Who Was George Floyd; and What Was His Significance?

  George Floyd was a black American man killed during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after allegedly using counterfeit money to buy cigarettes. Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, knelt on his neck for nearly eight minutes as he lay handcuffed on the ground. After his death, protests against police violence toward black people quickly spread across the United States and internationally. Destruction of property in cities across America, looting, and gang theft are all left in the wake of the Floyd killing.

  Floyd played football and basketball throughout high school and college. He held several jobs, and he was also a hip-hop artist and a mentor in his religious community. Between 1997 and 2005, he was sentenced to prison eight times (drug possession, theft, and trespassing); in 2009, he accepted a plea bargain for a 2007 armed robbery, serving four years in prison. The conviction of 2009 condemned him to five years in prison, but he was paroled after serving four years in the lock-up.  In 2014, he moved to the Minneapolis area, finding work as a truck driver and a bouncer in a bar. In 2020, he lost his security job during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  After Floyd's release from prison, he became involved with Resurrection Houston, a Christian church and ministry, where he mentored young men. He helped his mother recuperate after a stroke. He delivered meals and assisted on other projects with Angel By Nature Foundation, a charity founded by rapper “The tha Truth.” Later he became involved with a ministry that brought men from the Third Ward to Minnesota in a church-work program with drug rehabilitation and job placement services.

  It is obvious from the above account that Floyd was a complicated person, being involved in charitable activities at times and chronic, habitual, crime, violence and armed robbery at other times. His behavior has caused courts to commit him to prison several times because he has been dangerous to the American citizenry. Several family members and friends remember him as a “gentle giant,” always ready to help people in difficulty whenever he could. He died a death he did not deserve for his last crime, e.g., allegedly passing counterfeit money to buy cigarettes. Since his death, more than $25 million has been raised by GoFundMe for the support of his wife and family and to pay for his funeral. Nevertheless, I could find no evidence on the internet that he had been living with the children he fathered or the woman to whom he had supposedly been married. There seems to be no evidence that he was paying child support money.

 Whatever his legacy may include, it seems inappropriate that his memory should be emblazoned in glory and honor for an exemplary life. I find no such honor having been paid for the memory of any police officer killed in the line of duty for attempting to maintain law and order on the streets.

 Whatever George Floyd’s legacy may be, it seems to me that he was an icon of inspiration to those who were looking for some excuse for violence and mayhem in society. I do not think that his memory deserves to be used to justify widespread violence and destruction.  

Crime and Violence in America

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Our nation is beset by a wave of violence, murder, rape, destruction of stores, businesses, and even homes. Looting is rampant in our inner cities where store windows and doors are broken down allowing thugs and thieves to enter without resistance. How can this be happening?!!

Much of the mayhem is being aggravated by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization which aids and abets such destructiveness. Liberals among us ascribe all this chaos to racism, poverty, lack of opportunity for black citizens, poor education, and limitation of health and medical care for the poor (and mostly black) residents of inner-city neighborhoods. But…we need to examine those presuppositions to see if they really are the root causes.

In the first half of the 20^th Century, the Black poverty rate was significantly higher than it is today. Black incarceration and crime rates were significantly lower than they would become in later decades. The Black homicide rate fell by 18% in the 1940’s and another 20% in the 1950’s. While this was going on, the Black poverty rate also declined by 40% over the same period. Black incomes grew faster than the incomes of Whites. Safer neighborhoods facilitated upward economic mobility.

In the second half of the 20th Century, those trends reversed. In the 1960’s violent crime rates doubled and continued to increase sharply until the early 1990’s when better policing and increasing incarceration brought crime down. Between 1990 and 2016 the homicide rate rose 40% among black men.

In 2013, the Black Lives Matter organization was established and today, 40 chapters of the organization exist worldwide. This organization was established after the killing of Travon Martin. Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a man of mixed race, as he was attempting to defend a gated community in Sanford, Florida. Martin was a 17-year-old Black, who was unarmed and visiting his relatives in the neighborhood. When an altercation occurred between the two, Zimmerman was injured; but he fired his gun and killed Martin. Later, Zimmerman was acquitted of wrongdoing because he was considered to have been acting in self-defense.

The Black Lives Matter organization has been active in disrupting the American society lately with its open advocacy of dangerous and violent protest activities. Mark Levin, a conservative radio host has said that anyone “embracing or promoting BLM should be made aware of exactly what it stands for.  Violence. Anarchy, Marxism.  And it has a convicted terrorist on the board of its fundraising group.”

Hawk Newsome, the president of Greater New York Black Lives Matter, threatened to "burn down this system" if "the country doesn't give us what we want" in an interview on 24 June 2020 with FOX News host Martha MacCallum. In my opinion, this kind of statement amounts to treason against the stability of our nation. The group is also a strong voice in favor of homosexual, trans-sexual lifestyles. (If anyone reading this blog post does not believe these accusations against BLM, I would recommend you look at their website and click on “What We Believe.”) But…you may ask, “Where did this disruptive rhetoric and behavior come from?”

The Black Lives Matter movement would have everyone believe that all Black persons hate the police and want the Federal Government to disappear, because it does not give them the perks it wants. Jason Riley, a Black columnist for the Wall Street Journal has said that groups like BLM are “out of stem with most Blacks, let alone most of the country.” (WSJ op-ed 6-25-20) In 2015, after Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a majority of Blacks said police treated them fairly. Thirty-eight percent of Blacks at that time said they wanted a greater police presence in their local communities. Eighteen percent of Whites wanted that. Last year a Gallop survey asked Blacks and Hispanics in low income neighborhoods about policing and found that they are not averse to law enforcement. Fifty-nine percent of both races said they would like more police to spend time in their neighborhoods than they currently did. Fifty percent of Whites responded that way.

Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970’s. Now 95% of black homicides do not come from law enforcement officers. Jason Riley states that police action against blacks does not come from racial bias it comes from criminal behavior.

In the late 19^th Century and early 20^th Century, two great leaders of the Black community were influential in promoting constructive behavior in society: They were both former slaves, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass. These men advocated peaceful opposition to discriminatory behavior against Blacks. Washington was especially noted for his lifting up of Blacks into higher levels of education and entrepreneurship. Douglas advocated Black participation in the established politics of his day. Both of these men and their followers sought peaceful participation in America through assimilation into the U.S. population. (It may be noted that other ethnic groups have found fulfillment of these desires through peaceful means and assimilation, e.g., Jews, Irish, and Asians.)

Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968) was known for his advocacy of peaceful protests in Albany, GA and Birmingham, AL and for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. As the years passed, Dr. King became more oppositional and he became known for his opposition to capitalism, poverty, and the Viet Nam War. In those latter years of his life, he was under investigation by the FBI for his supposed communist ties. Before he was finally assassinated in 1968, he was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C. by the poor and Black population.

Another prominent actor in the saga of Black oppositional activity was W.E.B Dubois (1868-1963). DuBois was an outspoken advocate for Black people the world over. He was a Socialist, and he eventually founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His many writings have encouraged integration of educational, political, and corporate entities for the advancement of Blacks. DuBois argued that the Black man deserved equal rights with the White man under the Fourteenth Amendment, and he should fight for them. On the other hand, the writings of Booker T. Washington have emphasized the development of economic and cultural improvements in order to gain the same goal.

In more modern times, Black people have most strongly advocated more violent forms of protest, modeled after the leadership of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Still, voices of moderate Black leaders like Shelby Steele, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and W. Julius Wilson at Chicago have spoken out in favor of more peaceful and constructive changes.

William Julius Wilson (born 1935) disputed the liberal stance that the “black underclass” owed its existence to entrenched racial discrimination; he also disagreed with the conservative view that African American poverty was due to cultural deficiencies and welfare dependency. Instead, Wilson implicated sweeping changes in the global economy that pulled low-skilled manufacturing jobs out of the inner city, the flight from the inner city of its most successful residents, and the lingering effects of past discrimination. He believed the problems of the underclass could be alleviated only by “race neutral” programs such as universal health care and government-financed jobs. Wilson observed the structural reasons for the plight of Blacks in America’s large cities. These structural reasons include the limited availability of economic and social opportunities and the extremely high crime rates among young black men from ghetto neighborhoods. In addition to those problems, Blacks face cultural problems, such as the tendencies for black men to be nonparticipators in black families. Wilson never advocated violence as a source of relief for the problems in urban America. 

In spite of Wilson’s admonitions, governmental programs, most notably the measures taken by the LBJ administration have failed miserably to raise the Black poverty rate or to do anything good to the deteriorating Black families in our midst. At this time 75% of Black babies are born out of wedlock; and this speaks volumes about why Black people today do not know how to deal constructively with social problems. The American Black simply has not had a father figure to teach him how to behave.

Other Black observers of the urban scene today who have strongly advocated against violence on the streets have been Shelby Steele, a sociologist from the University of California, Berkeley and Jason Riley, an editorialist for the Wall Street Journal. Charles Murray has also spoken of his agreement in this matter; Murray thinks the difficulty being caused by chaos in the cities hearkens back to broken cultural factors in the Black population.  Broken homes, sexual promiscuity, irresponsibility in social dealing, will do nothing except damage our society. It is my own opinion that the neglect of children (born and unborn) is also an important factor in delivering violent and unproductive citizens to our society. 

The essence of what I am saying can be gleaned in more complete form by reading the book by Jason Riley, “Please Stop Helping Us.” Riley makes the cogent argument that administrative/governmental programs do little for the problem of urban poverty. The only thing that holds any real hope of changing things for the better in American cities is improvement in the economic/business fields. Americans of all races need to get back to work, quit relying on government aid, and build trusting and faithful families with fathers who take an active interest in socializing their children.

Now, for a personal note from my own experience in trying to dope out the problem of urban violence. Several commentators have noted that one reason the police have difficulty controlling violence in the cities is that Blacks and others in low income neighborhoods is that the residents are reluctant to “snitch” on their neighbors for fear of retribution from the criminals. Several years ago, when Nancy and I were attending an inner-city church in Detroit, there was a poor Black man in that church who was unemployed and continually asking for prayer that he might find a job. When he failed to find a job, Nancy and I went out and found employment for him. We went to his apartment building to give him the good news, but the neighbors mistook me for a police agent and would not help us find his apartment. That kind of noncooperation never helps law enforcement.

So where does this polemic on violence in America lead us. I believe that the basic problem was elucidated by Mollie Hemingway on FOX news when she pointed out that the underlying problem in the violence and spirit of rebellion in American is the deteriorating family, especially the black family where 75% of Black babies are born out of wedlock. The problem of deteriorating families is not limited to Black families; Whites are culpable, too. Fathers are not the only people absent from the family scene. Many working mothers need to stay home and raise the next generation.  Personally, I think that there is another, even more pertinent cause of the difficulty, i.e., the general lack of faith in Christ by our population as a whole. This problem is not limited to the Black population; it is shared by Americans of all races and ethnic groups. We need to get back to true Christian orientation if we are ever going to solve our cultural and behavioral problems.

Let us each for others care

each another’s burdens bear,

to your church a pattern give,

showing how believers live.

Ed and Nancy Manring

History of the Universe

Mankind has long wondered about the age of the Universe—when did it begin and when will it end? Atheists think they have the answer—it has always been here; and it did not require a Creator to explain its presence. However, scientists testify that the Universe began about 13.8 billion years ago. They believe that the sun is about 4.5 billion years old; and that it is now in the process of burning up all its hydrogen. It will eventually begin to burn its helium and become a red giant, then a white dwarf star, then a black dwarf; and then, finally burn out—a process that will take about 5 billion more years. All the rest of the stars will eventually burn out, too.

So…from the scientific viewpoint, the Universe had a beginning and will have an end. Things that have a beginning and an end are not eternal. The Universe had a cause! The Universe came from someplace.

Let’s look at what we know for certain about our Universe. There are two immutable facts about the Universe—the two laws of thermodynamics:

1.   First Law of Thermodynamics—Energy cannot be either  created or destroyed.

2.  Second Law of Thermodynamics—All energy systems are running down, i.e., they are gravitating to lower energy levels.

In a closed system, energy can be changed into matter, but only with the input of more energy. For instance, under the influence of the sun’s rays, the energy in our closed system, i.e., the earth, can be changed into wood. Therefore, matter is just another form of energy where it is temporarily stored. When wood burns,that energy will be released; it will turn into useless heat, which will eventually radiate out into empty space. But…it will never disappear completely. Thus, we can see both the 1^st and the 2^nd laws of thermodynamics in action.

The Earth is also a closed system. We can see that the universe depends on two principles: Conservation (of energy) and disintegration (i.e., it runs down to lower forms of energy). The only way for complexity in the Universe to increase is if an outside source of energy impinges upon it. Complexity will not increase spontaneously unless it disobeys the 2^nd law. But…in our experience we see opposite forces working,  e.g., innovation  (new ideas, the opposite of conservation) and integration (the opposite of disintegration). These opposite forces could only be manifested if someone or something injects outside energy. Guess who that might be!

Other manifestations of God’s intervention in our Universe are morality and art. These qualities have absolutely no survival qualities about them. They cannot be accounted for by evolution.

Many scientific ideas have been put forward to explain the origin and operation of the universe. Those ideas are mulitplied upon one another in a bewildering blur of changing theoretical alternatives. It is beyond the reach of any inquiring mind to grasp all the various permutations and variations of scientific ideas in order to understand the universe in that scientific context. Bench experimenters, psychologists, philosophers, biologists, chemists, physicists—all have had their say in explaining the universe. None have been able to put it all together in  a comprehensive and believable way.

I have found that many thinkers who look for an answer to the origin of the universe cleave closely to the simplest explanation possible; and I think they come closer to the ultimate answer than these sophisticated scientists. I believe the right approach is likely the simplest approach. I think the answer is that God is the uncaused causer who puts outside energy into closed systems!

The explanation given above is attractive to me because it preserves the two laws of thermodynamics while, at the same time, it allows God to be identified as the outside injector of energy into physical, closed systems.

God did it!!

Who Kills Black Men

The National Review published an opinion article on 5 December 2019 entitled, “The Need to Discuss Black on Black Crime.” Of course, that article preceded all the violent chaos that erupted in America (and, even in foreign nations) in early March 2020 stimulated by the killing of George Floyd. However, the article raised the question, again, about the incidence of Black on Black violence and the question of what is causing it and what should be done about it. Since then, multiple articles have appeared documenting the violence and chaos on the streets of our country. One of them prompted a reader to publish the following letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Letter to the Editor of WSJ by Dave Fortin 6-4-2020

As bad as we all feel about what happen to Mr. Floyd, and I think it was atrocious, there are other very recent atrocities that seem to never get anyone's attention. There were 16 people shot in Philly this past Sunday & Monday - 7 died. In Baltimore, 13 murders since last Thursday. In Chicago, an unbelievable 92 people shot and 27 dead, just last weekend.  The Country has been rampaged over the murder of Mr. Floyd but, as far as I know, not one protest was started, or store looted over the killers who murdered these 47 people. Why is that? Were their lives less valuable than Mr. Floyd's or is the nation's outrage reserved only for the acts of bad cops?

I responded to Mr. Fortin’s letter

This is a good point. I am under the impression that most murders of Black people are committed by other Blacks. The number of White on Black murders are much less. There is something wrong with a culture that seems to promote violence and murder. However, in thinking about this issue, it might be a good idea to think about the number of White on White murders. I wonder if these murders are really a racist issue at all.

No matter how often we are admonished to avoid ascribing bad social effects to racial/ethnic causes, it is impossible to deny that Black on Black murders are simply a fact of life in America, today. That kind of social effect is obvious from hard data on murder statistics. As will be noted below, the improved state of social conditions bought about in America for Blacks during the mid and late 20^th Century, have not altered the statistical facts that the predominant causers of Black murders are Black perpetrators.

In 2017, homicide-victimization rates for Black men were 3.9 times the national average and 52 percent of all known homicide victims were Black. The perpetrators of these crimes were overwhelmingly African Americans. In 2018, where the homicide victim was Black, the suspected killer was also Black 88 percent of the time. And this is not an exceptional situation. From 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of Black victims were killed by other African Americans. High rates of Black-on-Black killing have been the norm for well over a century.

Violent crime is commonly intraracial, i.e., Whites kill Whites, Hispanics kill Hispanics. After the 1960’s, America’s crime rate increased markedly, but that trend had begun to abate by the early 1990’s. Black violent crime was a major factor in the post-1960s crime tsunami, but it persisted even after the crime wave began to ebb in the 1990s. From 2000 to 2015, the mean African American homicide-victimization rate, adjusted for age, was 20.1 per 100,000. That is more than three times the Hispanic rate of 6.4 (despite disadvantages comparable to those of Blacks) and over seven times the average White rate, 2.7. Moreover, as already noted, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of the killers of Black murder victims were other African Americans. In short, this is about exceptionally high as well as overwhelmingly intraracial Black violent crime. White-on-White homicide is also intraracial, but, the rates do not approach the Black rate of Black on Black murders

African Americans are worried about and strongly disapprove of violence in their communities. But there is also a deep strain of mistrust of police in poor Black neighborhoods, and this, along with fear of reprisals by Black criminals, leads to a refusal to cooperate with the authorities. Such noncooperation only worsens the Black-crime problem by providing impunity for the most violent. I have experienced this, myself: When Nancy and I were working in inner-city Detroit, I was often mistaken for an agent of the police force; and I was thusly distrusted and treated with a lack of cooperation.

The “stop snitching ethos,” perpetuates itself by preventing criminals who victimize communities from being brought to justice. But if rates of Black violent-crime are excessive (which they are), if these high rates have persisted over a long term (which they have), and if the stop-snitching ethos aggravates the problem (which it does), then it can be rightly concluded that urban violence is deplored by the Black community, but at the same time it is enabled by a culture of noncooperation.

In the 1920’s, many Blacks migrated to the north and set up Black ghettos in various cities, e.g., Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and others. Blacks came to these cities to make a better living for themselves; and many of them were able to do just that. But…as some of them became more affluent, they moved out of the inner-cities and into the suburbs, leaving the unemployed and the violent in the ghettos.

Black-on-Black violent crime was excessive in the late 19th century even in the South and, despite ups and downs, persistent crime patterns have continued, even up to the present day. Rates of Black violent crime continued to grow during the great migration north and the “ghettos” that developed in the 1920s.

Despite the lynchings and other mistreatment by Whites in the late 19th century, Black homicide was overwhelmingly carried out by other African Americans. In Savannah, Ga., for example, from 1896 to 1903, researchers found 91 homicides in which the race of both the offender and the victim were known. Sixty-eight of the victims (75 percent of all those killed) were Black, and 61 African Americans, or 90 percent of the alleged perpetrators, were arrested for these murders.

In the 20th century, the number of Black victims escalated while the killers remained overwhelmingly African American. In Memphis from 1920 to 1925, where African Americans were 38 percent of the population, Black-on-Black killings were two-thirds of all murders in the city (in which race was known).

An examination of coroner’s files uncovered 500 homicide victims in Birmingham, Ala., between 1937 and 1944. The city’s population was roughly 40 percent Black, but 85 percent of both the killers (418) and the killed (427) were African American.

In the contemporary period, from 1976 to 2014, it is estimated that 198,288 African Americans died nationwide at the hands of Black killers. That is 5,218 deaths per year on average, roughly 19 times the annual number of deaths of African Americans in confrontations with police.

It has been posited by many progressive thinkers that the high crime/murder rates noted in the Black population has been caused by White oppression.  In thinking this way, one would expect higher levels of Black crime when the racial oppression was at its maximum, and lower levels when it was less so. But that has not been the case. Black homicide rates were about the same as White homicide rates during slavery. They frequently were higher in the North than in the more oppressive South throughout the 20th century. And they hit new peaks in the late 1960s, a time when Whites supported the most sweeping civil-rights legislation in American history.

Secondly, if White abuse were responsible for Black violence, if White people were the problem of downtrodden Blacks, why weren’t Whites targeted more often? Why were other African Americans overwhelmingly the victims? Why was Black-on-Black violence elevated even after lynching and Jim Crow were no longer powerful disincentives to Black-on-White crime?

Third, how do we explain levels of Black violence out of all proportion to African American disadvantage? Other groups suffer comparable adversities — Hispanics, for example — but have much lower rates of violence. Though the poverty rate for Hispanics is 92 percent of the rate for Blacks, African Americans have three times the homicide rate. Indeed, many of the low-income Black immigrants to the United States, such as the Haitians who flooded into southern Florida in the 1980s, had lower violent-crime rates than did the African American residents. This despite the fact that they too were Black and impoverished and had suffered a legacy of the most brutal slavery.

So, what explanation can we have for the high incidence of Black on Black murders? A compelling case can be made that African Americans, having spent centuries in the South, adopted the southern White penchant for violent responses to perceived insults and affronts, what Thomas Sowell once called the “Black redneck” phenomenon. On this view, Black criminal violence was the product of the southern-male honor culture that, among Black men of lower socioeconomic status, manifested as a violent response to petty insults, sexual rivalries, etc. Since African Americans interacted socially with other persons of color much more than with Whites, the victims of such honor-culture assaults were overwhelmingly Black. This violence continued when African Americans migrated to the North. Indeed, it escalated in the northern cities, where there was greater freedom and less oppression.

It is my opinion that American Blacks, living next door to affluent White citizens feel an overwhelming sense of inferiority, and that causes frustration and desperation that results finally in violence and chaotic behavior. I can think of no other reason why Black rioters could find any reason for destruction and looting of stores in Phoenix for a killing in Minneapolis.

Racism probably does play somewhat of a role here in explaining the cause for Black homicide rates. We can envision discrimination (for reasons of racism or some other reason) has kept large numbers of Blacks from rising to the middle class, and the middle class, Black or White, eschews violence. Had Blacks been permitted to advance socioeconomically, their story would have been more like the Irish and Italian immigrant narrative, with a rise from violence and poverty to affluence and law-abidingness.

The most extreme progressive thinking views the entire criminal-justice system as irredeemably racist and calls for its abolition. This is the theme song of anarchy and its disciples! Such extremism hurts, not helps, poor communities of color. Of course, this brings us right back to the realities of Black-on-Black crime and the dire need for effective law enforcement in African American communities.

The proposals, i.e., increased police patrols in Black neighborhoods, programs to defray the opposition to police protection, better schools for Black people, affirmative action, meaningful threats of punishment for crime, locking up known violent offenders, etc., may or may not work, but they probably are worth a try. After all, meaningful progress on fundamental socioeconomic conditions will take generations to achieve. People living with the reality of urban violence need relief right now.

  

For decades now, criminologists, especially those espousing or at least harboring leftist views, have insisted that harmful social conditions are the primary cause of violent crime in general and Black violent crime in particular. This has not gotten them very far as an explanation for the enormously high rates of Black-on-Black violence. Despite declines since the mid-1990s, relatively high rates have persisted even in the face of overall Black socioeconomic progress. The policy proposals in the preceding paragraph can succeed in reducing these rates where others have not, but the underlying cause of the problem is still elusive, and scholars, politicians, and citizens must continue to search for a good explanation.

At the end of this blog, I offer my own opinion for the cause of the problem. I believe that the general lack of a consensual opinion in favor of faith in Jesus Christ is the underlying problem. This lack of Christian faith is not unique to the Black culture (If anything, Blacks more likely trend toward biblical faith than Whites.) Our whole society misses the desired mark of social peace and rest caused by lack of a meaningful faith in Jesus.

Yes, lack of Christ is the underlying cause of the difficulty, but the agency that deals out the chaos and violence is the deterioration of the American family. Today, 75% of Black babies are born into families where there is no identifiable father. Good, God-fearing fathers are meant to socialize their children; and good fathers can do that in concert with good mothers. Both are needed.

Much of this blog post was excerpted from the National Review article of December 2019 referred to above.

Introduction to the Book of Genesis

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We are about to embark on a study of the book of Genesis. This book is the part of the Bible that has caused the most controversy—especially the first 3 chapters. The difficulty has been arguments over the creation of the universe and the time frame of the book’s claims.

It must be said that in order to understand this book, one needs to have a belief in the supernatural. The whole Christian faith hangs on this basic belief. Does God exist? Did He create the universe and all that is in it, including mankind? If He did, why? Where did such a complicated organism as mankind come from? How old is the earth? Where did morality come from? Why do men insist on constantly worshipping something or someone? How does God say that man should behave? What is the ultimate significance of mankind, if, indeed there is any? What will happen to us at the end of our lives on earth? (And on and on with more questions!)

It is important that before we begin this study we must, at least, make a stab at answering these questions by establishing some basic presuppositions. Without true basic presuppositions, we cannot frame our thoughts in a logical and believable way. The following several paragraphs will attempt to help us form some true presuppositions.

Regardless of what you think about the age of the earth and the whole creation, you must admit that mankind has been around for a long time. If you have ever looked at recorded history, you must admit that mankind has developed a thinking pattern over the last 300 years that is different from the thinking pattern he worked with previously. In ancient times, man’s thinking was largely occupied with what we call now-a-days as “superstition;” that thinking pattern was largely worthless. As a matter of fact, is was a kind of thinking that led men to fear; it had no hope or high quality about it. One thing, however, that the ancients had in large quantity—a belief in the supernatural. For them, there were lots and lots of gods—a god for about everything; and men were scared to death of those gods. Their gods were thought to be dangerous and largely hostile to them. That ancient form of religion is known today as animism. As time passed and life became more complicated and crowded with an expanding population, the agricultural revolution happened (about 10,000 years ago), urbanization began to occur; and technology began to appear. As secularization occurred and the activities of individuals became more specialized, priests appeared in society; and people started to have more sophisticated ideas about religion.

Even though religion began to differentiate in the thinking pattern of the ancients, animism persisted; and even today it has proved to be very difficult to eradicate wherever it occurs. Nancy and I saw animism in its full development in West Africa among tribal peoples.

As more time passed, at least one ethnic group moved out of animistic belief and developed another kind of thinking pattern, e.g., monotheism—the belief that there is only one God. That ethnic group was the Jews. Later, the ancient Jewish belief system developed Christianity—a full blown revelation of what we have now, a belief in a creative God who brought us all the blessings we enjoy today, even a strong sense of right and wrong and all its implications of morality. Christianity gave mankind a way of knowing the reason he is on the earth in the first place. But…along with the basic tenets of the Christian faith, came a sense of guilt and hell. Mankind became preoccupied with those features of religion; he was frightened. However, as he really looked at the Christ of the religion, he saw clearly that Christ had the answer to his guilt and his fear of hell and death. This revelation was fully developed during the Middle Ages.

Mankind’s understanding of Christianity included a preoccupation with the above ideas; later it began to center on the question of “What is my SIGNIFICANCE?” But the Christian faith had the answer to all these several questions—Christ provided significance as well as an answer to what man should do with the problems of hell, guilt, and death. In sum, many blessings accrued to mankind as a result of Christianity, e.g., freedom from the fear of death, hell, guilt, and the lack of significance. This thing the ancients and the early Christians had would have been called by the Apostle Paul—"the milk of the gospel.” But, one thing went along with these early expressions of the Christian religion, i.e., FAITH!. Many early Christians had a rock-hard faith that carried them through hard times. That faith even allowed many of them to continue in the religion and testify to the truth of Christ in severe persecution.  And they had that faith even without the reasoning and logic which we moderns so strongly appreciate. Their faith was strong. All during this long time period of about 1500 years after Christ’s crucifixion, they maintained an understanding of the supernatural—they did not entertain a lot of questions about ultimate things; Christ was enough for them.

But,…later, along came another stage in human development, the Renaissance and with it the elevation of man’s thinking into the realm of pure thought. Mankind began to look at his universe and see how the hand of God had made the whole thing. Early scientists of the Renaissance such as Kepler, Bacon, Newton, Copernicus, and many others began to study the universe to see how God had done it. They were men of strong faith. They maintained a belief in the supernatural; but they wanted to know the answer, WHY and HOW? So, they developed the basic tools of modern thinking, i.e., the scientific methods of experimentation and testing to see if their conclusions were right or wrong.

As Renaissance thinking developed more and more, scientists began to discount the role of God in the creation; all they were willing to see was the hand of man in about everything wonderful in the world, all the technological gadgets from the plow to the computer microchip. Yes, they invented lots of things that we hold near and dear today. All the marvels of modern medicine, our cars, airplanes, plastics, printing presses, etc., etc. but along with these marvelous things we use daily came instruments of destruction, even culminating in such weapons as the atomic bomb. We have seen that the scientific revolution has contributed to some of the most horrific social, economic, technological, effects imaginable. The 20^th Century was marked by more war and bloodshed than any other preceding century in man’s history.

We need to step back from our view of mankind and his affinities and ask ourselves, “What shall we do with all this wonderful modern thinking and all the scientific accomplishments it has accrued to us?” We need to ask ourselves, “What was the value of all the ‘blind faith’ of the ancients and of Medieval man? Should we jettison all of our scientific thought in favor of living again in the Middle Ages?” I don’t think so. But, at the very least, we need to evaluate the development of scientific thought and ask ourselves why did science fail us in developing a culture and a society that we can hardly live with because of its concomitant war, violence, and intolerance. I strongly suspect that the science-based way of thinking will ultimately be found to be deficient—largely wrong in its ability to tell the whole truth about our universe.

I think we need to look back at the Middle Ages and early Renaissance and ask ourselves if those times had anything we might be able to use in a constructive way to understand our present dilemma.

Let’s step back a moment and try to see where our modern system of thought might have gone wrong. In 1830, a Scottish geologist, Charles Lyell, wrote a book titled Principles of Geology. In this book, Mr. Lyell thoroughly outlined a principle called “uniformitarianism.” Uniformitarianism is a principle that posits the idea that the laws of physics, mathematics, and chemistry are immutable, permanent, always existing, everlasting, and undoubtable. These uniform principles were seen as the basic building blocks of human knowledge and ultimate truth. They were all that really counted. Everything else worth knowing could be seen as derivatives of these principles of physics and chemistry. On them, mankind could supposedly build all his scientific and true knowledge of the universe. This book had such an appeal to scientists, such as Charles Darwin that he took a copy of it along with him on his voyage in the Beagle to study the islands of the Atlantic ocean and the costal areas of South America in the mid-19^th Century. The book led many scientists to believe that they no longer needed God to assure themselves of the significance of mankind and the way he should go. All they needed was more and more science to tell all the truth; mankind could do it all, himself. Evolutionary ideas arose from the basic tenets of uniformitarianism to describe the whole universe. Objections arose to these scientific ideas but scientists countered these objections with the claim that the driving force behind the development of mankind and all life on earth along with its geology, anthropology, and all the other “…ologies” was the passage of time—lots of time. Time was the powerhouse.

One question uniformitarianism did not answer was this one, “Who set up these ‘uniform’ principles of physics and chemistry in the first place? Somebody must have done it!”

I must tell you all that I do not believe in uniformitarianism; I believe that there is something much larger than the laws of physics, mathematics, and chemistry. I believe there is a Creator and a Law-Giver outside of the world in which we live. The development of the human organism and other life manifestations is far too complex to have come about by random distribution, natural selection, and the passage of time. To believe that TIME did everything takes a gigantic leap of faith—a leap much larger than the leap required to believe in a supernatural God who did it all through His intelligence and infinite power.

In trying to decide on the question of “Which is right, uniformitarianism and its attendant scientific accomplishments…or, supernaturalism, the belief that God did it by His limitless intelligence and omnipotence?” In arriving at a decision about this question, we should refer to a scientific principle called Ockham’s Razor. Ockham's razor is the problem-solving principle that states, "Entities should not be multiplied without necessity." William of Ockham was an English philosopher of the 14^th Century. Mr. Ockham defined a principle that used a preference for simplicity to defend the idea of divine miracles. To put this principle into understandable form, let’s think of it in this way—when we are confronted with two conflicting explanations of how something occurred, we should usually choose the simpler explanation. We will be right most of the time.

We are now confronted with two possibilities. On the one hand we can attribute the universe and the creation of life to the idea of uniformitarianism and science. On the other hand, we can attribute these things to the existence of a supernatural being who did it all. I, personally, think that the better explanation is supernaturalism; and that is probably the simpler explanation. At least, supernaturalism certainly comports with the Ockham’s Razor principle better than the explanation given by uniformitarianism.

What I believe is that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

In closing, let me say that I fully understand the arguments advanced by scientists who do not agree with me on this issue. I not only understand their side of the discussion, I understand that they have a cogent argument. They have reason on their side, as I, also have. My request of my scientific friends is that they allow me to participate in discussions with them without discounting my side of the question and considering me a fool for holding my opinion. Nobody, today, discounts the value of science; but many scientists totally discount the value of supernaturalism. We must both remember that we all have a right to our opinions; but…we do not have a right to “our facts.” The true facts of the matter will ultimately vindicate one of these two points of view.

(The part of this essay dealing with Charles Lyell was derived from a book by John MacArthur, The Battle for the Beginning.)

Any effective invitation to Hell will certainly appear in the guise of scientific planning. C.S. Lewis

Ed and Nancy Manring

Marriage Rates Dropping in the U.S.

I have not written a blog post for a long time; but today’s Wall Street Journal contains an article titled Marriage Is Becoming More Like a Luxury Good in U.S. I just could not resist writing one more blog about this subject.

The first sentence of the article reads, “Middle-class Americans are forsaking marriage amid financial insecurity, effectively making the institution more of a luxury good enjoyed by prosperous Americans.”

The article goes on to say, “Affluent Americans who marry are more likely to pool six-figure incomes, buy homes, and watch their assets grow. Among people aged 25 to 34, the median wealth of married couples is four times that of couples who live together but aren’t married.”

Even though many people on the lower levels of income are not marrying, most high school seniors in the U.S. still say that they expect to marry. Three quarters of them have claimed that ambition since 1976. Notwithstanding that fact, by the time a few years elapse, their attitudes seem to change; and they begin to feel that they must first start careers or land secure jobs and have some money in their pockets. Then, some of them decide to marry; but many maintain that marriage holds a lesser draw on their goals.

Half of middle earners were married in 2018, a drop of 16% since 1980. In the highest earners in the U.S. 60% were married, but even in that income level, the marriage rate had dropped 4% since 1980.

One may wonder why that drop in marriage rate has occurred. One reason is that many young people have seen their parents divorcing at an alarming rate; and they have become cynical about the prospect of establishing a stable home. Another reason is that women without a college degree have closed the earnings gap with their male peers even faster than women with higher levels of education.  That earnings shift has reduced the economic motivation for these women to marry. I think that another pertinent reason for the drop in the marriage rate is the falling away from meaningful religious experience. Young people are just not going to church and experience the love and the grace of Christ in their lives. For that reason, I believe they do not feel the necessity of marriage in compliance with the church’s traditional teachings.

Government regulations are not helping the situation, either. Nancy and I have a housekeeper who is in her 50’s. Her husband died, and she began drawing Social Security benefits from his Social Security income. Now she is living with a man she would like to marry, but if she marries him, her income will drop by $1000+. That is a strong incentive for her to remain unmarried! Housekeepers don’t make much money.

All the above being said, I think that Americans who shun marriage should be aware of biblical admonitions warning against adultery. “The wages of sin is death.” That means that despite the apparent benefits of living together without marriage, eternal punishments for that kind of behavior will  hurt far more than the “rewards” of living in an adulterous relationship will ever counter.

I am sure that many of my readers have been confused, as I was, about the true issues raised in the U.S. House of Representatives by the impeachment attempt on the President. As hearings grind on and more witnesses testify, I get bogged down in similar claims and accusations to the point that Nancy and I have become bored watching TV reports of the activity on this problem.

Nevertheless, this question of impeachment of the President is a very important one because it may set a dangerous president for the administration of our nation. For that reason, I have set out below what I think is a correct and pertinent explanation of the situation.

In an editor’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal of 21 November 2019, the editors write: “…readers who have lives to lead can save time (trying to understand this problem) by reading Senator Ron Johnson’s account. (https://bit.ly/2OwBLJ8 Control +click to follow link). The Wisconsin Republican has taken a personal interest in Ukraine since he joined the Senate in 2011. In a November 18 letter to House Intelligence members he explains what he saw and heard at the White House and on his six visits to Ukraine after 11 April 2019.” I strongly recommend that all my readers look carefully at Senator Johnson’s account of his extensive and comprehensive experience working with this Ukraine and impeachment situation.

The essence of the problem was that President Trump was initially opposed to giving money to Ukraine because of endemic corruption there in the government. He also thought that European governments should support Ukraine in its problems with significant financial distributions. President Trump was also concerned that the Ukraine government should ferret out any Ukrainian operatives who might have acted in opposition to his election in 2016. Never in any communication with Ukrainian officials did the idea of “quid pro quo” for cooperation ever come up in their conversations. The quid pro quo question should be expunged from the conversation, now. But…did he abuse his power? That seems to be the problem, now.

 Nevertheless, as Peggy Noonan, a lead opinion writer in the Wall Street Journal notes, it was not necessary for President Trump to specifically call out the Bidens in a conversation with President Zelensky. His position as the stronger of a two-sided conversation might carry the day just by the power of suggestion. It is very possible that Trump might have influenced Zelensky along the mode of the gangster movies of the 1930s in which the suave mobster tells the saloon keeper from whom he’s demanding protection money, “Nice place you have here, shame if anything happened to it.”

In a meeting with Zelensky and high-ranking members of the Ukraine government on 23 May 2019, Johnson and Energy Secretary Rick Perry both reported that their conversations never included any discussion of Burisma or the Bidens. Senator Johnson had not heard that money had been withheld from Ukraine until 28 August.

The President obviously had reservations about Ukrainian corruption and the lack of outside European financial support. However, he was convinced by opposition from the Senate and the House that the money should be released. That congressional opposition was spearheaded by Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) and Richard Durbin (D-Illinois). Advocates for release of the money claimed that it would bolster the military stance of Ukraine in its present struggle with Russia; and it would show the world that America is willing to help its allies in practical ways. Senator Durbin introduced an amendment to restore funding on 11 September; the funding hold was lifted within only a few days.

I believe it is incumbent upon anyone who is interested in this impeachment controversy to read the initial report of the “whistleblower’s” statement https://nyti.ms/2pIBZV4. After reading this report, it seems obvious that this whistleblower is a strongly ideologically oriented Democrat with a powerful bias toward impeachment. We can know that from a tweet posted by one of his lawyers, Mark Zaid only 10  days after President Trump’s inauguration Zaid posted, “#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately.”

If the whistleblower’s intention was to improve and solidify the relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine, he or she failed miserably.  Instead, the result has been to publicize and highlight the president’s deeply held reservations toward Ukraine that the whistleblower felt were so damaging to our relationship with Ukraine and to U.S. national security.  The dispute over policy was being resolved between the two branches of government before the whistleblower complaint was made public.  All the complaint has accomplished is to fuel the House’s impeachment desire (which I believe was the real motivation) and damage our democracy as described above. I do not think the President has done anything that rises to the level of “high crimes or misdemeanors,” as required by the constitution in order to impeach. At the most, he might be found guilty of misuse of power.

This impeachment effort has done a great deal of damage to our democracy.  The release of transcripts of discussions between the president of the United States and another world leader sets a terrible precedent that will deter and limit candid conversations between the president and world leaders from now on. The weakening of executive privilege will also limit the extent to which presidential advisers will feel comfortable providing “out of the box” and other frank counsel in the future. 

I have thought that the phenomenon of guilt by accusation, manifested by the McCarthy trials 1954, had been a lesson the American people had learned. But…no, we still seem to follow that line of action, at least in the case of the President. We should learn that lesson all over, again.  

House Democrats would have done better to hold hearings on the question of abuse of power to censure the President. Instead, they have released the dogs of impeachment—I think they have overstepped their procedural boundaries in doing this. If they were to censure the President instead of trying to impeach him, they would have issued the first presidential censure since the administration of Andrew Jackson. President Trump likes to think of himself as similar to Jackson. For that reason, he might even enjoy receiving a censure!