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Lots of statues being torn down across the United States. Some Fox News commentators complain that many such statues are of abolitionists. Don’t the BLM and Antifa mobs know their history, they ask quizzically? Well, no they don’t, as it happens, but what they do know is that the statues are of white men. In fact, with few exceptions, statues are mostly of white men. Why is that? It’s simple.
White men of the past made the modern world. They abolished slavery, which had existed since the dawn of time; they gave us basic freedoms, with enduring institutional arrangements to protect those freedoms; they gave us creature comforts and gadgets we now take for granted.
You might have noticed that I didn’t say white people. I could have been more sexually sensitive but it would have been subterfuge. Truth is, it was overwhelmingly white men. I have no idea whether it might have been women or brown or black or Asiatic people in different circumstances. But it wasn’t.
Lest you sense a note of triumphalism in my tone on account of me being a white man let me hastily say that I am not one of those white men who made the modern world. I would rate my own personal contribution as non-existent. In fact, most of us — white or ‘of colour’ men or women — are mere passengers.
At the same time, as a white man, I have no time for those who enjoy the fruits of the white giants of the past while whining about so-called white privilege — tell it to downtrodden white people — or about the slavery or colonialism of the past. Get over it. Obviously, rich NASCAR African-American driver Bubba Wallace isn’t over it. He complained that someone had left a “noose” in his garage. Turns out to have been a bit of old rope, found in most NASCAR garages to help with lifting the doors up and down.
You would think the FBI which sent fifteen agents to investigate and the media and those around blubbery Bubba would be so red-faced with embarrassment that they would hide away. Not a bit of it. They are waiting with bated breath for the next “example” of racism. And they are looking so hard that they are bound to find it.
People complain that NASCAR is very white. Racism! When I catch American basketball and football it appears very black. No racism! And when have we last seen a white man of any nationality mixing it up with black sprinters at Olympics’ finals? No racism! On the other hand, Olympic swimming is very white. I am waiting for that to be branded as racism at work.
According to the Manhattan Contrarian (23 June), Facebook has only 1.5 per cent African-Americans among its tech workers and Microsoft only 3.3 per cent. Is this subliminal racism on the part of these terribly woke organisations? Or is it that there are, relatively speaking, fewer black Americans that can do the job, as there are fewer top-level white sprinters? Plump for the latter, but if you do you gotta know you’re a racist.
Again, personally, I have little doubt that my IQ would never have passed muster among the whiz-kids at Facebook and Microsoft. So I don’t feel the least superior because I am white; nor, however, do I feel the least inferior to the sanctimonious nerds who infest these progressive tech giants. I would recommend this feeling to all those African-Americans rejected by Facebook and Microsoft and by other tech companies which, according to the Manhattan Contrarian, are too shy to publicise their comparable employment numbers.
Clearly accusations of racism are being used to cloak Marxism. Instead of workers of the world unite it is people of colour unite, together with those among white populations anxious to atone for the assumed sins of their forbears. In the absence of God, prostrating themselves to Black Lives Matter and sacrificing statues evidently offers them redemption. Once you lose God something spooky takes its place.
I have tried to make the point that we are all in a worldly sense inferior to the white men of stature who made the modern world. There is no basis for thinking that the ordinary man or woman, black, brown or white, living today are anything but, so to speak, equally inferior. Take that to the bank. And take this:
Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all (Colossians 3:11).
I can see no answer to the fake Marxist faith, in whatever guise it is cloaked, other than a resurgence of authentic Christianity. It seems increasingly unlikely that the battle can be won in the political arena — the political power centres having already been largely lost to the Left. It’s religion or it’s societal regression into what, I don’t know, but it won’t be pleasant.
“ I can see no answer to the fake Marxist faith, in whatever guise it is cloaked, other than a resurgence of authentic Christianity.”
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Agreed Peter, thank you. There are few saying this in the public sphere.
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“Authentic Christianity” being the outworking, by word and deed in every area of life that Jesus Christ is Lord, now today, and Caesar is not.
Psalm 110 is prophesy given before Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection and ascension.
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The LORD said unto my Lord,
Sit thou at my right hand,
until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion:
rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.
Psalm 110:1 & 2
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The Psalm is speaking of God’s kingdom on Earth – the result of faithful preaching of The Great Commission, in it’s entirety. For too long Christians have preached a truncated gospel that stops at how to get to heaven.
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Christians should stop trying to build the Church (that’s Jesus’ job) and instead work on the bigger picture, which is The Kingdom of God.
It’s a quote we probably know well, and it is one at a time of crisis too, albeit a little over two hundred years ago, but it is well worth remembering: ‘ Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field’.
Burke reminds us that these ‘shrivelled, meagre, hopping’ creatures are merely ‘troublesome creatures of the hour’.
Put it another way one might reassure, those prepared to listen, that evil is but short-lived and Truth will in its own time prevail, despite postmodernist belief that there is no such thing as Absolute Truth.
These half-life creatures know little history, study less scripture, yet claim to have the only and the rightful claim on matters universal.
If they bring about the demise of Western Civilisation, then we need to look to ourselves, and how we may have enabled such a decline to occur, because those minorities, those shrivelled insects are merely instruments of a greater will.
Authentic Christianity has to begin with Biblical inerrancy Peter, and that means taking the creation account seriously without trying to white-wash it with progressive, humanist evolution myths.
Especially given that the doctrine of creation without death – the good world without sin – underpins every other doctrine in the Bible. If you want authentic Christianity then perhaps start by taking the Word of God as given.
‘For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them’ Exodus 20:11.
How could it possibly be more clearly and resolutely stated?
And how long is a day at the dawn of time pgang?
It’s common in conservative church circles to describe the West as “post-Christian”. The Progressives outside church circles think so too, and they are delighted to be making such progress. One often hears, for example, that the LBGT Enlightenment is an example of the advance towards a more inclusive society.
To a Christian, this is merely a sign of moral decay. LBG people in debate often say that acknowledging their lifestyles to be ‘normal’ is a triumph over the backward superstitions embodied in the Christian West, Yet those same lifestyles long predated Christianity. Rather, history shows that the stricter standards set by Christianity raised the moral tone of of society. It was the moral power of Christianity that made prosperous modern democracies possible, healed the wounds of unchecked paganism, and restored the biological family to its rightful place as the basis of Western civilisation.
Unfortunately, however, historical reality no longer dominates popular discourse. Rather we have the invented historical narratives of feminism (that women have been oppressed by men throughout history – until now) and of the sexual revolution (that true human sexuality has always been suppressed by puritanical bigots).
The shredding of history to satisfy the emotional needs of degenerate mobs is typical of periods of social revolution. The rise of violent intolerance, which is a necessary attribute of all whose morality is based on their feelings, is symptomatic of a society descending into chaos. The result is a power vacuum into which steps the inevitable dictator, to establish totalitarianism in the name of freedom. It happened in modern Germany as recently as the 1930s. It can can happen here too. .
Peter Smith: How long is/was a day? Well, it’s a day. We have other words for long time periods, such as eon. Why didn’t Moses use one of those? Even in a metaphorical sense, to stretch the meaning of ‘day’ to ‘billions of years’ is absurd. You would get an ‘F’ in English class for attempting that.
When Moses was giving the law to the Hebrews, as noted above, do you think they would have understood the word ‘day’ to mean anything else?
Here is the full passage. (Trigger warning – it contains the ‘s’ word).
‘8 Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labour and do all your work. 10 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.’
To construe this passage any way but literally is to commit an act of violence upon it.
Genesis itself makes the case intentionally clear (probably because the evolution myth was already prevalent in pagan society). At the end of each day of creation it concludes with a clear and precise summary of the time taken, which could not be any plainer. ‘And there was evening and there was morning, the Xth day.’
Are you suggesting that the sun shone on all of the earth for billions of years without any night? That death came before sin?
To take the meaning of this text in any way but its plain meaning, which is carried throughout the rest of the Bible, is deconstructionism.
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There is a lot of lamentation here at Quadrant about the way people and society fall for bad ideas, such as cultural Marxism or Keynesianism, and rightly so. But I see good people falling for a much more damaging lie every day – evolutionary long ages. It is a concept that deliberately manipulates humans, undermining the authority of God so that they we turn our backs on Him.
Long ages evolutionism is not truth. There is no natural proof for it, just as there is no natural proof of a 6 day creation. I have been an avid follower of this topic for decades because it is one of the fundamental rots that is bringing down the West. It is directly responsible for the devaluation of God and human life, and the erosion of trust in the Bible.
There is no genuine science behind evolution or long ages, just as there is no science behind CAGW. It is a bunch of lies that references other lies in a closed loop that is encapsulated by the worldview of humanism. Counting isotopes and extrapolating dates from them doesn’t work (radiometric dating). There is no evolutionary ‘fossil record’ (fossil dating). Stratigraphic dating methods reference fossil ages which reference stratigraphy (stratigraphic dating). Uniformitarianism is an idiotically untenable axiom. Gravity was not the sole cause of the universe becoming what it is. We cannot date the vastness of the universe with light travel times because we don’t understand anything about light, space or time. We don’t even know whether light travels at the same speed in both directions. The unutterable complexity of biological information did not come about by random mechanical interactions. ‘Chance’ is not a natural force. ‘Life’ is more than just living tissue. Life from life is an empirically proven natural law. Life from non life is not.
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So there is a very brief exposition to your question which was, of course, deeply philosophical. But don’t just ask the question and presume that it is unanswerable, or that it has been answered by progressives such as Hugh Ross, or atheists. That it is to be like the ignorant fools tearing down statues in the name of nothing, wallowing in lies. Maybe do your own research from a Christian (God’s) perspective. Creation.com has a lifetime of reading on the subject. The earth really is ancient – it’s several thousand years old, and humanity has traversed a great journey through it since its beginnings.
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You and I agree on most things, especially this, ‘I can see no answer to the fake Marxist faith, in whatever guise it is cloaked, other than a resurgence of authentic Christianity.’
The truth isn’t always convenient. All I’m saying is, authentic is as authentic does (and thinks).
“…don’t just ask the question and presume that it is unanswerable…” Not for a moment pgang did I think you couldn’t answer it.
pgang, this convention has been used across religions. In the Vedic tradition, a day in the life of Brahma (the creator) is 4.3 billion years.
Getting your ‘head’ round the Old Testament is not for the casual reader, nor the feint-hearted. It helps being able to read it in the original Hebrew, if not the internet tool ‘Biblehub’ and Strongs can be of assistance.
Literal readings of the Old Testament is worthwhile (at a level). Close study, coupled with the use of the hermeneutic process can be even more beneficial. Understanding that the mind-boggling depth of metaphor in the OT (that’ll put the wonderful metaphysical poets of the 15th and 16th Centuries to shame) should make most wary of entering into polemical debates.
I’ve studied the OT for years and tend to restrict my reflections to a small group of like-minded (now elderly) students.
Most ancient scripture stand outside the realm of historiography, and ‘fact’ dissolves in the well-pool of archetypes (as Jung might argue) where ‘story’ becomes more real than our physical world. Scientific analysis barely scratches the surface, for that matter. Reflection goes a long way when it comes to understanding (da’at in Hebrew).
Warty, you point to the manner in which the Hebrew Scriptures stand very distinctly from other ancient writing. It is not written as a myth-story, but as a factual account of God’s work and. as mentioned above, the style of Genesis was very likely intentionally written to refute the myths. That is why it has endured the test of time, just as it will endure beyond our own age of unreason.
From all that I have read on it one thing stands out for me: scholars read into it far too much of their own cleverness. A classic example of this is the idea that the creation account metaphorically reflects the Jewish ceremonial tradition (this is the sort of nonsense vomited out of JEDP). It does not even occur to these scholars that the opposite is true, just as it is plainly described in the Scriptures, such as in Exodus 20 above.
I wish that I could read it in Hebrew. The little Hebrew that I have been able to study in relation to the OT has made it even more remarkable, and its inspired genius only convinces me more of its veracity. But I do know one thing: you would be hard pressed to find a Hebrew scholar who doesn’t take it at its word.
The human mind does not discern truth from the natural world, nor from within itself. Truth is gifted to us as revelation, which culminated in the miraculous resurrection of a very dead man to an eternal, physical life. You won’t find that out from just looking at nature.