Crusader War College

Roger Kimball at Pajamas Media makes the following comment on the "generosity" of President Obama's "spreading the wealth" that equally applies to Christians who support him based on "its what Jesus would do":

How long before people wake up to that fact that you are only incidentally interested in battling the deficit — sure, it would be nice, but how much more important to you is “spreading the wealth around”? That’s what, in an unguarded, an unscripted moment, you told Joe the Plumber. What was perhaps insufficiently appreciated at the time is the fact that there are two sides to “spreading the wealth around.” There is the open hand that distributes largess (while at the same time fostering dependence and accumulating chits for favors done). And then there is the clenched hand that fleeces other people for the money you require to make the redistribution work. On the one hand there are favors done, loyalties incurred; on the other, there are penalties exacted. I am not sure we have instruments fine enough to determine which is more gratifying to the political class of which you are so ostentatious a member.
(Hattip tipper at Rantburg)

While I believe the loss of freedom in the health care "reform" bill makes it intolerable, I continue to work on my project that has dictated this web site's hiatus, which promises to radically change the game.

Another masterful piece by Steven den Beste.

=> Read more!

Like, WOW!

Transcript here.

Hattip GolfBravoUSMC via Rantburg.

Wow.

Like WOW.

THAT is who I REALLY am.

THAT is what I REALLY BELIEVE.

And THERE ARE OTHERS who believe as I do!

I once joked that I was a Pentecostal Free-will Baptist, but I had no idea that what I thought was "off-the-wall" was actually held by others.

Like WOW.

Thanks be to God!!!!

[The Jansenists were seen as calvinists because they held to total depravity. So does Reformed Arminianism.]

Louis Palme's article at "The Critic", called "After God, What?", neatly lays out, from the authoritative texts of Christianity and Islam, the real differences between the two religions.

=> Read more!

Jerusalem

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

-- William Blake

An excellent article on the soulsearching and revisions of the chief Islamist theoretician, Dr. Fadl. It's a large article, with a lot of food for thought.

A long while back, I announced that this blog was going on minimal posting status. I was pursuing a line of biblical research, and needed more time to work on it, and the time had to come out of this blog. Occasionally, I've posted stuff, but mostly for a record and note to myself.

So, what have I been doing?

Well, I hit the jackpot. Hit it BIG.

I was researching several lines of inquiry on and off. One had to do with the church, one had to do with the Holy spirit, and one had to do with personal growth and improvement.

All three lines converged about 3 months ago, thanks mostly to the work of Owen Barfield, a fellow Inkling of C.S. Lewis, Lewis' lawyer (solicitor as they are called in Great Britain), and a rather prolific philosopher in his own right. I was cued in to Owen Barfield's work when I came across a PBS documentary titled "The Question of God", in which the work and world views of Sigmund Freud were compared with those of C.S. Lewis. In the documentary, Barfield played a key role in shifting the way that Lewis looked at the question of God: Lewis' secretary comments, in the documentary, that Barfield "Asked all the right questions." Lewis called the debate between Barfield and himself "The Great War", and all the Inklings (save Barfield himself) considered Barfield the most brilliant of their group.

You don't hear much of Barfield, since he eventually threw his intellectual lot in with Anthrosophy, an attempt to come up with a scientifically sympathetic view of Religion and the Spiritual world, created by Rudolph Steiner, a german philosopher that Barfield apparently idolized. Anthrosophy suffers from a bad case of Political Correctness, and shoehorned reincarnation into their view of the Spiritual side of man. Barfield adopted this view of man's existence, and generally abandoned classicial Christianity since he felt he could not get the results he wanted if he stuck with it.

It is probably not coincidence that about the time the PBS documentary came out in DVD, which is how I viewed it, Barfield's works began to be re-published. One that always was in print was his "Poetic diction", as close as a textbook on how to write poetry that one can find, and which I highly recommend if you need some help. I suspect that the documentary inadvertently stoked demand for his works. (The documentary itself is heavily stacked against God, putting in light-weights and distractors arguing God's side against the atheist publisher of Reason magazine. A fairer balancing would have put Chuck Colson on the panel, but that would have been too fair.)

While I have issues with Anthrosophy, having worked out an alternative method for getting the effects that Barfield needed without invoking reincarnation, I was able to sift the wheat from the chaff.

Reading Barfield's works, listening to the Holy Spirit, and pursuing an engineering approach to the three issues resulted in a mental and spiritual revolution. I came up with an alternative model of the Human mind that is more biblical and consistent with what I know of the workings of the human mind that science has proven (in contrast to its conjectures). From there, I was able to apply the model in a practical way to solving problems of a spiritual, mental, emotional, and psychological nature.

The results have been INCREDIBLE. I've lost temptations, sins, hang-ups, and phobias I've had for YEARS, since I was a child, and with hardly any strenuous work or mental effort. For the first time in 45 years since my parents divorced, I've been happy from the inside, not from externals coming to me from the outside. I've found depths of strength I never knew before. I don't think I've praised God so sincerely in my entire life. The only downside is that my bible study time is less efficient: I go only a few sentences before I get a revelation or a surge of joy, and then break off to give thanks.

You may have come here from Rantburg due to my strange attitude being demonstrated at the linked article. Simply put, I'M NOT SCARED ANYMORE. At the near top of my list of reasons for doing the research I've been doing is to figure out how to tap into deep spiritual resources to effectively fight the War against Terrorism. I've found those resources. Or, I should more properly say, The Resource. I've barely scratched the surface of what is possible. Trust me on this: the cavalry IS on its way.

Much work remains to be done, including the working out of a lesson plan to consistently replicate these results at a near-universal rate. Unfortunately, this will continue to take much of my time, so the status of this blog will remain at minimal posting. In fact, I've been dumping other non-essentials to pursue it.

In the meantime, don't bother Googling "Symbiotic Christianity": none of the hits are anywhere near the truth.

Soon...

Someday soon....

The bastards are back AGAIN.

Eight months ago he returned to Israel from the United States after generating a research breakthrough that changed his life. Berzin, the founder of GreenFuel Technologies - a U.S. company that produces green fuel from algae - discovered that "green slime" contains one of the keys to the alternative fuel the world is seeking. His company is the first ever to develop and produce biofuels from algae that are bred on gases emitted by power plants.

It might sound like some sort of magic trick to put algae, CO2 and sunlight into a box and come out with fuel, but Berzin did it.

God bless the Jews and Israel! Through them, they continue to bless the world!

Hattip twobyfour via Rantburg.

May Your Lord God watch over you, protect you, and resend the spirit of the Prophets and Kings to rescue you.

An excellent posting at John Ray's dissecting Leftism. Here's a sample:

When Leftists say, "There's no such thing as right and wrong", they are normally referring to moral judgments. They use that formula when confronted with something as uncomfortable as their unwavering support for murderous Communists and Muslims. And, as such, it is a transparent fraud. They themselves reveal that such talk is at best a tantrum by going on themselves to use the language of right and wrong to condemn "intolerance", "Zionists" or the Iraq war etc. Talk of right and wrong is meaningless when conservatives use it but highly meaningful when Leftists use it, apparently. To call such reasoning "sophomoric" is to praise it too highly.

And here's a real jewel, in the parenthesis:

So how come Pastor Wright can say the opposite of what is normally regarded as correct about race to thunderous applause at a NAACP convention? Simple: To a Leftist, the truth of a statement depends entirely on the use to which it is put. If a statement about an inborn difference seems to be derogatory to a favoured group (Leftists are so mentally limited that they think almost entirely in terms of groups) then that statement is WRONG. But if it defends the deviant actions of the same group it is RIGHT.

Wretchard at The Belmont Club provides a link to Stanly Kurtz's book review of "Culture and Conflict in the Middle East" by Dr. Philip Carl Salzman. The book review is facinating reading.

A professor of anthropology at Montreal's McGill University, Salzman specializes in the study of Middle Eastern nomads. He, too, is something of a last survivor of a once proud band. What Salzman has managed is to have preserved, nurtured, deepened, and applied to our current challenge a once-dominant anthropological perspective on tribal societies: the study of tribes organized into "segmentary lineages." It was one of the great achievements of modern anthropology. Yet, over the past 40 years, scholars have largely rejected and forgotten the study of segmentary lineage systems.

And why is that?

The anthropological understanding of tribal social structures--especially in Africa and the Middle East--has been shunned for 40 years as exaggerating the violence and "primitivism" of non-Western cultures, discouraging efforts at modernization and democratization, and covertly justifying Western intervention abroad. Decades of postmodern and postcolonial studies have conspired against the appearance of books like Salzman's. That an academic, "on the inside," could have worked in relative concealment long enough to produce this book is testament to the possibility of cultural survival. Indeed, fully appreciating what Salzman has to teach us will first require us to dust off our records of his all-but-forgotten language, and trace the trajectory of its destruction.

Heh. He's not the only one going covert...

... decades before 9/11, the rise of terrorism as a tactic in the Palestinian struggle against Israel suggested embarrassing continuities between the endemic violence of traditional tribal life and the present. Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism was the key work in the rise of postcolonial theory, and Said, a savvy Palestinian academic and advocate, was particularly keen to keep the focus on American and Israeli policies that he claimed explained terrorism, rather than on any causes internal to Palestinian society. By attacking efforts to link terrorist violence to Middle Eastern culture as bigoted "Orientalism," Said and his followers gave a hard edge to already widespread Third World complaints about Western scholarship. That move, coupled with the growing number of faculty members entering American universities from outside the West, put paid to all but a remnant of the anthropological study of Middle Eastern tribes. The triumph of Said's perspective meant that by the post-9/11 era, when we'd need it most, the systematic understanding of Muslim tribal violence was largely lost.

That understanding, that wisdom, is power. Note this:

Disproportionately powerful though they may be, outlying tribal populations are small in comparison with peasants or city dwellers in the modern states of the Middle East. Even conceding the renewed significance of militant but marginal tribes, can we really follow Salzman in treating the tribal template as the dominant pattern of Arab culture itself? Salzman confronts this challenge persuasively and, if anything, actually understates his case.

Salzman says that it is not the details of tribal kinship structure that pervade Arab culture but the underlying principles of "balanced opposition," in which collective responsibility, honor, and feuding shape every action and thought, often calling for quick shifts in loyalty. Unite with your erstwhile enemy in opposition to a more distant foe; treat all members of an enemy group as potential targets; demand honorable behavior from members of your own group; and maintain your own and your group's honor by a clear willingness to sacrifice for the collective good. Warring Sunni and Shiite sects from Beirut to Baghdad follow principles of balanced opposition. They may be at each other's throats, yet they'll unite in opposition to an outside threat, as when Shiite Iran harbors members of Sunni al Qaeda on the run from America. In a sense, Islam's founding triumph was to raise the stakes of balanced opposition by uniting all the Arab tribes in an ultimate feud against infidel outsiders.

Since Muslims treat the tribal era of Muhammad and his early successors as the golden age of Islam, the cultural influence of the tribal template remains pervasive. To prove it, Salzman takes us on a country by country tour of Middle Eastern tribalism, from Jordan, where Bedouin form the backbone of the army, to Iraq, where even towns are heavily tribal, to Kuwait, where the strongest parliamentary opposition to women's rights emerges from tribal MPs.

Writing in 2006, Salzman cites a news report of clashes between Hamas and a powerful clan in Gaza to show tribal themes enduring in towns and cities. By early 2007, when Salzman's book was in press, the Palestinian unity government had fallen apart and Gaza was in quasi-anarchy, with Fatah and Hamas too busy fighting each other to govern. Such order as existed was enforced by brutal, battling clans.

This is no isolated occurrence. We ought to understand the emergence of Gaza's feuding clans as the revelation of a bedrock of Middle Eastern social organization ever-present and ever-influential, beneath superficial layers of Islam and state. Salzman noted the phenomenon in Gaza well before it became obvious. And long before he could have known of the tribal-based Anbar Awakening of 2007, Salzman identified it in nucleus thanks to some throwaway news reports in 2005.

Thus, Edward Said's fear that knowledge about tribalism would strip the mask off of Palestinian motivations proves true. More tellingly, the fact that he, a Palestinian, acted in a way to suppress the truth in order to tilt the playing field in favor of Palestinians shows that the traditional understanding of tribalism, updated with new finding, reveals that he himself is acting tribally. This exaltation of one's "tribe" over the truth is shared by communists and liberals, making this a marker for sub-groups/tribes that are hostile to truly individual rights. The truth is often the only defense for a poor weak individual, and justice is served if the judge/court/jury dig the truth out into the light and makes sure its implications are implemented in actual life.

Further, a knowledge of how tribes work again illustrates and proves the superiority of Judaism. While we see tribal dynamics operating from the Exodus through the times of the Judges, King David works to unify the tribes, and Solomon works to promote and exalt the position of truth and wisdom over all. Judaism thus, in a sense, incorporates elements of tribalism with elements of behaviors that promote the stability of societies in the modern western nation state. Of course I do not believe, along with pious Jews, that this is an outcome from Jews working alone and on their own: All the elements and construction plans were there in the beginning, in the Torah and other writings.

Much food for thought. I may pick the book up.