Learning to Live
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Christians are ready to die, for we know what awaits us on the other side. We know death is the doorway that leads to true, eternal life. Death is not the end, but only the beginning.
Readiness to die is the first step in learning to live.
(J.I. Packer)
Are you ready to die? Perhaps this morbid question haunts you. Maybe it makes you anxious. Either way, it’s one of the most important questions you’ll ever answer; for we cannot truly live until we answer that question. Furthermore, we cannot authentically live until our answer is Yes.
Our culture is terribly afraid of death. We have seen this fear escalated exponentially due to Covid. We do everything within our power to not face death. As a result, what many end up doing is either avoiding the question or answering honestly with a No.
Society, for the most part, avoids the death question.
Millions of people walk through life with apathy regarding the prospect of death. They simply don’t care enough to ponder the question. They are concerned about the here and now—not eternity. It’s foolishness, and they have better things to do with their time. They push it away as much as they can.
What saddens me is the myriad of people who avoid the question because they don’t want to talk about the things in life that matter most. This is partly why it’s taboo to talk religion with people—to many, it’s awkward and uncomfortable. They either squirm or get offended when any disagreement takes place.
More than anything, however, it shows people don’t want to face the reality of death, so they ignore it. They know it‘s coming—as it comes for everybody—but to ponder if they’re ready, that means facing the big things in life head on. And, well, that’s just too serious.
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Social Justice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere
Written by Daniel J. Samet |
Monday, November 13, 2023
Sowell makes it clear that the state should reject the social justice vision and its agenda. The natural end point, he states, is “having government empower surrogate decision-makers to rescue victims of various forms of mistreatment by taking many decisions out of other people’s hands” (82). Our ever-growing administrative state is full of people convinced that others cannot be trusted to do what is best for themselves. We’re left with policies putting the lie to the world envisioned by social justice advocates. Sowell points out “the painful reality . . . that no human being has either the vast range of consequential knowledge, or the overwhelming power, required to make the social justice ideal become a reality” (127).
Another year, another book by Thomas Sowell. It is astonishing that Sowell, 93 years young, scarcely appears to be slowing down. No public intellectual of his generation has been this prolific for this long, save perhaps Henry Kissinger. He’s a veritable national treasure.
Social Justice Fallacies is classic Sowell. There are no graphs or tables, nor even any cover art. The one and only attraction of the book is Sowell’s air-tight reasoning. It alone justifies the price tag.
Within its pages is his salvo in our culture war du jour. At a time when activists, scholars, and politicians trot out slogans like “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “systemic bias,” Sowell has a biting retort. He argues that the social justice agenda they champion is mistaken. It is based on flawed premises and conclusions, inevitably leading to social policies that harm the people they’re supposed to help.
“You’re entitled to your own opinion,” reads the book’s epigraph, a quote from the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” That’s one way to describe the essence of Sowell’s writing. He does not assert anything without evidence in its defense. If only peddlers of social justice pieties could do the same. To rebut Sowell’s arguments, they will need many facts: facts that do not seem to be in abundance, to put it mildly.
Take their view that there would be equal outcomes in a world of equal chances, which is the subject of the book’s first chapter. “At the heart of the social justice vision is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities, these disparities are evidence or proof of the effects of such human vices as exploitation and discrimination,” Sowell writes (2).
Do human vices explain why NHL players from Canada outnumber those from the United States, despite the fact that Canada has under 1/8th the population of the United States? Why Germans have for centuries been world leaders in beer production? Why Asian Americans have more PhDs in engineering than blacks and Hispanics combined? Why first-born and only children are more likely than other children to reach the highest rungs of the professional ladder as adults? Sowell shows that much else besides exploitation and discrimination accounts for inequality of outcome.
Advocates of social justice deploy flashy terms to justify their agenda, but not hard evidence. “We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of the proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition— in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history,” observes Sowell (2–3). He, however, deploys many past and present examples of the reverse from places as varied as Italy, Malaysia, and South Africa.
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Book Review: Butterfield and Five Lies of Our Age
There’s no question that the West is becoming increasingly antagonistic towards Christianity. One reason for this is that the ever-expanding LGBT agenda is deeply incompatible with biblical Christianity. In our age of ‘self,’ choice and rights are paramount, and no one has the right to tell someone else what to do (unless, of course, you are correcting a Christian).
Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age speaks into our context, unpacking how we arrived at our current state. Butterfield gives a biblical diagnosis and prognosis of our predicament, outlining the key issues at stake. For this reason, it is a critical book for our day and age.
The author, Rosaria Butterfield, was formerly engaged in a homosexual relationship and worked as a radical feminist academic at Syracuse University in New York. After a radical encounter with Jesus Christ, her life was irrevocably changed. She now serves the Lord as a writer, speaker, and homemaker, sharing the good news of Jesus and its transformative power.
As the title suggests, the book provides biblical truths in response to five lies prevalent today:Lie #1: Homosexuality is Normal.
Lie #2: Being a Spiritual Person is Kinder than being a Biblical Christian.
Lie #3: Feminism is Good for the World and Church.
Lie #4: Transgenderism is Normal.
Lie #5: Modesty is an Outdated Burden that Serves Male Dominance and Holds Women Back.You ought to buy the book to receive all it has to offer, but here are some key points I took away:
1. The Lie of Gay Christianity
In Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age, Butterfield cautions Christians against jumping on the ‘Gay Christianity’ bandwagon. This movement describes homosexuality as an identity rather than a behaviour, refuses to identify homosexual lust as sinful (cf. Matthew 5:27), and embraces LGBT language in Christian activities (i.e., diversity, inclusion, hate speech, etc.).
Butterfield argues that ‘Homosexual orientation is a man-made theory about anthropology [which] comes from atheistic worldviews that coalesced in the nineteenth century in Europe.’ (p. 65) The Freudian idea of ‘sexual orientation’ is an anti-biblical concept which must therefore be rejected by the church.
She reflects on her own deception before becoming a Christian:
“Instead of lesbianism being who I was, I now understood it as both a lack of righteousness and a wilful transgressive action. I was no victim. I was no “sexual minority” needing a voice in the church. I needed to grow in sanctification—just like everyone else in the church.” (p. 49)
She continues:
“I learned that we repent of sin by hating it, killing it, turning from it. But we also “add” the virtue of God’s word. It is light that changes darkness. The Bible calls us to mortify (kill) and vivify (enliven). I realized that Christians are given a new nature, yet we have sin patterns that we need to kill, to be sure.” (p. 49)
‘Gay Christianity’ is not only anti-Christian, but it denies salvation to those in the snares of sexual sin. It negates the possibility of freedom from disordered sexual desires and does not appreciate the power of the cross to free captives from their sin. On the contrary, the gospel offers a better narrative.
First, those who have engaged in homosexuality — in thought or deed — need not view themselves as permanently enslaved to their desires. Instead, God calls them, as he does all people, to repent and believe in the gospel, that they may have everlasting life (cf. John 3:16).
Second, it provides freedom and hope to those feeling shackled by their sins. By accepting Christ, we can overcome the deeds of the flesh through the Holy Spirit, including sexual sins. God no longer defines us by our transgressions, as we have been united with Christ. For believers, how beautiful it is to be recognized as a ‘new creation’ rather than being labelled by our sins?
2. Spiritual or Biblical?
In recent times, liberal Christianity has reared its ugly head again. In the name of ‘tolerance,’ liberal Christianity despises exclusive truth claims as bigoted and inhospitable. As J. Gresham Machen, author of Christianity and Liberalism wrote in 1923:
“The movement designated as “liberalism” is regarded as “liberal” only by its friends; to its opponents it seems to involve a narrow ignoring of many relevant facts.”[1]
Similar to the climate of the early 1900s, there is now a push in the West to distinguish ‘Biblical Christianity’ from ‘Spiritual Christianity.’ In other words, your relationship with Jesus is more important than your doctrine.
Butterfield challenges the false dichotomy between spiritual and biblical, suggesting that true spiritual only flows from biblical Christianity. Unless spirituality is tethered to the truths of Scripture, it is nothing more than subjectivism.
Butterfield echoes the words of Peter Jones, who suggests, ‘Spirituality has become a do-it-yourself life hobby that blends ancient Eastern practices with modern consumer sensibilities.’[2]
She explains why only biblical Christianity provides the strength and power we need to resist worldly lies:
“What makes one child’s faith stand against the world and another fall in conformity to it? The word of God is our answer. And the word of God is an answer of hope. Jesus is our hope, and he is not done with any of us.” (p. 124)
Biblical faith is grounded in the promises of God as revealed in His Word. Unlike the chaff of ‘spiritual Christianity,’ biblical Christianity is anchored in real promises of hope, joy, and peace for those who repent and believe.
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Lord of Hosts
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