Burn, baby, burn that Plastic!

Burn (for fuel) vs. recycle: A lively discussion on Watts Up With That.

Ontario woman jailed in U.S. for driving with Canadian licence

It was a rainy night in Georgia, my friend. (Well, probably not night... or raining.) An Ontario woman got pulled over for speeding. The cop would not accept her Canadian driver's license as valid ID, or something...

Tossed in the back of the cruiser, hand-cuffed, car impounded, finger-printed, mug-shotted, oranged, -- tossed in the slammer.

Where's a sue-happy American lawyer when you need one?

Five Fake News Stories People Believe About Early Christianity

Via Michael Kruger, The Gospel Coalition:

1. Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
Perhaps there’s no conspiracy theory about early Christianity more sensational and captivating than the claim that Jesus was married and had children. It’s not only fodder for books like The Da Vinci Code, but it seems to pop up again and again in the mainstream media (see a recent example here).
The problem, of course, is that this belief is patently false. There’s no evidence Jesus was married.
(For a fuller critique of this idea, see my article here.) 

2. The deity of Jesus wasn’t decided until the Council of Nicea in the fourth century.
Another widespread conviction is that Jesus was merely an ordinary human who was exalted to divine status by the council of Nicea. They then suppressed (and oppressed) all who insisted otherwise.
Again, however, the evidence for an early belief in Jesus’s divinity is overwhelming. As early as the 50s of the first century, Paul applies the monotheistic creed of Israel to the person of Jesus, declaring: “For us there is one God, the Father from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Cor. 8:6). There’s good evidence Paul is drawing on earlier tradition in this passage, indicating that such a belief was present at the beginning of the Christian movement.
(For more on the early divinity of Jesus, see Richard Bauckham’s book Jesus and the God of Israel.) 

3. Christians didn’t have a ‘Bible’ until the time of Constantine.
Also making our top-five list is the oft-repeated claim that early Christians, at least for the first four centuries, didn’t have a Bible. They were reliant merely on ever-changing oral tradition. And this problem wasn’t resolved until Constantine commissioned the production of a Bible in the fourth century (containing only the books he preferred).
While this is yet another intriguing conspiracy theory, it lacks any historical foundation. The earliest Christians had a “Bible” from day one—what we now call the Old Testament. For them, the Old Testament was the undisputed Word of God, and they were deeply committed to its authority. Moreover, from an early point Christians regarded their own books as scriptural, and a core New Testament canon is evident by the early to middle second century.
(For a brief discussion of this point, see my article here. For more detail, see my full-length volumeThe Question of Canon.) 

4. The ‘Gnostic’ Gospels like Thomas were just as popular as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Ever since the discovery of the so-called Gnostic Gospels at Nag Hammadi in 1945, it’s been popular to insist that these “lost” Gospels were once more popular than our canonical ones. During the first few centuries, we’re told, Christians read the Gospel of Thomas with equal (if not more) regularity than the books that made it into our Bibles.
This whole narrative has a clear purpose behind it: to convince people that all Gospels are pretty much the same, and no Gospel is more valid than another.
But this narrative quickly evaporates when one looks at the historical data. When it comes to nearly every line of evidence—frequency of citation, use as Scripture, number of manuscripts—it’s clear these apocryphal Gospels weren’t very popular after all. Indeed, all historical indicators show our four Gospels were, far and away, the most popular ones in the early church.
(For more on this point, see my article here, or check out Chuck Hill’s book Who Chose the Gospels?) 

5. The words of the New Testament were radically changed and corrupted in the earliest centuries.
Rounding out our top-five fake news stories is the claim that the text of the New Testament has been so radically corrupted, edited, and changed that we can’t really know what the original authors said. Made famous by Bart Ehrman’s bestseller Misquoting Jesus, this story has been repeated ad infinitum.
But there’s no evidence for this level of radical corruption. Can we see scribal changes and mistakes in our New Testament manuscripts? Of course, but that’s true for every document of antiquity. The New Testament is no different.
And if there is a difference, it’s that the New Testament seems even more well-preserved than comparable documents in the ancient world. After generations of careful scholarship, and a wealth of manuscripts at our disposal, we can have great confidence in the words of the New Testament.
(For more on this issue, see the last chapter in my book The Heresy of Orthodoxy, or my review of Misquoting Jesus.)

These five examples of “fake news” about early Christianity get repeated so often people believe they must be true. Just like in the political world, however, we need to carefully examine the facts before we repeat the claims.

As St. Paul-Simon said, "All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest" -- who do you say Jesus is?

Is Donald Trump President "for such a time as this"?

James Dobson warns America that its fundamental rights and liberties are threatened by the totalitarian instincts of progressive courts and legislators.

Let me illustrate what can happen in a country that doesn't respect basic human rights as they have been understood historically. The Parliament of Canada, our neighbor to the north, passed an act into law on June 19, 2017. It is called the Transgender Rights Bill, and it imposes jail time and fines on anyone who uses inappropriate pronouns with regard to gender identity, gender expression, race, national or ethnic origin, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, genetic characteristics, disability or conviction of an offense for which a pardon has been granted. Forget laws protecting freedom of speech. Violations of this act are considered to be hate crimes in Canada's Criminal Code. Its passage has been lauded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "another step toward equality." No! It is a step toward tyranny for our Canadian friends....

..... In Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015, the [American] Supreme Court redefined marriage as it had been protected in law and celebrated internationally for more than 5,000 years. The decision was five to four, and it eliminated the exclusivity of marriage between a man and woman in 31 states. Five Justices imposed that cultural earthquake on America. Let me describe that ruling in another way. The laws protecting traditional marriage in 31 states were summarily invalidated. The citizens in those 31 states had recently gone to their polling places and voted to define marriage as being exclusively between one man and one woman. By a single vote, an arrogant, imperious, unelected justice and four colleagues on the Supreme Court overrode the will of the people and swept away collective decisions of the populous. 

These five unelected and imperious justices imposed a cultural disaster on America. Some court-watchers say it was tantamount to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, because it helped to undermine the institution of marriage. The family will never be the same. Lincoln's words at Gettysburg became hollow. Whatever happened to the promise that ours is a government of, by and for the people? What hubris those pious justices demonstrated with their votes!

In my opinion, this next example stands as one of the most outrageous assaults on parental rights in American history. Children attending Mesquite Elementary School in Palmdale, California, came home one afternoon and told their parents what had happened to them in class. It was a shocker. One of their teachers, with administrative approval, sat for hours with students, aged 7 to 10, to ensure that each of them completed 79 items on a questionnaire. The kids, barely out of babyhood, were required to respond to highly personal questions about their private thoughts, including 10 items about their sexuality. Permission was neither requested nor discussed with parents. The children were asked about such topics as frequency of thinking about having sex and thinking about touching other peoples' private parts, among many others. 

The parents were incensed (wouldn't you be?), and filed suit in both federal and district courts against the school district for invading their children's privacy and the parents' rights to control the upbringing of their children. They were desperately trying to defend the innocence of their children, but to no avail. The courts ruled that there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexuality or education of their children. Both the district and federal courts dismissed the case. One of them asserted that parents have no right to determine what their sons and daughters will be exposed to while enrolled in California's public schools. 

When the parents appealed their case, it went (where else?) to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California. You can guess what happened there. The judges upheld the lower court ruling in favor of the school district and concluded that education is not merely about teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. Education, they said, serves higher civil and social functions, including the rearing of children into healthy and responsible adults. In other words, "Parents, get lost."

The rest, here.

Canada, barring divine intervention, is probably too far gone. America needs conservative Supreme Court justices and a sea-change in public opinion regard progressive activism. Is Donald Trump President "for such a time as this"?

America: Is There a White Push-Back?

An excellent article from Taki's Magazine on the inevitability of push-back against incessant media/Democrat goading of white Americans...

Now, you might think that if you don’t like the increasing racialization of American politics—which is, as Klein notes, driven by mass immigration—you might think it wise and prudent to cut back on immigration for a while.

But of course that simple remedy never comes up in Klein’s essay. The “browning of America” is instead presented as some vast natural process, like the drift of the solar system through the Milky Way. And the browning of America is much less under human influence than climate change.

To Vox readers, importing a new electorate of foreign ringers is how they intend to grind their enemies, their fellow American citizens, into the dust beneath their political chariot wheels, so it’s best not to notice what they’ve chosen to inflict upon their nation.

After all, that white Americans are slowly waking up to the fact that they don’t really want to get pushed around by newcomers just for being white merely proves that whites deserve their fate.

And an excellent review of the excellent article in American Spectator:

You can’t insult a group of people repeatedly, aggressively, the way the Left in its mob mentality insists upon doing to the majority of America and not expect consequences. Those will come. And in its rampant enthusiasm the Left has apparently decided to take a swing at some 60-plus percent of the population — a decent chunk of which has heretofore been sympathetic to its policies.

When non-whites act in their perceived collective interests it is the natural order of things; when whites do the same, it is racist.

As the recent Laura Ingraham pile-ons  demonstrates.

Chuck Colson asks, “What is Christianity?”

From Tom Gilson's review of THE GOSPEL AND THE MIND, BY BRADLEY G. GREEN:

... Chuck Colson’s question to a group of theologians years ago. “What is Christianity?” he asked. Their answers varied from, “The culture from which we sprang,” to “a living relationship with God in Christ.” He disagreed with them all. Their answers weren’t so much wrong, he said, as inadequate, for in truth “Christianity is the explanation for everything.” 

[Bradley G.] Green would certainly agree that it’s the basis for knowing. And how little we know these days! He caught my attention right up front when he said, 

Having gone through school and now made the transition to teaching at a small liberal arts college, I have discovered that others have had similar experiences. They have come to the realization that they have really missed something crucial in their education. … What I am speaking of is not simply a humility that comes with age. I am describing a more troubling reality among my contemporaries marked by a genuine ignorance of the past, lack of grounding in the cultural and intellectual inheritance of the West, and perhaps most sadly, no sort of remorse or recognition that this situation might be a bad thing.

We know so little. How many times, reading C. S. Lewis, have I thought, “who is this writer he’s alluding to?” Followed by the unnerving sensation that if I were really educated I ought to know...

More from Tom Gilson's review of THE GOSPEL AND THE MIND, BY BRADLEY G. GREEN here.

You don't know me from Adam...

... I think that's how the phrase goes.

William Lane Craig is studying the issue of Adam in the Bible. Historical? Figurative? Representative?

Here's an interesting nugget on the difference between biblical vs. systematic theology.

It’s crucial that the tasks of biblical theology and systematic theology be pursued in pristine isolation from each other. There is an almost irresistible tendency to allow science to guide our biblical interpretation. This sort of interpretive approach to Scripture is often called “concordism.” Beginning with what modern science tells us about the origin of the world and mankind, we approach the biblical text and read that science into the text, or, at least, read the text in such a way that it comports with modern science. The flaws in such a hermeneutic are obvious: (1) It does not interpret the text as the author and its intended readers would have understood it but imports meanings foreign to them; (2) As science progresses, every generation will read its own science back into the text, e.g., 19th century biology and geology.  

Worth noting.

Poll: How serious an offense is illegal border crossing?

Blogger has "retired" its Poll gadget, so I'm just going to wing this, because I really want to know...

I suspect the divide between left/right on illegal immigration is driven by how serious an offense you think border-hopping is. Leftists make their views known by dropping the qualifier "illegal" entirely -- everybody's an immigrant. They invented a linguistic dodge -- "undocumented" which allows them to distinguish between legal immigrants and illegal without having to use the term illegal. Their media enablers have gone along with this.

So, how serious an offence is illegal immigration? Please "vote".

a) Not at all serious or important -- open the borders!

b) about as serious as speeding or illegal parking

c) about as serious as shoplifting

d) about as serious as cheating/lying to the authorities on your income tax

e) about as serious as cheating/lying to authorities AND breaking/entering into someone's home or property

f) more serious than (e) above (explain)

Schumer rejects US border separation solution - Why Did The News Cycle Drop This??

Schumer rejects GOP proposal to address border crisis

Asked if that meant Democrats would not support a bill backed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to keep immigrant families together while seeking asylum on the U.S. border, Schumer said they want to keep the focus on Trump.

Why wasn't this Democrat move shouted from the media mountaintops?

Implementing zero-tolerance is just another way of saying "we will uphold the laws of the United States".  If you don't like the law, change the law.

US Border Separations: "All this can be avoided if --

... These kids... are brought over in extremely dangerous conditions, in extremely dangerous terrain, and all this can be avoided if they just go through the port of entry. There would be no crime committed by them and they wouldn’t get separated. Why they don’t do this is beyond me,” explained Cabrera, adding, “As we all know, when you get arrested, you don’t get to stay with your family.”

RedState -- Border Patrol Agent Teaches CNN Just How Ignorant The Network Is About Migrant Children 

The Truth about Separating Kids: just the facts, ma'am

A fact-based explanation well worth the read by Rich Lowry @ National Review.

Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

.... The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).

So true, so true.

Notes:

1st offense misdemeanor: Separation of less than one day while the violation is being processed. "The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE."

2nd offense: felony. Criminal proceedings apply.

Appeals for asylum:  "In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children." "Flores Consent Decree from 1997...  unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so."

Why hold adults at all? "... if an asylum-seeker is detained... the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again... are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

Lowry ends by saying, "Congress can fix this". See my post on Chuck Schumer -- not interested in a fix by Congress.

Who’s Really to Blame at the Border: Activist judges, perverse incentives, and the law of unintended? consequences

The backstory to the current border crisis via Heather Mac Donald writing in City Journal: "the current distress and hysteria is the fault of illegal aliens and their enablers in the courts":

So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry....

.... The extraordinarily complex thicket of interpolated rules and rights that govern U.S. immigration policy (the result of decades of nonstop litigation by the immigration bar) contains a series of judicial mandates that defeated even the Obama administration’s tepid efforts to bring some semblance of lawfulness to the border. A long-running class-action lawsuit in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, originally styled Flores v. Reno, has held that alien minors cannot be confined by the government for longer than 20 days. This 20-day cap contributed to the flood of Central American child-toting asylum seekers that picked up steam during President Obama’s second term [my bolds]. Asylum petitions typically take months, if not years, to adjudicate, given the long backlog of such cases in the immigration courts. If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.

The Obama administration usually chose the second option. Word coursed through Mexico and Central America that taking a child across the border was a get-out-of-jail-free card that would exempt its holder from both criminal prosecution and detention. This child-release lever, coupled with Obama’s announcement in 2012 that he would grant amnesty to the so-called Dreamers, meant that Obama soon had his own family border crisis on his hands. In 2014, 70,000 adult-child units and 70,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended illegally crossing into the U.S. The administration tried building large family detention centers to hold the children and their accompanying adults, but the same Flores decree that has bedeviled the Trump White House stymied that effort. In 2015, a federal trial judge, Holly Gee, herself appointed by Obama and the very definition of an activist jurist, vastly expanded the scope of the original decree and ordered the administration to release the detained minors. The Department of Homeland Security warned that ending family detention would trigger another border surge. Judge Gee dismissed this concern as “fear-mongering,” according to the Associated Press. 

Obeying the law... is something that must never be demanded of politically correct victims. If lawbreaking carries negative consequences, the fault lies with the legal system, not with an individual’s decision to break the law in the first place.... 

The “progressive” solution to these dilemmas is to confer an immediate benefit on the alleged victim that will alleviate the problem in the short term, perverse incentives be damned. Illegal aliens with children must be exempt from immigration rules. The likelihood that such a policy will encourage more illegal aliens to come is out of sight, out of mind (if not covertly viewed as an affirmative good).... 

Strangely, after Trump issued his recent executive order, a few media voices tentatively raised the problem of the unintended consequences of purportedly humane rules. CNN anchor John Berman asked Schiff on Thursday morning if exempting illegal aliens with children from detention “incentivized” such illegal crossings. Schiff ducked the query: “Well, it’s not a simple question as whether somebody has a child or not.” But the problem of perverse incentives will not go away. America’s loss of sovereignty over its borders and the incursion of millions of barely literate campesinos and their progeny is the result of years of victim-favoring policies that ignore personal agency and court the consequences.

City Journal 

The ‘Mustard Seed’ That Liberated Spanish Christians from Islamic Rule

Way back when, a solitary Spaniard stood against the Islamic invasion:

Exactly 1,300 years ago, in the year 718, a little-remembered kingdom was born in Spain. It soon led to the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic occupation. To appreciate the significance of that development, we must travel back seven years earlier, to 711, when Arabs and Africans, both under the banner of Islam, “godlessly invaded Spain to destroy it,” to quote from the Chronicle of 754. Once on European soil, they “ruined beautiful cities, burning them with fire; condemned lords and powerful men to the cross; and butchered youths and infants with the sword.”....

“I will not associate with the Arabs in friendship nor will I submit to their authority,” Pelayo responded [to the dhimmi bishop]. Then the rebel made a prophecy that would be fulfilled over the course of nearly eight centuries: “Have you not read in the divine scriptures [e.g., Mark 4:30-21] that the church of God is compared to a mustard seed and that it will be raised up again through divine mercy?”....

(Here, in the Chronicle of Alfonso III, we have possibly the oldest record of the two sorts of Christians that developed under Muslim-occupied Spain: those who defied Islam and fled to the Asturian wilds, and those who accepted their lot and maneuvered within the system as subjugated dhimmis — and grumbled against their northern coreligionists for bringing Islam’s ire against them. The two will meet and compete again in centuries to come.)

National Review.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- Spaniard George Santayana.

How Does Christianity Differ from Other Religions On Homosexuality?

How Does Christianity Differ from Other Religions On Homosexuality?

That's a good question. Here's an answer by Terrell Clemmons at Salvo magazine.

Man and woman being created in the image of God is a blasphemous concept to Islam, a foreign concept in any pantheism, and an absurdity in any naturalistic secularism. Only the biblical worldview, which holds that all men and all women bear God's divine image, gives any objective grounding for inherent human dignity and value.

The argument could perhaps be summarized as this: God has a higher view of human beings than we have of ourselves, and expects us to act accordingly.

Jordan Peterson: A Christian Critique

Jordan Peterson is neither a Christian nor a conservative. But, he is thoughtful and brave, and his message of personal responsibility resonates with conservatives and Christians.

Perhaps he is, as Jesus might put it, "not far from the kingdom".

Here's a blunt Christian critique of his Jungian philosophy from the Daily Caller.

Here's another; more of a review than a critique: Jordan Peterson, Unlikely Guru, by Matthew Schmitz at First Things.

Peterson is a latter-day Norman Vincent Peale, offering sympathy and practical advice. He tells his fans to get a job and become worthy spouses.... But Peterson has an instinct for cultural combat that Peale lacked. He flirts with positions that the Religious Right gave up on long ago, such as opposition to contraception and divorce. “Was it really a good thing,” Peterson asks, “to so dramatically liberalize the divorce laws in the 1960s? It’s not clear to me that the children whose lives were destabilized by the hypothetical freedom this attempt at liberation introduced would say so.” He refuses to use gender-neutral pronouns, such as “zi” and “zir,” that blur the line between woman and man.
Most stunning of all, Peterson criticizes the liberal rhetoric of freedom. “Rights! Rights! Rights!” he exclaims. “It’s appalling.

Heartwarming: Soldier reunites with stray dog she rescued while deployed

Great story. Heartwarming. You can tell a lot about a culture by the way they treat their animals. Proverbs 12:10.

Here's the video.

The Pagan Roots of Easter?

When The Guardian published a piece on “The Pagan Roots of Easter,” ancient historian Tom Holland called it “the most historically illiterate article I’ve ever read in a major newspaper – and that’s saying something.”

Who Wants to Take the Covefe Cognitive Challenge?

I doubt these were reporters, but it is fun to watch them try to match Trump.

Feminist Cathy Newman takes on Canada's man-of-steel Jordan Peterson -- and loses big-league.

‘You’ve Got Me’: Feminist Cathy Newman Crumbles in Channel 4 Interview with ‘Controversial’ Prof. Jordan Peterson.

All of the associated links are well work a click.

(Primary video is ~30minutes -- Grab a coffee and a croissant)

How Delusional Can Privileged, Self-Absorbed University Students Get?

The mighty Heather Mac Donald weighs in:

(Grab a coffee -- it's 11 minutes long)