In case you missed it, the U.S. Government responded to Elon Musk buying Twitter by establishing an office to control “disinformation” aka “The Ministry of Truth.”
Very disturbing.
society
James Macpherson: We Are Witnessing the Birth of a New Religion
We Are Witnessing the Birth of a New Religion
James Macpherson
Transgender ideology is becoming sacrosanct, taken as a fact and not permitted to be questioned or criticised. It is treated as a sacred religion by those who actually believe in it. This has implications for all of society.
I don’t think most people believe that “trans women are women”, even when they say it.
I think most people who say it are afraid not to say it.
And then there are a small group of people who say it to make those who don’t say it afraid; very afraid.
“Trans women are women. Trans women are women. Trans women are women.”
Woke Confession
If you’re on social media, you would have seen everyone from the United Nations to US President Joe Biden and London Mayor Sadiq Khan repeat the phrase.
“Trans women are women. Trans women are women. Trans women are women.”
It’s like a religious confession; a sacrament of woke, if you will. When you say it, you prove that you have abandoned truth in order to fully embrace the new religion. You are a believer.
Repeating the woke liturgy is a way of signalling to everyone else that you have converted and so you won’t be any bother.
No matter how ridiculous or absurd things become, you won’t question anything. You’re a loyal member of the congregation of woke. You’ll go along to get along. And don’t the Emperor’s new clothes look good!
Total Control
If you secretly yearn to control and boss others around, the “trans women are women” confession is especially appealing.
Imagine having the power to bully people on social media or to get them fired from their job for not agreeing with obvious falsities.
Up is down! And if you don’t disagree, you’re a bigot who should be run out of town.
Imagine having that kind of power!
Read the rest of the article at Daily Declaration
Elon Musk’s Political Evolution
Baptism
Stephen McAlpine: Planting Flowers in Wartime
People are planting flowers in Kyiv. Spring is coming.
In the midst of all the chaos, horror and death that the Russian invasion has inflicted on Kyiv, there is something beautiful about people planting flowers in wartorn Kyiv.
As The Times reports, in the light of the Russian withdrawal from the city, the city’s mayor, former world heavyweight boxing champion, Vitaly Klitschko declared:
The municipal services have started spring cleaning. Parks, green areas are being arranged and trees and flowers are being planted.
The war isn’t finished of course. Far from it. Half of the city’s population is still missing, some dead, many in other countries. The devastation and pain will continue for some time yet.
But the normal process of planting seedlings in the flowerbeds, much the same as in my suburb on a seasonal basis, has recommenced. Spring in the air. Easter Resurrection in the air.
Planting flowers in wartime? It could be construed as denial. It could be misdiagnosed as futility or nihilism. Or it could be seen for what it is: Hope sprouting from the ground again.
And it’s a lesson too. A lesson for so many things, but a lesson, I think, for the church. I’ve written much about the straitened times that the church of God finds itself in in the West, either due to its own folly, or because of the turn against the Gospel in the hard secular age. There is much to be sober about. And let’s not get too shy about calling the Christian life a battle, or the spiritual work of the Church a warfare, for the sake of not offending, or for fear of being labelled seditious. If we were to jettison that language we’d have to cut large swathes out of the New Testament documents.
But in the midst of that, let’s remember the better story, the truer narrative of human flourishing, the light to the world, salt of the earth, shining like stars in the dark, sorta stuff that the New Testament speaks of as well. Let’s not forget the new citizens of a heavenly kingdom, the people who have a hope beyond the hope of this age.
In other words, the church gets to plant flowers in wartime. We have a hope that what springs from the ground in our midst, and as we do good to the world and in the world, will not be wasted. Our Resurrection Day is coming. Not Easter Sunday, that was the proto-type, the first-fruits springing from the ground, of which our resurrection will be the full planter bed, blossoming into eternity.
And that should encourage us as we approach what I believe could well be darker and harsher times ahead, both geo-politically and for the church.
The always brilliant Anglican rector and UK journalist Giles Fraser, pointed out recently in UnHerd, that in response to the Ukraine war, the Christian hope leaves the humanist hope quite literally for dead. Humanists have no way of explaining evil away, other than it being a good opportunity for humanity to glint through the darkest body count.
And while I think that humanists could look at the flower-planting in Kyiv and say “See? There’s humanity in all its glory!”, they are unable to counter that glory with any sense of the true horror of humanity that makes such a photograph as the one I posted above, truly memorable.
Read the rest of the article here
The Question That May Not Be Answered
It seems that nobody knows what a woman is any more.Despite calls for “equality” and respect for women, nobody can tell us what a woman is- not a US Supreme Court judge, not political leaders, not even the Australian Department of Health.
Remember when we were promised that the redefinition of marriage was not a slippery slope, the thin end of a woke wedge? Well here we are in 2022 in a crazy world where people dare not answer the queston, “What is a woman?”
From the Canberra Declaration
Senator Alex Antic Asked ‘What is a Woman?’ and the Department of Health Couldn’t Answer
With one simple question, Senator Alex Antic this week revealed just how real the ‘slippery slope’ is. Five years ago we undefined marriage. Now Australia’s top medical minds can’t define a woman.
Can Australia’s Department of Health define what a woman is? This was the burning question that Liberal Senator for South Australia Alex Antic took to Senate estimates in Canberra this week.
The response given by the department’s head revealed just how far Australia has drifted from reality since the undefinition of marriage took place in 2017.
“I can’t seem to get a bureaucrat in this building to define what is a woman,” Senator Antic explained to his followers on social media soon after the exchange. “Today, I took it right to the top, straight to the Department of Health, and [received] one of the most extraordinary responses I’ve seen to date.”
Defining a Woman: ’Pretty Basic Stuff’
In a short one-minute video that has had over 150,000 views on Twitter since Wednesday, Senator Antic asks a panel of five of Australia’s top medical experts:
I’m going to finish up … with a very simple question for the department, and that is one which has troubled me for a great deal of time with the bureaucracy here. Can someone please provide me with a definition of what a woman is?
After a period of silence and blank stares, Antic probes further. “Department of Health,” he says incredulously. “Definition of a man. Definition of a woman. Anyone?”
“It’s pretty basic,” someone off camera can be heard saying. “Basic stuff,” Antic adds.
Professor Brendan Murphy, the Secretary of the Department of Health, begins moving uncomfortably in his chair, realising that he is the most senior figure in the room.
“There, look, I think there are a variety of definitions, and I think… Perhaps to give a more fulsome answer we should take that on notice,” he tells the Senator.
Antic is taken aback, asking, “You’re going to take on notice the question of what a woman is?”
“No, well there are a variety of… it’s a very, it’s a very, ah… it’s a very contested space at the moment Senator,” Professor Murphy continues. “There are definitions in terms of how people identify themselves so we’re happy to provide our working definition on that.”
Antic’s response couldn’t have been more appropriate. “I’ve only been here two years,” he remarks. “That’s the best thing I’ve seen thus far. Thank you so much.”
The Slippery Slope is Real
For thousands of years and until very recently, it was universally understood that a woman is an adult human female. The definition of “female” was also set in stone: the sex that can give birth to young or produce eggs.
These definitions were present across cultures, but in the West they were grounded in Scripture. The Bible sheds immense light on the dignity, value and calling of men and women. The foundational text is Genesis 1:27, which declares, “God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Bible-believing Christians and other conservatives warned that by introducing same-sex “marriage”, Western nations would de-gender marriage and lay the groundwork for the abolition of gender altogether.
Within just years, this “slippery slope argument”, once mocked by progressives, turns out to have been entirely accurate. Gender is now widely seen as a mere social construct, not grounded in objectivity.
Unmoored from a biblical understanding of reality, the West is losing its moral and intellectual compass.
Read the rest of the article here
Is There Nothing A Mask Cannot Do?
Russia And The End Times
Russia And The End Times
The recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia has generated a lot of excitement among end times enthusiasts. Could this be the start of the stirring of God and Magog? Could Israel be next on Russia’s agenda?
A lot of the speculation has its roots in the end times hysteria of the 1970’s when the then Soviet Union was incorrectly labelled by the likes of Hal Lindsey (“Late Great Planet Earth”) as the “rush” and the Gog and Magog of Ezekiel 38-39. These chapters describe an attempt to destroy the Jewish people, an attempt that the Lord thwarts and turns back on Gog and Magog.
Some people have argued that there is no historical record of such an event given in Scripture or even in subsequent history. They argue that it must therefore refer to the end times.
So let us take a closer look at where we might find help with understanding these matters.
“Rush” is Not Russia
In Ezekiel 38:2, the Lord says to Ezekiel “Son of man, set your face against Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.”
The Hebrew word rushtranslated in the NIV as “chief” literally means chief or head. Everywhere it appears in the Old Testament it is translated with that meaning.
However, some prophetic writers have taught that it means, in this passage only, “Russia” on the basis of the sounds of the word. They say the passage should be translated as something like “… the prince of Russia, of Meshech and Tubal.”
It is odd that in dozens of uses in Scripture this word means “chief” but at this place, we are meant to see it as a reference to Russia.
In modern Hebrew, the nation of Russia is written not as “rush” but as “russiya”.
To equate “rush” with Russia is the same sort of ignorance which might lead a person to expect the land of Turkey to be the home of the bird of the same name.
Proponents of the Russia theory claim that they are vindicated by Ezekiel 39:2 where Gog is dragged from “the far north”. Look at a map, they say. Where else could it be but Russia?
But if we read the text, it describes Gog as “chief prince of Meshech and Tubal” in both 38:2 and 39:2, not of Russia. These regions were actually to the north of Israel! We might not think of them as “the far north” with our global perspective, but to the Israelites they would have been considered that way.
Who Is Gog?
Ezekiel prophesied from about 593 BC to about 571 BC. Just before this period, in 597 BC, Nebuchadnezzar had captured Jerusalem and taken many of the leaders and skilled workers into captivity in Babylon. In 539, Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon.
About 50 years later the Book of Esther tells of a plot by Haman to kill all of the Jews throughout the Persian Empire. At that time King Xerxes ruled over 127 provinces stretching from India to Ethiopia (Esther 1:1).
In Esther 3:1, we read, “After these events, King Xerxes honoured Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, elevating him and giving him honour higher than that of all the other nobles.”
As the story of Esther unfolds, Haman tricks Xerxes into issuing a decree that cannot be cancelled. This decree says that on a particular date, every Jew was to be killed and their goods plundered. Esther and her uncle Mordecai persuade Xerxes to issue another edict granting the Jews the right to defend themselves and to kill anyone who attacked them. Haman is hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai, and Mordecai is promoted to the position previously held by Haman.
Haman is described as an Agagite, that is a descendant of Amalek, one of the most persistent and troublesome of Israel’s enemies. Interestingly, there are ancient manuscripts of the book of Esther where the word “Agagite” is written as “Gogite” because the words are nearly identical when written in Hebrew.
In Ezekiel 39:11 and 15, the place where the army of Gog will be buried is the valley of Hamon-Gog and the nearby city will be called Hamonah. Both these place names come from the same root word as Haman.
When we see that Haman is a “chief prince” who gathers an armed force from across the Persian Empire (virtually the whole of the known world) in order to destroy the people of Israel, the identity of Haman in Esther with Gog in Ezekiel becomes apparent.
Conclusion
People who try to identify prophetic events with current geopolitical upheavals always make the mistake of allowing the newspapers to determine their understanding of the Bible. It should be the other way around: we interpret world events, politics and our own lifestyles through the instructions of the Bible.
At various times the identity of Gog and Magog have been seen as the Goths, the Huns, the Islamic Empire, the Turks, Native Americans and most lately the former USSR and present day Russia. There is a tendency to identify the geopolitical “bad boys”of the current age as Gog.
When Ezekiel was prophesying, he was not talking about the last days of planet Earth. No, he was referring to events that would threaten God’s people in the next generation.
We should be no more impressed by this prophetic fulfilment that occurred within decades of Ezekiel’s death than we would be by some fulfilment two thousand years later. The fact is that God is the Lord of history, and that should give us great hope as we face the uncertain days in front of us.
In order to understand difficult passages such as Ezekiel 38-39, we need to have a solid biblical understanding, allowing the Bible to interpret the Bible.
If you want to read a far more detailed account of this interpretation of Ezekiel 38-39, I recommend Gary Demar’s book “Why The End Of the World Is Not In Your Future” available from americanvision.org
The End of History
Ukraine War Spells The End Of The Golden Arches Peace Theory
Just a week ago there was a theory that no two countries that both had McDonalds outlets had gone to war against each other. Not any more.
John Roskam writes:
ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
For the past quarter of a century, we’ve wanted to believe Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman were right. And we’ve acted as if they were right.
Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992 at the end of the Cold War claimed ‘history had ended’ because every country would become a liberal democracy.
Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, published in 1999, at a time when the intertwining of national economies seemed inexorable, made popular “the Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention” – “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a way against each other since each got its McDonald’s”.
There are at least 700 McDonald’s outlets in Russia and more than 100 in Ukraine.
The idea of a new world order of peace isn’t new.
In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant envisaged a “perpetual peace” because, ashumanity embraced “reason”, communities would no longer tolerate “all the miseries of war”.
The day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, George Will wrote that “the nation’s decade-long holiday from history [has come] to a shattering end”.
Although he was referring to America and its political debates, which appeared to him to have reached “a nadir of frivolousness”, what Will said could easily have applied to the West as a whole.
Read the rest of the article at the IPA web-site
Brendan O’Neil: How our weak elites emboldened Putin
Western incoherence and Russian opportunism have led Ukraine into disaster.
As Russian troops pile into Ukraine, and Russian bombs fall on Ukrainian cities, what are the security services in the UK focusing on? White privilege. This is not a joke. As the Daily Mail reports today, ‘Britain’s spies are being urged to consider their “white privilege” and declare their pronouns as Europe descends into war’. This comes from a leaked report on ‘improving diversity’ in the security services, written by Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the UK’s national security adviser. It also advises against using gendered terms like ‘manpower’ and even words like ‘strong’ and ‘grip’, which can ‘reinforce dominant cultural patterns’. And there you have it: as Putin plays the strongman, our security bosses are saying ze and zir and advising against inappropriate usage of upsetting words like… ‘strength’.
You couldn’t ask for a clearer snapshot of the divide between the West and Russia today. In the West, institutions are riddled with political correctness, incapacitated by wokeness, and increasingly incapable of being serious about any almost any issue, including geopolitics. And in Russia there is a leader who is a keen observer of this Western ‘decay’, as he sees it. The West is beset by ‘sociocultural disturbances’, Putin recently said. Where Russia under Putin is reviving pride and nostalgia for Russian history – at least the version of history that the Putin regime prefers – in the West they pursue ‘the aggressive deletion of whole pages of their own history’, Putin says. The West is too busy ‘[teaching] that a boy can become a girl and vice versa’ to be able to defend its own traditions and truths, Putin chastises. And now we have British security bosses obsessing over pronouns as Putin spies more territory for the Russian Federation. Fiddling while Ukraine burns.
What has become clear in recent years is that there is a strange symbiotic relationship between Western incoherence and Russian opportunism. Between this ‘decay’ in the West that has led to a rejection of our own history and founding values, and even of basic scientific truth, and a seemingly emboldened Putin regime that increasingly positions itself as the opposite to all of that, as the political grown-up to the infantile West rocked by ‘sociocultural disturbances’. On sex, family, tradition and history, Putin put it as clearly as he could towards the end of last year. ‘We have a different viewpoint’, he said, addressing virtually the entire West.
Read the rest of the article at spiked
New Life Narrabri 