O Holy Night - Luciano Pavarotti

O Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining,

It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining.

Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices!

O night divine, the night when Christ was born;

O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!

O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!

Led by the light of faith serenely beaming,

With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand.

O'er the world a star is sweetly gleaming,

Now come the wisemen from out of the Orient land.

The King of kings lay thus lowly manger;

In all our trials born to be our friends.

He knows our need, our weakness is no stranger,

Behold your King! Before him lowly bend!

Behold your King! Before him lowly bend!

Truly He taught us to love one another,

His law is love and His gospel is peace.

Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother.

And in his name all oppression shall cease.

Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,

With all our hearts we praise His holy name.

Christ is the Lord! Then ever, ever praise we,

His power and glory ever more proclaim!

His power and glory ever more proclaim!

God Enters the World of Man

 

 

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

 

 

. . . That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of the blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father.), full of grace and truth (KJV, John 1:1-5, 9-14).

 

 

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16).

 

 





The Birth of Christ

Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

 

 

 



Four More Years of Insanity

 

The First Four Years:  A Pictorial History

LibyaGate

  

 

Objectivism: The Uninspired Religion of "Reason"

By Michael David Rawlings

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. —Ayn Rand¹
 

 

The politics of Rand's philosophy (called Objectivism for the postulate that all human knowledge may be objectively derived from reality via discovery rather than presupposition) calls for a minarchistic model of laissez-faire, an ideal arrangement of power whereby the state is not permitted to ameliorate the consequences of irresponsible behavior. Some critics on the left argue—due to their mindless reverence  for the politics of  bread and circuses—that Objectivism promotes rational anarchism (or anarcho-capitalism), despite the fact that it emphatically repudiates that model.

Government redistribution of wealth is a form of initial force (or coercion) that subsidizes and, consequently, encourages the sort of behavior that leads to poverty and dependency. It's the stuff of legalized theft exacted against the assets of individuals who aren't responsible for the circumstances, choices or failures of the recipients. In other words, beyond the general defense of the nation and the preservation of liberty and private property, including the necessary provisions and administrations thereof: it's immoral for the state to deprive a person of any portion of the fruits of his labor for the sake of persons who didn't earn them.

(Think President Barack You-Didn't-Build-That Obama.)

A Dirge for J. Alfred Prufrock: The Last Hurrah

By Michael David Rawlings

With hat in hand and at the feet of T. S. Eliot

Copyright © 2012

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. . . .
 

Let us go then, you and me,
And stroll beneath a cloudy sea
As evening spreads across its face like a toothless grin.
Let us go a-meandering down narrow-minded suburban lanes,
Silky slick with sullen rains
And hemmed in by redundant four-bedroom stalls and grated sewage drains;
Past the immaculate parks and the quaint, steepled churches,
    the lofty perches,
Where the vagabond Riffraff lurches in the pristine shadows:
A restless Crowd that chases dreams of easy grace and meadows
And sings a melancholy hymn, a petulant brew, that lingers at your nervebone.

A chorus of crickets roll their eyes
And dance beneath the cloudy skies.

The Air is still tonight—drenched with slumber.
A withered leaf dodders on spindly legs across Its gnarled spine.

And above the tiny rustlings, above the glistening lanes,
Above the languid shadows that creep and close on the mournful strains—
The Stars draw back the shroud and peep,
Shake their bearded chins, cast their pearly eyes away and weep.
And below, crookbacked lampposts unfurl their hazy-white plumes and glare
At the four-footed heaps, at the white picket fences,
At the cracks in the sidewalks, at the manicured grasses,
As the musty night seeps through our senses.
And through the parlor windows we may see, you and I,
The flickering glow of that babbling flow on the walls:
The Soma of the enervated masses.

Morpheus has alighted on his throne at the commencement of another dreary evening. . . .

The "New Math" of American History and the Unobscured Truth

By Michael David Rawlings

Virtually all leftists and the occasional libertarian confound the history of America's cultural-political heritage. For many, their ignorance is a function of a deep-seated prejudice against religion in general and especially against the notion that the tenets of Judeo-Christianity played some role in the articulation of the Republic's founding.

 

Like many leftists, lots of libertarians are "freethinkers." That is to say, they're atheists (See also "Objectivism:   The Uninspired Religion of 'Reason' ".).  Hence, there is a strain of libertarianism that like the contagious rot of progressivism is wont to go on about the supposed primacy of the democratic theory of Classical Greece or of the monolithic repudiation of religion in the thought of the Enlightenment. My favorite red herring along this line is something or another about the Founders and the naturalistic, nonthreatening religion of Deism.

[T]he much ado over the fact that many of the Founders were Deists is about nothing. First, most of them weren't. Second, it's the sociopolitical principles extrapolated from the Judeo-Christian moral tradition that matter. Both the Deist and the Christian of the Anglo-American Enlightenment embraced them. —Michael David Rawlings, "Abortion on Demand, Homosexual "Marriage": what will they think of next?"

The salient, recurring theme in all of this: only "benighted Christians" actually believe that Judeo-Christianity significantly influenced the development of democratic political theory. God Darwin forbid that the most gloriously prolific system of thought in world history might have had something to do with it!

Actually

By Michael David Rawlings

Thomas Jefferson is not the father of the phrase pursuit of happiness, and it's not merely a poetic turn  or an allusion to something new or different. It's a construct with a great deal of history behind it. That very terminology was used by John Locke and other classical liberals before Jefferson. Jefferson's terminology regarding the third element of Locke's triadic formulation of natural law—life, liberty and property—was used to emphasize the meaning of property in its entirety.

Neither Locke nor the Founders held that one's personal property was merely the material possessions or assets that one might own. Personal property in the political sense begins with the ownership of one's own self, the ramifications of which are (1) the right to be secure in one's material possessions, (2) the right of personal well-being and (3) the right of freedom of opportunity. Those familiar with the terminology of the emerging political theory of natural law understood why Jefferson used that phrase.

Hence, pursuit of happiness refers to the ownership of one's own self and to everything that entails.

A Mountain of Nothin' out of Somethin' or Another

by Michael David Rawlings
 

There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men.  —John Locke

For those of you who believe in nothing and, therefore, are easily deceived by almost anything, atheistic scientists like Lawrence Krauss, who intentionally muddle ontological distinctions merely to get a rise out of the philosophers and theologians they detest, do a disservice to science. Whether in jest or not, it's irresponsible. They dishonor their profession and treat us all with contempt when they imply that the problem of existence is strictly a scientific matter. As a group, atheists, whether they be accomplished scientists or not, are notoriously bad thinkers outside the comfort zone of their presumptuous metaphysics and are theologically illiterate bumpkins to boot. Karl W. Giberson, an evolutionary theist, is something else altogether . . . or is he?

I agree with Krauss that religious creation stories don't explain, at least from a scientific perspective, why there is something rather than nothing. The claim that "God created the quantum vacuum and its ordering principles" simply replaces a scientific mystery with a theological one: Where did God come from? — "Can science explain the final mystery of creation?"

The Bible doesn't "explain, at least from a scientific perspective, why there is something rather than nothing"?!

So?

Given that the Bible does in fact explain it from a theological perspective, what's Giberson's point? Rather, what's the point of acknowledging this fact in one breath and then heedlessly rattling on about a theological mystery in the next?

(Does the Bible explain it from a theological perspective or not, Mr. Giberson?)

The issue is metaphysical and arguably goes to the concerns of aesthetics as well. At the level of immanence, why do humans produce works of art? The scientific answer, stated colloquially: because they're wired to do it . . . but the next question is why are they wired to do it?

When a child asks, "Why is the sky blue?"

Science answers:  "The sky is blue due to the Rayleigh scattering of electromagnetic waves as refracted by the Earth's atmosphere."

But that doesn't tells us why light has different wavelengths or why these wavelengths are the sum of many different frequencies and so on ad infinitum. Science will never get at the ultimate why of anything.

There is no reason that something exists rather than nothing . . . except in the context of consciousness!

Think about that for awhile. . . .

Abortion on Demand, Homosexual "Marriage": what will they think of next?

By Michael David Rawlings

David Kirby writes some good news . . . sort of.

Emily Ekins and I have an op-ed in today's Politico¹ pointing out that while the Tea Party is united on economic issues, there is a split virtually right down the middle between traditional social conservatives and those who think government should altogether stay out of the business of "promoting traditional values." Candidates and representatives hoping to appeal to the Tea Party, we argue, need to focus on a unifying economic agenda that takes into account this strong libertarian undercurrent.

We conducted a survey of 639 attendees at the October 9, 2010 Tea Party Convention in Virginia, one of the larger state Tea Party gatherings of its kind to date. We included the same questions from Gallup and the American National Election Studies that David Boaz and I have used to identify libertarians in our previous studies. . . .

In our new survey, we found libertarians were 48 percent of Tea Partiers, versus 51 percent who held traditional conservative views. We defined traditional conservatives as agreeing that "the less government the better," and that "the free market can handle these problems without government being involved," but also believing that "the government should promote traditional values." Tea Party libertarians agreed that less government is better, and prefer free markets, but believe that "the government should not favor any particular set of values."  —David Kirby, "The Tea Party’s Other Half"²

Caution:  The libertarian faction of the Tea Party "think[s] government should altogether stay out of the business of 'promoting traditional values.' "

Well, it's not the government's role to promote any particular set of cultural values!

Wait for it. . . .

However, the government—if it's to be legitimate and stable—must obey the commands of certain principles commonly lumped in with things that have come to be thought of as mere traditional values.

Wisdom

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. —C. S. Lewis

A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings. . . . Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones. —Paul Johnson

A Striking Example of Lefty's Intellectual Vacuity and Moral Cowardice

By Michael David Rawlings
 

 

In "The World Doesn't Love the First Amendment", Eric Posner unwittingly reveals what we conservatives have always known about leftists: namely, they don't love the First Amendment either.

Salman Rushdie recently claimed that bad ideas, "like vampires . . . die in the sunlight" rather than persist in a glamorized underground existence. But bad ideas never die: They are zombies, not vampires. Bad ideas like fascism, Communism, and white supremacy have roamed the countryside of many an open society. —Eric Posner

This is the only statement in Posner's piece with which I agree. The rest of his ideas solicit the sort of reactionism that would allow the zombies to roam unchallenged.

 

For example: As often happens, what starts out as a grudging political settlement has become, when challenged from abroad, a dogmatic principle to be imposed universally.

"Imposed universally" is a startling choice of words given that Posner's conflating the unbridled free speech of Americans in a technologically global forum with an imposition of unbridled free speech on others abroad. The only imposition being suggested here would be that exerted against the unbridled free speech of Americans, unless he's suggesting that we Americans are demanding that all societies have unbridled free speech because we demand nothing less in ours.

That's not startling, that's absurd.

Posner continues. . . .

Suddenly, the disparagement of other people and their beliefs is not an unfortunate fact but a positive good.

I'm gettin' a weepy, snot-stained hanky feelin'.

What do bad manners, whether intended or perceived, have to do with the provisions of unbridled free speech? The positive good, obviously, is unbridled free speech; the intended or perceived disparagements are incidental.

It contributes to the "marketplace of ideas," as though we would seriously admit that Nazis or terrorist fanatics might turn out to be right after all.

Let's turn this on its head: as though the self-appointed arbiters of "decency" in history have never been the "Nazis or terrorist fanatics" of the world.

 

So symbolic attachment to uneasy, historically contingent compromises, and a half-century of judicial decisions addressing domestic political dissent and countercultural pressures, prevent the U.S. government from restricting the distribution of a video that causes violence abroad and damages America's reputation.

As the saying goes, never has so much been attributed to so little. No. The cause of the recent troubles goes to the depravity of mindless, nose-picking barbarians ginned up for decades by evil men with an agenda of world domination, not to any video. And how is America's reputation damaged by the insanity that rages in Islamic societies?

Imbecile! Coward!

 

And so combining the liberal view that government should not interfere with political discourse, and the conservative view that government should not interfere with commerce, we end up with the bizarre principle that U.S. foreign policy interests cannot justify any restrictions on speech whatsoever.

*crickets chirping*

. . . as if the first were true about the liberal view, as if the second were not a subliminal slight, an incomplete description of the conservative view and as if, in this instance, it were not America's very sovereignty assaulted, the video merely the pretext of cynical thugs . . . as if an unapologetic defense of human liberty were not a vital interest of U.S. foreign policy.

The rest of his piece is more of the same. . . .

Also see "The First Amendment and Zombies".

The Apology Tour Continues. . . .

 By Michael David Rawlings

 

The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. —Barack Obama, September 25, 2012, U.N. Address 

 

This statement stuns the moral and patriotic sensibilities of the American conservative, but the most stunning thing of all is the thought that Obama might actually believe that sentiments like this one serve to mollify the mindless savage of the Muslim streets. But more to the point, does Obama imagine that the likes of President Morsi (political head of the Muslim Brotherhood, the largest hate group in the world) and President "Wipe-Israel-Off-the-Face-of-the-Earth" Ahmadinejad, who have been cynically ginning up the mindless savage of the Muslim streets for years, are mollified?

In any event, it is clear that Obama's entreaty was greeted with contempt.

This is just the sort of talk that emboldens evil. To the Muslim rabble it translates as a statement of fact . . . if you get my meaning; to the elites of Islamofascism it translates as a show of weakness.

Allow me to Americanize Obama's womanish twaddle: The future must not belong to those who would suppress the inalienable rights of humanity, including the right to think or say whatever one pleases about that depraved prophet of the religion from hell; instead, it belongs to the defenders of liberty who will hunt you down and kill you should you violate our sovereignty in any way, shape or form.

 

 

Arab leaders rebut Obama speech
By Neil MacFarquhar
New York Times News Service
September 27
The Bulletin News

The presidents of Egypt and Yemen argue at the U.N. that cultural limits on traditional Western freedoms must be respected.


 "Muslim Leaders Make Case for Global Blasphemy Ban at U.N."

Pamela Geller on CNN: "Defeat Jihad" Ad

 

Random Thoughts on "Leftyism"

People are grasping that the only thing Lefties yield to is superior power. They don't listen to reason, they don't argue rationally, they don't respectfully exchange points of view. They have no interest in anybody getting a fair hearing; they want only to dominate, to bully, to push around, to tell you and me what to do and force us to obey. They relish the exercise of coercion, not the exercise of persuasion. —Jack Rail, FreeConservatives

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid; liberals think conservatives are evil. —Charles Krauthammer

Of course, leftist precedents having been set are sacrosanct, while other precedents are benighted, retrograde and have to be fixed. —Thomas More, FreeConservatives

The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is: Conservatives believe man was created in God's image; liberals believe they are God. All their other behavioral tics proceed from this one irreducible minimum. —Ann Coulter

By Michael David Rawlings

Any idea that ventures beyond the barren fields of cliché, lefty shuts out of his mind. Instead, he scratches at the surface of things and calls that which flacks off profundity.

The most daunting challenges facing this nation are not its fiscal and economic woes, but the cancer of self-imposed ignorance and bootlick subservience to the statist rhetoric of class warfare.

Of course Lefty is a statist bootlick, but the reason he deplores liberty is because he's terrified of it. He knows that his collectivist claptrap cannot compete in a free and open society, so he cheats and steals and lies his way along, using the judiciary, for example, as a means of maintaining his monopolistic stranglehold on the public education system in direct violation of natural and constitutional law. In other words, he's a coward at heart and a fascist by default.

In spite of lefty's contention, teachers are not underpaid by taxpayers; taxpayers are underserved by teachers.

Lefty regards all expressions of the truth as invective.

The recognition that reality is governed by absolute, universal imperatives is the beginning of grappling with the infinite nuances or complexities of the human experience. Beyond the developing intellect of youth, it is atheism, relativism or nihilism that perpetuates the black-and-white thought processes of intellectual immaturity. To the relativist—the incurious and almost invariably leftist—this is counterintuitive.

Progressivism's big lie is progressivism itself. It's the collusion of big government and big business to repress the working poor, the middleclass and small business. It's the crony capitalism of the self-anointed elite . . . a fact that flies right over the heads of the drooling idiots of Occupy Wall Street.

It's impossible to reason with the leftist. He doesn't process life like normal people, as even the most obvious conclusions elude him. He thinks and speaks in clichés. He proclaims and debates in slogans. When contradicted, he robotically spouts hysterical epithets like racist, homophobe or fascist. Once he veers off into this mindless routine, there's no getting him back on the topic at hand.

When fascism comes to America, it will be drenched in the blood of aborted fetuses and carrying a sign with some politically correct drivel or another scrawled across it.

The leftist doesn't know why the conservative is wrong, as he doesn't rightly understand the conservative's worldview in the first place. In the meantime, the conservative grasps the nuts and bolts of collectivism at a glance.



The only things that prevent a world of plenty as they produce a world of hurt are bloated, corrupt governments and the thieves who run them.

When they could no longer credibly deny the successes of the "Teflon Presidency," leftists begin to propagate the deliriously stupid fantasy that Reagan was an empty suite dangling from strings manipulated by some mysterious cabal. These dead-enders continue to prattle this fiction in spite of the fact that Reagan's political career entailed one of the most prolific records of personally authored addresses and op-eds of any president, a record that outlined the very same ideas he boldly enunciated and implemented during his presidency. When leftists aren't changing the subject, they're contriving new lies to tell themselves and others.

The leftist imagines bogeymen lurking around every corner where none exist, and he's determined to enslave us all in his mission to exorcise them.

All leftists are conformists.

Lots of leftists are well-educated, after a fashion. It's just that their ideas are so borrowed, so predictable, so banal . . . so untrue: a stream of mindless slogans lifted from a lifetime of PC conditioning.

Bottom line:  lefty is a bootlick statist.

Martin Luther King was a sexual degenerate, an apostate, a communist, a traitor. He despised the American ethos, consorted with enemy agents, helped erect the welfare plantation and spawned a generation of race-baiting pimps. He was an opportunist who cared for nothing but his own aggrandizement. But worst of all, like his ideological predecessor, the Marxist DuBois, King repudiated the legacy of America's greatest black leader, the true patriot Booker T. Washington.

Lefty can't allow that conservatism—classical liberalism, really—is stone-cold logic predicated on the lessons of history and the imperatives of human nature.  Yet, it's the joyful celebration of human life and liberty.  It's passion and poetry, music and romance. It's the masculinity of rugged individualism and the femininity of true compassion.

The manner of lefty's rhetoric is that of the moralizing shew, and the smirk on his face is that of the pitchfork-wielding Jacobin.

When you think of the leftist, think of the thought-conditioned denizens of Huxley's Brave New World, think especially of the sexually promiscuous and, therefore, passionless Alphas who think the romance of monogamy and familial allegiance is strange, even disgusting. Think emotional, intellectual and spiritual death.

When Lefty's not spouting banalities as if they were profundities, he's spouting insanity as if it were enlightenment.

In spite of his oft-repeated admonitions about nuance and open-mindedness, lefty is the Bruce Jenner of black-and-white think, a veritable virtuoso of the slammed-shut door.

Progressivism is not a uniform system of political thought, but a uniform collection of political slogans.

Lefty's IQ is cliché raised to the infinite power.

Compassion, tolerance, understanding, inclusion, acceptance: these are the code words of demonization in the leftist's handbook, the lexicon of Pollyannaish doofuses.

Victim Card: Don't Leave Home Without It

 

 

Schisms

By Michael David Rawlings

The First Great Awakening in England and America (roughly, 1725 to 1755), as lead by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield, was in some respects a reaction against the British empiricism of the Enlightenment which generally rejected the actuality or utility of innate ideas and traditions. While the revealed religion of Judeo-Christianity was perfectly compatible with a scientific methodology of observation and evidentiary experimentation, albeit, predicated on a mechanist naturalism, the idea that sensory perception and experience trumped the rational impressions of human consciousness signified a serious challenge.

It would appear that the art of human philosophy is the art of dividing human reason against itself: the schism of false alternatives. No sooner had the rationalist René Descartes concluded that he existed, the empiricist John Locke concluded that he knew substance via sensory perception.

*crickets chirping*

The former's system of thought devolved into subjectivism, the latter's, into relativism.

In the meantime, Christians knew that they and God existed and that God was the ground of all existence.

For the most part, the Awakening was an evangelical revival that appealed to the human heart regarding the need of repentance and an intimate relationship with God. It was also a precursor to the American Revolution with its concomitant political concerns for a free press and religious freedom.

The Fuzz in Descartes' Belly Button

By Michael David Rawlings

Nowhere in the West during the period of the Enlightenment was the hostility toward religion more palpable than it was in France. Rationalist thinker René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, was among the most sterling exceptions to the general rule until the arrival of the early proponents of laissez-faire in 1750 and the classical liberals of the so-called Thermidorian Reaction of 1794. This is not to say, however, that I approve of Descartes' epistemological ground for substance: that being (what is) is subordinate to the cogito (the thought of it).

God is the self-subsistent ground of all reality. He is the "God Who stands and stays",¹ as Carl F. H. Henry puts it, and the natural law of human apprehension conferred by Him, as rendered by Thomas Aquinas and refined by John Calvin, is the only legitimate foundation for a universal morality and for civil law. This is not a conditional aspect of human psychology.

A more satisfying epistemology, one that more perfectly mirrors that of scripture, is a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism, albeit, one that is contingent upon the imperatives of the imago dei and the historic, objectively independent interventions of transcendent revelation. In other words, it's because God does exist, and for that reason only, that we may be confident that the calculi of human consciousness correspond with the structures and mechanics of the temporal world beyond . . . insofar as they are guided by revealed religion. For whether one be aware of it or not, all scientific theory rests on an apriority of faith as a matter of practicality: the assumption that the rational forms and logical categories of the human mind are reliably synchronized with the apparent substances and mechanisms of empirical phenomena.

To be fair, Descartes never intended to cloud our awareness of the innate, natural law of divine origin or diminish the stature of nature's God. But he failed to anticipate that the reduction of the basis for knowledge from man's intuitive, preanalytic apprehension of cosmic order (which entails his moral and aesthetic senses) to the first impressions of a detached introspection would lead to the subjective relativism of postmodern popular culture—the untutored, inner musings of human reasoning making baby talk about the world beyond. He also failed to recognize that his basis for knowledge could not withstand the logical implications of an empiricism likewise detached from divine revelation . . . and he never imagined the subsequent nihilism of a Darwinian naturalism.

________________________________

¹Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority:  God Who Stands and Stays (Waco, TX:  Word Books, 1983), Vol. VI, Part II.

Mitt Romney's Acceptance Speach

 

That is to say, if you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove that you're not a racist, please vote for somebody else in 2012 to prove that you're not an idiot.

 

In America we celebrate success; we don't apologize for success. . . .

It's the genius of the American free enterprise system that harnesses the extraordinary creativity and talent and industry of the American people with a system that is dedicated to creating tomorrow's prosperity, not to redistributing today's.

Obama's Campaign about Nothing

John Ransom

Aug 25, 2012

Townhall.com

Obama may go down as the first president in the history of the U.S. to run a campaign based, like Jerry Seinfeld’s comedy, on nothing.

 

It’s gotten so bad that the New York Times is appealing to people to "believe in” Obama, like he’s a children’s character or a Vegas magic act, rather than president of the United States.

Talk about bitter clingers who cling to their religion.

But I know what they mean. There is isn’t any good logical reason to vote for Obama even if you are a liberal.

         

Let’s take his tax policy.

He wants to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires in an effort to do what?

Nothing really.

THE REST OF THE ARTICLE

The Political Physiology of the Left and Right Brains

 

 

 

We The People

 

 

 

A Tiny Brown Moth and a Little Gray Sparrow

By Michael David Rawlings

Copyright © 2011

　
A tiny brown moth, believing his heart above all else,
Battered himself against the window pane,
Thinking to embrace the morning air—wings a-flutter.

 



A little gray sparrow, believing his hunger above all else,
Battered his sharp beak against the window pane,
Hoping to spear the tiny morsel—wings a-flutter.

Eager, persistent, furiously tap, tap, tapping.
Bemused!
Frightened!
Angry!

"What is this?" the sparrow exclaimed. "His soft belly bruises my beak!"

And still the tiny brown moth
Battered himself against the window pane,
Eager to embrace the morning air—wings a-flutter.

The Ontological Materialist's Photo Album

 

Darwinian Theory

 

 

Your Brain on Darwinian Theory

 

 

A Darwinian Meth-Lab Apparatus

 

 

The Mechanism of Natural Selection

 

 

The Transitory Form Homeritus Simpsonias Odditateum

 

 

The Mechanism of Natural Selection Again

 

Uncle Chuck

 

Abiogenesis

How Highbrows Killed Culture

 

By Fred Siegel

April 2012

Commentary

Exhibit A

It is one of the foundational myths of contemporary liberalism: the idea that American culture in the 1950s was not only stifling in its banality but a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. Whatever the excesses of the 1960s might have been, so the argument goes, that decade represented the necessary struggle to free America’s mind-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the Lords of Conformity and Kitsch. And yet, from a remove of more than a half century, we can see that the 1950s were in fact a high point for American culture—a period when many in the vast middle class aspired to elevate their tastes and were given the means and opportunity to do so.

The wildly successful attack on American popular culture in the 1950s was an outgrowth of noxious ideas that consumed the intellectual classes of the West in the first five decades of the 20th century—ideas so vague and so general that they were not discredited by the unprecedented flowering of popular art in the United States in the years after World War II. And, in the most savage of ironies, that attack ended up not changing popular culture for the better but instead has led to a popular culture so debased as to obviate parody.

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'Post-racial' Lynch Mob

By Ann Coulter

March 29, 2012

Jewish World Review

Even after the Duke lacrosse case, Texaco executives allegedly using the N-word in private meetings -- which turned out to be "St. Nicholas" -- the Tawana Brawley case, not to mention virtual hailstorms of racist graffiti and nooses materializing on college campuses, all of which invariably end up having been put there by the alleged victims, the Non-Fox Media (NFM) didn't even pause before conjuring a racist plot in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida last month.

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City Journal

Winter 2012, Vol. 22 No. 1

Farewell to the Free Market?

By Nicole Gelinas

Western governments have compounded the economic crisis by rejecting the one force that can end it.

 

In the years leading up to 2007, the rules necessary to govern a flourishing market economy broke down, producing a financial and economic crisis. Rather than responding to the crisis by fixing those rules, the West aggressively repudiated market economics, and the repudiation continues to this day. Through their actions, which have lately involved everything from European debt to the American financial system to house prices in Britain, government officials around the world have revealed a disturbing assumption: that they can decide how to allocate resources better than markets can. No longer, it seems, do Western governments use investor signals as valuable feedback in devising effective policies; instead, they ignore those signals and plow ahead with their policymaking, leaving chaos in their wake. Often, in fact, public officials actively mute market signals in a vain but destructive attempt to impose their own will on struggling economies.

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Private Alters

By Michael David Rawlings
Copyright © 2011

I have seen the blood that flows from Private Alters,
That glistens on wasted flesh and bone.
I have seen the tiny severed Fingers—pink, adrift in murky, black waters.
In all my feverish dreams I hear their muted screams,
And in their eyes, those bewildered eyes turned on callous faces,
I see a plea . . . and the wounded face of God.
 

"It is Our Right!" they rant. "Our Right!"
 

"Yes," I whisper, small and foolish,
"But the Babies, the little Babies."

Lefty's Photo Album

 

Lefty's Mother

Your Standard Wild-Eyed Leftist

 

Your Fire-Breathing Leftist Loon

 

Standard Issue Abortionist
 

Religion-Hating Leftist

Your Average Leftist in Crisis Mode, Ever-Present Just Below the Surface

 

Lefty on a Good Day

 

 

America:  Four years of Jimmy Carter's Malaise, Four Years of Hopey-Change

 

 

Leftist Helen Thomas

 

 

Leftist Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi

 

 

Leftist Senator Harry Reid

 

 

Emperor Barack "Hopey-Change" Obama

 

 

Emperor Barack "Hopey-Change" Obama Again

 

 

Leftist President Hopey-Change

 

 

Leftist President Hopey-Change's Standard Operating Procedure