has arbitrarily and arrogantly supplanted the historic Judeo-Christian Consensus that provided the base for form and freedom in government. The Judeo-Christian consensus gave greater freedoms than the world has ever known, but it also contained the freedoms so that they did not pound society to pieces. The materialistic concept of reality would not have produced the form-freedom balance, and now that it has taken over it cannot maintain the balance. It has destroyed it.
Will Durant and his wife Ariel together wrote The Story of Civilization. The Durants received the 1976 Humanist Pioneer Award. In The Humanist magazine of February 1977, Will Durant summed up the humanist problem with regard to personal ethics and social order: “Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes, and fears.”
Poor Will Durant! It is not just difficult, it is impossible. He should have remembered the quotation he and Ariel Durant gave from the agnostic Renan in their book The Lessons of History. According to the Durants, Renan said in 1866: “If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” And the Durants themselves say in the same context: “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”
PAGE 440
Along with the decline of the Judie-Christian consensus we have come to a new definition and connotation of “pluralism.” Until recently it meant that the Christianity flowing from the Reformation is not now as dominant in the country and in society as it was in the early days of the nation. After about 1848 the great viewpoints not shaped by Reformation Christianity. This, of course, is the situation which exists today. Thus as we stand for religious freedom today, we need to realize that this must include a general religious freedom from the control of the state for all religion. It will not mean just freedom for those who are Christians. It is then up to Christians to show that Christianityis the Truth of total reality in the open marketplace of freedom.
This greater mixture in the United States, however, is now used as an excuse for the new meaning and connotation of pluralism. It now is used to mean that all types of situations are spread out before us, and that it really is up to each individual to grab one or the other on the way past, according to the whim of personal preference. What you take is only a matter of personal choice, with one choice as valid as another. Pluralism has come to mean that everything is acceptable. This new concept of pluralism suddenly is everywhere. There is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference. On a recent SIXTY MINUTES program on television, for example, the questions of euthanasia of the old and the growing of marijuana as California’s largest paying crop were presented this way. One choice is as valid as another. It is just a matter of personal preference. This new definition and connotation of pluralism is presented in many forms, not only in personal ethics, but in society’s ethics and in the choices concerning law,
PAGE 440
Now I have a question. In these shifts that have come in law, where have the Christian lawyers been? I really ask you that. The shift has come gradually, but it has only come to its peak in the last 40 or 50 years. Where have the Christian lawyers been? Surely the Christian lawyers should have been the ones to have sounded the trumpet clear and loud, not just in bits and pieces but looking at the totality of what was occurring. Now, a nonlawyer like myself believes I have a right to feel let down because the Christian lawyers did not blow the trumpets clearly between, let us say, 1940 and 1970.
PAGE 441
When I wrote HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? From 1974 to 1976 I worked out of a knowledge of secular philosophy. I moved from the results in secular philosophy, to the results in liberal theology, to the results in the arts, and then I turned to the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. I read Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, and I must say, I was totally appalled by what I read. It was an exact parallel to what i had already known so well from my years of study in philosophy, theology, and the other disciplines.
In the book and film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? I used the Supreme Court abortion case as the clearest illustration of arbitrary sociiological law. But it was only the clearest illustration. The law is shot through with this kind of ruling. It is similar to choosing Fletcher’s situational ethics and point to it as the clearest illustration of how our society now functions with no fixed ethics. This is only the clearest illustration because in many ways our society functions on unfixed, situational ethics. The abortion case in law is exactly the same. It is only the clearest case. Law in this country has become situational law, using the term Fletcher used for his ethics. That is, a small group of people decide arbitrarily what, from their viewpoint, is for the good of society at that precise moment and they make it law, binding the whole society by their personal arbitrary decisions.
But of course! What would we expect? These things are the natural, inevitable results of the material-energy, humanistic concept of the final basic reality. From the material-energy, chance concept of final reality, final reality is, and must be b it nature, silent as to values, principles, or any basis for law. There is no way to ascertain “the ought:” from “the is.” Not only should we have known what this would have produced, but on the basis of this viewpoint of reality, we should have recognized that there are no other conclusions that this view could produce. It is a natural result of really believing that the basic reality of all things is merely material-energy, shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.
No, we must say that the Christians in the legal profession did not ring the bell, and we are indeed very, very far down the road toward a totally humanistic culture. At this moment we are in a humanistic culture, but we are happily not in a totally humanistic culture. But what we must realize is that the drift has been all in this direction. if it is not turned around we will move very rapidly into a totally humanistic culture.
PAGE 442
The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population.This is what has happened. The abortion law is a perfect example. The Supreme Court abortion ruling invalidated abortion lawsin all fifty states, even though it seems clear that in 1973 the majority of Americans were against abortion. It did not matter. The Supreme Court arbitrarily ruled that abortion was legal, and overnight they overthrew the state laws and forced their will on the majority, even though their ruling was arbitrary both legally and medically. Thus law and the courts became the vehicle for forcing a totally secular concept on the population.
—-
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. I also 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. I wanted to encourage you to investigate the work of Dr. Bernard Nathanson who like you used to be pro-abortion. I also want you to watch the You Tube series WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop. Also it makes me wonder what our the moral climate Of our nation is when we concentrate more on potential mistakes of the police and we let criminals back on the street so fast! Our national was founded of LEX REX and not REX LEX!
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
PS: In this series of letters John MacArthur covers several points. In the first letter, he quotes you saying that the greatest threat to America—he said on one occasion—is systemic racism, which doesn’t exist; he said white supremacy, which doesn’t exist with any power; and then he said global warming, which doesn’t exist either, and if it does, God’s in charge of it.
In reality the greatest threat to this nation is the government, the government. And I want to show you how we are to understand that. Turn to Romans 13
In the 2nd letter, Dr. MacArthur noted When government turns the divine design on its head and protects those who do evil and makes those who do good afraid, it forfeits its divine purpose
In the 3rd letter Dr. MacArthur noted The world is the enemy of the gospel. The world is the enemy of the church. I pointed out that this manifests itself today in the form of HUMANISM.
In the 4th letter Dr. MacArthur points out how much today the devil is having his way in our society and that the Bible predicts that these will get worse!
In the 5th letter Francis Schaeffer points out “The HUMANIST MANIFESTOS not only say that humanism is a religion, but the Supreme Court has declared it to be a religion. The 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins specifically defines secular humanism as a religion equivalent to theistic and other non theistic religions.”
In the 6th letter Dr. MacArthur noted God has given government the sword, the power; and when they prostitute that power and they begin to punish those who do good and protect those who do evil, they wield that power against the people of God.
In the 7th letter Dr. MacArthur asserted, Throughout history, even in the Western world, people lived under what was called the divine right of kings. Kings were believed to have had a divine right. This was absolute monarchy. What broke that was basically the Reformers. The Reformers—a little phrase was “the law is king,” not the man.
In the 8th letter Dr. MacArthur noted that today the United States “Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion.”
Judge gives preliminary OK to $3.5M settlement of IRS case is discussed about the 2013 lawsuit during the Barack Obama administration over treatment of conservative groups who said they were singled out for extra IRS scrutiny on tax-exempt status applications. Then Dr. MacArthur talks about persecution in the Book of Daniel.
“These are groups of law-abiding citizens who should have never had their First Amendment rights infringed upon by the IRS,” Jenny Beth Martin, president of the Tea Party Patriots umbrella group, said Wednesday. “These are groups that want the government to be accountable.”
The government has been used to persecuting people they don’t like for centuries! Let me just share a portion of that sermon by John MacArthur with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984, says, “If [there’s] no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.” And that point is exactly when the early Christians performed their acts of civil disobedience, even when it cost them their lives. “Acts of State which contradict God’s [Laws] are illegitimate and acts of tyranny. Tyranny is ruling without the sanction of God. To resist tyranny is to honour God. . . . The bottom line is that at a certain point there is not only the right, but the duty to disobey the State.”
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 4 | The Basis for Human Dignity
Sunday Night Prime – Dr. Bernard Nathanson – Fr Groeschel, CFR with Fr …
——
Francis Schaeffer pictured above
Larry King had John MacArthur as a guest on his CNN program several times.
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Max Brantley, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Arkansas Times, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (3)
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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (2)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]
On Wednesday, National Right to Life made known its intent to score any House roll-call votes on the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act (H.R. 3755).
“The Women’s Health Protection Act is designed to remove all legal protections for unborn children on both the federal and state levels,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life (NRLC). “The Women’s Health Protection Act is, in effect, the Abortion-Without-Limits-Until Birth Act.”
Tobias continued, “The only ones to benefit from this legislation would be abortionists and abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood. This legislation endangers women and their unborn children, would expand taxpayer funding of abortion, and would no longer require that a woman be given information about the development of her unborn child.”
Among the protective laws that the bill would nullify:
· Requirements to provide women seeking abortion with specific information on their unborn child and on alternatives to abortion; · Laws providing reflection periods (waiting periods); · Laws allowing medical professionals to opt-out of providing abortions; · Laws limiting the performance of abortions to licensed physicians; · Bans on elective abortion after 20 weeks when an unborn child is capable of feeling pain; · Bans on the use of abortion as a method of sex selection. Anti-sex selection laws generally have broad public support in the states in which they are enacted, including support from substantial majorities of women.
The bill would also undo most previously enacted federal limits on abortion, including federal conscience protection laws and most, if not all, limits on government funding of abortion.
“According to pro-abortion groups, if this law is enacted, abortion-on-demand would be allowed in all 50 states, even if Roe v. Wade is weakened or overturned. Elective abortion would become the procedure that must always be facilitated – never delayed, never impeded to the slightest degree,” said Jennifer Popik, J.D., director of Federal Legislation for National Right to Life. “This legislation would invalidate nearly all existing state limitations on abortion.”
I am a proud member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and I attended the convention in Dallas in July and we have officially launched a nationwide push against abortion rights.
The article below notes:
At its first annual policy conference last weekend, group members voted to make a controversial new Texas law, the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” the organization’s first piece of model legislation, meaning that similar bills may soon pop up in state capitols across the country.
Announcing he planned to introduce a copycat bill, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R), the founder and president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, shared a template of legislation lawmakers in other states could fill in the blanks on and reproduce.
At the July 17th session of THE CHRISTIAN LAWMAKERS meeting in Dallas, I really got a lot out of the expert panel moderated by Texas State Senator Bryan Hughes entitled ABOLISHING ABORTION IN AMERICA. Here below is what Wikipedia says about Senator Hughes:
On March 11, 2021, Hughes introduced a fetal heartbeat bill entitled the Texas Heartbeat Bill (SB8) into the Texas Senate and state representative Shelby Slawson of Stephenville, Texas introduced a companion bill (HB1515) into the state house.[22]The bill allows private citizens to sue abortion providers after a fetal heartbeat has been detected.[22] The SB8 version of the bill passed both chambers and was signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott on May 19, 2021.[22] It took effect on September 1, 2021.[22]
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 1 | Abortion of the Human…
—
Tucker: Democrats have abandoned their ‘my body, my choice’ argument
Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert presides over a Senate committee at the state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark. in this March 14, 2018, file photo. Rapert’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers met recently to talk model legislation and pass resolutions. Kelly P. Kissel, Associated Press
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers has officially launched a nationwide push against abortion rights.
At its first annual policy conference last weekend, group members voted to make a controversial new Texas law, the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” the organization’s first piece of model legislation, meaning that similar bills may soon pop up in state capitols across the country.
The model legislation, called the Heartbeat Model Act, was accepted unanimously by the executive committee during a Saturday meeting.
The Texas bill it is based upon, Senate Bill 8, bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The legislation also allows for any state resident to bring a civil suit against a doctor who performs an abortion after a heartbeat is detectable. Under the law, a woman who has an abortion would be liable to civil suits, as would anyone who supported her in the act — from family members to the receptionist who checks her in at a clinic.
Not only is the doctor liable, but anyone found aiding and abetting,” said Texas legislator Bryan Hughes, the bill’s author, during the Saturday meeting, which was led by the organization’s founder and president, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert.Texas state Rep. Bryan Hughes speaks during the opening session of the 2015 legislative session on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, in Austin, Texas. Eric Gay, Associated Press
Speaking to the Deseret News on Monday, Rapert said the provision allowing residents to bring civil suits against anyone involved in an abortion is like “putting a SCUD missile on that heartbeat bill — they can’t stop it.”
Rapert was the author of a similar 2013 bill in Arkansas, portions of which were later struck down by a federal judge. At least a dozen states have implemented a variety of abortion restrictions in recent years, leading numerous observers to say that the landmark 1973 Supreme Court abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, is under threat.
Speaking Saturday to the Christian legislators gathered in Dallas, Hughes reminded the legislators that the Heartbeat Model Act is just a starting point and that the legislation will have to be tailored to work within each state’s laws.A anti-abortion supporter argues with those who attended a press conference and rally held by the Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah outside of the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Aug. 25, 2015. Stacie Scott, Deseret News
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers formed last year with three key goals: to offer conservative, Christian legislators networking opportunities,; to help lawmakers share bills that have been successful in their states so that legislators elsewhere might push through similar legislation; and to support Christians running for local, state or national office.
At the policy conference last week, the organization worked toward meeting these goals in various ways, including by approving the Heartbeat Model Act. The executive committee also passed a resolution supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself from terror attacks” and creating a standing American-Israeli Committee.
Speaking to the executive committee, Rabbi Leonid Feldman, who was born in the Soviet Union and was imprisoned there for his pro-Israel activities, remarked that the Jewish people “remember our friends.”
This conference and this organization will be remembered by the Jewish people,” he said.
The organization also approved a resolution in support of “election integrity.”
The executive committee also approved a second piece of model legislation: the National Motto Display Model Act. Based on bills passed in Arkansas in 2017 and this year in Texas, the legislation requires public schools to display the national motto “In God We Trust” when printed versions of the motto are donated to schools or copies of the national motto are bought with funds from private donors.
“As the Texas House sponsor of the Motto Act, I am proud to see a model put out by the NACL so that legislators from every other state can have a mechanism to ensure our citizens — especially our school-age children — are reminded of our nation’s motto,” said Tom Oliverson, a state representative from Texas and chairman of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ national legislative council.
During the executive committee’s meeting on Saturday, Rapert said Hobby Lobby would make frames available for a reduced price if they’ll be used for national motto displays.
Asked Monday what other pieces of legislation the organization might adopt as model legislation in the future, Rapert told the Deseret News that the National Association of Christian Lawmakers is already weighing some options.
Since religious freedom is central to the organization, it could end up adopting model legislation similar to bills promoted in Texas this year by Oliverson. He supported three measures designed to make it harder for the government to force church closures during public emergencies, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and a bill that would ensure homeowners’ associations can’t infringe on homeowners’ rights to display religious symbols.
WASHINGTON — A deeply divided Supreme Court is allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions to remain in force, for now stripping most women of the right to an abortion in the nation’s second-largest state.
It is the strictest law against abortion rights in the United States since the high court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and part of a broader push by Republicans nationwide to impose new restrictions on abortion. At least 12 other states have enacted bans early in pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect.
The high court’s order declining to halt the Texas law came just before midnight Wednesday. The majority said those bringing the case had not met the high burden required for a stay of the law.
“The Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”— Chief Justice John Roberts
Chief Justice John Roberts (Supreme Court)
“In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit. In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts,” the unsigned order said.
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented along with the court’s three liberal justices. Each of the four dissenting justices wrote separate statements expressing their disagreement with the majority.
Roberts noted that while the majority denied the request for emergency relief “the Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”
The vote in the case underscores the impact of the death of the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last year and then-president Donald Trump’s replacement of her with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Had Ginsburg remained on the court there would have been five votes to halt the Texas law.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called her conservative colleagues’ decision “stunning.” “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” she wrote.
“A majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”— Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Supreme Court)
Texas lawmakers wrote the law to evade federal court review by allowing private citizens to bring civil lawsuits in state court against anyone involved in an abortion, other than the patient. Other abortion laws are enforced by state and local officials, with criminal sanctions possible.
In contrast, Texas’ law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone involved in facilitating abortions. Among other situations, that would include anyone who drives a woman to a clinic to get an abortion. Under the law, anyone who successfully sues another person would be entitled to at least $10,000.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the law “patently unconstitutional,” saying it allows “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.” And Justice Stephen Breyer said a “woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during” the first stage of pregnancy.
After a federal appeals court refused to allow a prompt review of the law before it took effect, the measure’s opponents sought Supreme Court review.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the law “patently unconstitutional,” saying it allows “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.” And Justice Stephen Breyer said a “woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during” the first stage of pregnancy.
After a federal appeals court refused to allow a prompt review of the law before it took effect, the measure’s opponents sought Supreme Court review.
In a statement early Thursday after the high court’s action, Nancy Northup, the head of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents abortion providers challenging the law, vowed to “keep fighting this ban until abortion access is restored in Texas.”
“We are devastated that the Supreme Court has refused to block a law that blatantly violates Roe v. Wade. Right now, people seeking abortion across Texas are panicking — they have no idea where or when they will be able to get an abortion, if ever. Texas politicians have succeeded for the moment in making a mockery of the rule of law, upending abortion care in Texas, and forcing patients to leave the state — if they have the means — to get constitutionally protected healthcare. This should send chills down the spine of everyone in this country who cares about the constitution,” she said.
Texas has long had some of the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions, including a sweeping law passed in 2013. The Supreme Court eventually struck down that law, but not before more than half of the state’s 40-plus clinics closed.
Even before the Texas case arrived at the high court the justices had planned to tackle the issue of abortion rights in a major case after the court begins hearing arguments again in the fall. That case involves the state of Mississippi, which is asking to be allowed to enforce an abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Associated Press writer Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
—-
—
June 23, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I wanted to reach out to you because of some of the troubling moral issues coming out of your administration.
Over and over on my blog I have written about your efforts as Vice President and President to attack legally the rights of our unborn babies in the USA. These views of yours are due to your allegiance to the humanist worldview which Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHaye exposed in their books. Your vast support from humanist groups in the 2020 election proves my point. No wonder we have seen criminals let go and an effort by Democrats (namely VP Harris) to defund the police. The Bible recognizes the sinful nature of humans and calls for the authorities to have the power of the sword in Romans 13! However, there have been times when the IRS has been used against freedom of expression such as the past persecution of the Tea Party. The Founding Fathers did NOT think the King was above the law! Unfortunately many lawmakers today don’t care about the law very much it seems which is a result of loss of a Christian Consensus influence in our society!
America’s second-ever Catholic president supports abortion rights, leaving the bishops unsure about how to move forward.By Emma Green
MARCH 14, 2021
Archbishop Joseph Naumann is anxious about President Joe Biden’s soul. The two men are in some ways similar: cradle Catholics born in the 1940s who witnessed John F. Kennedy become America’s first Catholic president. Both found a natural home in the Democratic Party—in Naumann’s midwestern family, asking Catholics if they were Democrats was a redundancy. Naumann became a priest and Biden became a politician, but their paths really diverged over the issue of abortion. Now in his 70s, Naumann watched Biden—America’s second Catholic president—transform into a vocal supporter of abortion rights while competing for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Naumann runs the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and also leads what the Catholic bishops describe as their pro-life activities. He has suggested that Biden should no longer call himself a devout Catholic. At the very least, Naumann says, Biden should stop receiving Communion, a holy sacrament in Catholic life.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently convened a working group to discuss how the bishops should interact with Biden, and how they should deal with the challenge of having a visibly Catholic president who defies Church teachings on a central issue. Naumann was part of that group. Conflicts have already arisen: Naumann recently co-authored a statement expressing moral concerns about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was developed and tested using cell lines from aborted fetal tissue. He also joined a statement from a group of the country’s top bishops celebrating the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, but called it “unconscionable that Congress has passed the bill without critical protections needed to ensure that billions of taxpayer dollars are used for life-affirming health care and not for abortion.”
John MacArthur gave a sermon in June of 2021 entitled “When Government Rewards Evil and Punishes Good” and in that sermon he makes the following points:
INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION OF ROMANS 13
GOVERNMENT CAN FORFEIT ITS AUTHORITY
THE WORLD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOSPEL
ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY IS PROGRESSING TOWARD A GLOBAL KINGDOM UNDER THE POWER OF SATAN
ONE FALSE WORLD RELIGION IS FINAL PLAY BY SATAN
REAL PERSECUTION CAN ONLY BE DONE BY GOVERNMENT
PERSECUTION IN BOOK OF DANIEL
THE LAW IS KING AND NOT THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
THERE IS A PLACE FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DOES GOVERNMENT WIN?
Let me just share a portion of that sermon with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
One New Testament writer says that Romans 13 has “caused more unhappiness and misery . . . than any other . . . verses in the New Testament by the license they have given to tyrants . . . used to justify a host of horrendous abuses of individual human rights.” Hitler’s Holocaust, racism in the apartheid of South Africa, Cantrell says, “Both the Jews in Germany and blacks in South Africa were viewed as a threat to public health and national security. . . . “‘Trust us,’ said government . . . ‘we truly have your best interests at heart. All we want to do is help . . . keep you safe.’”
Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion; elevating the LGBTQ agenda, the bizarre transgender deception. The culture has become anti-truth, we all know that. The truth is the biggest threat to lies. William Pitt, well-known name in English history, said this: “Necessity (i.e., public health, common good) is the plea [of] every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants. “Get people afraid, and they’ll do whatever you want. A fearful society will always comply; panicking people will believe anything” [(Cantrell)].
“During the gruesome and bloody days of the French Revolution, when 40,000 innocent [people] lost their heads,” you would be interested to know who was operating the guillotine: the Committee for Public Safety [(Cantrell)]. One writer says, “Governments now get voted into power by promising to oversee housing, education, medicine, the economy, [the] currency, a minimum income, food, water, land, and the list goes on. The government become a parent, and the citizens are dependents. The government in this role becomes a monstrous juggernaut of bureaucracy, devouring taxes and trying to regulate every detail of life.” And they definitely want to regulate the church and silence its proclamation.
In his book The Glorious Body of Christ, Kuiper wrote, “Our age is one of ecclesiastical passivism. . . . When a church ceases to be militant it also ceases to be a church of Jesus Christ. . . . A truly militant church stands opposed to the world both without its walls and within. . . . Time and again in its history the church has found it necessary to assert its sovereignty over against usurpations by the state.” And Kuiper gave some biblical examples, like when King Saul or King Uzziah usurped the priesthood, stating, “In both cases a representative of the state was severely punished for encroaching [on] the sovereignty of the church.”
“Lord Macaulay of England summed up the Puritan reputation this way” [(Cantrell)]. He said of the Puritans, “He bowed himself in the dust before his Maker; [as] he set his foot on the neck of his king.” Kuiper says, “Ours is an age of state totalitarianism. All over the world statism is [rising] . . . . In consequence, in many lands the church finds itself utterly at the mercy of the state whose mercy often proves cruelty, while in others the notion is rapidly gaining ground that the church exists and operates by the state’s permission.” We do not operate by the state’s permission; we operate by the Lord’s command.
—-
Francis Schaeffer discusses this more in his fine book CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO:
PAGE 437
CHAPTER 3 THE DESTRUCTION OF FAITH AND FREEDOM
And now it is all gone!
In most law schools today almost no one studies William Blackstone unless he or she is taking a course in the history of law. We live in a secularized society and in secularized, sociological law. By sociological law we mean law that has no fixed base but law in which a group of people decides what is sociologically good for society at the given moment; and wha they arbitrarily decide becomes law. Oliver Wendall Holmes (1841-1935) made totally clear that this was his position. Frederick Moore Vinson (1890-1953), former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.” Those who hold this position themselves call it sociological law.
As the new sociological law has moved away from the original base of the Creator giving the “inalienable rights,” etc., it has been natural that this sociological law has then also moved away from the Constitution. William Bentley Ball, in his paper entitled “Religious Liberty: The Constitutional Frontier,” says:
i propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for two reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the “higher law”; second, because, that being so, secularism tends toward decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the “higher” criteria of a constitution.
This moving away from the Constitution is not only by court rulings, for example the First Amendment rulings, which are the very reversal of the original purpose of the First Amendment (see pp. 433, 434), but in other ways as well. Quoting again from the same paper by William Bentley Ball:
Our problem consists also, as perhaps this paper has well enough indicated, of more general constitutional delegation of legislative power and ultra vires. The first is where the legislature hands over its powers to agents through the conferral of regulatory power unaccompanied by strict standards. The second is where the agents make up powers on their own–assume powers not given them by the legislature. Under the first, the government of laws largely disappears and the government of men largely replaces it. Under the second, agents’ personal “home-made law replaces the law of the elected representatives of the people.
Naturally, this shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty. Mr. Ball closes his paper:
Fundamentally, in relation to personal liberty, the Constitution was aimed at restraint of the State. Today, in case after case relating to religious liberty, we encounter the bizarre presumption that it is the other way around; that the State is justified in whatever actions, and that religion bears a great burden of proof to overcome that presumption.
It is our job, as Christian lawyers, to destroy that presumption at every turn.
As lawyers discuss the changes in law in the United States, often they speak of the influence of the laws involved in the reentrance of the southern states into the national government after the Civil War. These indeed must be considered. But they were not the reason for the drastic change in law in our country. This reason was the takeover by the totally other world view which never have given the form and freedom in government we have had in Northern Europe (including the United States). That is the central factor in the change.
PAGE 439
It is parallel to the difference between modern science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and the materialistic science which took over the last century. Materialistic thought would never have produced modern science. Modern science was produced on the Christian base. That is, because an intelligent Creator had created the universe we can in some measure understand the universe and there is, therefore, a reason for observation and experimentation to be pursued.
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
There is exactly the same parallel in law. The materialistic-energy, chance concept of final reality never would have produced the form and freedom in government we have in this country and in other Reformation countries. But now it has arbitrarily and arrogantly supplanted the historic Judeo-Christian Consensus that provided the base for form and freedom in government. The Judeo-Christian consensus gave greater freedoms than the world has ever known, but it also contained the freedoms so that they did not pound society to pieces. The materialistic concept of reality would not have produced the form-freedom balance, and now that it has taken over it cannot maintain the balance. It has destroyed it.
Will Durant and his wife Ariel together wrote The Story of Civilization. The Durants received the 1976 Humanist Pioneer Award. In The Humanist magazine of February 1977, Will Durant summed up the humanist problem with regard to personal ethics and social order: “Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes, and fears.”
Poor Will Durant! It is not just difficult, it is impossible. He should have remembered the quotation he and Ariel Durant gave from the agnostic Renan in their book The Lessons of History. According to the Durants, Renan said in 1866: “If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” And the Durants themselves say in the same context: “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”
PAGE 440
Along with the decline of the Judie-Christian consensus we have come to a new definition and connotation of “pluralism.” Until recently it meant that the Christianity flowing from the Reformation is not now as dominant in the country and in society as it was in the early days of the nation. After about 1848 the great viewpoints not shaped by Reformation Christianity. This, of course, is the situation which exists today. Thus as we stand for religious freedom today, we need to realize that this must include a general religious freedom from the control of the state for all religion. It will not mean just freedom for those who are Christians. It is then up to Christians to show that Christianityis the Truth of total reality in the open marketplace of freedom.
This greater mixture in the United States, however, is now used as an excuse for the new meaning and connotation of pluralism. It now is used to mean that all types of situations are spread out before us, and that it really is up to each individual to grab one or the other on the way past, according to the whim of personal preference. What you take is only a matter of personal choice, with one choice as valid as another. Pluralism has come to mean that everything is acceptable. This new concept of pluralism suddenly is everywhere. There is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference. On a recent SIXTY MINUTES program on television, for example, the questions of euthanasia of the old and the growing of marijuana as California’s largest paying crop were presented this way. One choice is as valid as another. It is just a matter of personal preference. This new definition and connotation of pluralism is presented in many forms, not only in personal ethics, but in society’s ethics and in the choices concerning law,
PAGE 440
Now I have a question. In these shifts that have come in law, where have the Christian lawyers been? I really ask you that. The shift has come gradually, but it has only come to its peak in the last 40 or 50 years. Where have the Christian lawyers been? Surely the Christian lawyers should have been the ones to have sounded the trumpet clear and loud, not just in bits and pieces but looking at the totality of what was occurring. Now, a nonlawyer like myself believes I have a right to feel let down because the Christian lawyers did not blow the trumpets clearly between, let us say, 1940 and 1970.
PAGE 441
When I wrote HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? From 1974 to 1976 I worked out of a knowledge of secular philosophy. I moved from the results in secular philosophy, to the results in liberal theology, to the results in the arts, and then I turned to the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. I read Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, and I must say, I was totally appalled by what I read. It was an exact parallel to what i had already known so well from my years of study in philosophy, theology, and the other disciplines.
In the book and film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? I used the Supreme Court abortion case as the clearest illustration of arbitrary sociiological law. But it was only the clearest illustration. The law is shot through with this kind of ruling. It is similar to choosing Fletcher’s situational ethics and point to it as the clearest illustration of how our society now functions with no fixed ethics. This is only the clearest illustration because in many ways our society functions on unfixed, situational ethics. The abortion case in law is exactly the same. It is only the clearest case. Law in this country has become situational law, using the term Fletcher used for his ethics. That is, a small group of people decide arbitrarily what, from their viewpoint, is for the good of society at that precise moment and they make it law, binding the whole society by their personal arbitrary decisions.
But of course! What would we expect? These things are the natural, inevitable results of the material-energy, humanistic concept of the final basic reality. From the material-energy, chance concept of final reality, final reality is, and must be b it nature, silent as to values, principles, or any basis for law. There is no way to ascertain “the ought:” from “the is.” Not only should we have known what this would have produced, but on the basis of this viewpoint of reality, we should have recognized that there are no other conclusions that this view could produce. It is a natural result of really believing that the basic reality of all things is merely material-energy, shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.
No, we must say that the Christians in the legal profession did not ring the bell, and we are indeed very, very far down the road toward a totally humanistic culture. At this moment we are in a humanistic culture, but we are happily not in a totally humanistic culture. But what we must realize is that the drift has been all in this direction. if it is not turned around we will move very rapidly into a totally humanistic culture.
PAGE 442
The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population.This is what has happened. The abortion law is a perfect example. The Supreme Court abortion ruling invalidated abortion lawsin all fifty states, even though it seems clear that in 1973 the majority of Americans were against abortion. It did not matter. The Supreme Court arbitrarily ruled that abortion was legal, and overnight they overthrew the state laws and forced their will on the majority, even though their ruling was arbitrary both legally and medically. Thus law and the courts became the vehicle for forcing a totally secular concept on the population.
—-
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. I also 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. I wanted to encourage you to investigate the work of Dr. Bernard Nathanson who like you used to be pro-abortion. I also want you to watch the You Tube series WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop. Also it makes me wonder what our the moral climate Of our nation is when we concentrate more on potential mistakes of the police and we let criminals back on the street so fast! Our national was founded of LEX REX and not REX LEX!
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
PS: In this series of letters John MacArthur covers several points. In the first letter, he quotes you saying that the greatest threat to America—he said on one occasion—is systemic racism, which doesn’t exist; he said white supremacy, which doesn’t exist with any power; and then he said global warming, which doesn’t exist either, and if it does, God’s in charge of it.
In reality the greatest threat to this nation is the government, the government. And I want to show you how we are to understand that. Turn to Romans 13
In the 2nd letter, Dr. MacArthur noted When government turns the divine design on its head and protects those who do evil and makes those who do good afraid, it forfeits its divine purpose
In the 3rd letter Dr. MacArthur noted The world is the enemy of the gospel. The world is the enemy of the church. I pointed out that this manifests itself today in the form of HUMANISM.
In the 4th letter Dr. MacArthur points out how much today the devil is having his way in our society and that the Bible predicts that these will get worse!
In the 5th letter Francis Schaeffer points out “The HUMANIST MANIFESTOS not only say that humanism is a religion, but the Supreme Court has declared it to be a religion. The 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins specifically defines secular humanism as a religion equivalent to theistic and other non theistic religions.”
In the 6th letter Dr. MacArthur noted God has given government the sword, the power; and when they prostitute that power and they begin to punish those who do good and protect those who do evil, they wield that power against the people of God.
In the 7th letter Dr. MacArthur asserted, Throughout history, even in the Western world, people lived under what was called the divine right of kings. Kings were believed to have had a divine right. This was absolute monarchy. What broke that was basically the Reformers. The Reformers—a little phrase was “the law is king,” not the man.
In the 8th letter Dr. MacArthur noted that today the United States “Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion.”
Judge gives preliminary OK to $3.5M settlement of IRS case is discussed about the 2013 lawsuit during the Barack Obama administration over treatment of conservative groups who said they were singled out for extra IRS scrutiny on tax-exempt status applications. Then Dr. MacArthur talks about persecution in the Book of Daniel.
“These are groups of law-abiding citizens who should have never had their First Amendment rights infringed upon by the IRS,” Jenny Beth Martin, president of the Tea Party Patriots umbrella group, said Wednesday. “These are groups that want the government to be accountable.”
The government has been used to persecuting people they don’t like for centuries! Let me just share a portion of that sermon by John MacArthur with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984, says, “If [there’s] no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.” And that point is exactly when the early Christians performed their acts of civil disobedience, even when it cost them their lives. “Acts of State which contradict God’s [Laws] are illegitimate and acts of tyranny. Tyranny is ruling without the sanction of God. To resist tyranny is to honour God. . . . The bottom line is that at a certain point there is not only the right, but the duty to disobey the State.”
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 4 | The Basis for Human Dignity
Sunday Night Prime – Dr. Bernard Nathanson – Fr Groeschel, CFR with Fr …
——
Francis Schaeffer pictured above
Larry King had John MacArthur as a guest on his CNN program several times.
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Max Brantley, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Arkansas Times, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (3)
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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (2)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]
I was saddened to learn of the passing of Dr. John Raymond Smythies on January 28, 2019 in La Jolla, CA, and I wanted to spend time on several posts concentrating on him.
Well into his 80’s, John decided to join the world-famous neuroscience team lead by Dr. Ramachandran, in California and remained active until a few months before his demise in January this year. A tribute by Prof. Ashoka, exclusively in Different Truths.
I have always harboured the belief that psychiatry over the years has lost a large part of its sheen because of its reluctance to encompass the entire scope of the discipline. Many if not most of its dimensions are completely ignored in the training process, which suffocates the specialty to a large extent.
One of the foremost pioneers to challenge this status quo was John Raymond Smythies. As he had deviated from the mainstream, he is not as widely known as his contribution merits.
John was born in Nainital where his father was a philatelist in 1922. His more than fluent Hindi had its provenance to his various interactions with his playmates and father’s colleagues with whom he retained lifelong contact. Following his relocation to the United Kingdom, he completed his medical training in Cambridge and then worked with the Royal Navy in Bermuda, which is where he developed an interest in psychiatry.
But he was very clear that he did not wish to step into his discipline unless he had what he regarded as ‘proper grounding.’ He therefore decided to train as a neuroscientist under the Nobel Laureate, Sir John Eccles. While still a neuroscience researcher, he appreciated the philosophico-anthropological contribution to the understanding of mental health and developed a deep friendship with Aldous Huxley. He then moved to the United States where he formally trained and obtained a masters’ in philosophy and submitted his dissertation to the University of Cambridge, which earned him an M.D.
Only then did he consider himself ready to undergo psychiatric training at the Maudsley Hospital under Sir Aubrey Lewis. He then felt he needed some grounding in biochemistry and worked with John Osmond for two years before taking up a clinical assignment. He spent 12 years in Edinburgh at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital (where I trained).
His orientation quite frequently put him at odds with his colleagues, but he persisted, nevertheless. He noticed that mescaline could produce schizophrenia like symptoms and published a hypothesis that came to be the first biological explanation for schizophrenia and was popularised as ‘transmethylation hypothesis’. This created quite a lot of excitement in those days. But he firmly believed that in order to fully comprehend schizophrenia, one needed a philosophical orientation along with a neurobiological.
He moved to Alabama to take up an endowed chair in psychiatry and remained there for over 20 years continuing with his neurobiological-philosophical research in psychiatric disorders. He was an absolute delight to listen to and a regular at both neuroscience and philosophical conclaves. Well into his 80’s, he decided to join the world-famous neuroscience team lead by Dr. Ramachandran, in California, and remained active until a few months before his demise in January this year.
Somehow the sad news took its time to reach me. There are many, me included, who looked to him for inspiration and were always rewarded with effusive hospitality over meals at his place, where he lived with his Italian wife.
I mourn the passing away of a pioneer. We shall not see the likes of him again!
Ashoka Jahnavi Prasad is a physician /psychiatrist holding doctorates in pharmacology, history and philosophy plus a higher doctorate. He is also a qualified barrister and geneticist. He is a regular columnist in several newspapers, has published over 100 books and has been described by the Cambridge News as the ‘most educationally qualified in the world’.
—
Email
To John Smythies, Concerning my personal interaction with Clinton, election of Trump and a movie recommendation, From Everette Hatcher of Little Rock on 11-28-16
I am currently the JUSTICE OF THE PEACE for District 2 of Saline County which is the 6th largest county in Arkansas and I just finished going through my 3rd election. I won my first election by 4 1/2% and my last two elections by double digit margins in probably the most Democratic leaning district in the whole county even though I am a Republican.
At the age of 21 in January of 1983 I moved from Memphis to Little Rock and I had never seen a politician in person. I suppose it was because Memphis is a large city and I lived in a suburb outside it. However, the first week I was in Little Rock I got to meet Governor Bill Clinton and I ran into both of our U.S. Senators and our Congressman in downtown Little Rock when I was dropping off a deposit at Worthen Bank and attending a meeting in a small meeting room at the State House Convention Center. In fact, I ran into them again and again often at restaurants, movie theaters and ballgames around town. After a while I didn’t really take notice anymore since it was so common. My uncle explained to me that Little Rock was a capitol city and since we worked downtown we could often run into politicians.
Our plant location was on 300 Industrial Road which is right next to the Arkansas River within a few hundred feet from where the Clinton Library stands today. In 1985 we moved to another part of Little Rock.
A quick couple of stories about my personal interaction with Bill Clinton. One of the first times I spoke with him was at the 1983 ARKANSAS INDEPENDENT GROCERY WHOLESALER MEETING and he came into our meeting tardy because he said there was a big emergency at the Capitol and that was Hillary wanted a private meeting with him. The amazing thing that day was that I noticed that he personally greeted the dozen or so elderly men that owned these grocery wholesale businesses and called them all by their first names. Since then the Krogers and large supermarkets of the world have completely run these wholesalers out of business in Arkansas.
A year later I was at a relative’s wedding and I was seated on the aisle and when the father of the bride began to escort her down the aisle I noticed that Bill Clinton was in the seat directly behind me. Being a politician he couldn’t resist shaking the father’s hand and Hillary promptly elbowed Bill and his face turned red. I am sure she has had to elbow him a few times since 1984!!!
I am an evangelical conservative so even though I was very upset that Donald Trump was the Republican Nominee, I did hold my noise and vote for him over Hillary Clinton. However, I DIDN’T HAVE A GOOD EXPLANATION WHY CLINTON LOST UNTIL I READ THESE WORDS A FEW DAYS AGO in the DAILY MAIL:
In the waning days of the presidential campaign, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a knock-down, drag-out fight about her effort to blame FBI Director James Comey for her slump in the polls and looming danger of defeat….[Bill Clinton] got so angry that he threw his phone off the roof of his penthouse apartment and toward the Arkansas River.’
Bill has a luxurious penthouse apartment with an outdoor garden at the Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock.
During the campaign, Bill Clinton felt that he was ignored by Hillary’s top advisers when he urged them to make the economy the centerpiece of her campaign.
He repeatedly urged them to connect with the people who had been left behind by the revolutions in technology and globalization.
_________
Are you buying Bill’s explanation?
I just saw the movie GREATER about the life of Brandon Burlsworth and there was a secularist farmer played by Nick Searcy that reminded me of you and when the DVD is released on 12-20-16 I would like to send you a free one.
Yesterday while in my attic I ran across a cassette tape labeled “April 1999” and it has the recording of my 12 year old son calling into a local radio show where he got to talk to Brandon Burlsworth who had just been drafted by the Indianapolis Colts to play in the NFL. Just a few days later Burlsworth was on his way to his Harrison, Ark., home from Fayetteville, where he received an SEC West title ring along with the rest of the 1998 Razorbacks on April 28, 1999. Every Wednesday, he returned to take his mom, Barbara, to church. The drive was supposed to take about 90 minutes.
He never made it.
The 22-year-old Burlsworth, who had been drafted by the Colts 11 days earlier after earning first-team All-America honors as a fifth-year senior, was involved in a head-on crash with a tractor-trailer about 15 miles outside Harrison and was killed. He was in the prime of his life and football career, and then he was gone.
There’s a great deal of Christian content in this film. It can perhaps best be summarized by saying that Brandon’s unwavering faith deeply informs everything he does, while his brother’s faltering faith after Brandon’s death is something he grapples with mightily.
Brandon has deep trust in God. At every step along his journey, when naysayers rise up to tell him that he’s being unrealistic, Brandon keeps moving forward in faith. Marty is more pragmatic, asking his brother things like, “You think God would give you D I [Division 1] dreams and a D III (Division III) body?” To Marty, the answer to that rhetorical, spiritual question is self-evident. Brandon, however, soldiers on, refusing to give up. “Have faith, Marty,” he says elsewhere. “This is my road.”
For his part, Marty struggles to cling to his faith in the wake of his brother’s death. That internal battle is depicted in a dramatic way through ongoing dialogue with a doubter named the Farmer. Marty’s trying to summon the courage to go into Brandon’s memorial service at Harrison High School. And the Farmer (played by Nick Searcy), depicted very nearly as a Satan-like tempter, repeatedly delivers soliloquies about the utter foolishness of faith. In one scene, the man (who’s whittling a portrait of Marty into a block of wood, almost as if he’s creating a voodoo doll) says, “Brandon did have faith. He believed if he worked hard and did everything he was supposed to do, God would make everything turn out for the best. Did everything turn out for the best, Marty?”
Elsewhere, the Farmer taunts, “There is no loving God, Marty. That’s ridiculous. There’s just a howling void. And a real man, an honest man, doesn’t get down on his knees to pray to it for his mercy. He stands up to it, and he looks it right in his face and he howls right back.”
But Marty also talks with his godly mother about how to process the randomness of Brandon’s death. She tells him that it’s only random when looked at from an earthly perspective. “If you assume this is all there is, you’d have a point, Marty. But that’s not true. This life is a drop in the ocean. One tick of eternity’s clock, and we’ll all be together again, Marty. And every trouble we had here will recede away like a dream.”
__
It has been a pleasure to send you these letters in the past and I hope you take me up on this offer to see this inspirational true story about Brandon Burlsworth who was truly one of the greatest rags to richest stories in sports history. Also I would encourage you to google FRANCIS SCHAEFFER THE PROBLEM OF EVIL.
and you will hear what far smarter people than I have to say on this matter. I agree with them.
Harry Kroto
Nick Gathergood, David-Birkett, 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 second video below in the 95th clip in this series are his words but today I just wanted to pause and look at this life.
Quote from Dr. John Raymond Smythies
I would like to describe how mescaline works. These hallucination drugs have a very specific action in two ways. Number 1 they produce fantastic visual hallucinations. These are described by the people who have them (most of them are down to earth scientists such as MacDonald Critchley) as being more beautiful than anything they have ever seen in normal art. Some of these people have the sort of experience as union with God, mystical experiences and so on.
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)
The John Lennon and the Beatles really were on a long search for meaning and fulfillment in their lives just like King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon looked into learning (1:12-18, 2:12-17), laughter, ladies, luxuries, and liquor (2:1-2, 8, 10, 11), and labor (2:4-6, 18-20). He fount that without God in the picture all […]
______________ George Harrison Swears & Insults Paul and Yoko Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds- The Beatles The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking […]
The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA Uploaded on Nov 29, 2010 The Beatles in a press conference after their Return from the USA. The Beatles: I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis […]
__________________ Beatles 1966 Last interview I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about them and their impact on the culture of the 1960’s. In this […]
_______________ The Beatles documentary || A Long and Winding Road || Episode 5 (This video discusses Stg. Pepper’s creation I have dedicated several posts to this series on the Beatles and I don’t know when this series will end because Francis Schaeffer spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles and talking and writing about […]
_______________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: _____________________ I have included the 27 minute episode THE AGE OF NONREASON by Francis Schaeffer. In that video Schaeffer noted, ” Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band…for a time it became the rallying cry for young people throughout the world. It expressed the essence of their lives, thoughts and their feelings.” How Should […]
Crimes and Misdemeanors: A Discussion: Part 1 ___________________________________ Today I will answer the simple question: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE AN OPTIMISTIC SECULAR HUMANIST THAT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD OR AN AFTERLIFE? This question has been around for a long time and you can go back to the 19th century and read this same […]
____________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: __________ Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 […]
Love and Death [Woody Allen] – What if there is no God? [PL] ___________ _______________ How Should We then Live Episode 7 small (Age of Nonreason) #02 How Should We Then Live? (Promo Clip) Dr. Francis Schaeffer 10 Worldview and Truth Two Minute Warning: How Then Should We Live?: Francis Schaeffer at 100 Francis Schaeffer […]
___________________________________ Francis Schaeffer pictured below: ____________________________ Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?) Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro) Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1) Dr. Francis Schaeffer […]
National | Micaiah Bilger | Sep 20, 2021 | 2:52PM | Washington, DC
The U.S. Supreme Court just set a date for a major abortion case that could overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to protect unborn babies from abortion again.
The hearing on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health is scheduled for Dec. 1 at the Supreme Court, The Hill reports.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said she is looking forward to the opportunity to convince the court that there is no constitutional right to abortion and Roe v. Wade should be overturned.
“The court has acknowledged that states have the authority to promote legitimate interests, including protecting women’s health and defending life; but its abortion precedents have denied the people and their elected leaders the ability to do so,” Fitch said in a statement. “… while science, medicine, technology and culture have all rapidly progressed since 1973, duly elected laws on abortion are unable to keep up.”
In Roe and later Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court prohibited states from banning abortions before an unborn baby is viable. As a result, the U.S. is one of only seven countries in the world that allows elective abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Keep up with the latest pro-life news and information on Twitter. Follow @LifeNewsHQ
In legal filings, Fitch urged the high court to end this erroneous precedent allow states to protect unborn babies from abortion again.
The case centers around a 2018 Mississippi law that prohibits abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy and the question of “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortion are unconstitutional.”
The lone Mississippi abortion facility, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and the Center for Reproductive Rights are suing to block the law.
On Monday, the high court announced that the Dec. 1 hearing will be held in-person. The session will be closed to the public, but a live audio feed will be available for anyone who wants to listen.
The Supreme Court typically releases its rulings on major cases in late June.
Pro-life leaders celebrated the opportunity to restore protections to unborn babies after nearly 50 years of legalized abortion on demand.
“Science reveals the undeniable humanity of the unborn child. By 15 weeks, an unborn baby’s heart has beat nearly 16 million times. She already shows a preference for her right or left hand, responds to taste, and can feel pain. They and their mothers deserve protection in the law,” Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser said.
She pointed to polls that show just how extreme Roe v. Wade is compared to most Americans’ views on abortion. A new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 65 percent of Americans think most or all abortions should be illegal in the second-trimester and 80 percent think most or all should be illegal in the third trimester.
“We’re proud to stand with Attorney General Lynn Fitch, Solicitor General Scott Stewart, and the people of Mississippi as they champion life at the Supreme Court. It is time to follow the science and modernize our laws,” Dannenfelser said.
Pro-life advocates have strong hopes that the Supreme Court will scale back or overturn Roe when they hear the case, many pointing to the conservative majority’s recent decision not to block a Texas pro-life law as a promising sign.
As The Hill noted:
Experts who spoke to The Hill after the court’s Texas ruling said they expect the justices to uphold the Mississippi restrictions and reverse key elements of Roe and related rulings in the upcoming term, though there was little consensus over just how far the Supreme Court might go in paring back the federal protections.
Since the Supreme Court ruled on Roe in 1973, almost 63 million unborn babies and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mothers have been killed in legal abortions.
I am a proud member of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and I attended the convention in Dallas in July and we have officially launched a nationwide push against abortion rights.
The article below notes:
At its first annual policy conference last weekend, group members voted to make a controversial new Texas law, the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” the organization’s first piece of model legislation, meaning that similar bills may soon pop up in state capitols across the country.
Announcing he planned to introduce a copycat bill, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert (R), the founder and president of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers, shared a template of legislation lawmakers in other states could fill in the blanks on and reproduce.
At the July 17th session of THE CHRISTIAN LAWMAKERS meeting in Dallas, I really got a lot out of the expert panel moderated by Texas State Senator Bryan Hughes entitled ABOLISHING ABORTION IN AMERICA. Here below is what Wikipedia says about Senator Hughes:
On March 11, 2021, Hughes introduced a fetal heartbeat bill entitled the Texas Heartbeat Bill (SB8) into the Texas Senate and state representative Shelby Slawson of Stephenville, Texas introduced a companion bill (HB1515) into the state house.[22]The bill allows private citizens to sue abortion providers after a fetal heartbeat has been detected.[22] The SB8 version of the bill passed both chambers and was signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott on May 19, 2021.[22] It took effect on September 1, 2021.[22]
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 1 | Abortion of the Human…
—
Tucker: Democrats have abandoned their ‘my body, my choice’ argument
Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert presides over a Senate committee at the state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark. in this March 14, 2018, file photo. Rapert’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers met recently to talk model legislation and pass resolutions. Kelly P. Kissel, Associated Press
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers has officially launched a nationwide push against abortion rights.
At its first annual policy conference last weekend, group members voted to make a controversial new Texas law, the “Texas Heartbeat Bill,” the organization’s first piece of model legislation, meaning that similar bills may soon pop up in state capitols across the country.
The model legislation, called the Heartbeat Model Act, was accepted unanimously by the executive committee during a Saturday meeting.
The Texas bill it is based upon, Senate Bill 8, bans abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can occur as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. The legislation also allows for any state resident to bring a civil suit against a doctor who performs an abortion after a heartbeat is detectable. Under the law, a woman who has an abortion would be liable to civil suits, as would anyone who supported her in the act — from family members to the receptionist who checks her in at a clinic.
Not only is the doctor liable, but anyone found aiding and abetting,” said Texas legislator Bryan Hughes, the bill’s author, during the Saturday meeting, which was led by the organization’s founder and president, Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert.Texas state Rep. Bryan Hughes speaks during the opening session of the 2015 legislative session on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, in Austin, Texas. Eric Gay, Associated Press
Speaking to the Deseret News on Monday, Rapert said the provision allowing residents to bring civil suits against anyone involved in an abortion is like “putting a SCUD missile on that heartbeat bill — they can’t stop it.”
Rapert was the author of a similar 2013 bill in Arkansas, portions of which were later struck down by a federal judge. At least a dozen states have implemented a variety of abortion restrictions in recent years, leading numerous observers to say that the landmark 1973 Supreme Court abortion ruling, Roe v. Wade, is under threat.
Speaking Saturday to the Christian legislators gathered in Dallas, Hughes reminded the legislators that the Heartbeat Model Act is just a starting point and that the legislation will have to be tailored to work within each state’s laws.A anti-abortion supporter argues with those who attended a press conference and rally held by the Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah outside of the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Aug. 25, 2015. Stacie Scott, Deseret News
The National Association of Christian Lawmakers formed last year with three key goals: to offer conservative, Christian legislators networking opportunities,; to help lawmakers share bills that have been successful in their states so that legislators elsewhere might push through similar legislation; and to support Christians running for local, state or national office.
At the policy conference last week, the organization worked toward meeting these goals in various ways, including by approving the Heartbeat Model Act. The executive committee also passed a resolution supporting Israel’s “right to defend itself from terror attacks” and creating a standing American-Israeli Committee.
Speaking to the executive committee, Rabbi Leonid Feldman, who was born in the Soviet Union and was imprisoned there for his pro-Israel activities, remarked that the Jewish people “remember our friends.”
This conference and this organization will be remembered by the Jewish people,” he said.
The organization also approved a resolution in support of “election integrity.”
The executive committee also approved a second piece of model legislation: the National Motto Display Model Act. Based on bills passed in Arkansas in 2017 and this year in Texas, the legislation requires public schools to display the national motto “In God We Trust” when printed versions of the motto are donated to schools or copies of the national motto are bought with funds from private donors.
“As the Texas House sponsor of the Motto Act, I am proud to see a model put out by the NACL so that legislators from every other state can have a mechanism to ensure our citizens — especially our school-age children — are reminded of our nation’s motto,” said Tom Oliverson, a state representative from Texas and chairman of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers’ national legislative council.
During the executive committee’s meeting on Saturday, Rapert said Hobby Lobby would make frames available for a reduced price if they’ll be used for national motto displays.
Asked Monday what other pieces of legislation the organization might adopt as model legislation in the future, Rapert told the Deseret News that the National Association of Christian Lawmakers is already weighing some options.
Since religious freedom is central to the organization, it could end up adopting model legislation similar to bills promoted in Texas this year by Oliverson. He supported three measures designed to make it harder for the government to force church closures during public emergencies, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and a bill that would ensure homeowners’ associations can’t infringe on homeowners’ rights to display religious symbols.
WASHINGTON — A deeply divided Supreme Court is allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions to remain in force, for now stripping most women of the right to an abortion in the nation’s second-largest state.
It is the strictest law against abortion rights in the United States since the high court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and part of a broader push by Republicans nationwide to impose new restrictions on abortion. At least 12 other states have enacted bans early in pregnancy, but all have been blocked from going into effect.
The high court’s order declining to halt the Texas law came just before midnight Wednesday. The majority said those bringing the case had not met the high burden required for a stay of the law.
“The Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”— Chief Justice John Roberts
Chief Justice John Roberts (Supreme Court)
“In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit. In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts,” the unsigned order said.
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented along with the court’s three liberal justices. Each of the four dissenting justices wrote separate statements expressing their disagreement with the majority.
Roberts noted that while the majority denied the request for emergency relief “the Court’s order is emphatic in making clear that it cannot be understood as sustaining the constitutionality of the law at issue.”
The vote in the case underscores the impact of the death of the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last year and then-president Donald Trump’s replacement of her with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Had Ginsburg remained on the court there would have been five votes to halt the Texas law.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called her conservative colleagues’ decision “stunning.” “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” she wrote.
“A majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”— Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Justice Sonia Sotomayor (Supreme Court)
Texas lawmakers wrote the law to evade federal court review by allowing private citizens to bring civil lawsuits in state court against anyone involved in an abortion, other than the patient. Other abortion laws are enforced by state and local officials, with criminal sanctions possible.
In contrast, Texas’ law allows private citizens to sue abortion providers and anyone involved in facilitating abortions. Among other situations, that would include anyone who drives a woman to a clinic to get an abortion. Under the law, anyone who successfully sues another person would be entitled to at least $10,000.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the law “patently unconstitutional,” saying it allows “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.” And Justice Stephen Breyer said a “woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during” the first stage of pregnancy.
After a federal appeals court refused to allow a prompt review of the law before it took effect, the measure’s opponents sought Supreme Court review.
In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the law “patently unconstitutional,” saying it allows “private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.” And Justice Stephen Breyer said a “woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during” the first stage of pregnancy.
After a federal appeals court refused to allow a prompt review of the law before it took effect, the measure’s opponents sought Supreme Court review.
In a statement early Thursday after the high court’s action, Nancy Northup, the head of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents abortion providers challenging the law, vowed to “keep fighting this ban until abortion access is restored in Texas.”
“We are devastated that the Supreme Court has refused to block a law that blatantly violates Roe v. Wade. Right now, people seeking abortion across Texas are panicking — they have no idea where or when they will be able to get an abortion, if ever. Texas politicians have succeeded for the moment in making a mockery of the rule of law, upending abortion care in Texas, and forcing patients to leave the state — if they have the means — to get constitutionally protected healthcare. This should send chills down the spine of everyone in this country who cares about the constitution,” she said.
Texas has long had some of the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions, including a sweeping law passed in 2013. The Supreme Court eventually struck down that law, but not before more than half of the state’s 40-plus clinics closed.
Even before the Texas case arrived at the high court the justices had planned to tackle the issue of abortion rights in a major case after the court begins hearing arguments again in the fall. That case involves the state of Mississippi, which is asking to be allowed to enforce an abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Associated Press writer Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
—-
—
June 23, 2021
President Biden c/o The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President,
I wanted to reach out to you because of some of the troubling moral issues coming out of your administration.
Over and over on my blog I have written about your efforts as Vice President and President to attack legally the rights of our unborn babies in the USA. These views of yours are due to your allegiance to the humanist worldview which Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHaye exposed in their books. Your vast support from humanist groups in the 2020 election proves my point. No wonder we have seen criminals let go and an effort by Democrats (namely VP Harris) to defund the police. The Bible recognizes the sinful nature of humans and calls for the authorities to have the power of the sword in Romans 13! However, there have been times when the IRS has been used against freedom of expression such as the past persecution of the Tea Party. The Founding Fathers did NOT think the King was above the law! Unfortunately many lawmakers today don’t care about the law very much it seems which is a result of loss of a Christian Consensus influence in our society!
America’s second-ever Catholic president supports abortion rights, leaving the bishops unsure about how to move forward.By Emma Green
MARCH 14, 2021
Archbishop Joseph Naumann is anxious about President Joe Biden’s soul. The two men are in some ways similar: cradle Catholics born in the 1940s who witnessed John F. Kennedy become America’s first Catholic president. Both found a natural home in the Democratic Party—in Naumann’s midwestern family, asking Catholics if they were Democrats was a redundancy. Naumann became a priest and Biden became a politician, but their paths really diverged over the issue of abortion. Now in his 70s, Naumann watched Biden—America’s second Catholic president—transform into a vocal supporter of abortion rights while competing for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. Naumann runs the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and also leads what the Catholic bishops describe as their pro-life activities. He has suggested that Biden should no longer call himself a devout Catholic. At the very least, Naumann says, Biden should stop receiving Communion, a holy sacrament in Catholic life.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently convened a working group to discuss how the bishops should interact with Biden, and how they should deal with the challenge of having a visibly Catholic president who defies Church teachings on a central issue. Naumann was part of that group. Conflicts have already arisen: Naumann recently co-authored a statement expressing moral concerns about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was developed and tested using cell lines from aborted fetal tissue. He also joined a statement from a group of the country’s top bishops celebrating the passage of the American Rescue Plan Act, but called it “unconscionable that Congress has passed the bill without critical protections needed to ensure that billions of taxpayer dollars are used for life-affirming health care and not for abortion.”
John MacArthur gave a sermon in June of 2021 entitled “When Government Rewards Evil and Punishes Good” and in that sermon he makes the following points:
INTRODUCTION AND DISCUSSION OF ROMANS 13
GOVERNMENT CAN FORFEIT ITS AUTHORITY
THE WORLD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GOSPEL
ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY IS PROGRESSING TOWARD A GLOBAL KINGDOM UNDER THE POWER OF SATAN
ONE FALSE WORLD RELIGION IS FINAL PLAY BY SATAN
REAL PERSECUTION CAN ONLY BE DONE BY GOVERNMENT
PERSECUTION IN BOOK OF DANIEL
THE LAW IS KING AND NOT THE GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
THERE IS A PLACE FOR CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DOES GOVERNMENT WIN?
Let me just share a portion of that sermon with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
GOVERNMENT HAS BECOME PURVEYOR OF WICKEDNESS
One New Testament writer says that Romans 13 has “caused more unhappiness and misery . . . than any other . . . verses in the New Testament by the license they have given to tyrants . . . used to justify a host of horrendous abuses of individual human rights.” Hitler’s Holocaust, racism in the apartheid of South Africa, Cantrell says, “Both the Jews in Germany and blacks in South Africa were viewed as a threat to public health and national security. . . . “‘Trust us,’ said government . . . ‘we truly have your best interests at heart. All we want to do is help . . . keep you safe.’”
Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion; elevating the LGBTQ agenda, the bizarre transgender deception. The culture has become anti-truth, we all know that. The truth is the biggest threat to lies. William Pitt, well-known name in English history, said this: “Necessity (i.e., public health, common good) is the plea [of] every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants. “Get people afraid, and they’ll do whatever you want. A fearful society will always comply; panicking people will believe anything” [(Cantrell)].
“During the gruesome and bloody days of the French Revolution, when 40,000 innocent [people] lost their heads,” you would be interested to know who was operating the guillotine: the Committee for Public Safety [(Cantrell)]. One writer says, “Governments now get voted into power by promising to oversee housing, education, medicine, the economy, [the] currency, a minimum income, food, water, land, and the list goes on. The government become a parent, and the citizens are dependents. The government in this role becomes a monstrous juggernaut of bureaucracy, devouring taxes and trying to regulate every detail of life.” And they definitely want to regulate the church and silence its proclamation.
In his book The Glorious Body of Christ, Kuiper wrote, “Our age is one of ecclesiastical passivism. . . . When a church ceases to be militant it also ceases to be a church of Jesus Christ. . . . A truly militant church stands opposed to the world both without its walls and within. . . . Time and again in its history the church has found it necessary to assert its sovereignty over against usurpations by the state.” And Kuiper gave some biblical examples, like when King Saul or King Uzziah usurped the priesthood, stating, “In both cases a representative of the state was severely punished for encroaching [on] the sovereignty of the church.”
“Lord Macaulay of England summed up the Puritan reputation this way” [(Cantrell)]. He said of the Puritans, “He bowed himself in the dust before his Maker; [as] he set his foot on the neck of his king.” Kuiper says, “Ours is an age of state totalitarianism. All over the world statism is [rising] . . . . In consequence, in many lands the church finds itself utterly at the mercy of the state whose mercy often proves cruelty, while in others the notion is rapidly gaining ground that the church exists and operates by the state’s permission.” We do not operate by the state’s permission; we operate by the Lord’s command.
—-
Francis Schaeffer discusses this more in his fine book CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO:
PAGE 437
CHAPTER 3 THE DESTRUCTION OF FAITH AND FREEDOM
And now it is all gone!
In most law schools today almost no one studies William Blackstone unless he or she is taking a course in the history of law. We live in a secularized society and in secularized, sociological law. By sociological law we mean law that has no fixed base but law in which a group of people decides what is sociologically good for society at the given moment; and wha they arbitrarily decide becomes law. Oliver Wendall Holmes (1841-1935) made totally clear that this was his position. Frederick Moore Vinson (1890-1953), former Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, said, “Nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes.” Those who hold this position themselves call it sociological law.
As the new sociological law has moved away from the original base of the Creator giving the “inalienable rights,” etc., it has been natural that this sociological law has then also moved away from the Constitution. William Bentley Ball, in his paper entitled “Religious Liberty: The Constitutional Frontier,” says:
i propose that secularism militates against religious liberty, and indeed against personal freedoms generally, for two reasons: first, the familiar fact that secularism does not recognize the existence of the “higher law”; second, because, that being so, secularism tends toward decisions based on the pragmatic public policy of the moment and inevitably tends to resist the submitting of those policies to the “higher” criteria of a constitution.
This moving away from the Constitution is not only by court rulings, for example the First Amendment rulings, which are the very reversal of the original purpose of the First Amendment (see pp. 433, 434), but in other ways as well. Quoting again from the same paper by William Bentley Ball:
Our problem consists also, as perhaps this paper has well enough indicated, of more general constitutional delegation of legislative power and ultra vires. The first is where the legislature hands over its powers to agents through the conferral of regulatory power unaccompanied by strict standards. The second is where the agents make up powers on their own–assume powers not given them by the legislature. Under the first, the government of laws largely disappears and the government of men largely replaces it. Under the second, agents’ personal “home-made law replaces the law of the elected representatives of the people.
Naturally, this shift from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the restraints of the Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty. Mr. Ball closes his paper:
Fundamentally, in relation to personal liberty, the Constitution was aimed at restraint of the State. Today, in case after case relating to religious liberty, we encounter the bizarre presumption that it is the other way around; that the State is justified in whatever actions, and that religion bears a great burden of proof to overcome that presumption.
It is our job, as Christian lawyers, to destroy that presumption at every turn.
As lawyers discuss the changes in law in the United States, often they speak of the influence of the laws involved in the reentrance of the southern states into the national government after the Civil War. These indeed must be considered. But they were not the reason for the drastic change in law in our country. This reason was the takeover by the totally other world view which never have given the form and freedom in government we have had in Northern Europe (including the United States). That is the central factor in the change.
PAGE 439
It is parallel to the difference between modern science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and the materialistic science which took over the last century. Materialistic thought would never have produced modern science. Modern science was produced on the Christian base. That is, because an intelligent Creator had created the universe we can in some measure understand the universe and there is, therefore, a reason for observation and experimentation to be pursued.
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
There is exactly the same parallel in law. The materialistic-energy, chance concept of final reality never would have produced the form and freedom in government we have in this country and in other Reformation countries. But now it has arbitrarily and arrogantly supplanted the historic Judeo-Christian Consensus that provided the base for form and freedom in government. The Judeo-Christian consensus gave greater freedoms than the world has ever known, but it also contained the freedoms so that they did not pound society to pieces. The materialistic concept of reality would not have produced the form-freedom balance, and now that it has taken over it cannot maintain the balance. It has destroyed it.
Will Durant and his wife Ariel together wrote The Story of Civilization. The Durants received the 1976 Humanist Pioneer Award. In The Humanist magazine of February 1977, Will Durant summed up the humanist problem with regard to personal ethics and social order: “Moreover, we shall find it no easy task to mold a natural ethic strong enough to maintain moral restraint and social order without the support of supernatural consolations, hopes, and fears.”
Poor Will Durant! It is not just difficult, it is impossible. He should have remembered the quotation he and Ariel Durant gave from the agnostic Renan in their book The Lessons of History. According to the Durants, Renan said in 1866: “If Rationalism wishes to govern the world without regard to the religious needs of the soul, the experience of the French Revolution is there to teach us the consequences of such a blunder.” And the Durants themselves say in the same context: “There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”
PAGE 440
Along with the decline of the Judie-Christian consensus we have come to a new definition and connotation of “pluralism.” Until recently it meant that the Christianity flowing from the Reformation is not now as dominant in the country and in society as it was in the early days of the nation. After about 1848 the great viewpoints not shaped by Reformation Christianity. This, of course, is the situation which exists today. Thus as we stand for religious freedom today, we need to realize that this must include a general religious freedom from the control of the state for all religion. It will not mean just freedom for those who are Christians. It is then up to Christians to show that Christianityis the Truth of total reality in the open marketplace of freedom.
This greater mixture in the United States, however, is now used as an excuse for the new meaning and connotation of pluralism. It now is used to mean that all types of situations are spread out before us, and that it really is up to each individual to grab one or the other on the way past, according to the whim of personal preference. What you take is only a matter of personal choice, with one choice as valid as another. Pluralism has come to mean that everything is acceptable. This new concept of pluralism suddenly is everywhere. There is no right or wrong; it is just a matter of your personal preference. On a recent SIXTY MINUTES program on television, for example, the questions of euthanasia of the old and the growing of marijuana as California’s largest paying crop were presented this way. One choice is as valid as another. It is just a matter of personal preference. This new definition and connotation of pluralism is presented in many forms, not only in personal ethics, but in society’s ethics and in the choices concerning law,
PAGE 440
Now I have a question. In these shifts that have come in law, where have the Christian lawyers been? I really ask you that. The shift has come gradually, but it has only come to its peak in the last 40 or 50 years. Where have the Christian lawyers been? Surely the Christian lawyers should have been the ones to have sounded the trumpet clear and loud, not just in bits and pieces but looking at the totality of what was occurring. Now, a nonlawyer like myself believes I have a right to feel let down because the Christian lawyers did not blow the trumpets clearly between, let us say, 1940 and 1970.
PAGE 441
When I wrote HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? From 1974 to 1976 I worked out of a knowledge of secular philosophy. I moved from the results in secular philosophy, to the results in liberal theology, to the results in the arts, and then I turned to the courts, and especially the Supreme Court. I read Oliver Wendell Holmes and others, and I must say, I was totally appalled by what I read. It was an exact parallel to what i had already known so well from my years of study in philosophy, theology, and the other disciplines.
In the book and film series HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? I used the Supreme Court abortion case as the clearest illustration of arbitrary sociiological law. But it was only the clearest illustration. The law is shot through with this kind of ruling. It is similar to choosing Fletcher’s situational ethics and point to it as the clearest illustration of how our society now functions with no fixed ethics. This is only the clearest illustration because in many ways our society functions on unfixed, situational ethics. The abortion case in law is exactly the same. It is only the clearest case. Law in this country has become situational law, using the term Fletcher used for his ethics. That is, a small group of people decide arbitrarily what, from their viewpoint, is for the good of society at that precise moment and they make it law, binding the whole society by their personal arbitrary decisions.
But of course! What would we expect? These things are the natural, inevitable results of the material-energy, humanistic concept of the final basic reality. From the material-energy, chance concept of final reality, final reality is, and must be b it nature, silent as to values, principles, or any basis for law. There is no way to ascertain “the ought:” from “the is.” Not only should we have known what this would have produced, but on the basis of this viewpoint of reality, we should have recognized that there are no other conclusions that this view could produce. It is a natural result of really believing that the basic reality of all things is merely material-energy, shaped into its present form by impersonal chance.
No, we must say that the Christians in the legal profession did not ring the bell, and we are indeed very, very far down the road toward a totally humanistic culture. At this moment we are in a humanistic culture, but we are happily not in a totally humanistic culture. But what we must realize is that the drift has been all in this direction. if it is not turned around we will move very rapidly into a totally humanistic culture.
PAGE 442
The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population.This is what has happened. The abortion law is a perfect example. The Supreme Court abortion ruling invalidated abortion lawsin all fifty states, even though it seems clear that in 1973 the majority of Americans were against abortion. It did not matter. The Supreme Court arbitrarily ruled that abortion was legal, and overnight they overthrew the state laws and forced their will on the majority, even though their ruling was arbitrary both legally and medically. Thus law and the courts became the vehicle for forcing a totally secular concept on the population.
—-
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. I also 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. I wanted to encourage you to investigate the work of Dr. Bernard Nathanson who like you used to be pro-abortion. I also want you to watch the You Tube series WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? by Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop. Also it makes me wonder what our the moral climate Of our nation is when we concentrate more on potential mistakes of the police and we let criminals back on the street so fast! Our national was founded of LEX REX and not REX LEX!
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
PS: In this series of letters John MacArthur covers several points. In the first letter, he quotes you saying that the greatest threat to America—he said on one occasion—is systemic racism, which doesn’t exist; he said white supremacy, which doesn’t exist with any power; and then he said global warming, which doesn’t exist either, and if it does, God’s in charge of it.
In reality the greatest threat to this nation is the government, the government. And I want to show you how we are to understand that. Turn to Romans 13
In the 2nd letter, Dr. MacArthur noted When government turns the divine design on its head and protects those who do evil and makes those who do good afraid, it forfeits its divine purpose
In the 3rd letter Dr. MacArthur noted The world is the enemy of the gospel. The world is the enemy of the church. I pointed out that this manifests itself today in the form of HUMANISM.
In the 4th letter Dr. MacArthur points out how much today the devil is having his way in our society and that the Bible predicts that these will get worse!
In the 5th letter Francis Schaeffer points out “The HUMANIST MANIFESTOS not only say that humanism is a religion, but the Supreme Court has declared it to be a religion. The 1961 case of Torcaso v. Watkins specifically defines secular humanism as a religion equivalent to theistic and other non theistic religions.”
In the 6th letter Dr. MacArthur noted God has given government the sword, the power; and when they prostitute that power and they begin to punish those who do good and protect those who do evil, they wield that power against the people of God.
In the 7th letter Dr. MacArthur asserted, Throughout history, even in the Western world, people lived under what was called the divine right of kings. Kings were believed to have had a divine right. This was absolute monarchy. What broke that was basically the Reformers. The Reformers—a little phrase was “the law is king,” not the man.
In the 8th letter Dr. MacArthur noted that today the United States “Government has already become the purveyor of wickedness. Government is a murderer, slaughtering millions of infants in abortion.”
Judge gives preliminary OK to $3.5M settlement of IRS case is discussed about the 2013 lawsuit during the Barack Obama administration over treatment of conservative groups who said they were singled out for extra IRS scrutiny on tax-exempt status applications. Then Dr. MacArthur talks about persecution in the Book of Daniel.
“These are groups of law-abiding citizens who should have never had their First Amendment rights infringed upon by the IRS,” Jenny Beth Martin, president of the Tea Party Patriots umbrella group, said Wednesday. “These are groups that want the government to be accountable.”
The government has been used to persecuting people they don’t like for centuries! Let me just share a portion of that sermon by John MacArthur with you and you can watch it on You Tube:
Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984, says, “If [there’s] no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.” And that point is exactly when the early Christians performed their acts of civil disobedience, even when it cost them their lives. “Acts of State which contradict God’s [Laws] are illegitimate and acts of tyranny. Tyranny is ruling without the sanction of God. To resist tyranny is to honour God. . . . The bottom line is that at a certain point there is not only the right, but the duty to disobey the State.”
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? | Episode 4 | The Basis for Human Dignity
Sunday Night Prime – Dr. Bernard Nathanson – Fr Groeschel, CFR with Fr …
——
Francis Schaeffer pictured above
Larry King had John MacArthur as a guest on his CNN program several times.
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Arkansas Times, Francis Schaeffer, Max Brantley, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Adrian Rogers, Arkansas Times, Prolife | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | 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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (3)
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 Francis Schaeffer, Prolife | Edit | Comments (2)
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 […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Francis Schaeffer | Edit | Comments (0)
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 […]
Ten days ago, I shared some data and evidence illustrating how redistribution programs result in high implicit tax rates and thus discourage low-income people from climbing the economic ladder.
Or why work at all if the governments provides enough goodies?
But don’t ask such questions if you’re in the same room as Helaine Olen of the Washington Post. She is very upset that some people think welfare payments discourage work.
It’s a dangerous myth, this idea that government help causes some people to just loaf off. It’s also untrue.Reminder: Before the pandemic, most working-age people receiving benefits like food stamps worked. They just didn’t earn enough money.…the temporary child tax credit signed into law this year by President Biden demonstrates the opposite. It is an extraordinary success. Almost 90 percent of families with children under age 18 are eligible to receive a monthly check from the federal government through the end of the year. …Many other developed nations offer almost all residents a child allowance of some sort.
If you read the entire column, you’ll notice that she provides very little evidence, particularly considering her very bold assertion that a negative link between redistribution and labor supply is “a dangerous myth.”
Yet we know from the experience of welfare reform in the 1990s that work requirements did boost labor supply.
And she wants us to believe that everyone will continue to work, even if they can get $3000-plus for each kid, along with all the other goodies that are provided by Uncle Sam (often topped upby state governments).
For what it’s worth, I think she admits her real agenda toward the end of her column.
…an argument can be made that the children of the irresponsible deserve more support from us, not less. Children can’t push their parents to get with the work-and-education program. As a result, you’re not “helping” children if you insist on financially punishing their parents for not making an “effort.” …human infrastructure matters too.
In other words, Ms. Olen seems to share Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s view that money should be given to people “unwilling to work.”
Which is how some of our friends actually view the world. They think there is a right to other people’s money. Which is why they support big handouts, including so-called basic income.
The bottom line is that Biden’s per-child handouts and other expansions of the welfare state clearly would make work less attractive for some people.
The late Milton Friedman discusses economics and otherwise with Charlie Rose.
_________________________________________
Milton Friedman: Life and ideas – Part 01
Milton Friedman: Life and ideas
A brief biography of Milton Friedman
_____________________________________
Stossel – “Free to Choose” (Milton Friedman) 1/6
6-10-10. pt.1 of 6. Stossel discusses Milton Friedman’s 1980 book, “Free to Choose”, which was smuggled in and read widely in Eastern Europe during the Cold War by many countries under Soviet rule. Read and admired the world over by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, this book served as the inspiration for many of the Soviet sattellite countries’ economies once they achieved freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union.
_________________________________________
I first saw Thomas Sowell on the show FREE TO CHOOSE on the debate team that Milton Friedman chose. I suggest checking out these episodes of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “What is wrong with our schools?” and “Created Equal” and From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market. Below he is the subject of a fine article that shows how our government is wasting so much money on the welfare trap. We should stop trapping people in welfare and let the free market offer them a chance to do better. Obviously what we are doing now is not working. The best way to destroy the welfare trap is to put in Milton Friedman’s negative income tax. Of course, all welfare programs should be eliminated at the same time.
Political cartoonists like Michael Ramirez and Chuck Asay are effective because they convey so much with images.
But we need more than clever cartoons if we’re going to educate the general population about how government harms the economy and undermines freedom.
He just turned 83, and let’s hope he has another 20 years of columns to write
And that’s why Thomas Sowell is so invaluable. He’s one of the nation’s top economic thinkers, but he also writes for mass audiences and his columns are masterful combinations of logic and persuasion.
His latest column about poverty is a good example. In this first excerpt, he succinctly explains that official poverty is not the same as destitution.
“Poverty” once had some concrete meaning — not enough food to eat or not enough clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example. Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people to justify welfare state spending. Most Americans with incomes below the official poverty level have air-conditioning, television, own a motor vehicle and, far from being hungry, are more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an arbitrary definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers’ money.
He then makes a very important point about economic incentives.
Even when they have the potential to become productive members of society, the loss of welfare state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit “tax” on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax on a millionaire. If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it? In short, the political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty.
Since columnists are limited to about 800 words, Sowell doesn’t have leeway to give details, but his explanation of how the government traps people in poverty is the rhetorical version of this amazing chart.
He concludes with some powerful observation about who really benefits from the welfare state.
…the left’s agenda is a disservice to [the poor], as well as to society. …The agenda of the left — promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making loud demands for “rights” to what other people have produced — is a pattern that has been widespread in countries around the world. This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.
Related posts:Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” film transcripts and videos here on http://www.thedailyhatch.org
I have many posts on my blog that include both the transcript and videos of Milton Friedman’s film series “Free to Choose” and here are the episodes that I have posted.
_____________
__________________________
Thank you so much for your time. I know how valuable it is. I also appreciate the fine family that you have and your commitment as a father and a husband.
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail Lane, Alexander, AR 72002, ph 501-920-5733,
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 5-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 4-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 3-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 2-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman The Power of the Market 1-5 How can we have personal freedom without economic freedom? That is why I don’t understand why socialists who value individual freedoms want to take away our economic freedoms. I wanted to share this info below with you from Milton Friedman who has influenced me greatly over the […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. Abstract: Ronald Reagan introduces this program, and traces a line from Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of […]
Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full) Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. We must not head down the path of socialism like Greece has done. Abstract: Ronald Reagan […]
TEMIN: We don’t think the big capital arose before the government did? VON HOFFMAN: Listen, what are we doing here? I mean __ defending big government is like defending death and taxes. When was the last time you met anybody that was in favor of big government? FRIEDMAN: Today, today I met Bob Lekachman, I […]
The men in the south of Europe, the men of the Renaissance, struggled with themselves trying to find what “could give unity to life.” They were looking for some universal that “could give meaning to life and to morals.” In the north of Europe there was the beginning of another great movement that would come to be known as the Reformation that was emerging from the shadow of the Renaissance. This movement in the north of Europe was a reaction “against the distortions which had gradually appeared in both a religious and a secular form.” Too often the Renaissance and the Reformation are seen as two distinct and separate periods of history. In reality there is such overlap between the periods that it would be better to study them as different sides of the same coin. Francis Schaeffer suggests that: “The High Renaissance in the south and the Reformation in the north must always be considered side by side. They dealt with the same basic problems, but they gave completely opposite answers and brought forth completely opposite results.”
There are two important forerunners to the Reformation that we have mentioned in an earlier class – these were John Wycliffe(1320-1384) and John Huss(1369-1415). Their lives overlapped much of the Renaissance period. For example, their lives overlapped Giotto’s, Dante’s, Petrarch’s, and Boccaccio’s (Wycliffe) and Brunnelleschi’s, Masaccio’s and van Eyck’s (Huss).
John Wycliffe emphasized the Bible as the supreme authority, and he produced an English translation of the Bible that gained great acceptance throughout Europe. John Huss’ importance is explained by Schaeffer as that he “returned to the teachings of the Bible and of the early church and stressed that the Bible is the only source of final authority and that salvation comes only through Christ and His work. He further developed Wycliffe’s views on the priesthood of all believers.”
The beliefs of these early reformers were in opposition to the humanistic elements which had crept into the church. These elements had “led to the authority of the church being accepted as equal to, or greater than, the authority of the Bible and . . . emphasized human work as a basis for meriting the merit of Christ.”
Wycliffe and Huss set the footers upon which the coming Reformation would be built. Yet like much of Christian history these footers were set in blood. Huss was invited to attend the Council of Constance 1414-1418 which was convened to bring an end to the “Great Schism” in which the church had become divided by the creation of two and then three popes. In addition, the council addressed the issue of two great reforms: 1) To reform the corrupt morals of the church and 2) To eradicate heresies, especially those of Wycliffe and Huss. As Schaeffer tells us Huss “promised safe conduct to speak at the Council of Constance, . . . was betrayed and burned at the stake there on July 6, 1415.” Hussites, followers of John Huss, founded what was called the Bohemian Brethren, which were the roots for what came to be the Moravian Church.
Many people have mistakenly categorized the Reformation as an attempt to overthrow the Roman Catholic Church. This is wrong. The Reformation movement began as a reaction to the humanistic elements that had infiltrated the church. It was a reaction against the idea that the authority of the church was equal to or in some quarters even greater than that of the Bible. It was a reaction against the concepts that man could “earn” the merit of Christ, which stood in sharp contrast to what Luther recognized as the “grace” of Christ. The Reformation was about returning to the Bible as the final authority and that an individual’s salvation came only through grace and was based only on Christ and His works, not man’s. It is also worth remembering that there was no Roman Catholic Church at this time – there was just the church.
Humanism did not just suddenly appear in the church during the time of the Renaissance but rather it was the culmination of a slow infiltration process that had been growing over time. By 1500 A.D. it was threatening to strangle the church. Let’s briefly look at the impact of humanism on the church of the Renaissance. First, we see that the authority of the church was now equal to or greater than the authority of the Bible. When we speak of the authority of the church, we are speaking of man and man’s decisions being on par with the revealed word of God. It is a small jump from here to where man supercedes an authority which is not understood for being dominant. Second, was the perversion that man’s works were of greater importance for his salvation than Christ’s grace. We are still influenced by this today when people think that they will go to heaven because of their good deeds, ignoring the fact that it is only because of Christ’s work, His grace and His blood that any man can stand before God and be “saved.” Third, was the increasing blending of pagan thinking with biblical thinking. This is readily apparent in the art of the Renaissance, in the paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo and the writings of Dante to name a few.
The goal of Reformers, while certainly not entirely successful, was to make the Bible their standard, their rule, for living not just church. While there where many areas of life that the Reformers didn’t do well in, they did bring about a movement back to the Bible as the rule for all live and a return to the example of set by the early church.
It has been said that the while the Renaissance and the Reformation dealt with the same questions, they arrived at completely different answers. This is true and even though the question from which both the Renaissance and the Reformation began was the same, their eventual answers were very different. Schaeffer points to Thomas Aquinas as the primary reason that the Renaissance went off in the direction that it did. Remember Aquinas thought that while the will of man was fallen after the events in the Garden of Eden, man’s mind was not affected. This led people to think that man was quite capable of learning the answers to the great questions by looking only to themselves and human reason.
However the Reformers understood that man was completely corrupted in the “fall” and that if one was to find the answers to the great questions of life, man would have to look outside of himself and that the proper starting point for any inquiry was not man but God. “. . . in contrast to the Renaissance humanists, they refused to accept the autonomy of human reason, which acts as though the human mind is infinite, with all knowledge within its realm. Rather, they took seriously the Bible’s own claim for itself – that it is the only final authority. And they took seriously that man needs the answers given by God in the Bible to have adequate answers not only for how to be in an open relationship with God, but also for how to know the present meaning of life and how to have final answers in distinguishing between right and wrong. That is, man needs not only a God who exists, but a God who has spoken in a way that can be understood.”
Schaeffer gives us a concise statement of the difference between the Renaissance and the Reformation when he says: “Because the Reformers did not mix humanism with their position, but took instead a serious view of the Bible, they had no problem of meaning for the individual things, the particulars; they had no nature-versus-grace problem. One could say that the Renaissance centered in autonomous man, while the Reformation centered in the infinite-personal God who had spoken in the Bible. In the answer the Reformation gave, the problem of meaning for individual things, including man, was so completely answered that the problem – as a problem – did not exist. The reason for this is that the Bible gives a unity to the universal and the particulars.”
For the Reformers the Bible was the foundation of what they believed. They believed that the Bible tells us true things about God and that one can “know true things about God because God has revealed Himself” – to man in the Bible. While man cannot know all about God, he can know the truth about God. For Schaeffer and the Reformers, they can know the “truth about that which is the ultimate universal.” The Bible tells us the truth about “meaning, morals, and values.” The Bible also tells the truth about our world, about nature and the people in it. It is not the Bible’s purpose to provide us with “exhaustive truth” about nature, man and the universe but what it does give us is true. And it is this truth which is ultimately important, as Schaeffer tells us. “So one can know many true things about nature, especially why things exist and why they have the form they have. Yet, because the Bible does not give exhaustive truth about history and the cosmos, historians and scientists have a job to do, and their work is not meaningless. To be sure, there is a total break between God and His creation, that is, between God and created things; God is infinite – and created things are finite. But man can know both truth about God and truth about the things of creation because in the Bible God has revealed Himself and has given man the key to understanding God’s world.”
The importance of the truth that the Bible gives us about man cannot be ignored. The Bible tells us that man is made in the image of God. It is for this reason that man as an individual and as society can be great. But here we start first with God. Humanism, whose starting and ending point is man has, ultimately, no sense of meaning or worth to give man, except what each man decides to give himself.
The Bible explains that man is also a “fallen” being and that he has separated himself from God. Because man is not in the proper relationship with God, all of men are sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God. It is the Bible and its truth about man that allowed the Reformers to “could understand both their greatness and their cruelty.”
Over the passing centuries, the church, rather than being a guide to lead man to God had become a wall between man and God. Schaeffer gives us a great example of this in his discussion about the “Rood Screen.” The rood screen was used to separate the people from the altar. The Reformation with the return to the Bible, taught that man “could come to God directly by faith through the finished work of Christ. That is, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was of infinite value, and people cannot do and need not do anything to earn or add to Christ’s work. But this can be accepted as an unearned gift. It was sola gratia, grace only.” This and the Bible, and the Bible only, sola scriptura, is what enabled the Reformers understanding of God and provided them with the “intellectual and practical answers needed in this present life.”
One of the “raps” against the Reformation that one hears way too frequently is that the Reformation was “antagonistic” to the arts. The reason for this accusation is that the Reformers, in trying to purify their religion by removing certain “inappropriate images,” did in fact destroy what others looked at as works of art. But for the Reformer it was the inappropriateness of the image and the fact that it was leading people astray that was being destroyed not the destruction of art for art’s sake. Schaeffer tells us: “The men of the Reformation saw that the Bible stressed that there is only one mediator between God and man, Christ Jesus. Thus, in the pressure of that historic moment, they sometimes destroyed the images – not as works of art but as religious images which were contrary to the Bible’s emphasis on Jesus as the only mediator.”
It is critical for a proper understanding of the Reformation period to remember for the people of that period “art was an intimate part of life.” If art was destroyed, it was not as art but rather for its “anti-Christian religious significance. Art for the people of this period was not looked upon just for its aesthetic value but rather they looked upon art from the view point of its “truth and religious significance.” If one considers the artistic achievements of the Reformation, especially in music and painting, it is easy to see why those who insist that the Reformation was against the arts are wrong.
A significant moment in history occurred in the Reformation when the congregations in many of the churches as part of the direct approach to God were allowed to sing. In 1562 a hymn book of comprising the Psalms set to music was published. Luther, a fine singer and musician in his own right, wrote the words and music for more than a few hymns – the best known probably being “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Do not underestimate the impact of these hymns and others like them on the culture. Luther’s inscription to a hymn book published by his choir director, Johann Walther, provides us an insight into both Luther and the culture’s understanding of the importance of art and especially music in the life of the people. “I wish that the young men might have something to rid them of their love ditties and wanton songs and might instead of these learn wholesome things and thus yield willingly to the good; also, because I am not of the opinion that all the arts shall be crushed to earth and perish through the Gospel, as some bigoted persons pretend, but would willingly see them all, and especially music, servants of Him who gave and created them.”
Music became the favored mode of expression of the Reformation. Of the many great composers of the time, none surpassed the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1658-1750). He and his music were true products of the Reformation. “His music was a direct result of the Reformation culture and the biblical Christianity of the time, which was so much a part of Bach himself. There would have been no Bach had there been no Luther. Bach wrote on his score initials representing such phrases as: “With the help of Jesus” – “To God alone be the glory” – “In the name of Jesus.” It was appropriate that the last thing Bach the Christian wrote was “Before Thy Throne I Now Appear.” Bach consciously related both the form and the words of his music to biblical truth.
Another composer deserving mention is Handel, the author of what has become known simply as Handel’s Messiah, written in 1741. As Schaeffer comments, “Even the order of the selections follows with extreme accuracy the Bible’s teaching about the Christ as the Messiah. For example, Handel did not put the “Hallelujah Chorus” at the end, but in its proper place in the flow of the past and future history of Christ. Many modern performances often place it at the end as a musical climax, but Handel followed the Bible’s teaching exactly and placed it at that future historic moment when the Bible says Christ will come back to rule upon the earth – at that point where the Bible prophetically (in the Book of Revelation) puts the cry of “King of kings and Lord of lords!”
Painting of the Reformation was equally significant. The German painter Albrecht Dürer was a man of the Reformation. His famous woodcuts of the Apocalypse and his copperplate engravings of The Knight, Death, and the Devil, and St. Jerome in His Cell are not only compelling works of art but they clearly mark him as a man, as a painter, of the Reformation.
Dürer, Bach, and Handel, are clearly examples of the impact of the Reformation on the arts. It also follows that a man’s world view is reflected in his art or “creative output.” Schaeffer explains it this way: “A person’s world-view almost always shows through in his creative output, however, and thus the marks on the things he creates will be different. This is so in all fields – for example, in the art of the Renaissance compared to that of the Reformation, or in the direction man’s creative stirrings in science will assume, and whether and how the stirring will continue. In the case of the Reformation the art showed the good marks of its biblical base.”
The clearest example of this is in the life of the Reformation painter Rembrandt (1606 – 1669). For whatever reasons the fact that Rembrandt was a Christian and the influence of his beliefs as a Christian on his art is all but forgotten today. Rembrandt understood that Christ died on the cross for his sins and this is captured in his famous work Raising of the Cross. “A man in a blue painter’s beret raises Christ upon the cross. That man is Rembrandt himself – a self-portrait. He thus stated for all the world to see that his sins had sent Christ to the cross.”
Like Dürer, Bach, and Handel, Rembrandt was clearly a man and a product of the Reformation. His Christian world view is plainly depicted in all of his art. “Rembrandt shows in all his work that he was a man of the Reformation; he neither idealized nature nor demeaned it. Moreover, Rembrandt’s biblical base enabled him to excel in painting people with psychological depth. Man was great, but man was also cruel and broken, for he had revolted against God. Rembrandt’s painting was thus lofty, yet down to earth.” Schaeffer summarizes this study by drawing upon the conclusions of Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) from his history: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Speaking of Burckhardt Schaeffer says: “He indicated that freedom was introduced both in the north by the Reformation and in the south by the Renaissance. But in the south it went to license; in the north it did not. The reason was that in Renaissance humanism man had no way to bring forth a meaning to the particulars of life and no place from which to get absolutes in morals. But in the north, the people of the Reformation, standing under the teaching of Scripture, had freedom and yet at the same time compelling absolute values.”
God please once again bless Your people with a sense of “compelling absolute values.” Amen!
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 8 Rolling Stones – Hoo Doo Blues Blue & Lonesome is the album any Rolling Stones fan would have wished for – review 9 Comments Evergreen: The Rolling Stones perform in Cuba earlier this year CREDIT: REX FEATURES Neil McCormick, music critic 22 NOVEMBER 2016 • 12:19PM The Rolling […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 7 Rolling Stones – Everybody Knows About My Good Thing The Rolling Stones Alexis Petridis’s album of the week The Rolling Stones: Blue & Lonesome review – more alive than they’ve sounded for years 4/5stars Mick Jagger’s voice and harmonica drive an album of blues covers that returns […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 6 Rolling Stones – Just Like I Treat You Music Review: ‘Blue & Lonesome’ by the Rolling Stones By Gregory Katz | AP November 29 The Rolling Stones, “Blue & Lonesome” (Interscope) It shouldn’t be a surprise, really, but still it’s a bit startling to hear just how well […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 5 Rolling Stones – Everybody Knows About My Good Thing Review: The Rolling Stones make blues magic on ‘Blue & Lonesome’ Maeve McDermott , USATODAY6:07 p.m. EST November 30, 2016 (Photo: Frazer Harrison, Getty Images) Before the Rolling Stones were rock icons, before its members turned into sex […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
MUSIC MONDAY Rolling Stones New Album Part 3 The Rolling Stones Mick Jagger chats about new album “Blue & Lonesome” on BBC Breakfast 02 Dec 2016 Rolling Stones – I Gotta Go Rolling Stones – ‘Blue & Lonesome’ Review Barry Nicolson 12:52 pm – Dec 2, 2016 57shares The Stones sound their youngest […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
_____________ Carpenters Close To You Karen Carpenter’s tragic story Karen Carpenter’s velvet voice charmed millions in the 70s… but behind the wholesome image she was in turmoil. Desperate to look slim on stage – and above all desperate to please the domineering mother who preferred her brother – she became the first celebrity victim of […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|Comments (0)
carpenters -We’ve Only Just Begun The Carpenters – Yesterday Once More (INCLUDES LYRICS) The Carpenters – There’s a kind of hush The Carpenters – Greatest Hits Related posts: MUSIC MONDAY Paul McCartney Mull Of Kintyre November 13, 2016 – 10:29 am Paul McCartney Mull Of Kintyre-Original Video-HQ Uploaded on Nov 25, 2011 Paul McCartney Mull Of […]By Everette Hatcher III | Posted in Current Events | Edit|
…the Biden’s reconciliation bill, which increases the spending burden by 1.9 percent of GDP, will reduce the economy’s growth rate by about 0.2 percent each year. That…translates into more than $3 trillion less national income over the next decade. And the nation’s economic output will be $613 billion lower in 2031 compared to what it would be in the absence of President Biden’s fiscal agenda. …The cumulative loss of employee income over the next 10 years will exceed $1.6 trillion. Some of that will be in the form of lower wages and some of that will be a consequence of lost jobs. On average, each worker in a nonfarm job will lose $10,391 in total compensation.
Add the 3.8% ObamaCare tax on investment, and you get to 43.4%. And that’s merely the federal rate. Add 13.3% in California and 11.85% in New York (plus 3.88% in New York City), which also tax capital gains as regular income, and you are heading toward the 60% rate range. Keep in mind this is on the sale of gains that are often inflated as assets are held for years without adjustment for inflation. Oh, and Mr. Biden also wants to eliminate the step-up in basis on capital gains that accrues at death.
“Where’s our tax revenue?!?”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57018571/stallingsbryant.0.jpg)
U.S. President John F. Kennedy, center, poses with, from left, University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, White House Army Signal Agency John J. Cochran, All-American UA quarterback Pat Trammell, UA President Frank Rose, sportscaster Mel Allen, UA sports Hall of Famer Young Boozer Jr., Birmingham News sports writer Benny Marshall and Alabama businessman Tom Russell at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City in December 1961. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/69607892/AP20205603273979.0.jpg)
Arkansas state Sen. Jason Rapert presides over a Senate committee at the state Capitol in Little Rock, Ark. in this March 14, 2018, file photo. Rapert’s National Association of Christian Lawmakers met recently to talk model legislation and pass resolutions. Kelly P. Kissel, Associated Press/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22726922/AP898166992908.jpg)
Texas state Rep. Bryan Hughes speaks during the opening session of the 2015 legislative session on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2015, in Austin, Texas. Eric Gay, Associated Press/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22726936/merlin_1112102.jpg)
A anti-abortion supporter argues with those who attended a press conference and rally held by the Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah outside of the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Aug. 25, 2015. Stacie Scott, Deseret News
fluent Hindi had its provenance to his various interactions with his playmates and father’s colleagues with whom he retained lifelong contact. Following his relocation to the United Kingdom, he completed his medical training in Cambridge and then worked with the Royal Navy in 
The Daily Hatch 
