Tal Bachman: Dear Old Testament God, Maybe It's Time For A Comeback Tour

 

Maybe it's age, but I'm starting to warm up to the God of the Old Testament big-time....

A more serious accusation from the God-haters is that the God of the Old Testament isn't just unpleasant—he's evil. And he's evil because he repeatedly committed genocide.

But again, I'm not convinced. Sure, he committed genocide. But that presumes genocide is, by definition, always evil. Maybe God had extenuating circumstances.

Let's see what the Bible says.

God's first genocide was his biggest and most spectacular: the flood. He created mankind, and—well, it just didn't work out. "Every intent of the thoughts of (man's) heart was only evil continually", Genesis reports. But it was the ensuing evil human action which really sealed the deal for God. In a nutshell, "the earth was filled with violence". That means, I assume, colossal rates of murder, beating, rape, child molesting, brutal slavery, and more. Human beings had taken an Edenic paradise and turned it into hell on earth. God wanted a do-over. A hard reset.

So, yeah, God killed everyone, minus Noah and his family. Wouldn't you, if things were that bad? After all, you'd be delivering justice to the wicked, and maybe even mercy to their long-suffering victims. Just thinking out loud here....Hello, God.

I'm just going to come right out and say it: How about a comeback tour?

You fried the sickos in Sodom and Gomorrah. You drowned all those Egyptian slavers. You even wiped out the entire population of the earth, minus Noah and his family. So how about you help us out right now with a special new demographic reset?

READ THE WHOLE THING

God's Creation

Incredible Footage pic.twitter.com/I2pJ01VVV7

— Amazing Innovations (@AmazingInnovat1) February 27, 2022

Be Still and Know That I Am God

 

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelled among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

The upside of defeat in Afghanistan

 

Right now the nation is facing its second defeat in the last 50 years.  First, we were defeated in Viet Nam.  Now we are defeated in Afghanistan.  Tens of thousands of our citizens are trapped behind enemy lines.  The country is reeling from this disaster.  

But there's the upside.  This is a defeat, a disaster so blatant, so avoidable, so close to everyone in the country that it can't be covered up.  We're watching it live on TV.  Keep in mind that this disaster was brought to you by the same people who thought that this was a smart idea.  White House intern skipping around the office.

And that means it's an opportunity to change the direction of the country.

Conservatives - and I am persuaded that includes most of the people in this country - know in their bones that the country was headed in the wrong direction.  This country was rapidly being consumed by the Left.  The Left was triumphant everywhere you looked: culture, academia, government, law, medicine, churches, and especially the media were steering the country in the direction they wanted it to go.  And those who objected were canceled, destroyed, even imprisoned.  

Now suddenly, in the space of a few days, the Left crashed.  The political leaders of the Left: Biden, Loyd Austin, General Milley, Kamela Harris, Anthony Blinken the rest of the Biden administration, have crashed.  

The Afghanistan debacle was not the fault of the men who fought there, but the leaders who failed, and lied.  They failed and lied so spectacularly that even its handmaidens in the press are unable to spin their way out of this.   

Roger Kimball writes: 

The Rotten Edifice Revealed

In Afghanistan, the technocratic legitimacy of our administrative masters is being exploded.

 The problem is, of course, the wondrous world of instant communications. We have all seen these videos of the Taliban manhandling the crowds outside the gates of the airport, not to mention the scads of anxious reports from people trapped in their homes, awaiting a knock on the door from the Taliban, and news reports of the condemnation of the Biden Administration by the British Parliament. And there is the now-iconic image of that gigantic military transport plane lumbering down the runway in Kabul, surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of Afghans, some of whom clung to the landing gear only to fall from the plane after it took off. 

Afghanistan is becoming the largest hostage crisis in our history, making Jimmy Carter's hostage crisis in Iran disappear into irrelevance.  Where are we headed?   We are in for a reckoning.

For that we have the bumbling, mentally incontinent Joe Biden to thank, he and his clown car of self-absorbed spiritually adipose bureaucrats who prance about in a cloud of self-importance, shedding disaster like dandruff. 

But they're simply the end result of a nation that has killed tens of millions of its children in the womb, where actual educational institutions charge obscene sums to teach children to hate their parents, their religion, their country, and people with different skin colors.  Where inept government officials perform medical experiments on an entire world while lying that it's about science.

There is a God and he punishes sin.  And there has been a lot of sinning.  The Israel of the Bible learned this lesson numerous times.  But he forgives those who repent.  

Theology Proper - The Doctrine of God

1. Evidence For God's Existence
2. What God Is Like
3. What God is Doing

How Dare God leave us when we asked him to

Da Tech Guy:

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration and as such it is an excellent time to answer a question I’ve been hearing concerning the Dayton and El Paso shootings, particularly from the non-religious: “Were was God when this was going on?”

The short answer is: ” Where [did] you expect him to be?”

For nearly sixty years our media, political, social, educational and cultural so called “betters” have done all they could to drive God out of the public square, out of the classroom, out of our political discourse, out of our social discourse, out of every single cultural aspect of society. And being a loving God rather than an oppressor - instead of defying that demand, respected the free will of these folk - so allowing folks who didn’t want him there to do the best they could without him.

That best isn’t very good. Particularly when the ancient enemy has been ready to step into the gap left by his departure.

There is, however, good news.

There are plenty of people who weren’t all that anxious for God to go away and he has remained with such people willing to give aid and comfort to those who ask. That’s good, but even better is that just like in the Transfiguration where the glory of Christ was made plain to Peter, James and John, God is willing to transform us and help us transform our society, if we want to do so.

But it’s our choice. God will not compel us. He will allow us to face the world as it is, human nature as it is, if we so choose.

[minor edits]

Richard Fernandez: "We need a bigger world"

After WW2 a chastened humanity realized the kingdom of man was unattainable through force of arms especially with the invention of the Atomic Bomb and turned its attention to achieving its goals through global institutions instead. The traditional faiths would be allowed to wither away, driven back year by year by advancing secularism, until they were impotent. Then the press would replace the pulpit; the academy the monastery; the State substitute for God till the institutions collectively had all the attributes of divinity and decide who would live or die, be born or not born, who was man or woman, even determine who belonged to what race. It would rule on the very meaning of life itself until there was nothing beyond the competence of the world of man....

Everything would be under control. But since, as Andrew Sullivan argued, religion is "in our genes" some ersatz had to fill the void, some opiate of the masses. So the time from the Fall of the Soviet Union to the present was spent building a substitute. Religion didn't "decline" so much as replaced and it is easy in retrospect to recall how this was done. Reverence for the great was provided through remoteness and elaborate pageantry. Substitute dogma, sacraments and even hagiography were found. By 2016 a nearly complete substitute religion generally known as Political Correctness had been rolled out.
Sponsored

Everybody knows what PC is because we are all members of its church, born into it at birth. It has sacraments like abortion, blasphemous words one cannot utter, heretical doctrines you cannot hold, individuals canonized by the media you cannot impugn and a roster of the damned with whom you cannot associate. Few say their prayers any more but multitudes spend each day sorting their trash in their backyard altars to the goddess Gaia. Nonbelievers in Global Warming are anathemized as Deniers; virtue signaling has become the new piety. And we are familiar with all of it because our conversion until recently seemed all but complete.

Unfortunately digital omniscience and globalization eroded the religion of men. When Rome, Jerusalem, Brussels or Washington are no harder to visit than Disneyland; when the peccadillos of the rich, famous and reverend are splashed across social media then familiarity will breed contempt. The Gramscians marching through the institutions never realized that in capturing the castles they would ruin them and deprive these of their mystery and power to overawe.

But there is hope because God is not dead and Jesus will come again. Read the whole thing.

An 11-year-old's proof of the existence of God.

Church of Sweden to stop clergy calling God 'he' or 'the Lord' in bid to crack down on gendered language

The Church of Sweden is urging its clergy to use gender-neutral language when referring to the supreme deity, refraining from using terms like "Lord" and "He" in favor of the less specific "God."

I didn't thnk that there were any churces left in Sweden.

God is Great

There is a God

Awakening New Zealand

God's creation viewed from New Zealand.

God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Hand of God

Gerard Vander Leun has written a wonderful essay about this, and the universe that God made along with you and me. And about the difference between "facts" and "truth."

Here's how he ends: (Excerpt:)

Do I, an exemplar of the most advanced culture in history, actually believe that this is the image, the manifestation, the fading photograph of the hand of God, the Supreme Being? Of course not. Not for a moment do I think that what I see in this image is that. I believe... no... I know for a fact that what I am seeing is merely gas and stars in a seemingly random arrangement shining in a narrow, very narrow, part of the spectrum so that, to my deeper mind and imagination, I pull together some vague shapes in the play of color on the void and relate it to what I have seen elsewhere, felt elsewhen -- and out of that produce a feeling, thought, in my mind that makes my eyes see what appears to be an impossible hand reaching across space long ago in exactly nowhere. It's a cosmic Rorschach image, a glowing gasblot somewhere in limitless space. That it is a 'hand' is impossible. It is even more impossible that it is even an image of a hand.

But that is not the most impossible thing about this image.

What is even more impossible than this utter impossibility is the fact that you see it too.

I know, from all the facts that I have learned, that if the Earth itself were positioned in relative space a few degrees this way or that, moving at a slightly different relative speed towards a slightly different point in the sky, with its local group of stars slightly tilted a bit this way or a bit that way, that the purely imaginary impression of this being a hand would disappear utterly. It might look like a dagger. It might look like a flower. It might look like nothing other than the random assortment of gas clouds that it most assuredly is. What it would not look like, given just a few minor (on the cosmic scale) variations is 'The Hand of God.'

And that's a stone cold fact. Note it. File it. Toss it to the top of the always rising mountain range of facts that we love to build as bulwarks against the dark.

But is it the truth?

Well, it is a true fact. But here's another.

After all the facts are filed, here I am and there you are. We're spinning about an immense ball of thermonuclear fire on the third stone out from the Sun. We're the end product, as of today, of a great chain of being stretching backwards in time for billions of years to a primordial spark that we do not know or understand. That spark created life here and began the long process to us. It began life that is -- as far as we know today for a fact -- the only life anywhere in the billions of light years we can see. (Yes, I know it is unlikely we are alone, but until we know differently for a fact, that's the fact.) We do not know the why of it all even though the persistence of the miracle whispers there must be a why. At the same time, it is highly likely that beings as limited as we obviously are will never know the why. The why is pretty much outside of science, barely within metaphysics, and above our evolution grade.

What we do know is that, because of how we are made and what we have become, through suffering, striving, effort and, yes, grace, that there are some six billion of us that can look at this strange image of gas and stars and somehow understand it as a hand. And that, at will, we can move our hands to write words such as these to reach across space and time and make others like us understand that although it looks like a hand it cannot possibly be one; that such a thing is utterly impossible.

If you don't think that's a miracle that surpasses all understanding, you simply don't have all the facts.

'The Global War on Christians,'

A book review by the book by John Allen is appropriate at a time when a Christian is being persecuted in the US for quoting the Bible by people who are trying to drive Christianity underground here; as has been done in other countries.

On Oct. 31, 2010, a dozen Islamist gunmen stormed the Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Salvation, in Baghdad. Striking during a service, they butchered some 60 priests and worshipers, notionally in revenge for insults to Islam. Ghastly as that crime might be in its own right, atrocities of this kind are quite commonplace around the world. Mobs sack churches in Egypt, Nigerian suicide bombers target worshiping congregations, and Eritrea has its hellish concentration camps for Christians. "Christians today," writes John L. Allen Jr. , "indisputably are the most persecuted religious body on the planet." So widespread and systematic are the attacks, he explains, that they amount to a global war, which he proclaims "the transcendent human rights concern" in the modern world.

Mr. Allen's main point, though, is less to report the persecutions than to ask in bafflement why the West seems to care so little about them. Yes, the American media report individual attacks, provided they cause some critical minimum number of fatalities—20, say—but they offer no sense of generalized mayhem, any awareness that the same groups and denominations are being victimized in India and Sudan, in Indonesia and Kenya. Would such silence prevail in the face of a global campaign against any other group, ethnic or religious?

This silence is another example of the political and religious orientation of the press and the media in the West. If they were simply neutral, they would report the atrocities. Since they are actively opposed to Christianity (see the uproar caused by the Duck Dynasty Robertsons) they cover up that active persecution.

In cruder hands, "The Global War on Christians" could easily have turned into an anti-Islamic rant. Yet while Mr. Allen devotes full attention to the evil deeds of Islamists in Iraq, Nigeria and elsewhere, he also refutes the myth "that it's all about Islam." Over the past century, some of the very worst anti-Christian persecutors have been fanatically anti-religious, commonly driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology. Islam, evidently, has nothing to do with the atrocities of the North Korean regime, which has made its country perhaps the worst single place in the world to be a Christian: The government has killed thousands of Christians and imprisoned tens of thousands more, in hideous conditions. Nor does Mr. Allen succumb to the common temptation to concentrate so much on Muslim misdeeds that we ignore savage and persistent persecutions by Hindu fanatics—the pogroms, the forced conversions, the mob attacks against churches, often committed with the tacit acquiescence of police and local governments.

Mr. Allen's list of other myths surrounding the war is just as thoughtful and has important policy implications. He is properly scornful of the common post-atrocity response that "no one saw it coming," that attacks like the Baghdad cathedral massacre are all random and unpreventable rather than "the predictable result of a mounting pattern of hatred." If law-enforcement agencies aren't expecting such crimes, and aren't seeking to prevent them, they should be roundly condemned. They have blood on their hands.

The biggest butchers of Christians were Communists and Nazis; people whose religious views closely match those of modern Liberals who wish to create their own Gods and find the Cristian God too much competition.

Psalm 19

1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

The fight between God and government

People have faith. They may not have faith in God but they have faith in something or someone. The alternative for faith in a just God - for many - is faith in government.

President Obama knows that if the peoples’ faith rests in government elites, his power has no competitors. When individuals abandon their own moral and religious compass, the ruling Democratic party can fill the void.

Much of Washington is power hungry. It pursues the blind faith of the American people, a faith that pushes aside personal faith. The systematic manipulation of the American public and the peoples’ abandonment of fundamental values has created a perfect storm of social issues intertwined with political agenda.

With the connivance of the media which shapes people's perception of reality political figures have created the "cult of personality" or the "Führerprinzip"

The “cult of personality,” as defined by Princeton University, is “when an individual uses mass media, propaganda or other methods to create an idealized and heroic public image.”

This technique can be best implemented when the burden of trust rests not on the shoulders of the governed, or on the sovereign God, but on the elites governing.

Americans have abandoned an essential truth: God is sovereign. This has led to god-like government and the demise of liberty, two results that are intertwined. In the middle of a godless society, the “cult of personality” flourishes. Who better to take God’s place than the President?

William Saletan is running up a red flag about the NSA spying scandal and has come to the conclusion that "Laws Are Not Enough." What are we to do if the laws no longer limit what government can do to and with us? I noted that

But suddenly people who are not into wearing tinfoil hats, receiving messages through their fillings or telling Dan Rather that George Bush went AWOL are starting to question just how constrained the government is by laws. What happens when an old piece of paper like the Constitution is ignored and even ridiculed? What happens if the law is what the government says it is? What happens if, when the government does it, it's legal?

When George Bush was president he was compared to Hitler numerous times by the very same people who today strongly support the vastly greater imposition of lawless actions taken by Obama.
 

So where are we today:

Then enters the “cult of personality.” The American people have placed all of their trust and faith in the government, ultimately abandoning trust in God and their own moral judgment.

The true unemployment rate is hovering near fifteen percent and Americans are more dependent on government assistance than ever before. The White House, uninterested in reducing this dependence, seems focused instead on expanding it.

Laws like Obamacare are wrecking the economy and expanding the government’s power. All the while, Obama claims it will solve all our problems, and that all economic destruction is the result of gridlock caused by the Republican-led House. As the train is flying off the tracks, the President is retaining his underdog, savior image, campaigning as if he’s defending middle class America from the big, bad Republicans.

The only way for the American people to take control of their government is to rediscover the fundamental truths of the United States’ founding. We the people must once again place our faith in the sovereignty of God and the foundational truth described in our Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This is a fight, not between Republican and Democrat, but between God and government.

Speaking truth to power.

Democrats Boo God, Mideast Erupts, Bernanke Prints More Money

"we'll print as far as the eye can see"

However, money printing is addictive. We have independent central banks exactly because it's so addictive. The lure of printing money out of thin air and buying stuff and assets with it is so powerful that even democracies felt the need to create an exception, to create institutions away from democratic control to watch over the money printing cookie jar.

The Taliban Wing of the Democrat Party

As a famous dictator once said, "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."  For evidence, see and hear the famous vote during the Democrat's convention in Charlotte on putting God and Jerusalem back in the party platform.



Seated next to the man shouting "NO" to God and Jerusalem is a woman holding a sign identifying their group as "Arab American Democrats."

This next video is as fascinating as watching Debbie Wasserman-Schultz blatantly lie.

“From my vantage point, it was a unanimous vote,” said Madison County Democratic Commissioner Bob Harrison, who voted to reinsert the God and Israel wording. “I was personally on the floor, and I heard no ‘nays’ at all. Zero ‘nays’. We have people who are believers and we have people who are atheists, but as far as this party is concerned, we give due process to everybody.”

This issue was dropped by the MSM overnight as they went back to praising Clinton, Biden and both Obamas. This is what gives people like Debbie Blabbermouth-Schultz and Bob Harrison the courage to lie, lie openly and blatantly without fear of contradiction. He knows that his lies will be trumpeted as truths by the MSM. Remember, comrades, what Josef Stalin told us:

The press must grow day in and day out — it is our Party's sharpest and most powerful weapon.
 

Now that the press is no longer growing, is the Party's tool becoming a little dull and less powerful?  The election will tell the tale.

Three Times They Said No to God

"Who thought that the word God would be so controversial?"

Allan West campaign video.