False Ideas Have Evil Consequences: Marxism

 Thomas Sowell in an interview on the program Uncommon Knoweldge, which can be found on You Tube, said the reason he wsas first attracted to Marxas its  was its simple explanation for porverty, that the rich are righ and the poor are poor because the rich take from thew poor.    

Eventually he came to see how false that idea is but it's an incredibly popular idea among many othersw, and in fact in our day is probably what runs the world.  Into the ground.  I don't know if it's the red hot center of the rpproblem it feels to me to be, but something in Marxism is certainly that red not center.   Marxism is the enemy of everything sane and real.  And it dominates everything these days, having grown over the last five or six decades into a voracious monster that is eating up everything that makes life worthiwhile.  Yes it's totalitarian and maybe the pithy red hot center lies somewhere in that term rather than the economic term, I don't know, I'm trying to find the best way to think about it.  

Recently somebodey on the Rogan show said something so irrational and evil it left my stomach in knots.  Instead of complaining about all the illegal aliens coming across our border now we should be encouraging more to come because it's just unfair that America has so much wealth and prosperity and good things that most of the rest of the world lacks that it's only right that they overrun us and take it away from us to equalize things and make things fair.  I don't know how he bput it, I've forgotten but that's the gist of it.  I don't even remember his name.  Chris something I think.

A crimninal idea.  Utterly irrational, utterly at odds with reality, a receipte for not only a total crash from that prosperity but a recipte for murder in the end, the death of millions in the end.  

I guess I'm not to call this liberalism but there are people who call themsevles liberals who hold such crazy ideas.  Ldeftists is another world for it.  Also Marxism, socialism, communism.  All of it.  The most even destructive ideas ever  allowed to increase to a dominating role in the world.  How did we let this happen?

Listen to that discussion on Uncommobn Knoweldge with Thomas Sowell.  Good stuff.  How the welfare state had a destructive effect on the black community rather than the other way around which is what is commonly thought.  Decreased prosperity, decreased success, increased crime, the whole jmess.

I've been wondering why  the thinkers who most attract my interest in recent years are blacks, the black public interllectuals as they call themselves, such as Thomas Sowell.   I think maybe it's because in their quest to understand the deteriorating condition of the black community they often arrive at this sort of recognition, that the liberal or leftist solutions are really the problem, and in arrivcing at that conclusion they illuminate the general problem of Marxism in the world these days and its destructive effect on America.  How it's the seedbed of so many of our current nightmarish insanities, so much of it traceable to this perverted idea of equality or equity or social engineering that has no understanding at all of human nature or economic or social realities and forces people into nonsensical abstract ideas that kill everything good and decent.

Marxism seems to be the perfect demented ideology to reflect the fallen condition of humanity.  As a Christian I see the Christian worldview as the intellectual frameworld for all good things in this fallen world, and the natural habits of fallen humanity as the contrasticg opposite.  Thomas Sowell has a book out titled A Conflict of Visions in which he contrasts what he called the Constrained Vision with the Unconstrained vision and I'm hopint go get it through my audible books for the blind.   

Sowell's Constrained View is apparently more or less synonymous with conservativism, and I'd like to find out how closely both views align with the Christian Worldview.  Seems to me it is this arena of thought that we could find the solutions to the destruvie trends we are suffering from these days.  But it would take bringing such ideas into focus for libersals and leftists to make suha difference.  Something I heard recently, some talk show or other I suppose, said that Constitution Day, which recnetly came and went, on September seventeenth, was oritginally conceived to ba a day in which all the schools spend the entire day studying and Constitution of the United Stes, but somehow that idea got dropped and now nobody even knmows there is such a day.  But wow, what a differnece that would have made if it had bwen practiced.  Wow.  And  think the whole nation, not just the schools, need a day like that, a day when all the tv shows and radio shows and special gatherings, conrferences and so on, are aimed at educating us on the meaning of our American institutions, which so few of us understand at all these days.  Wow do we need that.

Yes I thinki the Constitution is probably a great example of the Constrained vision  I don't know, I haven't heard Sowell say so, but as he defined the vision as far as I've heard anyway it's pretty clear the Constittuion aims at a restraining of the passions of fallen humanity so that tyranny and totalitarianism are presevented.  Of course when you just throw out all the restrains or redefine the Constitution to mean something other than what it was intended to mean, which is of course what has been going on for decades now, it exerts none of the good influences on the nation it was inteneded to do.  The amoujmt of recovery needed to bring that back is staggering.

I think Mark Levin's book The Democrat Party Hates America is going to do a good job of defining how all the destructive evil ideas we are suffering from reside in that party.  That's a playce to start.  As might be Eric Metaxas' books "If You Can Keep It" and "Letter to the American Church>"  Kind of foundational principles we need to recognize.  All of us.

As usual I feel mistakes galore getting tapped out under my fingers and I can't see so I can't go back and correct them and all I an do is hope the resultant garbling doesn't make my message incoherent beyond usefulness.  

Ineffable GodD

True religion confronts earth with heaven and brings eternity to bear upon time.

PPreface to The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer

cAN WORDS LEAD US TO gOD?  wELL, IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE wORD.  bUT ON THE OTHER HAND MAYBE THE BEST THEY CAN DO IS STEER US AWAY FROM THINGS THAT AREN'T gOD.  aND THAT'S A GOOD THING IN ITSELF FOR SURE.

rAPT ADORATION.  oF WHAT.  sOMETIMES JUST RAPT ADORATION ITSELF IT SEEMS, THOUGH THERE IS A SENSE THAT THE OBJECT OF IT gOD, gOD NOT HAVING ANY CLEAR DEFINTION OR SHAPE OR CONCEPT AT ALL.  

i'M BABBLING.  bUT i LOST gOD AND i WANT hIM BACK.  i LOST hIM YEARS AGO AND i WANT hIM BACK.  i DON'T KNOW HOW i FOUND hIM IN THE FIRST PLAYCE, THAT'S THE PROBLEM, BUT i HAD hIM FOR A LONG TIME AND NOW i DON'T.  rAPT ADORATION.

oNE OF THE POETS WROTE ABOUT THE MERE THOUGHT OF gOD FILLING US WITH SWEETNESS.  yES THE MERE THOUGHT AND YET THE THOUGHT ISN'T OF ANYTHING THAT CAN BGE DESCRIB3ED.  iT IS JUTS "gOD" AND THERE IS THE SWEETNESS.

i TMAKES THE AUTHEIST DEBATES LUDICROUS.  tHERE IS NO WAY TO ANSWER THIS SORT OF THING AND THERE IS NOTHING THEY CAN SAY TO TURN ONE AWAY FROM IT.  

hAV YOU EVER NOTICED THAT SOMETIMES A cHRISTIAN WILL ACTUALLY SMACK HER LIPS AT THE IDEA OF gOD?  iVE SEEN IT.  THAT'S WHAT IT IS.  TASTE AND SEE THAT THE lord IS GOOD.  tHE nAME OF gOD MAY BE ENOUGH TO BRING THE TASTE OF gOD.

tHE MERE HOUGHT OF gOD, THOUGH THERE IS NO TOHOUGHT OF ANYTHING DESCRIBABLE.

iF gOD IS NOT THE ORIGIN OF EVERYTHING, IF SOME STUPID IDEA SUCH AS EVOLUTION INTERVENES i SUPPOSE IT IS SIMPLY IMOSSIBLE TO HAVE SUCH AN EXPERIENCE.  iF YOU HAVE EVOLUTION YOU SIMPLY DO NOT HAVE gOD, YOU CAN'T HAVE gOD.  TAKE YOUR PICK

Later:  I don't mean to imply that God is not with me at all because He is.  He is sometimes a presence I feel even , especially in His Word, and He answers my prayers or some of them.  He has not left me.  I only mean that because I let myself fritter away my own time on worldly things, however good some of them are in themselves, I lost my much more continuous sense of Him that I had for may years after I was saved, when my attention was almost exclusively on Him.  Now my attention is scattered and I don't know how to get back that blissful easy concentration on god that I once had.  

Gospel Weapons To Save America

 Starting with Eric Metaxas's book Letter to the American Church, which as I keep saying I haven't yet read, or heard, I've been definitieoloy drawn into the theme of recovering this miserably damaged nation we live in, despite the strong feeling that the Lord is right at the door ready to return and bring it all to an end.  I know that book I haven't yet read is all about calling the Church to speak up for the America we are losing to the destructive forces of the Left, and in response to a prayer for guidance after hearing about that book God told me to wear a MAGA hat.  Yers I'm sure it was God who told me to do that although I haven't yet been out of my apartment so I have yet to obey Him and that does mamke me nervous.  But He seems to be saying yes we need to be working to save this nation.  All of us, whatever role we are in a position to play.

Metaxas' book was the start of it for me.  But I think Levin's new book The Democrat Party Hates America could play a huge role in this effort and that's the next one I want to get through my Services for the Blind Audio Books system.   

It's God who has to guide this and I think He is doing it.  I just heard a great talk by Ben Carson at Classical Christian Schools, Association of Classical Christian Schools, which is where Rosaria Butterfield gave the talk I mentioned in the previous post, Five Lies of our Anti Christian Age.  Carson is talking at a conference called repairing the Ruins which pretty strongly affirms the effort to save the nation.  It's a great talk he gave, fulol of humor and pointed analysis.   

He quoted Skousen who wrote The Naked Communist, another book I need to read, who listed their plans for destroyihng America from sixty years ago which have almost all been fulfilled by now.  Scary stuff.  He also echoed some of my own recent thiemes about the founding of America on CHrisstian principles and de Toqueville's recognition of our religious morality as our strength.  that being what we've lost above all.  And Skousen pointed out that the Communist list of goals focused on destroying our moral foundations.  That has certainly been accomplished.

The one thing we need above all is the recovery of the biblical worldview that launched the nation \, the biblical mjorality if nothing else but a huge movement of evangelism to bring in millions of converts would be the most powerful effect if the Lord would grant it.   

I know I'm repeating myself a lot lately but \\\\ but it's SO imortant.  All those churches that Rosaria B identified as traoitors and cowards for refusing to stand for God's word over the claims of the LGBT etc etc they all need to wake up and repent and ive themselves to the Lord's work, skhaking off the tentacles of the world.  If the Church repented and focused on doing the Lord's work this evil national and even global menace could be overthrown in short order.

Still Hoping God will Give Us Recovery of the Nation and the Church

 The Lord sent George Whitefield to America a few decades before the American Revoluition, and his impact on the nation that was ultimately formed is considered by most historians to be enormous.  Eric Metaxas in his little book, If Youi Can Keep It, treats it as the essential consolidating culturual influence that made the new nation possible, a nation based on self-government, something that had never existed in the world to that point, a nation without a king or other despot, a nation of laws that could only be held together by what the main founders considered to be a religious and moral poeople.  As John Adams, the form of government they crafted was inadquate for anyother kind of people.  

I keep coming back to this but never feel I've said it enough or even appreciated it enough myself.  It is frighteningly clear that we are no longer such a nation, that we once were, as attested pricipally by Alexis De Toqueville, but no longer are.  Relgious and moral?  You've got to be kidding.  Of course we aren't and that's the way it should be, we don't need any of that nonsense in order to be America, in order to have the freedoms we were given, of course not.  We're good enough just as we are, rotten to the core as we are.

But the signs are pretty clear these days that we are headed toward a totalitarian tyhranny and in fact are already in the beginning phase of such atyranny, almost already a police state, in which we are not allowed to speak as we will unless we speak what the powers want us to speak.  We are to be censored and cancelled if we oppose them, and they are many, very  mamany.  Not just in the government, but in businesses and coroporations that can just pull our jobs out from under us, and on social media who can just pull us off the platform and silence us.  Here and there people are being thrown in jail, some pastors in Canada a few years agov for opposing the vaccine mandate there, and now we've got this horrendous jailing of people who committed nothing more than walking around the building getting slapped with long sentences in one of the worst jails in the country.   And on trumped up invented crimes they wnat to do the same to our ex president.  It's all partisan, it's all political, it's all done by the left against the right.  Sure it could be a different order I suppose, but at this time that's what it is, left against right and with a ferocious power and astonishing level of hatred and malice.  

Justice is corrupted, all normal ethics and morals are corrupted, that's the only way this could be happening as it is.  Satan succeeded in corrupting the nation, the people of the nation, and buidling up his stronghold on the left, and that's what is happening to our once free nation.  

ric Metaxas wrote another book, Letter to the American Church, in which he exhorts the church to fight for America against these trends.  I haven't read it yet, can't get the aubible version yhet but I hope I will soon.  He's one who thinks we still have a chance to reclaim our heritage.  I hope he's right.  Well, I'm sure he's right about the method.  I'm not so sure that the Church will rise to the occasion.

Another powerful voice that could make a huge difference if people read him in the numbers he deserves to be read, is Mark Levin, in his latest book, The Democrat Party Hates America.  It's just out and early responses show that it has th epower to change minds toward a reclaiming of what we have lost.  I haven't read this one yet either though I've heard a lot of it discussed on Levin's radio show and hope to get to hear an audible version soon.  It sounds like a real game changer if it gets the audience it needs.

And all this needs to be buttressed by prayer, prayer, prayer and more prayter.  Oh God have mercy on us, we don't deserve it, we've let this nation come under the power of evil forces, oh give us the ability to raise our voices in the mnillions for Your help now, change us, lead us to repentance, wake us up and save our nation.  Oh yes you promised that if we give up our wickedness and call on Your name you will heal our land.  You told Solomon that back when he dedicated his emple some three thousand years ago but we know it is for us too.

God raises up people of His own wise choice to bring about the changes He is willing to bless us with.  he did that with Whitefield before the revolution and He may be doing it now with Metaxas and Levin and no doubt others.  Jan Markell is probably another I just realized.  But now I'm thinking of one Ijust head, a new talk by Rosaria Butterfield titled Five Lies of Our American Christian Age in which she dismantels the gay rights and transgender corruption through biblical revelation.  Definitely a voice for such a time as this.  Metaxas to call the Church to rise up against the evils, Levin to show us the evil we are fighting so we know what we are to fight, Rosaria to identify one of the biggest strongholds we are up against and equip us with God's weapons against it.

I also like Glenn Loury and his cohort Johhnn McWhorter as fighters of the fight against the cuoprruptions  in this case the Woke stuff, the attempt to destroy the country by racial racial divisiveness and insanity.  I just heard one from a year or so ago titled The Golden Age of Black Heterodoxy in which they lay out some of the terms of the fight.  Well, now that I think about it, I liked that discussion but now I'm not sure it's thebest one for this purpose.  Oh well.  It's a good one anyway and they are always in one way or another attacking the craziness about racie and that is a huge stronghold in today's battle.

But I keep coming back to the formula about a moral and religious people as the foundation for the kind of governm,ent Washington and Adams and jefferson and Frankloin and Paine and others gave us.  We need somewho to reinstate the biblical mindset in this country and so far I don't see that midset as such on the agenda even thoguh I see many trends as listed above that would feed into it.  We need a George Whitefield or somebody or many somebodieies who can bring the gospel back to this natuion.

And as usual, yes we may be at the door of CHrist's return, the Rapture of the CHurch and the Great Tribuoation , the Great Reset in which world totalitarianism under the Antichrist will reign for seven years, and noe n of this recoveriy I'm talking about will have a chance to come about.  May be .  I don't know.    But I have to rmention it.

Rosaria makes clear just how corrupted the churches have becoming, capitulating to the leftist trends that are the cause of our destructon. That has to be overthrown.  Levin makdes it clear that he Democrat Party is who wholly corrupt the whole thing needs to be thrown out.  it's a lot to ask but then God is the God of the impossible.

Biarre new technologies, and demons too

 Over the last year or so I've found out more than I ever wanted to know about Artificial Intelligence and other technologies that carry some pretty portentous possibilities as they get more deveoped and refined, which is happening at a scary pace these days, according to those involvled in it.

It's almost too bizarre to mention, but they claim, some websites claim, some scientists claim, that there is technology that can read our thoughts and implant thoughts in our minds.  Yeah I know, way over the top but even if I don't want to believe it I'm afraid the sincerity of the reports I've found is hard to deny.  Scary stuff.  This kind of thing always suggests demons to me since I know that demons CAN do such things, implant thoughts at least, perhaps read some thoughts.  I've avoidied learning much about demonology because it's so creepy and scary but sometimes I wish I knew more about it.  I've thought for a long time that there is probably a lot of phenomena in this world being ascribed to normal physical or mental sources thta is really caused by demons.  I'm certain of the that in the case of the credible UFO reports.  No wayu any of that can be explained in terms of the physical universe.  It has to have a spiritual origina and what is that but a demonic origin.  Jacquesx Vallee who is not a Christian, arrived at the conclusion that these UFOs don'tbehave like anything in the physical world but do fit much of the folklore of the world, which means they belong to another dimension and not to they phyhsical world.

But technology that can implant thoughts in our minds?  If that isis really possible it gets awfully confusing since I know demons can certainly do that.  hwo would we be able to tell thedifference?  And there are some who see all this sophisticated stuff as occurring in some relation to the demonic.  I don't know how to put it all together but the whole thing is alarming and threatening of something unwelcome coming on the planet.    

Swarms of insect sized drones that can attack and kill people?  All sorts of insects from large to tiny.  Some take pictures, most take pictures but some can carry weaponse of various sorts, even needles to inject us with something or other, or things that can explode and other stuff that gives me the shakes.  For some reason I imagine arming myself with a ping pong paddle.  It's got a hard surface and could bat the things out of the air and perhaps do them some real harm.  Not a tennis racquet, that would only bounce them to some distance, not necessrily hurt them.  But a massive swarm would probably be impossible to deal with.  

I've seen videos of these things, I know they are real, and I suppose here may be more sophisticated version of them thatn those that we can find on  You tube.  Saw a demonstration of a very impressive "fireworks" display done completely by dorones, a thousand of them I belive they said.  Pictures in the sky, the usual exploding pretty displays and all that.  If they can control the things to that degree, make them  do that kind of precision s precision work, wow.  And what if AI is involved in this and reallyh does acquire self=programming powers?  Ow.

And there could still be demons involved in all this too.  Why not.  They are always there and always hating the human race so they have to have a role in it.  At least Christians know we can call on the name of the LORD to protect us, but unbelievers are unprotected.

If It Depends on Moral Virtue Then How Can It e Reinstated?

 Well, God could send us a George Whitefield or something like that.  It would take a supernatural event to make the kind of difference that is needed.  That's what I'm thinking anyway.  I don't see how you reinstate any kind of moral foundation without that sort of power behind it.  People love their fallenness to o much.

It figures of course that we are at the threshhold of the very last days, just a step over and we're into it, the church raptured if the pre trib scenriou is accurated, and the rest of humanity left to suffer mightily for their sins.  

If we are that close to the end it makes no sense tht we could ahve any kind of renewal or revival that would take us back to our moral foundations.  Unless, it just cooccurred to me, for the purpose of reaping a greater harvest than we would without it.  That is, right now the church, the believers, seem a very small number compared to what we could be or have been not too long ago even.  A revival would bring many into the church and then we'd have a lot more in the rapture.

But just focusing on what it would take to take America back to the condidtion described by De Toqueville and envisioned by the founds as necessitating a strong moral people, moral and eligious people, just in an dfor itself.  Just to imagine that much, what would it take?  

I was thinking the essential thing is the Fear of the LORD.  What is that but the sense in the individual that there is a God who is watching and who judges our thoughts and deeds on the basis of His moral law.  That's what he fear of the LORD is all about, keeping the individual afraid of deviating from a righteous response in every situation because God is real and Hell is real.  

That's what we've lost.

How can a travesty of the Law Prevail so easily in this country?

 I don't get it.  Hosw is it that a governor of a state, this Michelle Grisham of New Mexico in this case, can make a decree that violates the sewcond amendment, which is obvious on the face of it to everyone, but it has to go into effect in spite of that and we have to wait for some process or other to unfold before rthe amendment can be reinstated, some legal process.  Meanwhile for the duration the amendment is suspended.  How can that be?  

The same sort of thing is happening right and left these days.  Lawsuits are brought against Trump for instance that I know becuase I know what happened in the original case as it unfolded in the news, that they are bogus cases, tha for instance he was not trying to overthrow an election, he was protesting what he considered to be the illegitimacy of the election, and that was obvious at the time, yet we have to acc3ept this bogus lawsuit, and let it determine how things play out during an election year during which these cases are nothing but interference with the election process, waiting for this ponderous bogus legal situation to play itself out on some program or other that is only a mockery of justice.  Why?  How is it that these theings can happen?

The Constitution, the second amendment, is actually suspended for the duration of the governor's decree.  Actually suspended.  Her law must be obeyed over the Constitution, endorced by the police that are in the power of the state.  How can this be?  How can it be?  We are without the second amendment in New Mexico?  At least that particular expreession of it?  How can that be?  All it takes is some ignorant or malicious official to make a decree and the whole foundation of our government is dissoved?  That's the way it seemjs.  And there is no redress, no immediate recress anyway.  It has to be treated as leigtimate law?  The suspension of the Constitition has to be treated as legitimate law?  What on earth is going on here?

And now I think of the Covid nightmare.  They tell us to mask up although the science says that masks don't prevent tghe virus from being spread through them.  Still we have to bobey this utterly insane law because it has been decreed by some power or other in office.  We have to obey it because it is enforced by police power.  how can this be?  And they can mandate the vaccine for some people in some places and that has to be obeyed too because there are other ways of enforcing it, usch as the threat of losing a job.  Or being denied access to some business or insititution.  

Yes this is totalitarianism and it is being pushed on us these days.  So what are we talking about, the failiure of thta virtue the founders said was necessary to our kind of republic?  We've lost the moral foundation and now we are getting the only possible result, evil or ignorant people make a lwa and push us all around at their whim and we can't do anything about it?