Culture is downstream from the cult

What is the foundation of culture?

In thinking about this, I have a vague recollection of hearing someone (I can't remember who) saying something to the effect that "the foundation of cult-ure is the cult; the religion held by the people and holding the people together."

In this sense, the religion of held by the people is a unifying force and when it finds its expression it leads to those elements of culture that many find profound, such as the arts.

When I was travelling and living in East Asia, especially in countries such as Thailand and Cambodia, the dominant cultural expression that I witnessed was rooted in their Buddhist beliefs. The statues, paintings, architecture and temples were everywhere. When people talk of travelling through Italy and France, they remark on the Cathedrals and the art work, much of which has religion themes and subjects.

When we look at modern western culture, we see that it is dominated by sex and much of the political discourse is focused on death. We see that modern culture is fragmenting society through an ever increasing list of -ists and -isms for which people can be derided, shamed and shunned. Tolerance is the buzzword, but it is not actually practiced. Modern culture is becoming more and more totalitarian in its practice as elements within the culture (the loud radical left) scream for ever more censorship, deplatforming and shunning of opposing views, especially those that would be considered more traditional and those that oppose their agenda.

The fracturing, wounding and decaying of western culture is due to its foundational cult - sex worship. The slut pride walks, the gay pride parades, the destruction of the family unit, and the murder of millions upon millions of innocent children is all due to the modern worship at the altar of sex and the profane. By seeking to destroy the culture of the past, rooted as it was in Christianity, they producing a society that is not only opposed to Christianity but is its opposite.

Where Christianity promotes unity, the modern naturalistic, amoral, relativistic sex cult promotes disunity.

Where Christianity promotes the sanctity of human life, the modern naturalistic, amoral, relativistic sex cult denigrates and demeans human life.

Where Christianity promotes the sanctity of the family as the foundation for society, the modern naturalistic, amoral, relativistic sex cult  demeans and destroys the family unit.

Where Christianity promotes humility and love, the modern naturalistic, amoral, relativistic sex cult  promotes pride and arrogance.

Where Christianity promotes meekness and service, the modern naturalistic, amoral, relativistic sex cult promotes violence and selfishness.

Western culture is changing, it is being undermined by people who hate what it once stood for and what it once promoted (unity, life, family, humility, love, service, meekness) and want to see it replaced with disunity, individualism, pride, arrogance, violence and selfishness.

I've heard too many people foolishly say that it doesn't matter what you believe, what matters is how you act; but our actions are rooted in our beliefs.

If you believe that traditional western culture is worth saving, then act accordingly.

If you believe that it needs to be destroyed, well when you sow to the wind, you reap the whirlwind.

Satan has long been trying to destroy what God has established, but we know that he will not prevail against Christ and his Church.

In the words of Moses, today you have been given a choice, to choose blessing or curse, to choose life or death. Choose life.



fragmented religious beliefs lead to a fragmented culture and is a disunifying influence.

The Church - Part 1

Legacy

Simplify

Christian Relationships

Christmas 2017 Worship

Our Transformation

Dolphins off Bais

Trip to Cebu

Tumalog Falls

Maintain Focus

A Transformed Life

Triumphal Entry

Further thoughts on objectivity

Recently I wrote about objective versus subjective truth and how the government of Canada has stated publicly that truth is not subjective. In it I asked the question "if the government of Canada says that truth is objective, then why does it insist that its citizens accept subjective truth in its place?"

Subsequent to that post I've been doing some reading concerning Canada's abortion laws, which I have found out are among the most liberal in the world.

Abortion is legal for any reason at any time, without a restriction or regulation, and is covered by the universal government health insurance plan. The partial-birth abortions banned by the U.S. Congress (but protected by President Clinton's veto) are readily available in Canada, with taxpayers picking up the bill.

So what does this have to do with the objective nature of truth?

In my previous post I pointed out that objective truth is rooted in the object rather than in the subject (person) viewing that object. In case after case, the Supreme Court of Canada and numerous provincial courts have stated that human beings are not legally human beings until they have been born.

So the object, the baby is a person but 8 inches earlier it is not. Location does not change the nature of the object, and as such does not change the objective truth of that object, or in this case the objective truth that a baby is a human being both outside the mother's womb and inside the mother's womb.

The absurdity that the courts in Canada will argue against this objective truth is seen in a case in British Columbia:

And perhaps the most bizarre decision of all was handed down by the British Columbia Court of Appeal, when they held that a physician performing an abortion has a duty of care to the fetus—not to leave it injured if the abortion is unsuccessful and the child lives.

So if you try to kill the baby its all okay just so long as you kill it while its inside the mother, but once its out, you have to work to make sure that the baby lives because it has magically become a human being deserving of legal protections.

This twisted logic is based on the very unscientific notion that a baby inside the mother's womb is the same as the mother and so ending the child's life in the womb is no different than a woman cutting her finger nails.

The Supreme Court decision was emphatic. “The only law recognized is that of the born person,” said the court in a 7-2 decision. “Any right or interest the fetus may have remains inchoate and incomplete until the birth of the child.”

An unborn child is a legal non-entity, and so therefore cannot be the object of a court's protection.

“A pregnant woman and her unborn child are one,” wrote Justice Beverly McLachlin for the majority. Her choice of words was illuminating. Her own sentence has two subjects—the woman and the child—so to say that they are one is a logical non sequitur, unless one of the two subjects is simply declared not to exist for the purposes at hand.

However, if you were to take a DNA test of the baby in the womb and compare it to the DNA of the mother, it would show, that while related, the two are distinct beings.

The Government of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada, along with provincial courts are denying objective truth in order to justify the murder of children in Canada.

Breaking! Government of Canada states that Truth is objective.

When I first seen this commercial I was blown away by its message; especially as it was coming from the Government of Canada.

"Creativity is subjective. The truth isn't."

What a powerful statement.

Truth is not subjective. That being the case, truth must be objective.

Truth is objective.

What's the difference?

Well, subjective truth is rooted in the subject, while objective truth is rooted in the object. An illustration is helpful to understand the difference. You are wandering around a mall with a friend and come upon a stand that is offering a taste test in order to determine which is better, chocolate ice cream or vanilla ice cream. You try both flavors and say that chocolate ice cream is better. Your friend tries both flavors and says that vanilla is the better flavor. Well which is it? Both.

In this scenario, the ice cream is the object under investigation and the two friends are the subjects. For you, chocolate ice cream is the best flavor and that is true for you, but not true for your friend who chose vanilla. To be subjectively true, something is true for you, but not necessarily true for anyone else.

What is objectively true in this scenario, is not the better flavor of ice cream, but rather that what you were tasting was indeed ice cream. You could believe with all your might that it was salad, but that would not make it true. Ice cream is ice cream regardless of what you believe about it because the truth of it is rooted in the ice cream itself and not in your personal belief.

Brett Kunkle puts it this way:

[A] statement is true when it matches up with the way the world really is. The ancient philosopher Aristotle captured the idea of correspondence this way: “If you say that it is and it is, or you say that it isn’t and it isn’t, that’s true. If you say that it isn’t and it is, or you say that it is and it isn’t, that’s false.”

[...]

On this view, is reality a matter of your subjective opinion? In other words, does reality depend on what you believe? Absolutely not. Reality is what we call an objective fact. It exists independent of what anyone believes or thinks. It is not relative to our beliefs but indifferent to our beliefs. And since truth is grounded in reality, truth itself is objective. The truth of reality does not change based upon your beliefs or mine. 

Video courtesy of The One Minute Apologist, featuring Dr. Norm Geisler.

Today our culture is rife with examples of people who profess and believe things that may be subjectively true for them, but insist that what they believe is actually an objective truth that everyone must accept. A person's gender is based on biology (xx = female, xy = male), yet there are many today that would say what a person feels, or believes about themselves (a subjective truth) is something that is actually an objective truth and must be given ascent by the masses despite what reality is telling us.

This is only one aspect of the why understanding what truth actually is matters. When we hold to the idea that subjective truth is the same as or equal to objective truth, or that all truth is simply subjective we do ourselves and each other great harm.

Which causes me to ask the question, if the government of Canada says that truth is objective, then why does it insist that its citizens accept subjective truth in its place?

When we do this, we deny reality and reality has a way of winning out in the end. Sometimes in the most painful of ways.

Be accurate: Straw men are not needed

Today Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister came under fire for comments that are being described as racist. I'm not looking to comment on what was said, whether it is racist or not, etc. but rather how discourse is conducted in our society.

Here is what the Premier said:

"Young Indigenous men — a preponderance of them are offenders, with criminal records — are going off shooting guns in the middle of the night. It doesn't make sense,"

Here is how Nahanni Fontaine, NDP MLA for Winnipeg's St. Johns area described his comments:

"To be able to blanket all young Indigenous men as criminals, as gun-toting, shooting thugs, is no different than what Donald Trump did throughout his campaign. It is one and the same: racialized, disgusting narrative."

Did you notice the switch?

Pallister said "preponderance", Fontaine says that Pallister said "all."

Now preponderance means "the quality or fact of being greater in number, quantity, or importance." Notice that it does not mean "all," but rather a majority.

There is no need for Fontaine to change what Pallister said, but she chooses to do so, so that she can claim that the Premier is racist rather than having the harder discourse on the state of native males in the province of Manitoba.

Is it true that a majority of native males in Manitoba have criminal records? If yes, then there is a discussion that can be had about why that may be. If no, then there is a conversation that can be had concerning the Premier's need to effectively and accurately communicate to the citizens of his province.

Fontaine's mis-characterization of what was said, though creates a straw man that is then lambasted with accusations of racism, which makes effective and perhaps necessary conversations virtually impossible.

It seems that this politicians need to virtue signal, to grandstand for her electorate is of far more importance to her than than the facts concerning the situation of native males in her province.

Right Not Wanted

It is a sad day indeed for society when the (supposed) institutions of higher learning are both unwilling to hear disparate points of view and are able to be bullied by increasingly fascistic elements of society.

On Thursday, UBC announced in a tweet that it had has pulled an ad promoting its new swimming pool from Breitbart News, which was once led by a top adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump's adviser Steve Bannon has promoted the site as a champion for the so-called alt-right, a U.S.-based offshoot of conservatism that critics allege promotes racist, sexist and homophobic sentiment.

A campaigner at www.sumofus.org — an international group that describes itself as targeting "the growing power of corporations" — raised concerns Thursday about the ad on Twitter, asking the university to take it down.

UBC spokesperson Susan Danard said the ad was pulled shortly after it went up and concerns were raised on social media. 

A university is supposed to be a place where students are encouraged to engage with differing points of view and come to a place of understanding. Today though, universities are more akin to left-wing echo chambers where no other thoughts are permitted, leading to an understanding that to disagree is double-plus-ungood badthink.

When the time comes I'll be sure that my children don't attend UBC.

Take 2.1

Let me begin by saying that I'm going to make a greater attempt to be more active on this blog. This of course is not a tremendous task given that I had a total of zero posts in 2015 and only two posts in 2014.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of needing to say something about the dramatic changes that are taking place in our culture. I find that I can no longer sit idly by, having conversations in my head about what is going on, without in some way putting out there for wider consumption.

The whole point of this blog was to provide me with a space for working through thoughts and ideas and if someone out there decided to engage, great, if not, at least it provided me with a means for working out what I believe.

With that said, I don't know that I'll be looking to post long pieces all the time. Sometimes it will simply be short commentary on what I see around me.

With that, let us begin.

Political effectiveness

Apparently Justin Trudeau has made the bold and daring move of removing Liberal Senators from the Liberal Party Caucus. The net effect of this seems a bit nebulous at the moment as by the end of the day they had declared that these newly minted Independent Senators would continue to support Justin and the Liberal Party, keep their affiliations within the Senate, and moved to ensure that they were still the Official Opposition in the Senate ensuring their continued bonus monies.

James Cowan, who had been the party's leader in the Senate, says the formerly Liberal senators will continue to support Trudeau and call themselves the Senate Liberal caucus.
...
"I think not a lot will change. I think that there is a perception perhaps that senators in our party and in the other party are under the control of folks on the other side. That's not been the case in our side. We obviously talk, consult with them and we have had the privilege of being part of their caucus up to now. We won't have that anymore. But we'll continue to talk to them and I suspect that not a great deal will change."

And my personal favorite was a tweet from Liberal Independent Senator, Mobina Jaffer:

"Mood upbeat in Liberal Senate caucus. Now we will serve Canadians more effectively," Mobina Jaffer said on Twitter.

So am I to understand that removing Senators from a political party somehow makes them more effective politicians? Or to put it another way, being a member of a political party makes one a less effective politician.

Good to know.

I just don't get it

A few days ago people across North America and the world took a moment to remember those who died as a result of the terrorist attacks against the US on September 11, 2001. It was the worst act of terrorism committed against the US with nearly 3000 people losing their lives. To this day it is not forgotten and to this day it is used as a rallying cry for those who would encourage the US to be ever more vigilant in defending its interests domestic and abroad.

It was a tragedy and one that I am in no way trying to diminish or disparage.

But given the way this one event has seared the soul of America one would think that an even greater tragedy would not go by with the minor level of attention that it does receive.

Imagine if you would if last year more than 300,000 Americans were murdered. Killed in cold blood. Imagine if we knew who the murderers were but chose not to bring them to justice. Even worse imagine if hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets in order to argue that these people did nothing wrong and in fact their murderous actions should be defended by the government.

It reads like an absurd scenario, one not worthy of consideration or a moments thought.

Unless of course you understand that I'm speaking about abortion.

Yes, I believe that abortion is murder and it pains me that each year approximately 3/4 of a million innocent people are murdered in cold blood and our society would argue that this is okay.

One of the most important questions that we have to answer as a society is: who is a person?

The abortion promoter would argue that a baby inside a woman's womb is not a person. This is the stance of the government. So if a woman is pregnant and decides to have an abortion it is a legal procedure that does not injure a person.

Yet if I were to kill a pregnant woman I would be charged with murdering the woman and the child who was in her womb.

The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, passed in 2004, defines a fetus as a "child in uterus" and a person as being a legal crime victim "if a fetal injury or death occurs during the commission of a federal violent crime."[10] In the U.S., 36 states have laws with more harsh penalties if the victim is murdered while pregnant. Some of these laws defining the fetus as being a person, "for the purpose of criminal prosecution of the offender" (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2008).

So let me get this straight, if a woman kills a "child in uterus" its called an abortion and its legal. If a pregnant woman is harmed and her "child in uterus" dies, it is murder.

How does that make any sense?

It seems that the distinction is the intent of the woman. In the first case the woman doesn't want to be pregnant and so the "child in uterus" is not a person and so when killed its not murder. In the second case the woman wants to be pregnant and so the "child in uterus" is a person and therefore a murder was committed.

How convenient.

What kind of society does one expect to have when we allow 16 year old girls to be the arbiter of what does and what does not constitute person - hood?

To make this tragedy of epic proportions even more heinous is that now people are using the twisted logic of abortion to argue that even if a child were born it could still be killed and be legal.

Florida legislators considering a bill to require abortionists to provide medical care to an infant who survives an abortion were shocked during a committee hearing this week when a Planned Parenthood official endorsed a right to post-birth abortion. 

Alisa LaPolt Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be left up to the woman seeking an abortion and her abortion doctor. 

"So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief," said Rep. Jim Boyd. "If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?” 

"We believe that any decision that's made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician," said Planned Parenthood lobbyist Snow. 

Rep. Daniel Davis then asked Snow, "What happens in a situation where a baby is alive, breathing on a table, moving. What do your physicians do at that point?” 

"I do not have that information," Snow replied. "I am not a physician, I am not an abortion provider. So I do not have that information.” 

Rep. Jose Oliva followed up, asking the Planned Parenthood official, "You stated that a baby born alive on a table as a result of a botched abortion that that decision should be left to the doctor and the family. Is that what you’re saying?” 

Again, Snow replied, “That decision should be between the patient and the health care provider.”

So what she is saying that even if the baby is born, lying on a table, kicking and screaming, it is still not a person because only a person deserves to be protected by the law whereas this person's fate should be decided by the woman and her doctor and if they should choose to kill it, that should be okay.

We are a sick and perverse generation that argues for and defends the right to murder their own children. If we were killing babies by burning them alive it would be barbaric and everything should be done to stop such a horrific crime against humanity. Call it a "choice" and use the term "abortion" and its all okay.

Don’t you see that children are God’s best gift?
    the fruit of the womb his generous legacy?
Like a warrior’s fistful of arrows
    are the children of a vigorous youth.
Oh, how blessed are you parents,
    with your quivers full of children!
Psalms 124:3-5

The first command that was given to man by God was to be fruitful and to multiply; to have children. Yet here we are killing 2150 of these innocent children every day!

Solomon once wrote:

There is a way which seems right to a man,
But its end is the way of death.

How wise he was.