Monday, August 31, 2015

2014 Poetry Memories


This was the first Christian poetry slam I ever attended. U-Turn cafe back in Philly wasn't even a 100% poetry event.

This was the day I met Daniel King Robertson. When I saw him perform I knew he would be the winner. But to God be all the glory for his talents.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

My first feature went well

So says my friends -- and the poets, and the random audience members -- who told me so.







Monday, August 10, 2015

Video: No End in Sight for America’s Longest War

From the Youtube Description:

As President Obama slows US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, former State Department official Matthew Hoh says this will only intensify the violence and perpetuate the war

Sunday, August 9, 2015

K. Scott Oliphint on Sin

Westminster Theological Seminary gives prospective students this meaty little booklet; and, like any good piece of meat, it is packed with the right amount of flavors that are distinctive but not jarringly so. Thus we have Dr. K. Scott Oliphint's essay on "The Irrationality of Unbelief" where he exegetes Romans 1:18-32 and shows the "deep and wide" implications of this passage to Christian apologetics.

He writes: "All sin, as sin, is rooted in an irrationality that seeks in earnest to deny what is obvious and to create a world that is nothing more than a figment of a sinful imagination."

I'd like to take the implications of this a step further: If we are creating a world based on our own vain imaginations, then we should have no problem realizing that the foundations of society are seemlingly turning into sand. No one should expect this kind of society to work.

More on this essay later...

Thursday, August 6, 2015

Congratulate Obama, and never forget the 47 Republicans Who Tried to Sabotage The Iran Deal


[Editor's Note: This was supposed to have been published on April 2, 2015. I never published it] President Obama should first of all be congratulated on this historic deal with Iran. If Paul Craig Roberts believes this has thwarted the efforts of the Neocons, then I am happy.  As Roberts put in a recent post titled "Massive Defeat For US Neocon Nazis and Israel’s Crazed Netanyahu":
The neocon scum and crazed Israeli government have worked for years, together with the idiot Republican Party to create a false reality about Iran and nonexistent nuclear weapons program in the hope of starting a war with Iran.
Now these war hopes are defeated by the nuclear energy agreement worked out with Iran by Obama and Putin.
What will the crazed Netanyahu, the neocon scum, and the crazed John McCain do now? Will they create a false flag event? Will they somehow start a war anyhow?
The world will not be safe until the warmongers are removed from the American and Israeli governments.
With that said, the 47 Senate Republicans, including Senator Rand Paul -- no, especially Senator Rand Paul! -- should be thoroughly condemned for signing that blasphemous letter to the Iranians saying that the next president -- and by this they mean Republican president because it is inevitable that you mindless American lemmings will swing back to the Republicans in the next election -- can scrap whatever peace deal President Obama makes with the Iranians.

As the New Yorker put it:

The G.O.P. did everything that it could to scuttle this deal. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader that will go down in the annals of diplomatic sabotage, and made it harder for American negotiators to demand a deal that the White House itself would find acceptable. They did so even though their ostensible goal—keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power—was the same as the President’s. 
Of course, all of that bible-thumping from Republicans goes out the window when it comes to issues of foreign policy. Blessed are the peacemakers and the Golden Rule go out the door when Iranians don't bow down to the number one purveyors of violence in the world.

And I am not a "liberal" nor a "pacifist" at all. Nor am I naive when it comes to foreign affairs. I am more realistic than so called "foreign policy realists." 

It makes me think this is the same Republican party that booed Ron Paul for citing the golden rule in the 2011 Presidential debates in the most religious state in the country -- South Carolina! That was an exaggeration, but only slightly. 


Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Good job, Mr. President

Photo courtesy of the Associated Press. President Obama on Thursday, April 2, 2015 in the Rose Garden at the White House.
[Editor's Note: This was supposed to have been published on April 3, 2015. I never published it] If Phyllis Bennis, Justin Raimondo, David Stockman and Paul Craig Roberts -- four of my favorite independent foreign policy thinkers (a progressive, two libertarians, and the third hard to classify) -- are all celebrating the Iran deal (the latter believes the neocons have been defeated, and Raimondo even said the president sounded like a "true statesmen" in his articulation the deals details), then so am I.

Good job Mr. President!

Now, all we have to do is remain vigilant against possible Republican efforts to repeal the deal.

And while this is an unarguably good thing, we must realize that the Obama administration is still economically Keynesian, and we will always be in the economic doldrums until those Keynesian policies are reversed.
Click here to read David Stockman's April review of the deal.

[Editor's Note: August 4, 2015 Update] David Stockman again weighs in on the deal. He nearly says what I say above in the last paragraph:

I have rarely found anything President Obama has done to be praiseworthy, and believe his domestic policies of Keynesian borrow and spend and incessant statist intervention in capitalist enterprise to be especially deplorable. But finally he has stood up to the War Party——and that could mark a decisive turning point in rolling back Washington’s destructive interventionism and imperial pretensions in the Middle East and, indeed, around the world.

Video: Brandon "REALT@LK" Williams at HRYC 2015


My favorite part starts at 42:45 and goes to the end.

John Frame on The Nature of Science

From the article "Is Intelligent Design Science?" in Volume 17, Number 33, August 9 to August 15, 2015 of Reformed Perspectives Magazine:
Science is religious. A great many writers (Kuyper, Dooyeweerd, Clouser, Van Til, Polanyi, Kuhn, Hanson, Poythress) have made an impressive case that science is not religiously neutral. At the most obvious level, science presupposes many things that it cannot prove, but must take on faith: the uniformity of nature, the correspondence of thought with reality, the universality of physical laws, the values required for the honest pursuit of truth. Indeed, their ideas and methodology presuppose Christian theism, though not all of them are willing to admit it.
Despite the uncertainty of much science, there is also a sense in which science, like religion, imposes "orthodoxy" on its participants. As Kuhn indicates, bodies of research create communities of scientists, and if anyone wants to enter that community he must not deviate from the standard paradigms. Certainly something like this has happened among Neo-Darwinists. So there is a strong analogy between science and religion that has been overlooked in much of the discussion.
John Frame, "Is Intelligent Design Science?" 

WCF Chapter One "Of Holy Scripture" Sunday School (Sept.-Oct. 2021)

Our text for Sunday School (also "The Confession of Faith and Catechisms") Biblical Theology Bites What is "Biblical Theology...