The Hallelujah Chorus

The Hallelujah Chorus by silent monks....

Putting Christ Back in the Government Schools

I certainly agree wholeheartedly with the spirit of putting Christ or prayer or the Bible back in the government school and the practical recommendation that all Christians remove their children. I would, however, take a slightly different approach in framing the question.

The issue, as I see it, is the legitimacy of the institution itself. If the institution is legitimate, then we must reform it by calling it back to obey the law of God and fulfill its God-ordained function. We can and should participate in such organizations as salt and light in order to restore the institutional acknowledgment and worship of God.

However, if the institution is illegitimate, then we should pray for God to destroy it and labor to dismantle it from without, not within. For example, no Christian would campaign to restore the acknowledgment of Christ to their local brothel. They certainly don’t patronize it in order to be salt and light, nor do they send their children to work there for purposes of evangelization. [Admittedly not an exact analogy, but hopefully close enough to be useful.]

The real question then is: Are government schools a legitimate or an illegitimate institution? Are they a corrupt institution needing to be redeemed by the gospel or a synagogue of Satan to be dismantled? This is the antithesis with our brothers and sisters.

I'm of the opinion that since we don’t find Caesar’s image on any of our children, they don’t belong to Caesar and therefore should not be rendered to Caesar for him to have his way with them. We do, however, find God's image in our children and we find Scripture commanding us to give them to God, to teach them to fear and serve God. (Caesar's kids being the possible exception.)

For this reason coupled with the Biblical teaching concerning the function of civil government (punishment of evil doers, cf Romans 13:1-4)), state schools are not a Biblically legitimate institution.

On the other hand, some Christians view government schools as a legitimate authority. The fact that it’s free babysitting (lol) doesn’t hurt. Corrupt? Yes, but legitimate nonetheless. Showing these people how government schools lead our children in breaking God’s commandments in that they give them another god by teaching that people have made themselves, they blaspheme his name by robbing him of his glory as the Provider and Sustainer, they manipulate children to not honor their parents, they assault their chastity, they encourage them to murder their offspring, they lead them into a life of stealing by blurring the distinctions of private property, and they lead them into a life of lying by denying the existence of Truth, only gives these people more reason to work harder to restore Christ to a corrupt institution.

I believe the reason for not supporting the Restoration of Christ to the government schools lies not in how bad they are, but in how illegitimate they are, no matter how good they otherwise might be. Our mission is not simply to rewind government schools to an earlier day when the Bible was tolerated in them in the hopes that the same movie will end differently, but to discard the entire DVD.

You Trust FOX News?

Here's further proof FOX news is completely unreliable. But don't miss the last line in this clip...Jane Akre's (one of the fired reporters) whistleblower suit was overturned on appeal because there was no law that requires news programs to state the truth! We all knew that, but now the courts have agreed, putting it in writing.

Now in the interests of full disclosure, I run a BGH free goat dairy - well, I fund it, Robert runs it. But it accepts no federal or state subsidies, employs no RFID chips, does not profit from illegal alien labor (James 5:4), gives all animals free range pasture, gets no property tax concessions or small business loans, is not too big too fail nor was it responsible for any increases in Federal Reserve "assets", has no corporate veil of immunity, yet makes the best kefir in Texas.

One Town Hall Meeting

In words of the speaker:

I, David William Hedrick, a member of the silent majority, decided that I was not going to be silent anymore. So, I let U.S. Congressman Brian Baird have it. I was one questioner out of 38, that was called at random from an audience that started at 3,000 earlier in the evening. Not expecting to be called on, I quickly scratched what I wanted to say on a borrowed piece of paper and with a pen that I borrowed from someone else in the audience minutes before I spoke. So much for the planned talking points of the right wing conspiracy.

Cured in the United States

Obama's health care plan will be:

• written by a committee whose head is on sick leave,
• passed by a Congress that hasn't read it,
• signed by a president who smokes,
• funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes,
• overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and
• financed by a country that is so broke they're using debt as money.

And we'll all be treated by government employees working for reduced wages.

The Great Debate - Does God Exist

I first heard this debate between Dr. Gordon Stein and Dr. Greg Bahnsen sometime in the spring of 1985 - probably during spring break of my junior year in college. It was on a tape that was obviously made from the audience. But I had met Greg Bahnsen about 10 years earlier and knew him to be a captivating speaker. So I pushed on. Within 5 min of placing it in the the "walkman" I was hooked. Within 20 minutes I was cheering and doing involuntary arm pumps. That escalated to a standing ovation with Bahnsen's deadpan monotone answer in the following exchange:

Dr. Bahnsen: Do you believe there are laws of logic then?
Dr. Stein: Absolutely.
Dr. Bahnsen: Are they universal?
Dr. Stein: They are agreed upon by human beings. They are not laws that exist out in nature.
Dr. Bahnsen: Are they simply conventions then?
Dr. Stein: They are conventions, but they are conventions that are self–verifying.
Dr. Bahnsen: Are they sociological laws or laws of thought?
Dr. Stein: They are laws of thought which are interpreted by men and promulgated by men.
Dr. Bahnsen: Are they material in nature?
Dr. Stein: How can a law be material?
Dr. Bahnsen: That is the question I am going to ask you.
Dr. Stein: I would say no.


Dr. Stein cross examines Dr. Bahnsen.


Dr. Stein: Dr. Bahnsen would you call God material or immaterial?
Dr. Bahnsen: Immaterial.
Dr. Stein: What is something that is immaterial?
Dr. Bahnsen: Something not extended in space.
Dr. Stein: Can you give me an example of anything other than God that is immaterial?
Dr. Bahnsen: The laws of logic. [Thunderous Uproar]


But you'll have to listen to the tape to appreciate the full crowd dynamics of this exchange.

I was so impressed with this debate that I began to transcribe it by hand. With no computer and a poor quality audio file, it was a tedious task. Eventually it reached 30 single spaced handwritten pages. I hung on to those papers until 1992 when I purchased my first computer and typed them into digital form - another lengthy process for someone who never learned typing or keyboarding. Now 24 years later, on the 13th anniversary of Dr. Stein's death, I am delighted to post this mighty triumph of Jehovah over unbelief. God defeated the Syrians in the plain because they thought Jehovah was just a God of the hills. It's as if God confounded Dr. Stein who thought he was just the God of irrational faith. In a debate that will certainly be studied for centuries, God showed himself to be the God of Faith and Reason, the God of seen and unseen evidence.

Transcript of the Great Debate

The Great Debate - Part 1

The Great Debate - Part 2

It's Conservative! But Is It Biblical?

I ran across this little video made in 1948 (along with a number of similar ones) on Utube. It presents the classic conservative message very well - that freedom to worship where we want, to labor as we see fit, to speak as we please, and so on, made America a great and wealthy nation.



It's very well done, interesting, and even a little entertaining, but is it right? It's right wing, but is it true when measured by the Truth?

Contrast their message with Deuteronomy 8:6-18:

So you shall keep the commandments of the LORD your God by walking in his ways and by fearing him. For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, flowing out in the valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. ...

"Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, ... . Beware lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' [or today...freedom or free enterprise has produced this wealth]

"You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day."

Moses makes it clear that freedom to worship God, freedom to labor for our own benefit, and freedom to speak the truth are not the cause of our prosperity, they are the result of God's blessing.

If 60 years ago the Christian Right was already saying that their hand had gotten them this wealth, is it any surprise that today we find ourselves visited by the curses spelled out in Deuternonomy 27 & 28?

Operation ?

(FYI - The false flag terrorism perpetrated on Cuba was called Operation Northwoods.)
I wonder what this operation is called? Since we'll probably have to wait 25 years to find out, I won't spend much time wondering...but just for a moment, I wonder if it's Eastwood or Knotwood?

Now Operation WouldNot .... that would make my day.

His assertions concerning the historical funding and origins of the Al-Qaeda are discussed in greater detail in George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War.

The State of the Nation: The Collapse of Christian America

Another "collapse of culture" presentation by none other than Ken Ham (60 minutes on streaming video).

Did You See This Bit of News In US Media?

After two smugglers were stopped last week with what at first appeared to be $134bn in US state bonds, the tension and paranoia surrounding the fate of the dollar hit a new high.

For every dollar created by the Federal Reserve to fund the stimulus packages, there is a dollar in US Treasury securities floating around. We may not know where the stimulus money went, but maybe we now know where some of the securities went.

From the UK's Telegraph:

Border guards in Chiasso see plenty of smugglers and plenty of false-bottomed suitcases, but no one in the town, which straddles the Italian-Swiss frontier, had ever seen anything like this. Trussed up in front of the police in the train station were two Japanese men, and beside them a suitcase with a booty unlike any other. Concealed at the bottom of the bag were some rather incredible sheets of paper. The documents were apparently dollar-denominated US government bonds with a face value of a staggering $134bn (£81bn).
How on earth did these two men, who at first refused to identify themselves,come to be there, trying to ride the train into Switzerland carrying bonds worth more than the gross domestic product of Singapore? If the bonds were genuine,the pair would have been America's fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the UK and just behind Russia.
No sooner had the story leaked out from the Italian lakes region last week than it sparked a panoply of conspiracy tales. But one resounded more than any other: that the men were agents of the Japanese finance ministry, in the country for the G8 meeting, making a surreptitious journey into Switzerland to sell off one small chunk of the massive mountain of US bonds stacked up in the Japanese Treasury vaults.

continue
Of course $134bn is only about 1/20 of the debt the Federal Reserve now holds. Maybe they were Federal Reserve agents ....

Collapse of Culture - Part 2

Part 1 can be found here.

What about today?
This year celebrates the 150th anniversary of the publication of a book attributing our existence to the power and wisdom of matter. That book has replaced the Bible as the source truth and the theories it teaches have replaced God as Creator. The prevailing faith today is that the earth began with a bang, a BIG bang. The underlying and often unstated assumption of the big bang is that matter is eternal. Few, if any, believe that matter was created in the big bang. The big bang only brought matter into it current form.

The question begging for an answer is, “Where did the matter come from that was reorganized in the big bang?” Some have suggested it came from other universes. But that doesn’t answer anything about how it came into being. Others hold to an irrational belief (that is not at all the same as Biblical faith) that there is some explanation yet to be discovered.

If matter is all there is in this world, then in matter is hid all wisdom and knowledge. The know-how to bring us into existence in our current form resides in matter and is expressed or revealed through the random and chance events of evolution. Since matter has no beginning, matter is eternal. Eternal? Containing all wisdom? These are the attributes of deity. In reality, matter has become the god of our culture. There are very few, if any, respected institutions of higher learning where a biologist or physicist could deny evolution, teaching instead recent creation according to Genesis 1, and be granted either a terminal degree or tenure.

Law Today
The situation is no better when we inspect the laws of our land. Not only is the first commandment no longer a law in our land, most Christians don’t even think that the first commandment should be a law in the land.

No punishments accrue to those who take God's name in vain, and have not in recent memory. In fact, enforcement of the first table was largely abandoned even before the Constitution was written, although it was considered improper to openly deny their truth long after they ceased to be enforced as laws.

Today even the 2nd table of the 10 commandments has been abandoned as the basis of our culture.

The fifth commandment, teaching us to honor those in authority over us, has been completely overturned. If a son was to defiantly tell his father in some isle at the local grocery store, “No, I won’t put that box of crackers back on the shelf” and the father were to lovingly spank his son and patiently admonish him to obey, who’d be in trouble with the law? The obedient father or the disobedient son?

It’s obvious to the most casual observer that the 6th Commandment forbidding murder is no longer upheld as law of our land. If you are unborn, or very old, or unable to speak or move your body, our culture allows you to be murdered at will.

But what about the 7th, 8th, and 9th commandments? Have these been overturned in our culture?

Please bear in mind, I am not talking about people who break these commandments. Cultures have always had to deal with people who commit crimes- murderers who kill other people, thieves who steal from other people, liars who perjure themselves, adulterers, blasphemers, and idolaters. What I want to impress upon you is that these commandments have been overturned not just by criminals, breaking the law, but also in the very laws themselves by which our land is governed.

Seventh Commandment
(Data taken from Judith Reismann's work, Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences)
In 1920 a zoologist specializing in gall wasps joined the faculty of the University of Indiana in Bloomington. He soon tired studying the mating habits of wasps and turned his attention to studying the sexual behavior of a different animal – humans. That zoologist, who you know as Alfred Kinsey, was no small time researcher. He received significant funding from prestigious foundations for his work.

In 1948 he published an academic work called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. A few years later he published one on female sexuality. Both these books were heavily promoted as scientific studies on the sexual practices of mainstream America by a conventional unassuming American family man and scholar. Both purported to prove that sexual activities most people considered abnormal perversions were really quite common in normal America.

Although Kinsey presented his work as representing a cross section of normal American males, it was anything but that. Of the 5,300 males that comprised his study, 2,446 were convicts, 1,003 were homosexuals, 50 were transvestites, 117 were mentally ill, and 650 admitted to sexually abusing boys. Based on his findings Kinsey claimed that “95% of ‘normal’ American husbands, fathers, uncles and brothers are sex offenders; 69% use prostitutes; 85% ‘fornicate’; 50% are adulterers; and 10-37% are part or full-time homosexuals.” (See footnote 23 at http://www.drjudithreisman.org/how.html ) Findings from a group like this are hardly representative of normal America, let alone a suitable basis for establishing standards of morality.

But that’s not the worst of it. Kinsey’s published research included actual criminal activity of sexual predators. In 1998 Dr. Fritz von Balluseck’s criminal trial records were uncovered in Berlin. According to news reports at the time, von Balluseck was a Nazi pedophile who was allowed to experiment on Polish children in occupied Poland. It turns out from these trial records that his database containing 20 years of criminal sexual activity against children was part of Kinsey’s “data.” Stuck in his diaries are letters from Kinsey encouraging him in his “research.”

Another pro-Kinsey biographer, James Jones, admitted in a British TV interview that Kinsey’s Male volume utilized the work of 9 pedophiles. Now it’s one thing to report on criminal activity. But it’s quite another thing when the research itself constitutes criminal activity. In this case, infant boys as young 2 months were sexually assaulted by stopwatch wielding predators and the results reported in Table 34 (that’s found on page 180 of the Male volume). ( See http://www.drjudithreisman.org/archives/alecreport.doc )

Despite being the work of convicted sex offenders, despite being populated with data from the dregs of society, despite nearly 50% of his sample population being prisoners in jail, the Human Male was billed as a scientific study of normal people. It became a New York Times bestseller. But it did far more. It became the scientific basis for the American Law Institute’s model penal code.

Today, the laws of nearly every state have been radically altered to conform to theories and ideas advanced in his fraudulent work. On the basis of Kinsey’s junk science laws relating to the 7th commandment were eliminated or the penalties drastically reduced under the notion that it can’t be wrong if 95% of the population is doing it. The consequences have been devastating, especially for women and children who have lost the protection God’s law provides. (See http://www.drjudithreisman.org/how.html )

Dr. Judith Reismann, the leading voice uncovering Kinsey’s crimes today, found that this fraudulent work was cited 799 times in major court decisions in a recent 14-year period. His junk science was the basis for Roe v. Wade.

Eighth Commandment
What about the 8th commandment, the one about not stealing?

Suppose you could create money, hundreds of millions of dollars and then loan it to people at interest – even very low interest. You could get rich overnight, without any labor as God commands. If you could create $10 million by just saying that you had the money and loan it, even at 1% interest, you could sit back with a 6 figure annual income just for cashing the interest checks.

Why doesn’t everyone do this?

• First, unless you have special permission from Congress, you would rightly go to jail for fraud.
• But secondly, if everyone did this, public confidence would be lost and the ponzi scheme would collapse. Nevertheless, the Federal Reserve does exactly this. When their point man goes to Capitol Hill to talk about it, congressman gather around and listen with reverent deference to his every word.

The Federal Reserve act passed in 1913 allows them to earn interest on money for which they did not work, on money that has been created out of thin air as the front page of the NYT proclaimed a few weeks ago.

Theft is getting something for which you did not pay and which has not been given to you. We live in a finite world, if someone is getting something for nothing, someone else is getting nothing for something. That is theft. Just because the two parties don’t see each other doesn’t make it any more right. But this sort of theft has been the law of this land for almost a century. Since 1913 our entire system of money has been built on theft.

Every dollar that is in circulation today, every dollar that is in your bank account, every dollar that is invested in the stock market, is created from debt that will never be repaid. (See The Two Faces of Debt by the Federal Reserve.)
According to the Congressional testimony of Marriner Eccles, if there was no debt in our monetary system, there would be no money (i.e. Federal Reserve Notes) in circulation – everyone’s bank account would be zero! (Marriner Stoddard Eccles, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, 1934-1948, in testimony before the House Committee on Banking & Currency, Congressional Record, September 24, 1941, p 1338.)

How could the 8th commandment be overturned any more than to have an entire economy based on fraudulent money?

Ninth Commandment
What about the 9th commandment – the one against lying? Has it too has been overturned as the law of our land?
I have a copy of a document in the National Archives (click on search and enter "Cuba Project Northwoods" to find the whole document. Here is a direct link to one of the pages.) that for many years was top secret. It was written by the Department of Defense in 1962 and personally signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It’s called the Northwoods report.


Northwoods - Click on image to enlarge.
The purpose of this document was to think of ways to get the US into a war with Cuba. Did you get that? The purpose of this document was to brainstorm on ways to get us into a war with Cuba. It contains all sorts of ideas for deceiving the American people into supporting a war with Cuba. Here are a few ideas presented in the document.

It is possible to create an incident which will make it appear that Communist Cuban MIGs have destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack.

a. Approximately 4 or 5 F-101 aircraft will be dispatched in trail from Homestead AFB, Florida, to the vicinity of Cuba. Their mission will be to reverse course and simulate fakir aircraft for an air defense exercise in southern Florida. These aircraft would conduct variations of these flights at frequent intervals. Crews would be briefed to remain at least 12 miles off the Cuban coast; however, they would be required to carry live ammunition in the event that hostile actions were taken by the Cuban MIGs.

b. On one such flight, a pre-briefed pilot would fly tail-end Charley at considerable interval between aircraft. While near the Cuban island this pilot would broadcast that he had been jumped by MIGs and was going down. No other calls would be made. The pilot would then fly directly west at extremely low altitude and land at a secure base, an Elglin auxiliary. The aircraft would be met by the proper people, quickly stored and given a new tail number. The pilot who had performed the mission under an alias, would resume his proper identity and return to his normal place of business. The pilot and aircraft would then have disappeared.

c. At precisely the same time that the aircraft was presumably shot down a submarine or small surface craft would disburse F-101 parts, parachute, etc., at approximately 15 to 20 miles off the Cuban coast and depart. The pilots returning to Homestead would have a true story as far as they knew. Search ships and aircraft could be dispatched and parts of aircraft found.

Or how about:

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated).

We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement would also be helpful in projecting the idea of Cuban involvement.

Apparently lying is a normal way of conducting business for our Departments of State and Defense. Knowing liars generally lie more than once makes me wonder how many other wars were started under similar pretenses.

The Conclusion of the Matter
The clear, unavoidable teaching of scripture is that righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. There are cultural consequences for cultural disobedience. God judges sin. That judgment has economic consequences.
When the king or the ruler of the land does not acknowledge God as Creator, when His name is blasphemed, His day profaned and ignored, when authority He has ordained is undermined, when murder is not just allowed by the civil magistrate, but promoted, when every sort of sexual perversion is legally protected, when an entire economy is built on fraud, theft and deception, when the civil magistrate is routinely lying to it’s citizens, and when he takes money from those who work and gives it to those who covet, the natural order of things is turned on its ear resulting in broken hearts, broken bodies, broken homes, and broken churches.

God will not be mocked. No nation, not even America with all its wealth and greatness, can laugh in the face of God, blaspheme his Name, and mock his Word as this nation does, and expect God to continue to open the storehouse of heaven and provide food in abundance and the rain in its season.

The inescapable conclusion is that not only has the law of God been set aside and ignored, the exact antithesis of those laws has become the law of our land. The foundation of law on which our culture was founded has been completely demolished. The culture will sooon follow.

But although the symptom of the problem can be found in the laws, the solution to the problem is not. The solution to our murder problem is not a better law restraining abortion and euthanasia. The solution to the theft on which our economy is built is not the abolition of the Fed. Though I would work for both of these, accomplishing them will not by itself solve our problem. The law can not change the desire of people’s hearts. God’s law can only be restored as the law of the land when lives are changed by the Holy Spirit working through the gospel truth and God’s law reigns in people’s hearts.

That won’t be accomplished by putting prayer and the 10 commandments back in government schools. More than any other single thing, the schools themselves are the problem. They need to be abolished.

Jeroboam, the first king of the northern half of Israel, didn’t want his subjects going up to Jerusalem to worship because he feared their hearts might get re-united with their brethren and they might want to rejoin the southern kingdom. If they did, he would lose his kingdom. So he rewrote history (and the Bible) and taught the people a lie. Moses taught the true version of history, that Jehovah delivered them from Egypt. But Jeroboam told the Israelites that a pair of golden calves delivered them from Egypt. Today government education continues in the tradition of Jeroboam. Government education of children is and was the primary means through which the law of God was removed from our culture.

To the young men and women reaching adulthood today, the mantle is now passing to you. Your God given commission is to restore the Law of God as the foundation of society – beginning with yourself and then your home.

Of all the things that you might do with your life – I encourage you to do many things, to climb many mountains, explore many planets, to build great monuments to the glory of God, to study for the rest of your life this world that God made in the Light of the WORD God gave – never forget that the most important task you will ever do and the most significant contribution you could ever make to rebuilding our culture is to raise a generation of young men and women who know Jesus Christ and love the Law of God.

There is nothing more important. There is nothing of more significance; there is nothing more honorable; and there is no job more difficult, more sanctifying, or more rewarding than the faithful completion of the high and noble calling of raising a quiver full of godly children who have not been educated according to Jeroboam’s version of history and redemption. (*)

I charge you this day to be a king, ruling over your own passions bringing them into subjection to the written Law of God.
I charge you this day to be a priest, pleading daily before the throne of grace for the work of the Holy Spirit that you would be enabled to do all that God has commanded.
I charge you this day to be a prophet of the of the Most High, daily bringing to yourself the Word of God that you may be complete thoroughly furnished unto every good work.

(*) If you think that’s overblown, name one other job of which it is said you will be saved if you complete it faithfully. 1 Timothy 2:15

Collapse of Culture - Part 1

‘Tis the season of graduations and the requisite commencement addresses – the annual ritual of one generation passing its collective wisdom to the next – or in the case of UCLA in 2009, a graduate of the previous year passing his wisdom on to his former classmates. Here’s my version of what the young men and women assuming the mantle of adulthood need to know today. They have a difficult job, to say the least, for they are being handed a country, a culture, and way of life that is in the final days of collapse. Our borders are like sieves through which foreigners pass at will. No one wants our debt because we are deemed poor credit risks (the massive spike in Federal Reserve assets belies their claims to the contrary). After decades of bullying and abusing weaker nations, much of the rest of the world would like nothing better than to see us obliterated. Our military serves under foreign commanders. Our companies are subservient to foreign judges and courts. And The Simpsons are not only considered entertainment, they have actually replaced the Bible and Shakespeare as our culture’s greatest source of idioms, catchphrases and textual allusions. If you have read Deuteronomy 28 recently you’ll remember that each of these things – economic privations, ascendancy of foreigners, and subjection to foreign rule – are given as elements of judgment.

Identifying God
In times like these, it’s easy to make grand sweeping claims about cultures collapsing and the like and it might even be hard to find someone willing to debate the claim. But just because a country’s economy is having a tough year, doesn’t mean their culture is collapsing. There have been many periods of tough economic times, some even worse than our current experience, that have not spelled the end of the culture. To substantiate this claim in a more intellectually satisfying way, we need to make a critical inspection of the foundation that under girds our culture. We need to find clear evidence that the foundation is indeed missing or crumbling before the claim that it’s collapsing can be substantiated. To that task we now turn.

A culture is always defined by the god that they serve. The god of a culture is whoever (or whatever) is acknowledged as the source of life and the source of law. These two, the source of life and law, are inextricably linked because the lawgiver of a culture is the one who by a creator’s right of ownership has the prerogative to define its laws. Conversely, the laws of a society will always reflect who is acknowledged as the source of life by that society.
What about American culture? Who do we acknowledge as the source of life? Let’s look at our culture at the time of its founding in the early to mid 17th century.

I have some copies of almanac covers – about 30 of them spanning the years from about 1650 to about 1750. They are published by different people in different colonies. In typical Almanac fashion, they all have the date prominently displayed. But unlike today’s almanacs with the date discreetly tucked into a corner, these dates are splashed across the entire front page, similar to the example shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 - Almanack Cover from 1660 (Click image to enlarge)

This almanac – in many ways the cultural equivalent of the magazines that crowd our check out stands today – clearly acknowledges that the very basis of numbering years is the advent of Christ our Lord and that the Creation of the world occurred some 5,600 years ago. In prominently listing these dates on the front page, the almanac publisher was not putting a controversial statement on the front page of his magazine in order to increase sales. Every one of the 30 almanacs I have puts the date of creation on the front-page in a similar way. Clearly these date assertions are as culturally acceptable as the date on Time magazine is today. Just as clearly, our culture, in its early days, recognized Jehovah to be the Creator and his Creation to be recent.

What about our laws?

Did you know that at one time in this county not only was the entire Decalogue incorporated into the civil law of the land, but the most egregious and heinous forms of all but one or possibly two of the 10 commandments were, at some point and time, considered capital crimes – just as in the scripture. Isn’t that astounding?

Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639), stated that magistrates “shall have the power to administer justice according to the Laws here established, and for want thereof, according to the Rule of the Word of God; ..."

Around 1639 some of the citizens of Connecticut got together to organize the civil government for their land. The minutes and actions that were taken at that early meeting are preserved for us in the Fundamental Agreement of the Colony of New Haven. In there we find this very interesting statement: When asked “WHETHER the scriptures do hold forth a perfect rule for the direction and government of all men in all duties which they are to perform to GOD and men, in families and the commonwealth, just as in matters of the church?” all assented by holding up their hands, no man dissenting. The charter goes on to record that “Afterwards it was read over to them, that they might see in what words their vote was expressed. They again expressed their consent by holding up their hands, no man dissenting that scriptures hold forth the perfect law for governing in civil matters.

The Massachusetts Body of Liberties, compiled in 1641, listed 12 capital crimes. The very first was: “If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other god, but the Lord God, he shall be put to death. (Deut 13: 6 - 10; Deut 17: 2 - 6. Ex 22:20).” Those references are right in the law. It goes on to enumerate 11 more capital crimes relating to blasphemy, perjury in a capital crime, homosexuality, hardened rebellion, and theft of people, which we call kidnapping.
A synod met in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1640 to discuss the question, “Should the civil magistrate uphold both tables of the 10 commandments? If I distill down the pages and pages of explanation and defense, their answer was an emphatic yes.
Clearly, Jehovah was recognized as our God and acknowledged as our Lawgiver in the church and state alike.

Laws against blasphemy, profanity, and swearing continued all the way into the 1830’s.
Many living today remember the so-called blue laws. Some even exist today regarding the sale of alcohol. Even the constitution acknowledged the sanctity of the Sabbath – the President had 10 days to veto a bill (Sundays excepted). That’s not business days like we have today. Saturday was included in those 10 days. Sunday was excepted because there was a universal understanding that Sunday was the Lord’s Day.

When we examine the early days of our culture, we find a people that acknowledged God as Creator and God’s law as the law of the land.

What about today? That's part 2.

Thanks for the Pick-Me-UP

According to Roger Wiegand in the above article, the the financial crisis we are currently experiencing is simply the fallout of the Fed's recession avoidance actions in 2000. However, he thinks the unfolding tragedies will be legendary and will threaten the very existence of the America. Some of his predictions include:

G20 initiated trading wars, massive unemployment and state bankruptcy leading to widespread violence and crime, bankruptcy and breakdown of retail and auto industries, Israel attacking Iran and setting off WW III, class warfare, and expansion of dictatorships around the globe.

Of course all this can be solved, preventing a return to the dark ages, by marking down assets to realistic levels and restructuring economies on sound economic footing.

The problem is there are no hints as to how one goes about structuring an economy on a sound economic footing.

It is very true that slavery and social collapse, as Mr. Wiegand describes, often follow economic upheaval. The hyperinflation and resulting financial devastation destroyed the foundation of German culture in the 1920's and created a willingness to accept industrial nationalization, youth brigades, and increased surveillance and regulation, setting the stage for Hitler's dominance in Germany.

Even John Maynard Keynes, the namesake of a perverted economic theory, understood this quite clearly. In 1920, he wrote in Economic Consequences of the Peace,

By a continuous process of inflation governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some… There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does so in a manner in which not one man in a million can diagnose.[1] [While he understood this, it did not stop him from recommending inflationary policies.]

Now people have been making predictions, like Mr. Wiegand's, for many years. First it was the threat of nuclear war with Russia, then oil shortages resulting in the collapse of the world economy, then holes in the ozone wiping out life on earth, then domestic terrorists, then Islamic terrorists ( Oops, Islam is a peaceful religion, it's just aberrant Islam terrorists), and now finally the global financial crisis that has the potential to knock us back to the dark ages.

However, it should be pointed out that in predicting every conceivable scenario, our friend is really predicting nothing. He's simply setting the stage to be able to make the self-serving marketing claim that "I predicted that."

The truth of the matter is, things are far worse. The roots of these problems go far deeper than the 2000 era manipulations of Mr. Greenspan and his banking colleagues. The solution involves far more than simply getting the economy on a sound footing.

Scripture actually has a great deal to say about the source of economic prosperity. When the children of Israel were preparing to enter the promised land, Moses recounted for them the history lessons that they had learned over the previous 40 years. In Deuteronomy 8, after reciting some of the economic blessings God had sent to them, such as the free food and the shoes that did not wear out, we read:

Therefore you shall keep the commandments of the Lord thy God to walk in his ways, and to fear him. For the Lord thy God brings thee into a good land, ... A land of wheat and barley and vines and fig tress and pomegranates; a land of oil, olive, and honey; A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack anything in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou may dig brass.

When thou have eaten and are full, then thou shalt bless the Lord thy God for the good land which He hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God in not keeping His commandments, and His judgments, which I command thee this day: Lest when thou have eaten and are full, and have built goodly houses and dwelt therein; and when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied and all that thou have is multiplied; Then thine heart be lifted up
and thou forget the Lord thy God …

But thou shalt remember the Lord thy God for it is He that gives to you power to get wealth, that He may establish his covenant which He swore unto thy Fathers as it is this day. And it shall be that if thou at all do forget the Lord thy God and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that you will surely perish. As the nations which the Lord destroys before your face, so shall you perish; because you would not be obedient to the voice of the Lord your God. Deuteronomy 8:6-14, 18-20 (KJV).

Clearly, Israel’s economic prosperity would be a direct result of their obedience. So important was this concept that Moses had half of the Israelites stand on one hill and half of the Israelites stand on another and recite the exact consequences of obedience and disobedience to each other. The blessings for obedience that they recited are in Deuteronomy 28. There we read:

And it shall come to pass if you shall hearken diligently to the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe and to do all His commandments which I am commanding you this day, that the Lord thy God will set you on high above all nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake you, if you shall hearken unto the voice of the Lord your God. Blessed shall you be in the city and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, and the fruit of your ground, and the fruit of your cattle and the increase of your kine, and the flocks of your sheep. Blessed shall be your basket and your store.

And the Lord shall make you plenteous in goods, and in the fruit of you body, and in the fruit of your cattle, and in the fruit of your ground, in the land which the Lord swore unto your Fathers to give you. The Lord shall open unto you His good treasure, the heavens to give the rain unto your land in his season, and to bless all the works of thine hand: and you shall lend unto many nations and you shall not borrow. And the Lord shall make you the head and not the tail; and you shall be above only, and you shall not be beneath; if you hearken unto the commandments of the Lord thy God, which I command you this day, to observe and to do them. Deuteronomy 28:1-5, 11-13 (KJV).

Economic prosperity comes from obedience to the Word of God. In other words the first step to economic recovery is

• Stop abortion
• Stop inflation (which particularly robs the widows and others on fixed incomes)

When Ezekiel (Ezekiel 34:25-29) speaks of the blessings of the Great Shepherd, he does so in economic terms, saying that the rain would come in its season, and as a result, the produce of the land would yield its fruit in abundance. Even on the return of the Israelites from 70 years of exile, Zechariah (Zechariah 7:9-14) repeats the words of Jeremiah in telling the Israelites that their troubles came as a result of their refusal to obey the Lord. Physical, material, economic, and spiritual blessings flow from cultural obedience to the Word of God. The richest man in the world was the son of the man after God’s own heart. Is it any surprise that the unmatched economic prosperity of Israel under Solomon followed one of the most godly kings Israel every had?

Our spiritual condition has economic consequences. Economic disaster is God's doing. Economic blessing is his doing also. We can not expect God's blessing on a nation built on fraud. We cannot expect God blessing on a nation that so systematically kills the helpless and oppresses and impoverishes the poor and the widow with the tax of inflation as this nation does. As a nation that never pays its debts, we can only expect a life of unending servitude.

[1] Keynes, John Maynard, Economic Consequences of the Peace (Penguin USA, 1988), p 235.

An Ancient Solution - Just Cancel the Debt

There are numerous sins and innumerable follies on which the collapse of the financial world and the global economy could be blamed. None of them, incidentally, have any connection to free enterprise or a shortage of legislation. The solution, on the other hand, has everything to do with the free market and the removal of harmful, monopoly granting legislation.

As it turns out, the free market could solve the crisis without any stimulus from Congress, if it was simply allowed to operate without additional crippling legislation. The situation in a nutshell is that foolish borrowers over-committed themselves, incurring debts that would take the rest of their life to repay. Greedy bankers illegitimately created the principal, hoping to receive interest on money for which they did not labor. Of course, God is not mocked. Only the Creator can create ex nihilo. The money created out of nothing disappeared even faster than it was created, taking with it the hopes and dreams of those whose wealth was built on it.

As Michael Hudson notes, Lehman's mortgages were trading at 22 cents on the dollar before it was nationalized, meaning that people were buying the notes for less than a quarter of what the loan originator paid in funding the loan. So with no intervention, Lehman Brothers loses lots of money, their employees don't get their bonuses and the company goes bankrupt. Yes, investors will lose money; but life and the economy will go on. Enron's bankruptcy, while destroying investor confidence in the veracity of CEO's and accounting firms and wiping out those who were over-invested in its stock, had little negative impact on the overall economy.

The benefit, on the other hand, of allowing the free market to buy these "toxic" notes at steep discounts (i.e. 80% or more) is that the new owners of these notes can go to the foolish borrowers and cut their mortgage by 75% turning a $400,000 mortgage into a $100,000 mortgage or a $100,000 mortgage into a $25,000 mortgage and not have lost a penny doing so. With a much lower loan, many of the foolish borrowers might have a reasonably good chance of paying their mortgage or at least selling their home for the value of the mortgage. Property prices would fall, making home ownership affordable for more people and gradually restoring demand for housing. Since many lenders will have lost their shirt, loans will be much harder to get, thereby slowing the creation of a new bubble. (To prevent a new bubble, existing laws granting monopoly power to some corporations to create new money must be repealed.) This could all happen without any help from Uncle Sam and without further impoverishment of taxpayers. And, it puts the burden on the those who should rightfully bear it- those who unjustly profited by the illicit creation of money in the first place.

This solution is outlined in this delightful interview with Michael Hudson. Thanks Mom for bringing it to my attention.

Astronomical Debt?

The Federal Reserve has been busy creating money out of debt for well nigh 100 years... well, at least that is what they say they are doing. In the early 1940's they had increased their assets from the measly $140 million, with which they started life, to over $2 billion [Congressional Record, September 24, 1941, page 1342]. In the intervening years their creative efforts have grown their assets to nearly $2 trillion. By the way, that's a 10.7% annual return for 68 years, achieved without ever selling one glass of lemonade, mining one grain of gold, or forming one bead of sweat.

Today, thanks to their efforts, and those of their fellow central bankers around the world, the face value of derivatives in circulation in the global economy is thought to be well over 1 quadrillion dollars. One might be tempted to think that, however fraudulent or useless their product might be, it's at least a prodigious output.

Or is it?

God created some 70 sextillion stars in one day by the word of his power. Of course that is just our best estimate after 6000 years of estimating. But assume it's close. That's 70 million stars for every single virtual dollar in ciculation- all made in just a day's work. And unlike a paper note of the Federal Reserve which couldn't even reach 1 watt in the best of woodstoves, stars are massive thermo-nuclear reactors each producing the equivalent of 700 quadrillion gigawatt power plants year after year.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? Psalm 8:3-4

Moved By Compassion

I don't know if this is a spoof or for real. But either way it's a good reminder that one's example and character bellow far more loudly than one's words.

Money FAQS

As an author of a money book, it's no surprise I get asked from time to time about our money.
Here are a few such examples:

1. How is money 'created' and how does it flow between the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and the banks, etc?
   
   Basically, every Monday the Treasury Dept auctions IOU's (i.e. bills) which mature in 13 or 26 weeks. They sell other longer notes at specified intervals throughout the year. Investors buy these pieces of paper (now all digital) on which the government promises to repay a certain amount of money with interest. Most are bought by private investors. To this point everything is legitimate. But if there are not enough investors to raise all the money the government needs, the Federal Reserve Corporation (Fed) gets involved and buys the remainder. This is the part that's the real problem. The Fed writes a check (again all digitally) to the US Government. But there is nothing that represents any labor or capital that is transferred to the US Government when this check clears the bank. Because the Fed is the check clearing agency, no one knows that there was nothing in their checking account when they wrote the check. The Fed increases their assets (they now hold a Treasury Note) and the US Government now has a few more billion dollars (Federal Reserve Notes) in their bank account. This site has a fairly good description of the details- of course it doesn't talk about the ones the Fed buys! http://www.ny.frb.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed41.html
   
   Recently the Fed has had to buy significantly more of this debt which has caused their assets to skyrocket. (See Rescue to the Rescue to the Rescue ). However the percentage of their debt comprised of US Treasury securities has plumetted from the 90's to around 50%. This means they have bought non US Treasury securities at an even greater rate.
   
   Money is also created when individual banks make loans. This part is fairly well explained in Modern Money Mechanics.
2. When you say the Treasury Dept auctions bills, where do they get the funds backing the bills? Or are the bills nothing more than paper?The bills are uncollateralized. Another setting may make the audacity of this whole scheme more striking (and clear). If you go the bank for a loan, you give the banker a signed and notarized note and the banker gives you money. In effect, the bank buys your note. They are the creditor, you are the debtor. In this case the Treasury Dept. is the debtor giving people notes and the T-bill investors are the creditors loaning the US their money. Every time a T-bill is sold by the US Treasury, the US debt is going up. T-bills and notes are in reality no different than the note you give the bank when you take a loan.
   
   The big difference, of course, is that banks typically require collateral before giving you money (i.e. buying your note). They won't accept a note from you that is only backed by your faith and credit. Not so with the US Government. Not only do people accept (i.e. invest in) uncollateralized notes from the US Government (Treasury Dept), they stand in lines for the opportunity to do so. Instead of talking about loaning their money to Uncle Sam, people say they are investing in, or buying, T-bills as if they were acquiring the productive output of someone's labor. We buy cars, we buy houses, food or gold that someone mined. In each case we are giving money in exchange for the fruit of someone's labor. When we extend the fruit of our labor to someone and do not receive the fruit of their labor in exchange, this has historically been called a loan, not a purchase. In the case of T-bills, people exchange the fruit of their labor for the IOU's of the US Government and under the linguistic revisionism of the Federal Reserve, they now have a debt-assets - See Two Faces of Debt . I discuss the importance of semantics and strict construction of words in a little more detail in Dollar Noncents.
3. When you say the Fed buys the left-over’s, who is the Fed? Isn’t this like a little boy making phony lemonade to sell on the street curb and then selling the left-over to his dad?
   The Fed is the Federal Reserve Corporation. They are a private non-governmental agency (This is all according to their own documentation.) which has been granted monopoly powers to buy notes of the US Government with nothing - well they use their own notes, but unlike the US Treasury notes, they will never have to pay on their notes. On the other hand, the T-bills and notes issued by the US Treasury Dept are real, they are very real. They are a real as the note you gave the bank when you bought your house - if you have a loan. They represent obligations of the US Government. The notes we use as currency are not notes of the US Government, they are notes of the Federal Reserve Corporation. The process of converting US Treasury notes into Federal Reserve Notes is called monetizing debt - turning debt into money.
4. Then the Fed writes a check to the U.S. Gov- Isn’t the Treasury Dept who started the process a department of the U.S. Gov?
   Yes, it is. The Fed is the check clearing agency - that why Federal Express is called Federal Express. In the old days of paper checks, they moved the checks from the Fed bank where it was cashed to the Fed bank where it was drawn.
   According to the Fed,
   

   When a bank receives a check for deposit, it provisionally credits the account of the check depositor and later collects the funds from the bank upon which the check is drawn. Rather than sort all the checks and send each one back to the bank it was drawn upon for settlement, depository institutions transfer many of their checks to Federal Reserve Banks for collection. In turn, Reserve Banks pay the depositing banks for the total amount of the checks, and then collect the funds from the banks on which the checks are drawn. The Federal Reserve processes about one-third of all checks in the United States. (from http://www.ny.frb.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed08.html)
   
   

   If you were the check clearing entity, you could write a check on your bank account and when it came across your desk in the process of being cleared, you would simply credit the depositing account and no one would ever know that there never was any money in your account or that you never even had an account to begin with. The depositor would be happy because the money showed up in their account. You could buy anything in this way with no labor at all. This is how the Federal Reserve "buys" T-bills and notes or other commercial paper securities.

A little complicated? Absolutely, it's supposed to be. By creating an elaborate process of smoke and mirrors involving exchanging each other IOU's, everyone is kept blissfully ignorant, trust is maintained in the faith and credit of the US Government, and no one knows (or cares) that the wizzard is just a fat, balding con man. WHERE"S TOTO??
Frankly, this is so hard to understand because it's too simple, fraudulent, and stupid be believed. But aren't the boldest cons often the most likely to succeed!

The State of the Church Revealed in the Family

What a telling indictment of the state of the church. The church is the light of the world. If the church is in darkness, it's no wonder the nation is busy trying to marry men to men, create money out of debt (debt money - what an oxymoron!), sell their bridges and roads to their sworn enemies, modify the global temperature of the earth, give away their sovereignty to foreign nations, make men and women equally capable of waging war, and find intelligent communication in the emptiness of deep space.

If we don't believe or won't obey scripture, how can we complain when the world doesn't either?

It's tempting to point our finger at all the problems in our nation today, but in so doing there are 4 fingers pointing back at us, right where they should be pointed according to Jehovah.

When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people [not the world] who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. (2Chronicles 7:13-14)