I don’t know if it encourages them to make a wiser decision, but it is amusing to poke fun at a dopey (and ugly) mutilation fad.

I’m not saying that Ron Paul would otherwise win, as I think that is a long shot unless there is an economic collapse soon. It’s just an interesting case study in showing the power of the political establishment to change public opinion quickly. Even conservatives are falling in line behind Mitt “I will preserve and protect a woman’s right to choose” Romney. They apparently prefer the U.S. empire and its endless wars.

I like Ron Paul and agree with nearly all of his positions. He’s the rare man of integrity in politics. However, he’s deficient as a communicator. I hope someone will come after him who will keep asking questions such as why the U.S. needs military bases in over 100 countries, why we as a country have killed way more foreigners in the last 10 years than any other country, why we are spending more on “defense” (“offense” is a more accurate term) than the rest of the world combined, etc.

And if it’s all true, well, poor Jerry Sandusky. The guy is just living out his lifestyle choice and he gets pilloried for it. Haters! Who made you judge? How about a little tolerance?

Actually, folks, we should be thankful that people still feel like vomiting when they think about some old dude manipulating a little boy into becoming his sex doll. I’ve long thought that normalizing man-boy “relationships” (only “consenting” ones, of course) is the next exit down the perversion highway now that men having oral and anal sex with other men is established as a mainstream lifestyle that must be affirmed and never questioned (and don’t go calling it gross or disgusting either).

The protesters weren’t at Wall St. Wall St. was partially closed off with steel barriers and a heavy dose of mounted police. The street is small and the buildings so large that they shield out the sun. There’s was a weird, sterile silence near the NYSE. It was like like being in a canyon. Perhaps it’s a metaphor.

Anyway, the protesters were actually occupying the smallish Zuccotti Park a few short blocks away from Wall St. What was Zuccotti Park like on Saturday? Zuccotti Park was a circus. There were steel barriers. And police. Lots of cops. The protesters looked like mostly college kids along with some more seasoned protesters. I walked through the middle of the park a few times. It didn’t smell at the park. It looked pretty clean overall, but in the middle of it where I wandered there was a lot of tarp and blankets and dirty-looking kids. Some looked like bums. I wouldn’t sleep there, we’ll put it that way. There were people holding signs of varying types in a phalanx next to the sidewalk on 6th Avenue. As the police fought to keep it clear, gawkers filed like sardines down it, snapping pictures, while protesters determinedly held their signs. Many of the signs were anti-war, many anti-Wall Street, some were calling for socialist revolution, and there were a few (not many) libertarian ones sprinkled in. The free market made an appearance in the form of opportunistic food trucks, an ever-present feature of New York street corners. Business seemed brisk.

I think there were more gawkers than protesters. This is life in the age of social media and iphones. Protesters snapping photos of themselves and gladly accepting the embrace of what Muggeridge called “that most ubiquitous of panders,” the camera lens. It struck me while watching all of this that many of these kids were pretty attention-starved. There was a guy doing a one-man play (there just cannot be a worse form of entertainment than the one-man play). There was a young girl in a garish outfit who seemed almost giddy at a gawker snapping her picture. My wife soon entered a store and went shopping while I wandered. She couldn’t take it any more. Her thought process: let’s not encourage them with more attention.

OWS struck me as silly. And shallow.

It makes you wonder a little about “history” itself. Fifty years from now, if the Lord hasn’t returned, perhaps we will look at OWS as a seminal moment for something or other and we will forget that a lot of it was people posing for pictures and satisfying their inner needs. It was people like me there to watch a reality show being filmed. “Are you not entertained?” There was a self-consciousness of “history” being made. We don’t like to think of history in this way, but maybe a lot of it is this way. I guess we can be happy that they didn’t have Droids in the Civil War, or tweets to commemorate the fall of Rome.

Later that day we saw a few hundred protesters marching up toward Times Square with their ever-present police escort. If you haven’t been to Times Square lately– I was at a trade show in NYC back in the mid 90s when it seemed like one big peep show– it’s now a series of huge electronic billboards. The ads light the night. There’s a lot of people, a lot of pricey delis, and a lot of places to shop. It’s touristy. The theaters overflow.

Well, the protesters decided that they were going to march in the middle of the zoo on its busiest night (the quest for attention again). We were in the area. One protester held a sign saying “Keep Shopping.” I don’t know if this was outrage or some type of Madame Defarge threat. Another held a sign saying to never, ever, ever vote for a Republican. The flip side said “Tax Hemp.” I wasn’t sure how to do the math on that one. So anyway, the police shut off part of Times Square for a time, and it turned the zoo into a mega-zoo of people being diverted from their theater or wherever they were going. It reminded me of an MTV-style, reality show re-enactment of that peaceful protest march scene from Dr. Zhivago, except less momentous. Instead of the cavalry leaving some dead bodies, there were some broken windows and arrests.

We didn’t see much of this action at Times Square, but you can’t win ‘em all when it comes to experiencing “history.” Maybe someone DVR’d it.

Laurence Vance unfortunately has been affiliated with the Grace Evangelical Society, but on the topic of war he publishes thoughtful articles. Why have Christians been seduced by the warfare state and this foreign policy of endless meddling in other lands? Vance attributes it partly to American exceptionalism.

Many Christians are guilty of nationalistic and political idolatry. They have bought into a variety of American nationalism that has been called the myth of American exceptionalism. This is the idea that the government of the United States is morally and politically superior to all other governments, that American leaders are exempt from the bad characteristics of the leaders of other countries, that the U.S. government should be trusted even as the governments of other countries should be distrusted, that the United States is the indispensable nation responsible for the peace and prosperity of the world, that the motives of the United States are always benevolent and paternalistic, that foreign governments should conform to the policies of the U.S. government, that most other nations are potential enemies that threaten U.S. safety and security, and that the United States is morally justified in imposing sanctions or launching military attacks against any country that refuses to conform to our dictates. These are the tenets of American exceptionalism.

The result of this American exceptionalism is a foreign policy that is aggressive, reckless, belligerent, and meddling. This is why U.S. foreign policy results in discord, strife, hatred, and terrorism toward the United States. We would never tolerate another country engaging in an American-style foreign policy. How many countries are allowed to build military bases and station troops in the United States? It is the height of arrogance to insist that the United States alone has the right to garrison the planet with bases, station troops wherever it wants, intervene in the affairs of other countries, and be the world’s policeman, fireman, social worker, security guard, mediator, and babysitter.

Many Americans seem to think we can do no wrong when killing foreigners. It’s all in the name of protecting our freedom and the American way.

I think it’s time American Christians took off their blinders and repented for following bureaucrats and lawless politicians with their flag pins, and for cheering on mayhem. American exceptionalism is American arrogance. It’s deeply unbiblical.

For me, a doctor is a medical doctor. I’ll call Ron Paul “Dr. Paul” because he is a an obstetrician. I can’t call RC Sproul “Dr. Sproul.” Plus, RC Sproul has a far more significant title than Doctor: Pastor.

This is why there aren’t going to be meaningful cuts to the government until there is some form of collapse. Mess with the checks going out and you’ll have a problem on your hands. Thus your conservative Congressman talks about a meaningless balanced budget amendment, as if Congress is going to pay any more attention to that than they do the rest of the Constitution. He proposes a 1% cut in year one (the only year that matters in the budget) when a 60% cut is needed (for starters). He supports a gimmicky non-solution. This is the path that wins elections in conservative districts. If you think most conservative voters support a small government in practice, just try to cut off their government checks.

As this article puts it:

The intellectual purpose of the entitlement state – conditioning people over generations toward dependency with vows to loot future taxpayers to maintain the system – has worked perfectly… The welfare state has won over all of society. It has succeeded in making the entire culture dependent on it. Middle class conservatives condemn welfarism even as they clamor for better public schools, apply for student loans for their kids, hold jealously onto their Medicare and Social Security benefits, accept unemployment checks when they’re expedient, and resist any talk about cutting back the government’s support for its police and soldiers. Liberals today say they are realists on welfare but never cease to agitate for more ways to put us all on the dole. As we find ourselves in the wake of fiscal catastrophe, we must recognize that only a tiny portion of government expenditures go to the easy targets – the earmarks, the welfare mothers, the roads to nowhere, the Woodstock museums, the funding to study bird migrations, even the salaries of bailed out CEOs. America is, despite the conservative and liberal propaganda to the contrary, essentially as much a welfare state as most other nations of the West, and the hugest chunk of the entitlement expenditures are going not to the easily scapegoated classes, but rather to the respectable masses.

I don’t lament the passing of an evil man, but when George Tiller was murdered I didn’t think to dance in the streets. Today there were loads of “rot in hell” wishes for Bin Laden in newspaper headlines and Facebook posts.

It bears reminding that all men are image-bearers. We can thankful when others are spared by a wicked man’s passing, and yet remember Proverbs 24:17: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the LORD see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him.”

I’ve been wondering lately how many innocent people the U.S. government has killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan over the past 10 years. No doubt many times more than those who died on 911. Some believe the deaths number well over 100,000. Who mourns these souls who are nameless to Americans? We rightly remember the dead of 911, but a more immediate question is this: what makes American lives more precious than others? Nothing, Biblically. Foreigners are image-bearers too.

Back in a 2008 debate, Ron Paul offended Republicans by stating something that is so obvious that it’s hard to believe anyone can deny it with a straight face. He said that our foreign policy– bombing, invading, meddling, aiding tyrants for our economic interests — creates blowback. It creates bitterness and hatred among the occupied. We wouldn’t like having Arabian troops in Indianapolis or Chinese troops in Georgia. Why would the Pakistanis want American troops in their country? Shelby Foote told an anecdote once of a confederate who was asked why he fought the North. His reply: “because you’re down here.”

Michael Scheuer long noted that Bin Laden didn’t “hate us for our freedoms.” Instead, he hated American interventionism and support for Arab police states. It doesn’t excuse the evildoer, but if you go down into the hood wearing a lot of bling, don’t be surprised if you’re mugged. Didn’t Jesus counsel his disciples to be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves?

I’m surprised that more people, especially those given to “anti-government” views in economic matters, aren’t more skeptical of the military. It’s another government bureaucracy that wants to grow as bureaucracies do, and an especially dangerous one given that it’s armed to the teeth. The old conservatives were well aware of the danger to liberty posed by wars. Yet today the same conservatives who think of the post office, the EPA, and the IRS as hopelessly corrupt unflinchingly embrace the military and militarism. And few think of the innocent lives in foreign lands or the potential for blowback that Ron Paul has so wisely warned us about for many years.

For more than an hour in an Oval Office meeting on April 7, House Speaker John Boehner had insisted that any compromise on the government’s budget include a prohibition on federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

Obama already had reluctantly agreed to a provision banning the District of Columbia from spending funds on abortion services — and that was as far as he would go.

“Nope, zero,” he told Boehner, according to a senior Democratic aide. “John, this is it.” The room went silent.

And there there’s this. Listening to the balderdash the last few days, why you’d think that PP was all about breast exams (which shouldn’t be subsidized by the public either, by the way). They always run from what they are, amid clouds, misdirection, and euphemisms. Only 3% of our services involve abortion (never mind that we do 300,000+ a year). Serving women. Protecting women’s health. Blah blah blah.

Not long ago, the Ryan plan was introduced with some fanfare. It promises lots of cuts… over decades. Few cuts of significance in the first year. When you hear someone say that they want to cut trillions over 10+ years, remember that budgets are redone every year. The shelf life is one year. The only part of the budget that matters is the first year. No one is basing the 2012 budget on what the 10-year outlook was in the 2003 budget.

One of the invariable parts of these plans is to oversee the slow privatization of retirement money by cutting benefits to those under a certain age. This is a good thing in that social security needs to be phased out.

The problem is how these things are sold. People are told that by privatizing they will get better returns at lower costs. True in the past. The problem is that the economy is headed down the tubes due to all the debt, and this promise will be empty (plus, 401K offerings usually provide little protection against inflationary forces since those are deemed “unsafe” investments by advisers living in the bubble past). So what’s going to happen when people see their “safe” bond funds getting killed and their money market funds losing purchasing power due to inflation? If it’s anything like I remember 2008, we’re going to hear a loud outcry. People believe that Wall Street is ripping them off (somewhat true, although the Fed is the far bigger culprit). People are going to want this corrected. It will be another outburst of what I call “stupid populism,” which asks good questions and proposes bad answers.

The gimmicks will fall apart from voter anger. Politicians will empathize but their inability to deliver the goodies will be more transparent. (If it were earlier in the Ponzi scheme, big government could ride to the rescue, but alas, the hour is late.)

I just finished Tom Wood’s book Rollback. Woods hammers away at historically false assumptions such as how the government saved us from sweatshops, or how the financial meltdown was caused by “deregulation.”

This questioning is what is needed with the Medicare and Social Security debate, too. The greatest assumption of all is that the government owes you a retirement. Instead of promising people increased returns through private/public gimmicks like subsidized 401Ks, the government should get out of the promise-making business altogether. The assumption that the government can protect our retirement “security” needs to be exploded. People need to be told that they are responsible for their own retirement. The entitlement mentality needs to be shamed. People need to buy their own insurance, work cooperatively with their churches or civic organizations, plan ahead, etc. There’s no free lunch.

It would help if the government would get out of the game of encouraging debt through low interest rates and backstopping loans, and spending massive amounts of money, but that is a topic for another post.

• Why do so many people look upon policemen, firemen, and public school teachers as sacrosanct? To use the latter example, public schools are an incredibly inefficient use of resources. If someone says “we can’t put a price on a good eduction,” to that I say yes, we can. We have to. We do it with everything in our lives because scarcity is a fact of life.
• Teachers sometimes tell us that they have a masters degree, as if that’s a reason why they should be paid at above-market rates. From an economic standpoint, you are worth what someone is willing to pay you. In a free market, most teachers would be making less money. Why? Because there is always the option to learn at home, to form cooperative education groups with other parents, to use digital learning methods, etc. Teachers would have to compete like everyone else. That’s a world teachers want to avoid, thus the desire to maintain coercive collective bargaining laws.
• In the end, the unions are going to lose (and it can’t come soon enough). Maybe not this year, but the fact is that state deficits are out of control. The pensions that past politicians agreed to (because promises of future payouts were easy to make way back when) are unaffordable. Unions can recall hard-headed governors, but states are still going to default on much of these debts. That’s economic reality.
• Does anyone else find it annoying that public workers think that private workers owe them an above-average living? Many of us in the private sector have seen declining living standards over the past 10 years.

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. -Gandalf to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings

I was at the doctor the other day, and as usual when the lady pulled up my sleeve to draw blood I braced. The nurse studied my arm for a minute, then I barely felt a prick (she should teach others how to draw blood correctly). I thought to myself: “That’s it?”

Recently I watched an atheist named Michael Shermer on John Stossel’s Fox Business show. Shermer had three reasons for being skeptical about God: 1. Where you happen to have been born tells you which God you happen to adhere to. 2. Why does God allow innocent children to suffer? 3. The moral problem. The creator of the universe couldn’t even get it right on slavery and how women should be treated, the OT is abominable in that regard, etc.

That’s it? Don’t get me wrong, there are unfathomable mysteries here, but… The essential similarity between all these issues is presumption and arrogance.

Is where you were born a good predictor of your beliefs? Of course. It always has been in Scripture. God called Abram, but not presumably thousands of others from that region. Israel was God’s chosen, but all that time people lived in Asia and America without a true knowledge of him. In 500AD, many in what is today Turkey knew the Lord; today most do not. Millions of Americans are Christian today; there were few 2,000 years ago. The examples are endless, but here’s the point: God is above nations and cultures. He works through them to accomplish His means, and His spirit goes where it will. It’s always been assumed that way in Scripture.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Technically they don’t, because none are righteous (Romans 3). So why does God allow children to suffer? For His glory. How exactly? We don’t know. We aren’t invited to God’s counsel. We don’t know eternity. We can’t see behind the curtain. Isn’t that a key point in the book of Job?

As for the moral reason, Who are you, o man, to think you have a greater capacity for love and morality than God? Why do you think your view of morality is righteous?

We are men. God is God. God is good. We are corrupt. God sees all and knows all. We see little. God it the alpha and the omega. We aren’t. God is holy. We are sinners.

There’s an apocryphal story that I’ve heard in multiple contexts, but it goes something like this. A lady is on a train with two rambunctious kids. A nearby passenger is annoyed with the rude behavior of the children, and the mother’s disinterest in controlling them. Murmuring under his breath, he finally says as calmly as possible that that they are rather loud. The mother sadly responds that her beloved husband and their beloved father has just died and, given the circumstances, she is letting them have a bit of fun. The passenger is humbled. It’s a parable of presumption.

We don’t know the whole story.

What we really ought to ask the liberal, before we even begin addressing his agenda, is this: In what kind of society would he be a conservative? -Joseph Sobran

A perceptive quote. For most, the answer is “in whatever society I can keep getting whatever I’m currently getting, and I don’t care or I don’t think about how it is extracted from others with threats.” For the true believers in the social gospel, it will occur when we reach an earthly Utopia. We have eternity in our hearts, but we want that eternity in the now. The spending cannot stop until every mouth is fed and everyone is cared for. Which, in reality, means that the spending can never stop, because it ain’t gonna happen.

And so the social security checks and the Medicare reimbursements and the wars will go on until we ram head-on into the wall at the end of the road. Then it’s going to get interesting.

The refusal to confront economic reality is evident in this discussion about raising the debt limit. Why, if we do this, there will be a default! Exactly. These people prefer the delusion (or deception) that there’s a way around this, when in reality adding more debt is just setting up a greater default, and more pain, down the road. Why not just get it over with? There is no way the government can legitimately “stimulate” the economy out of this problem. A bank makes a loan to a company with the idea that the company will be able to expand or grow production, and from that production pay back the loan. The government couldn’t produce its way out of a paper bag.

One more thing: I heard a guy say the other day that the government has a “fiduciary responsibility” to pay the pensions of public workers. Nonsense. If I contractually agree to pay someone $10 an hour, then I have an obligation to pay it. If politicians from 20 years ago passed a law saying that government workers get a massive pension, the law should be changed without scruple because politicians have no right to borrow and steal money from others to pay for it.

If you live by the government, you will die by the government.

All my heart this night rejoices
As I hear / Far and near / Sweetest angel voices.
“Christ is born,” their choirs are singing
Till the air / Everywhere / Now with joy is ringing.

I admit it, Christmas-time is my favorite time of the year. The wreaths are a closed loop, a reminder of eternity. Evergreens are lovely in the dead of winter. How can’t you love Christmas lights and their association with the Father of Lights and the light shining in darkness? Not that we attend church for its aesthetics, but last week we had morning communion and big snowflakes were falling outside, and I thought there it was one of the most wondrous moments in my life.

This year the time with family seemed extra special. When little, time with family compared weakly to presents. For teens, friends or a book seem paramount. You get a little older and the gifts end up in landfills and you’ve moved on to other friends, and you finally realize– perhaps after some of them have gone on to the next world– that your family was what mattered all along.

Enjoy the season. For the believer, these snippets of joy are a precursor to joy never-ending. Merry Christmas.

When I was at OSU, I think it’s fair to say that most of the bureaucrats aka. “educators” there hated the football program. “Here we are providing enlightenment to young minds and, alas, our public face is a most distasteful, crass game with young men smacking each other around.” Of course, a cash cow isn’t going anywhere with the brass.

I suspect that professors seethe about the football program to this day. If so, it’s a feather in the football program’s cap.

Still, while we all have to swim in the cesspool of an intrusive state that is hard to bypass, I wonder sometimes how many people would be outright hostile to universities if it weren’t for college football (and basketball). College sports advertise to conservatives almost as effectively as the military. Sean Hannity, who is on the radio when I drive home, rails about federal spending and then in the next breath is upset at how Obama is gutting the military (which isn’t true, but what kind of sense does that make anyway?).

If it weren’t for the military, the endless wars, the Pledge, etc., more people would be wholly alienated from the predatory Federal government.

If it weren’t for college football, wouldn’t the image of universities be much worse? The military, college football… these are the things that lend credibility and warm feelings to the state.

Even though I fully support the elimination of all public education, I still watch the games and love them. I’m trying to stop buying the merchandise, though. Little steps.

Anyway, never mind that. A huge choir, an organ, all really loud in a cavernous space. This must have been one of those rare moments in these shadowlands when the clouds part and, as Muggeridge put it, one sees “the bright vistas of eternity and the prison bars of time.”

War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results.

It’s probably not a coincidence that Sobran wandered off the conservative plantation into anarcho-libertarianism about the time of Buckley’s attacks (politically, I’m moving in Joe Sobran’s footsteps, 20 years behind). He wrote plaintively of his alienation from the militaristic William F. Buckley school of conservatism that still informs Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity:

Surely we all wanted the same things! … [I]t was only toward the end of more than two happy decades there that I began to realize that we didn’t all want the same things after all. When it happened, it was like learning, after a long and placid marriage, that your spouse is in love with someone else, and has been all along.

Like Muggeridge, Sobran was a great observer of the modern landscape. He wrote hilariously of Clintonian rottenness and with fierce moral insight into topics like sodomy and abortion. Always an inspiringly gifted writer, his style evolved into the very definition of “pithy.” He was staunchly Catholic, especially in latter years (I hope that he found the Lord). He wrote a column once that spoke of how he came back to his faith because he pondered Jesus’s words. No one has ever spoken as Christ spoke. Next time you read Jesus’s words, step back and think about that. The depth, the authority, the insight… it’s amazing. Who but God speaks this way? Almost every line Jesus speaks is a memorable line that rings with power, even two thousand years later. You begin to understand why his hearers were so often amazed and silenced by his authority and wisdom.

For that insight alone I’ll always be grateful to Joe Sobran. May he rest in peace.

10/2 addendum: In reading some of the remembrances, it’s interesting that many fine writers had the same thought I always did after reading a Sobran column: “I wish I could write like that.” I also should underscore that it was Sobran who first caused me to question my views on war. He helped me realize that opposition to (most) war was not only the domain of unhinged left-wingers, but also serious men on the right who found both moral and political reasons to oppose it. As has been said many times, “war is the health of the state.”

This is true. It is fun to watch incumbents squirm and then lose, but if the “new people” are just going to repeal Obamacare, maintain tax rates, and cut discretionary spending to the level of a few years ago, well, then they’re using a teaspoon to shovel snow during a blizzard. It’s nothing but a start. Drastic problems need drastic solutions. The public isn’t there yet, no matter how much we hear the word “revolution” this fall.

I now call myself a libertarian for lack of a better word. I’m not wholly comfortable with that term. Like other terms (“conservative”), it has its baggage. There are a lot of competing understandings of the word. But that’s true in the conservative world, too.

However, let’s summarize the solutions to the massive spending that threatens a complete economic collapse in this country. First, entitlement spending (Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, etc.) must be phased out. The money has already been squandered and we have seen the devastation welfare has caused. Second, government control of the money supply that enables overspending and boom/bust cycles needs to end (eliminate the Fed, repeal legal tender laws, end the moral hazards such as the FDIC). Third, the U.S. needs to end its military presence in over 100 countries. Don’t we all know the course of empire? Fourth, the Federal Register needs to be thrown into a bonfire. An economist noted that federal regulations alone cost $1.2T a year. That’s over 30% more than the government collected in income tax revenues last year. Fifth, public education needs to end. Why do people to see something sinister in countries with their red-scarved children, and yet they imagine that our government schools do not advance the state’s agenda? Public schools– and I include universities, of course– are government indoctrination centers.

Reread that last paragraph. Do conservative Republicans advance that kind of agenda? No. Libertarians like Ron Paul do.

Until I did P90X, I thought that yoga was for Hindus and New Age goofballs. Indeed, if you look into yoga it won’t be long until you start hearing about organic yoga apparel, and, worse, “spirituality” (always a red-flag). However, yoga is slowly getting shorn of its pagan roots. Although P90X Yoga does have a little of secularized “ohm” stuff at the beginning and end (which I faithfully skip), the rest of it is simply a tough workout. I watch TV while I’m doing it, just as I do while lifting weights. Jillian Michaels, for one, has a power yoga DVD that has no “spiritual” component. Just the moves: stretching, postures, and using your own body weight. People tell me that fitness clubs now offer “just moves” yoga classes, too. Yoga moves are being used in physical therapy. Yoga stretches at the beginning of aerobic workouts.

Yoga is going mainstream. The deceivers and goofballs are still out there, though, so discernment is necessary. If you’re doing yoga to empty your mind and find inner tranquility, or if you’re after anything more than a good workout and stretch, then you’re on shaky ground at best. I’d avoid yoga that has any “spiritual” component whatsoever. Proceed with caution. Just the moves, ma’m.

One last concern: Do you lose your man card? Maybe, but I don’t find it particularly effeminate.

The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will. -Proverbs 21:1

In his sermon this morning, our pastor noted that Mary responded to the Lord calling to her (John 11:29). Then, soon after, Lazarus responded from the grave to the Lord’s call (John 11:43-44).

This is an exceedingly powerful voice. If He can call a man back from the grave, can He not call your unbelieving relatives and friends?

There has always been something tedious and artificial about discussions of racism. The real problem is hatred and pride. People hate or look down on other people for a hundred reasons: they’re pretty, they’re ugly, they smoke, they’re red state, they’re blue state, they’re rich, they’re poor. And yet we single out one peculiar form– racism– above all the others. It’d be as if we all decided in concerted fashion to stamp out gluttons addicted to Moon Pies, or men who lust after green-eyed women. Not that these aren’t evils, but why these specific evils?

There’s little desire to combat sin, of course. The word “racism” has become just another club used by those with political agendas to pummel and marginalize others.

It’s gotten so silly that I’ve heard people say that the “worst thing” you accuse someone of is racism. Really? Worse than adulterer or blasphemer? Worse than sodomite or whore?