(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.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
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).
Sunday, June 21, 2009
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:
Of course $134bn is only about 1/20 of the debt the Federal Reserve now holds. Maybe they were Federal Reserve agents ....
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).continue
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.
Of course $134bn is only about 1/20 of the debt the Federal Reserve now holds. Maybe they were Federal Reserve agents ....
Thursday, June 11, 2009
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?
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.
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
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.
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.Or how about:
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.
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).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.
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.
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
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
