Category Archives: Culture

It Takes Time

The short term may look bad, but the long term is glorious

In this second part of the interview between Dr. Gary North and Cal Beisner, the discussion turns to long-term and short-term views. A long-term victorious outlook will yield much different results than a short-term pessimistic outlook. Thinking through the consequences of the Christian worldview on every topic of human existence takes time. This will not happen when the church is convinced that its time on earth is short.

Adam’s Fall or Christ’s Resurrection

Which is more important?

[See original text, by Gary DeMar, here.]

It seems like such a simple question for a Christian to answer. The answer seems so easy. Obviously, the resurrection is more important, now and in eternity. If there had been no resurrection of Christ, our faith would be vain. [See 1 Corinthians 15:13-17]

But this immediately raises a second question: Which is more important, the effects of Christ’s resurrection in history or the effects of Adam’s Fall (God’s curse of the ground) in history? The answer to this corollary question is going to make a lot of very dedicated Christians unhappy. The effects of Christ’s resurrection are more important, as time goes by, than the effects of Adam’s Fall.

The implications of this statement, if believed and put into daily practice, would revolutionize the Christian world. In fact, they would revolutionize the entire fallen world. We can go farther: the implications will revolutionize the fallen world. Yet this is what most Christians categorically deny today. They deny it because they have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that the effects of Adam’s Fall are overwhelmingly, inevitably more powerful in history than Christ’s resurrection. [1]

On today’s podcast, we run the first part of an interview between Gary North and Cal Beisner about worldviews and how they influence everything, including environmental issues. The Apocalyptic Environmentalists have been the majority voice in the media for decades. Cal and his organization, the Cornwall Alliance, work to inform, educate, and motivate Christians to get involved with facts, truth, and optimism.

[1] Adapted from Gary North’s book, Is the World Running Down?

How a War on ‘Misinformation’ Led To a Coronavirus Tragedy

As Covid has tragically proven, the war on misinformation, not misinformation itself, is perhaps the greatest threat to our civilization.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.” – Richard Feynman

Spectacular falsehoods, deep truths, and Canadian truckers are finally piercing the long-impervious Covid storyline. 

So writes Bret Swanson, president of the technology research firm Entropy Economics, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and chairman of the Indiana Public Retirement System (INPRS), in a recent article on realclearmarkets.com.

Here are some excerpts:

When Dr. Scott Atlas began advising the U.S. government in August 2020, Facebook erased his videos arguing against widespread business and school closures. YouTube erased the December 2020 U.S. Senate testimony of Drs. Peter McCullough and Pierre Kory, world-class experts in cardiology and critical care, respectively, and demonetized evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who were all trumpeting effective early treatments. YouTube also erased the testimony of Drs. Jay Battacharya (Stanford), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), and Martin Kulldorff (Harvard) at a forum led by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Twitter permanently banned Dr. Robert Malone, pioneer of mRNA and DNA gene therapy technologies.

These acts of censorship were just some of the most obvious. Yet they reverberated far and wide. The erasure and smearing of eminent scientists sent a clear message to thousands of other physicians, professors, medical editors, journalists, CEOs, and influential leaders: toe the party line, or we will destroy you. These rippling layers of cancellation then denied an even wider circle of people in all walks of life the information needed to make sound medical, personal, and political decisions.

Continue reading →

Natural and Unnatural Immunity

An article worth reading

Quote:

Rather, the best health care professionals ask the right questions, think critically, question government and Big Pharma narratives, respect their patients’ choices, and work diligently with their patients to help their patients perform rational risk-benefit analyses.  These doctors and uncertain scientists, some of whom have lost their professional licenses for crime of independent thought and the practical application of the scientific method, include the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration, the Frontline Doctors and now the Alliance of Doctors and Scientists. 

Here‘s the rest.

Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?

When it could no longer be denied, we heard: "Oh yeah, maybe."

Writes Matt Ridley in spiked-online.com: “In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.”

However, the strong possibility of a lab-leak in Wuhan can no longer be denied.

Ridley concludes:

The emails unveiled this week reveal no good scientific reason at all for why these leading virologists changed their minds and became deniers rather than believers in even the remote possibility of a lab leak, all in just a few days in February 2020. No new data, no new arguments. But they do very clearly reveal a blatant political reason for the volte-face. Speculating about a lab leak, said Ron Fouchier, a Dutch researcher, might ‘do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular’. Francis Collins was pithier, worrying about ‘doing great potential harm to science and international harmony’. Contradicting Donald Trump, protecting science’s reputation at all costs and keeping in with those who dole out large grants are pretty strong incentives to change one’s mind.

In August 2020 Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were among the lead investigators to receive $8.9million to study emerging infectious diseases, in a grant from Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of Francis Collins’s National Institutes of Health.

So, once the lab-leak narrative finishes its migration from conspiracy theory to accident (or even conspiracy) fact, who will be made responsible in the end?

Covid measures are driving people towards God

In Austria, they are praying the Rosary for deliverance from their government

It’s not just intellectuals who, perceiving many Covid measures as evil, are (re-)discovering God (see here and here for examples).

At least in Austria, it is also “common people” who are starting to pray. That’s no surprise, as the Alpine country is the country furthest down the road towards tyranny and totalitarianism with regard to the Covid measures. It plans to impose a vaccine mandate for every adult from February this year, enforcement is to start in March.

The only mitigation from the government and the majority in parliament has been to exclude the 15-17-year-olds from this measure, who were originally included.

On the Lifesite News website there is an interview with one of the leaders of the protests, Alexander Tschugguel. The most amazing part of the interview begins about half-way in. Tschugguel reports that many are publicly praying the Rosary, and people are joining these groups who say they have never prayed before. These are grassroots Christians being joined by grassroots non-Christians. I cannot verify this but please judge for yourself when you watch the video whether this man is telling the truth.

Is it Time for Intellectuals to Talk about God?

Another progressive leftist finds religion in the face of the pandemic measures

Naomi Wolf is a well-known left-wing, secular, progressive, human-rights (in particular women’s rights) activist. Or rather, was.

She wrote recently, in an article whose title I have copied for this entry:

I confessed at that gathering in the woods with the health freedom community, that I had started to pray again. This was after many years of thinking that my spiritual life was not that important, and certainly very personal, almost embarrassingly so, and thus it was not something I should mention in public.

I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.

I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends. [My emphases.]

Wolf, who is of Jewish heritage, concludes:

So I told the group in the woods, that the very impressiveness of evil all around us in all of its new majesty, was leading me to believe in a newly literal and immediate way in the presence, the possibility, the necessity of a countervailing force — that of a God. It was almost a negative proof: an evil this large must mean that there is a God at which it is aiming its malevolence. [My emphasis.]

This is amazing. After journalist James Delingpole, who was a more or less secular conservative, and Professor Mark Crispin Miller, a (former) leftist secular academic, we have a third more or less well-known public personas who profess that the pandemic, or rather the public reaction to the pandemic, have led, or should one say, driven them to God. Of those three, Naomi Wolf is by far the most famous.

Admittedly, she’s not Christian. She writes in the same article: “As I often say, I’ll take any faith tradition. I’ll talk to God in any language — I don’t think forms really matter. I think intention is everything.”

Still, I see a trend, a pattern. Let’s see who’s next.