A Nation Of Laws

A great quote from James Leroy Wilson at Independent Country:

"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." - Frank Zappa

Independence Day Questions

Vache Folle raises a good 4th of July question about who authorized the Declaration of Independence. His ancestors in Georgia were not part of that, yet it happened. Their consent, he concludes, was therefore engineered for them. A good religious question is whether the American Revolution was righteous and biblical, and should a Christian have supported it. Christians debate among themselves about this. One church I attended held that this was ungodly rebellion against a legitimate civil government - the British Crown - and no Christian should support such activity. Others, like Rushdoony-style reconstructionists, see the early colonies as having established biblical local civil governments, with the actions of Parliament being rebellious against them. The American Revolution, then, to them, wasn't so much a revolution as it was a justified defensive counter-revolution. Parliament and the Crown were the rebellious bodies against legitimate civil governments. In general I tend to hold to the latter.

But as Vache Folle has held regarding the Civil War, I've come to think that there were as many reasons for the revolution as there were people involved. I've read historical accounts that call this war the "pastors' war," as many of the soldiers who fought against the British were Puritan pastors, convinced from a biblical standpoint that such a war was just. A religious decline following the war resulted since there were so many pastors lost in the battles.

Some believe that we should legitimately be under British rule to this day, but such an idea would apply at most to only the original thirteen colonies. California, for example, didn't join the union for some 70 years later. It might have been an independent state, set apart from the British Crown, and some of my ancestors may have settled elsewhere. Many of them wouldn't have met each other, and I wouldn't have been me. Scary thought.

Eminent Domain - The Sin of Jezebel

In my last post, I asked if anybody would name their daughter Jezebel. Well, nobody would because she was one of the most evil, wicked women in all of history. And what was her most notorious sin? The sin of what today is called Eminent Domain (aka compulsory purchase, compulsory acquisition or expropriation in other countries). This is where modern governments use coercion in taking private property away from citizens without their consent. As evil as this practice is, modern Christians hardly speak a word against it, and in many cases whole heartedly support it.

In 1 Kings 21 (read this whole chapter here), the most wicked king in the history of Israel to that day, Ahab, coveted the vineyard of Naboth, his nearest neighbor, for his own use. He even offered Naboth money for it. Naboth refused, citing that even God forbid that his inheritance be parted with. Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, found out and hired false witnesses to testify against him, had him put to death, then took possession of Naboth's land.

In the most bone-chilling verse in this chapter (v. 15), we see an almost exact pattern of the modern state, "...Jezebel said to Ahab, 'Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth, the Jezreelite, which he refused to give to you for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead." The state usually offers money in return for property, but if refused, the state takes it anyway. The only difference is that the state only threatens murder via an armed police, whereas Jezebel carried it out. Today, the state bears false witness in court against those who refuse the state's condescending offers.

As a result of this, God brought down judgment upon Ahab and Jezebel. Read the further accounts in 2 Kings 9, here and here. The final judgment upon Jezebel is this: "This is the word of the LORD, which He spoke by His servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, 'In the property of Jezreel the dogs shall eat the flesh of Jezebel; and the corpse of Jezebel shall be as dung on the face of the field in the property of Jezreel, so they cannot say, "This is Jezebel."'"

This is a horrific thing to think about with respect to today's politicians that play games with Jezebel's abomination. May they hear this, repent, and do good before God.

Would You Name Your Daughter "Jezebel"?

It's fun to pick out names for a baby that will soon be born. Especially for a girl. Even though my wife is pregnant with a boy, we picked out a girl's name before we knew the gender. The last girl's name we would ever choose is Jezebel. I'm sure that's the case with most people.

But why? What's so bad about Jezebel? Just the name itself conjures up thoughts of dastardly evil. It is a name used to defame a woman to the lowest level possible. It is one of the harshest remarks possible, and imputes the sleaziest of whoredoms, oozing with the most depraved and vile form of wickedness. Would you name your daughter Jezebel?

How The Government Turns Potential Destruction Into Guaranteed Destruction

Have an ash tree in your yard? Even if you don't, read this over at the Anti-Positivist.

[UPDATE: Gene Redlin, who makes a living at horticulture, made a comment on the ash tree disease story I linked. Thank you, Gene, for the additional information.]

Zoning Laws (Part 1) - State Control Over Life

Read entire series here.

My grandfather had as one of his rules of life, this: he would never live (or work) anywhere that would not allow him to walk to work. Such can only be a dream for me. I've never been able to even come close to living close to where I work, or working close to where I live. This is true for many Americans.

Modern zoning laws have among the highest negative impact, and least acknowledged affect, of any legislations of civil government. They are foundational to the American way of life itself, yet are instrumental in causing or enhancing many of our social ills. They dictate where people can live, work, shop, recreate - every aspect of life is governed by zoning laws. Not only this, but they essentially create segregation by class, and are responsible for creating many of the problems with homelessness we see. Low job availability, long commutes, traffic jams, urban sprawl, racism and contempt for the poor are planted, watered and harvested by zoning laws. Yet most people don't have a clue that this is true.

I'll be looking at zoning laws and their affects in this new series.

Part 2 .

Hey, I'm an Illegalist!

If adding to God's word is legalism, and disobeying a law of the state is illegal, then since all state laws are additions to God's word to begin with, any belief that opposes legalism is illegalism, and since I oppose legalism I also out of necessity oppose the state; which would make me an illegalist!

Illegal Is a Sick Bird

My dad was a career California Highway Patrol officer. So growing up we had many goofy questions for him regarding driving and the law. "Dad, is it illegal to ___ (fill in the blank)?" His reply was usually, "Illegal is a sick bird," trying to impress upon us a distinction between legality and lawfulness, "do you mean lawful?"

I think I know what he meant, but this distinction needs to be impressed upon American Christians today. Most of the Christian faith has been made "illegal" by politicians, and from my experience, most Christians view "legal" as the same as "lawful," because of their false interpretation of Romans 13. So when good is outlawed, doing good is often not even viewed as good by many people. Just like Jesus and the apostles when they did good but were roundly condemned by legalists for disobeying false authorities.

Why I Support the War in Iraq

I support the war in Iraq because I am forced to support it. Taxes, in one form or another, are extorted from me by the federal government against my will and used for something I don't agree with. If I were to come out against the war, I could carry a sign or write against it on my blog. But if I really did something about it, like withhold those taxes, I'd have a new roommate named Bubba. Live-in boyfriend, kind of, with a habit of anal rape.

America has become a place where one can believe anything at all, just as long as one doesn't act on his beliefs.

The Curse of Inflation

Read James Leroy Wilson's latest post at Partial Observer through a link here at his blog Independent Country. The government has the inverse Midas touch when it comes to, oh, well, anything it does. Here Wilson tackles a job of barely scratching the surface of how government screws our lives by even the smallest of good intentions.

The Elite, The Humble, and Two Types of Government

Two recent posts I made (here and here) regarding authoritarian elites and the governing of others looked at some points Vache Folle made about evil and stupid people. Now, he wrangles with a way to disqualify evil and stupid people from serving in high office (here). People can be combinations of good or evil, and clever or stupid, resulting in four possible combinations. By eliminating those who are both evil and stupid, a quarter of the pool is cut off, so the results will be greatly enhanced.

James Leroy Wilson adds his ideas (here) of why he thinks authoritarian elites still believe in big government, despite the obvious. It's a matter of having the "right people" in control, even if it means risking losing control to your opponents, because they know they'll regain control at some point in the future.

Now the ruling elites believe they are above everybody else because of their ideas. They are arrogant. But humble people who might serve in some type of government have other people believe in them because of the observable deeds and character they have shown over a long period of time. These two types of leaders are quite opposites of each other.

It is interesting that Christian leadership in the bible is defined in terms of qualitative character traits of any prospective leader. Morally corrupt and even morally ordinary people are disqualified. How their lives have been viewed by others, and how they match up against God's standards, are the criteria for leadership. Gene Redlin at Northern Gleaner recently did a series of in-depth posts (here, here, here and here) on leadership qualifications and how to avoid the wrong people. The Biblical form of leadership is very non-authoritarian, as Jesus makes plain in Matthew 20:25-28. But, as Wilson points out, this doesn't stop Christian conservatives from wanting to control others through the civil government.

This brings me to two types of government. One type of government is the type that most of human history is familiar with. This is the type that Jesus rebukes in the above passage, the government of overlording of other people. The other type, which I have written about extensively on this blog, is one which is limited in its scope to the punishment of evildoers for only a limited number of crimes, and in terms of punishments that God has already laid down. The Gentile form of government, which we have adopted in this country, is one where the elites dictate what can go in our toothpaste, whether one can smoke on another's property even with his permission, how parents can discipline their children, and every other aspect of life imaginable. One is a government of freedom, the other of slavery. In communist countries, the only way out from the poverty caused by government overlording is to become a member of the party, and to lord it over others. It is similar in our country.

The Absolute Necessity of Centralized Government

Two posts ago I quoted Vache Folle's take on authoritarian elitism as proposed by George F. Will. To quote VF again:

I read Will’s “Statecraft as Soulcraft”, and I resent that I will never get back the hours I spent doing so. The basic premise is that most folks are evil and stupid and must be ruled over strictly by the small minority of worthy elites. These elites should, as part of statecraft, cultivate in their subjects desirable ways of thinking and moral values, the “soulcraft” part. This requires a pretty substantial apparatus for propagandizing and surveillance of the riff raff.

First, I agree with the authoritarians that people are evil and stupid; this is self-evident. My life is a testimony, as is the life of everybody around me. If people weren't evil and stupid, they wouldn't need anybody to govern them. Anybody, then, who would think that people are evil and stupid, and in need of governing by others who are not evil and stupid, are evil and stupid for thinking of such a thing, if in fact people aren't evil and stupid. Their evil stupidity proves that people are evil and stupid.

But, like my previous quote of VF, any human governors of evil and stupid people will be evil and stupid themselves. To think themselves as better than evil and stupid people, that is, without being evil and stupid, will only lend themselves to doing things that are far more evil and stupid than the evil and stupid people that they govern, because they would refuse to believe their own actions as evil and stupid. If evil and stupid people are left to govern themselves, they can mostly only affect themselves and those around them. If I back over my neighbor's garbage can on my way to work, then cuss him out because I am wrong and don't want to admit it, nobody in Jackass, South Dakota will be affected. But when people in government are evil and stupid, their actions affect everybody. They are far more damaging to society than common evil and stupid people. If a president signs into law something that allows the government to search everybody at an airport, millions of people's lives are screwed, businesses are destroyed, well, you get the idea.

But allowing evil and stupid people to govern themselves isn't a bed of roses either. Six billion people are bound to have conflicts. Every day. So, if you're honest, you'll admit that they really do need to be governed by somebody else. These governors, then, would have to be in control of everybody else without anybody slipping through the cracks. This government would have to be totalist. And these governors would have to act in tandem so as to not set up different rules in different places, and to make sure rules wouldn't conflict with each other. This government would also have to be centralized for this to occur. But how can the complexity of interaction of all our lives be governed by mere men? These governors would need to know each one of us to know how we best and least interact with others. They would need to know how any law they pass would affect everybody both now and in the entirety of the future before they even passed those laws, and they would have to know how all their laws would interact with each other all through time. They would also have to know everything about every problem before it occurs in order to know how and when to pass all these laws.

In short, governors would have to be all-knowing, all-powerful and everywhere at the same time to make sure laws would work, and also to make sure that their laws would be followed. But, you know something? Only God fits this description. He knew all about the entire future of the world when He wrote His laws, and only He can carry all this out.

In conclusion, evil and stupid people must be governed and that government must be centralized. But the only way this can happen is if God is the governor and His laws are the ones used. A government of men by men's laws is impossible. The bible lays out self-government according to God's law as the way we should live. This is why I'm a Christian Libertarian.

Centralized Government: A Necessity?

On the heels of my last post about Vache Folle's blog, I'd like to continue the line of thinking and explore the idea of centralized government. Next... on From The Pew.

Authoritarian Wankers

Nevermind hitting the nail on the head, Vache Folle uses a pneumatic hammer in nailing this one. His latest post is about George F. Will, but this quote covers the bases:

The authoritarian elitist position has at its core a paradox. If humans are naturally evil and stupid, then their human rulers will probably be evil and stupid as well. Accordingly, any government constructed by humans will inevitably be the fruit of evildoing and stupidity and not a check thereon.

How true this is. Too bad this mindset is alive and well in the church as well.

I like George F. Will's writing... when he writes about baseball.

The Fall Results In The Power State

When Adam was created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden, his task was to rule over the earth (i.e. dominion) according to God's rules. But man rebelled against God, and in doing so became his own god, and in his sin he has desired to rule over other men ever since. Since God rules over His creatures, any rebellion against God usurps God's authority, therefore man must rule over God's creatures in God's place.

Mark Rushdoony, in "Faith for All of Life" magazine (no link), writes in an article entitled "Don't Pray for the Peace of Babylon" the following:

Man's quest of autonomy, or self-rule by his own truth and word rather than that of God, tends to result in one of two manifestations. The individual may become anarchistic, seeking his "own rules" and his "own thing." The individual autonomous man, however, is either irrelevant or a nuisance to collective man, and so humanism's autonomy has always tended toward statism. The real autonomy is thus of the state, not individuals, which illustrates the Biblical teaching that man's rebellion against God represents an enslavement to sin. The moral reality of slavery to sin is manifested in the institutional enslavement of men to the highest collective voice of mankind, the state.

As a moral rebel, man perverts the things of God. Since man is not god, but only a creature, all he can do as a rebel is counterfeit the Creator's reality. Man was made to have dominion over creation (Gen. 1:28), for instance, but his moral rebellion in Genesis 3 means that all his attempts at dominion without God end in manifestations of his sin. The sinful lust for power rather than godly dominion stems from the original sin of desiring to be as gods. Man's constant grasp for power is manifested in aggression and exploitation. Power-hungry men create a power-hungry state as the utilitarian means of controlling others.

Christians do this when they lobby government to control others or when they vote for politicians who promise the same. Taxes, minimum wage laws, anti-smoking laws, and all other regulations of any kind are affronts to private property and property owners. Man, even sinful Christian man, is not content to let God rule this earth, but asserts his own godhood in ruling over others. May God grant us all repentance.

What To Do When Dope-Smoking Liberal Pinko Commie Leftist Radical Berkeley Wackos Are More Biblical Than You and You're a Conservative (Part 2)

Read part 1 here.

I spent five years of my life in Berkeley, California. Yes, the place famous for riots and demonstrations in the 60's, hippies, tie-dyed t-shirts and Grateful Dead concerts. I went to school for three years at the University of California, Berkeley, then lived in Berkeley after school for another two. During that time, the city council passed a city ordinance declaring that the Berkeley Police Department wouldn't arrest anybody who was found in possession of marijuana in an amount small enough to be considered for "personal use."

As a conservative kid from the suburbs (engineering major), my friends and I were incredulous at such a proposition. This also made national headlines. Marijuana was, after all, against the law, and the city of Berkeley was saying that it would ignore state law, which was against the moral law of obeying state law. I was raised within a culture that put state law above everything else (including God's law). Politicians, even though they were idiots, somehow were gods when legislating, and disobeying state law in any sense was tantamount to hating God or something.

But now, looking back on those wild times, I've come to a completely different conclusion regarding marijuana, Berkeley and conservative suburban culture. In the Bible, God tells the whole human race through Adam,

"Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food" and it was so. Genesis 1:29-30

Well, not only does marijuana fit this list, but so does opium and cocoa leaves. God plainly gave these things to man to use, so who is man to disagree? Even though I was a conservative "law abiding citizen", dope-smoking liberal pinko commie leftist radical Berkeley wackos, whether they knew it or not, held to a more biblical position than I did. So, now, I have no choice but to believe the bible. I've found so many of these things that I can no longer call myself a conservative.

Adoptive Parents Are Suspected Terrorists

Shortly after we adopted our youngest child almost two years ago, my wife and I discovered that, thanks to the Patriot Act and various other regulations created by Homeland Security, adoptive parents are now suspected terrorists. We were put on a no-obtaining-of-documents list, similar to the no-fly lists we hear about in the news. We were prohibited from directly obtaining official documents for our very own child, even after the adoption was complete. The only workaround was to secure the services of an attorney that could lobby on our behalf to obtain any necessary documents.

Long ago I decided that I would do the utmost I could to live my entire life without ever using the services of a lawyer. So much for that. I compromised on my principles and decided that keeping my son was more important.

Then, after we received the paperwork from the state, we were required to immediately return the paperwork to the state so that they could confirm that the documents were legitimate before they returned them to us. Yes, you read it right. All this screwed up our taxes and tied up thousands of dollars of our own money for quite some time, with some still being tied up.

How interesting that the political party in control of both houses and the white house when the Patriot Act was passed claims to be the "Pro-Family" party. Well, I'd like to thank them again publicly for being so pro-family to us. I already thanked them in private on November 7th.

Got Toothpaste? State Sponsored Child Abduction and Destruction of a Family is a Better Solution

The other day I saw a brief story in the news about a mother (presumably a single mom) who was neglegent in her 5 year-old's dental care. An x-ray was shown on the news as supposed evidence to this fact. It was far more muddled than I'm used to seeing, but the idea was to show the extent of his tooth decay.

Somehow this was brought to the attention of state authorities. Their solution? Well, it wasn't to have a judge order the mom to pay for the proper care of her son's teeth (the biblical concept of tooth for tooth is backward and barbaric, don't you know). Rather it was to charge the mom with a crime, jail her, and abduct the child from his family and place him in that pedophile's paradise known as foster care (I know whereof I speak).

Now I know that there are quite a few stupid and ignorant people in the world. But God gave authority over children to the parents for a reason. If the parents are neglegent in a certain area (and aren't we all), why not encourage them to grow in that area?

Let me get this striaght. The problem was that the child was deprived of a toothbrush by his mother. So the solution is to also deprive the child of his mother, family, home, neighborhood, friends just so he can now have his teeth brushed? Is the government collectively demon-posessed?