Developing Doctrine

Doctrine: a particular principle, position, or policy taught or advocated, as of a religion or government; a body or system of teachings relating to a particular subject.

If only understanding (and agreeing to) Christian doctrine was so easy….

Matthew 28: 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20(a) teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

John 21: 25 Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

The dating of when the books of the New Testament were written is a bit difficult to nail down.  Suffice it to say, even if the earliest dates for each book are utilized, those to whom Jesus gave the Great Commission and the communities they reached would not have had access to these for many years, even decades. 

They would have had access to what these disciple-missionaries knew from the oral teaching by and the life of Christ.  They would have had knowledge of what the Apostle John mentions – the many other things Jesus did that are not in his book.  But they wouldn’t have had the book – or books.  No Gospels, no letters, no Sola Scriptura.

Yet we know, even after 2,000 years, that having the books does little to help resolve differences – even by the most honest and sincere and ecumenically-minded theologians.

Where did these first disciples go?  Many places, many traditions, many possibilities.  By tradition, James went to Spain, Bartholomew went to India and Armenia as did Thomas, Matthew to Ethiopia, Simon and Jude to the Parthian Empire, Matthias to the north shore of the Black Sea, Andrew to Crimea and present-day Ukraine. 

All points in-between were also covered by these and others.  Of course, different countries and cultures have their own tradition regarding which apostles, etc.  They don’t all agree….

As we know, they did not all go together.  They also did not have identical memories and understandings; they did not have a common memorized creed.  We see even Peter and Paul in disagreement in the book of Acts.

All of this commonality was yet to be developed, the doctrines to be worked out, the creeds to be memorialized.

Why all of this background?

The Council of Chalcedon Re-Examined, by V.C. Samuel

Chalcedon resulted in the first long-lasting (and remaining) split in the Christian Church.  Yes, there have been other divides, but some lasted years or decades, maybe even a century or two.  But nothing like what happened after Chalcedon.  The split gave us what we today know as the Oriental Orthodox Churches – including Ethiopian, Armenian, and Coptic, among a small handful of others.

The Promise of Natural Law

Continuing with part three of this series, reviewing the conversation between Jordan Peterson (JP) and Peter Kreeft (PK): How to Combat Hedonism

They move on to speak of Job.  Kreeft offers that there is a rebel in us, and it’s a good rebel.  God approves of Job’s rebellion rather than the three friend’s comfort. 

PK: At the end of the book of Job, God says an amazing thing.  He says to the three friends: I burn with anger against you because you have not spoken rightly against me as my servant Job has.  But what they said was absolutely orthodox: God is great, God is good.  Let us thank Him for our food.  Amen

God is love.  This is how many Christians describe God, and because they don’t see lollypops and rainbows everywhere they go this description is why many non-Christians deplore God.  Yes, God is love, but He is many other things as well.  For example, He is also just (necessary if one is truly to love).  He also has left us free to live in this world, with all the joy and sorrow that this can bring.

PK: And Job is accusing God, wishing he could take Him to court.  And God approves Job’s part, rather than the comfort given by the three friends.

JP: At least Job was wrestling honestly with God, as opposed to the naïve advocates of God’s goodness.

Let’s see what the passage says:

Job 42: 7 After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: “My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. 8 Now therefore take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and offer up a burnt offering for yourselves. And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.”

Job 42 is the last chapter of the book.  After these verses, there are a few more: the Lord restored Job’s fortunes:

12 And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning. And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys. 13 He had also seven sons and three daughters.

Now…fortuitously or purposefully…the next book in the Bible is Psalm.  And Psalm 1 begins:

Blessed is the man

who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

nor sits in the seat of scoffers;

but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

and on his law he meditates day and night.

This could just have easily been the closing verses in Job 42.

The story of Job brings me to a comment I made a couple of weeks ago at a VanderKlay video.  In describing natural law, PVK said: “If you do the right things your outcomes in life will be better.”

To which I replied:

No, natural law doesn’t say this – depending on what you mean by your “life.”  If “life” is limited to time before the grave, this is a very shallow understanding of natural law. 

Living according to natural law will hold the world together properly (and improve our liberty), but it doesn’t guarantee any specific outcome to any specific individual. 

From the blurb introducing the video: “The section of 1 Corinthians 5 to 7 are not some random groupings of laws or rules. He is trying to give a vision for transformation to a group that hasn't yet been transformed.”

Transformation.  This is natural law:  what is our purpose?  To be Christ-like (theosis; to be transformed to be like Christ). 

Jesus Christ lived according to the natural law, perfectly.  He did the right things.  The outcome for Him, in this “life” was not so good.  We know this for us today: to do the right things in the face of the evil around us does not guarantee a better outcome for the individual sticking his neck out – at least not in this life.

Let’s First See if They Drown

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes.

-          Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty, Opinion by Emily Oster

I came across this piece thanks to Karen De Coster, referenced in her LRC blog post entitled The Satanic Church-of-Covid Left Begs for Mercy.  I will allow her to introduce it (in case her title isn’t sufficient):

The sham propaganda continues to twist in the wind, looking for one last chance to be embraced by the gaslighted masses.

Returning to Oster. 

We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself.

That was very scientific.  Homemade masks.  I wonder what surgeons and epidemiologists thought about that before March 2020? 

It’s bad enough that the parents in this family were deluded, what they did to their children was horrendous:

Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!” 

Someone’s dad should have decked the other child’s dad.

These precautions were totally misguided. … But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Bullsh!#.  We did know.  Those telling you to mask and social distance knew that they were lying.  Countless pre-stupidity peer-reviewed studies were clear: masking by amateurs with pretend masks (let alone homemade masks) was useless – and even harmful – when it came to dealing with airborne viruses. 

We knew that anyone younger than seventy years old with no co-morbidities was at virtually zero risk of serious complications.  We knew that continuing in school was the best option for young people.  We knew that the virus (such as it was) travelled equally well in both strip clubs and churches, but only one of these was closed.  We knew when politicians and other leaders went to restaurants or hair salons without masking while we were all forced into a face diaper that it was a lie.  We knew that these modern jabs were based on science that failed every test before.  We knew that forcing the decision of jab or job on individuals was both immoral and corrupt.

We knew.  And so did those who said otherwise.

And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong.

And on every topic, the people most listened to were always wrong, and those who were cancelled were (almost) always right.  This latter group wasn’t made up of just loons like me; hundreds of prominent and world-renowned doctors and scientists were cancelled because they didn’t agree with MSNBC, CNN, or “the science.”  Go back and read the Great Barrington Declaration (as mild as it is), written in October 2020 and signed initially by almost fifty doctors and scientists and currently by almost one million individuals.

They knew.  But Collins and Fauci and others worked to crush this attempt at minimal rational pushback.

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts.

Nope.  I don’t want to gloat; that’s not good enough for me.  And nope, I won’t merely allow the criminals to retrench; that isn’t justice.

The Creator and the Destroyer

Continuing with this series, reviewing the conversation between Jordan Peterson (JP) and Peter Kreeft (PK): How to Combat Hedonism

Peter Kreeft cites something from Karl Marx, apparently Marx’s favorite line from all of literature, from Goethe’s Faust: “Everything that lives deserves to perish.” 

PK: That is what I would call absolute evil.

To elaborate on this, from Dr. Paul Kengor, the author of the book The Devil and Karl Marx:

Friends said Marx would chant this. He would recite this–'Everything that exists deserves to perish. Everything that exists deserves to perish.’ This is a philosophy that's about tearing down, burning the foundation, leveling the house, to where you have Marx standing there in the smoldering embers, saying, ‘Now we are ready to begin.’

One need not even limit this perishing to traditional social conditions or even for all living beings as the enemy of Marxism.  As Peterson points out, this directly makes God the enemy of Marxism:

JP: This is very contrary to Genesis, where God says – after each phase of creation: it is good.

If it is good, it deserves to live.  It deserves this so much that God sacrificed His Son / Himself to ensure this was so.  But not according to Marx.  Everything that exists deserves to perish.  Everything.  It is satanic – even jab-like.

PK: If the benevolent God who created the world is a myth, and there is nothing beyond the created universe, then the universe is very much like Rhett Butler: frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.  It’s beyond good and evil. 

Can there even be such a thing as good or evil if we are the result of nothing but random atoms smashing together randomly?  In other words, while everything that exists might not deserve to perish, it also might not deserve to live. 

In any case, many modern atheists believe that good and evil can be determined from the stew around us:

JP: There is this idea from the materialist determinists that if we just derive enough information about the nature of things, we could produce an algorithm that would allow us to compute our way forward…

Now, that is naïve….

PK interrupts: Now, that is naïve.

Yes, that’s what I said.

JP: It is naïve, well I think it’s technically naïve.  I have talked to some great scientists like Sir Roger Penrose, and Penrose believes that in principle the horizon of the future is not fundamentally from the positions of the past.

Which diverts me to a conversation between Aubrey Marcus and Jonathan Pageau.  In this portion, they discuss artificial intelligence and psychedelics.  I will skip the psychedelics part, and focus on the portion of the discussion involving artificial intelligence (AI):

Marcus: I wonder if that [complete, supreme AI] could actually find a real understanding and be able to offer an actual shared system of value.  That it would come to that conclusion naturally.  That it would become not like the old gods that were capricious, but could become the great God – like God itself?   That it would understand that love is what actually animates life.

You can imagine Pageau, just chomping at the bit to tie into this.

Marcus: If it really was gathering all of the intelligence of the cosmos, would it not come to the truth – or could it not come to the truth?

The Answer to the Last “Why”

Jordan Peterson has had a string of excellent conversations recently.  I would say three in a row, in fact:

·       How to Combat Hedonism, with Dr. Peter Kreeft

·       The Language of Creation, with Matthieu Pageau (brother of Jonathan, equally as gifted but not nearly as public)

·       Julian Assange: Free Speech Martyr? Featuring Stella Assange

I will focus on only one of these, the conversation with Dr. Kreeft.  I will only focus on one because just this one will require several posts to cover.  Yes, you could listen to the podcast instead (I encourage it), but in this series of posts I will attempt to tie together some of their comments with threads that I have been explored in my writing.

For convenience, PK = Peter Kreeft; JP = Jordan Peterson.

PK: I love the old story about some peasants hauling stones on logs through the mud in a storm in order to build one of the great medieval cathedrals.  A visitor from another country asked one of the peasants, “what are you doing?”  And he was sweating and cursing and saying ‘I am trying to get this damn stone through this damn mud.”

And he asked another peasant – who was doing the same thing, but smiling – what he was doing.  And he said, “I am building a cathedral.”

There is significance to a task if you start at the end of the chain: what is the purpose?  Toward what am I aiming?  The first man had no purpose in his task; he did not see, or did not value, the end – the telos.  Apply this same lack of meaning to most aspects of life, as is the case for many in the West today, and you have a meaning crisis…which means a crisis brought on by a loss-of-meaning. A life without meaning – can you imagine a bigger waste of this gift of life that we have been given?

As for the second man…Peterson has often said (but not this time), and perhaps he was citing someone else: a man can suffer any how if he understands and values the why.  But we live in a world where there is no why:

Why are we here?

Because we’re here.

Roll the bones

-          Rush, Roll the Bones

This is all the materialist-atheist can offer – we’re here because we’re here.  “Because” is a child’s retort when asked “why” about something that would rather not be faced.  It is a reply as meaningless as the life it envisions.

No purpose, no design, nothing higher.  We are the result of random atoms smashing together randomly.  There are a small handful of individuals who are able to find meaning in such a life.  And of these almost all of them find a meaning toward evil, only a few find a meaning toward good.  But for most of humanity, a life without purpose offers no meaning.

Peterson understands this, although he also usually will just say “do something meaningful.”  Of course, Stalin and Hitler did do something meaningful…. But still Peterson continues to explore:

JP (asking rhetorically): What should be at the highest point?  Is it a description or is it a spirit?  Well, it has to be a spirit.  A description doesn’t provide a guide to perception and action. What human beings need at the highest place is something to emulate and act out and see through.

We have been given something to emulate that is even more valuable than a spirit – something more than the abstract form of the good.  We have been given the form of the good made manifest: Jesus Christ.  No matter the protestations of today’s atheists, Jesus represents the archetype for man.  But He offers (and is) so much more. This will be touched on in future posts.

Time to do Our Part

I am certain Lew Rockwell won’t remember this, but the first time I wrote to him was in 2008.  The blacklisting of Ron Paul’s election campaign had fully achieved its purpose, and I asked him where the energy of the Ron Paul Revolution might be transferred.  He didn’t know me at all – he had no reason to reply.  But he did.

He mentioned three or four libertarian / Austrian Economics institutions – to include the Ludwig von Mises Institute, suggesting any of these would be good organizations to support.

Why do tell this story?  Before getting to the main purpose of this post, I wanted to say something of the man.  You know what Lew didn’t say?  He didn’t say anything about his relationship with the Mises Institute (I didn’t know at the time).  He didn’t highlight as something to be considered over any of the others.  I only figured this out after I went to the different sites.  I then thought, “this is a humble man.”

Shortly after this, I met Lew in person.  I remember thinking, “this is a man doing God’s work.”  I don’t think I could fully understand why I believed this at the time (although I was certain of it); I do better understand it today.  Lew advances ideas that help man live as God designed him to live, as opposed to living how “the Conditioners” of C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man wish man to live.  Yes, Lew is doing God’s work.

I have since got to know Lew fairly well, and I would say two characteristics stand out.  The first, as represented in the above: he is a very humble man.  The second, when it comes to entrepreneurship in the world of ideas that underlie liberty and economic freedom, he is second to none.

He is the founder of the most important institution for liberty, economic freedom and peace: the aforementioned Mises Institute.  He also has his blog, LewRockwell.com (LRC).  The purpose of this post regards LRC.

It was about a year ago when google cancelled LRC.  No more ads.  This action significantly impacted the operating budget of the site.  Suddenly, and without notice, the continuing operation of the site was at risk.

At the time, Lew wrote about this and in fairly short order the countless number of people who see value in Lew’s work supported the site with funds to cover the next several months of lost revenue.

I was reminded of all of this the other day, when on the site an ad popped up asking for donations.  My first thought: why did I need to be reminded this way?  Lew did mention that the fundraising last year would last until around now, and here it is.

Before making my ask (and I will ask), please consider: how much value have you received from Lew’s work at LRC?  I can offer countless personal examples, from economics, liberty, anti-war, revisionist history, health and wellness, etc.  In all cases, alternative views – views that few others would cover, or would be courageous enough to cover.  In all cases, offering ideas that help free a man to live as he is designed to live.

But I will stick to one example, and it goes back to March of 2020.  From the beginning of the grips of covidiocy, Lew offered one of the first sources questioning the story.  I don’t mean he beat CNN or MSNBC (which in my lifetime won’t figure this out).  I mean one of the first anywhere, including the alternative blogosphere. 

I focus on this event, because including nine-one-one (on which Lew also has offered many articles exposing the inconsistencies and lies) and JFK in November 1963 (ditto), the events of the last 30 months have been the most important events since 1865 in the government’s war on Americans.

Lew has not shied away from any of it.  Every day, six days a week, he offers a dozen or so articles exposing the various ways in which authorities of all stripes are working to keep the sheep in line.  Every day he offers further links to other alternative articles through Political Theater.  And he makes available a further blog to include posts by others such as Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute, Tom DiLorenzo, Laurence Vance, Charles Burris, Walter Block, and others (I miss Becky Akers).

The site runs on two things: Lew’s dedication…and money.  Lew is doing his part; he remains dedicated to his craft and to his readers. 

You can tell something of a man by his enemies, and Lew’s enemies have done their work to remove the financial support necessary to run such a site.

It is time for the rest of us to do our part; if you find value in Lew’s work, and obviously many of you do, donate now.

News of the World

A Misesian for a Statesman

From Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at the General Debate of the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York, September 24, 2022:

The West is now in a temper tantrum over the referendums in Ukraine’s Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions. However, people there are simply reacting to the advice from the head of the Kiev regime, Vladimir Zelensky. In one of his interviews in August 2021, he advised all those who consider themselves Russians to leave for Russia for the benefit of their children and grandchildren.

This is what people living in the regions I have mentioned are doing, taking the land where their ancestors had lived for centuries with them. (Emphasis added)

I really appreciate the way Lavrov put this.  The land under the people belongs to the people, not to the state that governs the people.

It is a great statement, at least in this case.  Unfortunately, neither Lavrov nor Russia feel the same about, for example, Armenians in Nagorno Karabagh – a situation where Russia can have similar influence if it chooses to do so.  But let’s take what we can get.

From Ludwig von Mises, The Right of Self-Determination:

It must always be possible to shift the boundaries of the state if the will of the inhabitants of an area to attach themselves to a state other than the one to which they presently belong has made itself clearly known.

The right of self-determination in regard to the question of membership in a state thus means: whenever the inhabitants of a particular territory, whether it be a single village, a whole district, or a series of adjacent districts, make it known, by a freely conducted plebiscite, that they no longer wish to remain united to the state to which they belong at the time, but wish either to form an independent state or to attach themselves to some other state, their wishes are to be respected and complied with.

It is the only path to peace in many of the current conflicts faced throughout the world today.

The Degeneration of Beauty

Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.

-          Roger Scruton

I was visiting in a university town, noticing that the university orchestra would be performing during my stay.  Now, even though this was your typical university – where truth, objective values, open dialogue, etc., are, at best, irrelevant if not treated with disdain – I thought, “how could they mess up the orchestra?”

Ha!  The opening song was unique, but at least it was recognizable as music.  I say unique because it was very much in the form of progressive music.  Given my fandom of progressive bands like Dream Theater and Rush, I was able to appreciate it: time signature changes, varied chord patterns, etc. 

But now, time for some Mozart or Beethoven…or not.

For the next hour, the most discordant music I had ever heard.  It was as if each section – violins, trombones, cellos, drums – was playing a different song in a different time signature in a different key.  Well played, to be sure, but ugly.

I thought to myself: God didn’t need to give us the Bible.  He could merely have offered Bach on the one hand and this monstrosity on the other – Bach to be heard in heaven and this monstrosity in hell.  The straight and narrow path would have more joining in than coming out of all of the Billy Graham meetings combined.  Really, I thought that this could be the music played in hell – and it would be worse than burning in fire.

It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.

-          Roger Scruton

The loss of truth – the hallmark of the modern university – must result in the loss of beauty.  I wish I understood this before sitting in hell for an hour.

Better Than the Alternative

Then there is the other side.  A proposed new university, The University of Austin.  Compared to much of western academia, potentially a breath of fresh air.  Niall Ferguson, Heather Heying, and Bari Weiss are founding trustees.  The board of advisors includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Loury, and Jonathan Haidt, (among a few crazies…but I will come to this).  Peter Boghossian is a faculty fellow.  In other words, many who have been cancelled by “respectable” academia.

What do they have to say of themselves: