Homosexual Lobby

The Triumph of the Homosexual Lobby

Yet again I need to preface my comments by “Don't get me wrong” Though freedom of both speech and thought has been so curtailed in this area as in several others that I will still be branded a political heretic. 

Nevertheless I will say it: Don't get me wrong; I am not judging nor censuring those few who actually practice homosexuality, any more than I do adulterers, gossips & slanderers, drunkards, or the avaricious or power-hungry – just to name a few. We are all sinners. I had in one parish a young men's group of new believers who were able to support each other precisely because they were dealing with different life-controlling behaviours – a homosexual, a promiscuous heterosexual, a drug user, a thief …

However there is, here and in most Western countries, a powerful homosexual lobby

I first noticed it when the AIDS epidemic became a constant news item. I had folk in my congregation which at that stage had an average age of 60 or so years, afraid that they would catch AIDS. So I read through my wife's medical journals and found that in first world countries, transmission was basically by anal sex. (sharing needles was there but comparatively rare. In Africa AIDS was also transmitted by vaginal sex because, as the journals explained, much higher rates of promiscuity, and poor medical treatment led to a large proportion of sexually active African women suffering from sexually transmitted diseases which produced open sores – so that there was semen-to-blood contact – a perfect transmission rout for AIDS. This was rarely the situation in first world countries. Sorry about the gory details; but deceptive and unremitting propaganda by the homosexual lobby hid these and other facts from us.)

So in my little parish newsletter I told some of these facts. I copped a furious response from the Bishop for my intolerance, bigotry and lack of Christian compassion towards homosexuals!

The brilliant tactics by which a lobby group managed to convince an entire population that the problem of a tiny minority, caused by their own chosen behaviour pattern (epidemic needed male homosexual activity and promiscuity) was everyone's problem! It was a conjuring feat par excellence!

Then there was the “Gay Pride” movement with its marches through the streets. Marches that attracted official support, marches that seemed to be well attended by heterosexual families as well.

There was the “inclusiveness” dogma. Particularly in churches it became an article of faith that certain sorts of people must be “included” if one was to be truly “Christian”. So self-advertised homosexuals had to be welcomed. (I didn't actually have any problem with doing this part – after all I welcomed my “Ladies' Guild” members and most of them were unrepentant gossips and slanderers! Also most of the actual homosexuals I have dealt with were pretty decent human beings.)

Inclusion of one special category of people as an essential article of faith whilst happily excluding other categories of people is just plain unjust, and the slippery slope to heresy.

It is just a matter of history that this is precisely what has happened. We have had Anglican Bishops who were not merely unrepentant, but proud of the fact that they were engaging in homosexual acts. In Australia we had a public case where a Bishop accosted a young policeman in a public toiled and solicited sex! The policeman wanted the bishop charged with assault, but the case was quashed by his superiors because of the high profile of his assailant. The Bishop excused himself saying he “had a complex sexuality” and went on to greater things.

Rewind that! If that had been a heterosexual case the Bishop would have been out on his ear! Suddenly homosexuality has become a protected activity!

Can I pause here and make two important points:

1. It is the sex acts, not the orientation towards homosexuality that the Bible lists as a sin.

2. We are all sinners. But in the Christian church the idea is to be fighting the particular sins that haunt us. Priests, and above all bishops should exhibit progress towards godliness in their lives.

Marriage “Equality” Don't you just love the clever “newspeak”. Equality is Good, therefore by inference anyone opposing marriage equality is bad!

Not just 2,000 years of Christianity. But another couple of millennia of Hebrew culture and worship from which Christianity and modern Judaism sprang. And indeed the entire recorded history of every known culture is suddenly swept aside! It is a breathtaking occurrence! What was once banned has now not just become normal but sacrosanct.

In Tasmania the Roman Catholic Bishop issued a pastoral letter – just to congregants - outlining the historic Church and Biblical teaching on marriage. That is still (for the moment!) the law of the land: it is not lawful for two people of the same sex to marry. That Bishop is now having to defend himself in court after an “equal opportunity” tribunal found he had a case to answer for teaching against same sex marriage! Unbelievable? Yes, but true none the less.

Marriage is a social institution. Change it and you change society. How society will change is unknowable, but on the law of unintended consequences it will likely be bad. We have had quite a few examples of this in Australia in the world of nature. For instance: Early settlers though introducing rabbits would be a good idea – but the rabbits bred here to plague proportions and every measure to contain them has eventually failed.

Sexualising Children: of course it is not called that, but school programs are being funded and enforced by governments to make children of a tender age think in explicitly sexual terms, to think gender is a matter of choice not biology, and enlisting them to homosexual practices!

In my state the government – ater banning Christmas carols and religious education in schools has introduced such a syllabus. It is called by the Orwellian name of “Safe Schools”, ans its excuse is that homosexuals are being bullied at schools so such an awareness program right throughout the school life is necessary. This is patently a lie. This generation of school children have grown up with the political correctness that discriminates for not against homosexuals.

It is a big bad lie because bullying is indeed a problem at schools – but the choice of victims has little do do with their sexual orientation (if they are even old enough to know there is such a thing!)victims are mostly heterosexual). It is bullying however and to whomever it occurs that does need confronting – but this program is not interested in that.

It is simply a flimsy excuse for tearing down the traditional mores – regardless of the hurt it causes individuals. I was about to say “or the harm it causes to the social fabric” but that is of course precisely the aim. One of the formulators of the program admitted to being a Marxist and that the program was part of the Marxist agenda of destroying our society and replacing it with the Communist utopia. Perhaps the 34 or so million who starved in Mao's Communist utopia would should, if they could, from their graves not to go there!

Rule Smashers

Rule Smashers

People were horrified at the pictures of ISIS destroying ancient architecture at Palmyra. But the much more thorough and catastrophic smashing of ancient rules of conduct in our Western societies has gone largely unnoticed.

Even as I look now and see them crumbling all around I wonder “How come I never saw this coming?” It is as though our social system has been for years infected by woodworm and we are only realising it now as the chairs and tables start breaking apart.

We may not remember the date but we all remember the event. In April 1986 engineers at a power plant decided to test new voltage regulators that had been installed. To do this test they dis-connected some safety devices. What they didn't know was that their boiler had a rare design fault – well a lethal combination of several actually – which meant it was unstable. A bit like standing a pencil on end: it can balance there but it is just waiting to fall over. Grandma's rocking chair is the opposite; you can rock it but it always wants to return to the upright. So when they dis-connected the safety devices disaster was inevitable. The name? Chernobyl.

We suffer from a societal arrogance far bigger than those Chernobyl engineers.

We think “we” are so smart we can pull apart and re-build wholesale the moral and ethical rules that our societies have been running on. We are even now blind to the warning signs of “unintended consequences” that should be alerting us to our mistake. We are so insulated by rigid adherence to politically correct dogma – to an extent that would make the most rabid fundamentalist blush – that we cannot see that reality is about to bite.

Take an example: Divorce

Now don't get me wrong: I reckon that in Mark 10:2-12 Jesus is saying two things: 1) divorce was not part of God's plan but human sinfulness made it in some cases “the lesser of two evils” 2) He was addressing the legal scheming of the Pharisees: divorcing your wife on a trumped up charge so you can legally marry the “new woman” is still adultery in God's eyes.

So I think the “no divorce ever” camp are wrong: biblically wrong, and in every-day experience wrong. We all know cases where divorce is the only humane option. Funnily enough at present I have two acquaintances, one male and one female going through the traumas of the family law courts. Both seem to have spouses (one female one male!) who have and are behaving extremely badly.

On the other hand divorce rates have soared over past decades. Partly because women can more easily find work and so can now afford to leave an abusive marriage. Partly because of legislative changes – in Australia “no fault” came in in the '70's. But I think largely because the social mores have changed – and that change was the result of a tearing down of the old rules.

When I was a parish priest I had couples come to me for re-marriage after one of them had been divorced. This required the bishop's permission, and so required going through the circumstances of the marriage breakdown – which in itself was a beneficial exercise for the person involved. There were of course cases where one wondered why the person had stuck with their spouse as long as they did! But these were rare. In the most common case no one was “bad”. They just drifted apart, or were stupid, selfish or other traits which with early intervention by friends or family might have been corrected. I found myself on many occasions wondering “why didn't someone grab these pair and bang their heads together and tell them to wake up to themselves and make this marriage work”

Of course by the time they had been through the divorce court and were sitting in my office hand-in-hand with their new prospective mate that possibility was long, long gone! Probably even by the time they had started to build separate social lives or started a destructive downward spiral of bickering it was to late. But at some time the marriage could have been saved.

“Why bother?” you ask? Precisely! That is precisely the problem, we have made young people think that marriage is an “easy come easy go” arrangement. We have thrown out the old rule “and forsaking all others … as long as you both shall live”. Sure as I said exceptional cases had to be excepted – but we didn't have to throw out the whole rule!

What has resulted: Misery on a large scale. Divorce hurts those who go through it big time. It hurts their friends and families. It separated grandparents from grandchildren. But there is an even bigger toll. Child abuse.

Rates of child abuse are frightening. The most frequent offender is the step parent. These days sexual and physical abuse is nearly always by the step-father, but remember all those fairy tales involving the wicked step-mother!) So just in one important area of societal functionality we have the tangible result of tearing down of the old social rules causing major harm.

Every individual matters, so harm to all these individuals matters in itself, but the harm goes farther. In looking at the possible decline of Western civilisation functionality of society matters.

In the animal world species which don't adapt as well as others lose out to them and become extinct – ask the Dodo. Civilisations which become less functional lose out to more vigorous ones and disappear from the world's stage.

Traditional Morals

The Demise of Traditional Morals

Last week I introduced the idea that national or community moral values evolved by a trial and error process to be functional and to enable that society to function. I also put in my Christian bit that human nature was always at work corrupting everything but that as much as people would let him, God helped people make things better.

So the crunch is, as Hayek maintained: destroy its traditional morals and you destroy the society.

So let us examine my little bit of the West: the South Eastern part of Australia. What has been happening during my 67 years. In particular what has been the effect of some of the “-ism”s.

1. Feminism.

There was certainly inequality, but not on the scale today's feminists claim.

For instance my mother didn't work, but she didn't have to – my father even as a low tanking Air Force officer could support a family. Indeed middle class mothers not having to work was a cultural thing that had the good aspect of children getting lots of parent time. It is not accurate to portray it as “wicked” discrimination against women. Of course by the time the situation was changing, as it did in the '60's there were inevitable tensions between the old ways and the new which undoubtedly did include discrimination.

When my brother married – about 1966 – his wife was expected to resign her job. Just a few years later my sister became a junior partner in an established law firm – but some people did comment “how modern of them taking on a woman!”. On the other hand by the early 70's when my wife graduated as a doctor, nearly half her year were women.

I will hazard a guess that the rapid social changes in these decades were largely technology driven, and the redefinition of women's roles was more a by-product of that than feminists realise. Dare I say it, but this might even be an example of social mores evolving to adapt to a changed environment! But granted, in this evolving mileau some feminist activism may have been a necessity.

But there is a down side to modern militant feminism. They are even being denounced for it by their older sisters. It is the anti-men thing. We are all humans. That is the real dichotomy. To try to cast one gender as “bad” is pretty silly. Both contain people who are good, who are bad and who are in between.

“affirmative action” is still discrimination. Feminists say women were discriminated against in male dominated workplaces. Maybe, but to nothing like the extent that men are now discriminated against in female dominated workplaces! Girls may have been disadvantaged in the way schools operated. But not to the extent the boys are now disadvantaged in the new female-friendly curriculum and assessment models.

Family life: I really feel for young couples trying to raise a family with both parents having careers. We used to heap scorn on the Soviet workers trooping off to the factory and depositing their children in the factory child care centre. We've done worse: there is no childcare at the workplace, parents have to find their own, sometimes driving a marathon circuit to childcare, kindergarten, then workplace.

But the most seriously dysfunctional side to feminism has been its promotion of abortion. Think about it: in what way is creating a social acceptance, even an expectation for women to kill their babies a “good” outcome for women?

2. Pacifism

When I was at school, it was fresh in everyone's minds that but for the bravery of out troops we would all be slaves of the Japanese. In high school I could wear my cadet uniform safely on the train and indeed get get positive comments on my community service attitude. Nowadays the opposite is true. Whether it started because of Vietnam, or just concurrently with Vietnam I do not know. What I do know is that there has been a complete reversal of attitude in the media and a big slab of the society. Service men and women are now forbidden to wear uniform on public transport – for their own protection. A whole “violence is bad” ethic has crept in.

As I write the Catholic Church is convening a conference in Rome to debate whether their 1,600 year old doctrine of a “just war” should be scrapped.

The whole movement is understandable but terminally dysfunctional

Understandable because we see that war is terrible: yes it is.

Understandable because we see criminal violence as terrible: yes it is

We live in a world where there is evil as well as good. Warmongers like Hitler and Hirohito and all their henchmen were evil when they started their respective wars. No doubt about it! That evil had to be opposed. That evil had to be stopped. There was only one way to do it: force. This is what the Allied armies did, and the world was a better place for their heroism and sacrifice.

Until Jesus returns and the world ends there will arise evil people who can only be stopped by killing them. Sure in heaven “they will beat their swords into ploughshares … and study war no more” that will be wonderful. That will be heaven. Here and now we need to love peace but be fully prepared for war.

Similarly with police action. They swear to “serve and protect”. Sometimes to protect the innocent (or even their own lives) they have to kill killers. In traditional morals that necessity was recognised. In today's “new morals” a warped view of “human life” has crept in. “all killing is evil” is the new – socially dysfunctional theme. No, killing the innocent – that is evil. Killing the evildoer to prevent them killing the innocent – that is a virtue. The Biblical teaching is clear, and enshrined in our traditional morals in the West. If we turn that moral precept on its head there will be bad social consequences.

No toy guns: Boys particularly love toy weapons, wrestling and play fighting. In the new morals we want to ban toy weapons and play because “it leads to violence”. This is a simple but incredibly naive mistake. It all starts with the error “all violence is bad”. As discussed above that is wrong: Some violence is evil; some violence is a virtue. It depends when and how the violence is used.

Boys are “hard wired” to be able to protect their families, tribe, country. Yes it's in their genes. Yes it's their “testosterone charged nature”. Feminists should not sneer. They should be thankful that those qualities saved them from the Nazi and Imperial Japanese armies! It is not boys' ability for violence that is the problem; it is the perversion of it that is the problem! If you stop to think about it, a great number of evils are the perversion of something which is in itself good and/or vital.

Boys are by nature equipped to provide and protect. By “the sweat of their brow” and by violent often dangerous action. Just two observations on this:

a) Domestic violence: where instead of using their strength to protect those they should protect, they actually act out their aggression/frustration/or whatever by hurting those people. This is downright evil. It should be treated as a contemptible crime, a total betrayal of their natural obligations (I guess in that way it is for men what abortion is for women!)

b) If young men are geared to do dangerous physical feats to defend their own, in the absence of such threat they need socially acceptable dangerous physical feats to perform. Better they are allowed “extreme sports” and accept some casualties than have them endangering others “hooning” in cars or getting into drunken brawls outside nightclubs!

More nest time

How to Destroy a Civilisation

Saving the West : How to Destroy a Civilisation

Civilisations rise and fall, that is just history, but poignantly illustrated in Shelly's poem “Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

How or why particular historic civilisations fell I do not know, but I believe I do know one thing which can prove fatal. Something which is a clear and present danger for Western civilisations as we know them.

To start at the beginning consider morals.

How do we get them? Naturally as a Christian I will want to introduce the notion at some point that God is not only the best source of moral understanding, not even just the living example of them but also in his (OK English pronouns fail to do justice to a Triune, supra-gender Divine Being!) own moral character the one immutable standard of morals. But hold that thought for a moment. Moral virtues are common to pretty much all humans.

Not convinced? OK Abram and Sarai: Abram thinks when he goes into ancient Egypt that they will kill him to take his beautiful wife so he passes her off as his sister. At the end of the story Pharaoh lambastes Abram for this because, as he complains, it might have led him to commit the sin of adultery with Sarai. So there were definitely some strong moral ideals alive there!

So again I ask: How do humans get moral values?

Genetics? Possible, though I will argue against it. Spiritual afterglow of being created in the image of God ? – OK I like this one but let's leave it to one side for the moment. As part of our training from infancy? … Yes third time lucky! (see my post: Manners & Morals Pt. 1  )

In that post one of the things I say is that our frontal lobes are so well developed at learning even the most complex social skills that our responses become so quick and “effortless” that they seem instinctive. So we might be tempted to think morals are instinctive – or genetically inherited. But by comparison with the similar brain function required for social etiquette – which differs widely both over the planet and through history – which also seems instinctive – we can say that morals, even though much more comparable over human existence are learned.

I don't want to labour the point but any one who has raised children should remember how by nature babies are totally self-centred. Consideration for others has to be taught!

Here I want to introduce Friedrich Hayek again. This time from his last book “the Fatal Conceit”. In the opening section he talks about the origin of morals. You may be pleased to hear that he agrees with me that it is learnt not genetic, although he tries to do so without referring to God )

If I can boil down what Hayek says without losing too much it is this:

1. Humans are social beings: Philosophers like Locke and Hobbes went back to some imagined “solitary” primitive state. Hayek says, “Rubbish – a solitary human was soon a dead human! We depended on groups.

2. Group survival necessitated rules of behaviour for its members. If you like the idea of moral rules evolving then groups with rules that worked prospered: groups with rules that didn't work vanished. So rules that were effective in promoting group survival survived. Additionally individuals were taught to obey rules which possibly ran against their personal enjoyment or even survival because they could have neither of these without the group surviving!

3. Growth from tribes to extended civilisation brought refinements. The life of a large civilisation needed more refined moral rules. Again Hayek says that by a sort of “survival of the fittest” traditional moral rules became well fitted to maintaining such a civilisation.

4. This evolutionary quality to morals is important in another way: they are bigger than human “reason”. Any person or group who imagine that they can sit down and think up a new better set are seriously deluded.

4. One of the standard initial phases of socialism is to destroy the traditional morals. Yes they intend to replace these rules with others (which they have thought up) – but the consequence is that society will be harmed. In the case of modern Western societies the moral rules which have “evolved” over the millennia have been strongly influenced by Christian ideals and are not just essential to our societies functioning as they do, but are also “good” morals.

Personally I want to bring in the added complexity to the picture of the benign influence God exerts where humans respond to him aiding the evolution of “good” moral rules on one hand but also our “sinful” human nature that is constantly at work corrupting things and leading to worse moral rules emerging.

So what do we observe looking at our own countries?

More next week.

Saving The West: the story continues

Hello, I'm Back

In the time of reflection since my last post I've had quite a bit of food for thought. We spent two weeks in China, I've read F.A. Hayek's classic “the road to serfdom”, and the anti-Christian sentiment in Australia has been bot more obvious, and has even started to be objected to in newspaper articles (well, except in the left wing press obviously!).

There has also been the Islamic State terrorist attack in Brussels and the less noticed but more lethal attack targeting Christians celebrating Easter in Lahore (the majority of victims were in fact Moslem – but that does not diminish the intent nor the human suffering).

To start, since Hayek gives valuable contemporary insights into the historical roots and rise of Nazism in Germany and since Germany is the focus of the current European “invasion” by Moslem “refugees” I will start with this.

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, has been at the forefront of encouraging this massive movement of people into Germany and in pushing other European countries to follow suit.

The immigrants are coming in huge numbers.

They are overwhelmingly Moslem, many fanatically so, and some even Islamic State fighters deliberately infiltrating with the others.

They come from all walks of life, but many are young single men with no skills likely to make them employable. Already in the Moslem areas of Brussels for example, there is a staggeringly high rate of unemployment.

Unlike the immigrants who flooded into the United States, Canada and Australia after World War II, they show no interest in assimilating into their new country and prospering together with its previous citizens. On the contrary, as these terrorist attacks highlight, they despise and reject the cultures and peoples of their adopted homes.

So how could anyone have thought that this “open door” plan could end well?

How could Merkel, her ministers of state, and other European leaders have been so blind.

I think the answer lies in European history – particularly since the French Revolution. But for the moment I will single out Germany because Hayek has provided some insights there.

Up until about the 1870's, Hayek says, England was exporting culture, ideas and religion to the rest of the world. After the 1870's England began to import all these, particularly from Germany, who took over as the world intellectual leader.

I can relate to that in the field of religion. About that time German Biblical scholars and theologians came to dominate. Even when I was in seminary – late 1970's – I remember the Old Testament professor giving a list of books to read for our coming course on the first part of Genesis. There were many by German authors, then he named one – again by a German scholar. As everyone was copying down the details the professor added as if of no consequence “Of course it is 1,100 pages … in German” everyone in the class stopped copying down that title!

The rise of German Biblical Scholars and Theologians also heralded the tsunami of “liberal theology” which has sapped the vitality of the Christian Church and nearly destroyed anything which rose above a purely nominal faith in Christ. I do not mean to blame Germany – the fact that England stopped exporting Christian ideas and began importing them speaks to a spiritual malaise in England.

Hayek goes on tho say that from about then socialism came to dominate German politics. By socialism he is not referring to social justice, but to government control of the means of production and all that goes with this type of policy. It is illustrated by an old joke: A Russian Communist official came to England as the guest of a militant union. They showed him round a modern London bakery. He seemed impressed but puzzled. At last he asked: “but where is the committee that decides how many loaves of bread are to be baked in London each day?” In Socialism everything is centrally planned: in a free market lots of little businesses make decisions – and succeed or fail on the strength of their decision making.

He maintains that even before WWI there were German academics who saw Germany's role as the superior and militaristic “revolutionary” bringing the superior Socialist economic system to the world against the commercial spirit of the, non-militaristic and individualistic “counter-revolutionary” England.

The bitterness of defeat, the myth of betrayal and the harsh reparations imposed by the victors did much to pace the way for Hitler, but Hayek points out often neglected factors.

From the 1870's on there was a rejection of academic freedom of thought – rejected as English weakness. More and more succeeding generations accepted suppression of dissenting views – culminating in the student book burning in Berlin May 10 1933.

The economic chaos in Germany in the early 1930's was worse that other parts of the West. Low-paid white collar workers saw that militant unions had pushed blue collar workers' wages much above theirs. Both were a failure of the old socialism.

Hitler's National Socialists capitalised on both. Unlike Communism the Nazi's were nationalistic rather than international in outlook. Then this second socialist revolution drew on the “oppressed” white collar workers' anger.

I would add another dimension, one visible in the rise of veneration of old pagan mythology in Hitler's Germany – the previous weakening of Christianity and the widespread “taming” of churches to serve the purposes of the government.

As we all know, that train of events caused misery and destruction. The German people to give them credit after the war rejected Nazism. To their credit, and unlike Japan, they “confessed and repented” of the evils done.

However a new socialism has taken hold, (not just in Germany of course but right throughout the West). Progressivism, or progressive socialism has wormed its way in everywhere.

To illustrate the difference between revolutionary and progressive socialism consider the old wives tale about boiling frogs. If you throw them into boiling water they (so the saying goes) jump out again. But if you put them in cold water and slowly heat it up they stay put – until it is too late!

In Australia even the term “progressive” only came into widespread use a few years ago. Only in the last year or two have they really been coming out into the open. Now we see clearly our whole Christian-based moral sysytem, we may guess white-anted from the inside over decades, collapsing before our eyes. Only now do we see that for decades progressive ideology has been seeping into and taking over every social institution. I only pray that us little frogs all over the world still have time to jump!

In Germany in particular and the EU generally, Christianity has been effectively neutered and neutralised. The progressive socialist dogma is well established, and like the old German socialism has taught generations of students to be anti-rational and to silence any dissenting voices.

So to Angela Merkel: Her policies are the result of this ideology. They are in a way also the end product result of nations rejecting God. They are also likely to fail spectacularly.

On present course there are two probable scenario's.

1.) Like Turkey in the middle ages: the Moslem “invaders” will take over.

2.) Like the 1930's : the failure of international progressive socialism will pave the way for a new national socialism and some new Hitler.

Is there another way? The only one I see as having any hope of a better outcome is a Christian revival.

Painted into a Corner

Painted into a corner.

Or more specifically I have painted myself into a corner!

I have deliberately up till now not engaged with the relevant current events – the most alarming of which are: Europe at the behest of the German Chancellor and like minded people has welcomed a huge number of Islamic “refugees” - overwhelmingly young men of military age. France has suffered an orchestrated Islamic terrorist attack. German police, politicians and media tried to cover up over 1,300 attacks by large groups of “refugee” men during the new year's eve celebrations (About half these were sexual assaults on women).

Partly my silence was because there was no lack of commentary – at least outside Europe – in the media. Partly it was because I wanted to establish some Biblical principles through which to view these events and their probable causes and significance. But for the West, with Europe in the lead, rejecting God and his ways as foolishness may be a plausible cause – in which case God handing us over to the consequences of our foolishness may be the real significance.

The Biblical model for individuals and nations receiving deliverance from God is always “repent, throw away your idols and turn back to God”. What varies is the particular sins that have the person or society entranced, and what idols they have put in God's rightful place in their lives.

So somewhere we need to look at how our national lives measure up. Somehow we need to identify the sin of our age. And we may need to trace how we got into this mess for these things to become apparent.

If you are like me (and the other Christians I know) when the Holy Spirit convicts you of the next sin on God's list for you (from Romans 7 not even Paul after 20 years as an apostle had got through his life's punch list!) you know exactly what you have to repent of! On the other hand just vague, woolly guilt feelings (even if they are almost overwhelming) are not from the Holy Spirit.

Now you see how I am cornered! There is no lack of people eager to preach what they think is the sin of our nations! About the last thing I want to do is add another human voice proclaiming more such things that are just of human origin. The Old Testament is full of denunciations of the swarms of false prophets in those days who encouraged the wicked and disheartened the righteous!

Two simple examples of voices I think are wrong would be:
a) the classic progressives who are fiercely pro-abortion – and at least 95% of abortions exactly fit the Biblical definition of murder, but at the same time passionately anti-capital punishment, which the Bible gives at least an “in principle” mandate for (how this mandate should be applied is another matter)
b) anti-nationalism to the extent that, for example, some Americans are saying they are so ashamed of their nation's conduct past and present that they think God should destroy America! Dinesh D'Souza in his book and film “America, Imagine a World Without Her” gives a very powerful rebuttal of this doctrine.

But all this means a lot more work is required comparing the various claimants against the Biblical model before we can get beyond the proverbial shouting match “You say – I say”.

Which brings me to the crunch: I need to go and do some more research before I write any more!

So …. I will not be writing any more blogs for about eight weeks …

please come back for my next blog: First Weekend in APRIL

God & Human Failure

God and Human Failure

Or how does God respond to humans messing up his plans?

The answer to this is important in in our quest to save the West. If God alone can save, and we as nations and cultures have screwed up, is there anything in the Bible that reveals enough of God's nature from past events that we can guess what his response will be in our present circumstances.

It seems to me that no-one – absolutely no-one - thwarts God's ultimate purposes. Having said that, human actions certainly may cause a great deal of pain and mayhem. Also we may have very fuzzy and self-centred ideas about what God's ultimate purposes are, so people may think (wrongly) that his purposes have been thwarted!

Some examples to think about:

Adam and Eve: when our first parents sinned by falling for the devil's line “you can become like God, knowing good and evil” that should have ruined God's plans that he could have the intimate friendship with that we see depicted in such homely style in Genesis 3:8. with the humans he created “in his image”. Certainly their sin caused them to hide from God – a human problem right to this day! Certainly there was judgement – cast out of the garden, a curse on the earth: life would be hard and end in death . But there was mercy, (Gen.3:21) God made garments for them. There was still some communion with God possible for humans, there was and is above all God's future.

1 Peter 1:20 tells us Christ was “chosen before the creation of the world”. Our human rebellion did not thwart God's plans or even take him by surprise! It did of course bring death destruction and misery to Adam and Eve's descendants – not that we can blame them – every one of us has followed in their footsteps by choosing so many times to follow our fallen nature rather than follow God's ways. What God did to save us from the eternal consequences of our choices involved a great deal of pain for him: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son …” But Revelation ends with a new Jerusalem, described in better-than-Eden motifs “on each side of the river stood the tree of life … yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse”

So God's ultimate purpose of having humans who chose to love him enjoying for ever all the delight of a close friendship with him and a communion with each other unpolluted by sin was not thwarted.

Abraham and Ishmael: I though initially this would be a counter-example but looking closer it demonstrates the same point. Indeed So do all Abraham's mistakes. God has promised Abraham (still named “Abram” at that stage) a son through is wife Sarai/Sarah. She appears barren. She gives Abraham her maid as a concubine. That was the law and custom in the ancient near east. Marriage contracts of that period have been unearthed that lay down that if the wife cannot bear children she is to provide a surrogate whose children will be legally regarded as hers.

However God's purposes are to be carried forward by a son of promise – to be born by Sarah. Hagar despising her mistress was wrong as was Sarah's cruelty to Hagar. Demanding that Abraham sent Hagar and Abraham's son Ishmael away was seriously bad by the rules of their times. The very fact that over the centuries of the scriptures being transcribed and transmitted no-one thought to “whitewash” Abraham – their spiritual “father” – but left all the unsavoury details untouched speaks to the accuracy and integrity of the scriptural record!

At the end of the day God's purposes stood despite all these, and other (like Abraham passing Sarah off as his sister when they sought refuge in Egypt) human wrongs.

Choosing a king: Remember when ancient Israel chose to have a king? That was not part of the plan.

God had provided Moses to lead them out of Egypt and through the desert wanderings to the very edge of the promised land.

Over the next few hundred years whenever there was a crisis requiring a national leader to rally the tribes and lead them into battle God raised up one for that purpose. The book of Judges records this vividly. But … this made them different to the nations round about them. These nations all had kings. Being different was part of the plan, they were the people of the one true God, they were to trust him, and specifically not try to ape the peoples round them!

As Samuel grew old – and may have been part of the problem by appointing his own sons as rulers - the people of Israel demanded a king 1 Sam 8:5 “They said to (Samuel) 'You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us such as other nations have.”

Understandably Samuel did not like this, but it was also against God plan: 1 Samuel 8:7ff “the Lord told (Samuel) '… it is not you they have rejected; they have rejected me as their king. As they have from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods. … now listen to them but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights'.”

That is a scary thought for every one of us: God gives them what they ask for even though it his best plan for them! We should be so grateful for those times when God does not give us what we ask for in prayer – he is protecting us from our own ignorance and dumb choices! But I take comfort – and warning from the story of Baalam (Numbers 22). He was warned! Only when he persisted was he allowed to go when he would have been so much better to have stayed.

OK God gives them a king, even though they asked for the wrong reasons (to be like other nations), even though they were in fact rejecting God as their real King (who appointed leaders as needed), and even though kings came as good, bad and just plain greedy.

But God's ultimate plans were not upset. Re-arranged perhaps, but the repair - if repair it was – to his plans was so seamless that looking back we cannot see how it could have been any other way.

Jesus, God's own son sent to reverse the curse of the fall was the Messiah, the son of king David. The prophesies using kingship to describe Jesus; the examples of Israel's kings being bad shepherds requiring God to announce he would step in and be the good shepherd, how would it have worked had there been no kings? Unanswerable questions of course, but I do find it breathtaking how brilliantly God counters human (and demonic) moves against his purpose!

One more quick example: the North-South split.

Remember how King Solomon for all his good start went bad at the end and how God sent a prophesy that ten of the twelve tribes would be torn from his dynasty. (1 Kings 11:29ff)

The North rebelled against Solomon's son Rehoboam, and from then on there were two kingdoms, “Israel” in the North with Samaria as its capital and “Judah” in the south based on Jerusalem.

The North generally got into more trouble, but God still sent them prophets to warn them to come back to him – Amos and Hosea for instance. My point is that he did not abandon the North to their own devices. Sadly the history is that they disobeyed him and fell to the Assyrians who were excessively brutal and the original population were carted off and dispersed while foreigners were brought in to replace them (ie the Samaritans of Jesus day were not ethnic Israelites).

On the other hand God passed up many good opportunities to merge the two kingdoms again. This should give us food for thought when we are told that merging churches which have split sometimes centuries ago is some sort of Christian imperative!

Just to complete the story, the South survived until the Babylonians were the expanding power, they were comparatively humane, so while the Judah-ites were deported they were kept together, maintained their identity and seventy years later a remnant went back to Jerusalem. And from them at the appointed time in the town of Bethlehem was born God's Messiah - Jesus.