“Truly, truly, I say to you, (Transcendence)

the Son can do nothing of his own accord, (Hierarchy)

but only what he sees the Father doing. (Ethics)

For whatever the Father does, (Oath/Sanctions)

that the Son does likewise.” (Succession)

(John 5:19)

The premise that the entire text of the Bible has a common structure, one which operates at multiple levels, has many implications. Besides the fact that this is clearly a miracle, there is the question of why such a limitation would be placed upon the Words of God.

This post has been slain and resurrected for inclusion in my 2015 book of essays, Inquietude.

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“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” — Richard Dawkins

Well, there’s one statement I don’t understand, unless Mr Dawkins means every religion except Christianity. Modern science was born of a distinctly Christian worldview. This next quote is one I understand to a point, but only because Mr Dawkins has a broken worldview.

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion.

I can understand this coming from someone raised in a Christian culture, where humanism has become secular. The values of the Law of Moses are still recognizable (compared to, say, certain tribes where young females’ teeth are knocked out so they don’t look like pigs, or Asian cultures where graveyards are guarded by malevolent ancestral spirits.) The problem with a humanism that is secular is its failure to take the existence and nature of sin into account, and to comprehend that a cultural awareness that sin needed to be dealt with was what made our great culture possible. Secular humanism requires superhumans, and the only truly super humans are Christians, those governed internally by the Law of God.

Jealous and proud of it
God is jealous as a husband is jealous for his wife and his children. This is not a difficult concept to understand, unless of course you intend to slander God, and hope none of your sycophants reads Bible passages in context.

Petty
The Old Testament Laws are very detailed, and the details mattered. However, the Law included a “when you sin” clause. The sins that were punished severely were the “high-handed” ones, where the sinners had not been led astray but openly, deliberately, repeatedly rebelled against what they knew.

Unjust
God is entirely just in the Old Testament. Certainly, Israel in the wilderness (and later, but particularly in the wilderness) was an object lesson to the nations, and to nations for all time. As a “childish” nation, when they sinned, they were spanked immediately. This is not the case once they were in the Land. But in no case is God ever unjust.

Unforgiving control-freak
Neither is God unforgiving. Israel knew what they signed up for. They said, “Amen” to the blessings and the curses of the Covenant. Then they directly went and sinned. The Jews who crucified Jesus made a similar Covenant with Pilate: “Let His blood be upon us and upon our children.” Jesus forgave them, but those who hardened their hearts like Pharaoh bore the curses. Josephus tells us what happened to their children. They were free to obey the gospel or disobey, as Israel was in the wilderness. Now, one might say, “What about the other nations?” Judgment begins at the house of God. The light exposes the darkness in God’s people first of all. We are given “sacramental doses of death” to keep us alive and able to minister. But the cup given to the godless nations is not a dose, it is a tsunami. Where are the Canaanites today? The Babylonians? All the great nations, and the up-and-coming ones, since Christ, have had this purifying yeast of God’s people within them.

Vindictive
God takes vengeance on the unrighteous. He waits for people — usually corrupt leaders — to fill up their sins, then moves in to rescue the oppressed. Yes, this is vindictive. God avenges the shedding of innocent blood. The reason Dawkins and his ilk can think of God as vindictive is because He is currently working in the nations like yeast, behind the scenes, as prefigured in the books of Esther. But we all know how Esther ended, don’t we?

A bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser
This one is laughable. Abraham proclaimed the Lord to the Canaanites, then God gave them 400 years to fill up their sins. Their execution under Israel’s sword was no different to the retribution in Egypt for the slaughter of Hebrew infants. It was judicial. And atheists who parrot “controversial” Bible verses like these seem to overlook the fact that God used Babylon to wipe out old Israel for their own bloodthirsty decadence. Only, Israel rose again.

Misogynistic
Dawkins — and moderns — don’t understand the different liturgical stations of men and women and what they image. Science can tell us what things are made of, but it cannot tell us what they are for. Nature is a feast, and moderns think a knife and a fork are the same thing. On top of this, which nations are the ones which do not mistreat women? Christian ones. Which people in Christian nations show a contempt for women (though often disguised)? Those who hate the Bible, hate God and despise His Christ.

Homophobic
I don’t think God fears gays any more than He fears liars, adulterers, murderers, shoplifters and the rest of us lawless bunch. He tells us that these things are destructive. Certain sins carried the death penalty in Israel because it was a church-state. The Jews did not have this power after the exile. The church only has the power to excommunicate. But the testimony remains that these sins are the serious ones because they are the most destructive, and they bring a culture to an end.

Racist
God split humanity in two when He called Abraham. In a sense, Adam was torn into church and state, to be united, married, by the Spirit of Christ. The bloodline was important only until the Christ, the promised Seed. Race was not the issue. Covenant was the issue. And the New Covenant multicultural people of God was promised and prefigured many times in the Old Testament — that is, if we are not so blinded by our hatred for God that we don’t understand what He was doing.

Infanticidal
Alright, the Lord asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. But He also stopped him from doing it. He was testing Abraham’s faith in God’s promise that all nations (there it is again) would be blessed through Isaac. Abraham obviously believed God would raise Isaac from the dead if He had to. He was, at one level, probably excited to see what God would do next. By this time, he had plenty of experiences with God to bolster his faith. He trusted him implicitly.
In Egypt, God’s “murder” of the firstborn was judicial, a payback for the Hebrew infants. And the Lord gave Pharaoh plenty of warning, didn’t He?

Genocidal
I suppose this is the Canaanites again. If we could send Mr Dawkins back in time to live with the Canaanites, he might understand why they were being cut out of history like a cancer. And we know the cancer spread to Israel. In Judges, God allows Israel to suffer under the nations whose gods they had worshipped, to get a better understanding of why this was prohibited. The God of the Bible is not anything like these false gods.

Filicidal
See Homophobic and Genocidal above.

Pestilential
The results of obedience or disobedience are “multitudes.” The choice is plunder or plagues. God plagued Egypt and Israel plundered Egypt. God plagued Satan’s house at the cross and Jesus is plundering his house. Atheism is thus a temporary pestilence.

Megalomaniacal
Megalomania: A psychopathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence. Richard Dawkins vs. God. What can I say?

Sadomasochistic
It please Abraham to circumcise his household. It was a “sacramental dose of death.” It chased the Covenant curses away. It pleased the Father to bruise the Son. It pleased Him because it was a purchase. Most people could understand this even if they chose not to believe it. Only someone who was seriously deluded could misunderstand it.

Capricious
Yes, God changes His mind. He fully intended to destroy Nineveh, but then they repented. Some of these issues are purely historical-Covenantal. God forbade Israel’s eating of certain foods, but then He changed His mind. Childhood object lessons were over. Dad says you can’t travel on the train to the city on your own, but when you turn 16 he changes his mind. This is not caprice. It is parenting.

Malevolent
God has a long fuse, but He has a fuse nonetheless. The reason Jesus is my Saviour is because I needed saving from something called God’s just wrath. As someone wise put it, the real wonder is not that God sometimes lashes out and kills people, it’s that He doesn’t do it all the time.

Bully
How is this bad? Oh, wait.

Because he has believed the modern fiction, Mr Dawkins has God all wrong. Anyone actually familiar with God knows this very well. He claims to be a humanist, but he has misclassified humanity. By advocating the removal of the curses of God, he removes the blessings. Ours is a culture without hope, focussed on the short term, and unable to understand the Covenantal nature of reality.

Dawkins’ rage against God has inspired many people to be more vocal about their atheism, but he and they will all discover that the longevity of his ideas is a fantasy. The Dawkins meme has the logic of the darkened Adamic mind. It pontificates about God’s behaviour, and ends up as bones spread under the sun, moon and stars. The Jesus meme has the quickening Spirit of resurrection. It aligns our behaviour with God’s, whose followers become the sun, moon and stars.

God doesn’t fear atheism. Neither should we.

“If your eschatology sees something other than the progressive growth and universal influence of the Kingdom of God in time and history, the success and triumph of the Great Commission, then you’d better stop drinking the Kool-Aid.” George Shubin

That was my friend George’s comment after reading this article by George Weigel from First Things.

For 27 years, the International Bulletin of Missionary Research has published an annual “Status of Global Mission” report, which attempts to quantify the world Christian reality, comparing Christianity’s circumstances to those of other faiths, and assaying how Christianity’s various expressions are faring when measured against the recent (and not-so-recent) past. The report is unfailingly interesting, sometimes jarring, and occasionally provocative.

The provocation in the 2011 report involves martyrdom. For purposes of research, the report defines “martyrs” as “believers in Christ who have lost their lives, prematurely, in situations of witness, as a result of human hostility.” The report estimates that there were, on average, 270 new Christian martyrs every 24 hours over the past decade, such that “the number of martyrs [in the period 2000-2010] was approximately 1 million.” Compare this to an estimated 34,000 Christian martyrs in 1900.

As for the interesting, try the aggregate numbers. According to the report, there will be, by mid-2011, 2,306,609,000 Christians of all kinds in the world, representing 33 percent of world population—a slight percentage rise from mid-2000 (32.7 percent), but a slight percentage drop since 1900 (34.5 percent). Of those 2.3 billion Christians, some 1.5 billion are regular church attendees, who worship in 5,171,000 congregations or “worship centers,” up from 400,000 in 1900 and 3.5 million in 2000.

These 2.3 billion Christians can be divided into six “ecclesiastical megablocks”: 1,160,880,000 Catholics; 426,450,000 Protestants; 271,316,000 Orthodox; 87,520,000 Anglicans; 378,281,000 “Independents” (i.e., those separated from or unaffiliated with historic denominational Christianity); and 35,539,000 “marginal Christians” (i.e., those professing off-brand Trinitarian theology, dubious Christology, or a supplementary written revelation beyond the Bible).

Compared to the world’s 2.3 billion Christians, there are 1.6 billion Muslims, 951 million Hindus, 468 million Buddhists, 458 million Chinese folk-religionists, and 137 million atheists, whose numbers have actually dropped over the past decade, despite the caterwauling of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Co. One cluster of comparative growth statistics is striking: As of mid-2011, there will be an average of 80,000 new Christians per day (of whom 31,000 will be Catholics) and 79,000 new Muslims per day, but 300 fewer atheists every 24 hours.

Africa has been the most stunning area of Christian growth over the past century. There were 8.7 million African Christians in 1900 (primarily in Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa); there are 475 million African Christians today and their numbers are projected to reach 670 million by 2025. Another astonishing growth spurt, measured typologically, has been among Pentecostals and charismatics: 981,000 in 1900; 612,472,000 in 2011, with an average of 37,000 new adherents every day—the fastest growth in two millennia of Christian history.

As for the quest for Christian unity: There were 1,600 Christian denominations in 1900; there were 18,800 in 1970; and there are 42,000 today.

Other impressive numbers: $545 billion is given to Christian causes annually, which comes out to $1.5 billion per day. There are some 600 million computers in Christian use, up from 1,000 in 1970. 71,425,000 Bibles will be distributed this year, and some 2 billion people will tune in at least once a month to Christian radio or television. 7.1 million books about Christianity will be published this year, compared to 1.8 million in 1970.

The big lesson of the 2011 Status of Global Mission report can be borrowed from Mark Twain’s famous crack about his alleged death: Reports of Christianity’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. Christianity may be waning in Western Europe, but it’s on an impressive growth curve in other parts of the world, including that toughest of regions for Christian evangelism, Asia. Indeed, the continuing growth of Christianity as compared to the decline of atheism (in absolute numbers, and considering atheists as a percentage of total world population) suggests the possibility that the vitriolic character of the New Atheism—displayed in all its crudity prior to Pope Benedict’s September 2010 visit to Great Britain—may have something to do with the shrewder atheists’ fear that they’re losing, and the clock is running.

That’s something you’re unlikely to hear reported in the mainstream media. The numbers are there, however, and the numbers are suggestive.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

From the latest Creation Research newsletter:

After noting that animals living in perpetual darkness have “vestiges of eyes”, Dawkins asks the following question: “Given that a cave salamander lives in perpetual darkness so has no use for eyes, why would a divine creator nevertheless furnish it with dummy eyes, clearly related to eyes but non-functional?” (Dawkins, Greatest Show, p. 351)

In 2004 scientists studied blind cave fish with ‘vestigial eyes’ as well as their sighted relatives that lived in the light. They found they could get the blind fish to develop eyes when they implanted eye tissue from the sighted into a blind fish.

All similar studies on real vestigial organs such as flightless beetles with tiny stumps of wings show that they are descended from winged beetles and have degenerated by loss so they are now stuck where they are living. Quite the opposite of evolution.

It would therefore seem that the real history of blind cave life is that when their sighted salamander or fish ancestors somehow got trapped in the caves they lost their original sight abilities, through degeneration not evolution. The change is real, but Dawkins and co. are determined to call all change evolution, when it’s really the opposite.

It’s a Beautiful World We Live In.

Last night I watched a 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox on 5 of Dawkins’ theses from his book The God Delusion. Lennox (who recently visited Australia to speak at the Easter Convention here in Katoomba) was delightful and made some strong statements. Dawkins was, to me, surprisingly earnest. But I did see in Dawkins’ responses to Lennox support for the observations of David Bently Hart that I read in a recent post by Justin Taylor. The new atheists are not the same as the old atheists:

David Bentley Hart, author of Atheist Delusions (Yale University Press, 2009), reviewing 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, laments:

How long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral “truths,” their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about “religion” in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for? . . .

A truly profound atheist is someone who has taken the trouble to understand, in its most sophisticated forms, the belief he or she rejects, and to understand the consequences of that rejection. Among the New Atheists, there is no one of whom this can be said, and the movement as a whole has yet to produce a single book or essay that is anything more than an insipidly doctrinaire and appallingly ignorant diatribe.

If that seems a harsh judgment, I can only say that I have arrived at it honestly. In the course of writing a book published just this last year, I dutifully acquainted myself not only with all the recent New Atheist bestsellers, but also with a whole constellation of other texts in the same line, and I did so, I believe, without prejudice. No matter how patiently I read, though, and no matter how Herculean the efforts I made at sympathy, I simply could not find many intellectually serious arguments in their pages, and I came finally to believe that their authors were not much concerned to make any. . . .

I came to realize that the whole enterprise, when purged of its hugely preponderant alloy of sanctimonious bombast, is reducible to only a handful of arguments, most of which consist in simple category mistakes or the kind of historical oversimplifications that are either demonstrably false or irrelevantly true. And arguments of that sort are easily dismissed, if one is hardy enough to go on pointing out the obvious with sufficient indefatigability.

You can read the whole thing at First Things. He goes on to examine the “anecdotal enthymemes” of Christopher Hitchens, and later argues that “The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche.”

“Human beings are animals whose preference for group membership is simultaneously the source of their greatest salvation and their ultimate destruction” —Xenocrates

Who has the majority of evidence to support their paradigm? Is it the Young Earth Creationists or the (mostly atheistic) Evolutionists? (Please note that as far as I am concerned, anyone else is just sitting on a very sharp fence trying to hide the pain with clever words.)

The Old Earthers, whatever their stripe (from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to certain young Sydney Anglicans I admire and the misguided mob at BioLogos), despite their bluff, rely on hearsay and circular reasoning. Creationist cosmologist Russell Humphreys writes:

There is a little-known irony in the controversy between creationists and evolutionists about the age of the world. The majority of scientists— the evolutionists—rely on a minority of the relevant data. Yet a minority of scientists—the creationists—use the majority of the relevant data. Adding to the irony is the public’s wrong impression that it is the other way around. Therefore, many ask: “If the evidence is so strongly for a young earth, why do most scientists believe otherwise?” The answer is simple: Most scientists believe the earth is old because they believe most other scientists believe the earth is old!

They trust in what’s called ‘circular reasoning’, not data. I once encountered such a clear example of this misplaced trust, that I made detailed notes immediately. It happened when I spoke with a young (in his early thirties, career-ambitious, and upwardly mobile) geochemist at Sandia National Laboratories, where I then worked as a physicist. I presented him with one piece of evidence for a young world, the rapid accumulation of sodium in the ocean. It was ideal, since much of geochemistry deals with chemicals in the ocean.

I wanted to see how he explained possible ways for sodium to get out of the sea fast enough to balance the rapid input of sodium to the sea. Creationist geologist Steve Austin and I wanted the information in order to complete a scientific paper on the topic.3 We went around and around the issue for an hour, but he finally admitted he knew of no way to remove sodium from the sea fast enough. That would mean the sea could not be billions of years old. Realizing that, he said, “Since we know from other sciences that the ocean is billions of years old, such a removal process must exist.”

I questioned whether we ‘know’ that at all and started to mention some of the other evidence for a young world. He interrupted me, agreeing that he probably didn’t know even one percent of such data, since the science journals he depended on had not pointed it out as being important. But he did not want to examine the evidence for himself, because, he said, “People I trust don’t accept creation!”

So, in reality, who are the free-thinkers now? Not the old earthers.

Read the full article here.

These modern atheists are totally blind. Besides the fact that they give all the credit for the cultural achievements of Christianity to “human reason” (aren’t Muslims human, too?), they believe that social anarchy is freedom. After all, we are just pondscum, blindly—antinomiously— finding its full potential.

It is Christianity that has brought freedom and freedom of choice to the world. With the ingratitude inherited from Adam, our culture then demanded “freedoms” we could not handle. We want to rule but we have no wisdom. We are a train too smart for tracks.

Dawkins and his salamander-eyed toadies have now posted happy children onto the sides of buses with the message that religious freedom is actually freedom from a religious upbringing. Of course, the subtext is the false claim that secularism is neutral. These men are either incredibly ignorant or malicious self-serving liars. I think it is the former. They are blinded by their own fabricated worldview.

What is hilarious is that these smiley children as it turns out are actually from a well-known evangelical Christian family.[1] So it’s a bit like Brad Pitt’s body double having to do a basic run up a flight of stairs because of the actor’s chain smoking.[2] It’s false advertising. They should have used happy atheist kids but these tend to live with the flying spaghetti monster.

What they really want is your children indoctrinated with their child-deforming poison. Dawkins might dress as the Candy Man and offer freedom but he is really the Child Catcher. He is so deluded he has become an incarnation of the very methodology of Satan, in whom he doesn’t believe.[3] His idea of freedom for children, in practice, is like an outlawing of fences around preschools.

I wish they’d wake up and see that the full potential of their lawless doctrines is already becoming quite apparent in our culture. They have made us too weak to survive “natural selection” (or, as I see it, robbed us of Covenant succession). A bit like Brad Pitt, I guess.

______________________________________
[1] See Children who front Richard Dawkins’ atheist ads are evangelicals.
[2] I don’t think this actually happened, but someone in the movie industry did report Pitt as being incredibly unfit due to cigarettes and in the context of him running up stairs.
[3] For more comments on Dawkins and children, see Richard Dawkins, the blind compass maker. For Satan as child-catcher see Fighting Over the Children.

On the one hand, loud-mouthed, offensive Christians might not make unbelievers think, “Gee, I want to be like you.” But on the other, are Christians to woo the world using only the vocab of a Rick Warren calendar? When is it OK to be offensive?

In the Bible the ‘offensive’ language was (mostly) used by God’s attorneys, the prophets, who were speaking to a culture which had already heard the truth and should have known better (whether that be Israel or the nations immediately surrounding her). God reserves such scolding for those who were in high-handed (conscious) sin against the truth, and the prophets concentrate more on the nature of the sins than on ridiculing the sinners. Jesus does the same thing in Matthew 23-24. As mentioned here a few days ago, He even swings Isaiah 13 like a knife and infers that Judah is a new ‘Babylon.’ Now, that is some insult to a nation without a Davidic king since the captivity.

I guess, today, such ‘housekeeping’ would include dealing with those within the church advocating a wholesale sellout. Sarcasm aimed at two-faced liberal theology or theistic evolution would be an example. Richard Dawkins reserves his greatest spite for the latter and he is right on the mark.

Spurgeon was a wooer, and yet he wasn’t above using cutting remarks:

“As for sensible men, and especially the sturdy workmen of our great cities, they utterly abhor foppery in a minister . . . It is a pity that we cannot persuade all ministers to be men, for it is hard to see how otherwise they will be truly men of God . . . A hundred years ago the dressiness of the clergy was about as conspicuous as it is now, but it had no doctrinal meaning, and was mere foppery . . . Molasses and other sugary matters are sickening to me. Jack-a-dandy in the pulpit makes me feel as Jehu did when he saw Jezebel’s decorated head and painted face, and cried in indignation, ‘Fling her down.’” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, pp. 300-301).

Such rudeness exposes the rudeness of the sin. It is self-deprecating rudeness, or ‘rudeness with tears.’ And when we keep our own house as good stewards by showing the world how to repent, some out there might just want to be like us.

In one sense, giving Richard Dawkins two weeks of air time on ABC TV’s Compass is like putting the tobacco companies in charge of lung cancer research.

In another sense, however, it is quite right that atheism is seen as just another faith. Dawkins’ ‘mount improbable’ illustration of evolutionary theory is really ‘mount impossible’, but he chooses to have faith in it, and admits elsewhere that it cannot be proven. (So much for the mountains of evidence he claims to have.) Evolutionary theory is just another of Dawkins’ ‘orbiting teapots’ that men choose to believe in.

Dawkins also wants us to believe that religious faith is intolerant and leads inevitably to killing. Yet he neglects to mention that his own faith gave us the most bloodthirsty century in history, the death toll estimated at around 100 million, many of them Christians, which is more than the deaths from all the ‘religious’ wars put together. The arbitrary human ‘Reason’ he extolls brought us the guillotine and unprecedented genocide. The hypothesis of evolution brought us eugenics and amplified racism. Christianity, however, brought us an end to slavery, the first hospitals, orphanages and social welfare, and not just because the founders happened to be Christian. These were and still are a direct result of a biblical worldview. Is it any wonder people are turning back to faith? Perhaps we have longer memories than Richard does. He’s like a doctor extolling the benefits of thalidomide to a pregnant woman in 2007. Is he ignorant or deceitful?

Richard argues from a supposed position of compassion and concern for those he ridicules, yet this is inconsistent with his materialistic worldview, and is simply borrowed capital from the Christian worldview he has turned his back on. The only reason he can slap God in the face is because he is standing in His lap. There is no basis in Richard’s worldview for any moral stand whatsoever. Remember, natural selection boils down to ‘might is right’. If we are all just biological accidents, or ‘nature’s way of keeping meat fresh’, perhaps religious killing is merely evolution in action.

Richard is also crafty in his lumping together of Islamic terrorists with Bible Christianity. I am sure he is aware that Baptists don’t fly planes into buildings or Presbyterians strap dynamite to themselves. Both Islam and Christianity have a mandate to dominate the world, but unlike the Koran the New Testament limits the weapons to proclamation, charity and self-sacrifice. Dawkins must know this.

It struck me as ironic that Richard thinks that teaching faith to our children is a form of child abuse, which includes neglect, black eyes, incest and being locked in the cupboard. However, his one-eyed little film displays many obviously happy Christian families, and the bitter ‘free-thinkers’ holed up in the woods appeared to be childless. A politically incorrect but undeniable biological fact is that his beloved secular west is becoming extinct through birth control, abortion and sodomy. If this is natural selection in action, it seems the meek will inherit the earth after all.