Christianity was founded roughly 2,000 years ago on the shores of a big lake in the Near East that still exists today – the Sea of Galilee. It has its roots in a small town that still exists today in present-day Israel – Bethlehem. Its foundation was made permanent a city of much strife for thousands of years both before and after – Jerusalem.
It started out as a small sect of Judaism that most in its day found humorous at best, blasphemous at worst. A small group of fishermen, tax collectors, whores, and other assorted scum of the earth claimed to have met the Messiah, and that he taught that to live, you must die. He claimed he was God, a claim that makes him (paraphrasing CS Lewis here) either a liar, a lunatic, or LORD.
The Messiah had already drawn large crowds during during his life, but that was nothing new for the era. “Messiah”s of various forms had been rising up for hundreds of years before this one, gaining large crowds during their lives, only to die (usually by execution) and have their names be forgotten in the annals of history.
No, two things made this Messiah different: 1) After his extremely brutal -so brutal that he was no longer recognizable as human- and extremely public -so public that people from thousands of miles away saw it first hand- execution, he was seen by thousands living and breathing, with barely a scar on his body. 2) Because of this resurrection, this Messiah continued to draw large crowds after his death.
But 2,000 years later, his followers have devolved to where many of them – perhaps even most of them – have lost sight of the true Jesus Christ of Nazareth and what he did.
and ironically, this time (to my knowledge) no doctors predicted it.
I just found out that my cousin, Nick Waters, died this morning. Y’all may know him from Christmasseveralyearsago, when the docs thought he didn’t have long to live then. You see, that Christmas he wanted a Christmas Miracle – he wanted to get 10,000 Christmas cards. He wound up with more than 10x that number, and I heard stories that Christmas of so many mail bags full of cards that you could literally barely walk in his house – much less drive his motorized wheelchair.
Nick was always a very medically fragile child. I don’t know all the details, but I know he was born prematurely, with several birth defects. He’s had countless surgeries throughout his life, including at least a couple of open heart surgeries before he was three years old and later surgeries to implant steel rods along his spine to allow him to sit upright enough to breathe.
Nick was always the bright spot in family get togethers. His enthusiasm and optimism knew no bounds, even though he had probably experienced more pain in his life than most of us would ever wish on our worst enemies. Indeed, some of my fondest memories of hanging out at my grandfather’s farm growing up were playing with Nick.
Nick and his family had been told countless times throughout his life that he didn’t have much longer to live. Due to his birth defects, it was always a threat. If he had been born even 30 years prior, there is no doubt he would never have lasted anywhere NEAR as long as he did. As I noted above, apparently there were no doctors around this time. They finally figured out that Nick was stubborn enough to beat whatever length of time they gave him.
But now he is gone. His pain is finally over. He died peacefully in his sleep, rather than in some ICU or on some operating table, two places he had gotten to know quite well in his life.
I’ve done so good about not crying at my grandmother’s funeral 3 years ago, or my aunt’s 2 years ago, despite the fact that I loved them deeply. I can barely hold back the tears enough to type this post though. Nick Waters was a source of encouragement and inspiration to all who knew him, and to me in particular.
Yet again, I have another trip to Canton to bury yet another family member. This was already old when it was my grandmother three years ago – she had been the fourth to go on that side of the family in under 3 years, with my grandfather, his twin brother, and her husband preceding her.
As hard as the others were, this one will by FAR be the hardest.
The day many in my family have dreaded for years has finally arrived.
This is my newest tattoo, the one I am calling “Freeom: Laws Redefined”. It is a cross made of 2 nails, with an 8 made of 2 more nails. Faith and Freedom are two of the most core ideas to my being – indeed, the intersection of those two ideas is what has driven much of my growth and thinking for more than a decade now.
These ideas started long ago, as a sheltered kid began to question who he was and what he believed. I grew up in a very legalist tradition – rules were rules and you followed them without question, more emphasis on not going to Hell than enjoying your salvation, etc. As a teenager, my heart cried out echoing Stacie Orrico’s “(There’s gotta be) More to Life”. I finally began to find, as ZOEgirl once put it, that “different kind of free”: Freedom – In Christ Alone. I began to realize that as amazing as the gift of Christ was, it wasn’t God’s greatest gift to us, His Image Bearers. He had granted us a gift even greater than Christ, and it was this gift that led directly to the gift of Christ – He gave us Free Will. This was a decade long journey from the bondage of legalism to the freedom of grace – and there are new wrinkles developing on this path as we speak.
But perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the two distinct yet intertwining symbols of this tattoo:
First, the more obscure – the 8. One of my favorite movies, and among the most influential in my thinking, was The Postman – the 1997 movie with Kevin Costner and Will Patton. In it, Patton is the leader of an army who lives and dies based on 8 Laws, as seen in this clip:
Note Law 8 in particular: There is only one penalty: Death. This is a very legalist, oppressive, dictatorial system.
Later in the movie, at the end of the final battle between Costner’s Postmen and Patton’s Holnists, the laws get redefined, as seen here:
Law one becomes “no more killing” and Law 8 becomes “Live, and Let live”.
Thus, Law 8 is redefined as Life. Here we have a free, democratic, vibrant system.
To my mind, where my religious beliefs are never far from the surface, this immediately connected with basically the entire Bible, and particularly the Pauline teachings. In the Bible, the Law was given to the Israelites not as a method of salvation, but as a method of showing them how truly depraved they were – no man could ever possibly live up to every single mandate of the Law every single second of his life. Many thought they could, and by Christ’s time they had become the Pharisees and Sadducees. In John 8 (see how even the 8 is playing in here?), Jesus confronts them the entire chapter, beginning with the woman they caught in adultery and brought to him for judgement. This is where the famous “Go, and sin no more” is uttered. But later in the chapter, in vs 34-37:
I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
Freedom. In Christ Alone.
But let’s keep going, there’s more – much more.
In Acts 8, we get one of the first mentions of a guy named Saul. For those that don’t know, this same guy would undergo a dramatic conversion a couple of chapters later and gain a new name in the process – Paul. But in Acts 8, he is still Saul, and he is doing what Saul does – enforcing the Mosaic Law with ruthless efficiency, throwing people in prison and even assisting in their murder over some offense or another. We also have the famous story of Phillip and the Ethiopian here – one of the first documented missionary encounters.
Romans 8 includes some core Pauline philosophy of life through death. Christ was the ultimate redefinition of Law. In the perfect act of mercy, Christ completely redefined millenia of laws. Because He physically died to sin, no one or nothing else has to. We also get a couple of different core beliefs of mine shown in this chapter in vs 31-39:
31What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34Who is he that condemns? Christ Jesus, who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”[l] 37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[m] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Finally, in 1 Corinthians 8, we see the new wrinkles that are presently developing – what I call the “Conscience of a Libertarian” (something I hope to write about soon, either here or on the political site). This is where Paul discusses with the Corinthians the issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols, and it is where he makes the famous declaration in verse 13 that “Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.”
I had a Facebook friend overnight put up this statement:
You can’t have free will if God knows what you are going to do, before you do it.
The thing to remember here is that God exists outside of Time, which is a human construct. Therefore, Free Will vs Divine Omniscience becomes a frame of reference issue.
The classic frame of reference example is to look straight out of a train window. You see objects moving, which to you indicates that they are moving and that you are standing still. They, however, see a train moving and that they are standing still.
Which is correct?
It depends on your frame of reference.
Similarly, the issue of Free will vs Divine Omniscience is also a frame of reference issue. Humans can accurately see, and thus know, only the present and past – much like a 180 degree camera on a train that is pointed towards the back of the train. It can see absolutely everything from its point on the train and backwards, but will never see towards the front of the train. Let us further assume that this camera is mounted on a horizontal rack and can move freely across the train side to side.
While the camera is free to move about horizontally all it wants, it will never see the front of the train, no matter how hard it tries. It will only get different views of its present and past, which may dictate the position it choose to be in next. But even in its next position, it will never see the front of the train.
God, however, exists independently of the train, and can see the entire train at once. Thus, He can see what the camera cannot. He can point things out behind the camera and beside the camera, and thus help to point the camera to the next best position, but He will always know exactly what the front of the train looks like, while the camera will not.
Thus, because of frames of reference in regards to Time, Free Will and Divine Omniscience can, indeed, co-exist.
Those are quite possibly the words that changed my life forever.
I’ve been railing against a group I see as legalists and Pharisees for a couple of days now, and I figured it is time I admit a dirty little secret:
I used to be one.
Much like Saul, I was trained in “church” by some of the best in my community. These men and women came from all walks of life, but all of them had a firm foundation in the Bible and what it said. I learned the Bible with my head long before I ever started applying its principles to my heart. I was one of the best in nearly any Bible drill you could think of. At one point, I could name every single book of the Bible in order without any hesitation at all. I could repeat any fact about it in an instant.
And that level of knowledge about the Bible without its core teachings being in your heart is a very dangerous thing indeed. I insisted everyone live according to its edicts. I was one of those “goody two shoes” kids that everyone makes fun of for carrying a Bible around – eerily similar to Grace Bowman in season 1 of Secret Life of the American Teenager.
I caused SOOOO much pain back then, pain that I didn’t really realize until I finally heard the words in the title.
It was my sophomore year of HS, and me and a then friend were walking the halls after school. I was being very judgmental about the revelation she had let slip that she wasn’t a virgin. Finally, she couldn’t take it any more. “It wasn’t my choice, OK?” She yelled at me as she ran away crying.
She had been raped, and my judgment had destroyed any progress she had made in overcoming it.
I said shortly after the incident that her words had cut me like a hot knife through butter, and they still do – more than a decade later.
I didn’t overcome my legalism in that instant. It would take more mistakes, more pain, more learning. But God finally allowed that head knowledge I had of His Word to become a heart knowledge. It became something so intrinsic to me that I don’t have to pray aloud – I know God hears my every thought. It is as natural to me as moving my arm.
I still screw up all the time. Probably have over the last couple of days with my brothers and sisters.
I get easily upset when I see legalism now, because I know all too well the destruction I caused under it and the destruction that it tried to cause me when those around me lived under it. But I’ve been attacking my brothers and sisters rather harshly – vestiges of my old ways. For that, I do apologize – though I most certainly do NOT apologize for fighting legalism in general, only the animosity I have displayed in that fight. Just because my brothers and sisters are misguided does not mean they are not still my brothers and sisters, and I should treat them as such.
I just wish they fully understood, as I do, how much destruction they are causing among those we are called to be reaching.
Still, that does not excuse my actions over the last couple of days. Just wanted y’all to have an idea where I’m coming from.
As I grow in my relationship with Christ, and as I grow towards what I know to be my destiny, I occassionally get these “lightning bursts” that to me feel more like electricity, but that Jeremiah once described as a fire burning in his bones that has to get out. They aer always unexpected, always amazing, and always something I have to either write about or talk about. I’m feeling the need to write this one though, so here goes:
Christ had to choose to live a sinless life. He had to choose the Cross. We have to choose to follow Him. NO ONE has the right to force us to decide one way or the other on that choice.
If you’re familiar with the Bible – or even if you’ve seen the movie The Passion – you may be familiar with the story of the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus of Nazareth literally begged his Father to remove the burden of Golgotha from him – but chose to submit to his Father’s will regardless. This was a son BEGGING his dad not to order him to die, and a dad knowing that there was no other way to save EVERYONE than for his own son to die. In the entire Bible, it is the saddest, most poignant scene – and one of the scenes where the fate of the entire human race – past, present, and future – literally hung in the balance.
But Isaiah knew all about this. Indeed, Isaiah was told that Immanuel – “God with us” – would face a choice every day of his life to choose good or evil. According to Isaiah 7:15, “Curds and honey He shall eat, that He may know evil and choose the good.” Christ had to experience evil so that he could truly experience the human condition, and he still had to make the choice to choose good.
We don’t know what Jesus of Nazareth experienced as a child or young adult. We can glean a few facts from history that he more than likely saw people he knew crucified by the Roman governtment occupying the land he lived in. Some of those may have been killed for doing things that were perfectly within their religious views, but outside Roman law. We know that he probably saw all manner of decadence and evil being supported by the Romans and maybe even some of his own people – after all, he grew up in what we would probably term as the “other side of the tracks” today. From the Bible, We know the story of his birth, but after that we are given only that his parents went to Jerusalem every year for passover, with one year – when he was 12 years old – having a bit of detail. That can be found in Luke 2:41-52. Essentially, while in Jerusalem that year, Jesus went and spoke to the adults in the local church who were absolutely astounded that such a young boy could know so much about the Torah. After that, we see in verse 52 that Jesus grew both in wisdom and in renown, and men began to trust him.
The next thing we know though, Jesus shows up at the river where his cousin, John the Baptist, is preaching and baptizing people in the name of the one who is to come. Jesus chooses to get baptized over the initial objections of the Baptist, and his Father rewards that choice by audibly calling out from Heaven “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22)
Next, Jesus faced a period of ourtight testing. For 40 days in the desert, he was tempted to choose evil just a single time over and over and over – and chose good every single time. He didn’t grow weary of the trial and finally give in just to get it over with. Had he done so, we would all be doomed to Hell right now, as would every single human throughout history.
We don’t know that Jesus of Nazareth knew that the fate of the world hung in the balance of every decision he made in regards to good and evil. That is a theological question that I suspect we won’t find out until we can ask him ourselves.
But we do know that those choices were his and his alone. We know that he was separated from every outside influence for a time, and during that time was tested repeatedly yet never failed. We know that ultimately, he faced Gethsemane and had to choose for himself whether to live for himself or to die for us.
Not even his Father – God, the Father, who literally holds power over every single thing in existence – could make that choice for him. Not even his Father dictated to him which way he should choose.
The choice was entirely his own.
Flash forward roughly 2,000 years or so, to our lives. We face the same choices between good and evil every day. In many places around the world, even in the US to a lesser extent, people literally have to make the choice to live for themselves or die for Christ even as I type this. God the Father, who still literally holds power over every single thing in existence – does not make that choice for us, his most precious creation. God the Father still does not dictate to us which way we should choose.
Why then do we humans try to dictate to each other which way we should choose?
Joshua, one of the first leaders of Israel, once said “Choose this day whom you wil serve”. He said it something like 4,000 years ago, and it remains the choice each of us have every single day.
I’ve recently changed my ID on twitter from ’swgalibertarian’ to ‘veritasthorn’, and several people have asked me why.
It is essentially a continuation of a change I made several months ago on Peach Pundit of going away from having the word ‘libertarian’ in my ID, just to make it absolutely clear that even though I am a Libertarian, my opinions are not necessarily those of the Party. On some issues, I am honestly a bit more extreme than many in the Party are comfortable with, and on some issues I am a bit more conservative than many in the Party are comfortable with.
So to cut those concerns off at the head, I changed my twitter ID.
As to the specific change to this particular new identity, here is the backstory there:
My path to Libertarianism began several years ago, as I began to struggle with legalism in the Southern Baptist Church. One of the books I read in that era was Shaunti Feldhahn’s Veritas Conflict, a This Present Darkness-like novel centering around ideological diversity at Harvard. This book played a key role in pushing me towards Libertarianism, as it began to free me from the chains of “christian” legalism. (The next fiction book from Mrs. Feldhahn, Lights of 10th Street, would push me even further down that path.)
So that’s where the ‘veritas’ part originated, with paying homage to that early influence.
As to Thorn, it also comes from a work of fiction. In this case, it was Dale Brown’s President Thomas Nathaniel Thorn, who first came to power at the beginning of Warrior Class. Thorn was a self-styled Jeffersonian Republican who skipped his own Inauguration ceremonies because they weren’t explicitly in the Constitution. He was also my introduction to non-interventionism, and while Brown himself thinks that philosophy is pretty much slap crazy, I found I very much agreed with Thorn, for the most part. (Thorn was a full-blown isolationist, I am simply a non-interventionist, and there IS a significant difference. Isolationists don’t want ANYTHING to do with other countries, non-interventionists simply don’t want OUR men and women dieing in THEIR wars. We’re perfectly cool with international trade, and many of us more ardently support free trade than many of our pro-interventionism brothers and sisters.)
In other words, from Veritas Conflict I first truly learned about ideological freedom, and from President Thorn I first learned of non-interventionism – two ideas that would merge and lead me to finally separate from the Republican Party and join the Libertarian Party and work for genuine Liberty.
As I suspected it would, it has drawn a bitofcriticism, including most recently from a friend.
So let me explain a bit of my internal thinking and experiences regarding the matter.
First, one of the the traits about myself that I hold in highest regard is my ability to survive ANYthing – even things that many people let destroy them, mostly spiritually/emotionally/mentally, but sometimes even physically. Point blank, I will take on any challenge, and I WILL NOT let it overcome me. I may look defeated from the outside, but I will not give up until I have overcome the situation, if just in my own way. I even take this to the level of occasionally intentionally making a situation far more difficult for myself than it need be – just to prove that I can do it. (For example, walking 10 miles with Austin Scott last month with ZERO preparation – and that was one of the milder and more recent examples.)
Thus, seeing people that appear to be healthy adults standing around at the Superdome in the aftermath of Katrina is absolutely beyond the realm of anything I would ever think to consider for myself. Instead, I would be moving ever forward OUT of the city and area, working my way around or through any obstacle I encountered. If I died, it wouldn’t be sitting in the parking lot of the Superdome waiting on someone else to come to my aid.
But about the experiences that also shaped that post:
The first was during the days after Katrina itself. At that time in 2005, I didn’t have a job, I was still living with my parents. My church got heavily involved in sending aid down to the Gulf Coast, and because of my lack of a job, I did what I could – I volunteered at the drop off point doing whatever needed to get done to get the supplies in, palletized, loaded, and on their way. Because I didn’t own a gun, I wasn’t allowed to go with the people who were actually delivering the supplies, but we had two trailers running back and forth, and as one was completely filled, we had several men from the church grab their guns and Bibles and head straight down, unload, and come straight back. For the first couple of weeks, it got to the point where we would have the second trailer filled by the time they got back, and they would head right back down. In the few minutes they had to talk between loads, they would tell us of the massive destruction they saw – and how the towns were already coming together to work to rebuild. Our guys couldn’t get anywhere near NOLA, but were going instead into the areas of Mississippi that had taken the direct hit from the storm. For those first couple of weeks, most of us slept very little, but we got the job done. We did what we could with what we had to help our fellow Americans as much as we possibly could, and to this day nearly four years later I am still proud of my involvement in that – and even moreso of the men who had the honor of actually going down and helping the people directly.
The second experience I had though was a slap in the face to the first. A few months after Katrina, in January 2006, I finally got a teaching job. This was in Covington, on the outskirts of Atlanta. One of my students in particular was a refugee from Katrina – and she let you know it any time she didn’t come to class prepared or didn’t do her homework or failed a test or slept or talked in class etc etc etc. It drove me crazy then and it drives me crazy thinking about it now. I met her 4 months after Katrina, when she had had so much given to her and done for her, and yet she was STILL trying to blame her own inadequacies on her “victimhood”. When I left that school 6 months later, she was still doing the exact same things as when I had met her – and this was nearly a year after the storm. I have no doubt this student – who I believe would have been voting age last year – voted for Barack Obama, if she voted at all, and I have no doubt it was because he promised ever more government programs for all the “victims” out there.
The final experience was my first trip to NOLA itself, just this past April – 3.5 years after the storm. Tonya and I were taking a Carribbean vacation aboard the Carnival Fantasy, and we were porting out of NOLA. Driving down the highway from Slidell into the port area of NOLA – literally in the shadow of the infamous Crescent City Connector – I was absolutely astounded to see the amount of reconstruction STILL waiting to happen in the area – including one downtown skyscraper in particular that still had DOZENS of windows (at least) with plywood over them.
Going back into the way I think in closing, I genuinely believe that there is not a single situation a human will ever face that cannot be overcome in some way – but the individual has to choose to survive it, and choose to do whatever is necessary to overcome it. Once they make that choice, I spring in to action in whatever way I possibly can to help them – but I cannot help someone until they choose to help themselves. I know there are situations FAR more difficult than any I’ve ever seen, much less any I’ve ever experienced. But I still hold to that belief about the human condition.
If you’re still breathing, there is still hope – no matter what.
I first met Mike Sabot in early April when I called together a meeting of area liberty lovers to try to begin coordinating the area pro-liberty efforts. In fact, that was the first time I actually met several people, including Donna Driskell and Tom Knighton.
I’ve been on Mike’s email list since about that time, but here’s a dirty little secret: I rarely actually read any of them. I scan the headline and I might skim the email itself, but rarely do I actually read it.
About a month ago, I made the decision – without talking to Tom, my partner on SWGAPolitics.com, about it – to bring Mike in as a contributing author to our site. I did this primarily because he was covering Lee County pretty heavily in his emails, and he was regularly sending me stuff to publish under ‘Publius’ – some of which I actually did. Because I don’t really have the time to get to Lee County Commission meetings myself and he was going out there, I thought it was a good idea to bring him on to write about those issues in particular.
I was wrong.
Over the past couple of weeks, it has become apparent that Mike really is, as others have described him, an ‘angry old man’, and he is letting that get in the way of his reporting of the facts. While I disagree with many of his opinions, honestly because I do so deeply value freedom of speech, I was willing to let that slide so long as he had his facts straight.
It has come to my attention via some discussions with others as well as an article in today’s Albany Herald that apparently, Mike isn’t getting his facts straight any more before reporting. I can understand a slight slip or two, such as my own brain fart yesterday when I claimed that there was no law requiring government meetings in Georgia to be open to the public, and my friend GriftDrift corrected me.
But Mike has recently made an issue of potential alcohol in the new Lee County Library without ever seeing a floor plan, and earlier this week he accused some of the Lee County Commission – Ed Duffy and Rick Muggridge in particular – of illegal and/or unethical acts that had not yet occurred and in fact, DID NOT occur. He has also recently circulated an email claiming that the Lee County Commission was going to raise millage rates ‘over and above’ the amount that homeowners are now having to pay due to the General Assembly making the correct call of disbanding the Homeowners’ Tax Relief Grant during these troubled economic times. In fact, the millage rate stayed the same, while the Lee County School Board millage rate went up slightly.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I do my best to be as honest and accurate as possible both in my reporting and in my editorializing, and I WILL NOT stand for one of my contributors to put forth such lies. My own sources say Mike was corrected on at least one occasion prior to him sending these emails and writing these posts, and yet he sent them out anyway. In fact, it is due to these very issues that I personally will not be joining the Lee County Taxpayers Association so long as Mike Sabot is affiliated with it in any way.
That said, Tom and I talked about it this morning and we’ve decided to give Mike one more chance with our organization, and that is IT. The next time he spreads a lie, even if via email, I personally will sever all ties with him, including dismissing him from SWGAPolitics.com
I’ve been thinking about some things recently, the subject of a blog post that I’ll be writing tonight. But those things got me thinking in another direction, namely how important an entity’s beginnings truly are.
I like reading biographies because you begin to get an idea of how these people came to do everything they did by looking at what came before. Similarly, when you look at the historical record of any event, you come to see how it came to be by looking at its predecessors. Indeed, you really cannot fully understand anything – be it person, event, or organization – without understanding its history and in particular, its Genesis. [Continue Reading]
