Natural Law stings America!
16/April/2008 10:29 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 16
PDF copy
Do you believe in Natural Law? I mean this as a serious question.
I believe most people today, can’t even seriously define natural law, so how can they believe in something that they don’t have a clue.
So natural law is beginning to sting the American economy, and it comes as a great surprise to everyone, and the “experts” are baffled. However, they sing in a cappella harmony, “It is all going to work out for the best, all you have to do is trust us.”
We must begin at the beginning. Natural law is what makes the whole shebang work. That means the universe, the solar system, planet earth, and all life. The sun rising every morning is not an act of faith. It is a law that the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours. The moon rotates around the earth about once every 28 days. The Krebs cycle allows the physiology of your cells to function. Your nervous system sort of allows your body to operate in a somewhat organized fashion. Natural law is best described as a great natural unity in diversity, where every little detail works together in infinite precision.
Evolution does not have a reason for why the whole shebang exists, and even less evidence on how it can all work together so well. Intelligent Design really gets you no farther down that road either, for just not any person can design a universe, about all humans can design is a modern airplane or a computer program. The interesting point about all these human created things is that their function rests entirely upon a mass set of underlying assumptions, which are also part of the body of common natural law.
This whole natural law thing has worked relatively well in the world for all of human history. Human’s learned in order to survive you don’t mess with nature, or nature will mess with you. Like if you transgress nature’s law, you will be eliminated from the gene pool.
Throughout human history most people believed in God, or gods. One of these God’s, the Elohim of the Jewish Bible, began to have oral human religious history codified about 4000 years ago. According to God, he chose one of the smallest and least important nations on earth to be the caretakers of His word as a specific revelation of God’s unique almighty power and personality. Within this Book were reasons why the whole shebang existed, and how God created mankind thousands of years ago.
Then about 2000 years ago, this God sent His son, in the form of a Jewish man, to become Messiah, and to redeem humanity from its sin. Sin was part of human existence throughout history. The Bible says that this resulted in humanity rebelling against God and choosing to try and become god in their own eyes. Other religions also recognized sin, and as with the Jews developed very sophisticated sacrificial methods of dealing with it. This is best explained as God created mankind with a conscience, to know the difference between good (Godly) and evil.
This 2000 year old specific revelation, is now called Christianity, and found fertile soil in what was to become known as western civilization. For the most part the Jewish people rejected this Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, and hence these Christians sought to punish the Jews, because they had killed the Savior. What their sinful pride did not let them see however is that we all crucified Jesus because of our desire to be more than human, but to be our own god and deity.
This went relatively well until the 16th century when the Reformation greatly changed the message and the emphasis of Christianity. This new reformed vitality changed western culture considerably for the better. However, it was not long before man began to think that the Reformation was not a gift of God, but was brought about by human intellect. Once mankind moved beyond just using the Christian religion as the tool to change society, he came up with all sorts of other schemes where he could make the world a better place all on his own, without any help from God at all. After the Reformation came the Enlightenment.
Now let us fast forward into 21st century America. We have been pretty much doing it our own way for a number of centuries. In the 19th century Darwinian evolution taught us that there was no God, it all just happened by chance and evolutionary leaps. What about natural law that served the world for the entirety of history? Well if you have enough faith, any level of organization is possible, especially if you redefine science as whatever helps explain existence without God. The mantra goes something like, “Sin, I don’t believe in sin, because I don’t believe in God.
What this leads to is the supremacy of the individual and the demise of true unity in natural law based communities. Last week we looked at how and egalitarian elite in the Democrat Party wants to take care of all your ills by socialist programs that will give everyone something for nothing. As long as you are willing to play the game, they will take care of you, by providing stuff that you really don’t need, but would like to have. All it will do is cost you your freedom to have the opportunity to be what God created you to be in the first place and belong to the true human family where all persons have equal opportunities under natural and specific laws.
So all the preceding was required to get us to the current tension between the liberal socialist tension on the political left and the conservative right. By the definition of a true Conservative, they believe in capitalism as the means by which an individual should secure their place in society. As opposed to the tax and spend liberal concept of egalitarian equality of outcomes, these conservatives believe in equal opportunity of the individual to create his own destiny out of the wilds of the frontier. A government that governs least is the government that governs the best.
This is best described as the laissez faire model of business enterprise. The problem is that this libertarian lite model doesn’t understand the reality of natural law, just as the socialist model it claims to oppose. Laissez faire is really a statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and as such entropy rules, not design, not organization, nor any coherent reason for society or culture to exist at all.
As stated in earlier posts here in the Chronicle, socialism, or the more politically correct liberal agenda, offers answers to the problems that face America. It is just that those solutions are worse than the disease because they do not address the true unique nature of each human being, and thereby provide programs to level the playing field. Both Democrat presidential candidates have a very similar political ideology, create money out of nothing and give it to everyone who is willing to get in line.
At least under the Presidency of George W. Bush, there was really no program at all, other than the Iraq War. Laissez faire was pretty much given a free hand. We shall see if John McCain actually will come up with something a little more innovative, while not adopting a liberal agenda. We really have no recent record in this country of a functioning Federal Government that provides for the maintenance of infrastructure, including the military, or true growth without deficit spending. One may therefore question, whether this is true growth at all?
Contrary to the hopes and pipe dreams of billions of people on earth, there is a God, and He is the one who created natural laws in the first place. Furthermore, it is He who created and sustains both the nation of Israel and Christianity. Trying to defeat the purposes of either religion by thought, word, or deed will meet with failure and eventual judgment. That is God’s specific law. The options of what makes me feel good in these matters really are an exercise in true futility, based in the darkness of evil.
The God given natural law of creation is a reflection of the nature of God, essentially unity in diversity. The egalitarian socialist model of diversity is equality of outcomes. The conservative entropy model is unity by amalgamation, or better spun in contemporary jargon, mergers and acquisitions. We redefine this as “growth” but what we are really doing is creating a type of slow growing cancer which left unchecked will eventually kill the patient. In this case the “capitalist” system we were trying to save.
There is talk this week about the merger of Delta and Northwest Airlines. The spin, especially from the proponents is that this will save both companies, the airline industry (like travel services are really industry), give consumers better service. The fact is that airlines cannot exist in their present form with fuel prices at current levels. Neither can any other highly energy dependent industry or service. Bicycles however will be the transportation growth industry of the future.
This same line of amalgamation spin came as the oil companies merged into cartels and monopolies. So now we try to deal with oil and gas prices approximately twice, maybe more, of what true free markets would demand. The underlying sin in all this is greed. Greed is the cancer that is the major threat to economic growth in the whole world, because it does not produce unity in diversity, it creates simplistic monopolies ruled, by definition, by the quest for money alone. By definition modern corporations are real legal personalities formed just to make money, legal individuals without true life or a soul, or true accountability.
As reported here on many occasions, there is nothing inherently wrong with producing goods and services anyplace in the world, but it is highly energy inefficient. This means when all our TVs come from China, or our OSB to build houses comes from northern Canada, high energy costs are going to kill both the TV and OSB factories, and also the distant retail TV sales companies and the housing industry.
This is the sting of trying to do it the easy and simple way, to make everyone rich materially, with no one willing to pay the real price of the hard work of being stewards of God’s creation.
In a little over 700 words the 18th chapter of the Book of Revelation speaks to the demise of this world’s economic system, which is now in place and was operating rather smoothly until it all began to melt down a few months ago. Whether these times in April 2008 are the hour described in this passage is unknown, but the similarities are self-evident.
What is important to note here is the admonition that God gives his people in verse four: And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues.
Do you hear any such message in the pulpits of America or the world today? Hardly.
What you hear in church today, is basically make sure you get your share, based upon why you are superior for some reason to those sinners who are getting rich by exploiting you. Whatever reason fits with the genre and the social climate of the congregation, will be spun in the message. This golden rule is “Do unto others, before they do unto you.”
I suppose this revelation can simply mean a couple of things: Quite a few of God’s people are going to be one day sharing the plagues of the demise of economic Babylon, or maybe those who call themselves “God’s people,” really are not.
So what would be the cause of this great holocaust? I used this word for a reason, for the signs for the Jews were the same during the rise of Hitler in Germany 70 years ago, as they are today, for both Jews and Christians. We should be able to discern the rise of a totally materialistic state, which is based entirely upon atheistic evolutionary dogma that some people are inherently more highly evolved than others. By definition those who have religion, also control all the stuff, ergo get rid of the religious and you can have their stuff, because you deserve it.
So why don’t we leave Babylon?
I would submit, for the reason that this article began, we really don’t believe that God’s natural law applies to the world today and especially to us, you and me. We really don’t want to go into the wilderness of the unknown and live by faith in God’s provisions; we want to have God on our terms, not on God’s terms. That is a heresy of a theology of man’s Glory, not a theology of the cross of Christ, and this time for both Jews and Gentiles.
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” Matthew 6:24
God created man a gardener. In that role Adam could both internally and externally comprehend the unity and diversity within himself and the same complexity and beauty in the world, which he was continually immersed? You can’t gain that natural law and common grace perspective in an office tower in New York City, or other urban center. So when all the shallowness of enlightened humanity begins to become self evident, where should you turn for advice and direction?
The God who created creation and who redeemed humanity are one God, the eternal unity in diversity. That is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end and everything in between, provided you are willing to live in His world, not an insane fantasy of your own sick creation.
PDF copy
Do you believe in Natural Law? I mean this as a serious question.
I believe most people today, can’t even seriously define natural law, so how can they believe in something that they don’t have a clue.
So natural law is beginning to sting the American economy, and it comes as a great surprise to everyone, and the “experts” are baffled. However, they sing in a cappella harmony, “It is all going to work out for the best, all you have to do is trust us.”
We must begin at the beginning. Natural law is what makes the whole shebang work. That means the universe, the solar system, planet earth, and all life. The sun rising every morning is not an act of faith. It is a law that the earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours. The moon rotates around the earth about once every 28 days. The Krebs cycle allows the physiology of your cells to function. Your nervous system sort of allows your body to operate in a somewhat organized fashion. Natural law is best described as a great natural unity in diversity, where every little detail works together in infinite precision.
Evolution does not have a reason for why the whole shebang exists, and even less evidence on how it can all work together so well. Intelligent Design really gets you no farther down that road either, for just not any person can design a universe, about all humans can design is a modern airplane or a computer program. The interesting point about all these human created things is that their function rests entirely upon a mass set of underlying assumptions, which are also part of the body of common natural law.
This whole natural law thing has worked relatively well in the world for all of human history. Human’s learned in order to survive you don’t mess with nature, or nature will mess with you. Like if you transgress nature’s law, you will be eliminated from the gene pool.
Throughout human history most people believed in God, or gods. One of these God’s, the Elohim of the Jewish Bible, began to have oral human religious history codified about 4000 years ago. According to God, he chose one of the smallest and least important nations on earth to be the caretakers of His word as a specific revelation of God’s unique almighty power and personality. Within this Book were reasons why the whole shebang existed, and how God created mankind thousands of years ago.
Then about 2000 years ago, this God sent His son, in the form of a Jewish man, to become Messiah, and to redeem humanity from its sin. Sin was part of human existence throughout history. The Bible says that this resulted in humanity rebelling against God and choosing to try and become god in their own eyes. Other religions also recognized sin, and as with the Jews developed very sophisticated sacrificial methods of dealing with it. This is best explained as God created mankind with a conscience, to know the difference between good (Godly) and evil.
This 2000 year old specific revelation, is now called Christianity, and found fertile soil in what was to become known as western civilization. For the most part the Jewish people rejected this Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah, and hence these Christians sought to punish the Jews, because they had killed the Savior. What their sinful pride did not let them see however is that we all crucified Jesus because of our desire to be more than human, but to be our own god and deity.
This went relatively well until the 16th century when the Reformation greatly changed the message and the emphasis of Christianity. This new reformed vitality changed western culture considerably for the better. However, it was not long before man began to think that the Reformation was not a gift of God, but was brought about by human intellect. Once mankind moved beyond just using the Christian religion as the tool to change society, he came up with all sorts of other schemes where he could make the world a better place all on his own, without any help from God at all. After the Reformation came the Enlightenment.
Now let us fast forward into 21st century America. We have been pretty much doing it our own way for a number of centuries. In the 19th century Darwinian evolution taught us that there was no God, it all just happened by chance and evolutionary leaps. What about natural law that served the world for the entirety of history? Well if you have enough faith, any level of organization is possible, especially if you redefine science as whatever helps explain existence without God. The mantra goes something like, “Sin, I don’t believe in sin, because I don’t believe in God.
What this leads to is the supremacy of the individual and the demise of true unity in natural law based communities. Last week we looked at how and egalitarian elite in the Democrat Party wants to take care of all your ills by socialist programs that will give everyone something for nothing. As long as you are willing to play the game, they will take care of you, by providing stuff that you really don’t need, but would like to have. All it will do is cost you your freedom to have the opportunity to be what God created you to be in the first place and belong to the true human family where all persons have equal opportunities under natural and specific laws.
So all the preceding was required to get us to the current tension between the liberal socialist tension on the political left and the conservative right. By the definition of a true Conservative, they believe in capitalism as the means by which an individual should secure their place in society. As opposed to the tax and spend liberal concept of egalitarian equality of outcomes, these conservatives believe in equal opportunity of the individual to create his own destiny out of the wilds of the frontier. A government that governs least is the government that governs the best.
This is best described as the laissez faire model of business enterprise. The problem is that this libertarian lite model doesn’t understand the reality of natural law, just as the socialist model it claims to oppose. Laissez faire is really a statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and as such entropy rules, not design, not organization, nor any coherent reason for society or culture to exist at all.
As stated in earlier posts here in the Chronicle, socialism, or the more politically correct liberal agenda, offers answers to the problems that face America. It is just that those solutions are worse than the disease because they do not address the true unique nature of each human being, and thereby provide programs to level the playing field. Both Democrat presidential candidates have a very similar political ideology, create money out of nothing and give it to everyone who is willing to get in line.
At least under the Presidency of George W. Bush, there was really no program at all, other than the Iraq War. Laissez faire was pretty much given a free hand. We shall see if John McCain actually will come up with something a little more innovative, while not adopting a liberal agenda. We really have no recent record in this country of a functioning Federal Government that provides for the maintenance of infrastructure, including the military, or true growth without deficit spending. One may therefore question, whether this is true growth at all?
Contrary to the hopes and pipe dreams of billions of people on earth, there is a God, and He is the one who created natural laws in the first place. Furthermore, it is He who created and sustains both the nation of Israel and Christianity. Trying to defeat the purposes of either religion by thought, word, or deed will meet with failure and eventual judgment. That is God’s specific law. The options of what makes me feel good in these matters really are an exercise in true futility, based in the darkness of evil.
The God given natural law of creation is a reflection of the nature of God, essentially unity in diversity. The egalitarian socialist model of diversity is equality of outcomes. The conservative entropy model is unity by amalgamation, or better spun in contemporary jargon, mergers and acquisitions. We redefine this as “growth” but what we are really doing is creating a type of slow growing cancer which left unchecked will eventually kill the patient. In this case the “capitalist” system we were trying to save.
There is talk this week about the merger of Delta and Northwest Airlines. The spin, especially from the proponents is that this will save both companies, the airline industry (like travel services are really industry), give consumers better service. The fact is that airlines cannot exist in their present form with fuel prices at current levels. Neither can any other highly energy dependent industry or service. Bicycles however will be the transportation growth industry of the future.
This same line of amalgamation spin came as the oil companies merged into cartels and monopolies. So now we try to deal with oil and gas prices approximately twice, maybe more, of what true free markets would demand. The underlying sin in all this is greed. Greed is the cancer that is the major threat to economic growth in the whole world, because it does not produce unity in diversity, it creates simplistic monopolies ruled, by definition, by the quest for money alone. By definition modern corporations are real legal personalities formed just to make money, legal individuals without true life or a soul, or true accountability.
As reported here on many occasions, there is nothing inherently wrong with producing goods and services anyplace in the world, but it is highly energy inefficient. This means when all our TVs come from China, or our OSB to build houses comes from northern Canada, high energy costs are going to kill both the TV and OSB factories, and also the distant retail TV sales companies and the housing industry.
This is the sting of trying to do it the easy and simple way, to make everyone rich materially, with no one willing to pay the real price of the hard work of being stewards of God’s creation.
In a little over 700 words the 18th chapter of the Book of Revelation speaks to the demise of this world’s economic system, which is now in place and was operating rather smoothly until it all began to melt down a few months ago. Whether these times in April 2008 are the hour described in this passage is unknown, but the similarities are self-evident.
What is important to note here is the admonition that God gives his people in verse four: And I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues.
Do you hear any such message in the pulpits of America or the world today? Hardly.
What you hear in church today, is basically make sure you get your share, based upon why you are superior for some reason to those sinners who are getting rich by exploiting you. Whatever reason fits with the genre and the social climate of the congregation, will be spun in the message. This golden rule is “Do unto others, before they do unto you.”
I suppose this revelation can simply mean a couple of things: Quite a few of God’s people are going to be one day sharing the plagues of the demise of economic Babylon, or maybe those who call themselves “God’s people,” really are not.
So what would be the cause of this great holocaust? I used this word for a reason, for the signs for the Jews were the same during the rise of Hitler in Germany 70 years ago, as they are today, for both Jews and Christians. We should be able to discern the rise of a totally materialistic state, which is based entirely upon atheistic evolutionary dogma that some people are inherently more highly evolved than others. By definition those who have religion, also control all the stuff, ergo get rid of the religious and you can have their stuff, because you deserve it.
So why don’t we leave Babylon?
I would submit, for the reason that this article began, we really don’t believe that God’s natural law applies to the world today and especially to us, you and me. We really don’t want to go into the wilderness of the unknown and live by faith in God’s provisions; we want to have God on our terms, not on God’s terms. That is a heresy of a theology of man’s Glory, not a theology of the cross of Christ, and this time for both Jews and Gentiles.
"No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” Matthew 6:24
God created man a gardener. In that role Adam could both internally and externally comprehend the unity and diversity within himself and the same complexity and beauty in the world, which he was continually immersed? You can’t gain that natural law and common grace perspective in an office tower in New York City, or other urban center. So when all the shallowness of enlightened humanity begins to become self evident, where should you turn for advice and direction?
The God who created creation and who redeemed humanity are one God, the eternal unity in diversity. That is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end and everything in between, provided you are willing to live in His world, not an insane fantasy of your own sick creation.