CalvinDude.com

One of the refrains that leftist newscasters (but I repeat myself) oft repeat is that the Republican Party is in trouble because it embraces its radical right wing kook fringe. The premise is that if the GOP would just get rid of social conservatives and focus only on maintaining fiscal conservatives, the GOP would win elections again.

Given that this advice comes from leftists, conservatives already ought to reject it (since when does the opposition really care about helping their enemy win elections?). However, since there is a libertarian wing that is fiscally conservative while socially liberal, they echo these claims too.

That’s why examining the recent initiatives in California and Maine are so important. In California, the courts ruled that gay marriage should be allowed because there was nothing in the state constitution to deny it. So social conservatives passed a constitutional amendment to outlaw it. Even though Obama carried the state by a wide margin, gay marriage failed.

Ditto in Maine, where the only distinction is that the legislature passed the law instead of the courts ruling it. Still, it was not put to a popular vote, and once it was…gay marriage was defeated. In fact, in every state (31 total) where gay marriage has been put to a vote, it has been defeated.

And more importantly, in the California election, the initiative came at the same time as the presidential election. Which means there were a lot of people casting a vote for Obama and Proposition 8 at the same time. In Maine, homosexual activists were quite vocal in trying to keep the law the legislature had passed, yet they failed too.

Because of libertarians, we know that one can be fiscally conservative and socially liberal. But voting evidence indicates there are also a sizeable number who are fiscally liberal while remaining socially conservative. This is why California and Maine could vote for a liberal president and still vote against gay marriage.

If the GOP wants to win elections, they have to stop nominating “moderate” candidates and return to their socially conservative base. The public consistently votes for socially conservative initiatives even in liberal states. This means liberals must rely on the courts to impose their agenda, because they lack popular support.

Why anyone would consider socially conservative voters to be a weak-point in their party can only be explained by willful blindness.

I love how the media complains that bloggers need to be “fact checked” and yet then they fall for fake quotes attributed to Rush Limbaugh without bothering to, you know, “fact check” and all. Irrelevancy would be an upgrade for the lamestreet media.

Here’s hoping Limbaugh sues for libel. In any sane legal system, he’d win. But this is America…

We’ve known for some time that the Nobel Peace Prize is a piece of crap, worth little more than the prom king crown. It’s nothing but a gauge of how well leftist Eurodweebs like you. A popularity contest among an inbred festering sore of intellectual laziness.

I thought Al Gore winning it was bad. Winning as a talking zombie obsessed with the thermostat was pretty far down on the list of “reasons why you should win the Nobel Peace Prize” in my book. Now President 0 has “won” it. Yet nominations ended February 1—you know, when Barak was still picking the color of drapes Michelle would wear to their first “let’s go to New York” trip.

Apparently, peace these days means “being a president not named Bush.” Because as far as I can tell, that’s the only thing Barry has managed to “accomplish” in his whopping 9 months of using our country as a rented mule. Perhaps a 9.8% unemployment rate (17% if you count numbers the way they were under Bush, who had the horrific 5% rate that proves he was a dunce) is a means to peace. After all, it works well in France, all those unemployed “youths” who go around burning cars in the name of peace…

If Nobel knew his prize would have been used in this way, I think he might have dynamited Oslo himself.

WARNING: This post contains graphic quotes from court testimony and is not meant to be read by children.

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It is impossible for the Left to get their priorities straight. This has been seen often in the court system where leftists victimize the perpetrator of crimes while accusing the victim of promoting the crime. Most recently, we can see this displayed in the hysterics leftist raise regarding the arrest of admitted pedophile Roman Polanski.

When Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a 31-year-old warrant, Hollywood elitists went ballistic. A petition has been passed around the Zurich film festival stating, in part, that “Film-makers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision.”

Dismayed that an admitted pedophile is arrested?

“It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him.”

And I find it inadmissible that a party in Jack Nicholson’s home, paying homage to massive Hollywood egos, is used by a pervert to rape and sodomize a 13-year-old girl. Somehow, one of these “inadmissible” behaviors is not like the other.

Producer Henning Molfenter told The Hollywood Reporter:

There is no way I’d go to Switzerland now. You can’t watch films knowing Roman Polanski is sitting in a cell 5 km away.

Yes, poor Roman! He’s going through what some Polish film-makers have called a “judicial lynching” all because of something that happened back in the 70s. He’s the victim here. Not the 13-year-old Californian girl.

I mean, really, if you read the testimony of the 13-year-old, it is obvious that Roman Polanski was the true victim.

Q. What did you do then?

A. I went into the bathroom and started drying off.

Q. Did you see Mr. Polanski then?

A. Yes, he came into the bathroom.

Q. What happened at that time?

A. He asked me if I was all right, if my asthma was bad.

Q. What did you say?

A. I said that I wanted to go home because I needed to take my medicine.

Q. What did Mr. Polanski say?

A. He said, “Yeah, I’ll take you home soon.”

Q. What did you do?

A. I told him – I said that I wanted to get – I wanted to go home. I said, “No, I have to go home now.”

Q. What did Mr. Polanski say?

A. He told me to go into the other room and lie down.

…

Q. What did you do when he said, “Let’s go in the other room”?

A. I was going, “No, I think I better go home,” because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch.

Q. What were you afraid of?

A. Him.

…

Q. What happened when you sat down on the couch?

A. He sat down beside me and asked if I was okay.

Q. What did you say, if anything?

A. I said, “No.”

Q. What did he say?

A. He goes, “Well, you’ll be better.” And I go, “No, I won’t. I have to go home.”

Q. What happened then?

A. He reached over and he kissed me. And I was telling him, “No,” you know, “keep away.” But I was kind of afraid of him because there was no one else there.

Q. After he kissed you did he say anything?

A. No.

Q. Did you say anything?

A. No, besides I was just going, “No. Come on, let’s go home.”

Q. What was said after you indicated that you wanted to go home when you were sitting on the couch?

A. He said, “I’ll take you home soon.”

Q. Then what happened?

A. And then he went down and he started performing cuddliness.

Q. What does that mean?

A. It means he went down on me or he placed his mouth on my vagina.

…

Q. What did he do when he placed his mouth on your vagina?

A. He was just like licking and I don’t know. I was ready to cry. I was kind of – I was going, “No. Come on. Stop it.” But I was afraid.

Q. And what did he say, if anything?

A. He wasn’t saying anything that I can remember. He was – sometimes he was saying stuff, but I was just blocking him out, you know.

…

Q. How long did Mr. Polanski have his mouth on your vagina?

A. A few minutes.

Q. What happened after that?

A. He started to have intercourse with me.

Q. What do you mean by intercourse?

A. He placed his penis in my vagina.

Q. What did you say, if anything, before he did that?

A. I was mostly just on and off saying, “No, stop.” But I wasn’t fighting really because I, you know, there was no one else there and I had no place to go.

…

Q. At any time did he ask you when your period was?

A. Yes.

Q. When was that?

A. While he was having intercourse with me.

Q. Did he ask you about being on the pill?

A. Yes.

Q. When did he say that?

A. At the same time.

Q. What did he say?

A. He asked, he goes, “Are you on the pill?” And I went, “No.” And he goes, “When did you have your period?” And I said, “I don’t know. A week or two. I’m not sure.”

Q. And what did he say?

A. He goes, “Come on. You have to remember.” And I told him I didn’t.

Q. Did he say anything after that?

A. Yes. He goes, ‘Would you want me to go in through your back?” And I went, “No.”

…

Q. What happened after he says, “Do you want me to – “ was it go through the back?

A. Yes.

Q. What happened then?

A. I think he said something like right after I said I was not on the pill, right before he said, “Oh, I won’t come inside of you then.” And I just went – and he goes – and then he put me – wait. Then he lifted up my legs farther and he went in through my anus.

Q. When you say he went in your anus, what do you mean by that?

A. He put his penis in my butt.

Q. Did he say anything at that time?

A. No.

Q. Did you resist at that time?

A. A little bit, but not really because – (pause)

Q. Because what?

A. Because I was afraid of him.

I must be pointed out that Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to statutory rape. In the above, we see that his victim told him “No” and to stop at every step of the way. And as we all know, “No means no.”

Unless you’re a famous Hollywood director.

Of course, that could move into a “he said, she said” type of event. Perhaps she did come on to him. But that ignores and important fact.

She was thirteen.

Some Polanski defenders have said she looked old for her age. At the time, the age of consent in California was 16 (it’s now 18). Suppose that his victim actually did look like she was 16. Polanski was 44 years old at the time. If you’re 44 years old and you’re having to wonder if the person you’re having sex with might be underage, that ought to be giving you warning bells.

In any case, since this unfortunate “event” occurred, Polanski has been forced to live in “exile” in France. And while that generally would be considered cruel and unusual punishment, his exile included multi-million dollar homes, a wife, children, an Oscar award, fame, and recognition for making slightly better crappy movies than the other crappy movies out there. The only real tragedy is that Polanski couldn’t pick up his Oscar in LA…

Sickening.

At root, this simple fact cannot be lost: Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl. This is not in doubt—he admitted it. I don’t care if he found the cure for cancer instead of just making more money for Hollywood schlubs, he ought to be punished for his crime.

The fact that Leftists are making him into a victim shows just how morally incompetent they are.

In many recent blog exchanges, I’ve engaged Victor Reppert on the question of Calvinism and the problem of evil. During these exchanges, I have pointed out several times that Reppert never bothers to define what “good” or “evil” is, and I’ve also pointed out that there’s really no purpose in discussing “the problem of evil” if one does not define “evil” in the first place.

I would have thought that this would be sort of obvious, especially for Reppert who is a professional philosopher. Apparently, however, Reppert feels no need to actually define his terms—making it very easy for him to engage in sloppy thinking without even realizing it. After all, part of the reason we define terms is so we can spot ambiguity. If you work with an undefined “evil” then it can morph depending on how you feel, such that an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph in a philosophical argument use completely different meanings of the term “evil” and yet seek to come to a logical conclusion. Not defining the terms is, obviously, poor argumentation.

Since Reppert posted another article about Calvinism and the problem of evil without defining his terms, I pointed out once again that he had not bothered to define his terms. In this case we might give him some leeway since he merely reposted an older blog post; however, given the fact that I have asked for his definition several times, I think such leeway is ultimately unjustified. Since his lack of defining terms has been shown many times, he ought to define his terms before posting another thing on the problem of evil from any perspective.

Reppert decided to respond to my request that he define his terms. He decided to first attack my definition of “good” before attempting what he claims is a definition. Unfortunately, rather than actually interact with my entire argument, presented for instance when I examined the Euthyphro Dilemma or my post on the definition of evil, Reppert decided to use quotes from one comment made on this post.

Sadly, Reppert didn’t seem to read his own post, for his first question in response to what I had written was:

At the risk of becoming tiresome, I would have to ask what definition of God we are working with here?

The post I responded to was entitled: “Is there a moral obligation to worship a Calvinistic God? Or any other God for that matter?” Apparently, Reppert didn’t think that maybe I was responding to his first question.

But it’s actually even worse than that, for in that post in response to my previous comments Reppert had already said:

Of course the divine command theory has the problem of identifying God. The standard philosophical definition of God is a being who is worthy of worship in virtue of being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. But if “good” means “commanded by God” and “God” means a being who is, among other things, perfectly good, it looks like you’ve got vicious circularity here.

I note in passing that this paragraph is basically the entirety of Reppert’s current response to me too.

If Reppert had bothered to actually read my arguments that I had linked in my comments before the one Reppert pulled out to respond to now, he would have seen that I already addressed the issue of identifying who God is. In my Euthyphro post, I said:

Now one could argue, as the Moral Philosophy site did, that that means that God could command slavery, genocide, holocausts or any number of such things. However, God could not have done so, for then God would have a different nature then the one He has. A different God could have commanded those things and been morally good in doing so; this God (Who happens to be the real God) cannot do so.

Apparently Reppert thinks that when Christians talk about God, they might mean Moloch or Vishnu.

In any case, the God of the Divine Command Theory is pretty obvious to spot. He’s the God who gives the commands. I would have thought that to be self-evident.

Reppert then moves on to the only thing that resembles a definition (and sadly, he does think it is a definition). He writes:

In my view moral obligation is created by the fact that God creates us with an intended purpose which is identical to our good, in that we as humans flourish if we fulfill that purpose.

But this simply fails as a definition of good. This definition would not enable one to examine whether God Himself is good, for good apparently is fulfillment of the purpose for which God created us. Since God did not create Himself, nor did He have a creator, then under such a definition God cannot be good.

Secondly, such a definition of “good” is not equivalent to moral goodness. It is good of me to eat food when I am hungry, but it’s hardly righteous of me to do so. If this is what Reppert implies by the moral obligation portion, then this definition remains unsatisfactory, for it is certain that God designed people needing food, yet who would consider eating breakfast to be morally good? If, on the other hand, Reppert only intends to define only what moral obligation is here, then he’s got the cart before the horse for he is using the term “good” without defining it once again.

Thirdly, and quite damaging to Reppert, in order for us to use “good” in the above, we would have to know for what purpose God designed us. How would we know what that is…without God’s commands? But wouldn’t that make Reppert a closet Divine Command Theorist?

Fourth, and most damaging to Reppert, if God designed someone to be a vessel of wrath, then by the above definition Reppert has said such an intended purpose “is identical to our good,” in which case there is absolutely no reason at all for Reppert to disagree with double-predestination on the grounds that it’s evil. Even by his own (weak) definition above, fulfilling the purpose God intends for us is the definition of good. So when a reprobate fulfills his purpose and burns in hell, that’s good by Reppert’s above definition.

Note that at this point Reppert will be required to insert a qualifier. That qualifier will be: “No, it must be a good intention.” At which point it will be demonstrated that the “fulfilling one’s purpose” definition above does NOT define “good” at all because it already presupposes some other definition of good in “fulfilling one’s good purpose.”

Reppert continues:

Further, God acts in a way that is consistent with the pursuit of that good for all his creatures.

I shudder to think that Reppert seriously is asserting that if God does not act in a way that is beneficial toward man then God is committing evil (see next blockquote too). This is so obviously anti-Christian that I would think it absurd for a professing Christian like Reppert to think that God failing to live up to our goodness is what constitutes evil, rather than us failing to live up to His goodness. But sadly Reppert doesn’t give me confidence that he sees this problem, so I mention it here.

Continuing:

Our good is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, evil is what gets in the way of that.

But again, under such a view, good or evil is meaningless of God. At best, Reppert can only use this to try to establish relative good and evil amongst mankind, but he can never examine the problem of evil for none of his “definitions” of good and evil extend to anything that God can do.

Reppert says:

On Calvinist theory there is a large gap between what makes God’s character good, and what makes us good, a gap that cannot be explained in terms of a difference in God’s wisdom or knowledge.

Well, yes there is a gap because men are sinners and God is not, and therefore what “makes us good” is Christ’s righteousness imputed to us and our unrighteousness imputed to Him, which God does not need to be good.

But more specific to our current discussion, God is the standard of goodness; we are not. Yes, that makes a wide gap. But so what?

Reppert continues:

A native may believe that men in white coats bearing long needles are mean to little kids because he lacks knowledge that the men in the white coats possess, but the standard of goodness for natives and for missionary doctors is the same.

That is because both are human. Apparently, Reppert would put God under the Law, which was implemented as a tutor to bring us to Christ, as if God needed to be brought to Christ.

Reppert continues:

Piper seems concerned to respond to the charge that God’s interest in his glory makes him selfish, since selfishness is a vice amongst humans.

There’s a difference between the one who claims something as his own having not earned it and the one who claims something as his own after having earned it. As a liberal, Reppert will never grasp this. But to help others, the next time Reppert says, “I wrote C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason” I will point out that that’s a pretty selfish thing to say. Who cares if Reppert deserves the title of “the author of the book C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason“? It would be selfish to attribute it to him and not also to me.

Reppert said:

If I were to read on someone’s tombstone “He pursued his own glory single-mindedly throughout his life” I don’t think I would think I was looking at the grave of someone I wish I had known. Glory hogs in basketball don’t help the team win.

But once again Reppert reduces God to a mere man. He never considers that the reason God can be selfish for His glory is because God deserves glory for who He is, and because we are not God we do not have the same right to pursue our own glory.

But even worse, this trivializes what God does for us in the pursuit of His glory. He demonstrates greater love than we ever could by sending His Son to die for us while we are yet sinners; He shows mercy, justice, wrath, and love; He sends rain to the just and unjust alike. And Reppert is upset that God would do this for us with His own glorification—the very thing He most deserves—in mind?

Reppert says:

It seems to me that when you say God gives commands based on his nature, it is pretty clear that we don’t have obligations to reflect all aspects of God’s moral nature in our own conduct.

How could we? It’s pretty clear that no matter how much you love someone, you will never die a substitutionary death for them, imputing their unrighteousness to yourself while imputing your righteousness to them, so that you take upon yourself the sins of another so that they might live. Maybe that’s why God didn’t command it of us, but He did ask it of His Son.

Reppert continued:

We might be rightly wrathful when someone we love is raped, but we aren’t supposed to be looking for or artifically creating opportunities for us to exercise our attribute of being wrathful at evil…

Why look for artificial opportunities when natural occurrences abound? Secondly, so what? Again, we have already established that God’s nature is not ours and that He can do things that we cannot. Why insist that God must be a man rather than God?

Reppert said:

So while divine commands are supposed to be based on the divine nature, the kind of people we are commanded to be fails to fully reflect the character of God, and there are actions on the part of God which are deemed right which, if parallel actions are performed by humans, they would contravene the commands of God.

But this last clause is true no matter what position you take. God does do things that He has commanded us not to do. And the first clause is only a problem if God has commanded us to fully reflect His character. He has not done so. He has given us the commands which we are to follow, and we do not have any right to add to them. For an easy example, God doesn’t command us to take vengeance—He claims that as His own right. Engaging in vengeance surely is an aspect of character, isn’t it?

Back in November 2007, I watched the special edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the time, I described the movie this way:

First of all, the movie is long and boring. There’s also some monkeys in it, a talking computer that gets disconnected, and it’s really long. Plus boring.

Other than that the movie was…well, underwhelming isn’t weak enough.

In addition to this rather apt description (if I do say so myself), I also mentioned something about the special commentaries they had:

Ask ten people and they’ll give you two hundred answers about what the movie is about. My favorite [is] Camille Paglia, a feminist whacko, who concludes that when Dave turns off HAL 9000, it’s really a depiction of a sociopathic man raping a woman.

I concluded: “if Dave’s killing of HAL 9000 constitutes a metaphor for rape, then the rest of the movie is a metaphor showing that if you leave a woman unsupervised for five minutes she’ll kill everyone on board the ship…”

So why do I bring this up? Because Camille Paglia has a column in Slate, and I’ve read it semi-consistently for about a year now. Despite her overt liberalism and being in the tank for Obama, I…I agree with almost the entirety of her latest column. She still won’t admit that Obama is the problem (it’s always his advisors who make mistakes, and never him for nominating such incompetent people), but the rest of the article savages Democrats. For the record, I even agree with most of what she says about Republicans, although really her paragraph about Republicans seems to be tacked on as an afterthought, as if she realized “Whoa, the leftist nutroots aren’t gonna let me get away with saying this unless I throw in at least SOMETHING about Republicans too.”

Here are some excerpts from her column (be sure to read the whole thing, linked above):

As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. … (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s [healthcare] plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)

…

At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate.

…

An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president’s innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to “help” the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare? [Ed.--bold mine]

…

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

…

Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (”racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

There is much more there too. It’s hard to believe this is the same woman who obsessed over male genitalia in her review of 2001 (see here–the comparison of turning off HAL to a psychopath raping a woman begins around the 5:55 mark). I mean, after turning that entire movie into one sexist comment after another (sexist in the sense that the bone at the beginning of the film is a phallic symbol (see also: the ship in space) so everything is sexualized), she here points out that that is exactly what you get from academia.

Most of her article could have been written by a conservative. When a leftist feminist starts thinking this way, it doesn’t bode well for Democrats in 2010.

Since the Arminian blogosphere’s argument du jour happens to be “Calvinism makes God the author of evil” I thought I would come at it at a slightly different angle then the one that Steve has already taken. The problem with throwing around a phrase like “author of evil” is that it’s kind of important that two words (”author” and “evil”) get defined, yet Arminians seem to think such a step is too burdensome to enact. Steve has recently focused a great deal on what “author” means, so I want to look at the other term. This also ties in to my recent posts on Divine Command Theory, and I must point out in passing that for some strange reason we never see Arminians attempt to ground morality in a like manner to how I have argued for it in DCT.

With that said, what do we mean by evil when we ask if God is the author of evil?

Well, evil could mean simply those things as natural disasters—hurricanes, famines, floods, etc. Indeed, these are often called “natural evils” for that very reason. But most Christians would have no problem saying that God is the “author” of natural evils given the myriad examples of God causing/sending/creating disasters. A few specifics from Scripture will suffice to validate this point:

“For in seven days I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground” (Genesis 7:4).

“And I will heap disasters upon them; I will spend my arrows on them; they shall be wasted with hunger, and devoured by plague and poisonous pestilence; I will send the teeth of beasts against them, with the venom of things that crawl in the dust” (Deuteronomy 32:23-24).

“Then they will say, ‘Because they abandoned the LORD their God who brought their fathers out of the land of Egypt and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore the LORD has brought all this disaster on them’” (1 Kings 9:9).

“I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).

Because of how plentiful such descriptions are in Scripture, most people who contend that God is not the author of evil ought not mean evil in the sense of natural disasters (although given the state of inconsistency that plagues a certain branch of theology, I am hesitant to be dogmatic). Instead, they should mean it in the sense of immorality, unrighteousness, sinfulness.

When we are talking about moral evils—sins—then we have to have some kind of moral framework in place. That is, we have to have a proper frame of reference to determine whether something is good or evil in the first place before the question “Is God the author of evil?” is even meaningful.

Now as I’ve argued before, since I am a Divine Command Theorist, God is the standard of good. There is nothing else that God can point to other than Himself to say “This is what the definition of good is.” As such, anything God does will be, by definition, good. That means that it is ruled out by definition that God could ever do anything evil Himself.

But saying that God is good isn’t the whole picture, for that does not tell us how we ought to behave in order for us to be good too. Thankfully, there is something that tells us what the standard of behavior we ought to uphold are: God’s commands (i.e., laws).

Now of God’s commands, the apostle Paul writes:

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good (Romans 7:7-12).

Now there is a lot to this passage that addresses the issue we are looking at. First, Paul states that “if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” Indeed, he insists “apart from the law, sin lies dead.” Therefore there is no sin if there is not first a commandment from God. That means that if we are to look at evil as a function of immorality instead of natural evil, then evil can only exists because a commandment first exists. Consequently, Paul says “I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’”

The logical conclusion of this must therefore be that it is impossible for any immorality to come about if God does not issue any commands. Yet despite this, Paul maintains “the commandment is holy and righteous and good.” We can ask rhetorically: How can it be anything but good? God is, after all, the definition of good, and His commands must be good too even if evil cannot come about unless they exist. This doesn’t mean the commands are sufficient for evil to occur, but it does mean that the commands are necessary for evil to occur.

Let us then examine the scope of the commandments. It is one thing to say that men are under the commands of God; but is God bound by those same commands? I merely point back to the above natural evils that God authors and ask, “If you did that would you be doing evil?” If you flooded the Earth and killed all but 8 people, would such genocide by considered good or evil? If you sent famines and plagues on people, would you be good or evil? Obviously you would be considered evil, yet God is not evil for doing so.

That’s because God is not under His commands but rather He issues those commands. This is why James says: “There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?” (James 4:12). God has the right to judge while you do not. That is why along a similar vein Paul writes: “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls” (Romans 14:4). We who have been created by God do not have the same rights as He who created us. God does not have to obey the commands that He gives us, and therefore even if we think we have seen a conflict between what we are not allowed to do and what God is allowed to do, that is not grounds for us to say that God has committed evil.

Finally, God can also use instruments of evil without Himself being evil. We read, for instance: “Now therefore behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the LORD has declared disaster for you” (1 Kings 22:23). We see that God is the one who “put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these…prophets.” We read Jeremiah’s words: “Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord GOD, surely you have utterly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, “It shall be well with you,” whereas the sword has reached their very life’” (Jeremiah 4:10). And if it weren’t enough for Jeremiah to say God deceived fallen Israel, he also says: “O LORD, you deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jeremiah 20:7).

While this last passage is part of a lament of Jeremiah, it is nevertheless evidence that Jeremiah didn’t have any problem with the concept of God deceiving people for His own reasons. Yet Hebrews 6:18 says that it is impossible for God to lie. How would it be possible for God to deceive someone without lying? One way would be by putting “a lying spirit in the mouth of [false] prophets.” For in that case, God is not the one who lies (the lying spirit lies), but God does put the lying spirit in the position where it will be believed. We see this again when Paul asserts “Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false” (2 Thessalonians 2:11). The thrust of the passage cannot be ignored: God is the one who sends the delusion so that sinners believe what is false even though God Himself does not lie.

In other words, when God uses evil instruments that does not mean ipso facto that God Himself is evil. If God uses evil people with their penchant to lie in order to deceive other evil people that does not mean God is evil. And just as God can use a liar to establish His purposes without being evil, so too can He use other types of sinners for the same reason.

So let us take stock of where we are. Is God the author of evil? Well, He is obviously the author of natural evils, and He gave the commands without which there could be no evil at all. So yes, He is the author of evil (when the term is properly defined). The reason why so many hesitate to accept this is because they believe it would make God evil, but I have shown that despite God being the author of evil (again, as properly defined) He is not evil, for 1) God is good by definition; 2) God’s commands are for us and not for Him; and 3) we have Biblical examples when God used evil instruments that increased sin without being evil Himself.

Given this, it is improper for Arminians to claim that “God is the author of evil” is a defect of Calvinism. They must show how God’s authoring of evil actually makes God evil, and that requires them to A) ground morality somewhere and, B) deal with the Scripture I have presented above showing God using evil to increase sin without being culpable.

So we got another Global Warming article pointing out that it’s been a decade since we’ve had our “record” high temperatures. You can click the linky for the article if you want. However, I’m just going to point out one lil thing for now.

According to data from the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., the global high temperature in 1998 was 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the previous 20 years. So far this year, the high has been 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit), above the 20-year average, clearly cooler than before. [Edited slightly to fix stupid journalism grads who think every single sentence should be its own paragraph.]

Okay, got that? We’re looking at the 20 year average. Now read this excuse as to why this doesn’t disprove Global Warming:

“It’s entirely possible to have a period as long as a decade or two of cooling superimposed on the long-term warming trend,” said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

“These short term fluctuations are statistically insignificant (and) entirely due to natural internal variability,” Easterling said in an essay published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in April. “It’s easy to ‘cherry pick’ a period to reinforce a point of view.”

Huh?

…a period as long as a decade or two

Wouldn’t that be…I dunno, TWENTY YEARS? So the warming trend we’ve experienced over the last 20 years can possibly have as many as twenty years of cooling superimposed on it that should not disprove the warming that those twenty years have had?

Right. And if you go to Graceland and look at the tomb it’s proof that Elvis is still alive. And if you play Backstreet Boys songs backwards, they sound better. Okay, that one could be true.

Just remember, ice melts the fastest when the temperatures are cooling. Don’t believe me? Pour boiling water into a cup. Allow it to start to cool. Then pull out some room-temperature tap water. Put ice in both.

The water that’s cooling melts the ice faster.

This is why the world is doomed.

That and the fact that I’m now writing single-sentence paragraphs, so you can trust my journalistic instincts on this one.

Bias? There’s no bias. Just watch this video.

Note how these crazy white people are bringing weapons to Obama appearances! See how racism is running rampant through America.

Only problem? This was the guy who actually brought the guns:

Wait. Isn’t that video of the back of the guy the same video used by MSNBC? But…but wouldn’t that mean that MSNBC sorta kinda cropped it so they could pretend the guy was considerably less tan or something? Would MSNBC possibly edit video so they could pretend reality is different than what it is?

Obviously not. There’s no bias here. Move along.