Bully's Blog

Alastair Roberts has some wise things to say about rational public debate on important issues being hampered by the new culture of “tolerance.” Of special interest to me are his observations concerning the nature of the recent spat involving Doug Wilson, Jared Wilson and Rachel Held Evans. I have had similar experiences in online discussions. I’m relying on and presenting facts and somehow the other side is irate that facts are being presented. And the fact-free, vitriolic, ad hominem comebacks would make my hair curl if I had any.

Continue reading

“The Left might be godless, but the Right has only the form of godliness.”

Just chucking some ideas around here, so comments are welcome (especially from actual Americans.)

From the New York Times (April 2008)

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]
Continue reading

The dreamtime is over.

The Bible teaches us that flesh is temporary. This is bad news for those who distrust God. Flesh is all they have.

Continue reading

Kerry Lewis recently posted this quote from George Grant on facebook:

There is a fundamental principle of dominion in the Bible:
dominion through service. This principle is understood well by the
modern welfare State. The politicians and planners recognize that
the agency that supplies charity in the name of the people will
gain the allegiance of the people. So, they “serve.” And so they
gain dominion…

Continue reading

Kerry Lewis shared an interesting article relating the difference between the final events on the Titanic and the version portrayed in movies.

“Men of power and prestige sacrificed their lives for women and children of the lower class, many of whom were indentured servants, day laborers, and domestic workers. On this flotilla of self-absorption, self-sacrifice became a prevailing virtue during a crisis moment, and the powerful chose death that the powerless might receive life.”

The era of such brave sacrifice is gone, along with the Christian worldview that sustained it. Progressives accuse conservatives of nostalgia for a culture that is past, a time we cannot recreate. They are half right. It is gone forever, but the future (or “eternal utopian present”) imagined by progressives is unsustainable, if not downright destructive. We agree on the death of the old culture, but have very different ideas about the future.

Continue reading

or As Far as the East is from the West

“That very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other, for previously they had been at enmity with each other.” (Luke 23:12)

“Secular humanism and Islam are merely the bipolar moods of Christless Christianity. They can be united only in suicide.”

Getting a grip on the Tabernacle layout helps us understand the architecture of Creation, the history of mankind and the structure of the entire Bible. After reading Mark Steyn on the Islamic/secular conflict in Europe, I was thinking that the same “Tabernacle” categories can be found in the world today. Whatever we do, however much we distort the truth, we are still bound by the walls and furnitures set up in Genesis 1. And, in my humble opinion, the light this sheds on the current conflict is not only revealing concerning its true nature, but it also helps us to predict its future.

Continue reading

“Survival is not the highest good.”

Doug Wilson tackles contrived ethical dilemmas in his review of The Hunger Games.
Continue reading

Some excerpts from David P. Goldman’s essay, “Admit It, You Really Hate Modern Art,” in It’s Not the End of the World, It’s Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations.

Why is it that the audience for modern art is quite happy to take in the ideological message of modernism while strolling through an art gallery but loath to hear the same message in the concert hall? It is rather like communism, which once was fashionable among Western intellectuals. They were happy to admire communism from a distance, but very few chose to live under communism.

Continue reading

“…there is a historical difference between toleration and religious liberty, even if we sometimes use the two terms interchangeably today. Toleration puts up with minority religious believers because it is more convenient; religious freedom declares that they are allowed to practice their faith, privately and publicly, not because the government has given them permission, but because the permission is not the government’s to withhold.” — Nathaniel Peters, Should Christians Be Wary of Conscience Talk?