Cultural Marxism & The NY Times

“Even the optics must be irritating. A woman (Nancy Pelosi) pushed the health care bill through the House. The bill’s most visible and vocal proponents included a gay man (Barney Frank) and a Jew (Anthony Weiner). And the black man in the White House signed the bill into law. It’s enough to make a good old boy go crazy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/opinion/27blow.html

This NY Times opinion article is interesting because it insists that the direction that this country is taking is unchangeable. People who don’t like Marxism are told in this article that they just need to get used to being obsolescent, and that the country that they love will never come back.

Now, all that may be true. I am yet undecided whether or not the hour is to late in this country for it to return to the religious and theological roots that contributed significantly to what it once was. However that turns out I find it interesting that the people this African-American writers cites in the quote above are all representatives of the people groups that cultural Marxism have employed as their cultural neo-proletariat shock troops to tear up the theological and religious roots that once supported what this country leaned towards. Remember, that in the Cultural Marxism of Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and others of the Frankfurt school, those employed to overturn the old “oppressive Christian social order” are those who believe that they have grievance against that old system. Women (Pelosi) have grievance against its patriarchal nature. The Sexually deviant (Barney Frank) have grievance against its heterosexual monogamous nature. The pagan Secularist Jews (Anthony Weiner) have grievance against its Christian nature, and the Blacks (Barack Obama) have grievance against its White nature. All of these groups, as embodied by the above representatives, also have in common allegiance to a religious theological and ideological system that overthrows both the Christian faith and the culture that it creates. To these groups anybody who supports the previous order is a racist, xenophobe, homophobe, sexist, anti-semite.

This is why the writer of the NY Times piece so easily implies that those who don’t support the ideological tending of the country are racists, uneducated, irrationally enraged, rednecks. In his cultural Marxist multi-cultural world anybody who isn’t Marxist and who doesn’t agree w/ political correctness or multi-culturalism is, by definition, a nekulturny troglodyte.

The Current “Christian” Mind On Homosexuality

Confused Christian is a Ph.D in New Testament and is a Dean of a Holiness Seminary in Indiana.

Confused “Christian” (CC)

“So I think almost anyone who would be reading this post believes that homosexual sex is wrong biblically. What do we do with this? Do we

1. Try to stop it from happening anywhere we can by trying to pass laws against it or even by resorting to violence against such people? This is Bret’s Christian reconstructionist position where you try to make the nation into Calvin’s Geneva.”

Bret responds,

You know, you might first want to do some reading up on Reconstructionism before you start pretending to be an authority on what they do or don’t want.

It is interesting that you talk about “resorting to violence against such people” as if violence visited upon violators of the law is a bad thing. Was God wrong for insisting that violence be visited upon people for their committing of Capital Crimes?

Not liking Calvin’s Geneva, I presume you would prefer Harvey Milk’s San Francisco?

We try to stop rape from happening anywhere we can by trying to pass laws against it and even by resorting to violence against such people? Why should sodomy be any different?

I notice you said that “anyone reading your post would believe that homosexual sex is wrong.” You did not say whether or not you think homosexual sex is wrong. Do you?

CC,

2. “Do we ‘hate the sin but love the sinner,’ let such individuals know we love them without waffling on our values but without trying to force them to stop? This at least seems more Arminian to me and in keeping with the way God deals with the world in general, wooing people to Him rather than forcing us to obey him. And, ironically, this approach seems more in keeping with our Constitution, which does not really allow for us to pass laws based on specific religious traditions that are not universally shared and do not involve basic harm of others.”

Bret

Do you do this all the time? Do you constantly pretend to know what you’re talking about in matters outside what is supposed to be your expertise? What do you know of Constitutional law? Where does the Constitution say that we are not to pass laws based on specific religious traditions that are not universally shared and do not involve basic harm to others? Having read the Constitution a few times I would dearly love for you to point that out. Secondly, on what basis are you suggesting that homosexuality doesn’t involve basic harm of others?

All laws, all the time, are passed based on some specific religious tradition. Indeed, law itself is dependent upon some notion of a lawgiver. Show me the law … and I’ll show you the lawgiver. Having shown you the lawgiver, I’ll show you the very specific religious tradition from which the law comes.

A question for you. Should we also love people who are polygamists w/o trying to force them to stop? Yep, that certainly sounds Arminian to me. It also sounds idiotic. But I repeat myself.

CC,

“The other question is one of motive. The insidious thing about preaching against sin is that, without diluting the badness of sin, it often gives us an excuse to sin by hatefulness. In other words, it is sinful to hate homosexuals, yet because we believe homosexual sex is wrong, it is easy to let yourself off the hook and self-justify evil in one’s own heart because you are preaching against sin. Preaching against sin when we are not preaching for someone is the kind of activity that most easily lends itself to sinfulness on the part of the preacher in this way.”

Bret,

Paul said in Romans, “Hate that which is evil, cling to that which is good.”

The Psalmist, speaking to God said, “Do I not hate those who hate you w/ a Holy Hatred?”

When we preach against sin we are automatically preaching for someone. The first someone we are preaching for is God. Let’s not forget him in all of our sensitivity and compassion for sinners. The second someone we are preaching for is the Sinner himself. Sin hurts people. It hurts them bad. Confronting them w/ Sin and holding out the Lord Jesus Christ as the forgiveness of sin and the cure for sin is the most loving thing you can do for someone.

Second, it is most certainly not hateful to hate homosexuals (or any sinner) when done for the sake of love, who are, through their respective sin of choice, seeking to pull God off His throne. Certainly we must communicate a sense of pity to those who are flipping off God and certainly our hatred of them must be a hatred based on love for them (an, “against the world for the world,” kind of thing) but if we love them we must hate them. Indeed true hatred of them would be a harlot love for them that did not resist them.

The Ubiquitous Race Card

“Their (Tea-party attendees) stated fears — socialism, communism, liberalism — are just proxies for the one fear most of them dare no longer speak … it insults intelligence to deny that race is in the mix.”

Leonard Pitts
Miami Herald Newspaper
March 24, 2010

With the passages of the Marxist Death care legislation the Democrats have turned to the race card and government arrests of Christian Constitutional nutcases in order to try to intimidate the American electorate. The subtle but clear message seems to be that,

1.) If you associate w/ the Tea-Party fringe element in America you are associating with racists, misogynists, homophobes and assorted nutcases and fruit loops.

2.) If you are a Tea-party fringe element (and by the Feds standard any association w/ the Tea-party puts one in the “fringe element” category) you better watch your step because we will throw your sorry white cracker arse in jail.

The Obama administration, and before that the Obama campaign has played the Race card ceaselessly. During the campaign they pulled the race card on Bill Clinton, and Obama was forever warning against “those people who would remind you that I don’t look like the rest of those other presidents on our dollar bills.” Once Obama was victorious in November of 08, through the manipulation of white guilt, Obama had an inauguration benediction that was all race card,

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen”

Then, there was the the whole Cambridge cop imbroglio, where, quite apart from knowing any facts, Obama turned a comparatively pedestrian incident into a National issue of race. Obama, it may be said, is our Racist in Chief.

And now, the race card is being played, by Obama hacks and flacks in the American Pravada media, on anybody who points to the Constitution and screams in concert with tens of thousands of others, “We will not be enslaved by the State.”

For my part, I think we should go ahead and admit that race is in the mix. We should publish broadly and widely that it can be seen that race is in the mix by the fact that so few minorities desire to be free. We should publish broadly and widely the curiosity that finds such a large percentage of minorities voting to support Marxism. Yes indeed, race is in the mix, but it is only in the mix because, percentage wise, minorities choose not to attend protests that cry for freedom for all people.

However, Tea-party types should go out of their way to explain how the policies of the Obama administration will disproportionally hurt minorities. Tea-party types should go out of their way to explicitly set out how the Marxist policies of the Democrats and the Obama administration are racist, for these policies, in direct pursuit of hurting the white man, will instead bring untold suffering on minorities.

So, yes, Mr Pitts, “race is in the mix,” but it is only in the mix because the Obama administration and people like Pitts have put it in the mix.

Of course, I suppose it is possible, though I don’t like to think or believe it, that minorities on the basis of being minorities, don’t like liberty. I mean, given the voting record in the 90-95 percentile of the black community for Democrat Marxist candidates, maybe it is possible that race has something to do w/ an aversion to liberty. But even if this is so, it would be the minorities that are putting race into the mix, not the Tea-party denizens. The only thing that the majority of the Tea-party activists have in the mix is liberty.

Americans who are pro-liberty only want liberty and any individual who shares a desire for liberty for their people are welcome to come to protests that cry for freedom for all peoples.

Holy Week — Monday

Mt. 21:18 Now in the morning, as He returned to the city, He was hungry. 19 And seeing a fig tree by the road, He came to it and found nothing on it but leaves, and said to it, “Let no fruit grow on you ever again.” Immediately the fig tree withered away. 20 And when the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, “How did the fig tree wither away so soon?” 21 So Jesus answered and said to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but also if you say to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ it will be done. 22 And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.”

On Monday of the first day of Holy Week we have the event of Jesus withering of the fig tree. Matthew places this cursing and withering as simultaneous events. Jesus curses and the tree immediately withers. The context of the fruitless fig tree reveals that the fig tree is serving as a illustration and metaphor for the fruitless ritual of the Temple and the fruitless life of God’s covenant people, Israel. Jesus comes to the Temple and expects to find fruit and instead finds no nourishment for the people. Jesus may have anticipated early fruit on the Fig tree and finding none uses the tree as a illustration to reinforce the cleansing of the Temple.

The idea of a fruitless fig embodying barren Israel was not a completely novel idea. We find this kind of language being used in Jeremiah 8:14 and Micah 7:1. It may very well be the case that Jesus’ action is consistent w/ a framework of understanding that would have been familiar to the Jews.

The idea of the owner coming to find the expected fruit and being disappointed with barrenness or refusal, whether of Temple, or Tree, is articulated a third time in Matthew 21:33f w/ the Parable of the wicked vine-dressers. Here the landowner expects fruit from his vineyard but after the repeated sending of his representatives to collect what is to be expected, finally the landowner resolves to come in judgment upon those who will not yield up the fruit that is rightfully his.

The repeated message in Temple Cleansing, Fig Tree Cursing, and Vine-dresser’ Comeuppance is that eventually judgment falls upon those who are covenantally unfaithful and who participate in a defiant, consistent, and ongoing disobedience. In history that judgment that was promised and prefigured in all of these events came to pass w/ the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

We are reminded in all of this that when salvation comes it means both deliverance and condemnation at the same time. Deliverance for those who have been about the Master’s business but condemnation for those who have been lived w/ self at the center neglecting to yield up to God what He rightly expects and has so abundantly provided for.

There is one thing we want to explore here in conclusion and that is Jesus pronouncement in Matthew 21, “Let no fruit grow on you ever again.”

Now, remember in these words Jesus is referring to National Israel. I would submit that Jesus words mean that Israel as a National entity is eschatologically irrelevant. Certainly, Jews as individual Jews have, do and will continue to be converted but these words of Jesus suggest that God is finished with Israel as a National entity. No fruit will grow on them ever again.

If people would pause and think about the implications of that last paragraph they might have to re-think their whole theology.

Label-phobia, Non-Labelism, or Un-Labelism

Recently, I am interacting w/ one of the Ph.D’s at my college Alma Mater. Dr. Schenck and I are about as polar opposite as one can imagine in our belief systems and our notions about the nature of reality. Recently, he wrote a brief bit about the dangers of “labelism” that you can read below. It suspiciously reads like it was a treatise born of a liberal and post-modern agenda. Now, certainly some of what Dr. Schenck wrote was true. It is absolutely true that we all need to be careful about hasty generalizations, false compositions, and false divisions. However his piece struck me as one that could as easily been written concerning the opposite dangers of “Label-phobia” (my new word to be submitted to the Webster Dictionary people) to describe many of Dr. Schenck’s positions.

I interact w/ Dr. Schenck’s material because I still have a soft spot for the Wesleyans in my heart. Nothing will ever change how much the Wesleyans did for me in my first 22 years of life. As such, I’d like them to be as orthodox as it is possible for Wesleyans to be. Dr. Schenck is dragging them away from that Wesleyan orthodoxy.

I am coming to have a growing admiration for Dr. Schenck for I find him to be a person who can get my creative juices flowing. Perhaps, I am finding in him a muse?”

Dr, Schenck wrote,

I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:

labelism: The tendency to skew diverse particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by grouping them under overly generalized labels in the service of argument.

Examples:

* Those who favor women in ministry are liberals because radical feminists push for equal rights and pay for women.

* True conservatives are opposed to gun control because gun control is generally pushed by Democrats.

* Allowing the government to manage some area of its citizens’ life shows that we are becoming socialist like China.

* Taxing us to support the health care of the elderly shows that we are becoming communist like the Soviet Union.

* Making decisions that are unpopular shows that President Obama is a Fascist like Hitler.

* You can’t believe in the idea that Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke because that is an idea that comes from higher criticism.

* The students at Oberlin were transcendentalists like Emerson who didn’t believe in a personal God because they put a high emphasis on religious feeling like the Romantics.

All these statements are logically fallacious, even though they are the stuff of common rhetoric. They take diverse realia and oversimplify them because the human mind has difficulty processing complexity.

Logical fallacies involved: 1) hasty generalization, where differences between one observation and a general conclusion are ignored in the midst of argument; 2) fallacy of composition, where a whole is assumed to have certain characteristics because some parts have certain characteristics; and 3) fallacy of division, where all parts of something are assumed to all have certain characteristics because of some characteristic of the whole.

Explanation: The human mind is generally unable to process large amounts of particular facts without grouping them together into schemata, as Piaget called them. In deductive reasoning, where all the data can be accounted for and where all the data is usually of a simple nature, universal groupings can be fully coherent.

In inductive thinking, however, which is the nature of our lives in the world, all the data can rarely be accounted for, and the data is almost never a simple nature. People, events, and various other particular data are extremely complex and interwoven together. Simple ideas thus can hardly represent them without skew of some kind.

Beware of generalizations bearing fallacies! The Devil is in the details.”

Bret responds,

I have a suggestion for a new word for the dictionary:

Label-phobia: The tendency to skew related particular ideas, events, people, and so forth by refusing to properly generalize them in order to put them in the service of argument.

Further, this would be the state or condition of refusing to see patterns or the refusal to speak in generalities unless 100% compliance was held in each and every generality. Un-labelism or Non-Labelism or Label-phobia would flinch at Universals preferring instead to see the world only in terms of mass and total differentiated individuation. Label-phobia, Un-labelism or Non-labelism would be something consistent w/ a kind of post-modern reading of reality where, if universals exist, they only exist on a (you guessed it) an individual by individual basis.

Examples of such would be,

* A refusal to label those who hold to women in ministry as “liberal” since the un-labelists refuses to see that generally speaking people who embrace women in office also embrace a confluence of other liberal positions.

* A refusal to label Obama as a Marxist even though his past associations, his past employment, his administration appointments and his current actions all testify that Obama is a Marxist.

* A refusal to label the current government as socialist even though there has been a long and decided trend in US government (which has displayed Fabian waxing and waning) for 100 years. This refusal to label is defiant even in the most egregious of evidence to the contrary such as the State taking over much of the Financial infrastructure, the Auto industry, the health industry and the student loan industry.

* A refusal to identify and label neo-orthodoxy and higher criticism even when people clearly embrace a distinction between geschicte and heilgeschicte.

* A refusal to label the Oberlin College of the 19th century as Transcendentalist even though Finney had clearly drank deeply from the Transcendental / Romanticist zeitgeist. (Indeed, so deeply had the man quaffed from the spirit of the age that when you read his systematic theology you realize that it is all ethics and no grace. All what man does and none of what God does. There is no personal God in Finney’s theology.)

All this refusal to label might be seen as endemic to the post-modern mind which refuses to see universals or organize material into universal universals. Indeed, label-phobia might be seen as the mark of the post-modern.

Beware the refusal to generalize, and to label and recognize the presence of the Universal. The devil would love for us to be forever knowing but never coming to the Truth.

Beware of non-labelists or Un-labelists who create words like “labelism” in order to demonize those who do not have a post-modern bent mind.

Simple ideas such as label-phobia can hardly represent truth without skewing of some kind.