I wish I had skills

This is an example of a wonderfully written blog post. It features the beauty of Jesus' Kingdom breaking into this world through mission work, the real horror of Islamic terror, a brief line regarding the coming clash of China vs. Jihadists, and a shot at Western elites. Superlative.

Purdue's computer simulation of the 9/11 attack

It's amazing science.

Stay in the Shadows

What's wrong with leaving illegal aliens in the shadows? I'm not a hater. I don't want every illegal alien to be deported. I agree with those that say that many of them are hard-working, family-oriented people. Good for them. You want to work here? Good on you.

America is facing the symptoms of a serious problem: Central and South America sucks. How can I phrase it nicely? Yeah, there are some good things about the rest of the Americas, but since the first Spanish and Portuguese settlers stepped foot on American soil there has been exploitation. They were then, and they continue to be, racist states with wealthy aristocrats that exploit a vast underclass of people to harvest from the land every available resource. First it was gold, now it's oil, lumber, coffee, illicit drugs, and other produce. The wealth is distributed the same way it always has been: Europeans have it all, native mixes have next to nothing, and the natives have absolutely nothing. It sucks, but it is NOT the fault of the United States that Latin America can't stop exploiting its lower class.

The SYMPTOM of that disease is the "immigration debate" in America. All of the downtrodden from around the world (primarily Latin America) are coming to the U.S. so they can be less downtrodden. I feel for them, but that's not a solution to the border problem. Turning North America into South America is just going to make it worse. I have a heart for these people, but I have a brain, too. Making it worse for us does not make it better for them. Bankrupting our economy doesn't solve any of our problems.

What can America do? America can enforce it's laws. Period. Close down the border, and prosecute employers that hire illegal aliens. Some say, "You can't deport 12 million people!" Fine, don't deport anybody. Well, you can definitely deport the pimps in Minneapolis that were running a prostitution ring there. If their home country won't take them, deport them to the middle of the Pacific Ocean in a rubber raft with no paddles. Deport them to Siberia and pay the Russians to show them a little Russian hospitality. I don't really care where they are, as long as they aren't in American society. Other than the drug-runners, pimps, and slave-traders, leave everyone else in the shadows. They came here to work in the shadows, let them work in the shadows. Hopefully their kids will get a better education than they had and get themselves out of the shadows, but I see no reason to legitimize or deport their parents. They came here because they are starving in Mexico and living in houses made of pallets and tin cans. Their living standard is already 1,000 times better than it was in Mexico. Why must we now bankrupt our government paying for medical attention and social security? They weren't going to get it in Mexico, why should they get it here?

Why do we only care about the poor and down-trodden that snuck into the U.S. What about the poor that are still in Mexico, should we pay for their medical needs? What about South Africa, should we pay for their retirement? What about the poor of India, should we pay for their children to go to school? It would be nice if we could, but it's not possible. We do what we can, and I encourage you to dig out of your own pocket to help people, but there is no reason to make our government financially obliged to pay for 12 million people to get services they didn't pay for that they never would have gotten had they not broken our laws to get here.

Bingo

"We need respect for the law in this age more than we need workers. We need secure borders more than cheaper products."
--John Mark Reynolds, Professor of Philosophy at Biola University

Christians with big hearts and small brains tend to join the typical leftists that support illegal immigration. It's pretty simple:

1) An open border is a security risk.

2) Flooding the market with unskilled laborers will drive down the quality of life for the unskilled laborers we already have, i.e. the blue collar, non-college crowd. Blacks lose mightily when illegal immigration is allowed.

Religion 2.0

How fun it is to worship
at the Church of Wholly Me!
Services are everyday
and, of course, admission's free!

I know what you're thinking
I used to think the same-
"All those wars and death and strife
isn't religion mostly to blame?"

With the old ways, yes it's true.
On this point we both agree.
But with the New, Improved, and Better Faith
I can't help but think of only Me!

Oh, sure, I know it's tough
to meet new folks, exchange a pleasantry.
But conversation is so easy
If the subject's always Me!

Oh, and that's too bad, about your woes.
Cancer is such a nasty thing
to have taken your husband long ago
and I see you still wear his ring.

But while we're on the subject,
did you know that I was ill?
For a while I was quite a sight
but I recovered, according to My will!

Now, about our funds, just so you know,
our budget isn't what it used to be,
which I find difficult to understand
because I always tithe to Me!

Evangelism is so easy,
the Faith's growing at quite a pace.
I don't know why, but thankfully
all the world holds Me in the proper place!

The mall's a tabernacle
T.V. ads are sacrosanct
Best part is, for all this stuff
I know it's Me I have to thank!

But anyway, you should drop by
next time you have an evening free.
Our membership's through the roof these days
at the Church of Wholly Me!

The other side of 300

The General detailed at length what he enjoyed about the film "300" in the previous post. So, I wanted to spit out one of the movie's failures and connect to a larger point.

One of my favorite writers today is Victor Davis Hanson. VDH gets tons of hits because I linked it in the HIFI sidebar. Hanson writes beautifully, and he defends Western Civilization from modern deconstruction with sharp insight.

Hanson wrote the introduction for a book on the making of this movie and also reviewed the film. It seems that he and Frank Miller are on the same page regarding history and man's quest for freedom.

They are both wrong. Despite what is suggested in the film and your average history book (or even books written by VDH, which are excellent), secularism does not lead to freedom. The concept of a secular reality began with Jewish monotheism, which stood in stark contrast to the animism of pagan religions. When secularism is divorced from its monotheistic mooring, Secularism becomes a tyranny of its own (see Stalin, Mao, and Pol-Pot).

In general, the contribution of ancient Greek city-states to the development of the West is way over-stated. The Greek and Roman cultures did not consider compassion to be a virtue. The truth is that Christianity is the basis for the correct understanding of freedom, which led to labor laws, civil rights, human rights, etc.

True freedom is found in the Bible. A slave of righteousness enjoys freedom in Christ.

If you hate freedom, you won't like 300

I just recently watched Frank Miller's 300 and I feel it's my duty to share with you all how awesome this movie really is. For those of you that have been living in a cave on Mars for the last 3 months, "300" is a Warner Bros. movie based on Frank Miller's graphic novel "300", which is based on the history of the Battle of Thermopylae in which several thousand Greeks (most notably 300 Spartiate elites) held back Persian hordes numbering between several hundred thousand and millions. If you want to read the history, you can try the wikipedia link; read on for the movie review.

I have to start with the criticism. The movie was long on nudity, and long on horror movie special effects. The comic book was long on nudity as well; but I appreciate Frank Millers decision to portray the Spartans in the "heroic nude" that you might see in ancient art. It was an interesting and bold artistic direction. The horror movie special effects, however, were not in the comic book and were a bit ridiculous.

From the beginning, it is obvious that this movie is trying to convey just how bad-ass Leonidas and his Spartans were. The conclusion, "Mission accomplished". The battle starts out with the Spartans squaring off against 10's of thousands of Persians and they quickly get up close and personal and fight for every square inch. Then the Spartans start killing them. First they kill the first row of idiots, and they move forward a step. Then they kill the second row of idiots and they take another step forward. Then they start stacking up the bodies like lincoln logs. The one on combat is very well choreographed to the point where my fiance thought it was almost graceful. I think she used the qualifier "almost", simply because it's hard to call a bloodletting "graceful". I have no such hesitations: it was graceful. The killing style was almost meticulous in it's intricacies. If these Spartans are supposed the best of the best, trained since youth, they better have some kind of crazy-awesome techniques that no other armies or soldiers have, and those crazy-awesome spear skills and sword skills come through in 300.

The dialogue was inspiring. Truthfully, the movie was full of machismo and one-liners, but it worked exceptionally well. I'm pretty sure Gerard Butler could have yelled every single one of his lines in his Leonidas roar and I still wouldn't have thought he was over the top. It's an over the top story of over the top soldiers from an over the top culture in an over the top war, and the movie does them all justice.

The movie is based on history, and the history is pretty simple: 300 Spartan warriors kill 10's of thousand of Persians that are trying to raze their countryside, rape their women, and enslave their children. Do you expect this film to question whether there is honor or glory in the horrors of war? Do you expect this film to delve into the complex moral decisions that leaders in a time of war must make? Do you expect this film to question our assumptions about the innate moral superiority of the Greek cause? I hope not! Because this film does none of those things, and rightly so. We have this modern obcession with deconstructing and sanitizing history until we have utterly ridden it of any humanity whatsoever. This is Greek history and Greek sacrifice and it deserves to be told from the Greek perspective, regardless of whether it improperly dehumanizes the Perisan armies (which this movie most certainly does).

I also think that it is entirely appropriate that the movie be grossly exaggerated. When you are telling an epic story it is your obligation as a story-teller to project the sense of awe that was felt by those that were present. This kind of story-telling naturally conjures up supernatural images in the listeners mind that are beyond the reality. I think it's entirely appropriate for comic book writers and film directors to try to capture those inflated images on paper and on film. Watching 300 gave me this sense that I was 7 years old and I was listening to an old man tell the story. The images on the screen were exactly what my mind would have conjured up.

I want to draw out one more observation about story-telling and connect it to this film. Morality is conveyed far better through story than through instruction. If you want to start your children on the road to virtue, tell them great stories of great men and women performing great deeds of honor and justice and virtue. Once that foundation has been laid, you can expound on the intricacies of ethical systems. You need great stories that exemplify right behavior more than you need systematic theorums. 300 is one of those stories. It is also an antedote to the anti-heroes that are regularly churned out by the mainstream media. I don't need whiny second-guessing protagonists that struggle more with themselves than with the forces of evil around them. I want to see the model. I want to see the gold standard by which we should all be so courageous to live by. That's why I loved 300, and that's why I think you will too... unless you hate freedom.

To: Anyone That Cares

The little writing that I've been doing has been mostly on my essay that the application to seminary requires. Beyond that, I've been mixing it up on Westy's blog and ignoring HIFI. That will change.

What follows is my response to the quotation below.

"...church doctrine has been established by people who tend to be white, male, and rich"

Come on, now. The reality is that God blessed mankind through different cultures all along. The Asian and African continents were prominent for thousands of years, then came Europe, and also North America of late, historically speaking.

The "white, male, and rich" label is a sign of the times, a vacuous and misleading slur. Rich? Permit to point out the abounding irony here. Because of the Reformation, led by the white men Martin Luther and John Calvin, the skill of literacy was transformed from the aristocrat's luxury to every man's right. Why? So every family could study the Bible.

When Calvin studied Aquinas and Augustine, he didn't flagellate himself due to these authors' wealth. Why? Because for most of history, wealth and education were inextricably linked.

Fast forward to modernity, where we find out generation's ungrateful response. We find the Chairman echoing the current university logic, assailing the wealth of these scholars, the same men whose labor smashed the bond between wealth and education!

It is a fantastic spectacle: A young man today, enjoying the fruits of a society where literacy is normal, turns and lambasts theologians of days past, with the very criteria that THEY BROUGHT ABOUT.

What else to say? We bite the hand that feed us.

Our media sure does suck...

...but there's biased, alarmist, and shallow, and then there's China:

China's storm response: Too good to be true