Blah Blah Evolution Blah Blah COVID Blah Blah

Yes, it's obvious, and they should see it also if they would only really really think it through. That is, evolutionary theory is false. False false false. It's nothing but a piling on of one assumption after another, nothing but a castle in the air built of specul.ation. They really think it's science. THEY REALLY DO. tHERE IS NO FACT ANYWHERE IBN THE WHOLE MISERABLE MESS BUT NO MATTER, IT'S SCIENCE. iF YOU SAY OH IT'S ONLY A THEORY THEY SAY YES BUT THAT'S ALL SCIENCE EVERYIS. uM, BUT THE THEORY OF GRAVITY IS A VERY DIFFEREHNT THING FROM THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION. tHEY CAN GIVE ALL SORT OF ACTUAL FACTS FOR GRAVITY, FACTS AND FORMULAS AND SO ON. sAME WITH eINSTEIN'S FORMULA. bUT But for Darwinian evolution nothing but clever speculations. Yes, still. Not just Darwin's but everything they've added to it. It's not science. It's not science.

But of course that will get me about as far as I get trying to argue that it's the vaccinated, not the unvaccinated, who are spreading the Corona virus. Sent to the gulag, the gulag of being ignored and ridiculed in this case though the unvaccinated seem to be destined for a more substantial gulag. Lbr<
A bird is a bird is a bird is a bird. Sparrow or ostrich or penguin or flamingo. There is a birdness to birds that makes them birds. A dogness to dogs, a catness to cats etc. It's in the body plan, the basic structure. That never varies. You'd think it would if evolution were true, if birds were realated to dinosaurs for instance. But no, a bird is a bird. Cat body plan doesn't vary either, it doesn't shade off here and there to some other body plan, it's always a cat body plan whether it's a lion or a tabby housecat. I don't know why I got into this one, it's only one of dozens of ways o9f showing that evolution is a b ig fat fraud.

But of course it wouldn't matter a whole lot since it really has absolutely no practical consequance. Yes that's true but they'll deny that too because they appropriate things that aren't evolution to evolution and call them evolution. Sign. But the reason it matters is that this fraud of a "theory" is destroying the foundations of western civilization. First it brought the Bible into question. They oh so earnestly say but golly gosh all the good things in religions are still there even if science has proven some of it wrong. Doesn't work that way. The Bible is God's word. ALL of it is true. Darwin set himself against God and silly fallen humanity bought it.

I wish wish wish I could show them how they are wrong but of course I can't. Since it's all a mental fabrication it can't be falsified. Why can't they see it though? For one thing they probably never try to address the theory itself, they spend all their time looking at living creatures and using the evollutionary tag words to describe what they observe. It's all a word game.

Makes me hope the Pre-Tribulation Rapture is coming very very soon.


asnd yet of course I want people to be saved. But as long as they "know" that"sicence" is the truth and the Bible is false fat chace even of that. Well, let's not run away with this now, God is the one who saves and no stupid fallen science can stop Him.

Meanwhile we're being lied to in a million other ways these days. Lethal ways.

Where the Last Post Was Trying to Go and Almost Went

It's not all that much a racial thing, what sort of civilization or culture you get. It is to some extent but in the case of Western Civilization and its unique achievements in human rights which Loury rightly says belong to him as much as to any of us who inherited that legacy, it should be ascribed to the influence of Christianity,. I know that's "Controversial" among the atheistic secularists who run things today, it's a truth that needs to be recovered.

Whereever Christianity took hold it would have transformed a culture in the same direction, it just happened to take hold more in the West than anywhere else. Not without detours and conflicts, a millennium of pagan Roman Catholicsm mixed with the Christian influence and so on, the mixture of iron and clay described of the final Empire in Daniel perhaps. The Magna Carta was forged during that period, and that is certainly one of the historical milestones on the way to the rights and freedoms the American founders aimed to establish.

Such concepts come from God, they certainly don't come from fallen human nature, but what Christ did for us on the cross was make it possible for our nature to be transformed. He overcame the effects of the Fall for all those who belong to Him, who are born again, born of the SPirit, growing in conformity to the character of CHhrist. Under that influence society as a whole grew more and more into the character of Christ. Infants the pagan world abandoned to die, the dlderly the pagan world put out to die, the sick, the unwanted for whatever reason, were erescued by those under the influence of Christ and given shelter. Hospitals were started, orphanages were started, all the provisions for the weak that have now been taken over by government were started by Christians.

And from the same source came the concepts of rights and freedoms that led to the curtailment of overbearing kings. None of this could have come from the pagan world. It isn't in fallen human nature to free the slaves or regard humanity as created equal. That comesw from God. That comes from the understanding that human beings are made in the image of God. The concept of natural rights comes from that same source, we are born into rights because we are made in the image of God.

All this needs to be recovered, and that today is certain to be an uphill battle because the fallen mind has reasserted its contrary vision. The Enlightenmentnt to which American liberties are ascribed these days was really such a reassertment of the fallen nature. The liberties that derive from the biblical God were at least partly reshaped in the image of fallen humanity, and we can see where that goes by looking at the bloodbath of the French Revolution. We can also see a twisting of biblical concepts in Communism. Their twisting makes a tyranny out of what in the Christian context is genuine liberty.

I wanted to watch Christ Pinto's latest film again, the one titled "The True Christian History of America" but my eyes are so bad I couldn't make all the right buttons function for me. I tried to watch it at Amazon but for the first time they asked me to sign in and I could barely see the sign-in form, and what I managed to enter kept getting rejected so I don't get to watch the film again. But I think he did a good job of putting together the Christian foundations of the rights and freedoms of the West that came down to the American Constitution.

We need an army of scholars pursuing these points and pushing back against the resurgence of tyhrannies. What we need is a sweeping revival, a HOly ASpirit revival, of Christ in our world.

That's the legacy of the West Glenn Loury possesses, but we're in a time when it is rapidly getting swallowed up in the paganism it once overthrew, and in twisted redefinitions of its own contributions. But a genuine revival of true docttrine through the Holy Spirit, would transform this nation and potentially the whole world back to the original vision of the American founders. Glenn Loury wants to see black communities themselves make the changes that would bring them into the prosperity and peace promised by the Constitution, but what I'm saying is that for this to happen requires a great move of God in those communities. When people are brought under conviction of the Holy Spirit they emancipate the slaves, they abandone crime and establish a rational system of justice, they seek the good of their neighbors, they promote sane education, they establish orderly societies. T

There's a lot standing in the way of such a recovery. We have decades of twisted laws and politices that need to be undone, we havde a couple centuries of pagan claims to "science" such as evolutionary theroy that has contribued greate greatly to the destruction of western civilization, now Marxism , COmmunism, have taken hold of people. Aand as I keep noting, it doesn't look like God is going to give us the revival we need. I haven't comjpletely given up hope but ....

A Mess of a Post Staring with the Black Intellectuals such as Sowell and Loury and Leapfrogging Wildly to the Feet of God

If I had another lifetime I think I'd want to read all of Thomas Sowell's books. I'm sure he's not the only one I'd want to read at such length but he's the one I'm thinking about at the moment, and that's because I just heard a discussion about him on the Glenn Loury Show at You Tube, with Loury, John McWhorter, and guest Jason Riley who wrote a biography of Sowell.

These guys are thinkers. I want to say the best of the thinkers these days seem to be blacks. I don’t know if that’s true but that’s how it hits me.



Then I heard another Loury podcast with guest Heather MacDonald who is new to me, and within the first six minutes she said something that blew me away because it is so true and I’m so glad somebody finally said it that way. Here’s that podcast:



She said she’d been reading books by major black writers – Frederick Douglass, DuBois, Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver and others, and although she sees the “1619 Project” as wrong as history, she found something in that and the other accounts of black experience very sympathetic to the point of calling Loury’s own position in support of the principles of the American founding to be amazingly magnanimous, since “we don’t deserve you.” She said that it was remarkable that a black man could take such a generous position considering the “gratuitous humiliation” whites had subjected blacks to over the years, using also the terms “gratuitous sadism” and “gratuitous nastiness,” and it was those terms that made the crucial point for me. *

Yes, I’ve seen that gratuitous cruelty against blacks, even in parts of my own family. Not very often, it was highly subdued and some family members who turned out to hold such views never expressed them in my hearing, I found out about it later. So I grew up thinking my family was blessedly free of such attitudes for the most part, it was only the odd cousin, the odd aunt who once in a great while said something denigrating about blacks that was so out of context I didn’t know what to do with it. I was pretty strongly antiracist though in a passive way, and thought I got it from my family but now I’m not sure where it came from. School? Church? Other family members?

But I’d certainly heard racist expressions from people outside the family and even in recent years, when Obama was President, I was astonished to hear a Christian denounce him for being black while I was denouncing him for being a Communist and his blackness had nothing to do with it to my mind. THAT blew me away, and then when MacDonald described the attitude of some whites to blacks as gratuitously vicious I recognized how exactly she’d identified that mindset and I needed to be reminded of it in those terms..

So I know it still exists here and there though I agree with her that it’s mostly been done away with in our time and systemic racism is certainly gone. And although I understand what she meant about her surprise at Loury’s generosity considering such mistreatment by whites I just see him as able to transcend his own personal experiences,whatever they might have been because he is a true thinker who can appreciate the philosophical bedrock of the American founding apart from the inherent sinfulness of fallen humanity. I’ve always admired that about him specifically, he has the best grip on these issues of anyone I’ve heard.

While today’s leftist are busy trying to kill America itself as fundamentally flawed by racism, he knows that, on the contrary,fundamentally America was originally designed to be the only answer to it we have, it’s the principles of the founding that brought slavery, and ultimately also racism to an end and without those founding principles there would be no recourse against it. Slavery countinues to thrive in the rest of the world without no such principles to oppose it. Loury appreciates that those principles were the fruit of centuries of western civilization.

She’d started out praising a speech Loury had given at a National Conservatism Conference sometime in the previous year, and since I love Loury I looked it up and was reduced to tears by it. Here it is:



No, he is not just being magnanimous in embracing the principles of the American founding as his own inheritance, his own worldview, over all the mistreatment of blacks by whites in this country. He knows they are not the essence of America, they are fallen human beings acting in spipte of the principles he embraces as an American. He knows that it was those principles that finally made it possible to bring the injustices to an end. The legacy of the west that ended slavery in the west and nowhere else on the planet, is his The humanitarian achievementys of the West are his, and America as the finest embodiment of those virtues are his. .

He doesn’t talk in terms of fallen human nature as I do but the concept is implicit in his thinking. The main framers of the Republic had the fallenness of humanity at the center of their vision of government, aiming to prevent any individual or group from acquiring power to the point of focing the rest of the wountry to submit to their will, which is what the fallen human nature will do when given free rein. We see this happening now as these principles designed to keep such power in check are being ignored. What is happ-ening is a coup, the destruction of the Consitution that would protect us from such tyranny if it were obeyed. We’ve seen it eroded step by step over the last century by twisting its own principles against it. So what Loury is lauding is its original intent and that is what we need to recover it we are to save the nation.

I suppose I should try to unpack that last paragraph but it’s more than this post could bear so I won’t. The point is that we are losing what Loury recognizes as the essence of America. Marxism is in its very nature treason against the American vision but even Marxism couldn’t prevail if that vision remained intact. That is why it is destroying it.

The fallenness the framers sought to keep in bounds is threatening to overthrow it all. Not the racism that was once out of control but now the antiracism that pretends it still exists when it doesn’t any more. The problem with a Constitutional government is that the people who run the government have to understand what it means and have the courage to apply and defend it. As John Adams said, the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people, it is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. Now that we are no longer a moral and religious people it is fallenness that is taking control. We haven’t been alert enough and it’s already torn down much of it going back decades.

The achievements of the West, of the Constitution of the US, are the fruit of the CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE OF THE WEST. This is the perspective that needs to be recovered. It is hardly ever recognized--it's been co-opted to the Enlightenment and that's what Loury also says --but it is crucial. The rights and freedoms Loury embraces could not have sprung from any fallen source. The only solution, the ONLY solution to the current breakdown of western society and government is a return to our Christian roots. We can’t put the Constitution back together without God. Once the fallen nature, the unbelievers, have control, it can only continue to disintegrate. Revival on a nationwide scale, God coming among His people to reform us and strengthen us, God’s Spirit drawing millions into His kingdom, that’s the revival we need. And I still don’t know if it’s possible, if we have enough spiritual strength to be heard, if we need to make some reforms before He’ll listen, if He’s already determined that it’s time for judgment and too late for recovery. I don’t know.

========

* I realized later that I didn't really say why Heather MacDonald's description of the gratuitous humiliation of blacks by whites had such an impact on me and by now, a couple days later I have to scramble to recover it. I think of it this way: I'm used to the idea that blacks suffered from unfair laws in the Jim Crow era, and used to thinking of racism as a predominantly southern phenomenon even though I could point to instances of it across the country if I stopped to consider it. What MacDonald's description did was make it close and personal, a matter of countless individuals with a racist mindset, a mindless mindset that had no foundation at all that anyone could tell, just a completely senseless attitude, a hatred without a basis. And her expression brought it into my own family in a way the historical facts of unfair laws didn't. So I was able to appreciate what she was saying about being able to accept something in the historically false 1619 Project for instance, and no doubt the writings of the radicals she'd been reading. The scholarship of that recent book is ridiculous but it impressed on her the pervasiveiveness of that gratuitous meanness, and her putting it in those terms impressed it on me too. There's nothing inherently any more racist in whites than any other peoples of the world, evidenced by the fact that it seems to be almost completely eradicated by now, not completely but almost, but there's no denying that for more than half of the previous century sprobably most whites held to that attitude of gratuitous meanness.

Keeping it alive as today's leftists want to do does no service to blacks or the country as a whole, and Loury is quite right to lay claim to the legacy of western civilization as his own because he's an American, and apparently the generations of the last few decades are blessedly free of the racist mistreatments their fathers and grandfathers had endured.

Spurgeon the Christ-Bearer

Spurgeon has lately become for me a deep well of wisdom and comfort through many of his sermons that are online and read by a surprisingly congenial voice. Some preachers open the scriptures to the hungry soul, but Spurgeon, I hope I'm not just using hyperbole, brings Christ Himself to the the hungry soul. His words carry Christ. If you are open to receiving Him. I'm discovering this with every session of listening.

God told Abraham, "I am thy exceeding great reward." Not just salvation, not temporal blessings, but God Himself is our exceeding great reward. One of Spurgeon's themes is passages from the Song of Solomon, and Spurgeon himself conveys Christ in such a way as to make the hearer say with the Shulamite, "I am sick with love" -- that is powerful preaching.

As the deer panteth for the water brooks, so pants my soul after Thee. It is a rare preacher who can convey God at that level. He was immersed in God.

The world is disintegrating before our eyes. I want to be a force for good in it. That can only come from God. People have some good ideas but in the end the only power that could accomplish anything of value comes from God.

Footnote: Yes in a sense there is no distinction to be made between scripture which is Christi's words and Christ Himself but I'm trying to say something about how Spurgeon's preaching has a way of bringing a sense of the presence of Christ Himself in his preaching while other preachers may bring a deep understanding of doctrine and that's hugely important and it's Christ in a different way. It's hard to get this said right. I feel I touch the Spirit through Spurgeon in a way I don't always with other preachers, even the best preachers. He restoreth my soul.

Part 2 on the COVID Nightmare by Understanding the Times radio

Part 1 last week is posted below. Among other things it covered a couple of horror stories about people hospitalized with COVID who died of mistreatment by the hospital. This week Part 2 starts with the situation in Europe where the unvaccinated are being severely restricted, causing protests. Another case of hospital mistreatment is described, and a guide is referenced to help people to deal with COVID if they get it. Avoiding hospitalization is the number one advice.
Both parts are on the Olive Tree Views website radio archives page.
Archives Page

Charles Spurgeon, film about his life -- AND ANOTHER CALL TO THE HEAD COVERFING FOR WOMEN

This little film just happened to come up on my screen, about the life of Charles Spuurgeon, known as "The Prince of Preachers" who became hugely popular as a preacher in Lonbdon in the 19the century
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Spurpgeon had a great impact on the church and his writings are still available. It's hard to believe that there ever was a time in England when a preacher of the gospel could have been so popular and influential. We need another Sprrgeon.

UPDATE: Spurgeon's impact on England and indeed the world might fairly be called a revival, again tnot the dramatic sort of revival I have in mind when I pray for it, but it has to be called a revival when so many people are impacted for the gospel and a great effect in social reforms is one of the results as it was in response to Spurpgeon's preachibng.

And note please, that the women in his day all covered their heads in church. Since this is an argument I often make, that it may well be that God will not bless us with revival because we have abandoned this one simple but important requirement as preached by the apostle Paul, this is another opportunity to say so. Again, the whole point of the requirement to cover our heads is based on God's creation ordinance of the hierarchy of headship, Christ over man, man over woman. Headship is not tyranny or domination, it's a simple ordering of roles and authorities. Giving it up was suspiciously aligned with the growth of liberalism in the churches, and feminism, both worldly values that undermine the biblical authority.

So I have to say it again: IT MAY BE THAT WE CANNOT HAVE REVIVAL UNTIL WE REINSTATE THIS SIMPLE BASIC OUTWARD OBEDIENCE TO GOD'S ORDERING OF HEADSHIP.

Evolutionary Assumptions Should Drive You Crazy, If You Think About Them At All Carefully.

Just a teensy little example.

He says we are able to think logically because logic serviced our ancestors well and got passed on in the evolutionary pathway to modern man.

Sigh

Surely if they spent any time at all thinking through just how any of this could happen as they so blithely assert that it happened, they'd have to come to the realization that it could not have happened as they so blithely assert that it happened. Surely. If you spend any time at all thinking through how the reptilian ear could have evolved into the mammalian ear you MUST come to the concluseion that it could not have happened, and all the assurances that it just took a lot of time don't substitute for that thinking through.

Sigh.

We think logically because God thinks lobiccally and He made us in His image.