From the Mailbag — Question On Obama-care

Pastor Bret,

My mother-in-law went to Sam’s Club yesterday to get some prescriptions. Her co-pay has gone up $30 for some prescriptions. She was flustered and asked the pharmacist what was going on. They had a long chat about the matter. From the pharmacist’s perspective, the co-pay difference was due to Obamacare. From his perspective, also, the govt, via Obamacare, is trying to “wipe out old people,” by increasing costs of prescriptions, by making some medications rare and unavailable, etc. He said that the effect this is having (as he sees it) on the elderly and the middle class is going to be huge.

What is your take on this?

Dear Kirsten,

I’d say your Mother-in-law’s Pharmacist is correct.

What is going on is that the FEDS have these HUGE entitlement obligations to Senior Citizens (Social Security) and to sick (Medicare / Medicaid). There is one of two ways you can get out of those obligations. You can either increase the money supply to fund the programs or you can decrease the recipients to make funding un-necessary.

Now the FEDS could bankrupt the country by raising taxes on younger generations. But that will inevitably lead to generational warfare as younger generations eventually refuse to impoverish themselves in order to enrich the generation or two ahead of them. At some point people realize that there is little use in working if the majority of your income is being taken. The FEDS could also just print more money but in the end that debases the currency and the purchasing power declines precipitously, with the same sure result of social unrest.

Or alternately, you can kill off the people who are the beneficiaries of the entitlement programs. I believe this is the route that the FEDS are taking.

Promises were made that could never be kept. The whole entitlement leveraging by the FEDS was a giant Ponzi scheme. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the voters who originally created Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid etc. are going to pay for “the greatest generations” sins in creating this monster. The Greatest Generation created the Monster and now their descendants are about to be eaten by the monster they created.

Obamacare has always been about killing people. The very title tells you that if you are familiar with how Government Euphemisms always work. Obamacare is not about health. Obamacare is about death management. It will very soon, once implemented, be deciding if the contribution of the ill to society is equal to the value of the procedure that the ill person needs to regain their health.

Plus of course Obamacare may be the final piece in totalitarian collectivist government. Now the State can control the cattle (people) it owns every step of the way. From Birth, to school (school to work programs), to the food we eat (The FEDS are in bed with the GMO Creators), to the medicines we take, to the media we imbibe. What Obama-care is, is the final piece in a “Brave New World” social order that the NWO has been working on for decades.

Some of us tried to warn people. But they were to busy with their bread and circuses.

Perhaps the worst part of all this is that the Church is largely asleep on these issues, or where it is not asleep, it is actively fighting for the NWO agenda. Really, we have come to the point where the visible Church is largely the problem.

The Cultural Marxism Captivity of the Church

” … a significant clerical group under Professor Nieburh’s influence is able to rationalize and to some extent at least justify the perpetration of almost any crime because it serves, as Lenin said, ‘the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.’

… Until we come to understand the effect on a wide section of Protestant clergyman in this country, we are not going to get very far in understanding the way in which the Church is integrated, in part, into this whole communist movement.”

Dr. J. B. Matthews
The Actor — Alan Stang — pg.80

Dr. Matthews was a investigator who worked with the House committee on un-American activities. As such, the quote is dated.

Still, I would say the thrust of the quote remains true. Much, if not most, of the American clergy has been either saturated in the Marxist paradigm (Cultural Marxism today) or has been coated with a patina of Marxism so that even orthodoxy as it comes from their lips is tainted with Das Capital. From Tim Keller’s retooling of “social justice”

http://www.amazon.com/Generous-Justice-Gods-Grace-Makes/dp/1594486077/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375472793&sr=8-1&keywords=Tim+Keller+social

to Carl Trueman’s British Socialism, to much of the Church’s embrace of illegal immigration and everywhere in between the Church is a hotbed of Cultural Marxism and the clergy are those at the point of the spear of this agenda. Even Churches that insist that the Church must not speak on public square issues create a open door for the success of cultural Marxism in our culture and social order by suggesting, through its silence, that God is not opposed to Cultural Marxism.

Unless one is epistemologically self conscious holding a Biblical Worldview the Church and its clergy are dangerous realities. I think it is fair to say that he who dines with the contemporary Church had best dine with a long spoon.

A good book length treatment of the compromise of the contemporary church is C. Gregg Singer’s “An Unholy Alliance.”

Click to access gsua.pdf

The work is dated, leaving off sometime in the 1970’s but if one reads carefully and one is at all aware of what is going on today in Denominations one can get a feel for where we are at.

The Dangers Of Unharnessed Libertarianism

There is a sense among some Christians that movement Libertarianism provides a Christian response to various strands of the Marxism we currently face. (Cultural Marxism, Fabianism, Corporatism, Fascism, etc..) R. J. Rushdoony was under no illusion to that end. While Rushdoony advocated a form of Libertarianism it was always Libertarianism in a decidedly Christian and Theonomic social order. In other words, RJR despoiled the Libertarian Egyptians but he despoiled them while making the Libertarians serve the Christian worldview vision.

Repeatedly Rushdoony reminded us of Max Stirner who was one of the greatest foils to Karl Marx. Stirner was a kind of extreme prototypical Libertarian. He was Ayn Rand before Ayn Rand was Ayn Rand. Stirner was an Egoist, which means that he considered self-interest to be the root cause of an individual’s every action, even when he or she is apparently doing “altruistic” actions. This principle is the radii of all movement Libertarianism.

The centrality of the sovereign individual is seen throughout Stirner’s writing. A few examples will suffice,

“I am everything to myself and I do everything on my account.” [The Ego and Its Own, p. 162].

Even love is an example of selfishness, “because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me.” [Ibid., p. 291]

He urges others to follow him and “take courage now to really make yourselves the central point and the main thing altogether.”

As for other people, he sees them purely as a means for self-enjoyment, a self-enjoyment which is mutual: “For me you are nothing but my food, even as I am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.” [Ibid., pp. 296-7]

Obviously this hyper individualism of Stirner — this emphasis of the many (individual by individual) over the one (collective) — was not something that Marx could countenance. Rushdoony notes of the collision of Stirner and Marx,

“The most vehement book written by Karl Marx was against Max Stirner; because Max Stirner pushed this idea to its logical conclusion, the meaninglessness of all things and therefore the legitimacy of all acts. He is the man who accused the atheists of his day of being closet Christians because they didn’t practice incest and other perversions, and Marx recognized that Stirner was right. But if Stirner were allowed to establish his thinking and successfully convert men to his position, there could be no socialist order. So he wrote a two-volume diatribe against Stirner.”

and elsewhere,

“Max Stirner was a logical, a consistent, atheist and an anarchist. And Max Stirner said in his book The Ego and His Own, that atheism required one to disbelieve in the validity of any law, because since there is no God there is no truth, no right, no wrong, no good, no evil, no sovereignty in the world, except man doing what he pleases. And in his book he turned on the atheists and the liberals of his day. He accused them of being closet Christians and he said ‘how many of you are ready to practice incest with your daughter, sister, or mother? Until you are, and if what I say horrifies you, you are simply manifesting the fact that you are a closet Christian. You are talking about not believing in God but you are believing in all his rules, you are still under theology rather than autonomy, And if you are still obeying your civil magistrate, your civil government, you’re still believing there is some validity to any law other than the biology of your own being.’”

Stirner absolutized Marx but he absolutized Marx in the indivdiualistic Libertarian direction.

Because of this Rushdoony saw that movement Libertarianism was but the opposite side of the coin to movement Marxism. Rushdoony saw that Libertarianism gone to seed was merely Marxism come into its own for the individual. Consistent Libertarianism was merely Marxism for the individual.

Now some will try to save movement Libertarianism by appealing to the “Non aggression principle.” They would contend we Christians can support Libertarianism as long as we apply the “non aggression principle.” The problem here though is that we must have some standard for what counts for “aggression.” And if we take what the Scripture, as God’s Law Word, teaches as God’s standard for aggression then we will find ourselves, as Christians, advocating for penalties that the movement Libertarians would insist fall under the rubric of the Non aggression principle.

This explains why the Christian dance with libertarianism needs to be thought through. Yes, there are aspects of Lbertarianism that Biblical Christians whole-heartedly embrace but those aspects are only embraced in the context of a bible informed Christian social order.

The Attack On Distinctions Is An Attack On The King

The West could have and would have never been the West if it had not influenced, informed, and shaped by the categories of Biblical Christianity. Today the West is in a war for its soul because there is a different Worldview that is animating it and that Worldview is at direct warfare with Biblical Christianity. Over the centuries, and especially since the “Enlightenment” the West has been attacked by sundry non Christian Worldviews but with the rise of Cultural Marxism all those previous anti-Christian worldviews have found their nadir and most potent expression. I would even say that with Cultural Marxism one has arrived at the full blossomed fruit of all the Christ hating worldviews that have been spawned since the Enlightenment. It has the emotionalism of Transcendentalism – Romanticism. The Egalitarian impulse of abolitionism. The viciousness of Jacobinism. The sense of inevitable progress of Social Darwinism. The confidence of inevitable victory of Marxism – Communism and the cocksure certainty of Unitarian Deism. Cultural Marxism is the grand inheritor of all the “virtues” of all the Christ hating worldviews that have gone before and by inheriting all those “virtues” it is poised to finally do what each failed to do in their turn, and that is the final destruction of that Biblical Christianity that made the West the West.

Cultural Marxism is of course, like all the worldviews that went before it, an ideology, but it is more than an ideology. Unlike the ideologies that went before Cultural Marxism understood that there was a direct correlation between cultural Institutions and conquering the West. As such, the cultural Marxist have, by design, attacked the cultural Institutions of the West in a “long march through the Institutions.” This long march through the institutions was designed to overthrow the influence of Biblical Christianity in every cultural nook and cranny of the West. So, from Theodor Adorno’s “Authoritarian Personality” which overthrew the idea of the Christian family, to Lord Keynes who overthrow the Biblical idea that debt was bad, thus overthrowing the foundation of Biblical Economics, to Magnus Hirshfield and Alfred Kinsey who glorified sexual perversion, to Franz Boas who advanced the idea of cultural relativism denying that cultures could be inferior or superior according to a Transcendent standard, to Sigmund Freud who anchored the meaning of reality (or such meaning as could be had) in the subconscious and unconscious of the individual, to the Social Darwinism of Frank Lester Ward who argued that man’s evolution and progress could be directed by man himself to the Educational theories of John Dewey and to a host of other examples what Cultural Marxism has done is to overthrow the West by overthrowing the Biblical presuppositions upon with the cultural institutions of the West were based. Now it is true that some of the names mentioned in this paragraph predated the rising of the Frankfurt School in Germany, from which Cultural Marxism arose, but all of the names mentioned above with their respective ideas were put in the toolbox of Culture Marxism unto the destruction of the West.

A key component in the toolbox of Cultural Marxism is its doctrine of Egalitarianism. Cultural Marxism, with its core doctrine of Egalitarianism, is a frontal attack on God’s Law and in how the West has been structured. The Ten Commandments are inoperative in a world where Egalitarianism is at the fore because Egalitarianism denies the very distinctions that God’s law regulates. If one denies those distinctions one denies the very concept of God’s law. Egalitarianism denies all distinctions while God’s law labels and creates the distinctions He demands.

Cultural Marxism with its Egalitarianism destroys the distinction between God and all other gods. God said,

“You shall have no other gods [b]before Me.”

But Cultural Marxism, wearing its officially religious garb, as it has crept into the Church, denies the distinction between the God of the Bible and all other gods. When putatively Chrristian men argue that there are any other ways of salvation besides Christ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_YkeKhA8BUw

they are denying the distinction between the God of the Bible and all other gods. If other gods can provide other ways to the same salvation then the teaching is that all gods are the same. All the gods lead to the final harmony of God.

This idea of denying the distinction of God vis-a-vis all other gods is seen also in R2K as they insist that in the public square all the gods must be given equal playing time. No god is to be before any other god. There must be a egalitarianism among the gods. This is the whole idea behind public square pluralism. There is a whiff of egalitarianism in R2K theology in their reasoning concerning the lack of God’s primacy in the public square.

Cultural Marxism, with its egalitarianism, also destroys the Creator creature distinction. God has said,

“You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.”

Here there is a clear distinction that is being posited between the Creator and the creature. The Creator is of such a transcendent character and nature that the creature is to worship Him in a proscribed and distinct way. The Creator is of such a transcendent character and nature that even His name must not be sullied. Cultural Marxism, with its egalitarianism insist that the Creator creature distinction is a myth and so all law legislating man’s approach to god are irrelevant. Cultural Marxist Egalitarianism is an attack on distinctions and an attack on distinctions is an attack on both God and God’s law.

Though we will get to this in more detail later, it should be said even here, that Egalitarianism both begins and ends with an attack on the Creator creature distinction. All of the distinctions that the Cultural Marxists attack in the second table of the Law have as their goal forever finally destroying the the Creator creature distinction. If man as man is bereft of all the God given distinctions that makes him distinct from other men then there is hardly room for a God who insists that He is God distinct from the creature. In Cultural Marxism all colors must bleed into one. Even the colors that would color man as distinct from God.

In God’s fourth words He establishes distinctions among the days,

“Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.”

The Egalitarianism of Cultural Marxism destroys the Cultic Holy Day by suggesting that all days are the same, thus eliminating the distinction that gives Christian meaning to all the days. With the destruction of the Christian cultic holy day, all other days, which are non cultic holy days, lose their meaning. Interestingly enough it is also the case that with the elimination of distinctions between days of work and days of rest what one inevitably finds in cultural Marxism is a culture where there is no rhythm of work and rest. Instead what you find are cultures of sloth or cultures where the tyrant’s motto is “Arbeit macht frei” (Labor makes you free).

In my next post I will go on and look at egalitarianism in terms of the second table of God’s Law. However, we are already seeing that Cultural Marxism with its attack on distinctions is an attack on the authority of God’s legislating law word. On a more macro scale egalitarianism is an attack on all of God’s creative work of distinguishing. Whether we consider how God in His creation ordained distinctions between earth and sky, sun and moon, land and water, man and animal, male and female, what we continuously see is a God who is at war with a worldview that has as its defining center-piece the obliteration of distinctions. Even in the fall we see the first foray of the Cultural Marxist and egalitarianism as the serpent attacked the distinction between God’s legislating law word and Eve’s own legislating fiat law word. From Satan’s first assault on the throne — an assault that found him defying the distinction between himself and God — and an assault that found Satan insisting that “I will arise to the most high” what we find in Satan’s plan is the destruction of all God ordained distinctions. Egalitarianism is nothing less than Satan’s work to un-make God’s creation, God’s law-word, and God Himself.

And the fact that the visible Church is blind and dumb to this frontal assault is more then enough reason to be done with those visible Churches who are trying to baptize this abomination.

Two Cosmologies

“I stand before you as a 40-year-old, single, celibate, and chaste yet openly gay man . . . no longer willing to be silent,” Bowman told the hushed delegates.

Saying he had been excommunicated from another church, Bowman added, “I want to thank this denomination for being affirming of somebody like me.”

Delegates gave him a standing ovation.

Journalist Report From CRC Synod 2013

“All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis— have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.”

1993 Cover Story from “The Nation” magazine

Some observations cross correlating the two quotes.

It should be noted that the word “cosmology” in “The Nation” quote is largely synonymous with “Worldview,” and I am using it that way as well.

1.) In a Christian cosmology the main means of identifying one’s self is by the noun “Christian.” In a Christian cosmology one finds their identity in Christ. We are baptized into Christ. We are crucified with Christ. We are raised with Christ. We are even seated in the heavenlies with Christ. The Catechism reminds us that “we are not our own but belong to our faithful savior Jesus Christ.” ST. Paul even can say that “to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” All of this is what one expects to find in both the individual and the covenant community where a Christian cosmology is in the ascendancy. In a Christian cosmology Christians identify with Christ.

However, when sodomy comes to the fore a new cosmology has to be created in order that the chief identifying mark is not “Christian,” but rather “gay.” In a sodomite cosmology one finds their identity in their homosexuality. This is so true, that the sodomy identity even for the “sanctified Christian homosexual,” is “gay” and not “Christian.”

Now in a Christian cosmology there is understanding that all Christians struggle with what the Scripture call besetting sin and Christianity is sympathetic towards those who are constantly seeking to mortify the old man in order that the new man in Christ might be vivified. As such, in a Christian cosmology there might be those who would confess that they struggle against sin and who might even admit that they have been made a “eunuch for the Kingdom,” (Mt. 19:12) but they would not identify themselves — their persons — with their sinful inclinations. St. Paul reveals this kind of mindset in his letter to the Corinthians when he, speaking of those who have been redeemed from such sinful lifestyles,

9 Do you not know that the unrighteous and the wrongdoers will not inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived (misled): neither the impure and immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor those who participate in homosexuality,

10 Nor cheats (swindlers and thieves), nor greedy graspers, nor drunkards, nor foulmouthed revilers and slanderers, nor extortioners and robbers will inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God.

11 And such some of you were [once]. But you were washed clean (purified by a complete atonement for sin and made free from the guilt of sin), and you were consecrated (set apart, hallowed), and you were justified [pronounced righteous, by trusting] in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the [Holy] Spirit of our God.

Note that their identity has changed. They no longer are foulmouthed revilers and slanderers or those who participate in homosexuality. They are now known simply as Christian. They once were the old man but now they are the new man.

In a Christian cosmology it is true that all the saints are sinners but it is also true that in a Christian cosmology no Christian, who is self conscious of their identity in Christ identifies themselves with that sin from which they’ve been delivered. They identify themselves with Christ because they’ve been washed.

2.) Another difference between the Christian cosmology and the sodomite cosmology, when it is played out to its fullest implication, is that in the Christian cosmology how people engage their sexuality cannot be divorced from their Christianity. In the Christian cosmology sexuality is disciplined and harnessed by the Christian faith. In the the sodomite cosmology absolute individual freedom of sexual expression is the center around which all other considerations must orbit. Note the distinction here between a Christian cosmology and a sodomite cosmology is that in the former there are sexuality prohibitions that are part and parcel of the Christian cosmology while in the sodomite cosmology, as it comes into its own, it is only sexuality prohibitions that are prohibited. In the Christian cosmology lust is sin and is to be confessed and denied. In the sodomite cosmology sexual repression is sin and is to be confessed and denied.

3.) In the historic Christian cosmology anthropology and sexuality are bound up together. Man without a helpmeet woman is incomplete (where he or she is not gifted with singleness) and man is not complete until woman is taken from him, fashioned anew, and returned to him in marital union. This historical imagery is so integral to the Christian cosmology that it is taken up in the New Testament with its testimony that the male female union relationship is a reflection of Christ’s relationship with the Church. In the Christian cosmology this male female relationship is fruitful and is to the end of glorifying God and raising faithful covenant children. Sodomy overturns all this cosmology and anthropology for a cosmology and anthropology that teaches that sexual intimacy is not unique to a male and a female and that sexual union is by definition sterile apart from technological contrivances.

4.) The cosmology of Christianity and the cosmology of sodomy are in antithesis and so are incompatible with one another. If there is an attempt to mix them together the end result will only be semantic deception. By semantic deception what is meant is that any mixing of these two antithetical cosmologies will result in the language of Christianity being retained but emptied of its historic orthodox Christian meaning in favor of meaning that is subservient to the cosmology of sodomy. The results will be a retention of Christian jargon but only as that jargon is emptied of its objective historic Christian meaning.

5.) The whole issue of sodomy is so important because it is not just about who is sleeping with whom. I really couldn’t care less about that. The whole issue of sodomy is so important because if the LGBT – sodomy agenda is to overthrow standard historic Christian cosmology then everything changes. If the cosmology of the LGBT crowd wins the day it is not merely a matter of a slight alteration in our social order. No, if the cosmology of the LGBT crowd wins historic Christianity is thrown off completely and with the embrace of the new sodomite cultus a new culture and social order is born that is opposed to Christ and His Kingdom.

At this point it appears that the sodomite cosmology might win in the short term. It has been steamrolling since the enlightenment in one form or another. However, in the long term it can not win because it is a cosmology of death.