Democracy is the road to socialism.
Karl Marx
God’s unwitting minion?
Of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheist Apocalypse, I rate Christopher Hitchens highly. (Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, not so much.)
One of Hitchens’s last public appearances was at the Texas Freethought Convention where he was presented with the Freethinker of the Year Award by Richard Dawkins.
When I watched this, I was struck by a few things Christopher Hitchens had to say.
If Jesus wasn’t the son of God, he was a hideous, wicked imposter whose words were vain and empty and intended to deceive.
Isn’t that the main premise in C. S. Lewis’s well known argument (Lewis’s Trilemma) for the divinity of Jesus?
In conversation with a young freethinker whose copy of his book Hitchens autographs, he pays respect to Jesus and reminds his young fan to heed Christianity’s central message.
This is getting worse and worse. She’s floored me twice now. This is like the rabbis confronting Jesus outside the temple, you know …
Lots of love, take it easy. Remember the love bit, also.
RIP Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens Dies.
I read the sad news of Christopher Hitchens death today from Cancer. Though he did his very utmost to convince the world that God is not great …and that my own religious faith in Christianity is nothing but a Delusion, yet still I hold not malice for the man but pity.
I was once an atheist myself. Once upon a time I too could not conceive the possibility of a God. I too thought the notion of such a supreme Being was merely primitive myth… the superstition of a by gone pre-scientific mentality… founded upon fear, ignorance, and whim.
Thus it is with sympathy and compassion that I consider his convictions. It is with great sadness that I realise he went to his grave never experiencing as I did… the realisation of the gross errors of reasoning upon which Atheism hangs.
Watching such Good souls…in many ways better Men than I being swallowed up by the delusions of our age of Materialism and Scientism, I recommit myself to exposing these errors to the best of my ability, while I have breath in me… in the hope of opening up the hearts and minds of my contemporaries to the Light of the Gospel Truth of Jesus Christ…that they might be saved.
It is at times like this that for the sake of Atheists like Christopher… that I could easily wish myself to be wrong, and them to be right… Yet I know Reality does not hang upon the whim of any Man… That the truth is the truth… even if its Hell.
Thus we all must all face the mystery of Life and death… and make our own moral choices and decision whether to trust in Christ and the Gospel…. or not… and to step though deaths door either in faith and hope… or in the expectation of Oblivion. I have no doubt that He believed his assault on religion was motivated by a desire for a better world… was a brave man standing up for what he believed to be the truth…even though I am sure he was absolutely deceived.
I am glad to live in Liberty whereby we are free to make up our own minds, free to follow our own conscience… and to preach our vision of reality… whether Theist, Atheist, or agnostic… Good bye Christopher Hitchens. May the Lord have mercy.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10773672
A man of the sheeple
LAWRENCE SMITH/Fairfax NZ
Andrew Little, David Cunliffe, Shane Jones … all have been touted as future leaders of New Zealand’s Labour Party. But Helen Clark’s successor (Goff was just fillin’) is relative newcomer David Shearer.
Helen Clark resigned from Parliament in 2009 to take up a post with the United Nations. A by-election was held in the Mount Albert electorate. David Shearer quit his United Nations post to contest and win the Mount Albert by-election and became the new Member of Parliament for Mount Albert. It’s early days, but I’m picking that Shearer will succeed Clark as New Zealand’s next Labour Prime Minister, too, in three years’ time.
A question for the Labour caucus: Is Shearer the Best of You or is he The Pretender?
Happy 60th Number 1.
Dr Goode informs me its Lindsay Perigo’s 60th birthday… Praise the Lord!
I thought Id help Linz celebrate the day with some Mario Lanza… Bugger that!
New Zealand’s #1 libertarian
New Zealand’s #1 libertarian turns 60 today. Happy Birthday, Linz!
RIP Chuck Schuldiner
Chuck Schuldiner, “the Father of Death Metal”, died 10 years ago today.
Never to return, memories will last.
Ecclesiastes 7:1-2
A good name is better than fine perfume,
and the day of death better than the day of birth.
It is better to go to a house of mourning
than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of everyone;
the living should take this to heart. (NIV)
Matthew 22:15-22
Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”
But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, “You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax.” They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.
Then he said to them, “So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away. (NIV)
The Principle of Self-Custodianship
Glenn Peoples says that a Christian cannot be a libertarian. He says, “A Christian, by becoming a libertarian, compromises and gives up part of her Christianity.”
His argument is that libertariansm is based on the Principle of Self-Ownership or Individual Sovereignty
Each individual is the owner of his own life and has the right to live it as he sees fit, as long as he respects that same right in others.
and that this principle is incompatible with the commonly held Judaeo-Christian view that everything, including one’s own life, is owned by God.
The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it (NIV)
Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine (KJV)
It does not follow from this incompatibility that a Christian cannot be a libertarian, because libertarianism does not have to be based on the Principle of Self-Ownership. My view is that Christian libertarianism is based on the Principle of Self-Custodianship.
Each individual is the custodian of his own life and has the political right to live it as he sees fit, as long as he respects that same political right in others.