The innitial news was that the Norway shooter was a conservative Christian fundamentalist. I knew immediately that this report was going to be proven wrong.
The truth is that the shooter, Anders Behring Breivik, was not a Christian. Nor was he conservative in the American sense of the word. He lists himself on profiles as ‘Conservative’ and ‘Christian’ but definitions matter.
Let’s start with politics. He was part of a neo-Nazi forum. Nazi’s may be right wing in Europe that is very socialist but in America Nazi’s are left wing. National Socialism is left of center in American politics. In America, the right wing opposes all forms of socialism.
Regarding the ‘Christianity’ part, there are two definitions of Christian. One is the nominal term. It is those inside the visible church. Those who somewhere along the line were baptized. But true Christianity also has a heart and Lordship conversion. When someone is truly a Christian, they lay their will down at the feet of Christ. Christ was against killing innocents. Christ laid his own life down for others. Christ would have died to save the victims of that murderer. If he was a Christian, he was a very very verrrrrry bad one who violated all of the basic tenants of Christianity by his action. He scoffed at God and did great harm to the cause of Christ.
Don’t be fooled by words that mean nothing. Understand definitions.
Update: He was a Freemason (incompatible with Christianity). And he was a fan of John Stuart Mills (a secularist). More evidence that this was not a “fundamentalist Christian” by any true sense of the word.
And here is more detail on the definition of “right wing”.
Taking a break from posting….back in mid august
July 13, 2011
I am going to take a break for a while due to busy (and fun) summer stuff that is taking up a lot of time.
How capitalism works
July 9, 2011
Education as the Soul of a Society
July 4, 2011
“What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.”
~ GK Chesterton “Illustrated London News” (July 5, 1924).
Russia says abortion ads must carry health warning
July 1, 2011
Russia is now requiring health warnings for any abortion advertisement.
Russian lawmakers, worried about a falling birth rate, passed a law on Friday that abortion advertisements must carry a health warning.
Russia has one of the world’s highest abortion rates and cutting this could help it stem a demographic disaster that is looming as its population shrinks.
The riddles of God…
June 29, 2011
“…JOB WAS comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.” ~GK Chesterton, ‘Introduction to The Book of Job’
Why Memorize Scripture?
June 28, 2011
Oh good. Another preachy Disney Movie
June 25, 2011
The Wall Street Journal has this interview with Cars 2 director John Lasseter. He states that the sequal to the hugely successful Cars will have ‘Big Oil’ as the bad guy. He states as he developed the plot, he kept thinking:
What would be a really good kind of über bad guy? Who is an über bad guy?” I kept going to big oil. This is before what happened in the Gulf of Mexico.
Really? Big Oil is the ‘uber bad guy’? Are they forcing people to buy gas? Capitalism is nice because no one is forced to do anything. If you don’t like oil stop using it. Or at least cut back. This is like me saying that ‘Big Chocolate’ is evil because I eat too many candy bars. No. Hershy’s is not the problem; I am. Let’s stop blaming people for selling stuff.
Disney is a good example of not having to buy stuff you don’t like. When Disney was selling movies like ‘Snow White’ everyone loved them. Then they started selling preachy movies that made over 50% of their audience uncomfortable (like Pocahontas and Brother Bear) and suddenly they couldn’t get people to show up to their movies anymore. Then along came Pixar and had good (non preachy) movies that people loved. Then Disney bought Pixar and we are back to preachy. Hmmm. Big Hollywood is at it again. But I won’t call them uber bad guys. I will just probably will wait until this one comes out on Netflix.
I hear the non-Disney Kung Fu Panda 2 is pretty good.
NT Wright on the Second Coming
June 24, 2011
Read this from the daily caller.
“One of the things we could do about it is to change the technologies, to put out less of this pollution, to stabilize the population, and one of the principle ways of doing that is to empower and educate girls and women,” Gore said. “You have to have ubiquitous availability of fertility management so women can choose how many children have, the spacing of the children.”
Regarding education, Gore knows that the more educated women are the fewer children they will have. From the Weekly Standard:
“One of the best predictors of fertility is education: The more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will have. The total fertility rate for American women without a high school diploma is 2.45. With each subsequent level of educational attainment, fertility falls—it drops to 1.6 for women with a graduate degree. One of the drivers of our fertility decline was the making of college de rigueur for middle-class women.”
But Gore either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the damage that low fertility rates has on the world. Old people rely on young people to care for them in their age – whether that help comes from the collective (social security, medicaid etc) or from children. The less offspring people have the fewer young people there will be to take care of the old.
A declining population also crushes economies. Most economies rely on continual economic growth to fund governments and pay debts. Wealth is created by people. The fewer people you have the less wealth is created. Consider Japan. Again from the Weekly Standard:
Japan’s demographic momentum kept its population slowly increasing during the late 1990s and early 2000s; in 2004, it peaked at 127.84 million. And then the contraction began. In 2008, Japan lost 145,000 people and by 2025, it will have lost 6 million. By 2050, it will have shed an additional 17 million people, leaving its total population around 100 million and falling. And a declining population is necessarily an aging population, meaning that you’re faced with both a decline in demand for goods and services (because the population is getting smaller) and at the same time a labor shortage (because so many of the remaining people are too old to work). In 2050, the largest five-year cohort in Japan is expected to be people aged 75-79. While health care will likely be a growth sector, this is not a recipe for a robust economy.
Now, what worries me about Gore is not that he has such an opinion. I remember my public school teachers back in 3rd grade (in liberal Ann Arbor) saying similar things. What bothers me is that he ties it to a collective good that he believes needs regulation to be protected. Gore has advanced with great passion caps on emissions and ‘green house gases’. Does anyone doubt that Gore would be open to caps on the number of children we can have? Collectivism is never content with letting people consider the facts and make their own decisions.
