Damaged Souls, Torn Apart by Disparate Forces

This blog post was inspired by an article in First Things May 2021 by Jenna and Benjamin Storey, “Pixelated Souls.”

 

It was a fact that in the Sixteenth Century, western civilization was caught on the horns of a dilemma, conflicting loyalties between Christ and the King. It was a “psycho-political” problem, well-articulated by the philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. A generation later, the problem was largely dispelled by the philosopher, John Locke, who concluded that people could resolve the problem by compartmentalizing it into two distinct loyalties. They could be good Christians and good citizens at the same time.

 

Today we have more than two loyalties which pull at us incessantly. All sorts of things grab for our loyalties, values, and behaviors. Currently we are called upon to proclaim fealty to various identity groups, our jobs, families, church, politics, social forces, etc., etc. All this confusion is aggravated by our lock-in to social media. We have a great problem of trying to figure out what is important in our modern lives. These problems make us distracted, restless, and unable to get most anything together—confusion reigns!

 

The Storeys remind us that we are threatened by a dispersion of forces, whose claims on us are ever-shifting. Pulled in a dozen different directions, we are unable to subject our days to any clear purpose. We move through time reacting to influences and often not able to control anything to our satisfaction.

 

We seem forced to take all our cues in life from screens on our computers or cell phones. Email reminds us of professional obligations and opportunities. YouTube promises diverting relief from the press of demands; and many eye-catching visions keep us off balance in trying to get a fix on anything meaningful. In the conflict of pulls against us, we lose sight of who we are; and the electronic world distances us from our fellows in the world around.

 

Liberal politics did not do any of us much good. Its claims of showing us the important things of life are shallow, transitory, and ultimately meaningless for the most part. Yet…its claims are frequently fascinating to us. But these liberal/progressive forces do not design anything lasting or ultimately meaningful. Our problems of values come at us in a completely random fashion, all aggravated by rapidly developing technology. The women’s movement has done us no good. It has taken mothers out of the home in search of a more affluent standard of living and thus, it has taken away from our children the stability and basic understandings of moral and spiritual truths that used to be transmitted by mothers (and fathers). The value of reading good books also seems to be lost today in favor of video games.  

 

Several decades ago, our forbears had an answer to the problems of dispersion we are experiencing today; and we would do well to listen to the past in this confusing world. There was a time in America when life was oriented around family, faith, and patriotism. We need to get back to those old-fashioned values. Those old values and identities can make life meaningful to us. Christ and the Bible have answers upon which we need to reorient ourselves. There is meaning in life! “Life is real, life is earnest; and the grave is not its goal. Dust thou art; to dust returnest was not written of the soul.”

 

"Systemic Racism?"

This post was sent to President Biden on 5/8/2021

"Systemic racism?" Where is it? With all the programs aimed at poor Blacks and other minority groups, it is hard to see this kind of discrimination, e.g., opportunity zones, affirmative action permanent funding for historically black colleges, and a raft of welfare programs aimed primarily at Blacks. I think the government is foisting this charge on the American people in an illogical and unfair way. 

The Development of Revolutions

Lately, I have been reading about revolutions that have happened in recent centuries; and I have referenced a paper published in the January issue of First Things. The title of the paper is “The Road to Revolution,” by Stanley G. Payne, an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

        Dr. Payne points out that “Revolution is not generally provoked by deteriorating conditions; rathe, complaints tend to increase after conditions have already begun to improve. The regime destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than the one that came immediately before it, and experience teaches us that the most hazardous moment for a bad government is normally when it is beginning to reform.” Once people begin to think of reforming their government, some new crisis or setback, which may or may not be important in itself, can trigger revolution. 

        A good example of this phenomenon is the French Revolution of 1798. The absolutist government of Louis XIV provoked less resentment than did the milder rule of Louis XVI. Other examples of this revolutional reaction can be seen in Russia, Venezuela, Italy, Germany, Argentina, and Cuba. Those nations began to experience better governments at first; and later they deteriorated into autocratic regimes. Most of them evolved through socialist governments prior to developing a fascist government.

        Revolutions from a relatively weak regime are often bloodless, nonviolent revolutions at first. However, as time goes by, the revolutionary process leads to greater radicalization and greater carnage, sometimes involving a foreign war.

        The Spanish revolution of 1931-1939 is a good model to study this classic example of a national civil uprising/revolution. Spain had created the first liberal democratic system in the country’s history, with, at first, impartial elections based on universal suffrage and broad constitutional guarantees of civil rights. This achievement did not prevent revolution and civil war. Conflict arose because leftist groups demanded total control of the government; and conservative groups (largely Catholic) resisted. As more force from the left developed, a group of “anti-fascist” radicals caused violence and mayhem in the nation. At first, they used democratic means to grab power and insert their adherents into government positions, but when that became less effective against the conservatives, they resorted to extreme violence.

        We, in America, are seeing what this process may be developing into.  Violence by left wing groups that even use the same name as the revolutionaries in Spain, e.g., “anti-fascists” (or ANTIFA, as we know it here in the U.S.) seek to grab power by violent means. Many of these groups which claim to be socialists, look more like anarchists to me.

        It is interesting to see that these left-sided groups which have attained control of their several nations mentioned above eventually consolidate power in a central government that is subsequently identified as fascist—the very group against which the revolution was aimed in the first place!

        Here in America, we are experienced civil unrest. It is happening in a nation that has very recently been enjoying economic prosperity. In 2019, the unemployment rate fell to a low of 3.4%, the lowest since 1968. The unemployment rate has presently risen to 6.7%, but that is still better than the rate posted by the Obama years. During the Trump years, median household income increased by $6000/year. However, it must be observed that some of that improvement has been partly offset by increases in the cost of education and shelter. By many measures, however, America is in better shape economically that it was under the Obama administration. All this, despite the cries from government leaders and the media that the U.S. is going to the dogs economically.

        As noted above, good economic times and fair civil regulations do not, in themselves, portend peaceful conditions. I sincerely hope that America will settle down and enjoy good times without forces such as ANTIF and Black Lives Matter causing disruption. 😐  

         

   

 

 

 

The Portland Protests

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Civil Unrest—The Portland Protests

22 January 2021

In the city of Portland, Oregon nightly violence, vandalism, and looting have been going on for 79 nights. The violence has spread to other cities around the United States; and protests have even been staged in cities of Europe. All this mayhem was supposedly started as a protest against racism and was sparked by the police killing of George Floyd on May 25^th. However, rioters have included people who are protesting a variety of issues, e.g., immigration rights, homelessness, racism, police accountability, and free speech. The protests have not had any visible leadership—disorganization has prevailed.

 

The violence is being supported by the Black Lives Matter organization and antifa movement. The NAACP and various news sources have been vocal in supporting the movement. Wikipedia reports that as of 5 July 2020, 29 people have been killed—25 were from gunshot wounds. Many lesser injuries have been incurred.

 

City administrators have had varying attitudes toward the violence; and Republicans have been vocal in accusing Democrat mayors and city governments of refusing to quell the violence. President Trump has repeatedly protested the violence, and he recently sent federal law keepers into Portland to protect federal buildings from destruction and fire. His efforts were strongly opposed by Portland’s Democrat mayor, and Democrats around the country have protested federal interference. Presidential candidate Joe Biden has commented on the violence by saying, “There is no reason for the President to send federal troops into a city where people are demanding change peacefully and respectfully.” Well…I would say that I doubt these protests are “peaceful and respectful.”

 

It seems to me that the time is long past when legitimate protesting has been the character of the activity. Anarchy seems to be the guiding principle of these protests; and only destruction of property and destruction of peaceful local government seems to be the general goal.

 

One movement in the protests has been a widespread demand to defund the police departments in order to prevent further police violence against people of color. This movement has caused city governments to pull police patrols off the streets in some very violent neighborhoods; and that regulation has predictably caused an uptick in crime. A Wall Street Journal analysis of crime statistics among the nation’s 50 largest cities found that reported homicides were up 24% so far this year, to 3,612. Shootings and gun violence also rose, even though many other violent crimes such as robbery fell. The homicide rate is up because violent criminals have been emboldened by the sidelining of police and the emptying out of jails and prisons due to the protests and because jurisdictions have been trying to limit the spread of covid-19 infection in crowded prisons according to analysts and law-enforcement officials in several cities. Though many of America’s biggest cities noting this increase in homicide are run by Democrats, the rise in killings is a bipartisan problem. Homicides are rising at a double-digit rate in most of the big cities run by Republicans, also, including Miami, San Diego, Omaha, Tulsa, Okla., and Jacksonville, Fla. Two major cities run by Independents, San Antonio and Las Vegas are also seeing increasing rates of homicide. Much of the increase in homicide is being seen in parts of these cities that are not involved in rioting. In Portland, for instance, the police department did not see any homicides around protests in July, a department spokeswoman said. Through June, its latest crime maps show, all of its homicides happened east and south of the city center.

 

I think the time has passed when simple and nonintrusive means should be used to control the violence. Removal of federal soldiers from Portland does not seem to have helped the situation. Despite pleas from local city officials for the removal of those troops, city resources do not seem able to control the damage.  It seems to me that police protection should be increased—not decreased. There is a time when force is needed to make America’s cities safe and livable. Police departments around the country are noting a decrease in applicants for police service. That is understandable. After all, who wants to work in a police department that is not supported by city governments which do not support police activity in controlling crime and violence?

How to Petition the Federal Government

How to Petition the Federal Government

1)    Go to USA.gov

2)   Click on government agencies and elected officials.

3)   Contact elected officials.

4)   Under Federal Elected Officials, choose the President.

5)   Fill out his online form and write your comment. Keep your comment very brief so that, if necessary, you can send the comment via Twitter. (If you do not have a Twitter account, just go to Twitter.com and sign up—it is free and very easy!) Keep your comments very short, and do not include more than one issue for each message. Always remain polite and nonconfrontational. If you are writing about a bill under consideration, try always to refer to the bill by name and number. If you do not know the number of the bill under question, go to Agencies on USA.gov and choose Library of Congress (LOC). Enter the bill name in the search field, and you will receive the bill number and information about the bill.

6)   Highlight your message to the President and copy it with the control/C command to copy.

7)   Go to U.S. senators on the USA.gov site and go to “choose a senator.” Scroll to your 2 senators and click on “contact.” Then, fill out each senators’ online form. When you get to the comment field, use Control/V to paste your comment. You may have to modify your comment to fit the Senate message.

8)   After you have written to your 2 senators, choose “leadership” and send the same message to each leader in both parties. Do not avoid sending messages to senators with whom you disagree on the issue you are discussing. After all, those are the votes you want to change, anyway. (By using this technique, you can contact any other senator you wish to contact.)

9)   After you have contacted the Senate, go beck to USA.gov and select “U.S. representatives.” You will arrive at “Directory of Representatives:” Click on “By last name,” and enter the last name on the table below. When you find your representative, fill out his/her online contact form and do exactly the same thing you did for the senators. The House of Representatives web site will not allow you to contact leadership or any other representative. They seem to have made that difficult and not available for people other than the representative’s own constituency.

 

Nancy and I are presently petitioning government to support a bill that will be introduced in the House on 6 January by Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama to override the Supreme Court on the election issue. He will ask the legislative branch of the federal government to force objective evaluation of the presidential votes in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania for three reasons:

1.   Voters cannot be accurately identified in those states.

2.  Voters must be legal residents or green card holders in order to vote.

3.  Legal votes must be submitted within the legal time periods to be counted.

This procedure of legislative override of Supreme Court decisions is legal and has been used several times in recent years.

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Covid Death Rates from the CDC

I would like to draw your attention to the latest report of Covid death rates reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). If you could look carefully at the graphs included in the link below, you will see that the death rate for Covid-like illness (CLI) is very near the incidence reported for Influenza-like illness (ILI).

 

This indicates to me that the risk of dying from Covid-19 is about the same as contracting influenza. This makes me wonder if all the hype over Covid-19 is worth it all! After all, most of us Americans don’t worry so much about dying from the flu!

  

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html

 

(This data was brought to my attention by my son, Ben.)

 

A Letter to an Atheist

A Letter to an Atheist

I have a very good friend who claims to be an atheist. He lives a life entirely in compliance with Christian morals and ethics, which makes me doubt the sincerity of his atheistic beliefs—but…that is beside the point. What I am hoping to do with this blog post is to show him that his belief in atheism is an impossibility—it can’t be true.

 When I confronted him with the belief that God created the universe, he denied it saying that the whole universe, all the planets, stars, rocks, and trees, etc. have been here forever—they are, in his mind eternal. To him, it seems that God is not at all necessary. At one time, I pointed out to him that many scientists believe that the universe is about 15 billion years old and that the sun is believed to last for another 3-5 billion years. All the stars are in the process of burning out, just as is the sun. He replied that he does believe the scientists.  I asked him “If you believe that, and the scientists are right, how can you believe that the universe is eternal? After all, anything that has a beginning and an end cannot be eternal?” (I don’t think my argument convinced him of his error.) So…I am writing this blog in the hope of convincing him that the universe is not eternal; and that God created it.

 There is one scientific fact that my friend believes; and I, too, believe to be true—that is the truth of the three postulates of thermodynamics:

1)   The first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot either be created nor destroyed.

2) The Second law of thermodynamics is that entropy is always increasing. (Entropy is the manifestation of constant deterioration and randomness in the system.)

3) A system's entropy approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero (-459.67º Fahrenheit).

 The energy in the universe is all there is or ever will be. This is the characteristic of a closed system like our universe.

 It can be shown that matter is merely a storage form of energy; and the two are simply two expressions of energy. Energy can be turned into matter, as exemplified by sunlight that is converted into wood, thus showing that energy is temporarily stored in wood. And…that energy can be released in the form of heat and light when the wood is burned. Many other examples of this process can be seen in our universe. We might see this more clearly when we realize that heat will only pass to objects which are cooler. It will never pass spontaneously to an object which is has a higher temperature. Systems are thermodynamically irreversible. The entropy in a system will not work in the opposite direction spontaneously without input from a source outside the closed system.

 The second law of thermodynamics is that entropy is always increasing. Entropy is the same as randomness and disorganization in a closed system, like our universe. This is just another way of saying that all physical systems are running down to lower and lower levels of energy—thus, they are being downgraded into useless heat, which is subsequently diffused into outer space, never to be regained into a useful source. Entropy always moves downwardly; it never moves to higher energy level systems.

 But…one might ask, if that is true, how does one account for the fact that we, ourselves are extremely organized beings. Where did we come from, if energy only moves in one way, e.g., into systems of lower levels of organization. Where on earth did such highly organized systems as the biological systems we see every day come from?

 The answer to that question is that some Outside Force caused energy to move up the scale of existence instead of downward. The only way for highly organized beings or systems to occur is for an Outside Force to act upon energy to make it develop into complicated forms of matter, such as the human body in all its complexity. That Force has to be something or somebody that exists outside of the closed system of our universe and who is able to cause energy to become progressively more organized. Nevertheless, our bodies will eventually follow the inexorable course of deterioration destined for all other forms of matter, i.e., into useless entropy—heat that will disappear into outer space. The laws of thermodynamics cannot be denied for long.

 All that being said, we must finally admit that we are all in the process of increasing entropy. Our world is in the process of becoming useless heat dissipated into outer space. (Please do not get me wrong here. I am only speaking of our physical bodies, ourselves in a material sense. All this has nothing to do with the destiny of our eternal souls—God will take care of that!)

 Remember, I am in the process of proving that the world we live in is not eternal. The whole thing is faithfully following the laws of thermodynamics. And as entropy only increases and does not decrease unless it is acted upon by an outside process or Person, then it will ultimately result in a universe which will be in complete equilibrium and where there is no more matter or localized energy, which we might identify as our universe. At that point the temperature of our universe will be right about absolute zero. Heat will have no other place to go—equilibrium of the thermodynamic system will have been reached. Needless to say, this system modification will take a very long time. But…it will occur eventually. (Unless, of course, God intervenes, again! We have no indication that He will!)

 Now, let’s get back to our original question about the eternality of the universe. It should be obvious from the above text that if the universe were eternal, then there should have been plenty of time for all the material and localized energy in the whole universe to turn into useless entropy. If that were the case, according to the Third Law of Thermodynamics, there would be absolutely no material left in the whole universe, and the ambient temperature would approximate absolute zero. That has certainly not happened, yet; and, thus, we find ourselves in the middle of the process of all material and localized energy turning into entropy. It is, thus, concluded that when the final drop of energy deteriorates in the universe, then that will be the end of the universe, itself. And…as I have said, before, any system with a definite end cannot be eternal. Likewise, the deterioration of a given amount of energy in a definite end presupposes that the energy had to have a beginning. Thus, the universe must have begun at some definite time.

 Now, a parenthetical note from myself: I most certainly do not subscribe to the idea that the universe is billions of years old. I hold the biblical principle to be true that God created the universe, and He did it at a definite time. He very probably did it much later than the scientists say the universe was born. But…that is a different subject for a different time. Again, my purpose in writing this blog is only to show that the universe cannot by any stretch of the imagination be eternal. It had a beginning and it will have an end.

 None of the above is rocket science. King Solomon said essentially the same thing 3000 years ago: “I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that men will revere Him.” Ecclesiastes 3:4

 (Several ideas in this blog post came from The Battle for the Beginning by John F. MacArthur.)