An objectivist/atheist friend on Facebook pointed me to an article by Daniel Dennett, where Dennett was trying to promote the notion that "Goodness" is transcendent. Dennett had survived a serious heart malfunction and apparently needed to reach out beyond himself and the material world to thank somebody or something for his life. He decided to turn the whole episode into a public opportunity to mock Christ and encourage people to "Thank Goodness" whenever they are tempted to thank God. It was appalling, and it was really nothing but a diatribe for Pantheism. Dennett, as if he is a god, even went so far as to say that Christians who prayed for him had committed a sin in praying and that he needed to forgive them! So Daniel Dennett, one of the prominent, so-called, rationalists of our day, is a pantheist trending toward Panentheism.

The Pagan/Atheist notion of transcendence is always rooted in materialism. The Luciferian, Alice A. Bailey, even wrote a book entitled The Consciousness Of The Atom. She published that book under her publishing company, Lucifer Publishing.

What Bailey and Dennett have in common should already be obvious, but there is more to it. Both of them promote the idea that Christianity is founded on pagan religions. Keresy Graves was a hack writer with the same idea. He published a book entitled, Sixteen Crucified Saviors, where he tries to make the case that Christ is a myth borrowed from pagan religions and that there were many Christ-figures in those religions centuries before the rise of Christianity. He listed these sixteen false-Christs, and I took up the challenge to examine them. I ranked them according to ten criteria that Graves claimed that a Christ should meet. I gave them each a tenth of a point for each criteria that they met. I used the best sources I could access. I could not find a half of a Christ among them! I even gave one them credit for being a miracle worker because he was supposed to have 10,000 wives!

Now what I find particularly interesting about all of this is the thread of irrationality in godlessness. Dennett is a man who claims to have no religion, yet he wants to promote one. Bailey wants to worship Lucifer, but she claims that one can and should follow a false Christ. Graves, claiming to be a champion of reason, is so intellectually bankrupt that he makes bold assertions that he can’t support in order to "prove" that God doesn’t exist. The Bible teaches the person that says God doesn’t exist is a fool. The Bible gets it right, atheism is irrational.

Pantheism is an attempt to attribute deity to the material world, which is not transcendent. It is proposition to ascribe personality to that which cannot contain it. It’s personality without a person.

To reject God is to embrace insanity and nonsense. Isaiah 29 and Romans 11 talk about a stupor that God has decreed for a people who have the law and transcendent promises communicated to them and reject them while saying they believe. Not only that but the Word Of God says that such people will have understanding removed from them. Searching for something while rejecting it is irrational! It is stupidity.

The God of the Holy Bible is unique. He has many imitators. He is like none other in the way that He can redeem the human heart and make it whole. People sense a brokenness in their lives and the soul wants to reach out beyond the material world for a personality that has the power to save them from themselves and their circumstances. People relate to their world and each other in terms of personality. All other religions are feeble attempts to satisfy the need for a transcendent all-powerful personality.

There is one personality in all of human history that claims to transcend material existence and offer living hope beyond the material world. That person is the incarnation of the God of the Holy Bible, the Creator, Jesus Christ. He is the author of sanity. He is the Logos, the Word Made Flesh. Read! Test! Believe!

People deceive themselves in amazing ways. Self-deception is amazing because it is entirely self-assured. It’s a form of abstract faith. One would have to be captive to some “tribal” authority (church body, political party, union, PAC, etc.) to miss the ideological threads running through our American institutions.  The great multitude of our dis-educated populace seem to be blind to the spiritual and philosophical forces behind our politics and economics.

Emergence is deeply rooted in the same anti-Christ mentality that Marxism and Theosophy share. It’s the same mentality that produced death and destruction on a massive scale in the last century. That mentality in a word is Utopianism.

I have spent way too much time in the last year on Facebook. I tried to use it as a witnessing tool. I can’t say that I had any success. Most Americans are too far steeped in Postmodernism, harboring a dialectic mentality with respect to fact and faith, to seriously think things through. Words are often meaningless to them because they’ve accepted the premises of postmodernism. Stoogery is the problem, not the solution.

I’m taking a break from Facebook. I’ve deactivated my account there.

My sabbatical from blogging has otherwise been spent doing volunteer work and self-directed study. My primary focus in study has been on history and philosophy.  My volunteer work has been in the area of firearms rights at the state level.

I was in the process of trying to formulate a response here to Brad Cecil’s Nine Pillars of the Emergent church. Cecil has since rebooted his blog and the post where he listed the “pillars” is vapor now. I was working on point #3, “Human concepts are limited”, when I decided that I need to to get a better grasp on where Postmodernism comes from. I was dis-educated in public school after all. My undergraduate degree is in Geology, so I had a lot of catching up to do.

I intend to pick up where I left off in the next week.  Now to catch up on some of my volunteer work before noon.

I’ve been studying the breakdown of churches and congregations for the last year. I think I have some things to say on that subject that are worth sharing. 

Let me preface my remarks by saying that I did not grow up in my youth as a Christian. My family belonged to a Catholic church, and I once thought that I wanted to be a Catholic priest. I turned away from believing in God as I progressed into pre-adolescence. I lived as an agnostic/atheist for about 25 years. I repented from rejecting God about 12 years ago. Why? I found myself in desperate need of grace.

I am a member of an independent Baptist church, but I have not attended services there for several months. So I don’t have any particular allegiance to a denomination or group, If you ask me to recommend a good Bible-believing church to you, I could not come up with one at the present time.  I would not recommend a church without attending it and interviewing the people there. Why? For the same reason I have stopped going to my church down the street, doctrine and theology.

I cannot recommend, nor can I suffer, a church where doctrine and theology clash with the Holy Bible. Why? Because adherence to the Bible in teaching and practice is the only thing that will distinguish the Church from every other belief system.

I find it disturbing when a church publishes a statement of faith, and then routinely sanctions teaching and practice which run contrary to that statement. In any other setting that would justly be called lying, but not so in pews full of existentialists who get their theology from “Christian books” and other forms of entertainment. Loose theology finds fertile ground in congregations where men are idolized and the sayings of men (aphorisms) are raised to the same level as Scripture. I do not have a place in such a church. Why? Because I could not sit by without challenging false doctrine. I would be considered a troublemaker.

Here’s the point…I’ve been brought to faith and shown the Light of the World by His Word. (He has changed my life and my thinking 180 degrees from where it used to be in the days of my rejection.) Therefore words mean a great deal. And not only words, but actions too. Words and actions that conflict with reality are false, and therefore rightly to be called lies and deceit. To accept that words can mean anything one wants them to mean, and to say that truth is relative, that is playing with irrationality. That is to invite a breakdown in communication, and without communication nobody can know Christ, except the false christ of their imagination.

I ex-communicate myself from any church that lacks integrity concerning the teaching and preaching of the Holy Bible.

I plan to trust God and pledge a monthly gift to help pay for Carol’s medications. I hope you will do the same.

Jay, brother, I have news for you. God hates homosexuality (Lev 18; Lev 20; Rom 1; 1Cor 6; 1Ti 1; and Jude). Read those passages, brother! The LORD puts homosexuality in the same category as infanticide, incest, beastiality, adultery, pornography, idolatry, witchcraft, covetousness, drunkenness, extortion, and theft.

Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? Verily, verily, I say unto thee, We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye receive not our witness. If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things? And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. (Joh 3:10-21)

The love of God provided the blood of the lamb, which is given to redeem you from the curse of sin. But you’re one of those Red Letter Christians who ignores half of the red letters. Aren’t you, Jay?

HT: Apprising Ministries

Paul tells us, in Romans 1, that God gives people up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts.

We live in a sex-obsessed culture. Heterosexuals are just as guilty of sin as homosexuals. The flesh is exalted in our mega-churches. Corruption thrives everywhere else men add philosophy or tradition to the plain teaching of the Holy Bible. That guilt conditions people to turn their ears toward reprobates like Gene Robinson.

It’s interesting how nuanced attitudes toward sexual perversion can become. I was just reading an article on Wikipedia that cites the opinion of an ASPCA doctor. He said that no evidence exists to show that beastiality leads to sexual deviation. That’s right, what was once deviation has been reclassified. The Anglicans reclassified homosexuality a long time ago by reclassifying God’s Word prohibiting it. Those parts of scripture became errant and the deviation became acceptable.

The Bible says homosexuality is deviation. Gene Robinson says it is blessed.

The Church is to be led by the Holy Spirit and the Word of God. All other patterns lead to failure in the work of God, which is the business of the Church. Flesh fails but the Spirit will succeed.

2. Language is limited

I said that I agree with this point in my first post on this subject. I must now eat crow, because I don’t agree with this point at all. This second excuse is also a matter of pragmatism.

God seems to think language is sufficient enough. The Bible comes to us through words. The LORD used language as the primary means to communicate His will and purpose to men for the last 6,000 years. Take a simple phrase like “the LORD spoke”. That phrase appears 143 times in the Old Testament. Revelation came to men as “the word of the LORD” 242 times in the OT and that phrase can be found 13 times in the New Testament. Paul tells that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God (Rom 10:17).

Satan tempted Jesus after the LORD fasted in the wilderness, telling him to turn a stone into bread. Jesus answered him saying, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (Mat 4:4).

Conversation, which Emergents seem to worship, is dependant on language! So, if we concede to this point about language being “limited”, then what is to be accomplished by conversation?

Let look at the 8 Points of Regressive Churchianity and see what they say about Jesus. Bear in mind that this crowd supports government sponsored abortatoriums and a homosexual anti-Jesus.