The way for a secular agnostic bothered by a gnawing emptiness to move off dead center regarding Bible skepticism

Great piece at The Resurgent today by Peter Heck, on the subject of a particular internal within the findings of the Pew Research poll on contemporary Americans' spiritual and / or religious views and beliefs.

He cautions that before we find too much encouragement in the stat that roughly 50 percent of those polled believe in the God of the Bible, we should consider something:

many of those same folks don’t regularly read or study the Bible and often know very little about it. That leads to a phenomenon of Burger King Christianity where adherents literally “have it their way,” taking out the parts of Scripture or the faith that runs afoul of their social, cultural, political, or philosophical preferences.

For Biblical Christians that might seem to be a sobering reality, but it is also highly motivating. The American church has unquestionably slipped into a complacency where we “do church” on our terms, often reducing the power of the transformative gospel to a feel-good, do-good self-help social club. We shape it so that it conforms to our beliefs rather than shaping our beliefs to conform to its truth. We water down its doctrine and rub off its sharp edges to make it palatable and comfortable for our lives. There’s no struggle, there’s no transformation, merely assurance and affirmation.

People cannot be saved by a false Jesus, and they can’t be changed by a false gospel. That means Bible believers should recognize we are living the words of Scripture where, “the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” 

The comment thread below it is worth a look as well. It's refreshingly free of the snark and vitriol that characterizes most exchanges in such forums. In fact, its a lively exchange of viewpoints worth considering.

I've been thinking about this one in particular:

Certainly our culture is full of "salad bar Christians" who are quick to adapt moral positions to fit the times. Being non-judgmental seems to be the highest biblical virtue to some. 

But, there is no absolute science to interpreting the Bible as evidenced by the number of Christian denominations and the squabbles over doctrine and dogma. How much literalism should be applied to the Bible? How much allegory? What does a relationship with Jesus really mean...are the implications clear? I do agree that there are a whole lot of distractions today that impede or distract people from evolving their understanding of what they believe and how they should live. For some, religion is largely social...for others it is very personal....others are not at all comfortable with evangelizing....since faith is something one must come to in his/her own way. It's tough selling a supernatural Bible to a culture that needs visual evidence. 

Such questions make for handy excuses for the secular agnostic to dismiss study of scripture on the grounds that it's just too full of vague metaphor and gaping holes in historical accounts to be worth much more than serving as a balm for the existentially desperate.

I've even recently, in the course of being pestered on social media by a hardcore leftist atheist, seen the Bible characterized as "a compilation heavily edited by an all-male group 300 years after the last event documented in it occurred."

It's clear to me, though, that there is a certain type of person - or rather, person at a certain point of ontological inquiry - who is not that far gone, who indeed doesn't ever crack a Bible, much less go to church, but who harbors a growing, gnawing sense that his secular agnosticism is utterly incapable of addressing his moments of darkness - and who, furthermore, understands that it's impossible to press on with his existence if living with that darkness is the best that can be done. I know, because that person was me once, and not so long ago.

The exact right words have to be found for each particular situation, or course, but it seems to me a general - and appropriately respectful - way to proceed goes something like this:

I invite you to suspend your cynicism and ask yourself a purely historical question. Why has the Bible come to assume such an authoritative role in the development of our civilization? Why do we number our years from the birth of Jesus? Why were universities traditionally church-affiliated? Why have Biblical names been so common throughout the centuries? 

Just set your preconceptions aside momentarily, even if you pick them back up immediately after a bit of exploration. Just approach the Bible from the standpoint that a whole lot of people and institutions made it central to their missions, even if they were wrong. 

Then just start into reading somewhere. The late Billy Graham recommends starting with the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, rather than with Genesis. That may be the most effective.

Read it with an unclouded curiosity. Who was this Jesus? What, indeed, are some ways one might interpret his parables? Why did he undergo the savage torture, humiliation and execution he experienced that grim Friday, knowing that it could all end in an instant if he'd tell the authorities what they wanted to hear? How are you with four accounts of the empty tomb?

I submit that if you really permit yourself some humble inquiry, you'll start to be touched by the humility of Jesus, and then the other figures you encounter: his apostles, and then, going backwards, Abraham, Moses, Esther, David, the prophets.

You'll notice something - and this is a most non-empirical thing for me to say - a stirring in your heart. You'll get little glimpses of light intruding onto your darkness, even if they're fleeting. 

Take it at your own pace. Put it down if the "yeah-but-what-about-this-angle" voice in your head won't leave you alone. 

But if you approach it with a willingness to meet it on its own terms, there's a good chance you'll keep picking it up, and your curiosity will grow into hunger.

What I've posted here is my first foray in a direction that I'm hoping will lead to an essay for another website. I may share some more preliminary thoughts here as I develop that. Then again, I may leap right into that essay. Inspiration can be like that.

Blessings.

Sunday roundup

Sam Houston State economic historian Brian Domitrovic on the role tariffs played in the life of our country up to 1913. The first Congress assembled after the Constitution was ratified passed some tariffs, in a blatant act of cronyism:

At the very outset of this nation’s Constitutional order, by means of the tariff, Congress offered itself to the public as venal and corrupt. This is surely one of the reasons—perhaps the major reason—that government remained so small over the entire era of the tariff.

From 1789 to 1913, the size of the federal government in the economy as a whole averaged about 3%, with variation in time of war. Today, that number is over 20%—a 7-fold increase. State and local government was another 3% back then, and is another 12% today. Where total government was 6% of economic output in the era of the tariff, it is five times larger at over 30% today.

A reason government was small under the tariff was that it was widely understood that government and its functionaries are objectionable. The tariff communicated this lesson inherently and explicitly. Because the tariff was a list displaying cronyism and making no play for being enlightened or fair, it did not demand respect. The quid pro quo the populace made with the tariff is that Congress and its conspirators in business got their favors, but in turn Congress’s realm, the government, had to stay small.
Therefore, the private economy was free to survey immense horizons. Boundless growth at the hands of entrepreneurs and a talented and ambitious workforce built up year after year as Congress got to curry its petty favors on the condition that government stayed limited in size.

The second essential aspect of the tariff during its heyday concerned receipts. Debates surrounding the tariff always inquired whether it was “for revenue” or “prohibitive.” These terms were ubiquitous in Congressional dronings on the tariff, the tariff easily being the most discussed political issue, slavery included, in America from 1789-1913, even in the antebellum period.

A tariff “for revenue” was one where a rate was set low enough for the good in question to flow into the country in sufficient quantity to bring in increasing receipts to the government. A “prohibitive” tariff was one that was so high, receipts would go up if a rate were lowered. The “Laffer curve” concept was the most discussed theorem in political-economic debates in the United States in the 19thcentury.

A tariff for revenue was that minimally tolerable to the public. A prohibitive tariff not only raised the cost of living; it also required further tax impositions to make up for the lost revenue. When Congressmen suggested prohibitive tariffs, they had to resort to stratagems. In the 1880s, Congress suggested that prohibitive tariffs were good because they yielded government less money, and government was bad. In the 1820s, pro-tariff Northerners had the votes, so they were relieved of having to justify a prohibitive tariff to South Carolina. This was one of the reasons South Carolina felt less and less need to move away from its slave economy on ethical grounds.

After the income tax was put in place in 1913, the tariff shed its revenue purpose and became exclusively a vehicle for cronyism. Therefore it got very high—so high, in 1930, that it shut out imports that were responsible for financing upwards of a fifth of the American banking system’s loan portfolio. That system was ruined and the result was the Great Depression. 

In other words, the vast majority of those engaged in commerce, behaving in a free-market manner, harbored no illusions about how human nature plays itself out in the government environment. They just went about their business unfettered by it.


You may know about the January 2017 meeting between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates in the Seychelles, a subsequent get-together in the hotel bar with a Russian, and Prince's testimony about his trip in front of the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017.  

Prince told House investigators that a representative of the Emiratis got in touch with him to ask him to come to the Seychelles to meet top officials, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ. Prince, who said he was focused on the oil and minerals trade, told investigators he was hoping for some business. "I'll be direct about it," he told the House. "I think the Obama administration went out of their way to tarnish my ability to do business in the Middle East, and, with a different administration in town, they probably figured that the downdraft wasn't present any more. So I'd been wanting to see [MBZ] for some time."

Prince said he met for about an hour with MBZ and other officials at a Seychelles hotel. At the end of the meeting, according to Prince, the Emiratis "mentioned a guy I should meet who was also in town to see them, a Kirill Dmitriev, from Russia, who ran some sort of hedge fund."

"It's not like I was at a meeting and they invited this Russian guy to the meeting," Prince explained. "It was a matter of, 'Hey, while you're here, there's a Russian guy that we've done some business with in the past, and it'd be interesting for you to meet him." Prince said he met with Dmitriev later at the hotel bar for about 20 or 30 minutes. "We chatted on topics ranging from oil and commodity prices to how much his country wished for resumption of normal trade relations with the — relationship with the USA," Prince said.
And that was it, Prince told the House. He made no arrangements with the Russian, was never in touch with him again, and didn't get any business with the Emiratis, for that matter.

Now Lebanese-American businessman George Nader has told the Mueller team that he was at the meeting, too. All very interesting, but, um, it can hardly be called collusion. The election had transpired over two months earlier.

Another FNC personality is exposed as a failure at marital integrity. Jesse Watters's wife has filed for divorce. They'd married in 2009 and have twin daughters. He is still dating the mistress, a 25-year-old associate producer of his show. (She's been moved over to Laura Ingraham's show.) What is it with that place?

I always enjoy Ed Morrissey's Sunday Reflections at Hot Air. Today's is particularly good. It riffs off of John 3: 14 - 21, which includes, of course, the one-verse encapsulation of the entire Gospel message. The overall passage, though, depicts Jesus being able to make a comparison between Moses lifting up the bronze likeness of a serpent and his own death, because he knew that as a big shot of Jewish theology, Nicodemus, to whom he was speaking, would know that story from Numbers. Morrissey draws in some other scriptural passages to make the larger point about the pattern of the Israelites asking God for favor and then rebelling against him, and how that in turn is a microcosm of the sin in which we're all mired. He ties it all back together by saying we must squarely face the cross.

Here's a moral monster for you: Washington Post deputy editorial-page editor Ruth Marcus says that if tests during either of her two pregnancies had come back positive for Down's syndrome, she would have aborted the person in question, "grieved the loss and moved on."