Antiskeptic were wrong, there really is nothing to say…

What have we done to Christmas?

Pine trees, snow, Santa Claus, reindeers, profits, KPI’s, advertising, sales. Debt. Divorce. Conflict. Stress. What an ungodly time of year. Where we submit to the expectation that we give each other presents. Where we feel compelled and pressured. Where retail staff are pushed to the limits by angry people who want what they need to get someone now. A supposed Christian festival marking the good news of great joy. The coming into the world of our saviour. And what have we turned it to? A marketplace in the temple. Let’s strip off everything that isn’t anything to do with Jesus. Lets get rid of the winter paraphernalia (in Australia). Lets get rid of some fat dude who rewards kids for being self-righteous. Lets get rid of the need and the expectation that money be spent and debt be accumulated buying stuff. Let’s get rid of the ‘Christmas Spirit’ (sounds like witchcraft to me). Ignoring the fact that decorated pine trees, the late December time-frame, the present-giving and the fat guy all actually have a darnsight more to do with European pagan rituals for the winter solstice than anything to do with the saviour of the world being born in a stable among the muck and the animals in the most inextravagant manner imaginable up to two years before a group of men came from the east to present him with a gift for his birth, his coronation and his burial, soon after which a jealous ruler put to death thousands of infants that were born at roughly the time Jesus was. Let’s not worry about the fact that the birth of Christ is marked by a mixture of humility, joy, grief, gladness, sorrow, relief, pain and death. It should be enough to concern us that our modern version of Christmas is marked by greed, debt, materialism and idolatry. Call me Scrooge, but the church should be leading the way to destroy the modern christmas and get real about Christmas. Not defending this complete perversion of what it was meant to be.

Shame on you, Minister.

Five years ago Hungary decided that this old man, Charles Zentai, needed to be extradited to Hungary to face the court, having been accused of murder, which Hungary have conveniently characterised as ‘war crimes’. Today, government Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor decided that they can have him. There are a few reasons why I find this unpalatable.

Mr Zentai has been a citizen of Australia for 50 years. The reason this is an issue for me is that simply the government and indeed a good proportion of this country are talking about border security at the moment as being a major threat to Australia’s sovereignty. What has this got to do with Mr Zentai? Australia, by serving him up to Hungary based on their classification of him as an accused war criminal is surrendering their sovereignty. In their efforts to protect the perception of their sovereignty by beating their chest and coming up with phrases that racist bogans can print on bumper stickers with the backdrop of our flag and slap on the bumper of their commodore , they are treating people indecently and putting needy people through hell and turning them out into Australia after many years locked up as haunted and empty shells that once contained humanity, just so that they can look tough in the protection of Australia’s sovereignty so they can appeal to the bogan set who are sitting on their couch watching ‘the telly’ and foaming at the mouth to see foreigners kicked out of ‘their country’ by ‘Ruddy’. Hello, if you’re white, you’re a foreigner, you sit there telling Aboriginal Australians to get over it and then curse Muslim women for wearing their regular attire. Here’s the deal. If you want Australia’s sovereignty to be protected, get angry that the World Police have decided to put their greasy fingers on an Australian citizen and classify him under some scary title in order to get the world to snap to attention. Either that or get prepared for the fact that if you’re white and you live in Australia we could make up a retrospective law to punish you for illegal possession of the land on which your television, beer fridge and ute sit.

An Israeli group of ‘Nazi Hunters’ is behind this. They set themselves up a few years ago to bring ‘war criminals to justice’. By their own admission, ordinary people were often forced to do terrible things during World War II. Considering that the few remaining people that were involved in Nazism during WWII are extremely old and one would generally presume frail, and have had to live all this time realising that they have done something that, at the time to them seemed usually to be in good faith to their government, and according to their government was the legal and right thing to do, but turned out to be a terrible and monstrous thing, I would like to know where the justice is in chasing them down. Here’s the thing. At the end of WWII the nazi leaders were rounded up before a tribunal in Nuremberg and found guilty of breaching laws that didn’t exist. This set up a body of law that we refer to these days as war crimes. It’s not really that bad that the men who wielded the power to cause these things to happen were punished by the international community. What bothers me is that we now have a body of law that punishes people for obeying the law that tyrants forced upon them. Zentai himself at around the time of the incident that he was accused of was suffering greatly from this. He was not a nazi, but he was part of a police force over which the nazis had control. It has been said that he faced beatings and even death if he did not comply with the rules. And historically speaking, this would seem to be accurate. In the process of carrying out the will of men like Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Lange, Liebehenschel and other evil characters, it has been alleged that 4 Hungarian police officers, one of them allegedly being Zentai, the rest of them now dead, killed a young Jewish man, who himself was breaking the law. The nazi leaders faced punishment for these acts at Nuremberg. Now Brendan O’Connor has decided to release an old man to the hounds because there is a group of people who can’t move on from something terrible that occurred over sixty years ago and still want to punish people for Hitler’s crimes. Shame on you minister. Shame on you.

The right to selfishness.

I was just having a chat with someone, when I realised that generally if your focus is on yourself things won’t be well with others around you. It was in the context of discussing how we’d been in a position where someone was talking about something to us, we had been exhibiting clear body language that we really didn’t care, and yet this person passionately dribbled on for about 45 minutes despite our attempts to change the subject. Why? Because all he cared about at that moment was himself and his interests. These things somehow blinded him to the fact that within 2 meters of his face three people were so sick of the topic they all looked like they wanted to become one with the table over which we were eating. He was really communicating to us that he didn’t give a rats about us, what he wanted was to be the centre of focus. I think right can have this effect on us.

How can you tell if one of your rights are being infringed? By looking at yourself and seeing how you are affected. Where rights are focussed on you can essentially ignore everyone else in the world and focus on yourself, and expect everyone to behave in such a way as you are catered for. Next thing, everyone’s doing it, and you have a situation where everyone is so self interested that people can’t live together and work through arguments. It’s such an anti-social way of living.

Enter judges. When each person is so impassioned by their own situation that they simply can’t agree on a better way to deal with things, someone has to decide the outcome for them. It kind of resembles two children fighting over something, which they will because their development hasn’t allowed them to get to a stage where they can practically reason some situations yet, and then the adult has to step in and adjudicate. The problem is, when we look at it like this, all of a sudden we’re elevating the status of judges from just another person who has to make a decision to resolve the argument that we’ve become to selfish to resolve ourselves to the status of a morally and intellectually superior being. But this is simply not true. A judge is just someone who’s savvy with the law.

When judges have to apply themselves to the rights issue, we end up with someone who we think is more qualified to tell us what our rights are forcing their opinion on us, and too bad if they’re wrong, because they’re in a position to punish us if we disobey. In Australia we’re in a position where judges generally shouldn’t be able to do that, but in countries with a political focus on individual rights its a whole different story. Whereas in Australia judges are legal professionals who are somewhat (and I have to say not completely) limited to working with the law, when you add a bill of rights to the mix you end up with a legal professional who has superior moral status and powers over 99.999% of the population. Why? Because people can’t agree on what rights everyone should have. So they edit the rights and the edit them down to the point where they became a shapeless, vague, amorphous statement that could mean absolutely anything so that everyone can be happy with them. What’s the problem with this? Somebody then has to decide what these statements mean, which means that those people get to declare what is morally good and right for everyone. And these people are judges. I’ll give an example.

A popular right in the Western world is the right to free speech. But what is free speech? Literally it means I can say anything I want and not have to answer for it. But we know this isn’t true, because at some point our right to free speech will end up doing damage to somebody’s reputation (reputation not really being considered  a right). So the judge gets to decide the line between you’re ability to exercise your right and and your responsibility to not damage someone else’s reputation unfairly. In the case of free speech that can sometimes be fairly uncontroversial, and not necessarily morally-centred. Until you get to the point where judges decide to read by implication a right to political communication from a Constitution that was deliberately and expressly intended not to enumerate any rights. But that’s another gripe for another day. For a more controversial matter, the US Supreme Court decided that abortions should be legalised because of their moral reading of the right to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. There was other stuff involved obviously, but when it came down to it, this right was pivotal in the decision. How can you make such a moral decision based on such a general statement? It’s simple, if everyone agrees on it, it’s because everyone can read it in a way that suits them. Which means you can make it mean anything based on your moral persuasion. Which means that 5, 7 or 9 lawyers sitting around a bench with wigs and capes shouldn’t be the ones who get to decide what’s wrong and what’s right when the decision extends beyond law and into morality. And how can we stop them from getting that power? By not establishing a bill of rights. Simple.

Get off your High Horse

Lately it seems to be a popular trend in some circles for people to reject important parts of Christian doctrine for – among other equally pathetic reasons – the reason that it doesn’t make sense to some people.

Let’s take, for example, the virgin birth or immaculate conception of Jesus. God did it this way for a reason, and made certain it was recorded in scripture and preserved accurately over hundreds and even thousands of years (more accurately than any other ancient document – do a little research to find out how astoundingly so) so that it could be in my hands today. There are those out there who seem to know better than God who say that really it’s not important. These people are idiots.

To take the specific example of the virgin birth, it is important because when mankind fell, flesh became sinful, and in fact, cursed. It wasn’t just Adam who fell, the Bible says that through the one man, all became sinful. Humanity fell. Sin is inherent, it is passed on from Mother and Father to children by virtue of the fact that a child is made from the flesh of their Mother and Father. You aren’t sinful from the date of you’re first sin, you are human, so you are sinful. A bunch of awkward questions come from this, and I know that parents who have lost infants or unborn children may find this hard to swallow, so for their sake I will mention that salvation is the Lord’s and God’s grace is mysterious in many ways. Nevertheless, you are born of tainted flesh. For Jesus to be without sin, he could not be. This is why the virgin birth is so important. Jesus was not born of Mary or of Joseph, Mary was more or less the first surrogate mother. This is one reason why Jesus is referred to as the second Adam. God created Him from scratch, and He is good.

The reason that there are those who say this is not important and brush it off or even reject it is because when you apply this to their theology things get screwy. Rather than submitting their theology to God’s, they’d rather ignore what God said and downplay its importance. This applies beyond the issue of the virgin birth, wherever people ignore the Bible it’s through the operation of their own pride, they don’t want to humble themselves before the almighty God, they want to call the shots. There are too many ‘Christians’ who want to do it their way, they’re happy to wear a Christian t-shirt and sing along at church, but the second things get a bit uncomfortable for them, they want to dictate wrong and right to the God who created the universe and set everything in order. You don’t get to pick and choose. You’re either following Him or you’re not. If you’re happy to put your hands on the communion elements and then go home and put them all over your girlfriend, and you want to stand before God and tell Him why that’s okay, you’re lukewarm. If you’re lukewarm, he spits you out. Easy as that. The Bible has been miraculously preserved, some parts for up to four or five thousand years. It is relatively few words considering, I get a feeling God was trying to say something with them. God has revealed himself through and in accordance with the Bible to many, many people over thousands of years. Who do you think you are to claim you have the better way? Pull yourself together. He is God, and you’re a dirtbag. Get off your high horse.

David Crowder Band – Church Music

So far I haven’t had a real in depth or critical listen through, so I’ll update this review, but on first listen I’m very impressed to the point I caught myself dribbling…

This album seems to me to (musically speaking) be a more logical progression from A Collision, an album where many different sounds were played with, but yet still somehow produced a well-structured and solid album. The only way that Remedy seems to fit in between is possibly the greater use of electronic sound that we hear on Church Music.

There aren’t a lot of quiet moments, the music is always doing something, and when the band ‘goes loud’ you get hit by a wall of sound that’s about as subtle as a one-legged rhinoceros on a train platform and leaves your eyes rolling around like marbles in a jar. Nevertheless, the musical arrangement, as on previous albums, is absolutely brilliant – I can’t say that any of the album is unpleasant to listen to.

Different styles are incorporated into this album as well, but nothing as extreme as the spectrum from hillbilly bluegrass to European dub that can be heard on A Collision. A lot of the album is keyboard-driven, with little extras thrown into the mix. The band also demonstrates their skill with guitar work, my favourite musical moment (at this stage) being the two-minute glam/hardcore lead guitar outro in God Almighty, None compares.

I haven’t really caught a lot of the lyrics at this stage, I’ll edit this post as I listen to them, but so far as I can tell, Crowder seems to capture a good broad spectrum of the aspects of God’s nature, fury, joy, love, happiness, fear, holiness, jealousy. As usual with Crowder, there’s dancing and crying, celebration and lament all in the same place. It’s outstanding.

Possibly the only disappointment for me is the inclusion of a song that every man and his dog are covering at the moment, How He Loves. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good song and all, but right now there doesn’t seem to be a worship-oriented album being released without that song on it. Further to that, it’s really a boring arrangement from a band that’s known for making tastefully unique mixes of other songs. But really, this is a fairly minute criticism of a brilliant album that made my brain melt and want to leak out my nose…

Conviction

Conviction is not a dog, that you might become it’s master and train it to respond to your commands. Before you presume to loose it, be prepared for it to turn back and bite you in the way you intended it to bite someone else.

Your ‘waste’ may be a sweet fragrance to the King

I was having a discussion with someone the other day about risk takers, and the conversation turned to how guys that spend their lives taking crazy risks and trying to pull off insane stunts are actually wasting their lives. I disagreed at the time and I still do. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

The particular subject of our conversation was Travis Pastrana and the Nitro Circus. The night before I watched Travis motoBASE off a cliff, and as he went to pull the chute he realised the bike was still to close, so he delayed pulling it. Eventually as the chute came out, there was roughly 0.25 of a second between the chute inflating and him hitting the ground. Hard. Everyone watching thought he was dead. But then he got up with a big grin on his face, and upon being dropped off back up the top of the cliff jumped out of the car and immediately got someone to start picking cactus thorns out  of him. Further than that, he didn’t even care about how close he came to dying. It was almost like he was oblivious to it. I was impressed. My friend wasn’t.

I was impressed because he was committed. The guy is passionate and happy to risk it all for what’s important to him. The argument coming back at me was that he is self-centred and is only seeking after his own pleasure. I don’t disagree entirely with that, but (a) that wasn’t the point I was making and (b) I think we (Christians) need to be careful about what we consider to be evil self-indulgence.

Travis knows what’s important to him and he’s given everything to push his sport to a new level. He doesn’t seem to fear the consequences of doing whatever is necessary to break new ground. My point is essentially that there should be more people that are willing to go to that level in whatever it is that God has appointed for them to do with their lives. That doesn’t always mean risking life and limb, maybe just reputation, maybe their ’spiritual resume’, or risking the poor opinions of others who would dare look at your life and ask to see your ‘fruit’ in an effort to put you down and make themselves feel justified.

I have a few thoughts about this, and I don’t really know where to start because they all kind of feed into each other. So first I’ll point out Jesus’ rebuke in Matthew 15:8-9 -

“These people draw near to me with their mouth and honour me with their lips, but their heart is far from me, And in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrine the commandments of men”.

I want to relate this to the story of the woman who came into the house where Jesus was having dinner with some dudes when Mary came in and poured spikenard over his feet and rubbed it in with her hair. I’m using John 12  and Mark 14 for this one. The reaction by the disciples and other onlookers was that this was an awful waste, such an indulgent and selfish thing to do, considering the sale of it (presumably to some ’self-indulgent’ rich person) would have raised funds to feed poor people. It seemed to them that this was the right thing for her to do with it, rather than waste it like she did, but they were teaching as doctrine their own route to righteousness. Let me tell you, righteousness is found in the Cross of Christ, he’s the one that decides what the right thing to do with the perfume is, who do you think you are to dictate what seems right to you to someone else who may very well be worshipping God by doing what you would tell them is unholy?

Now let me make it clear that the analogy to Pastrana has ended. It would not appear to me that he knows Jesus or worships Him, I’m just saying the guy is giving everything he’s got for what’s important to him. I think there are many within the Church (organisation that is, another post for another day…) that would prevent others from doing something that Jesus has made holy by making rules that are out of line with what the entire Bible really has to say about it. Sometimes those rules may look good externally, but the reason for making them was bad, and would suggest that the heart behind the rule colours any effect that the rule may have…

There is so much talk, so many voices saying ’sell the perfume and feed the poor’, many others saying ‘keep it for yourself, God didn’t create you to be mediocre’, but so few that waive their right to make noise so as to give the ears a turn. Now maybe it is that God wants for you to take that money you were going to spend on an Aston Martin and use it to buy houses for three struggling families. Or maybe this time He says its okay to get the car. I have a verse for that by the way. I think I’ll post an entire entry on this verse sometime.

Ecclesiastes 5:19: As for every man to whom God has given riches and wealth, and given him the power to eat of it, to receive his heritage and rejoice in his labour – this is the gift of God.

It would seem to me that (properly) enjoying a gift that God gave you to enjoy would be an act of worship. But it can be so hard to listen to what He says when there’s so many other voices baying at you, condemning you for even thinking about it. If you are one of those voices, I’d strongly encourage you to shut up. Where words are many, sin is not absent, and to obey is better than sacrifice. I think you’ll be surprised at some of the people that actually end up being part of the number when the Kingdom is revealed at the end of days, it’s a good thing that God decides who they are and not you. You may be ready to give your life for God, but would you give your life for a sinner?

Jesus said

“wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world. what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her” (Matt 26:13).

I don’t hear this story much these days. According to what Jesus himself said, it make me wonder if the gospel is truly being preached. We need holiness and righteousness, but we need it from Jesus. By turning our focus to judging peoples lives based on their ‘fruit’ I don’t think we’re seeking it from Him, and I don’t think we’re encouraging others to do so. Lets stop condemning others and start remembering the woman with the alabaster jar.

Rights

This is my first post on the issue of rights. There will be many more. I just want to kick start it by explaining my interest in this topic.

Rights are a massive topic in the world today. They seem to shape the way people think, and behave, the way that people think in terms of politics, the way people interact with ther people. Really this is only a relatively new phenomenon, that is to say, the idea of individual liberties and rights has found favour with the academic community and the wider society (speaking in terms of Western Society) since the 1700’s, but they’ve really only begun to gain worldwide interest and cultish popularity in the 2oth Century. There has certainly been much political consideration since before then, the Constitution of the United States being ammended several time to include statements about basic rights, and consideration being given to the way that rights are governed and protected in the formation of the Swiss Confederation, and the consitution of many other nations including Australia. All of this has coincided with with the development of a more egocentric society, who rather than looking at the interests of others and considering how they can contribute, focus first on themselves and how society can conform to their needs. Would JFK’s famous words from 1961 ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country’ be an accurate reflection on the modern collective conscience? Would he receive the a public display of affection and approval, only to be treated with contempt by the true intentions of the people? Is society a hypocrite?

To further discuss this issue I will give my personal working definition of a right. A right is something that is claimed by individual or groups that makes a demand on other individuals or groups to act, omit, forebear, or permit in such a way that the individual or group claiming the right can restrict the freedom of any other party in order to gain certain freedoms of their own. It is my view that a claim to a right is a self-centered claim. This is a very controversial topic to try to sum up in on statement however, and there is much more to discuss.

My final point to this introduction is that I don’t think rights are Biblical. This may be a radical and very controversial statement, particularly in Western Liberal Democracies where we really don’t like to think that the world isn’t about us. I intend to attack the Western Liberal hybrid of Christianity with vehemence for the remainder of my life, and one of the things that has sparked my train of thought on rights are the number of Christians who blog, call talk-back radios, preach and ignorantly proclaim that they have a God-given right to anything. It is my goal to destroy misconceptions that Christians have regarding rights, and to destroy the ignorance of Christians in relation to this. The Church has been ignorant and unempowered for too long and something has to give.

First Blog

So here’s my first foray into the apparently self-absorbed world of blogging. That exact perception of it is exactly why I’ve delayed for so long, but I’m starting to question whether or not it’s all that bad. So I’m having a go to see whether there is an opportunity to reach people by blogging that I have otherwise been missing out on. So here goes…