Payola

Listen to it here.

Now, if you haven’t heard about Lee Fang’s substack article about community advocacy groups getting money from Pfizer to say that the vaccines and vaccine mandates are good, without disclosing that they had gotten money from Pfizer, check it out, because that’s what this article is about.

First of all I want to commend Mr. Fang because it appears that there are still some journalists actually doing journalism in this country—which is refreshing to see! And, there are others who continue to do actual good work, Matt Taibbi comes to mind; Bari Weiss would be another who actually seems to be seeking the truth. There are still good journalists out there. And chances are there are a lot of them—but most of the good ones don’t have big enough microphones.

There are people who are digging in to corruption; there are those who are seeking to bring the darkness to light; there are men and women out there who are brave and heroic and who live up to the high calling of journalism. Because journalism IS a high calling. It takes courage to investigate and publish the news that the powerful don’t want published. It takes strength of character to seek the truth wherever it may be. Journalists who actually live up to that high calling deserve the respect and gratitude of a grateful republic.

And Mr. Fang’s article here is a great example of someone digging in, getting the info, and publishing it.

Now, I’m not sure that this should surprise anyone.

Indeed, if this surprises you then I’m curious where you’ve been living for the past several years. But it does confirm suspicions, and a lot of the time that’s just as important as new information. And what this comes down to, ultimately, is that Pfizer, by all appearances, paid people to say things that they might not otherwise have said.

Now, you might ask, “Well why do you assume that the advocacy and community groups that promoted vaccine mandates wouldn’t have otherwise said the things they said without the Pfizer money? Couldn’t it be that the money from Pfizer was co-incidental to the honest opinions of said community groups?” Sure, I mean it’s possible. In the same sense that it’s possible that Elvis is still alive somewhere. I can’t disprove it.

But just to be fair, let’s actually consider that logic.

So, lots of groups came out in favor of forcing US Citizens to get experimental drugs injected in them. And these experimental drugs were sold, for profit. And the company that profited off of the sales of these vaccines was giving money away to advocacy groups who were promoting the forcing of US Citizens to get the experimental drugs.

Moreover, consider the things that advocacy groups said. They said that the good done by vaccines and mandates would outweigh the harm—not only biological harm, of which there has been much, but the harm to our civil rights. Because this is something that hasn’t been talked about very much which is that the US Government has tried to compel people, by force of law, to surrender their rights to enrich private companies. And, frankly, whenever anyone stands to benefit from the suppression, or erasure of civil rights, we ought to at least be extra cautious about doing that thing.

Again, you might say, “But Lukey-poo, it could have all been honest.” Yes, that’s possible—but why did none of these advocacy groups disclose that Pfizer had given them money? I mean, I’ve done book reviews for publishing companies that have given me free copies of books and it’s standard practice—in fact it would be considered deeply dishonest and deceptive to not let those reading my reviews to know that I received a free copy. Why? Because I’m a shill? Well, I don’t think I am, but people reading online reviews of theology books don’t know me or if I have integrity. And I think that one line of text is worth it to maintain my integrity and honesty.

So, here’s my logic.

1)     Groups who are tasked with protecting, advocating for, and advising citizens promoted a policy of the injection of citizens with an experimental for-profit drug under force of Government compulsion.

2)     These groups received money from the for-profit manufacturer of this experimental drug.

3)     These groups did not disclose that they had received money from the for-profit manufacturer.

Now, IF

A)     The advocacy groups honestly desired to promote forcing citizens to be injected with an experimental for-profit drug by government compulsion

THEN,

B)     Why did Pfizer give them money? Pfizer exists to make money, not give it away out of niceness.

Another logical puzzle for us to work out, IF

A)     The advocacy groups were giving their honest opinions uninfluenced by Pfizer’s money

THEN,

B)     Why did they EITHER

1)     Take the money in the first place?

OR

2)     Not disclose they took it?

Still another logical puzzle, IF

A)     These advocacy groups were not being coached or influenced by Pfizer

THEN,

B)     Why did they all seem to have the same talking points which turned out to be false, among which are that getting the vaccine will provide immunity from future illness, that getting the vaccine will make a person incapable of spreading the virus, that the drug was safe?

Brothers and sisters, friends, these are questions that deep down in our hearts we all know the answers to. Is it possible that this is all just a coinky-dink. Sure, if that’s the world you choose to live in because reality is scary, then, yep, fine, it COULD be a coincidence. But is that really the most likely interpretation of the data? William of Ockham taught that all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the best—at least that’s the popular and quite helpful form of his Razor. What he literally said is, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity.” I mean, except he said it in Latin, but you get the point. The notion is that you don’t add in extra steps or more complications to an explanation unless you need them.

For instance, let’s say that you leave you kids at home and you come home to find Grama-Aunt-Pa’s ceramic clown broken with chocolate smeared on it. No one is home but your children, the doors were locked when you got home, just as you had left them, there is no one else there, no doors or windows are broken, there’s no sign of forced entry, and the kids won’t meet your eyes.

The simplest explanation is that the kids broke it.

Is it possible that a ninja picked the lock, ate a Butterfinger, tried to steal the ceramic clown, dropped it (because of the Butterfinger…obvi), and they absconded with no one the wiser?

Yes. It’s possible. But you have to add so many unnecessary steps to this solution that no one would actually buy that story. But it’s possible. Absolutely it’s possible. And you can’t disprove it either. But what William of Ockham would say is that you don’t presume a chocoholic, clumsy ninja did it unless the evidence comes to necessitate that possibility.

The reality is that there are always an endless number of POSSIBLE solutions to a problem if you’re willing to entertain magic and time-travel, but that doesn’t mean that they’re good solutions.

And I think we all know what happened. Pfizer came around, offering some cash and people took it. And in exchange for the cash they said what Pfizer wanted them to say. This isn’t complicated. And it’s not morally complicated either.

Matthew 28 says this:

While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

Now this is a passage of scripture that doesn’t normally get preached on except around Easter-time, but it’s important because it’s relevant to so much of what we see in society. People, many people anyways, will say just about anything if you off them enough money. Another famous example comes from Acts 24 after Paul has made his defense before Governor Felix:

Then Felix, who was well informed about the Way, adjourned the hearing and said, “When Lysias the commander comes, I will decide your case.” He ordered the centurion to keep Paul under guard, but to allow him some freedom and permit his friends to minister to his needs.

After several days, Felix returned with his wife Drusilla, who was a Jewess. He sent for Paul and listened to him speak about faith in Christ Jesus. As Paul expounded on righteousness, self-control, and the coming judgment, Felix became frightened and said, “You may go for now. When I find the time, I will call for you.” At the same time, he was hoping that Paul would offer him a bribe. So he sent for Paul frequently and talked with him.

After two years had passed, Felix was succeeded by Porcius Festus. And wishing to do the Jews a favor, Felix left Paul in prison.

Just like in the passage about the Roman guards in Matthew 28 we see that people will change what they say if they’re offered the money and they lack the moral courage to tell the truth.

And these are just examples, many more could be offered, but it reminds me of a passage that confused me for a long time. In Exodus 18, Moses is giving his father-in-law Jethro the grand tour and Jethro sees that Moses is literally the only Judge for all of Israel and Jethro gives this advice:

Moses’ father-in-law replied, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone. Listen now to me and I will give you some advice, and may God be with you. You must be the people’s representative before God and bring their disputes to him. Teach them his decrees and instructions, and show them the way they are to live and how they are to behave. But select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Have them serve as judges for the people at all times, but have them bring every difficult case to you; the simple cases they can decide themselves. That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.”

Did you catch the qualifications for being judges? Let me read it again, “Select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain.”

There are 5 qualifications that I see. 1, they must be capable—which is, you know, always good. 2, these men must come from all the people, not just one family, or clan, or tribe, but they need to come from the whole nation so there can be no favoritism (or at least less of a chance of it). 3, they must fear God. 4, they must be trustworthy. 5, they must hate dishonest gain.

That last one always confused me. I always thought it was such an odd way to phrase it. But it isn’t weird. I was weird to not understand it. For someone to be a judge, they have to HATE dishonest gain. It isn’t enough for them to not be greedy or to have high moral standards. The thought of getting money in an illegitimate way must be hateful to them. They need to have a negative physical reaction to bribes—it should make them angry. Corruption should be so despicable and wicked and unpleasant in their eyes that they hate it and will have no tolerance whatsoever. I would love to do a whole episode on these qualifications because they are fascinating.

But the crucial point is that to have a functioning society people in positions of power need to hate dishonest gain. That’s the kind of society we need to create. We need to create a culture that hates dishonest gain. Because you cannot love justice unless you hate bribes. You cannot love truth unless you hate dishonest gain.

Let’s be people who hate bribes and let’s pray that God will raise up leaders in this nation who hate dishonest gain.

Hardball Part II

Listen to it here.

OK, friends, last week we talked about the arrest and arraignment of President Donald Trump—and I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t remember when we stopped saying “former President” and just started calling all ex-presidents “President” but I guess that’s a thing. Emilypost.com says that it’s incorrect to call a former President “President,” and Miss Manners from a Washington Post article back in 1992 says that the correct address is either Mr. or the highest previous title that the former President is entitled to, so you would call him Governor Carter, Governor Clinton, Governor Bush, Senator Obama, Mr. Trump, historically Washington went by General Washington and Jefferson as Mr. Jefferson, theoretically you would call Taft Justice Taft—although he only lived for a month after he retired, but you get the point. The point is that there’re a lot of social rules and niceties and conventions about the person of the President.

There used to be another social convention around the president—you don’t put former Presidents in prison!

There’s a famous anecdote from history about this. And that is that when the United States sent Franklin and the boys over to Paris to request military aid from the Bourbon Monarchy to help overthrow British rule in the Americas there were a lot of close advisors who told Louis XVI that it’s not really wise for an autocratic imperial monarch to help peasants overthrow a neighboring imperial monarch, indeed, overthrow one even less autocratic than yourself.

It sorta, you know, gives people . . . ideas.

I mean, we’re sending French soldiers and sailors to Boston to overthrow the British because all kings are tyrants . . . nope, hold that thought . . . nope . . . only King George is a tyrant, all is well in France, carry on your lives of abject poverty, exploitation, and having virtually zero accessible civil rights.

Anyways, you get the point. Political leaders, at least the smart ones, realize that there’s a certain “good for the goose, good for the gander” philosophy about prosecutions. And basically, it’s the golden rule of corrupticos. If I don’t prosecute my opponents, they won’t prosecute me. And frankly, it’s probably wise to follow this. Constantly arresting former Presidents is, I would argue, not in the best interests of the political stability of the Republic.

But that ship has sailed. We have gone, as the Phantom of the Opera would say, “Past the point of no return, no going back now.”

And last week I said that this crossing of the line would need to be answered by conservative politicians or it’s all over. If one side is going to decide that the rules don’t apply then the other side has to take them at their word. Now, please don’t mishear me. I’m not saying that conservative and especially Christian lawmakers should break the law of do anything immoral or illegal. That’s NOT what I’m saying. What I AM saying is that all the niceties and unwritten rules and norms and conventions are over. The days of playing by unwritten rules are over. Now, some conservative politicians have already learned this lesson and are using it to great effect. Others are catching on quickly. And if I were a betting man I would say that soon and very soon we will see a member of the Biden family indicted in a Redstate.

And I said that if Christians want to see Christian laws put on the books then they are going to have to learn to play political hardball. Christians are going to have to learn that once the norms and conventions and unwritten rules and niceties are broken, they’re broken for good. And the can ONLY be reestablished when both sides decide to play by them.

You can’t have one side playing by the unwritten rules and losing real power while the other side refuses to play by the unwritten rules and they gain real power. You can’t have one side threatening to pack the Supreme Court and threatening to add states to the Union and threatening to abolish the filibuster and refusing to enforce Federal Laws in sanctuary cities and weaponizing the Justice Department and weaponizing the IRS and promoting political violence and to do it with the entire establishment media and big tech on their side. You can’t have just one side doing all this and leave it go unanswered.

Again, I am not in any way shape or form advocating anything illegal, unethical, or immoral. What I am saying is that one side can’t take off the gloves and forgo the unwritten rules and play dirty while the other side refuses to play hardball. Well, I mean, you CAN do that if you want to lose. And I believe, in fact I KNOW that there are a lot of Christians out there who are politically conservative and there are a lot of Christians out there who think that even if the godless leftists want to break the norms and conventions we must continue to play by the unwritten rules because, doggonit if we nobody plays by the rules then the Republic is lost.

And I’m sensitive to that take because I think it’s true. If nobody plays by the rules the Republic IS lost. But that take misses a very important piece of reality which is that, if the Republic is lost if both sides stop playing nice, then the Republic is already lost. Because it doesn’t matter if two forces refuse to play by the rules or if one side does play by the rules but it has no power and no ability to affect change. If the conservatives in this county continue to follow the lead of the Point-of-Order-Republicans then all we’re going to see is a very polite descent into tyranny. Or rather, we’ll see one side being very polite and orderly while the other side continues to act like a pack of unhinged demon possessed maniacs as we descend into tyranny.

But enough talking around it, what am I saying should happen? I’m saying that Christian politicians should and Christians should encourage Conservatives in positions of power to do a series of very specific actions. Now listen, I know that last week I said that I would give a theological defense of my claim that Christians can and should engage in and encourage our representatives to engage in political hardball. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that I needed to be clear about what that actually entails. And long story short playing political hardball in a Christian way means that Christians can and should use their political power and influence to promote Christian morals and ethics; reduce the power of the military-industrial-tech-media-pharma-education-complex; root-out and prevent corruption; punish those who misuse political power; prevent the creation of inflation and debt that abuses the poorest, punishes the financially prudent, and robs future generations of wealth by saddling them with inflation, debt, and taxes; and promote localism and state power and the reduction of the size and power of the Federal government. I believe that these are all policies that every Christian can get behind and which I can make a strong Biblical argument for.

In what follows are twenty-one points. These twenty-one are not the only things that could make this list, and certainly there are things I missed, and perhaps more important things I missed. And you may disagree with some of these points. I’m not perfect. I am not claiming that these have come from on high; I didn’t climb Sinai to receive these 21 points. And I’ll admit that they could certainly be improved in how I present them and order them and all that jazz. But I believe, that if these twenty-one points were put in action that our country would become godlier, more Christ-honoring, more Christian, and better to live in. And, so, here they are.

First, Conservative lawmakers can and should propose the strongest laws that have a possibility of passing, that promote Christian morality in the justice system, and promote Christianity in the culture.

Second, Conservative lawmakers can and should punish, to the strongest degree that has a possibility of not being struck down by the Supreme Court, businesses that are seeking to pervert our children, corrupt our society, and undermine Christianity.

Third, Conservative Governors, when capable should remove godless prosecutors who seek to weaponize the justice system against the community’s they are sworn to protect. Moreover, the laws for prosecutorial misconduct should be more heavily enforced and laws when applicable should be broadened. Moreover, the release of information about evidence collected and prosecutorial theories should be banned from being disclosed to the public before a trial. Pre-trial press conferences should only include the name and the charges that have been filed, anything else should be considered an attempt to prejudice the jury.

Fourth, Conservative Governors can and should appoint conservative Christians to serve on the boards of trustees of all state universities and those trustees must fire any and all woke staff, as permitted by law, standards of education must be reestablished, title IX committees must be shut down, grievance-disciples and education departments must be eradicated, administrative bloat must be cut, and universities must be made places of learning that creates good and godly citizens.

Fifth, Conservative lawmakers can and should remove members of legislative bodies who promote rioting and unrest or who stoke racial hatred.

Sixth, Conservative lawmakers can and should refuse to approve federal justices appointed by Biden.

Seventh, Conservative lawmakers can and should break-up tech monopolies under anti-trust laws.

Eighth, Conservative lawmakers can and should continue to outlaw abortion to the degree that it will be successful.

Ninth, Conservative lawmakers can and should use congress’s investigative power to subpoena anyone associated with Hunter Biden’s pay-to-play schemes, launch a multi-year investigation of Anthony Fauci and everyone else involved in deceiving the United States about the truth concerning Covid-19, its origins, its safe treatment, and anyone associated with the manipulation of statistic that led to the continuation of lockdowns and the violation of civil liberties. Moreover, Congress should revoke vaccine manufacturer’s indemnity and hold pharmaceutical companies liable. Moreover, congress should conduct a multi-year investigation of the FBI, NSA, CIA, and any and every other organization, to gather evidence for prosecution of Agents who spied on citizens without or with illegitimate warrants, who leaked false evidence, who instigated violence on Jan 6, who have targeted Roman Catholics; and this investigation should get on record, why crimes against Christian Crisis Pregnancy Centers have been attacked without investigation, why acts of terror by Antifa and Black Lives Matter have gone largely uninvestigated and why BLM continues to maintain its tax-exempt status. Moreover, congress should launch an investigation, in partnership with conservative lawmakers in the states where they have sufficient power, to investigate hospitals who have conducted transgenders surgery on minors and when applicable prosecute them for child abuse and if that is impossible revoke their medical licenses. Moreover, congress should use its investigative power to determine where taxpayer money is going in the Ukraine war and should investigate who blew up the Nordstream II pipeline.

Tenth, Conservative lawmakers can and should where they have the votes to do so, completely outlaw transgender surgery and hormone therapy on anyone who was not born intersex.

Eleventh, Conservative lawmakers can and should, where they have the votes to do so pass laws outlawing and criminalizing the teaching of transgender ideology to children with criminal prosecutions against people in positions of authority including but not limited to teachers, professors, school administrators, school employees, pastors, psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, coaches, medical doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses, aids, or any other hospital employees.

Twelfth, Conservative lawmakers can and should, where they have the votes to do so pass laws outlawing and criminalizing as child abuse parental promotion of transgender ideology.

Thirteenth, Conservative lawmakers can and should, where they have the votes to do so, in keeping with the precedent set by liberal city councils, mayors, state legislators, and governors, refuse to recognize gay marriages, refuse to recognize trans-identities on government paperwork, and otherwise refuse to recognize, enforce, or assist in the enforcement of any Federal law of Federal bureaucratic regulation deemed obnoxious to the state or location. This refusal to participate on the enforcement of obnoxious laws should be carried out on a local level by conservative sheriffs, deputies, and municipal and state police officers.

Fourteenth, Conservative lawmakers can and should revoke the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, ensure that the US ceases to engage in military adventurism without a formal declaration of war from Congress, and either nationalize or federally mandate that the profitability of weapons and military supply manufacturers be limited to rates approved by state referenda. Or that profits made in production of weapons exceeding the national profitability rate for that year shall be collected and used to provide veteran’s services such as health-care, GI Bill expenses, and lifetime financial support for the wives, husbands, or children of soldiers killed while serving.

Fifteenth, Conservative lawmakers can and should ban anyone serving in the US House or Senate or any of their aids, or any or their spouses to execute any trade of any stocks for life.

Sixteenth, Conservative lawmakers can and should revoke the Executive Bureaucracy’s ability to create regulations that have the effect of law. Law must be created by lawmakers. Moreover, the congress must reject and fight the Executive branch on presidential orders, the creation of executive agency czars, and other actions that take legislation away from the legislative branch and give it to the executive.

Seventeenth, Conservative lawmakers can and should severely reduce the budgets of several federal agencies and executive branch departments to reduce their power and influence.

Eighteenth, Conservative lawmakers can and should declare major tech platforms publishers and revoke their right to stifle or editorialize on free speech AND declare internet service providers as common-carriers who have no right to deny service for political reasons.

Nineteenth, Conservative judges should fight to reverse previous decisions including but not limited to Obergefell, as well as either revoking or revising the doctrine of qualified immunity.

Twentieth, Conservative lawmakers and judges can and should eliminate no-fault divorce, either by changing the law or by refusing to grant such petitions.

Twenty-First, Conservative prosecutors can and should, when sufficient evidence exists to justify a prosecution, prosecute any member of the Biden family or any of his business associates for any crime. Moreover, Conservative prosecutors can and should, when sufficient evidence exists to justify a prosecution, prosecute any and every politician who promotes godlessness, the erosion of Constitutional rights, chaos in the streets, corrupt racial theories, abortion, or the degradation of marriage and the traditional family.

So, these are my twenty-one points on how Christians can play political hardball. And whether you agree with these points or not isn’t the biggest and most important thing. The most important thing is for Christians to recognize two things. First, we have a duty to God and country as citizens of Heaven, the State of Ohio, and these United States to use our pollical influence for the glory of God and the good of our communities. Second, this duty includes the duty to use political power in ways that the enemies of God will find unpleasant and distasteful.

We need to play hardball.

Hardball

Listen to it here.

So, in case you missed it, former President Donald Trump was indicted, arrested, and arraigned in a Manhattan courtroom for 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Now, I’m not going to go through the indictment or give my opinion on the validity of the allegations. To my mind it doesn’t really matter, big picture, whether or not Trump falsified business records. And it shouldn’t matter to you either. And the reason it shouldn’t matter is NOT because it’s OK to falsify business records—white collar crime is still crime afterall. I have heard a fair number of people playing down these charges, which are essentially one criminal act, as unimportant because, hey, whatever, he just falsified some business records. Well, you try it in your personal business and see how far that gets you next time the IRS audits you. Nor, am I suggesting that politicians should be above the law. I really don’t think they should be.

But what I am suggesting is that I prefer, whenever possible, to live in the world of reality. And in the world of reality there are consequences. And several other people have already done a great job of explaining the social and political consequences of arresting former presidents, so I will simply give you the big picture and then move on to my main point for this morning.

You see, friends, it’s not a good idea to go around arresting former Presidents, especially on trumped up misdemeanor charges. Trump is potentially facing 136 years in prison. Now you might be the most uncompromising legalist in the world but you’d still have to admit that 136 years for a this is unreasonable at best, that 136 years, which is a life sentence, is excessive. But again, this isn’t a good idea. And the reason that it’s not a good idea is this. There is such a thing in this world as retaliation.

I want you to think and think hard—do you really think that there aren’t District Attorneys and Solicitors and Attorneys General in different states and locales who won’t go after Biden? Who won’t go after the Clintons? Who won’t go after Kamala Harris? If you think that there aren’t some Prosecutors in Florida and Texas who aren’t just salivating at the opportunity right now, then you’re kidding yourself.

You see friends, when you break a wall, things come through that wall—sometimes they’re things you want. Sometimes they’re things you don’t. But won’t you don’t get to do is have a wall, anymore. When you put a hole in a wall you no longer have a wall, you have a door.

DA Bragg and his friends in Manhattan thought that they would get to be the Heroes of the Day, Saviors of the Republic, Defenders of All that is Good and Righteous by prosecuting Trump. But insodoing they broke a wall. Nobody has ever gone after a former President like this. And now it’s been done. There was a wall and now there isn’t one. And who knows what’s going to come through that wall now that it’s a doorway?! I can take a guess. And so can you if you try hard and put on your thinking cap. And that’s ugliness. I mean real political ugliness. If you think that politics was dirty and ugly and murdery before, just wait till we raise the stakes! If the cost of being the loser in an election is prison then things are going to get very . . . spicy.

Now, like I said, other better commentators have already spoken to that issue. So now we need to move on to the big point for this morning. And this is a fairly complicated point, so I’m going to give you a short version of the big point now and then I’ll explain it in careful detail.

OK, so, big-point short version: There will be a temptation by Christians who are big on grace to side with the Point-of-Order-Repiblicans and say that even IF the entire weight and force and power of a godless, Leftist political machine is brought to bear against conservative politicians, that Republicans should never ever retaliate, because Jesus would have us to be better than our opponents and to love our enemies. That is a temptation. And it’s stupid. This is a trick. And it’s not a new one. Christians need to have more wisdom than to fall for this.

OK, so, big-point long version.

Now, I said that Point-of-Order-Republicans are going to protest any kind of political retaliation because they are the Point-of-Order types and they’re all about norms and institutions and they care about fair play. And I don’t want to mock these people. They care about good things. They care about extremely important things. Norms and institutions matter in what ought to be a nation of laws! You cannot have a nation of laws without norms and institutions. And you cannot have norms and institutions without people who are willing to lose power before breaking the norms and institutions. You can only have a nation of laws if the men who make the laws love the laws more than they love their ability to make them! I love the Point-of-Order-Republicans. But I think that they have been living in a world that no longer exists for quite some time.

Because we do not live in a nation of laws anymore. Now, some people in some states and cities live in states and cities of laws—but some live in states and cities of cronyism, nepotism, and all manner of corruption. In Manhattan you can commit felony assault after felony assault and get released on bond and get your charges downgraded to misdemeanors and get slaps on the wrist, but Heaven forfend that you falsify a business record!

We live in a nation where Point-of-Order-Republicans are striving to play by the rules while their political opponents threaten to pack the supreme court, add new states, give voting rights to illegal immigrants, get rid of the filibuster, and wield the FBI and DOJ against political enemies. I honor and respect the PoORs for their work in preserving institutions and norms. But we are now living in times where one side plays by the rules (largely not always) and the other side plays by no rules (largely not always).

Now, I was with Youth for Christ for a long time. And over the years I’ve played and refereed a lot of dodgeball. And anyone who’s watched middle schoolers play dodgeball knows that watching middle school dodgeball is like watching a competition in cheating. And every once in a while you get a team full of cheaters versus a team full of kids who (largely) believe in fair play. I’ve seen this happen. You probably have to if you’ve watched enough dodgeball.

Now, when you let the kids call themselves out and you have a team of cheaters against a team of honest kids you’ll notice that the cheaters cheat and the honest kids don’t. Shocking I know. But what’s interesting is that if you let these teams play eachother a few times, the honest kids stop being honest—well not all of them—the most competitive of the honest kids stop being honest. Why? Because they realize that there’s nothing to be gained by playing fairly against a pack of cheaters!

Well friends, the same thing happens in politics. Politics has rules and a lot of them are unwritten rules—they aren’t laws, per se, but they’re norms and practices that everyone chooses to abide by because wise people in the past realized that if you followed these norms and practices that things would be better.

For instance, you don’t arrest former presidents. Does this mean that former presidents are above the law? Well, sort of yeah. But what’s the alternative? American politicians have all understood for nearly 250 years that arresting presidents is dangerous because it makes elections criminal affairs. Much of our system of government was designed and maintained by men and women who didn’t care so much about the good a law could do but by the danger of that law being abused. That’s why we have a system of checks and balances; that’s why we have a system where power is distributed among a lot of people with different roles. But trust me, the reason no president has ever been arrested is NOT because no president has ever broken the law!

And here’s the thing, do I think that the charges against President Trump are ludicrous and politically malicious and demonstrate prosecutorial abuse and gross negligence to the Manhattan community? Absolutely I do. I think this is demonstrably political and it’s gross. I also think that it’s possible that President Trump actually did break New York law. I think it might even somehow be in the realm of possibility that he committed a felony. Maybe; I doubt it, I find it improbable, but not impossible. But even if I were convinced he’d broken New York law, if I were on the jury I would vote for jury nullification. If it were proven to me, as a juror, beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump did violate some law, I would just vote for jury nullification. Why? Because it’s not worth breaking the Federal system over a clerical error. It’s simply not worth it. It wouldn’t make him innocent, it wouldn’t make him not guilty. But it would mean that I as a juror would say that even if he did break the law, the prosecutor had no business bringing this case. This case will do far more harm than good.

Now, maybe right now you’re thinking “but Lukey-poo, nobody should be above the law!” Yeah, that’s a nice thought, but it doesn’t work in reality; which is where I prefer to do my living. Yeah, nobody SHOULD be above the law, but the truth is that some people are and it might be safer for everyone if some people sometimes are allowed to be above it.

Again, you might be saying, “But Luke, you fabulously handsome, silver-tongued, theological virtuoso, if you let some people be above the law some of the time, that sounds like situational ethics. That sounds like relativism.” OK, sure. I call it wisdom. There is such a thing as mangling the hand to save the finger. When we’re talking politics and criminal justice and politics in the real world in which we live where we know there are bad actors and corrupticos then sometimes a prosecution of a powerful person might do more harm than good. Sometimes you need to let sleeping dogs lie. Again, I know that this is going to bother some of you deeply, because you’re thinking that right is right and wrong is wrong and Lady Justice is blind and we should pursue justice without fear of favor and all that stuff. And that’s great stuff and I would love to live in that world. But we don’t. And wiser people then me, people who have dedicated their lives to the law and to this country have foregone arresting a president because they knew that once that happens all bets are off.

Arresting a president is a crossing of the Rubicon; it’s passing a point of no return. And as I say all the time, genies don’t go back into bottles. Now all bets are off; cliché, cliché, cliché!

On April 3rd we lived in a world where American presidents weren’t arrested by their political opponents. On April 4th we stopped living in that world. And we can never go back to the world of April 3rd. And if you think that there aren’t prosecutors in Redstate American who aren’t salivating at the opportunity to take down the Clintons or the Bidens then you need to have your head examined. Friends they are licking their chops.

And now we come to the main point of this morning’s message. There are some very well meaning conservative Christians who are watching this all unfold and they are clutching their pearls and shaking their heads in disgust and wringing their hands. But they are vehemently opposed to retaliation because they think retaliation is unchristian and that it’s going to make things worse. These are the people who would rather let our nation fall into abject tyranny than for conservatives to sink to Alvin Bragg’s level. They, along with the Point-of-Order-Republicans are going to whine and protest and make fine sounding speeches about the violations of norms and institutions. And they will be fine speeches, Lincolnian, even. And they will be so much wind, and the emboldened Leftists and Deepstate will continue to seize and secure power, punish their political enemies, and entrench themselves ever deeper in the heart of this nation. The PoORs will write strongly worded letters while the Leftists imprison their political opponents, while they have the DOJ send the FBI to harass parents at school board meetings, and call Christians and white people terror threats, shut down your churches when there’s a cough going around, mandate that you inject yourselves and children with experimental drugs, protect and encourage the murder of babies, the mutilation of children’s genitals, the corruption of children’s minds, the perversion of our morals, and the erosion of our civil rights.

And a whole lot of good those fine sounding speeches and our O so precious moral high ground will be.

Friends, I want to live in a world where PoORs have power. I want to live in a world where everyone plays by the written and unwritten rules. I want to live in a world where politics brings out the best in people. I want to live in a world where equal justice under law is not just a motto but a practice.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. We live in a very corrupt world. And one of the most difficult lessons for very kind and very righteous Christians to learn is that we live in a world of evil, powerful people and that unless some very hard-nosed people make them taste their own medicine they have no incentive to stop!

Brothers and sisters, if the conservative half of this country does nothing to retaliate against their political opponents do you think that the Left will just stop prosecuting conservatives? Out of niceness? Because the job is done and there’s no one left to prosecute. If you believe that then I’ve got some ocean-front property in Arizona I want to talk to you about. The only way to stop a bully is to punch him in the face and teach him that there’s a price to be paid for that kind of behavior and he needs to think long and hard about whether he is willing to face those kinds of consequences.

But this requires a good deal of theology to defend, so I invite you to join us again next week when we talk about Christianity and political hardball.

Easter Message

Nothing New but the Good News

Listen to it here.

As you are well aware today is Easter Sunday, and if you aren’t well aware that it’s Easter Sunday, well…now you are. And this morning I don’t have an awful lot that’s new or uniquely insightful to say. In fact, I don’t think that a single thing I’m going to say this morning is new or will be uniquely insightful. And the reason is because I think that it’s silly and frankly stupid and possibly bordering on the sinful to believe that we need to come up with a “new take” on Easter every year. There’s this pressure that pastors and preachers feel that they have to come up with something, some new insight, some unique spin or approach so that their congregation or in this case you my beloved audience can have a fresh take on Easter.

But that’s wrong.

Now, certainly there’s nothing wrong with learning new and deeper things about Christ and His Word. If you HAVE a new and true thing to say about the Resurrection, then, please, by all means share it. There’s more truth in the Word of God than I will mine in a thousand lifetimes. So, I’m not saying that there’s nothing new and good and preach-worthy about Easter that I’m unaware of.

What I AM, in fact, saying is that the pressure to have some new thing to give new insight or to offer people a new experience is not always a good thing. It’s not a good thing to constantly need novelty, because, the fact of the matter is, most of life is lacking in novelty. And that’s part of the tragedy of so many people’s lives. There are so many who feel cheated if they leave a single wine untasted, if they fail to experience some romantic encounter. It’s the same anthropological itch that causes people to go skydiving or bungee jumping.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not preaching against trying new things, and I’m not preaching against seeking a thrill every now and again. What I AM saying is that building an entire life and existence off of thrill seeking and the constant need to validate one’s own personality through newer and ever more extreme adrenaline rushes is not healthy. The need to try exotic dishes; the unshakeable desire to fall in love again and again; the addiction to danger—all these things are chasing a feeling and worse than chasing a feeling. Not because feelings are bad—they aren’t. And not because feelings are unreliable—I think that’s overplayed and people fail to understand what feelings are for. But the life lived in enslavement to novelty is a life that can never really begin. Because the reality is that life is not about the new and novel, it’s about Christ; and Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Christ is always the same, but because He’s an infinite person we never grow tired of Him.

But back to the point about a life of novelty seeking not really beginning, I want to emphasize this because I think it’s deeply important. Life, real life, meaningful life cannot be lived chasing after the wind. If you want to live a life that matters you have to settle down into the rhythms of life. You have to settle in to the repetition. If you want to have children you have to settle in for repeating yourself a million times; for cleaning up other people’s messes a million times. Being a parent isn’t changing a diaper once and saying, “welp, I’m glad that’s over!” No, it’s not about changing a diaper once it’s about changing diapers until there are no more diapers to change. It isn’t about making up a bedtime story for the novelty of the experience, it’s about coming up with a thousand stories and falling asleep in the middle and talking gibberish in your sleep and telling stories until the kids don’t want ‘em anymore. It’s the same thing with work. A carpenter doesn’t learn how to build a set of stairs of how to cut and frame rafters and then just quit because he’s “done carpentry” and can now move on to something else. You pound nails till your hand aches and you do it over and over and over and you repeat the same skills until you retire.

And lest you think that because Christianity is spiritual that our faith somehow escapes the reality of repetition let me say that living the Christ-life is a life of repetition. Unfortunately, and for understandable reasons, but unfortunately all the same, many if not most contemporary evangelical Christians have internalized the notion that if something is extemporaneous and unplanned that it’s spiritual and that if anything is prewritten or ritualistic that it’s dead orthodoxy. We’ve somehow, and I’m pretty sure I know how, but we’ve somehow drawn the conclusion that if something is new that it’s spiritual and something that’s old is just dead-letter Pharisaism.

Now, look, I’m all for new wine in new wineskins. I get it. But something being new doesn’t mean that it’s good. In the same way in very conservative times in history, and even in very conservative groups and institutions today, being OLD doesn’t make something good. Sometimes a tradition is nothing more than a group of people who’ve been subjected to a misery insisting that because they suffered through it that everyone else oughta too!

But that’s not the point. The point is that there is a lot of stuff that’s repetitive that’s good. Spiritual disciplines are this way—most things that are pedagogical are, in fact, repetitive. And the incessant need for new experiences does not, to me, signify a deep and thoroughgoing spirituality, but actually a deep spiritual immaturity. Children are the ones who kick against the pricks and hate the slow painful disciplining practices that form excellence. Mature people know how to practice the fundamentals to maintain excellence.

If you’ll forgive the analogy, if you watch a major league baseball game, those are the best players in the world and they take ground balls between innings just the same as the 7 year olds in little league. They show up to batting practice and they take grounders and do long-toss and they work hard at it to achieve excellence. They don’t complain about taking grounders or working on the repetitive drills of backhanding a onehopper. They do the fundamentals to maintain excellence.

But little kids whine and complain—all they want to do is go up to bat and swing for the fences. But you can’t go from a kid who never practices to someone who hits major league homers without endless hours of practicing the fundamentals. Everybody wants to be the guy who strikes out the side to win the World Series, only serious people are willing to spend thousands of hours working on the spin of their curveball.

Everybody wants to have a deep, lifechanging, and entirely new Spiritual experience. Everybody wants to have perpetual novelty. Everyone wants freshness and newness.

And those things aren’t bad. In fact, they’re good, when they come organically. But the problem is not that we want something good, it’s a problem with prioritization. There is nothing wrong with wanting deep, lifechanging, entirely new, fresh, novel, Spiritual experiences. We should want them. Morning by morning we should see new mercies. We should desire that. The problem is not desiring Spiritual experiences, the problem is chasing Spiritual experiences and new Spiritual experiences to the detriment of our relationship with Christ and obedience to him. Because the simple fact of the matter is that nobody becomes a mature Christian without a lot of repetition. Nobody develops a deep faith in Christ without a lot of saying the same old prayers and reading the same old verses and asking forgiveness for the same old sins and seeking grace to do the same old righteous deeds.

A truly deep relationship with God CAN and often DOES involve a desire for more of Him and great visitation of the Spirit in power upon us. Absolutely. Paul commands us to earnestly desire the greater gifts. We are supposed to fix our gaze on Christ. Closeness and the experience of closeness to God is a wonderful blessing and we should desire it. But that doesn’t come by chasing novelty.

If you seek Christ and attempt to live a life in careful obedience to Him the spiritual experiences will come and you won’t have to work yourself up into an emotional or psycho-somatic frenzy to get ‘em. They’ll come of themselves. That’s because chasing a Spiritual experience is the least efficient means of getting a Spiritual experience that’s possible. Constantly trying to conjure up some dizzying Christian transport is the worst way of achieving powerful intimacy with Christ.

Again, I’m not saying to not desire powerful, experiential intimacy with Christ—you’d have to be dead inside to NOT desire that! What I’m saying is don’t substitute Christ and obedience and love for Him with the sensory and/ or Spiritual experience of closeness to Him.

In the Christian life, it seems that the fastest way is always the long way.

Again, I say all this because this is Easter and instead of giving us some new, novel, fresh, never-before heard take on the Resurrection I want to simply retell the story of the Resurrection. It’s a pretty simple story. Let’s read Mark’s version.

16:1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

And there you have it. A simple story, and rather an incomplete. Mark simply tells us that an angel told the women that Jesus had risen. We don’t get an inside look in the tomb; we don’t get any details about HOW the Resurrection occurred. We don’t get the skies parting. We don’t get drama and fanfare. We get an angel, which, to be fair is pretty exciting, but he doesn’t dazzle everyone with his power and might. He simply tells them a straightforward account and sends them on their way.

Let me reread the angel’s words:

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

Friends the Easter story, and there are legitimately an awful lot of ways to preach this, but it is a simple story. Jesus was dead and then he wasn’t. And at its core that’s the Easter story. Jesus was dead, but He’s not anymore.

Mark’s gospel doesn’t go into details about how or why Jesus rose—or even who raised Him!—the women are simply told to get a move on. And they did.

And friends, at its core, the Christian story is not a complex story, at least not in its broad outlines. God made people; God loved people; people loved themselves more than God; people’s self-love separates them from God; God comes in the flesh; God loves people more than He loves Himself; God in the flesh dies; God in the flesh stops being dead and starts being alive again; people who trust in Him will be able to love God more than they love themselves.

That’s the story. And you might tell if differently, indeed, you almost certainly wouldn’t use the same words and wording that I did. And that’s OK. But the fact is that it’s a simple story. It’s not complicated. It’s a story so simple a child can understand it. We deserved punishment and Jesus was punished for us. We deserved death and He died for us.

But He didn’t stay dead.

And that’s the core of the Christian message. That’s the kicker, the crux, Jesus didn’t stay dead! Most people who die stay dead. In fact, I’ve done a fair number of funerals in my years as a pastor. Not one of those people ever stopped being dead. I’ve had a good number of family members and friends die over the years—they’re all still dead. None of them stopped being dead. And, apart from a few miracles in the old and new testaments, everyone who’s ever died has stayed dead.

But not Jesus.

Jesus didn’t stay dead.

And there are two questions that naturally follow from this statement. These questions are implied in the Gospel of Mark, but I think they’re implied strongly enough that we can say ‘em out loud, so I’m gonna say ‘em out loud.

The first question is simply this: do you believe it? Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning two thousand years ago? Do you believe it? It’s a simple question, maybe a difficult one to answer, but I think those are the kind worth asking…and answering. Do you believe that He rose from the dead? I’m not asking you to doubt yourself or to look deep inside. Just answer the question. Did Jesus stop being dead?

The second question is: what’re you gonna do about it? Now this second part applies nomatter how you answer. If you say “no” I don’t believe he rose from the dead, then you really ought ask yourself if you want to believe it and to ask yourself why you don’t, and then if you want to believe and you just don’t then come see ole Lukey poo and we’ll talk. And if you don’t believe and you don’t wanna, then I’d ask you to be honest about it and don’t call yourself a Christian and don’t pretend. And if you do believe then let me ask again, what are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do with the faith that God granted you?

Friends He either rose or He didn’t and you either believe it or you don’t and you either live by your belief or you don’t. I pray you’ll believe and I pray you’ll live in accordance with that faith.

Pattern Recognition

Listen to it here.

Well, friends, today we’re going to do a bit of a weekly round-up, so to speak. Rather than looking at one news story we’re going to look at two events, which I will summarize for the sake of time, and then you at home can try to guess the thing that connects these two pieces of news. We’re going to play “find the pattern,” which is a game I’ve always loved and I hope you love it to. And “find the pattern” is a great game to play and learn to love because you can play it all day every day. And really, once you start playing, if the game gets its hooks into you, you never stop playing. But that’s another topic for another day!

OK, so, the first story I want us to consider is one that you almost certainly have not heard about in the news. And you almost certainly haven’t heard about it in the news because the news has literally zero interest in reporting it. You see, back over a week ago a British MP spoke about the Covid vaccines and presented a cost-benefit analysis. He used ONLY research and data from the British government itself. And he did a tiny bit of math, or maths as they say across the pond.

And the results of the math are almost incomprehensibly bad for those who are vaccine mandate advocates. They are, in fact, worse than most people would ever imagine. Let me give you just one paragraph of this speech:

The Government’s own data shows that, in healthy adults aged 50 to 59, it was necessary to give 256,400 booster jabs to prevent just one severe hospitalisation, putting 321 people into hospital with a serious side-effect from the booster, which includes, obviously, risk of death. For healthy 40 to 49-year-olds, that number increases to 932,500 who needed to be boosted to keep one covid patient out of an intensive therapy unit, putting potentially 1,165 people into hospital with serious harms, death or disability. And for healthy 30 to 39-year-olds, no one knows the answer to the number needed to be boosted to prevent a serious hospitalisation because the Government’s own data says that there has never been such a case of this age group being put into intensive care due to the current variant of covid-19. But many, indeed on average one in 800 of this group that has been boosted, will have died, or been disabled or seriously harmed by the booster itself.

Let me repeat that for you because that may have just rushed by you—by the British Government’s own stats, you need to give a quarter million booster shots to healthy people in their 50s to prevent one, a single, just one and only one, hospitalization. So, to put that another way, if you give a million people the booster, you will have prevented 4 severe hospitalizations from Covid assuming they’re healthy 50-somethings. BUT, insodoing there will be 1,250 people who have serious side effects from getting the vaccine—and a friend of mine who has a biology degree keeps telling me to stop calling it a vaccine because it’s not a vaccine but, hey, one battle at a time, knowwaddamean?

The financial costs are also appalling. You can read about them, watch the speech and collect all the data if you go to andrewbridgen.com. You can also go to my website, Lukenagy.com to find the links. Because if you just go to google and do a search for “British parliament covid” you’ll get results from January. Even if you know the name and look for news stories about Andrew Bridgen, you won’t find any stories about this speech. You won’t find people debating him or calling him out for bad data. You won’t find hilarious videos like we’re used to seeing in the British Parliament where people are heckling each other and shouting and making government fun. No, there’s none of that because Brigden spoke to essentially and empty house. The Labour party all left, the Social Democrats all left, the Scottish Nationalists all left, and almost all everyone from the Conservative party left. Now, to be fair, most House debates and speeches don’t attract all that many people. The British House of commons only seats 427 of the 650 MPs, but people deliberately walked out of this speech to make a point.

And the point was simple: we don’t want to hear you say bad things about the vaccine or the government’s role in facilitating the vaccine. And the news media have also joined in.

Friends, these data, while not entirely new, are earth shattering. And the fact that British MPs have over a billion, with a “B” pounds invested in big Pharma, that would suggest to a cynical man that the British government has a bit of a conflict of interests vis-à-vis vaccine implementation and regulation.

But the fact that there just aren’t stories about it and the walkout, that’s the part that sticks with me, but we must keep on a-movin’.

Second story today, Ana Kasparian, member of the Young Turks, a long-running extremely liberal show found herself in hot water recently. Why, you might ask? Well, I might reply, she had the audacity to insist that people call her a “woman” and not a “person with a uterus.”

Now, that is not, you would think, something that would land someone in hot water. One would think, had they come from a sane world where people were not deranged and the culture not degenerate that not referring to someone by degrading them to nothing more than a body part would be, you know, not at all upsetting.

Now, don’t get me wrong, women do with rare exceptions, have uteri. It’s just a thing that happens. It is ONE of the things that defines what womanhood is. But womanhood while not being less than possessing a uterus is more than that. Biologically we know what womanhood is, chromosomally, skeletally, even the brain chemistry of men and women is different. And it’s a difference so obvious that babies, literal babies can figure it out. Babies, you know, the tiny new versions of people that come out every 9 months, they can tell what a woman is.

So, again, I’m not saying that there isn’t a biological aspect to womanhood. I, indeed, think that womanhood is entirely biologically determined. I’m a theologian who advocates non-reductive physicalism, and we don’t have anywhere near enough time to go into that!

But here’s the thing, Ana Kasparian is right. Whatever else she might think about a whole host of topics she’s right about this. Calling women “birthing persons” and “people who menstruate” and “people with uteruses” is about the most ludicrous and demeaning Orwellian claptrap since the last ludicrous and demeaning Orwellian claptrap to come from our social-betters. Because while, yes, women’s biology is inseparable from who they are that’s not ALL they are, anymore than saying that being a mother means someone who has been impregnated. Is a mother someone who has been impregnated? Yes. And that’s both a necessary and sufficient condition of being a mother (with the exception of adoption, but that’s not the point). Yes, a mother is a woman who has been impregnated, but that’s not ALL a mother is.

And I would like to say that the truth is that everyone actually knows that. But I’m not so sure they do. In fact, I strongly suspect that there are a whole lot of people who are deeply confused, people who have believed the lie who think that people with penises can be women and that man can get pregnant. I think that there are people who actually think this.

We call these people deluded.

And, sadly, there are a whole lot of deluded people in our society. Why or how they were deluded is a bigger conversation and one that I’ve been trying to have on this broadcast for the past decade. But for the purposes of today’s episode the key is simply that people are deluded.

But here’s the funny thing. As deluded as they are, there is a little sense of sanity that keeps poking its unwanted head in and announcing itself. It’s almost as though reality were incessantly and cruelly reasserting itself at every turn! Damn and blast! Curses!

You see friends, people who agree with Ana Kasparian on literally every other thing she says are now calling her all kinds of vile and hideous things because she simply doesn’t want to be called a “person with a uterus”. That makes her a villain.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if you are living in this culture and society and you haven’t studied the French and Soviet Revolutions you’re missing out because I get to read the news before it happens! Godless revolutions always end the same way—with a suicidal race to prove your revolutionary bona fides and save your own skin. You can never be revolutionary enough. It is impossible in a godless revolution to EVER be permanently sufficiently radical. There are a whole host of reasons why, not least of which is this: godless revolutions fail and you have to find someone to blame. But there’s another reason and this is the one that I want us to focus on today.

Godless revolutions become totalitarian because they are built on lies because they are godless.

Samuel warned the people of Israel not to turn to useless idols, that they couldn’t help them because they were useless.

Lady Wisdom warns people to not trust in folly because foolishness will betray you in the end.

Jesus says the truth will set you free.

You see friends for all that people like to mock Christianity for being bigoted and intolerant it is only in a Christian society where long-term intellectual diversity can happen. That’s because the truth is durable. Lies are fragile.

Now, that doesn’t mean that lies just fall apart of their own accord.

A china teacup can sit there on the shelf safe and sound and exist for centuries, it can have boiling water poured into it over and over for centuries. But it’s still fragile.

An anvil is durable. You can pound on that thing with a 20 pound sledge all day every day and all you’re gonna do is wear our some hammers.

Try swinging at the teacup with a lump hammer and you’ll find out pretty fast which one is fragile and which one is durable. You see the truth can exist in the presence of lies. A society built on truth can tolerate lies—lies won’t undo such a culture overnight. But a society built on lies can’t tolerate the truth. Because lies are fragile; they cannot handle real scrutiny; they cannot survive in the wild.

You see brothers and sisters, if you haven’t noticed it by now, I hope and pray you’ll see this now. Lies are weak and fragile. Now, the people BEHIND the lies might be strong and powerful. But lies are always fragile. All the lies in the world are as nothing before the truth and its simple demonstration. It doesn’t matter how longly or how loudly you shout a lie, a demonstration of the truth will leave the lie undone—at least for those who have eyes to see.

Ay and there’s the rub. Because as the old saying goes it’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled. But that’s another story for another day.

The point is that the British Parliament walked out of an extremely data-heavy and painfully convicting speech about the failures of the British government to protect people; and the British MPs didn’t want to hear it, and the British Press didn’t wanna talk about it. Talking about this is to simply draw attention to it. If people find out that the cost-benefit analysis of continued Covid mRNA shots and boosters is so insanely out of whack, if MPs were to debate the issue and the news were to report it then an awful lot of people would draw the conclusion that the British Government was complicit in a ruinously expensive public health campaign that has demonstrably and unarguably done incalculably more harm than good! And there are simply a lot of people who don’t want the British public to think those thoughts because the lies of Big Pharma and Big Government are far too fragile to stand up to the merciless scrutiny of reality and good data.

The point is that someone like Ana Kasparian, who is so far Left that she might as well be blue, a woman who has openly advocated for all the transgender nonsense, all the talking points, all the things—she says something as innocuous as that she doesn’t want to be called a “person with a uterus” but wants to be called a “woman” and now she’s Armenian Hitler! Now we could point out the ludicrous and painfully hilarious hypocrisy that the transgender movement engages in. We could point out that they demand that all of society, all speech patterns, the dictionaries themselves have to be changed, our definitional concepts of reality have to be altered to fit their whims; no one is allowed to call them anything but the thing they demand to be called at that exact moment; these narcissistic, delusional, tyrannical, solipsistic, cry-bullies, they demand that you bend to every whim, but if you simply express that you want to be called a woman—the very right they’re demanding, hilariously—that you’re doing violence.

It's hilarious. I mean, I’m laughing. But I’m laughing in the sardonic way that one laughs at a classical villain whose hubris is his own undoing. Ana Kasparian bought the lie. She promoted the lie. She tried to and I believe will continue to try to silence the truth, but even the tiny little itty-bitty bit of truth she wanted to hold on to was too much and she had to be attacked. The truth had to be thrown into a burlap sack, tied to a cinderblock and tossed into the creek as though it were a sick puppy.

Brothers and sisters, you’ve all heard of the new superbugs right, these bacteria that are anti-biotic resistant. They exist in hospitals because they just so happen to be these forms of life that have developed that are immune to anti-biotics. But this isn’t evolution. They can only live in the hypersterile hospital environment. If they get out in the real world they die and die quickly because they are not evolution but a degradation of the bacteria that can’t compete with other bacteria.

Lies can compete with other lies, sure. But they can’t compete with the truth. Sadly, our society has become an incubator for lies. We’ve worked so hard to exclude truth from the public square and we’ve done it so effectively for so long that we now have superlies. We have lies that our culture can’t defeat. Our culture has not immunity to these superlies. Now, the truth will wipe them out lickity-split. These superlies can only exist in an environment sterilized of the truth.

Yes, the lies get bigger, but they also grow fragiler.

Don’t fear lies—proclaim the truth. The lie is terrified of the truth. So believe it, speak it, and live it.

SVB: An American Parable

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So, if you’ve paid any attention at all to the news this week you’ve heard about the collapse of several large and medium-sized banks. The biggest bank to go bankrupt, at least as of the time of recording, is SVB or Silicon Valley Bank. And this morning I’m going to focus on SVB because it seems the least controversial and it’s the event that seems most talked about by commentators and it has the most impact on the financial system.

Allright, so, in case you either a) haven’t been following the news, which, good for you OR b) you haven’t had time to look into all the ins-and-outs of this story, let me give you the run-down as best as I understand it. And so I now present to you, Silicon Valley Bank: An American Parable.

SVB is, or should I saw was, a pretty large community bank in, you guessed it, Silicon Valley. Because of its location it catered to the tech world. Its major clients included tech startups and venture capital firms, of VCs, for short. Now, apparently, VCs LOVED SVB and many venture capitalists would recommend SVB above any other bank. And so, SVB had a lot of money to work with—but most of that money, and you have to remember this because this is really important to the story, most of that money was tied up in the tech world.

Now, to tell you the story of SVB I have to go back to 2008. Now, after 2008 there were new regulations placed on banks that were designed to make them more secure and to prevent runs on banks etc.

Ok, so allow me to pause here and say some stuff that some of you is going to think is so elementary that I’m wasting your time, but there are people who don’t know what I’m about to say. You see, friends, and I don’t know who amongst you needs to hear this, but I KNOW some of you do. You see, the banks are not just a bunch of nice people in suits who put your money in a vault for you and keep it safe, you know, out of niceness. Nope. When you put your money in the bank the bank takes your money and they give it to other people who then pay interest. So, you know how banks give out loans? That’s not their money. It’s not as though the loan officer is putting up her own money. The banks are gambling with your money. Now, most of them are pretty good at it and they make lots of money.

OK, so, if this is news to you, you probably have questions. I remember when I first learned about fractional reserve banking. The obvious question was this: if the bank is lending out the money of other depositors what happens if all the depositors want their money back?

You know what my good friend, the banker told me? He said that that’s really unlikely.

But low-probability events happen. Right? I mean, bank runs do happen…as in evidence at SVB.

Anyways, let’s go back to 2008. Post ’08 there were new regulations from the regulators that would regulate banking. Part of this regulatory revamp was that banks needed to keep a larger portion of their investment portfolio in what was considered “liquid” assets. OK. What does this mean. Well, obviously banks need to keep a certain amount of cash on hand—and by the way, please use cash as much as possible, that’s another story for another day—banks need to keep cash on hand, or at least have assets on their ledgers in case depositors need their own money. So, the regulators decided that before 2008 banks didn’t have enough money readily available for depositors, so they said, “look you have to keep a higher portion of your assets in liquid form.”

HOWEVER, liquid didn’t just mean cash. Guess what else the regulators said counted as “liquid?” If you answered treasury bonds, then you’re right. Because treasuries are, in fact, pretty liquid.

OK, remember how I said that SVB catered to the tech world? Remember how I said that would be important? OK, here’s why it’s important.

So, a few years ago there was this worldwide pandemic thing. And remember how with that pandemic thing how the local, state, and federal governments decided to shut down businesses and prevent you from going anywhere? Right, well, the tradeoff was the government shuts down your life and in exchange they give you a bunch of devalued money that will increase the national debt. So now, all the sudden there are people who are flush with cash and are trying to find places to put it, because people know that there’s inflation—how can there not be?

Well, in the midst of all this free money flying around, people think, “boy, o boy, where should I put all this cash? I know, technology—the young people seem to really like computers—I’ll invest in tech.” So they do. And now all these tech companies are flush with cash and they have the enviable problem of having to figure out what to do with more money than they currently need. So, they give it to the bank. Cause, I mean, it’s a bank, right. Nothin’ safer than money in the bank.

So, now because the government shut down everyone’s lives and gave them money instead of freedom, people took that cash and invested it in tech, and the tech companies couldn’t use it so they gave it to the bank, primarily in uninsured bank deposits—and why all these companies were putting they’re money in uninsured deposits is another story for another day I s’pose.

Now, the banks have all this cash, but the economy is cash-rich but there aren’t enough loans to give out because even though there’s lots of cash, there really aren’t a lot of good places to put it. So, the SVB puts about half of this money in government bills and bonds. Now we don’t have time to go into all the nitty-gritty of the government bond market, and, as Hagrid told Harry Potter, I’m not sure I’m exactly the right person to tell you that. But let me give you an extremely oversimplified version that’s probably going to make the bankers and investors in the audience wince. But here goes. The government needs people to invest in it and they issue bonds. A bond is a loan you give the government and the bonds that SVB were buying had a face-value on them, so that let’s say you pay 1 dollar for the bond, when the bond matures in 10 years you’ll have made a buck-twenty-five. Now the bond market has not only direct purchases from the treasury, but these bonds are also traded on a secondary market.

But here’s the deal. The face value of the matured bonds fluctuates every time the government issues new ones. So, because inflation has been so low for so long, the face-value on these bonds is practically nothing. The bond is basically just cash.

Now, the clever amongst you have already spotted the problem. What’s the problem? Well, if SVB has lots of money in bonds that have a face-value that’s very low, what happens when inflation hits? Well, you realize a loss on those bonds is what happens. Now, you COULD sell them on the secondary market, but you’ll sell them at a loss because the person buying them knows that the face-value will be inflated away, so they want to buy at enough of a discount so that they will actually make money when the bond matures.

Now, the obvious answer is to just take the loss, wait for the bond to mature and learn your lesson. But remember how I said that the fact that SVB catered to tech and venture capital was important? Well, it’s important again. You see, tech companies fail. And a lot of them go a very long time before they actually become profitable. A lot of tech companies do nothing but eat money for a good long while until they become profitable. Even large companies might not be as profitable as you think.

So, what happens when these not yet profitable companies who used to be flush with investor cash suddenly stop having all that sweet, sweet money flowing in? They go to the bank…obviously.

Except, here’s where things get really uncomfortable. Because the bank doesn’t just have your money in the vault. It’s tied up in bonds and bills. So, obviously sell the bonds and pay your depositors.

Except you can’t. Because let’s say you bought $91.3B worth of government paper promissory notes that you intend to hold to maturity. Except those aren’t worth $91.3B. They’re worth less than that. How much less than that? Well, they’re worth so much less that you can’t pay your depositors back.

And we all know what happens then.

So, what did we learn?

What is the lesson that we should all glean from this tragedy?

Well, first things first, I think it shows that people in suits and ties and who have fancy degrees from top-tier schools can be fools too. Just because you have a corner office doesn’t mean you can’t do some utterly boneheaded.

You see SVB’s investments required two conditions to lead to catastrophic failure.

The first condition was increased bond-rates. Now, you might want to come to the defense of SVB and say, “well, Fed rates were at all time lows for a very long time so it stands to reason that they would stay low.” OK, if you say that then you need to study up on logic, because that’s called the gambler’s fallacy. That’s basically saying that because the roulette wheel was black 20 times in a row it’s more likely to be black this time…or more likely to be red. It’s not. It’s 50/50 every time. Now, to be fair, Fed rates aren’t pure chance like roulette, and human decision-making skews the results. Fair enough, but then it’s actually worse than that, because Jerome Powell has been saying for a very long time that the Fed was going to increase rates. They said this. And more than that, anyone who’s watched a 5 minute youtube video on monetary policy will tell you that when the government prints money that to slow down inflation they have to slow down the velocity of money, which means they need to slow borrowing, which means they need to increase rates. Everyone knows this. This is not a secret. I know this. And I’m an idiot.

Everyone who has a lick of financial sense knew that there was heavy inflation coming! You know how we knew? BECAUSE IT WAS ALREADY HAPPENING. It’s true that the Fed had said they would keep interest rates low as long as inflation was under 2%. It’s true. But by 2021 if you didn’t predict that inflation was coming and coming hard they you’re no longer qualified to handle other people’s money.

BUT. But there’s a second condition that had to be met for SVB’s errors to become catastrophic. You see banks make bad investments. Even very smart people make bad investments. Even very smart people doing the best things possible suffer because of events outside their control. Just because SVB made a bad bond investment didn’t mean necessarily that they would suffer anything worse than taking a very expensive bath.

Except, remember, the tech startup thing. Yeah, it’s important again. Because remember how startups aren’t profitable right away? Remember how they eat money. Yeah, that brings us to our sufficient condition. The necessary condition of the bank failure was not having enough liquid assets to cover depositor’s assets. The sufficient condition was the depositors wanting their money.

And that condition was met. And maybe all the stupid things SVB led to decreased depositor confidence and maybe the runs on the bank could have been avoided and SVB could have survived. Maybe. But those things didn’t happen. Instead, the depositors actually wanted their money, you know, to run their companies.

So, if we had to summarize what happened in SVB we could say that they had lots of money and they just assumed that the good times would last forever. They looked at all that money coming in and they thought, man, we’re a bank, we can’t just store that cash, we need to invest it in something…you know, because we’re super smart. So, we’ll tie our money up in an asset that can only not lose money if there the Fed doesn’t do what it said it would do. And even if the Fed does raise rates and our low-yield bonds are worth less than their face value, we’ll be OK, because tech companies are a great investment and they won’t need their money for day to day operations because the good times will just keep rolling along.

SVB looked around at the government printing money and giving it away at never before seen rates and they saw tech companies flush with more money than ever and they thought—this will last forever. Now, you might be thinking, “Luke, they couldn’t have been that foolish. There’s no way they thought that low-interest rates and free money would last forever! They’re not fools!” Friends, what’s the alternative? That they KNEW rates would rise and they just made a monumentally stupid investment. I think that attributing this failure to them being fiduciary Pollyanna’s is less insulting to their intelligence than to presume they were clear-thinking hard-nosed doomsday prophets.

But right now, maybe you think I’ve been talking about SVB this whole time. I have. But not really. SVB is a parable of this country. This is the great modern parable of American culture. We have seen what godlessness leads to. We knew it. We knew that godlessness would lead to national moral bankruptcy and all that comes with. We knew it. And we chose godlessness anyways.

Oh sure, the early days of godlessness are glorious. They’re heady days. The early days of godlessness seem like endless summer and eternal sunshine. No more bigotry, no more stuffy preachers moralizing, no more laws—just freedom, nothing but total freedom. Let the good times roll! We’ll live forever and tomorrow will be just like today or even better!

But godlessness may taste sweet as honey in the mouth but it’s bitter as gall on the tummy. And we’ve glutted ourselves. You see our nation saw that godlessness has come with a bitter price everywhere else it’s been tried, but like a fool we said, “it won’t happen to us. We’re special. It’ll never happen to me. That can’t happen here.” Our godless culture could only survive if we would never be forced to pay the price. Our godless culture required that a man doesn’t have to reap what he sows. Our nation’s survival demanded that one of the most basic laws of God’s universe would either be overturned or at least suspended. We wanted God to be mocked so that we would not reap what we’ve sown.

SVB is the American Parable. The difference is that we may still have time to change the story.

Small Victories

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Well, there are such things in this world as small victories—and the wise know to take ‘em when they can get ‘em. One of those small victories was the Tennessee Bill 1. I could have called it a minor victory and got extra points for being clever with the puns and stuff, but I chose to stick with small victories. And it’s a victory because in Tennessee confused children will no longer be subject to chemical castration, hormone manipulation, or genital mutilation.

Now, I think that preventing the castration and mutilation of children to be a victory. I call that a win every day of the week. It’s rather tragic that we have to take that as a victory, but here we are. But as they say a “W” is a “W”.

But it’s a small victory because this was a State Bill and not a national ban on the castration and mutilation of children. And it’s a small victory because the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association think that we most certainly should be mutilating and castrating kids.

Now, frankly, I take ANYTHING the AMA or the AAP say with so many grains of salt that my electrolytes are out of balance. However, they are still a voice that has influence in our culture. Why? Well, for one because they’re living on borrowed time. The AMA and AAP in the past had won goodwill and so they are holding on to that legacy of respect. Moreover in our society we have come to the not at all self-evident conclusion that anyone who is a doctor is, by necessity, wise and moral and to be listened to.

But as I’ve talked about before, putting on a lab coat doesn’t make you moral. Having MD or PhD attached to your name doesn’t make you wise.

Now, in our secular-pagan society, anything done under the Aegis of Science is therefore good and true and nevermind the fact that good and true are ethical and metaphysical characteristics that Science literally cannot weigh in on because the scientific method is inductive and naturalistic and things like goodness and truth are metaphysical and require transcendent revelation and deductive logic. Nevermind all that, a guy in a lab coat said a thing, let’s all do the thing, because…reasons.

Moreover, it’s a small victory because, again, we’ve come to a pretty pass if this is what can be considered a victory at all!

But hey, a W is a W.

And this reminds me of one of my favorite passages of the Bible and one that I know I’ve talked about a lot over the years:

Zechariah 4:1-10 say this:

1 Then the angel who was speaking with me returned and woke me, as a man is awakened from his sleep.

2 “What do you see?” he asked.

“I see a solid gold lampstand,” I replied, “with a bowl at the top and seven lamps on it, with seven spouts to the lamps. 3 There are also two olive trees beside it, one on the right side of the bowl and the other on its left.”

4 “What are these, my lord?” I asked the angel who was speaking with me.

5 “Do you not know what they are?” replied the angel.

“No, my lord,” I answered.

6 So he said to me, “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the LORD of Hosts. 7 What are you, O great mountain? Before Zerubbabel you will become a plain. Then he will bring forth the capstone accompanied by shouts of ‘Grace, grace to it!’ ”

8 Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 9 “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house, and his hands will complete it. Then you will know that the LORD of Hosts has sent me to you. 10 For who has despised the day of small things? But these seven eyes of the LORD, which scan the whole earth, will rejoice when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel.” (BBT)

You see, brothers and sisters, when Zerubbabel was governor of Judea there was a lot of opposition to building the Temple. And this opposition didn’t just come from the outsiders, but from the insiders. There were Jews who didn’t want to rebuild the temple.

In Ezra 4 we read:

1 When the enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the exiles were building a temple for the Lord, the God of Israel, 2 they came to Zerubbabel and to the heads of the families and said, “Let us help you build because, like you, we seek your God and have been sacrificing to him since the time of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us here.”

3 But Zerubbabel, Joshua and the rest of the heads of the families of Israel answered, “You have no part with us in building a temple to our God. We alone will build it for the Lord, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus, the king of Persia, commanded us.”

4 Then the peoples around them set out to discourage the people of Judah and make them afraid to go on building. 5 They bribed officials to work against them and frustrate their plans during the entire reign of Cyrus king of Persia and down to the reign of Darius king of Persia.

6 At the beginning of the reign of Xerxes, they lodged an accusation against the people of Judah and Jerusalem. (NIV)

And in Haggai 1 we read:

1 In the second year of King Darius, on the first day of the sixth month, the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest:

2 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “These people say, ‘The time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord’s house.’”

3 Then the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai: 4 “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?”

5 Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. 6 You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”

7 This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. 8 Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build my house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored,” says the Lord. 9 “You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?” declares the Lord Almighty. “Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with your own house. 10 Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops. 11 I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the olive oil and everything else the ground produces, on people and livestock, and on all the labor of your hands.” (NIV)

Notice that in this passage we see not only that there was external opposition but internal opposition. People didn’t want to build the Temple because it would be expensive and hard. It’s too hard, was their theological argument. Which, as a theologian I can tell you is not a very good theological argument.

And I can PROVE to you that it wasn’t a very good theological argument. You know how I can prove it? Because God said he gave them drought and crop failure because of their refusal to build the Temple.

But the people listen. They do build it. Haggai continues:

12 Then Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest, and the whole remnant of the people obeyed the voice of the Lord their God and the message of the prophet Haggai, because the Lord their God had sent him. And the people feared the Lord. (NIV)

So they listened and built the Temple, and God speaks again to the people through Haggai in chapter 2:

1 on the twenty-first day of the seventh month, the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai: 2 “Speak to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, to Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people. Ask them, 3 ‘Who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing? 4 But now be strong, Zerubbabel,’ declares the Lord. ‘Be strong, Joshua son of Jozadak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land,’ declares the Lord, ‘and work. For I am with you,’ declares the Lord Almighty. 5 ‘This is what I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt. And my Spirit remains among you. Do not fear.’

6 “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. 7 I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory,’ says the Lord Almighty. 8 ‘The silver is mine and the gold is mine,’ declares the Lord Almighty. 9 ‘The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the Lord Almighty. ‘And in this place I will grant peace,’ declares the Lord Almighty.” (NIV)

Brothers and sisters, friends, God was telling the Israelites not to despise small victories. The Israelites who returned from exile were a small, demoralized, and struggling band of believers. They were surrounded by enemies. Their glorious kingdom was a shadow of its former self. But God told them not to despair—if they wanted to worship Him He would grant them the victories needed to worship Him. The victories may’ve been small, but who despises the day of small things?

Friends, do you despise the day of small victories? Do you look at the culture and look at your empty church and then look at a small victory like this and look down your nose at it? Don’t despise it. A W is a W. When God grants us victory we need to celebrate, we need to rejoice. We need to eat the fat and drink the sweet and rejoice for the joy of the Lord is our strength! We need to rejoice because today, for a little while anyways, kids in Tennessee are safer than they were, primarily because godly people changed society and politics. They didn’t do it by power, nor by might, but by God’s Spirit.

So don’t despise small victories. Don’t reject incrementalism. Take the little wins and run with ‘em. Because what the wordlings know that too often Christians don’t is that a lot of small victories add up to big victories. Let’s be wise. Let’s be grateful to God. Let’s OBEY the Scriptures and rejoice! Don’t despise the day of small things. Rejoice and be glad. And pray for more victories along the way!

Content

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Well, friends, it’s officially the one year anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. And, frankly, I’m not sure how to celebrate this anniversary. Cake? Greeting cards? A watch party?

Now, I say this and right away, I’m sure many of you got your hackles up, you’re disgusted by the idea of having cake to celebrate the one year anniversary of the largest conventional war on European soil about 80 years. But what, exactly, was so offensive about what I said?

Because we still, a year later, have blue and yellow flags hanging from homes and businesses and on twitter-bios and facebook backgrounds. Is that the same as a greeting card? No, not exactly, but in some ways it’s more important because it’s more pervasive.

As far as having a watch-party, as though this war were a Super Bowl, you might find that offensive. But why? We’re supposed to consume these images, don’t ya know. That’s why we have all the clips of combat circulating on the news and on the internet. So, ah, I see; yep, now I get it. It’s TOTALLY OK to watch the brutality and horror of Ukrainians and Russians having their lives snuffed out, as long as you do it alone, or as a family. But the moment you invite over friends and have buffalo chicken dip it’s ghoulish.

Yeah, that dog won’t hunt.

I don’t buy that.

Now listen, I’m NOT saying that there’s not a difference between dispassionately or even compassionately watching images of war and getting’ the boys together to root for the -chenkos instead of the -ovskis. There is a difference.

But that’s not a difference that Big Media, in conjunction with Big Tech, supporting the Military-Industrial Complex want you to engage in. The powerful forces in our society don’t want you to view images of war and be disgusted and heartbroken and desirous of a rapid, peaceful resolution. No.

You’re supposed to see Javelin missiles take out T-90s and get up and cheer as if you were watchin’ Ezekiel Elliot running over the ‘Bama defense or into the endzone against Oregon back in 2014. You’re supposed to consume the Russo-Ukrainian War just like you’re supposed to consume everything else. You’re supposed to sit there and open you brain and let it all get shoved in there. Consume next product. That’s why you exist, don’t you know, you exist so you can consume next product, because next product is so much better than precious product or current product.

Our minds, our emotions, our souls are bombarded every waking moment of our lives with a ceaseless cannonade of vapid, vacuous, vain, venal, violent, and variable messages that attempt to break down any level of real and meaningful individuality and self-assertion. We are not being inspired to be wise, brave, competent citizens of a free republic. Rather we are being reduced to Pavlovian response mechanisms, infantilized, idiotized, and monetized to make us nothing but docile, pliant, pliable, and pitiable, drudges.

The wealthy and powerful do not want you thinking for yourself. They don’t want you cultivating a rich inner life. They don’t want you gardening, chopping firewood, going for long walks, reading the great books, having meaningful conversations. They don’t want you raising 9 kids in a small house with beat up old cars and no data plans on your phones. They don’t want you to get your kids out of government schools. They don’t want employees who will refuse to get the jab or wear the mask. They don’t want people who love and long for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

No.

They hate those people.

They hate those people and they want you to hate them. And if they can’t get you to hate them then you at least need to think they’re psychotics or religious nuts. I mean who would want to contemplate the transcendentals when there’s new product to consume?!

Who would want to spend their limited resources on the legacy and heritage of children when you could have the newest iphone instead!? Why read Shakespeare or Thackary, why listen to Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, why go to the opera or the ballet or the theatre when there’re Tik-Tok videos?!

Why would anyone need silence when there’s a whole world of deafening, mind-numbing, soul-destroying noise out there? a ceaseless din of sound slightly more coherent than static that can act as a soporific or even a narcotic, relieving you of the responsibility to contemplate your own existence? Why consider the reality and responsibility of being a free moral agent in a fallen world created by a loving God when you can be monetized and date-mined instead?!

Why wrestle with your children or talk with your friends or pray with your church or hold your wife’s hand when instead you can stare at a screen measured in square inches?

Why be a person when you can be a consumer?

Now, you might be thinking, “OK Lukey-poo, you sound like a smug elitist here.”

OK.

Don’t care.

I don’t care if I sound like an elitist, frankly, in our society I wear that as a badge of honor. I take it as a point of personal accomplishment that in a nation of zombified consumers of intellectual sewage I have the good taste and the good sense to say the obvious truths: Hamlets is better than Harry Potter; Bach is better than Bruno Mars; Chartres Cathedral is better than Corbusier; Enrico Caruso is better than Cardi B; Baryshnikov is better than Lizzie Howell; Charles Wesley is better than Chris Tomlin; Bernini is better than Banksy.

I don’t care if I sound like an agrarian idealist, frankly, in our society I wear that as a badge of honor. I take it as a point of personal accomplishment that in a nation of promiscuous, baby-murdering man-children and women-children that I have the wisdom to know and say the obvious. Children are better than childlessness; big families are better than small; rurality is better than urbanity; homes are better than apartments; marriage is better than friends with benefits; walks in the woods are better than video games; dogs, cats, cattle, pigs, chickens, horses, orchards and gardens are better than door dash; time spent with children and grandchildren and parents and siblings is better than time spent working for a faceless corporation.

I don’t care if I sound like a religious nut, frankly, in our society I wear that as a badge of honor. I take it as my bounden duty that in a nation of depraved, Satan-worshipping, porn-addled, drug addicted, godless fools I proclaim a Christ who died to pay for sinners such as us. Jesus is better. He’s better than everything and anything. And our nation needs Jesus.

Friends, right about now, you might be thinking…”OK, Luke, you devilishly handsome, silver-tongued, wordsmith you, that’s all brilliant and true and I totally agree with everything you say, but what on earth does this have to do with China and Russia being superbestfriends?”

Well friends, you see, all day, every day, you’re being subjected to psychological warfare. The powerful interests in this world are deeply interested in conditioning you to feel, think, and behave in certain ways. They have a significant vested interest in ensuring that you are very, deeply, earnestly concerned about which group of roided up millionaires push a leather ball past a painted grass line, but not quite so concerned with the centralization and accumulation of power. They want you very, deeply, earnestly worried about which CGI comic book hero in a CGI world can use CGI weapons to defeat CGI enemies to get the CGI McGuffin to stop the CGI apocalypse but they don’t want you worried about whether children are being sexualized and subjected to Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. They want you worried about whether Megan Rapinoe gets paid the same amount for playing soccer as people who are orders of magnitude better than her at playing soccer and not worried about collapsing literacy rates and mathematics scores. They want you worried about pronouns and deadnaming and not worried about train derailments. They want you worried about SUVs and ignoring private jets. They want you thinking about bottled water and ignoring the desertification we cause by poor water management. They want you to root for the people they say are good guys so that they can use that popular mandate to enrich themselves and gain more power.

I’m not saying Russia is right. I think Russia is wrong. But just because Russia is wrong doesn’t make the US or the West right. Just because Russia is wrong doesn’t mean that the West hasn’t been bear-baiting for decades. Just because Russia is wrong doesn’t mean that the US isn’t more interested in selling weapons to Ukraine, selling gas to Europe, and marginalizing Russia and China than the health, welfare, safety, and security of the Ukrainian people. Just because Putin did a bad thing doesn’t make us right just because we’re not Putin.

As the old saying goes, it takes two to tango. And you don’t need to be a Putin-stooge to say that while his invasion was wrong and evil, it’s not as though the history and politics of this whole thing are clear and simple. But that’s what powerful interests want you to think—if and when they want you thinking at all, which is rarely—they want you to think in simple, uncomplicated, and politically advantageous ways. Now, the simple and uncomplicated is easy; Americans have been undergoing intellectual programming for decades and at this point I doubt that the average American could logic their way out of a wet paper sack. But as for thinking in simple ways that are politically advantageous to the powerful and elite—well that takes some doing. When you turn your population into a gigantic baseball bat it’s going to be a blunt instrument nomatter who uses it—it just ain’t gonna be useful in brain surgery. The problem is who gets to wield it? Which demagogue will get to swing the lumber that is the American Public?

Frankly, I care a lot who gets to swing it.

But that’s not my primary concern, because if I had my druthers nobody but nobody would be making hay out of our sunshine. If I had my way this country would be a nation of careful thinking, wise, contemplative, sober, compassionate, and moral people who then exercise their political will in such a way.

But there’s only one way to have a nation like that.

Christ.

Only a nation that loves God will be a nation fit for freedom. Only a nation that loves Christ will be a nation that HAS freedom.

If you want to just be a consumer; if you just wanna be content with content then go ahead. eep consuming the new content; keep living a godless life; keep just being told to eat the bugs and drink the vinyl chloride—you’ll be fine. If that’s the life you want, then you can have it. And there’s gonna nobody that’s gonna try to stop you (well except me a few other weirdos).

But if you want to be free, if you want to be free to think for yourself, if you want to be free to live life on your own terms, if you want to be free to contemplate the good, the true, and the beautiful, if you want to be free to not be a slave to those who would enslave you, there is one and only one solution and that is Christ.

Only a nation that loves God will be a nation fit for freedom. And only a nation that loves Christ will be a nation that HAS freedom. Christ can set you free. Free to no longer be content with content.

East Palestinian Refugees

Listen to it here.

So, if you’re like me, you have questions about East Palestine, Ohio and its residents. If you’re like me, you may be a bit dubious about exactly how necessary it was to explode a cloud of chlorine gas over a small border town. If you’re like me, there’s a part of you that wonders—just a little bit—whether this controlled explosion was absolutely necessary or whether it was just the fastest and cheapest way to get the trains rolling again.

Now, as I said in last week’s episode, I’m going to stick with the facts. I’m going to stick with the publicly available data from sources that are as reputable and broadly accepted as we can find. Notice I phrased that last sentence very carefully. There’s no media outlet I trust altogether. There’s no member or branch of government that I trust altogether. There’s no corporation or industry I trust altogether. But the reality is that we DO have to get journalism from somewhere and you have to pick your poison and cross reference major media with independent media with independent experts in certain topics. Frankly, it would be the cat’s meow if we could just trust one of the 3-letter-networks. But I think that unwise.

But the dubious of their truthfulness doesn’t mean that the major media outlets aren’t going to be the most well-funded and broadly accepted groups that are going to have the easiest access to the power players. But that’s a whole ‘nother story that we’ll have to talk about another day.

Because when it comes to the East Palestine derailment and the (cough) cleanup there are a lot of questions. These questions don’t have easy answers—or maybe not easy answers that the likes of us are ever going to be privy to—but they do have answers. While no one individual may be personally and entirely responsible for what happened, there certainly are people who bear responsibility.

As of the time of recording, it would appear that the best explanation for WHY the train derailed is because of a catastrophic failure on an overheated wheel-bearing. OK. I get it. Wheel bearings wear-out. They are a part that is literally designed to wear out. You wear out the bearing so you don’t wear out the axle.

So, let’s assume that this is true—that there was no skullduggery as some are asserting and which I am not asserting and I don’t believe—let’s just take it at face value that the blown wheel-bearing caused the derailment. OK. A series of questions should follow:

Why did the bearing overheat?

When was the last time the bearing assembly was inspected?

Why was the bearing allowed to overheat to the degree that it caused a derailment?

Because the thing is, bearing failures, according to one study, are the number 3 cause of train derailments, accounting for about 6% of all derailments, and moreover, bearing failure derailments are more common than some other factors in speeds over 25mph—thus they are more likely to be serious accidents than railyard derailments happening under 10mph. Now, since there are about 1,000 derailments a year, and of those, according to older data that we’re assuming is fairly stable, a little over 50% of derailments are on the main rails, and since bearing failures are responsible for about 6% of derailments, we can say that AT MINIMUM there are 30 derailments on the mail lines, per year, due to bearing failure.

Now, maybe you’re saying that that number is acceptably low. I don’t agree. I don’t agree because bearing failure derailments are largely preventable. I’m not saying bearing failure is entirely preventable. I’m saying that bearing failure derailments are largely if not entirely preventable. There is technology that will act as an advanced-warning-system that will alert engineers and others to the danger of a failed bearing, with MORE than enough lead time to replace the bearing. Now, the railways DO have infrared sensors that CAN detect wheel bearing failure. However these sensors are placed up to 20 miles apart and overheat failure can occur within 2 miles. Which to me isn’t a solution, but rather a cheap way of pretending to do something about a problem that you have no intention of actually solving because solving the problem is expensive and hard. And if there’s one thing the railroad industry doesn’t like it’s expensive and hard. There are practical technologies that can be implemented but simply aren’t because, well, it’s expensive!

In fact there are a lot of things that could be done to improve railroad safety. But they’re all expensive. And the simple fact of the matter is that the railroad industry has determined that they would rather pay to clean up the accidents than to prevent them in the first place. Which, to me, sounds like callous disregard for other people.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not a ridiculous person. I understand that just because a safety measure might save 1 life or prevent 1 accident that we should do it. There are things that are ruinously expensive. We could lower the speed limit on trains and heck, we could outlaw trains—but that’s not really a solution to the logistical challenges that this country faces. I know that dollars and cents do matter. But I also know that this is not just a matter of dollars and cents—and it makes no sense to pretend that it is.

Because here’s the thing. If the railroads have the technology and it is economically feasible to implement it and they are choosing not to because it isn’t as profitable as just paying for the cleanup then that is evil.

It’s similar to the question of why the railroads aren’t required to have lights and crossbars at every intersection. Is it expensive? Yes. Do we know that it saves lives? Yes. Why should taxpayers bear that burden? Look into the history of railroads and you’ll see that few people have ever gotten the kind of sweetheart deals that the railroads got. Moreover, the railroads are ludicrously profitable. Back in 2019 they had profitability rates higher than 50%! Just the 7 biggest rail companies in the US and Canada netted over $27B in 2021. I’m guessing that they could have spent some of the $27B putting gates with lights and arms on all the intersections that lack them. According to the Ohio Public Utilities Commission, the average upgrade costs about $200,000. At that rate they could upgrade 135,000 railway crossings. There are only 129,500 public at grade crossings!!! And half of them already have some kind of advanced warning system!

So, if you’re keeping score at home, that means that with one year’s net income the 7 biggest rail companies in America could MORE than pay to upgrade ever single public at grade crossing. Every one of them. Why isn’t this mandated? Why has nothing been done about this?

Money.

Plain and simple.

Money.

Another fun fact for those keeping score at home. When Governor DeWine gave the go-ahead to detonate the vinyl chloride the ignition of vinyl chloride created hydrogen chloride and phosgene gas. If you feel like phosgene is a term you’ve heard before it’s because it is. You’re thinking back to your World History class in 10th grade and remembering that phosgene is one of the names for chlorine gas…that they used…in WWI…to kill people…which was banned by the Geneve Conventions…which is a war-crime to use on people.

But it’s OK, guys, don’t worry, we weren’t dropping chemical weapons on our nations’ enemies, no we’d never do something that evil; we just created a cloud of chlorine gas overtop of a bunch of poor white people. And poor people don’t count anyways, and they ‘specially don’t count if they’re poor whites! We might maybe give a crap about poor non-whites, but naw we ain’t a-gonna shed a tear over that plain white trash, even if Fancy is their name.

Brothers and sisters, I’m not saying that there’s any one person to blame for the derailment. And maybe engaging in an act that would in some circumstances be considered a war-crime REALLY was the safest option because a catastrophic explosion would have been worse. MAYBE, just MAYBE, recapture of those gasses into a refrigerated car to prevent explosion was impossible or impracticable. Maybe. I’m not a chemical engineer. I’m not a hazmat expert.

But I am a man with questions. I want to know how preventable this derailment was. I want to know how necessary the detonation was. I want to know what will be done to make the people of East Palestine and its environs whole. I want to know who will be held responsible if people do develop cancer and die from this. I want to know why the most profitable industry in this country is allowed to continue to ignore improved safety technologies, lay off workers, and reduce safety standards. This isn’t to save the industry! It isn’t cut-corners or no mo choo-choos! No. These are multi-billion dollar concerns that just seem to operate with impunity.

And frankly, the most absurd thing of all of this is that Norfolk Southern has given a ludicrous pittance of money for a disaster cleanup and made vague promises to help to town recover in its press releases, but NS , despite these press releases and promises, seems rather more interested in getting this all over as quickly and cheaply as possible. It frankly astonished me that this town had poison gas released over it because of a train wreck and the people were told to go thoroughly deep clean their homes themselves—from the poison!

I am utterly shocked that officials would have the nerve to tell the residents of East Palestine—and its environs—to just go clean up the poison themselves…you know the poison that Norfolk Southern spilled and the government OKed detonating! But it’s OK everybody, they’re just rural whites, who live in a small border town. They’ll only be relevant for another half a news cycle and then we can just leave their lives and community shattered and move on with makin’ money.

And this is a theological concern. This is something Christians should care about. The Mosaic Law states that we are our brothers’ keepers and Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. You can’t love your neighbor when you are choosing slightly more exorbitant profits over people’s lives—over the lives of entire communities and entire ecosystems!

Friends, brothers, sisters, justice does matter to God. And a nation that will allow some of the wealthiest people in the world to poison a whole community and walk away without making them whole is a perverse, degenerate, and wicked nation. I hope that we’re better than that. I hope Ohio is better than that. I pray that Governor DeWine and Attorney General Yost will use every power at their disposal to ensure that Norfolk Southern pays every last red cent to make this right, not just some phony-balogna clean-up which is just getting the tracks cleared, but that they are paying to fix and repair homes, to purchase new homes, to clean the soil, to replace livestock, to pay for medical care, from now until the last person exposed to this poison is dead and gone or Jesus has returned. Because that’s justice and accountability. That’s how Norfolk Southern makes it right. AND IF and ONLY IF corporations like Norfolk Southern are forced by the state, will they make this right. So, friends, brothers, sisters, get on the phone, type up some emails and let DeWine and Yost and your State Congressional representatives know that Norfolk Southern must make this right. And the railroad industry must be compelled to increase railroad safety. Only that is justice.

Anything less is injustice. Anything less, is legalized theft, and legalized bloodshed. And God has some strong things to say about nations that don’t punish bloodletters and badmen.

I pray our nation, our state, will hold those accountable accountable. As Christians and citizens we ought to join our voices together and make them heard so that the Ohio government knows that the people of Ohio won’t stand for East Palestine being railroaded.

Serpents and Doves

Listen to it here!

OK, so before we begin today I want to make a claim that I think should be self-evident, but I need to make anyways, otherwise you aren’t going to understand the point of today’s broadcast. The point is this: just because someone has lied once doesn’t mean they’re lying every time they talk to you.

A related point: just because someone has done something unethical or illegal or evil in the past doesn’t mean that everything they do is unethical or illegal or evil.

Or to put it another way, just because the boy cried wolf doesn’t mean that they’re never telling the truth about the wolf. Indeed, that’s the whole point of the parable is that if you lie over and over again then people aren’t going to believe you when you tell the truth. Similarly, if you do someone dirty they’re unlikely to trust you even if you’re trying to be a fair-dealer. Once-bitten twice shy, as the old saying goes. Or, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Now, the reason I’m making this caveat at the beginning of this episode is because I’m pretty sure that the position I’m going to take is going to make pretty much everyone angry. My friends on the left are going to think that I’m a crazy anti-vaxxer and my friends on the right are going to think I’m a Pfizer-stooge. I’m neither. And I hope to prove to you that I’m neither.

What I am is a pastor-theologian who is trying to do theologically-informed social commentary on the news of the day. I’m trying to, as I say every week, give you Truth in Journalism. I’m trying to apply the Word of God to current events. And that means that whatever I happen to think about a subject isn’t good enough to hit the airwaves. I can’t just go off half-cocked because I have a burr up my…body. It is unfair, unethical, and unchristian for me, to make assertions that I can’t verify and present it as truth. We have too many in this society who do that. You don’t need me to do that…you have the whole of American society to do that for you if you need it.

So I’m going to limit what I say today to evidence that’s in the public record and from official sources. My opinions on what else may be behind everything going on are not relevant. What matters is the truth and its theological impact.

So, let’s begin trying to get some Truth in Journalism.

Now, not too long ago Project Veritas released excerpts of a sting operation they performed on a man they claim was a Pfizer executive. As of the time of my recording Pfizer had not denied that the man in the video was an executive. This is not an admission, but it is an odd omission from their public release if it’s untrue. So for sake of argument we’ll assume that the man in the video was, indeed, a Pfizer exec. as there has no attempt to dispute that claim.

Now, in the video this man made some statements that he later recanted. These were essentially related to two topics. First, that Pfizer was working towards directed evolution of viruses so that they could get ahead of nature, develop vaccines and create a cash-cow. Pfizer has half denied this, but not entirely. Second, that Pfizer is quite concerned that the side-effects of the vaccines could have negative effects on women’s fertility, and that Pfizer is aware that there have been widespread reports of fertility related issues.

Moreover, and this is where we are leaving off of this video and moving into the realm of that crazy-old internet we all love and crave so badly, there are increasing rates of excess deaths due to the mRNA vaccines and that SADS or Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome—commonly and falsely called Sudden Adult Death Syndrome—is now at a never-before seen level and athletes are dropping like flies.

Now, let’s deal with the last two claims first because these are in some ways old news and aren’t the main topic for today. Now, firstly, is there an increase in the excess death rate? Well, not really. As far as I can tell from the data available the excess mortality rate in this country and in other countries does not seem to be associated with the vaccines causing excess deaths in significant numbers. The excess death data seem to show that since the rollout of vaccines excess deaths have stabilized and decreased. Now, you might say that those numbers are fudged. OK. That’s fine. You can claim that these are all lies. But that’s not how research works and it’s not how responsible commentary works. I have to deal with statistical data that are available. Now, if someone wants to do a deep-dive into the methods of data collection, great! Do these data prove that the vaccines work? No. But they also don’t prove that the vaccines are killing people in statistically significant numbers.

Secondly, the claim that athletes are dying in droves, and that SADS is at never before seen rates: this one’s a bit more complicated. There are some serious scholars who have found a connection with an increase in SCD: Sudden Cardiac Death and the vaccine. Paul Maffetone shows that there has been an alarming increase in SCD in athletes that occurred in 2021. This would suggest that a) this is caused by myo and pericarditis stemming from vaccination or b) it’s caused by myo and pericarditis as a result of contracting SARS-COV 2 and that it took a few years to see the results. Now, here’s the thing. The fact-checkers are working hard to dispute claims such as “more athletes dropped dead in one year than in 40 years.” These seem to be junk-science. And I don’t believe in junk-science. Notably, I haven’t seen many or any people disputing Maffetone’s paper or claims. His seem chastened and limited to the evidence. Moreover, Pfizer now admits that myo and pericarditis are recognized side-effects of the vaccine, but claim the incidence is only 1 in 100,000. You might think that that number is a lie. OK. You can. I think that this is an area of concern and one that isn’t new and the core of this isn’t disputed, but the numbers and statistics have been blown out of proportion.

HOWEVER, if Maffetone is correct and 325 athletes died of SCD in 2021 and fewer than 5 did in the years 2018, 19 and 20 and no more than 10 athletes per year died of SCD since 2001, that’s a disturbing number. That’s between a 32 and 65 times the number and in some years 325 times the number of athletes dying of SCD! 2018 had 1 athlete. 2021 had 325! Does this mean that the vaccine is gonna kill Grama Aunt-Paw? No. It does mean that people who undergo significant cardiac stress probably shouldn’t increase their risk of myo or pericarditis? Yes.

But now I want to move to the real news of the right now. What do we do with Pfizer? How do you solve a problem like big Pharma? They say that they aren’t doing directed evolution.

Now, you might say, “well, of course they’re saying that—they’re liars.” Well, yeah, Pfizer is a company that I don’t find very trustworthy. They are, indeed, liars. But just because a liar says something doesn’t make it a lie. So, I examined what Pfizer actually said and I’d like you to look at it to.

I’m quoting from their press release:

In the ongoing development of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, Pfizer has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research.  Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern. This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required.  

OK, so at first this looks like a flat denial. Pfizer says that they don’t do GoF or Directed Evolution! End of story; good-bye; the end. So, I mean, I guess we should stop being suspi………..whoa….what now? You aren’t doing any of the bad sciences. But they are, they tell us, doing research in which “the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern.”

So, if you’re like me, you’re not a virologist or a microbiologist—maybe you are, and if you are please correct anything erroneous I might say—but from the research I’ve done it seems that what that means is basically this. So, we all know what the covid virus looks like: imagine a blue softball with lots of keys sticking out of it and that’s a pretty crude but helpful image. Now the keys are spike proteins. The job of spike proteins is to bind to protein receptors on the cells the virus is attacking. So, imagine if on the cell were locks. Not every key can fit into every lock, but if the key is close enough it will still work. Well, the spike proteins on the coronavirus will fit into the Ace2 receptor on lung cells in the human body. Once the key is in the lock the cell opens up and lets the virus into the cell and then the virus replicates itself and the infection has begun.

Now, here’s the thing, as SARS-COV 2 has mutated and the various variants have arisen, the shape of the spike protein has changed. This means, that the keys sticking out of the softball are slightly different. And evidence suggests that the keys are even better at fitting into the locks. So, if Pfizer is getting the much deadlier Wuhan virus to “express” spike proteins from these newer more effective variants, that may mean that they are developing viruses that are as dangerous as the initial virus but more contagious.

And here’s the thing. When you combine the spike proteins from variants to the body of the original Wuhan virus, then you don’t have the Wuhan virus or the variant you have a new organism with unpredictable emergent properties. Dr. John Campbell of the UK had this to say about this experimentation:

“The idea of a brand new virus, with unpredictable emergent properties terrifies me; but that’s only me, I’m a timorous man.”

Sarcasm duly noted Dr. C…sarcasm duly noted.

Now, I will readily admit. I’m not a scientist. I am not an expert in viruses. But I am pretty good with words and I do know how words can be used to deceive and manipulate. I have a pretty high verbal intelligence. And it seems to me, not as a scientist, but as a person who does words good and reads words good too that Pfizer is basically trying to change definitions and slip by on technicalities without denying the actually scary part. Whether what Pfizer is doing meets the technical scientific threshold for “gain of function” or “directed evolution” isn’t really the relevant part. The relevant part is whether or not they’re manipulating the virus so that they are creating new viruses and/ or more dangerous viruses and or just experimenting with results unknowable. The issue is NOT that the general public is concerned with the technical ins-and-outs and science jargon. The public isn’t overly concerned with gain-of-function qua gain-of-function. What the public is concerned with is the reckless experimentation that these mad scientists are engaging in. They’re concerned that people are experimenting in ways that is creating new and deadlier viruses. Whether it’s called GoF or you call it Bananagrams is irrelevant. I don’t care if you call it Luke’s-a-poopy-fart-head. If you’re experimenting with the virus people don’t trust Pfizer to do that and they have good reason to not trust them.

But Pfizer is trying to slide by on a technicality. And that’s why we need to be careful.

Let’s face facts. The corporate media and your average public health official are either in thrall to or in the pocket of big pharma, and big tech partners with them, in a convergence of interests. And what Big tech and big government do is work hand-in-glove to silence and censor people who tell the truth. But they don’t fact-check the truth. They, generally, fact-check the false, unreliable, or exaggerated version of the truth.

What they do is big tech, public health, the fact-checkers don’t go after peer reviewed research that demonstrates that there is an increase in Sudden Cardiac Death in athletes—they ignore that and instead debunk the claim that more athletes had died of SADS in the past year than the previous 40.

It’s a fallacious form of argumentation. It’s called weakmanning, which is like strawmanning, but instead of refuting an imaginary argument you only deal with the weakest form and not an invented argument.

Friends, brothers, sisters, hear me carefully. We are living in a world where people profit off of lies. We live in a world where government, media, and big business have converging interests and it is in their interest to lie to you. But that doesn’t mean that everything they say is a lie and it doesn’t mean that every accusation against Pfizer of Fauci of Facebook is true. Does Pfizer need to be asked hard questions and held accountable? Yes. But that doesn’t mean that we should believe and repeat everything we hear. Same thing with big tech and big government.

Brothers and sisters, I’m appealing to Christians. We are supposed to love the truth. We are supposed to seek the truth. We believe that the truth will set us free. Therefore, don’t believe and repeat lies or misstatements even lies and misstatements against evil people and bad actors.

We need to ensure that the things we say politically and socially are reasonable, defensible, and as far as we can discern true. First, because the power of the tongue is great and we have a duty to control our tongues and an obligation before God to only speak the truth.

Second, because when we spout lies and conspiracy theories and indefensible arguments, all it does is allow the enemies of truth to refute lies rather than to have to cover-up the truth. And I’m here to say that refuting lies is much easier than covering up the truth.

Christians, it’s OK to have doubts. It’s OK to trust your gut. But it’s not OK to spout your gut feelings as unquestioned fact. It’s not OK to spread lies—even if they are noble lies. Be a free-thinker; be skeptical of powerful interests; be suspicious of people who are known liars who have a financial and reputational interest. All that’s is being shrewd as serpents.

But only tell the truth and only argue from the truth that can be defended with evidence. That’s being gentle as doves.

We need to be both. Too many Christians know how to do one but not the other. Let’s be gentle and shrewd.

Artificial Christianity

Listen to it here!

Back in April of 2016 I did a broadcast covering this very topic of Artificial Intelligence putting white-collar workers out of business. It’s big news now because of the top-of-the-line chatbots. But the issues of tech displacing workers isn’t new news. Years ago Richard and Daniel Susskind were in the news because they had written and written convincingly that not only WOULD Artificial Intelligence replace white-collar workers, but that it was already happening.

And I said back then, and I’ll say right now that this can be a good thing. Having computers do your taxes and write your wills CAN BE a good thing. Outsourcing mindless work to machines CAN BE a good thing. Notice that I’m saying CAN BE and not IS. There is a distinction with a difference between things being good in themselves and things having the potential for good. There is a difference between technology having the potential to make our lives easier and making our lives better.

Now, full disclosure, I’m a bit of a luddite. I prefer to take notes with paper and pen. I like to read physical books, I hate smartphones, and refuse to have one.

But I’m a luddite who spends huge portions of my day working on a computer. I use the computer to study the Bible, to do research, to go to seminary, to write articles and essays and to do a weekly radio broadcast. I use it for emails. I use it for sermon-prep. I use the computer to study Hebrew and Greek and French and German and Latin. I use the computer for fun. I use it to watch movies and shows, to listen to podcasts, to play chess, and to talk with friends.

I have a computer on and with me most of the day.

Is it because I love computers?

No. I really don’t love them or have any special care for technology.

But I love the usefulness of a computer. I love what it allows me to do. But I’m not fooled into thinking that it isn’t a mixed bag. Yes, the computer allows me to do a lot of things very efficiently. But it’s also changing how I work and think and it’s also very addictive. And, of course, there’s the simple reality that computers allow us to search through vast amounts of information to find exactly what we’re looking for very quickly without the need to sort through vast amounts of related and unrelated data—unless, of course, you’re using the file explorer on Windows 11 which can’t find anything.

But sometimes the most rewarding part of research is all the little nuggets and rabbit trails and treasures you find along the way. One of the things that made old time scholars so good was the fact that they were so well-rounded. They did a lot of broad reading and they read through things inefficiently, but the inefficiency of their education and research methodologies meant that they had a broader and less specialized body of knowledge.

And while this isn’t the point of this broadcast today, I do want to at least mention in passing that a broad knowledge base is a necessary thing for any kind of scholar or thinker, or frankly, any kind of useful citizen in a free republic. A few years ago I was having dinner with one of the Deans at Dallas Seminary and one of the things that he thought was very detrimental to Christian education and pastoral ministry is that so many students came to Dallas Seminary out of Bible Colleges and Christian Colleges with Bible degrees.

Now, make no mistake, he was NOT against Bible degrees. But he thought that people need a broader body of knowledge and experience to make a well-rounded pastor. And I must say I agree. If I had to do it all over again I would have made better life-choices and sinned less, but I still would want to marry my wife and have my kids, and I would still want to be a pastor and a theologian. And I still would want to study at Dallas. But I would NOT go get a Bible degree from a Christian college. And when I look at how God has used me, I’m glad I spent so many years as a carpenter and feeding cattle and working with Youth for Christ. I’m glad because it gave me a lot of life experiences that have made my ministry and theology richer. So, doing things the hard way is often beneficial in indirect ways. I like to think of it as learning to do calculus by hand without a calculator. Can you do it faster and more efficiently with a calculator? Sure. But it isn’t rewarding and you don’t actually learn calculus—you learn calculator operations.

And I’m glad we have very powerful calculators. And when the best mathematicians in the world can use the best tools in the world then we can make new advances in mathematics and solve problems that we might never have solved otherwise!

But technology comes with costs. Anything that is going to change the world is going to destroy aspects of the world as it is. Now, I know that that might comes as a surprise. But it’s a simple reality. Anything that changes your world destroys the world as it is. Technological advancements come with costs; they create and they also destroy.

Back hundreds of years ago when the Industrial Revolution hit, it was a disaster for rural life, particularly in England as England industrialized more rapidly than anywhere else. And the Industrial Revolution allowed England to become the leader of the world and to expand her empire beyond anything it had yet seen. But there was a real cost. There was a human cost. The ruination of rural life led to a rapid population influx to the major urban centers where they were exploited by corrupt and greedy capitalists. See Charles Dickens for more details.

Now, we have a welfare state so I doubt that there will be mass impoverishment resulting from the inception of AI technology. I also don’t know what the pace will be and what kinds of laws will be put in place to protect industries. Let me give and example.

So, lawyers are particularly susceptible to losing work because of AI. Who is going to go to a lawyer for a simple will or for a straightforward tax return when the computer can do it for you in a matter of second for free? The answer is nobody. No one will go to a lawyer to fill out forms for them if a computer can do it. So, consider the influence and power of lawyers in this country. Even though lawyers no longer make up the majority of congress they still make up a large plurality. And when you consider lobbying by the American Bar Association and the State Bars, you can imagine that it won’t be long before there are state and federal regulations limiting what kind of legal documents can be filled out and filed by AI. And obviously this goes further. As we talked about back in 2016, when we looked at the research by the Susskinds, Daniel Susskind made this point:

“Consider that every year on eBay, 60m disagreements are resolved using “online dispute resolution” software, without a traditional lawyer. This is three times as many lawsuits as are dealt with in the entire US justice system. Clearly, in the absence of this system many of those 60m would go unresolved. And it is this – what access to expertise people would have if these systems did not exist – that should often be our benchmark.”

Now that was back in 2016! Lawyers are only getting less needed for a lot of routine tasks. And that’s actually a good thing. It’s good because it means that millions of people are able to resolve disputes and get some measure of justice or being made whole when they wouldn’t have otherwise. AI COULD BE a tool to promote a more just society by allowing more people to have more access to legal services than they could otherwise.

Does this mean that there will come a day when we don’t need lawyers? No. But what it does mean is that lawyers will have more time to do tasks that require actual humans. It means that lawyers won’t have a lot of their income coming from boilerplate forms and paperwork, but will need to find other ways of serving clients with their legal talent and expertise.

And, as I said back in 2016, the clergy, pastors, YOUR pastor will be affected by the advent of artificial intelligence. Most people, especially protestants, make a very strong association between the role of a pastor and preaching a sermon. But what about when your pastor isn’t preaching HIS sermons but is just having the computer write them. Do you really need a pastor at that point?

Now, I don’t think that this is meaningfully different from pastors who plagiarize or pastors who buy their sermons. If you’re a plagiarist or you buy your sermons, shame on you. And I’d love to talk about this more, but we’re running out of airtime so we must move on.

There are a lot of clergymen who are either blithely unaware of how much AI will change preaching, or they arrogantly still think that a computer will never be able to preach as well as a human, or they are terrified that this means the end of the clergy.

I think that this is a tool that can be, is, and should be threatening to pastors who are not engaged in incarnational ministry. I am afraid that too many will think that this is a huge boon that will allow them to continue being lazy and ignorant and still drawing a paycheck.

But I also think that this is an opportunity. I think that IF AI breaks the American Church by proving that the television, entertainment model of worship that we currently have is inadequate and not truly human and not truly Spirit-filled.

Too many people, not just pastors, but layfolk as well, have an idea that church is nothing more than a Jesusy-inspirational speech or a glorified Bible-study. The average church is set-up as close as it can be to make you feel like you’re watching television. Just think about this. How the stage is bright and emits light in a dark space and it’s in that bright space where stuff happens and your attention is fixed. Church has become television and that’s why so many people found it so easy to move to “virtual church”—which isn’t church and never has been and never will be.

The problem is that pastors have come to the place where they think of themselves as TV personalities performing before a live studio audience rather than as men of God shepherding a congregation. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming to be a perfect pastor or even a very good one. Nor do I make any claim to being anything other than a fair to middling preacher. But the one thing I strive to be is honest, authentic, and true to my calling.

The Artificial Intelligence Revolution could be a great opportunity for the people of God in America and the West to see how shallow and robotic so much of what we do has become. It is an opportunity for us to see that church as we know it has serious problems and is not really incarnational. It is not a faith and church-life that’s lived out in body, soul, and spirit, but one that is primarily addressed to being as much like entertainment as possible.

This could be a call to return to gathering as the people of God to love the Lord with all our hearts, minds, souls, and strength together, sharing our lives together, to share the loaf and cup, to wash feet, to lay on hands and anoint with oil, to have genuine fellowship and to practice hospitality. This could be the kick in the pants we need to stop living beneath our privileges and fully embrace being the BODY of Christ.

Corrupticos

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OK, so, as per usual when I discuss anything having to do with the Covid vaccines I want it known that I’m not a doctor nor a scientist, nor am I your doctor. I am a reasonably intelligent citizen in a free republic, however. And I am someone who cares deeply about the truth. And I am someone who desires the flourishing of all people.

But more and more I am growing increasingly disturbed by the scale and scope of corruption that exists in this nation. I’m growing increasingly disturbed by the revolving-door relationship between Big Pharma and those who are supposed to regulate Big Pharma. I’m disturbed by the convergence of power and interests between government, big-tech, and big pharma. As we see evidence of this corruption almost daily thanks to the Twitter-files. Scott Gottlieb may be one of the most egregiously corrupt public health profiteers but he’s far from the only one.

Eisenhauer warned us about the military-industrial-complex. And Ike was right to warn us about that. Right now, there are very serious questions that need to be asked about the Ukraine war and the level of profits that the US arms industry is making and HOW they make their profits and who gets paid with those profits—almost all of those profits, by the way are from taxpayer dollars! And the top 24 executives at the top 5 defense contractors will rake in over $250M this year! These companies are making enormous profits and they also are deeply connected to lawmakers and their marketing wings subsidize large amounts of the news media—as do pharmaceutical companies by the way.

Ike warned about the military-industrial-complex, but it isn’t ONLY arms manufacturers drumming up war-fever. Now we have the Big pharma promising to solve your other kinds of fevers…even if they can’t. And again, there are serious questions to be asked about how the vaccine research and development was funded for the Covid vaccines. Because if it was funded by taxpayers why are the pharmaceutical companies permitted to make gigantic profits off of these drugs?

I’m not saying that the companies shouldn’t profit. Not at all. These companies were spending their time on a vaccine when they could have been researching and producing other drugs. The time of these companies is valuable and I’m not advocating socialism. I am, however, suggesting that our medical system’s pseudo-private nature, while in reality it’s becoming single-payer, is making it ripe for corruption and malfeasance.

Because right now the government is paying for and has attempted to mandate drugs that private companies stand to receive enormous profits for providing. Now if I were a cynical man I would say that pharmaceutical companies have an ENORMOUS financial incentive to promote vaccine mandates, to ensure that the FDA, and it’s sister organizations around the globe, quickly and with no headaches approve the use of the vaccine for everyone, and to use the power of government and big-tech to silence anyone who asks any questions or makes any statements that might endanger the profitability of the drugs the drug-makers are selling. Oh, well, maybe I am a cynical man because I would say all those things, and in fact, I DO say all those things.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the revolving door between the FDA and board and executive positions at major pharmaceutical companies causes one to wonder just how much regulation the regulators in their regulatory agencies actually do. And of course, this isn’t just in the medical field. As time has gone on, we have seen that Bernie Madoff was crooked for years and people knew it and the regulators knew it but nobody did anything because people were just making too much money. In the end no one, not one single person at any regulatory agency was fired, including people who were directly tasked to investigate Madoff after being given a veritable goldmine of red-flags from whistleblowers. Yet, the cry came out that we needed more regulators! Why? So, more people can do nothing? Obviously, the SEC hasn’t improved, as Sam Bankman-Fried has proven. The fact that these Ponzi schemes are only stopped when the money literally runs out is proof that these agencies lack the will to enforce regulatory codes and financial law. But, of course, there is a very chummy relationship between the FED the regulators and Wall Street.

What our society is witnessing is a convergence of interests in almost all of our major institutions to perpetuate corruption and lies. It’s all either rotten or got rot in it! Everyone lies, everyone turns a blind-eye to the truth, they all are engaged in suppressing the truth. We are a nation of liars.

The common stat is that the average American lies 4 times a day. And research shows that Americans are growing more and more comfortable with lying. And it isn’t just that we’re a nation of liars—we’re a nation of thieves. Indeed more than half of people admitted to stealing from work! This theft is so widespread that employers sometimes need to order 20% more supplies to simply cover their losses from employee theft. We’re a nation of adulterers and adulteresses with the divorce rate dropping but still around 50% total with approximately 40% of first marriages ending in divorce.

Why am I saying all this? I’m saying this because when we look at someone like Scott Gottlieb who claims that he only wanted to silence people who had questions about the efficacy, safety, and profitability of the Pfizer Covid vaccine because these comments will lead to violence, he’s obviously lying. No one, not one single person, actually believes that. Well, let me try that again, nobody, not one single person who isn’t a complete chump believes that. It’s such a brazen lie. And we balk at it, as though it astonishes us that the former FDA chair would lie about healthcare products! Why are you surprised?

Why everyone in our culture is claiming that everything that they hate is either Hitlerian or does violence. Heck, even silence is violence…remember that one!? So how dare we get all exercised when some corruptico like Gottlieb says that truth about medical science is violence?! Because he is, indeed a corruptico. He’s wielding his connections and influence to achieve a corrupt result. It’s cronyistic corruption at its worst. We mock The Russian Federation and call it corrupt and dirty and claim that Putin is just the chief Kleptocrat. We do that as though our politicians weren’t corrupt. Hunter Biden claiming to pay $50k a month to his dad in rent on a house that both people claim to own can be nothing else but a money laundering scheme. Ever wonder how Congressional Representatives get rich AFTER being elected? Isn’t is strange how they all have spouses who, out of nowhere, suddenly become stock market rockstars? What a coinky-dink!

And maybe I’m making your blood boil. But here’s the point. Government will always be more corrupt than the population in general. The best and brightest and most honest and integrous RARELY go into government. They say that those who can’t do, teach. Well, those who can’t even teach go into politics. Are there exceptions? Of course. But your average government worker, elected or unelected, is likely not to be better than the average American but worse.  

Daniel 4:17 says that God is sovereign over the kingdoms of the world and sets over it the lowliest of men.

Matthew Henry points out that sometimes, sure, sometimes, this means that a guy like David becomes king. But frankly friends, we can all do the math and we can see that the rate of Davids is pretty low, and even David had his problems.

Brothers and sisters, my point is this: your government, your representatives, your regulators are not the good and great among us. They are our barometers not our best moralists. The level of corruption among the elites is always going to be indicative, especially in a republic, or really any governmental system where people choose their rulers, indicative of the moral strength of any society.

You want to know what’s going on in America? Let me read for you from the Bible:

Romans 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. 29 They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31 they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. 32 Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Friends, Brothers, Sisters, we are a corrupt people and this is what it looks like when God hands a nation over to its own corrupt desires. This is what it looks like when God let’s a nation go. We can moan and cry all we want about corruption and lies and incompetence. But we can never forget that the lies and corruption exist in Washington and Wall Street and Silicon Valley and in big-weapons and big-pharma and big-education and everywhere else because there is corruption everywhere else. If a nation is full of godless, corrupticos, where are our institutions supposed to get honest men and women? Where are you gonna get an honest congressman or CEO if there are no honest men and women from which to choose? You can’t draw blood from a stone and you can’t find an honest man in a pack of liars.

What’s the answer? You know the answer. You know what we need. We need Christ.

Villainy!

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“I do not know what the heart of a villain might be, I only know the heart of a virtuous man, and that is frightful.” Count Joseph de Maistre

Villains, villains everywhere. There really are villains in all of our stories. Especially in the film age of the superhero. In the superhero age of film and television, you of course need supervillains. And interestingly, the morality with which we portray villains has changed over the past few decades. In the mid-20th century villains typically didn’t get a lot of sympathetic backstory. Especially in the age of the Western, where bad-guys wore black hats and good guys wore white hats and you didn’t need to know why the bad guys were bad, they just were. And there was no moral complexity—just good guys clearing frontier towns of bad guys. From the Lone Ranger onwards, the morality was pretty straightforward. Until Clint Eastwood came along and now, we had to deal with antiheroes and villains with backstories. We had to deal with moral obscurity. And while we don’t have time to do a full history of film in this country, I want to say that what we have now in film and television, with this emphasis on sympathetic villains is not new. It’s happened before. Perhaps not as broadly as before, and perhaps not with this level of moral ambiguity, but it has happened. And while sympathetic villains aren’t new they ARE indicative of where our culture is. Because the way we portray bad guys matters. It matters an awful lot.

Villains are crucial to stories. And giving the bad guy a backstory is NOT unchristian or immoral. Indeed, read your Bible. Lots of bad guys in the Bible have pretty extensive backstories. Often, we’re allowed to enter into the mind of the bad guy in the Bible and understand his or her motivation. And it isn’t simply the Bible, but Christian writers too have given us insights into bad guys.

Shakespeare famously created masterpieces of his villains, and frankly, since most people prefer his tragedies to his comedies, many of Shakespeare’s most popular characters are the villains! People prefer MacBeth to Benedick.

Milton gave motivation to Satan and attempted to explain how and why the prince of this world said, “So farewel Hope, and with Hope farewel Fear, Farewel Remorse: all Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good.”

William Makepeace Thackeray in his extremely underead—seriously if you haven’t read it go read it—Vanity Fair presents people who are all antiheroes. There is no one who is fully good and kind and noble and brave. Everyone in the story has some massive character flaw. And this disturbed people, but Thackeray didn’t care. He continued to live and write as he believed a Christian should: with unflinching honesty.

Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are both dedicated to showing us human nature as it truly is. There are villains in the great Russians’ works, absolutely, but they are never sloppily made and almost never without understanding their motivations. And indeed, in some of the most complex characters we find that the protagonist and the antagonist are the same person, as in the case of Anna in Anna Karenina.

And of course, Tolkien and Lewis our latter-day saints presented us complex characters, Lewis giving us intense and even frightening looks inside the nature of villains in That Hideous Strength, and showing us how we can be the villain while thinking we’re the hero in ‘Til We Have Faces.

I say all this to say that villains are important to fiction, not only mechanically, but morally. Villains are important and great Christian novelists have always recognized this. And great Christian writers have not been afraid of moral ambiguity and complex characterization. Great Christian writers are not afraid to give the bad guy a backstory, because in the end whether you’re a hero or a villain depends not on your motivations, your experiences, your sympathetic qualities, or even your good attributes and actions. No, whether you’re a hero or a villain depends on whether your loves are ordered enough to aid the protagonist or so disordered that you oppose the protagonist.

Now, let me put that in slightly more plain English. Christian theologians at least from Augustine have understood that being a sinner and doing sin happens because our loves are disordered. Augustine’s point was that you can love everything and anything, as long as you love it in right proportion. You can and should love your parents but compared to Christ that love should be as hatred. You can love your dog but compared to your parents it should be as hatred. It’s a question of priorities.

And you see, that’s why villains that are interesting and make for good fiction are often so sympathetic. They have sensible motivations, they have loves, they want good and desirable things. But they want them at a cost that’s too high. Their loves are disordered.

And this means that villains can be used for moral instruction JUST AS EFFECTIVELY as heroes. Heroes teach us what to do and villains teach us what not to do, or what we must not permit or tolerate in ourselves. Heroes teach us what to desire and villains teach us what to despise. Heroes show us what to love and villains what to loathe. Heroes give us an example of adequately ordered loves and villains give an example of disordered loves.

I say all this to say that villains are very important to fiction. And all fiction tells a moral story. All fiction is, is just a writer doing theology with his imagination. All fiction revolves around conflict. There has to be conflict to have a story. Whether you agree with Aristotle that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, or if you go with a different and/ or more complex concept of story, the simple reality is that a story—or at least a story that someone will bother listening to—requires a conflict. If the story is just people sitting around living the good life, that’s a really pleasant painting, but not a very interesting story. It’s conflict and the need to overcome obstacles that makes a story worth listening to.

And because stories are essentially narrated conflicts there is no getting around conflict. But what is conflict? Why does it exist? And why should we care? And why is this theological? Come on, Lukey, get it together!

Ok, ok, I get it. I’ll try to hurry it up. You see, when a conflict happens, and this is true of real life as well, it happens because one person’s view of how the world ought to be conflicts with how the world is or how someone else thinks the world ought to be.

Let’s look at an example.

So, in Genesis. Cain thinks that the world is not the way it should be. Cain believes that he should live in a world where God accepts his offerings. But that’s not the world he lives in. He lives in a world where God accepts Abel’s offerings and does not look with favor on Cain’s. God tells Cain that if he does right he will certainly receive God’s favor.

So, we see at least two kinds of conflict here. The story shows us plainly that Cain is in a conflict with God. Cain’s view of how the world ought to be is different from God’s. Cain is also in conflict with himself because God has told him that he hasn’t yet learned adequate self-mastery. So, we have a man v God and a man v self; this is on top of the man v nature that we learned about when the ground was cursed. But then Cain murders Abel—man v man. But why? Because Cain did not want to live in a world where he was rejected, and Abel was accepted. He couldn’t force God to accept him, but he could prevent Abel from offering anymore blood sacrifices. Cain did what he did to make the world as it ought to be align with the world as it is.

Cain is the villain. But look at his motivation. He wanted to live in a world where his sacrifices would be acceptable to God. That’s a good and noble and laudable desire. It’s a good love. But that love was disordered. Cain put disproportionate love on being accepted and inadequate love on doing right. He loved being accepted more than doing the things that made him acceptable.

I could go on all day about this, but here’s the point. Villains are important because they teach us moral lessons about how to not to order our loves and the cost of having our loves disordered. Villains teach us what happens when good things are loved out of measure. Villains teach us about ourselves because all of us are a bit villainous. All of us are born sinners who do evil. All of us have our loves disordered to some degree. Villains show us that we don’t want to be that way—as the great theologian and popstar P!NK has said, “I’m a hazard to myself! Don’t let me get me! Don’t wanna be myself no more; I wanna be somebody else!”

It's important that villains in mature works of fiction are relatable and drawn as complex characters with complex and relatable motivations because that teaches us to shun the evil that we have inside of us. Simple allegory has its place, of course, and I’m not despising it. Black and White villains teach us to shun the evil and not allow it to tempt us with the insane reasonability of wickedness. There’s a place for Pilgrim’s Progress. But there’s also a place for Gollum. And one of the most important things in LOTR is Frodo and Sam learning to see themselves in Gollum and learning to shun the corrupting power of the ring.

And this is why, in the age of “representation” in Hollywood, where we have all of our box-ticking racial quotas it is so fundamentally absurd and puerile that Hollywood won’t cast nonwhite actors as villains. Now, I don’t agree with Hollywood that if someone doesn’t look like you that you can’t relate to them. But for the sake of argument, let’s say I do. My question to Hollywood would be: why can’t nonwhite actors play villains? Their answer would of course be something to the effect of: “we don’t want to reinforce harmful stereotypes” or, as Kumail Nanjiani ironically says, “If the bad guy is a brown guy, what message is that sending?"

Well, it obviously is sending the message that nonwhite people are fully human. It’s not setting people up with the false notion that all nonwhites are always heroes. If you believe in representation, it’s necessary if nonwhite people are going to struggle through the darker parts of their natures and shun the bad and cling to the good.

Pretending that nonwhites are infallible is a stereotype and a harmful one.

Now, apart from the fact that casting nonwhites as villains isn’t racist and to think so is smallminded, apart from the fact that preventing talented nonwhite actors from playing villains makes the art of film and television worse, apart from the fact that it’s a job and if nonwhite people are really all that concerned with racial perceptions then they simply won’t audition to play villains, and apart from the fact that it’s an actively racist and discriminatory hiring practice, and apart from the fact that as someone who’s done amateur acting, I can tell you with certainty that the villain is almost ALWAYS more fun to play than the hero, meaning nonwhite actors have less fun on set and apart from the fact that this practice doesn’t actually make logical sense with the representation mantras that woke Hollywood espouses—apart from all that, and much more that we don’t have time for, apart from all that it means that Hollywood doesn’t even understand stories.

They don’t really understand what villains are and why they exist. They don’t understand the moral function of a story. They don’t understand what’s actually happening and how fiction is formative of character.

And that’s sad. It’s sad that our society’s storytellers are imbeciles. It’s tragic. And it’s a tragedy that has had and will have consequences. Does it matter all that much if Kumail Nanjiani gets more parts…no, not really, not in the grand scheme of things. But it matters a whole lot if our storytellers are moral idiots. Because the truth is that Hollywood, Disney, Netflix, and Youtube are the pastors, preachers, priests, and philosophers of our age. They are shaping and shall shape this world into their image. And what a world it shall be.

L-OHIO-neliness

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It’s curious that Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo, and Akron would all be in the top 20 loneliest cities in America. It’s also curious, if you check out the Chamber of Commerce’s report, that almost all of the least lonely cities are in California. It was interesting to me that the Washington, DC area has 4 of the top ten loneliest cities. DC, Alexandria, and Baltimore are all in the DC metro area and Richmond isn’t too far out of it. A lot of federal government workers would predictably mean a lot of single households as large numbers of people would only be in that area temporarily, as well as the kinds of people involved in government employment may be more likely to be single.

But I didn’t know how relevant these data were, so I compared the numbers for Cleveland with those of Fulton and Williams counties. And while Cleveland, has about 46% of all households only having one person living there, Fulton county has about 21%, and Williams has 24%, and both of those include about 10% of those single-occupant households being held by householders over 65. So realistically Fulton and Williams counties likely have less than 10% of their households filled with single people who are at marriage and childbearing ages.

So that’s a big statistical difference. And the difference isn’t just between cities and counties today, but throughout history. Single-family homes have been a rising statistical trend since about 1940. When you look generally at historical trends, even going back to the 1500s, around the world, the percentage of single-occupant households was at ofrbelow 10%. Today there’s hardly a place in the world that’s that low.

Now, obviously, there have been a lot of social changes over the past 100 years. There have been a lot of social changes over the past 300 years. And these changes often impact eachother. Forces coalesce. The rise of capitalism, and late-stage capitalism, industrial and post-industrialism, urbanization, 3rd wave feminism, the sexual revolution, secularization, and individualism have all joined their forces to encourage living alone. This conjunction of forces has been noticed and commented upon and lamented and the alarm has been sounding in sociological circles for quite some time.

Now, I’ve talked many times on this show about the problems of low birth-rates. Because low birth-rates are a problem for any society that seeks to be successful. But while that is a favorite hobby horse of mine, that’s not the one we’ll ride today.

Today I simply wish to talk about the human cost of so many people living alone.

Genesis 2:18 says: It is not good for man to be alone.

After God creates and creates and creates and everything he does is evaluated and declared to be good we get this comment that breaks the pattern. It is not good for the man to be alone.

Why not?

Well the answer, theologically, is quite simple. We are social beings. We are made in the image of God and God exists as the community of the Trinity. Now, while some are uncomfortable with social Trinitarianism, the reality is that the Godhead exists as one God in three Persons. The Godhead is a community of personality. Therefore, if we are made in His image, it would stand to reason that other persons would be desirable and even necessary for our flourishing.

And I, in fact, believe that other people are desirable and necessary for our flourishing. And when I talk about this, I not only mean that it’s better for our mental and emotional health to not live alone—which I do mean and believe and we’ll talk about in a second—but I also mean that living alone is bad for your spiritual development and maturation.

Now, please don’t mishear me. I’m not saying that single Christians are second-class Christians. If anything, married Christians are second-class Christians; that’s not the case, but historically and biblically, virginity, celibacy, and singleness, even to the point of hermetic singleness, has been placed on a pedestal. I think that historically these trends have perverted the call-to-singleness. But I’m simply saying that it’s a LOT easier to make the case, biblically and historically, that married believers are second-class Christians, not the other way around.

What I mean, rather, is that living alone causes people to develop certain habits and tendencies that, if they lived with another person, even a friend or a servant, not necessarily a spouse, but simply living with another person would prevent certain habits from forming or becoming concrete.

And I, of course, am not the first to notice this. In fact, John Wesley makes a great example of this. Because for all the good and great things John Wesley was, he was an old bachelor when he got married and everyone knew it was a mistake at the time and his better biographers have never shied away from that truth. John Wesley was a bad husband and his wife was a bad wife. Luke Tyerman, a 19th Century biographer of Wesley wrote this:

It was one of the greatest blunders he ever made. A man who attains to the age of forty-eight, without marrying, ought to remain a bachelor for life, inasmuch as he has, almost of necessity, formed habits, and has acquired angularities and excrescences, which will never harmonize with the relationships and the duties of the married state. Besides, if there ever was a man whose mission was so great and so peculiar as to render it inexpedient for him to become a benedict, was such a man. His marriage was ill advised as well as ill assorted. On both sides, it was, to a culpable extent, hasty, and was contracted without proper and sufficient thought. Young people entering into hurried marriages deserve and incur censure; and if so, what shall be said of Wesley and his wife? They married in haste and had leisure to repent. Their act was, in a high degree, an act of folly; and, properly enough, to the end of life, both of them were made to suffer a serious penalty. It is far from pleasant to pursue the subject; but perhaps it is needful. In a world of danger like this, we must look at beacons, as well as beauties.

It is simply and truly the case that marriage has a sanctifying power that singleness does not have. Marriage changes people. Living alone allows people to become more like themselves without anyone ever pointing out their flaws or without the example of godliness in another in a domestic setting.

Again, I’m not saying that unmarried Christians are second-class. I don’t believe that. I am saying that they have not experienced the sanctifying power of marriage. Some have experienced the incredible blessing of living with a close and dear brother or sister in the Lord in a deep friendship. And for people whom God has called to singleness I cannot imagine a more blessed situation than to live in a shared home with another or several other deeply dedicated Christians.

I think the monasteries were on to something. I am not promoting monastic living, but I think that Christians living a life of deliberate singleness to serve Christ would do well to share their roofs and their food with other believers.

And I think that living together is not only a great blessing in that it sanctifies us, but it also fills us with joy. Let me speak frankly right now, and many of you may think I sound like a cold-hearted fool right now, but allow me to say that friendship, just plain-Jane friendship with another believer who truly gets us comes with blessings that marriage lacks.

Right now, in our society, the constant message is to “marry your best friend.” I don’t think that’s good advice. And I don’t think it’s good advice for a lot of reasons, but not least of which is the simple fact that men and women are different. Let me give you an example.

I had lunch with a pastor a few months ago. I’d never spent time with him, but he was new to the area and as the president of our local ministerial associate I thought buying him lunch was the least I could do. Well, I sat and talked with this man for almost 3 hours. We had a blast.

When I got home my wife asked how it went and I said that it was great that it was fun and I hoped to get to know him better. My lovely wife then asked me about his family—his wife’s name, how many kids he had, and what their ages were.

I looked at her and said, “I know he has a wife, and I’m fairly certain she has a name…and he has kids, and I bet they have names too!” She just shook her head and muttered something about “men.” She said, “what did you even talk about you were gone for 3 hours!?” I said we talked about theology!

Men and women are just different. And men can have friendships with other men that offer men things that women simply cannot. Similarly, women can offer my wife things in friendship with her that I can’t give my wife. And you know what. I don’t want my wife to try and she doesn’t want me to try. She needs a husband, not a soul-sister or a sob-sister. And I need a wife, not a buddy or a bro. And I’m not saying that men and women can’t be friends and close friends. I’ve had a lot of close women friends throughout my life. But it isn’t the same and expecting a spouse to be your bestie is unrealistic, unfair, and unhealthy.

Now, I said all that because I want to point out that friendship is one of the most glorious and wonderful blessings that God gives us. And for unmarried people to live with a friend and to not live alone is a good and godly thing. Living with other people is good because it forms us into the kind of person that you might be able to tolerate spending eternity with.

But I not only wanted to talk about the spiritual blessings that are character formative, but the lived experience of living alone. Now, one of the common refrains mentioned in the research on the rising trend of single-occupant households is that living alone is a poor predictor of loneliness. That these are conflated and that that’s just not accurate. Researchers argue that self-report data of those who live alone claim that they don’t experience loneliness at a statistically significantly higher rate. Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t buy that argument.

Saying that living alone is a poor predictor of feeling lonely is like saying that living underwater is a poor predictor of feeling wet. I’m sure it is. That doesn’t mean that it’s reliable. And external data such as the rise in depression, especially among urban women would be a fairly good indicator that it is not good for woman to be alone.

And in his excellent essay on the topic K.D.M. Snell writes:

Situational aloneness, or being in solitude, let alone desiring privacy, needs to be differentiated from subjective or temperamental feelings of loneliness, and these concepts themselves have many variants and cultural forms. Nevertheless, being alone often becomes loneliness: many modern studies of self-rated loneliness (widely using the UCLA Loneliness Scale or its European equivalents) and much historical evidence highlight a frequently close association between alone-ness and loneliness. In quantitative studies of subjective loneliness, lone living is almost always the strongest explanatory variable when analysing loneliness, often linked to allied conditions (for example, divorce or bereavement).

OK, so a lot of that was jargon, but I hope you got the gist of it. The fact is that whether or not science can agree, statistically the best predictor of experienced loneliness is whether or not you live alone. I was reading this essay to my wife and she rolled her eyes and said, “how many millions of taxpayer money did they get to do that study?”

And I laughed and you might be laughing to because, thank heaven we have science, otherwise we wouldn’t have known that people who are alone are lonely! Good work, gang, high-fives, all around!

But here’s the point and it’s a serious point that I hope people will take seriously. Our society is changing and not for the better. This rising tide of living alone is just one more indicator that something is wrong.

Now. If you live alone, I’m not saying something is wrong with YOU. I’m saying that the high statistical rate of people living alone show that something is wrong with our society. People aren’t getting married; people don’t have friends; people are getting divorced; and something else to consider, is the high number of people over 65 who live alone. Why do they not live with family? I think that these are all indicators and pretty reliable indicators that our society is disintegrating. And there are a whole lot of reasons why. But one of the reasons and the most important reason is that our society has forgotten God and insoforgetting we have forgotten what is good. We have forgotten not just what’s good for society and how we can fulfill social and civic duties, but also what’s good for ourselves, for the development of our souls, of developing character and virtue and godliness and becoming the kinds of people God wishes us to be.

As we enter this new year, I would encourage us to consider what’s happening in our nation and our community and ask if this is really the way it’s supposed to be. And if not, then let’s seek to change it. Let’s seek to build our lives and our households and our communities on God’s vision of humanity and life.

Christmas Magic

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This morning, Christmas morning, I thought it would be wise to begin with Luke’s words because this is a show about the news, and Luke is telling us about good news! And I want us to focus this morning on one verse, in particular. I want us to consider Luke 2:10.

“But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people.”

Now, if you grew up on the King James, that’s gonna sound different. You’re expecting “good news OF great joy.” The New English Translation, produced by scholars at Dallas Seminary translate that verse like this: “for I proclaim to you good news that brings great joy.” But most English translations follow the King James, and other languages also translate similarly.

The trouble is that verse 10 makes perfect sense in Greek and just doesn’t work very well in English, if we’re trying to translate literally. If you wanted to translate it hyper-literally, and by the way, hyperliterally is another way of saying badly! IF we wanted to do a bad translation so we could look under the hood and see what’s going on the translation would look like this:

And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I evangelize great joy to you, which is to all the people.”

What the angels are saying which doesn’t translate easily is that the angels are evangelizing. They are proclaiming good news and the content of that news is great joy. Think of it this way. Imagine someone giving you a newspaper. Giving you the newspaper is the evangelizing, it’s the giving of the good news. Because that’s what evangelize means is to give good news. But the newspaper has content. That content is great joy.

But what does this mean? Does it mean that the result of receiving the news of Messiah will cause great joy? Does it mean that the news being delivered is that something greatly joyful has already occurred? Does the news cause joy, or is the news that there is joy? Or is it both?

I don’t know! John Calvin in his commentary says that the angel “announces great joy.” And is the angel saying that he’s announcing great joy for all the people—as in all the people will experience the great joy? Or is he saying that he’s announcing great joy, and this annunciation is for all the people—as in all the people will hear the news that great joy has been announced?

Also, how do you announce joy?

Brothers and sisters, I honestly have no idea. This verse is too hard for me. I can’t untangle it and I have just enough humility to not try to untangle it. I really don’t know what exactly this verse means. And that’s OK.

Because what I don’t want to do is intimidate you—at least I don’t want to intimidate you beyond measure. I want you to be intimidated by the Bible. It’s God’s Word for crying out loud. We should come to God’s Word with fear and trembling. And yet we fear not for these are wonderful words of love and life.

The Bible is the book that shatters the proud imaginations of the theologues and scholars and lifts up the humblest child to the knowledge of God. It makes peasants of kings and kings of peasants. The Word of God is the great equalizer. Before it we stand before God and all the nations are as nothing before him—the mountains are as dust on the scales. The Word of God intimidates us because it is at the same time, a cozy cottage with a roaring fire on a cool mountain summer’s evening and a ponderous abyss, too deep to plumb full of treasures and wonders beyond man’s wildest imagination. It’s a stream for a lamb to wade in and an ocean for an elephant to swim. Yes we come to the Word with fear and trembling and also with love and longing and joy and hope.

We come as we are, but we must become as little children, seeking wisdom from our Father and the Father of all good gifts will grant us wisdom according to His wisdom.

I don’t know what all Luke 2:10 means, I don’t think anybody but the angels really knew what all that verse meant. But I know that it meant something. And I know, for all I don’t know, and all I don’t know is too much to fathom, but something I do know is that Jesus’ birth is good news. And it’s news that’s associated with joy. And that news if for all of us!

What else and more it means, I don’t know.

But I know it means that.

And I know that that’s good.

I know that it’s good that Jesus came.

And unfortunately I think that Christians, serious Christians anyways, we miss out on this. Now, I know that right here right now on Christmas day, you’re probably thinking, “ummm, no, I am not missing out on the good news of Christmas.” OK, maybe not RIGHT NOW. But let me ask you, do you think that Christmas is a bit of a second-class event next to Easter? Do you think that Easter is the good news, Easter is the gospel and that Christmas is just kind of the necessary precursor to Easter. As though Christmas is REALLY nice and all, but it’s really just here to get us to there?

Because a lot of Christians do.

Lots and lots of Christians, when we come to the life of Christ, we think that all of it before the resurrection is just material to get us to the resurrection and all the material AFTER the resurrection is material that deals with the effects of the resurrection. And there is certainly truth to that. I’m not suggesting that there isn’t. In MANY ways, the resurrection is the climax of human history. It’s the hinge of history. It makes salvation possible. It makes the 2nd coming possible. It makes the millennial reign possible.

But so does the Incarnation. Christmas is necessary for all these things as well. And so is the creation! It’s very hard to say what the most important thing is, because salvation isn’t really the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is for God and man to dwell together in loving fellowship. For us to be His people and for Him to be our God. That won’t be achieved until the New Jerusalem. So, how do we decide what the climax of the story is? Is Christmas incomplete without the resurrection? Sure. But the resurrection is incomplete without the saving grace of God from the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life. And the purpose of saving souls isn’t JUST to save souls but so that people can spend eternity with God. And the purpose of them spending eternity with God is so they can be like Him. And the purpose of being like Him for eternity is so that we can love Him and be loved in return.

Brothers and sisters, I’m not saying that Easter isn’t important. It is. And I would say that the Christmas tree with out Calvary’s tree would be empty. But the empty tomb with an empty New Jerusalem would be pointless.

Everything leads up to the thing before it. That doesn’t mean that anything is more important than something else, it just means things happen at different times. There’s a quote attributed to Einstein, I’m not sure if he actually said it or not, but the quote says, “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” And I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

And maybe this would make more sense if we weren’t so fascinated with breaking things down into little tiny pieces so we can examine them under our microscope, but we could learn to appreciate the thing for the whole. Look, I’m all for deep examination. I’m FOR minute, careful, precise study. But there’s the danger in overfocusing on precision and missing appreciation. If we get so close examining stitches, we’ll miss the beauty of the quilt. We will, as Jesus warned, miss the forest for the trees. There is such a thing as gestalt—the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The gospel story, the Biblical story, is greater as a whole than the sum of the parts. And because the Biblical story is a coherent whole it’s pointless in saying, “well this part was really important and this part was pointless.” You might say that Jesus dying on the cross was more important than Naomi returning to Bethlehem. But if Naomi doesn’t come back to the house of bread after the famine, Ruth doesn’t happen upon Boaz’ field. And if Ruth doesn’t marry Boaz, then Obed isn’t born. And if there’s no Obed there’s no Jesse. And if there’s no Jesse there’s no David. And if there’s no David there’re no Mary or Joseph. And if there are no Mary or Joseph then there’s no Christ.

Again, you might dicker and say that because the resurrection ACCOMPLISHED more that it’s more important. Ok. Sure. Fine. But please don’t miss my point. My point is that the WHOLE story matters. Not just our favorite parts.

And what I’m saying to my buttoned down very theological Christian brothers and sisters is that Christmas matters. It matters just as much as Easter. Christmas is Immanuel. Christmas is the Word become flesh. Christmas is the coming of Messiah. Christmas is the Godman sharing our infirmities. Christmas is miracle and mystery.

Christmas is important. It’s not just some hallmark holiday for second class Christians and capitalists. Christmas is magical. Not in the sense of hocus-pocus. Not in the sense of witchcraft. But Christmas is magical in the sense that the world is full to bursting with supernatural power and supernatural beings. God, angels, demons, the stars in the sky, the heavenly bodies in their courses, ancient prophecies, mysterious travelers, divine visitations, angelic singing, dreams, virgins. Christmas is about these things.

Christmas reminds us that the world is full. You see friends, we live in an empty world. We’re taught that there is matter and nothing else. The secular mind says that there’s just the stuff we can measure and that’s it. But the world of the Bible, the ancient world, the medieval world weren’t empty. The world of the Bible and the world that MOST Christians have lived in and frankly huge numbers live in today is a full world. It’s a world full of angels and demons and spirits and power. It’s a world where the Invisible God is all places. It’s a world where unexplained and unexplainable things happen. It’s a world of magic.

And Christmas reminds us of that. That’s why we put out lights and we love the snowfall. We go out and the night is lighted up in all the colors of the rainbow as the snow falls and we see our breath and we sing thousand year old songs and remember six thousand year old prophecies. And all of it reminds us that we live in a world of powerful spirits and God’s power. We live in a world that is pulsating with the supernatural and the alien and the other that is pushing so hard it's fit to burst through the veil of invisibility. On Christmas the wall between our world and the supernatural is thin, so thin we can almost see through. On Christmas the blindness that prevents us from seeing and interacting with the powers all around us is almost turned to sight. That’s why Christmas is magic.

Christmas is a mystery beyond our comprehension. Christmas belongs to a different world than the world of secular, consumerist, atomistic individualism. It belongs to an ancient world. Christmas calls to us from across the centuries and draws us back to the world as it truly is and not the world as we pretend it to be.

And that’s good news.

That’s good news of great joy.

It’s wonderful good news that Christmas still penetrates the armor of irony and flippant, glibness and existential despair that people put on to live in this empty, cold, secular world that’s at once shiny, plasticated, and customized, and gloomy, despair-filled, and angst-ridden.

Christmas reminds us that not only CAN God break through into this world, it reminds us that He has, He does, and He shall.

And that’s good news. It’s good news we ought to spread.

The Art of Persuasion

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The Specials

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Well, today we’re going to look at two stories. Now, these things don’t seem to have much to do with eachother, and so, I’m going to have to ask you to be patient with me in developing my thesis here. But Let’s just get to the stories and then we’ll talk about it.

So, the first little bit of news I want us to talk about today comes from the 303 Creative LLC v Elenis case where Oral arguments were heard this week. During the arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett posed a question to Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher. What Justice Barrett asked was simply this. She asked a tables-turned question. She asked Mr. Fletcher. Ok, let’s say there’s a homosexual couple who makes websites and then a Christian organization whose sole purpose is the defense of traditional marriage [or as Lukey likes to call it, ACTUAL marriage]. Can they refuse to make a website for this Christian group?

Now, I’ll give you 2 guesses as to what he said? Can you guess? I’ll give you a hint. It rhymes with “No.”

Hey, yep, you guessed it. No, the homosexual owned businessmen cannot have their speech compelled by Christians. And after the Principal Deputy Solicitor told Justice Barrett that the Christians could not compel the speech of homosexuals even though the Solicitor thinks that homosexuals can compel the speech of Christians, Justice Barrett asked the question I think all rational people would ask: “why?”

Well, fear not, our intrepid Biden White House Lawyer has an answer. Because it’s not a rejection based on status. K. I mean, even if we accept that that’s a legitimate legal foundation—which I don’t—but that’s another story…even if we accept that premise, we still have to ask why being a Christian organization whose purpose is to defend marriage isn’t a “status.” So, Justice Barrett asks the logical follow-up. She says that in her hypothetical the status of the club is inextricably intertwined with the message they want to speak, so why is it different? Indeed. Why is it different?

Well, the lawyer has a an answer: because the Supreme Court has found that the status of being homosexual is inextricably linked to conduct. Which, by the way doesn’t answer her question, and also seems to be foolish reasoning. The English language works by saying that status is always inextricably linked to conduct. A fisher is someone whose conduct is fishing. A baker is someone whose conduct is baking. Gardeners garden; welders weld; farmers farm; carpenters carpent. And he seems to realize that this is a fundamentally empty statement and he has to back away from the bad logic and try to protect his argument so he says HOWEVER. Yes homosexuals can compel the speech of Christians HOWEVER the Court’s decisions and public accommodation laws are not universal, the don’t apply in most situations.

So, Justice Barrett simply says, “so this is a special carveout.” And Mr. Fletcher can’t deny it he just states that there are other carveouts. But that’s not really the point is it, Mr. Fletcher?

And what Justice Barrett pointed out with a very insightful question is that the Legislatures and the Courts have created a group with legal super-powers. There is a group who gets extra rights denied to the rest of us. This group can compel your speech and behavior but you can’t compel theirs.

Now, you might say that this is rank hypocrisy. You might say that this is unfair. You might say that this is unconstitutional. You might say all these things and say them rightly. But that doesn’t mean that homosexuals do not have special legal super-status.

They are a protected group. What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander. But we’ll come back to this, right now we need to look at the second story for this week.

Story number two didn’t start this week, it started in 2008 in Thailand. Way back then there was a team of law enforcement personnel from the US, Interpol, and the Royal Thai Police. They were involved in a sting operation, posing as rebels from Colombia’s FARC, planning to buy weapons to continue their war against the Government. The arms dealer these cops met with was Viktor Bout, a Russian weapons smuggler known as the Merchant of Death. Bout was extradited to the US and was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2011. Which means his sentence would be over in 2036. Let’s fast-forward to February 2022, when Brittney Griner a WNBA player, who also played in the Russian Premier League, was arrested at a Moscow airport carrying vape cartridges containing hash oil which is illegal in Russia.

Now, these two stories have nothing to do with eachother, you might be saying. Ahh, but they do. Because you see, the Russians want Bout out and the Biden administration wants Griner out. Bout is an international arms dealer. Griner is a basketball player. Both of them are guilty of the crimes they committed. Both of them are considered political prisoners in their home countries. And, frankly, while I am not opposed to the arrest and conviction of Bout, the reality is that jurisdictionally, his extradition to the US was always a bit tenuous.

Similarly, Griner’s 9-year sentence for a very small amount of drugs might seem excessive—and I would agree that it is. At the same time, nobody ever accused the Russian criminal justice system of being fair and reasonable.

Now, here’s where these stories intersect. Ever since Griner’s arrest, the media have been making her cause the singular cause of justice. For nearly a year we’ve been told how we have to care and care deeply that mean old Russia took one of our lesbians, and frankly we don’t have any to spare. And if you think I’m being facetious I’m not. Search the archives of the interwebs and you will find that all kinds of people, many of them lesbians, were saying that Russia’s arrest and conviction was motivated by animus towards lesbians, and especially a black lesbian. So the rainbow warriors started making noise and trying to convince all of us that getting Brittney back was US State Department priority one.

And the Biden administration agreed. Getting Brittney back was important to the Biden admin. It really mattered to Uncle Joe that we get Griner. I mean, the fact that she’s an obnoxious, entitled, whinging, self-important, cry-bully who openly insulted her country, actually didn’t matter. And frankly, I don’t think it should. A citizen is a citizen. If a citizen is being held unjustly then whether you like that citizen or not, we have an obligation to make REASONABLE efforts to effect her release. And the Biden administration, according to the President, worked tirelessly for months to get her released. Which is ODD. I mean, it’s really strange that someone has to work tirelessly to end up giving your opponent what he wants. Russia was demanding Bout for Griner all the way back in July, if not earlier.

So, I’m not a mathematician, but by my calculation that’s over 4 months ago. What was happening in that 4 months? Like, how did you dicker for 4 months and then just give in? That doesn’t sound like white-knuckle negotiations, it sounds like knuckling under. So, we get Griner back and Russia gets back one of the most dangerous men in the world.

And we know why the Biden administration was willing to make such an embarrassingly bad deal. Because Griner is a woke, black lesbian. If she were, I don’t know, let me pick a random, non-specific example, a white guy who many claim had been wrongfully arrested would the US trade Bout for him? I don’t think so. And the answer is no. They would not because they did not. Because Paul Whelan is still in Russian prison.

Now, based on his records, I don’t think Paul Whelan is a little ball of sunshine. He seems like a bit of a sleazy dude. But most Americans working for security firms who are arrested in Russia are sleazy dudes. But he IS a US citizen. So, why didn’t we get him back? Is the Biden administration working tirelessly to effect his release? I sincerely doubt it.

No, the fact is that Griner was traded for Bout because she’s a woke, black Lesbian. She’s in a protected class. A class with super-legal status.

You see Governments do these sorts of things. They create special protected classes. They create classes that have special rights and privileges. They create groups that have legal powers that other groups don’t have. And this isn’t bad.

In fact, it’s good that we have people who have special legal powers.

Let me give you an example. Imagine living in a society where the enforcement of law and morality depends solely upon people taking justice into their own hands. This is obviously not an ideal social situation. Most societies have determined that giving certain people the power to have legal powers that the rest of society doesn’t have tends towards the good. In America a police officer has powers you don’t have. They can legally detain someone, they can use force, and deadly force in carrying out their social duties. You can’t do that—or at least only in very limited circumstances. You can’t pull someone over for speeding. You can’t demand someone’s ID if they didn’t use their turn-signal. You can’t arrest someone for tax fraud.

We give judges super-legal powers. They can do things that the rest of us can’t. We give lawyers super-legal powers. You can’t go defend your friend in court. Doctors have super-legal powers. You can’t practice medicine. In fact, anyone who is licensed by the state has a super-legal power. They are doing something that is illegal UNLESS you’re part of this special class of people. I have a super-legal power. I have the power to solemnize marriages. If you get your cousin Fred to officiate your wedding and he doesn’t have a license, your marriage is invalid.

Children are a protected class. We protect children. And we should. There are all kinds of laws that protect children from abuse, neglect, exploitation, and molestation. And these are good laws. We also have laws like this to protect senior citizens and the mentally and physically handicapped. And these are good things. I’m not suggesting that there is no time to have protected classes.

Homosexuals now constitute a protected class in our legal system. They have rights that others don’t. They have legal powers that others don’t. They can compel speech, which is a violation of your first amendment rights, because their status as a protected class outweighs your status as a citizen. Due process is built into their identity. They are walking, talking, due-process negations of your first amendment rights.

Make no mistake about it, we are seeing a gigantic shift in the legal and judicial systems in this country. However SCOTUS rules on this case the trend in cities, states, and the Federal system will continue to increase the specialness of the special status of homosexuals.

Again, I’m not saying that the government doesn’t have the right to create protected classes. And they’re a-gonna whether I agree or not because all governments do! The question is not WHETHER there will be protected classes but WHICH classes will be protected. Aye and there’s the rub, because yet again, morality comes into play. Once again we see that the moral vision of a nation determines its laws. And its laws determine its moral vision.

The Law of Moses created protected classes. Levites for example were the only people who could handle the tabernacle and sons of Aaron were the only people who could serve as priests. This is just one small example, but it demonstrates the point that special classes aren’t new. And the Bible does not oppose them. I for one believe that women cannot hold the role of elder in the Church. That doesn’t mean that women can’t be intelligent, competent, godly, and spiritually gifted. It simply means that, as a class, they do not have the legal-power to serve in a specific role.

Every society, every legal system has protected classes. Every society has people with super-legal powers. But who has those powers and what those powers are are indicative of the moral-vision of that society.

In America, we’ve chosen to make homosexuals a protected class. We have determined that they should have super-legal powers. America has taken a group of people whom God has said are violators of the moral order and we not only have eliminated the laws that illegalized sodomy, but we’ve given them the right to marriage, which God does not grant. And now we’re giving them the power to compel speech and demand that people celebrate their perversion.

The will of the government is for you to celebrate the degeneracy and perversion and immorality of people doing something that God hates. The Government of the United States, wants people who love God to rejoice in something God hates.

Why?

Because the State wants to be the only God. The State and the State alone will determine morality. The State and the State alone will have your loyalty, your fealty—the State will give you a moral vision. And it’s no accident that the moral vision of the State is one that encourages baby-murder and sodomy. The State doesn’t want to celebrate and inculcate family. Family creates loyalty. They don’t want strong civic organizations and churches because organizations and churches help you to not feel alone and to recognize that there are other people who see and hate the moral idiocy and insanity going on. The State doesn’t want you to have any other God before it. So it wants you living as an atomized individual, living in your 400 square foot apartment, eating bugs, watching Disney+, working 18 hours a day, not having children, not having friends. The State wants worker bees and drones. They want a hive full of isolated, ignorant, pliable, gullible, childish, narcotized, feminized, godless, phone-addicted, castrati who will do their bidding. The kind of drones who are always consuming new product to make the rich richer. The kind of drones who will give over their rights and privileges for safety. The kind of drones who will stand on the sidewalk and chant “Gay!” as though it were a compelling political argument.

These kinds of people are fools. Useful idiots. And while idiots are idiots, useful ones are useful. It’s a dangerous game, trying to be God. Nobody has won playing it so far. But there’s never been a lack of people willing to try.

We’re seeing that now. And we’re seeing the results to. Fortunately, we still have the Gospel and we can still try to call people out of their spiritual darkness and into His marvelous light. Let’s do so while we still have the chance.

Bugs for Thanksgiving?

Listen to it here.

Now this week, because I can’t help myself, I’m going to give commentary as we read this article, rather than at the end, and I’ll try to make it clear when it’s me giving commentary and when it’s the article giving the article. But I hope it’ll all make sense. Anyways, away we go:

Bugs Instead of Turkey? Why Insects Make a Perfect Thanksgiving Dish and How to Cook Them

OK, so right now we can tell that this is either clickbait or if it’s not clickbait then I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. Anyways…

BY KASTALIA MEDRANO for Newsweek

About 80 percent of the world already eats insects,

Well, this was a statistic that they supported with a hyperlink to an NPR article. The NPR article does not say or insinuate that 80 percent of the world eats bugs. It states that bugs are eaten in 80 percent of the countries in the world. Conflating the two is preposterous; and anybody who has a career in journalism who makes a mistake like that needs to find other work because she’s either stupid or a liar. Think about it like this and you’ll see why this is such a whopper. What if I said, 100% of the world commits incest. Yeah, you don’t like that do you. But if by that I mean that incest is committed in 100% of the countries in the world you might understand my claim but you would say that I’m still wrong and dumb and need to learn how words work—or that I’m lying to you. Moving on…

which are a fantastic source of protein. As Americans prepare for this year's Thanksgiving meal, perhaps it's time to consider the many merits of a bugcentric holiday feast.

No it isn’t.

Insects are a food source in many places in the world for good reason.

Yep. Poverty.

Fried grasshoppers, as The New Yorker has reported, are excellent sources of iron and zinc, and contain three times as much protein as an equivalent serving of beef. In West Africa, they're an invaluable staple for warding off a dangerous protein deficiency known as kwashiorkor.

Also, in West Africa people are poor. In West Africa there are 407M people living in 15 countries with a GDP per capita average of $1,783. The GDP per capita for 8 of those countries is less than $1k! So, let’s be frank, if people in West Africa are eating grasshoppers to ward of protein deficiency diseases they probably are doing so because they can’t afford beef, pork, fish, or poultry. Moving on.

According to PBS, a single 6-ounce serving of crickets has less than half the saturated fat as the same amount of ground beef (plus twice the vitamin B12).

Half the saturated fat and 0% of the dignity.

There are the holdouts who prefer honey-baked ham, but turkey is pretty unquestionably the reigning Thanksgiving centerpiece. Aside from the fact that people like the taste, turkey is a popular meat in the country because it seems both healthy and environmentally friendly.

I honestly don’t know what she means by country, if she means amongst rural folk, or if it was a typo and was meant to be “this country.” Either way, no. People like turkey because it’s tasty and it’s traditional. Most normal people are not thinking about the environmental friendliness of their once per year Thanksgiving meal. Moving on.

Those things are true, sure, but really only in the context of comparing turkey to beef. Cows use at least 11 times more water than turkey and nearly 30 times more land. Add in the sheer volume of methane gas produced by our country's cattle (grass-fed or not) and the fact that red meat is also very bad news for your heart and yes, turkey is a great choice.

But the benefits of turkey still don't stack up to the benefits of bugs. In future Thanksgivings, you might be persuaded to swap out turkey for crickets,

YOU might. Luke won’t be.

which is also what you will be met with after suggesting this to your loved ones.

"I do realize that insects do have a bad rap," California Academy of Sciences entomologist Brian Fisher told PBS. "Most people see insects are pests or as dangerous. But it's just the opposite. Insects are less dangerous and less of a problem for humans in terms of disease."

I mean except for lice that carried the black plague and mosquitos that have killed up to a quarter of all humans who ever lived by some estimates. I mean except for those two examples…stop knit-picking, Luke, gosh…

Insects are also environmentally friendly, broadly accessible, and affordable. Cricket farming produces 100 times less greenhouse gas and requires 22,000 times less water than beef farming, and this is to yield an equal volume of product.

Don’t care.

Insect protein also can be powdered, and no more resembles the original bug than a burger resembles a cow.

Yeah, but you know don’t ya. You’ll still know. You’ll ALWAYS know.

According to one curious taster, most kinds have a mild, slightly earthy taste, sort of like nuts.

Or like bugs.

To get you in the Thanksgiving spirit, here's a recipe for a bug-based main dish and another for a side. (If you're allergic to shellfish you might be allergic to some bug species, so consult your doctor first.)

Yes. Yes, indeed, consult your family physician for her to run the old bug-edibility tests on you if you’re shellfish intolerant. And of course she ends the article with the word “Enjoy” and gives us a recipe.

So, it’s hard for me to count the ways I hate this article. I mean, it’s not the math part, I mastered counting months ago. It’s the actually being able to articulate all the ways that I actually hate this article. But I think I’ve come up with the most hateful thing about this article and something that has been gnawing at me for a few years and for which I’ve been trying to find ways to talk and preach about.

You see, we have a problem in our culture and society and that problem is that we are riddled with self-loathing narcissism. And it’s given birth to one of the most hilarious phenomena in the history of stupidity. It’s called “acknowledging your privilege.” Here’s what it looks like:

A 20-something college educated white kid with fancy hair and fancy coffee in a paper-cup that has a fancy label, begins to speak about a social issue. Now, Trevvor (with two “v”s) or Meaghanne (spelled exactly how it sounds if you failed English) gives a caveat or preamble to whatever him/ her or she/ they are going to say about said social issue. It sounds something like this.

Trevvor/ Meaghanne: OK, so, first of all, I want to acknowledge my privilege and say that as a cis-hetero, white, middle class, American, my views on this topic aren’t shaped by the lived experiences of the LGBTQ+-BIPOC community…

And then they go ahead and tell us their opinion anyways. I mean, if you’re going to undermine your own argument, there are less smug ways to go about it, but different strokes, ya know.

But they aren’t really undermining their argument. It’s just us fundy rubes who think that undermining your argument undermines your argument. Because in MANY places, “acknowledging your privilege” is not a way to tell people that they can safely stop listening to you, it’s a way to demand that others do. You see, it’s kinda like using the magic words—not Avada Kadavra, they’ll send you to Azkaban for that!—no the magic words, like “please.” You see, in the intellectual world that we’re building normal white kids who didn’t grow up in destitution are being taught that they don’t have a right to speak because people of color need that space and their white, cis-hetero, whiteness is offensive. So, if you’re white and you want to talk you need to acknowledge that you don’t have the right to talk. It’s kind of like a Catch-22 or a Kafka-trap. But it’s not really those things. It’s more like the Kobayashi Maru.

Now, for those of you who went on dates in school, the Kobayashi Maru is an unsolvable test given to potential spaceship captains in the Star Trek universe. The point of the test is that it is unsolvable. It’s an exercise that is supposed to teach prospective captains that sometimes there is no way to win.

HOWEVER, as legend would have it, James T. Kirk, apparently reprogrammed it and beat it, becoming the only cadet to ever defeat the test. So, when people say that they Kobayashi Marued something it means they found a way to make the unwinnable situation work against itself and give you a win.

And that’s what our fresh-faced lily-white youngsters are up to. They are engaged in an intellectual world where their race, sex, creed, or orientation precludes them from having opinions. BUT if they acknowledge their privilege they turn the whole thing on their heads and now they have control.

Now, if you ask me, “Ummm, Luke, how does that work, that shouldn’t work?” I’ll agree, it shouldn’t work—but nobody every claimed that racism was internally logically consistent, either, so let’s move on. Because the point is that privilege has become a bad word. It’s not actually bad. It’s not something that people are actually giving up. But they are SAYING it’s bad. And that’s almost like being intellectually honest, so there’s that.

And yet, you can only play these games so long before you stop playing and you’re just living your life. And at a certain point all this self-loathing begins to add up. At a certain point all this talk about how privilege is bad actually affects people and shapes their thinking. It’s one thing to lie about privilege being bad and make a woke pantomime. Because, as I’ve said before, all Wokeism is performative Wokeism. It’s one thing to be disingenuous and just use it as a way to keep people like me out of conversations but to give yourself a backdoor into them. It’s wholly another thing to hear your whole life that privilege is bad and shameful and then to eschew it.

And that’s what we’re seeing. As younger generations of people and older people who oughta know better but don’t are inculcated into this cultic nonsense that privilege is bad they believe it. They seek to eschew privilege by chewing on bugs.

Allow me to quote me, but not the right now me, but the me from back in April:

I think the reason why our culture (either in truth or pretense) is trying to shed the unwanted privilege is because our material blessings are making us miserable. And they’re making us miserable, not because they’re bad – but because good blessings to the thankless become burdens.

For every blessing God gives us, we have an obligation to give thanks. The longer we go in thanklessness the more of a moral debt we create. And as that debt grows, so does the moral and spiritual weight of owing that debt. Refusing to thank God is like being the Little Dutch Boy – all the gratitude is fit to shatter the dyke of our pride, but we have to sit there keeping our fingers stuck in the holes. But it’s worse than that – the boy kept his finger in the dyke because he loved Haarlem and wanted to save something good and beautiful and innocent. Our latter day Niederländer hate the homely houses and detest them because the quiet and calm happiness of average people in average homes, like all blessings, can only be enjoyed when we give thanks to the giver of all good gifts. We don’t want to save Haarlem, we’re trying to blow-up the dyke and destroy it because it’s a constant reminder that we’re neither special nor the creators of our own existence. Material blessing from God: prosperity; privilege; call it what you will, these blessings accrue and the longer we put off the reckoning the more in debt we are – and so we try to sell the assets even though we’re underwater.

You see, friends, it comes down to this, good blessings to the thankless become burdens. Lemme say it again, because this is crucial to understanding our culture: good blessings to the thankless become burdens. And these burdens, they grow ever greater and greater, until they set us to weeping. And we, like Christian in the City of Destruction cry out that the burden on our backs will sink us lower than Tophet. But there’s no Evangelist to lead us to the Wicket-Gate. Instead, our young people are getting Leftist Legalism. They are told to do their penance. They need to acknowledge their privilege and eat their bugs.

Friends, the bugs aren’t about protein and they aren’t about the planet. It’s about degradation. Bugs are gross. Everyone knows they are. That’s the point. Humiliation is the point. They don’t want you to be convinced that they aren’t gross. They want you to know that they’re disgusting and eat them anyways.

And humiliation has always been the tyrant’s way, from Easter Emperors making people kowtow, to Roman crucifixion, and on. The Soviets perfected humiliation. Everything about their secret police state terror organization was about inflicting humiliation on people. And our police state does it to. That’s why the FBI brings more guns than necessary to rifle through your underwear drawer at 4 in the morning when they could just request the documents. It’s about humiliation.

The bugs are about humiliation so that those in power and have more power over you. End of story.

But people are eating bugs because on their side of the ledger this is their religious penance.

You see, without Christ, you have nobody else to take your sin, so you have to deal with it all by your lonesome. And the problem with that is that you can’t. So, if you can’t take away your sin you inflict misery upon yourself to make up for the pleasures of indulgence. And that’s what the bugs are.

The bugs are a godless nation’s way of doing penance. People are so ashamed of their privilege that they have to do penance. They’re so sorry that they were born into wealth and prosperity that they need to chomp on crickets.

But why? Why be sorry for being born into wealth and prosperity? Because they refuse to give thanks for God for it. Remember the key to understanding all this is: good blessings to the thankless become burdens.

But that shall not be our fate. No. We shall eat the fat, drink the sweet, and rejoice for the joy of the Lord is our strength! Brothers and sisters, this thanksgiving, this Christmas, this New Years, this Feast of the Epiphany, eat too much turkey, have too much cake, have an extra glass of wine or a few extra beers, sing some Christmas carols to make your husband annoyed, and then have some more turkey and some more pie and just fall asleep on the couch and stay there. Have a party. Feast. Rejoice with everything in you and do it to the glory of God. Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love endures forever. Give thanks to God and you’ll never be guilted into bugs. Give thanks to God and rejoice in His good blessings with joyful hearts.

Noodling on Truth

Listen to the radio broadcast here.

When I first read the headlines about Barilla being sued I thought that it meant that the purchasers bought the entire company—as though Barilla somehow hid all its manufacturing from some tech billionaires and now they were getting sued for some kind of failure to disclose issue.

But no. It’s far more ridiculous and far more idiotic than that.

These people are filing a class-action suit against Barilla, with a total of $6 in damages, because they assumed, or claimed they assumed, that Barilla was made in Italy and that therefore it was a better product, but the specific boxes of pasta they bought were not made in Italy, therefore they paid too much.

Indeed, the claim is that Barilla deceives customers into believing that it’s an Italian product which gives it an unfair competitive advantage (UCA).

Now, the insane thing is that there might actually be a case here. If Barilla were claiming that it’s pasta were made in America and lying about it. It is important to note that some Barilla pasta sold in America IS made in Italy, but only a few styles of pasta. It’s also important to note that the scarcity of Barilla’s Italian made products in America is largely because Italy does not grow enough durum wheat to meet global demand.

These people might have a case—petty and ridiculous as it is. A case so small that it doesn’t meet the constitutional threshold for a jury trial – which is $20. So, we’ve had 250 years of inflation and the founding fathers would STILL say your case is hardly worth wasting the court’s time! But they want to make it a class action, so they can prove that Barilla has done large numbers of small harms, rather than a small number of large harms. And for various reasons the judge determined not to dismiss. You can read the judges arguments, yourself as to why, but strictly speaking it seems like the Judge is trying to follow the law.

Alright then, so far we’ve established that Barilla pasta is being sued. They are being sued for false advertising in a class action suit. The central claim in that case is that Barilla deceives consumers into believing that their product is made in Italy, which it isn’t, to gain an unfair competitive advantage, which harms customers by inducing them to pay more for a potentially inferior product.

And, frankly, I feel like that claim is not unreasonable. Now, there are all sorts of fun twists and turns this case could take! I’m envisioning blind taste tests, and witness stand breakdowns, but that seems less than likely. Because this case while it IS about product superiority, really isn’t about product superiority. It’s about our interpretation of words and the conveyance of meaning.

Because, you see, Barilla IS owned and headquartered in Italy and they are selling an Italian product. The plaintiffs claim that the presence of the Italian flag on the box next to the words “ITALY’S #1 BRAND OF PASTA” deceives people into thinking that the pasta is made in Italy.

But that’s not what the box says is it? And the box does say that the pasta is made in America. But the plaintiffs claim that the Italian tricolor and the claim about it being the number one brand are too far away from the wording that states where the pasta is made to prevent a reasonable person from being duped.

Now, frankly, I think that if I were on a jury I would tell the plaintiffs to read the whole box and learn how words work. But, at the same time, I don’t think they are entirely wrong. The box certainly could be interpreted as insinuating that the pasta is made in Italy! In fact, I’ve boughten Barilla pasta and assumed it WAS made in Italy. But I’m not suing. And I’m not suing because I’m not a ridiculous person. Also, I’m not suing because I know how marketing works, and I was the guy who chose not to read the whole box! It’s nobody’s fault but mine.

So was I deceived? It really depends doesn’t it. Barilla is Italian owned and headquartered and they ARE in fact the most popular brand in Italy. Moreover, they are selling Italian foodstuffs. Should they be forbidden from using the Italian flag or noting their popularity because these particular noodles aren’t made in Italy? I don’t think so. I think that they are fully within their rights to use the labelling they do.

But I also feel like they are implying or insinuating that the pasta in the box comes from Italian grown durum wheat and is made in Italy. Now, I’m not sure what Barilla is trying to accomplish. I have my guesses, but those are immaterial to what I want us to consider today.

What is important is that whatever Barilla’s intention, the reality is that sometimes the truth can be used to deceive. Sometimes a lie can be made of nothing but true statements.

Now.

Wait.

I know you think I’m a madman! How can you tell the truth and still lie?! How can you tell the truth and not tell the truth simultaneously?! VERY EASILY!

Let me give you a very famous example about a chemical known as DHMO:

o  is also known as hydroxyl acid, and is the major component of acid rain.

o  contributes to the "greenhouse effect".

o  may cause severe burns.

o  contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape.

o  accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals.

o  may cause electrical failures and decreased effectiveness of automobile brakes.

o  has been found in excised tumors of terminal cancer patients.

Despite the danger, dihydrogen monoxide is often used:

o  as an industrial solvent and coolant.

o  in nuclear power plants.

o  in the production of styrofoam.

o  as a fire retardant.

o  in many forms of cruel animal research.

o  in the distribution of pesticides. Even after washing, produce remains contaminated by this chemical.

o  as an additive in certain "junk-foods" and other food products.

Now, many of you have heard this example before, and you know that the product I’m talking about is water. You see the brilliance of this example, which was invented by a 14-year-old, by the way. The brilliance of it is that it lines up a bunch of true statements and leads you to infer that there is a causal relationship between DHMO and all these negative things. The version I gave you NEVER says that it’s toxic or harmful to humans. But the arrangement of the facts makes it sounds as though it is a nasty industrial manmade compound that needs to be banned.

But how? How do a series of true statements become a lie?

Well, the reason that they become a lie is because when we consider communication, we can’t just look at the pure content of every word and statement isolated from context. We have to look at the message as a whole.

And there’s something even more important. There’s an idea in communication theory called the “implied reader.” Now, I’m not gonna get into the weeds on this, but think about it this way. The implied reader, in writing, is the person who responds to the writing the way the author wants. The writer expects certain people to respond in certain ways to certain things in their writing.

I have an implied listener to these broadcasts, and an implied reader to my theological essays I publish on my website. I have an implied listener to my sermons. If I’m teaching a junior department Sunday School lesson, I have a different idea of who’s hearing me than if I’m submitting a theological essay for publication with a journal. The implied reader is VERY different. And because they are very different I have to change the way I communicate. I’m not going to talk to children the way I’d talk to academic theologians…although sometimes we need to talk to academic theologians the way we talk to children, but that’s another issue!

The point is that ALL of us, know how to change how we communicate based upon how others will hear and receive and interpret and respond to our words. Humans are shockingly good at predicting how people will respond to what we say. And what this means is that for something to be true it not only has to be accurate in its propositions, but the intention must be to communicate truth. Intention matters because all communication revolves around intent. Without intention there is no communication.

If we sit down to have lunch and talk we do so for a purpose, even if the purpose as banal as filling the air with small talk so it doesn’t get awkward, our intention would be to fulfill a social obligation and avoid needless conflict. Whenever we communicate we are engaging in intentional acts, not only in the sense that they are deliberate put that they are purposeful.

Let me give you a great example of lies through truth:

3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

If you look carefully at what Satan says here, he never actually says anything that, taken in isolation isn’t at least technically correct. His first question is a question. He doesn’t assert anything. But what he does do is insinuate that God’s commands are unreasonable. He knows that the woman will now begin to stop thinking about her freedom and focus on her limitations.

So, at the level of the words spoken, it was simply a question, neither true nor false. But at the level of intention it was a lie because it caused her to believe something that was untrue.

Next he tells the woman that she will not surely die. Now the Hebrew is complex. It literally could be translated “dying you shall die” and it is a Hebrew grammatical feature that expresses certainty. First she has a false idea about the command which plays into this, but Satan insinuates that the claim of surely die means that she will physically perish that day. Which she didn’t. And so based upon one reading of God’s command to Adam you could argue that Satan, told the truth. And yet he lied because he insinuated that God would not carry out the punishment He had threatened.

Lastly, Satan says that the woman and the man will be like God, knowing good and evil. Well, God does know good and evil, and so to that degree they would be like God. But the insinuation is clearly that they would achieve near deity. The implication is that by disobeying they would actualize themselves. That by defying God’s will they would be like God.

And of course, Satan is a liar. But you COULD, you MIGHT, you CAN defend every one of Satan’s statements in Genesis 3 as being technically true. But they are still lies. And Jesus says they are lies. Satan lies by telling the truth.

And sadly, all too many people have learned Satan’s tricks. As the old saying goes there are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. And the other one, figures don’t lie but liars can figure.

I’m not here to say whether or not Barilla owes people their money back.

What I am here to say is that if you’re a child of God you have a duty to reject the prince of lies who speaks his native language when he lies.

Christians have an obligation to not only say things that are technically factually accurate and instead to speak the truth in love. Let’s speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Mad Vlad and the Pipelines

Listen to the radio broadcast here.