Aphorisms on Leadership and Lowly Tasks

You cannot lead with poor attitude. The attitude which you do a lowliest task marks your character.  If your attitude is poor doing a lowly task you will never be qualified to do a leaderly task.

A lowly task, even sweeping with a broom, can be done elegantly and excellently.

A leaderly worker performs his tasks in a leaderly way, with a marked level of diligence, elegance and excellence that serves his master and models excellence to his fellow works.

12 Ways to Debate Like a Trained Boxer and Triumph in the Ring

1. A trained boxer puts in the time and the focus to become skilled at his craft:   As someone who wants to enter the ring of debate you will need all the focus, and training time that a trained boxer requires to be effective.

2. A trained boxer knows his skill level and weight class:  It’s not necessarily a good thing to always stand up for what you believe.  You can damage reputation and your cause if you get onto a stage that you’re not ready for. You need to test your debate skills in an arena appropriate for your skill level, and know when you are ready for a larger stage and when to go back into the dojo.  

3. A trained boxer has a good sparring partner and a good trainer:   As someone who aspires to be effective debating, you will need a qualified person to bounce ideas off of who can give you constructive criticism, different perspectives, play devil’s advocate, and role play. You will also need mentors who can help you consider points of view that you did not consider and who can help you hone your focus.

4. A trained boxer studies current champions and those champions who came before:  You will need to read and keep yourself informed and study those past and present who are engaged in the same or similar debates.

5. A trained boxer studies his opponent:   You will need to become a careful student of those you are debating against, what their mindset is, what deeper questions are they trying to answer, what historical events led to their way of thinking, what they get right in their thinking and what they get wrong and why.

6. A trained boxer knows how to connect punches from many different angles:  You will need to understand what you are debating from the perspective of many different topics, being knowledgeable on those topics.

7. A trained boxer does not get distracted from executing his fight strategy in the ring:  You will need to know how to avoid red herrings, misdirects and tangents and be able to refocus the debate back to the point you are trying to make.  The more successfully you can do this, the more power your point will have.

8. A trained boxer never trades slop for slop:  You should never stoop to the level of a lesser opponent in a debate by trading sarcasm, name calling, ad hominem attacks, making assumptions about your opponent, etc…  Your power comes from executing logic correctly the same way that a trained boxer executes punches with good boxing form.  Like a trained boxer, you should trust in your training and remain above reproach in the ring of debate. 

9. A trained boxer never lets negative emotions get the best of him in the ring:  Your ability to succeed in a debate will take emotional toughness and mental toughness that comes from always taking the right risks, and always avoiding the wrong risks.

10. A trained boxer knows how to use his opponent’s movements to his advantage:   You will need to be able to take the things your opponent says and use it to your advantage.  It is far more powerful when you can accurately describe what your opponent believes, based on what they have said, than saying something negative by making sloppy generalities. Precisely exposing a contradiction in your opponents position, based on your opponents own words, will do the work of sarcasm without you having to stoop to being "snarky" to make your point.  

11. A trained boxer is prepared to go all 12 rounds: you won’t win a serious debate in a single “haymaker" statement.  Your effectiveness in a debate will take a demonstration of skill, persistence, determination and patience.  In a debate your goal is not to convince your opponent so much as it is to sway those on the sidelines who are watching, and embolden and encourage those who believe as you do but may not have the words or the courage to debate. As for your opponent, your goal is to wear out his arguments.  He will know that you are a worthy opponent.

12. A trained boxer does not win every match: You must care enough about your long term success in arguing for what you believe to lose a debate sometimes.  It’s your opportunity to grow and not allow a fear of failure to keep your from your ultimate goal of being able to influence others toward what you believe.

A Similarity Between Sexuality and Language

There are those who believe that traditional cultural expressions of sexuality are mere “social conventions”, as if these social conventions should be sloughed off by enlightened people.
Sexuality and traditional sexual social conventions have a similarity to language. Language begins in pure physiology with vocal chords, tongue, etc…, and ends in pure convention, with accents, slang, etc… Spanning the first part of the gap between physiology and culture is the basic human need to communicate with language, and the basic logic of language (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc...), and the human brain that is designed to link biology, logic, emotion and expression.
Spanning the second part of the gap, various languages and cultures organize the basic logic of language into different conventions of grammar, sounds and words. While languages are conventions in the way they organize the basic logic of language, they are not fungible any more than a motorist in the U.S can decide to drive on the left side of the road. Having all of these non-fungible things supporting it, language then has its more fungible social conventions of slang, accents, colloquialisms, evolving words, etc...
Sexuality also spans a bridge from pure biology to pure social convention, with a host of non-fungible aspects in between. Those who believe they are promoting “freedom” by removing sexual social conventions, do not respect this, which leads to the emotional and social equivalents of car crashes and train wrecks.

What's in a Word? The Long-Game Of the Sexual Left

Much of the Church has yet to fully comprehend Leftism as movement that is equal parts political, social, ideological, and spiritual. Each one of these four facets of Leftism compliments and reinforces the other three facets of Leftism.

Generally speaking, the Church is either under the influence of Leftist thinking, OR it understands the social and political symptoms of Leftism: sexual immorality, porn, divorce, abortion, the erosion of freedom to live openly as a Christian, etc... but not Leftism itself, as the unique evil in our age that is driving and encouraging those sins.

The Church understands the Biblical language of spiritual battle, but does not fully understand how Leftism has taken people's minds captive, as the spiritual battle of our time on the macro level, as the ideology that lies at the root of the existential crisis driving people into sexual immorality, as the defective moral compass directing people into spiritual death in the name of being politically correct.

The Church understands traditional Christian doctrine, which was provided to us by those who clarified it against the heresies of the past, but the church does not understand how to clarify the Gospel against the modern rival to the truth of Scripture that is Leftism, and the worship of Nature that is behind Leftism.

The Church has a lot to learn from those like Dennis Prager and other secular thinkers who have stared hard into the Left to understand, classify and categorize its dangers, particularly in the realm of the social, political and ideological. The Church also has a lot to offer those in the world who take Leftism seriously, by explaining how the Kingdom of God offers the only real, durable answer to Leftism, as the only thing that addresses every facet of Leftism including the spiritual facet. The Church will only be effective in ministering to people out of their Leftism when it first identifies Leftism as the reigning counterfeit idea of the age, and carefully clarifies the Kingdom of God against Leftism.

The essential fallacy of Leftist Christianity is this: because Jesus cared for the poor and was mindful of the outcast and downtrodden, any idea that is promoted in the name of helping the poor, downtrodden and outcast is what it means to be like Jesus, and to be Christian.

Jesus mission was to reconcile each individual with the Father, to call the individual to repent of sin and to enable his/her regeneration and sanctification. It was the context of personal repentance and reconciliation with the Father, and in the context of having utmost respect of the Law and the whole of Scriptures teaching, that Jesus modeled how we are to care to for the poor, in all of the ways that people can be poor, economically, spiritually, socially, etc...

By stripping away the repentance out of sin into reconciliation with the Father, and by extension, the whole counsel of Scripture, the Leftist prescription for one to be "Christ-Like" is to affirm someone in a state of gender unholiness, never calling them into repentance, since to promote the the Biblical idea of gender holiness with the intent of calling people to repentance is merely to promote stigma towards those on the margins, keeping them marginalized.

Words are such that they have whole ideas, philosophies and worldviews baked into them. A word itself is like a thesis encoded into letters, such that you must understand the idea to fully understand the meaning of the word, and uttering the word reinforces the idea that word exists to express.

The thesis that is "baked" into the terms "man" and "woman"/"men" and "women” is the Biblical binary of the God-created sexes of human male/female operating in the God-ordained genders of man/woman.  The idea encoded into the terms "man" and "woman" is that there is a universality to human sexuality: that men and women express a whole greater than the sum of their parts and that the differences between men and woman are durable and predictable across time, space and culture.  

The substance of the uniqueness expressed by the terms “man” and “woman” to convey the uniqueness that one has vis a vis the other is a trifecta, a "three legged table" of purpose, design and role: men and women have, respectively, a unique purpose, and from there a unique design to express that purpose, and from there a perogative for unique space in the culture to express that purpose according to their design.  Remove any part of that trifecta and there is no reason for the other two aspects of the trifecta of purpose, design and role to have meaning.

While a Leftist may allow the terms men and women for the sake of convenience, from an ontological standpoint, the Left does not believe that men and women actually exist in the full meaning of these terms, rather only biological human males, females, and hermaphrodites having different bodies, chromosomes and genitalia. Any favored expression of sexual differences above biology is merely the imposition of a cultural artifice that gives one form of sexual expression the false dominance of normalcy over other forms of sexual expression, giving one set of biologically different human creatures the power to oppress another set of biologically different human creatures.  

So that is why the Left is not simply interested adding "lesbian", "gay", "bi-sexual", "trans-gendered" ... to the already existing terms “men” and “women”, but in coming with their own alternative terms to codify their diametrically opposed view of the world in regard to gender and sexuality, a worldview that rejects the binary of sexuality into man and woman. 

One of their terms, “hetero-normal” is intended to convey the idea that being a “man” is merely a normative lifestyle choice for the biological human male to conform to among other lifestyles. Complimenting “hetero-normal” is “cis” as the term to describe someone who identifies the sex they were born with.  So a man is no longer merely a “man” but a “male cis hetero-normal”.   And then you have the movement to promote "ze" instead of "he" and "she". 

The long-game of this Leftist word play is to enable the sexual "individualist" to come out from under sexual "conformity" imposed by the terms "man" and "woman", and to remove the stigma for those who do not feel/believe that they are either a man or a woman.  In reality, these "alternative" terms are not so much in the business of removing stigma, but re-distributing it in favor of Leftism.  These terms serve a social engineering effort to remove social stigma from those who do not feel that they are either fully man or woman and place stigma on those who value the terms man or woman enough to require the cultural space needed for these terms to have meaning.

There is no room in the long run for both a Leftist concept and a Biblical concept of sexuality and gender to co-exist and co-habitate.  We will either operate under the conformity to the ideas of "man" and "woman" or the alternative conformity of sexuality and gender splintered to a host of non-binary terms. 

Either the Left is promoting freedom and justice, liberating people into what is truly natural, or it is keeping people from being redeemed into what C.S. Lewis would describe as the "arch-natural", what is truly natural as God designed us to be. 

People do not set out to be evil, but rather walk backwards into being evil, often because they believe that they are doing the right thing, passionately.  As one who affirms Scripture, I assert that the Left is engaged in evil, promoting sexual confusion by believing that it is promoting justice.  

Confronting the Feminizers

It is said that Thomas Jefferson had a Bible where he simply blotted out the passages that he didn’t believe. In his case, being a Deist of the Enlightenment, he had a problem with the miracles of Jesus but otherwise believed that he agreed with Jesus’ teachings. If you have a Bible where you have blotted out passages that you don’t believe, and make no bones of having done so, you are an honest doubter of those passages you don’t believe.

The Bible makes claims on our sexual behavior, on our physical behavior and heart behavior in regard to sexual interaction. Connected to that, the Bible makes claims on our gender, what it means to be a husband and wife, what a man represents vs what a woman represents in relation to God, and authority within the Church.

The Feminizers reject those gender passages and thus operate with a partially blotted out Bible. The problem is that they don’t admit it, and so their doubt in those passages is dishonest, cloaked in pseudo-Scripture and context abuse to make it superficially seem like they care about the whole of Scripture when they actually believe in it selectively.

Either there is wisdom in the Scriptures that clarify gender and gender role behavior or there is not. Through God’s guidance, the Church needs to clarify the wisdom of the passages against the challenge of the Feminizers.  

The issue of gender is the gateway to the rest of leftism entering the church. The church either confronts gender correctly or it caves on gender, and then later caves to the rest of sexual leftism.

The Why behind the What: Sexuality and the Revelation of Creation

Every generation presents rival ideas to the truths of Scripture, and the truth of Scripture must be clarified and re-clarified against the rival ideas in each age. The superficial understanding that was sufficient in a prior age will no longer do. Preaching needs to speak to the rival ideas of the present age, informed by a deeper understanding of things that were always revealed in Scripture but not always stated in Scriptural bold print.

We live in an age where the church is beset from both outside and from inside, with powerful, rival ideas about gender and sexuality. These rival ideas of gender and sexuality are part of an even broader set of beliefs. As these ideas enter the church, they are challenging our ability to trust the What that is written in Scripture by sowing doubt into the Why. I believe the Why of sex and gender boundaries is revealed in Scripture, even if it is not always stated in the same bold print as the What.

Laying the foundation for the Why requires taking a closer, deeper look at the revelation of Creation. The revelation of creation as articulated in Romans 1 is based on this premise: everything that God has made was designed to impress his character upon us, and we were designed to be impressed upon by what has made to comprehend the qualities of the invisible God. When the Psalms 19 talks of the heavens declaring the glory of God, this is only to highlight one aspect of creation fulfilling this role in our lives, not by any means to exclude all the rest of Creation from doing so.

Our own making as part of the Revelation of Creation is special in two keys ways: 1) our making was specifically made in God’s Image unlike any other thing that was made, and 2) we experience our making from the inside-out, whereas we experience everything else in creation from the outside-in. If the heavens, being far away and not specifically made in God's image, have things to teach us about God, how more so does our own making, which was specifically made in God's image and that we experience from the inside out?

Sexuality is the domain where we experience our making in a uniquely powerful way, where our differences between male and female and are intended to impress upon us special aspects of the character of God. Sexuality is where we experience those aspects of God's character which are more uniquely and completely represent in women compared to men, and in men compared to women. Though the act of sex is part of sexuality, it is not necessary to be in a sexual relationship for us to experience the instructive power our sexuality to reflect God's image and impress upon us aspects of God's character.

God, being above sexuality, is not made in sexuality’s image, though human sexuality is made to reflect certain aspects of God’s image. Pagan religions, like the ancient Egyptians, saw sexuality as a fundamental aspect of reality, of fertility, death and rebirth that was represented in both the gods and in human flesh, and so they conceived of their god’s as being made in the image of sexuality.

Sexuality is a quality of human creation that functions to reflect God’s image, though God himself, being divine, is above sexuality. In the similar manner, if I were to make a clay statue in the image of the person, I would need to do certain things to the clay (like sculpting it and baking it) that are not appropriate for the person. The clay would then have a limited, specific way that it would convey information about the person it was representing. So it is, in a roughly similar fashion, that sexuality is a quality of human existence that God has created for a special purpose to reflect certain aspects of God’s character, but it is not something that directly correlates to a quality of God.

The boundaries on sexuality, encompassing sexual and gender behavior in Scripture are put there so that the revelation of Creation expressed through the sexual aspect of our making functions as it was intended to properly reflect and illumine the nature of God and how we relate to him as his children. The power of sexuality is such that it is either powerfully involved in reflecting God's image for our benefit or it is powerfully diverting us into sexual idolatry.

Sexual immorality is the result of sexual idolatry caused by sexual confusion, where sexual energy is not operating in it's God-ordained way.

An Open Letter To Lauren Jauregui

This is an open letter to Lauren Jauregui in response to her recent open letter:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/fifth-harmony-lauren-jauregui-comes-out-bisexual-sexuality-open-letter-donald-trump-voters-billboard-a7426996.html

This is an open letter written back to you, Lauren Jauregui, as an American and as a Christian who voted for Trump.  

It’s true that Trump is not qualified to give a sermon in church.  There are many unfortunate things he has said, and alarming character traits, and he was not the first choice of many who were going to vote for a conservative candidate for president.  But it’s not true that voting for Trump means that those who voted for him approve everything he stands for, and everything he has said and done and allegedly done.  As many have said, it was a choice for many between the lesser of two evils and the greater among competing goods.  

Your letter demonstrates no respect for those nuances in differing opinions, between those who reluctantly voted for Trump and those who think he is an American savior.  By doing so, you have left no room for dialogue of any kind or consideration of those nuances.

Those who think like you have already taken over many of our universities and created an environment where dissent is suppressed, and where there is no true exchange of ideas. The more those who think like you are allowed into power the more they will continue to impose a leftist caliphate and silence dissent and criminalize thought. 

Hillary was poor candidate who was propped up by the power of political-correctness, and so the power of political-correctness took a dent when Hillary was voted down.  As an American, I’m glad this election has put a speed bump in the way of the march forward of an increasingly weaponized political-correctness that attempts to squash any dissent.

Now let me deal with your letter as a Christian.  You believe that since Trump does not respect political-correctness, a Christian who voted for Trump is a hypocrite because they are taking a stand against what it means to be “Christ-like”, since to be politically correct is to be Christ-like. 

Even as I think that political-correctness is abhorrent, I recognize that political correctness can challenge the church to acknowledge those on the margins, and challenge the church to be mindful of the tone and manner that it is communicating to them.  But in no way does political correctness have anything to do with the Gospel or the teachings of Jesus Christ. Political correctness uses the force of social taboos to convert behaviors into being socially and morally acceptable that were heretofore considered to be morally deviant.  

Christ’s views on sexuality are clear, as are those in the Old Testament Scriptures, which Jesus Christ affirmed, and those written down by the men he chose as his Apostles who wrote the New Testament Scripture.  Scripture as a whole is unambiguous in its condemnation of sexual desire and sexual interaction among people of the same sex. It is also unambiguous in its condemnation of human jealousy and a host of other things.   The Gospel must be bad news before it is good news, and until anyone recognizes the wretchedness of their current condition and the power of Christ to enter it, they will never comprehend the Gospel. 

In regard to the challenge that political correctness presents to the church, Jesus teaches us to worship in Spirit and Truth.  We are to speak in Truth, as clarified in Scripture, without compromise, and we are to speak in Spirit, guided by the Spirit as to the timing, the words and the manner of our speaking.  That is what it means to be Christ-like, as reflected in Christ’ words and actions.

An Analysis of Gender, Sex and Deuteronomy 22:5 Part 2

I want to add a thought to the prior post, based on a question I was challenging myself with: Does a man does cease to be a man just because he is effeminate and/or because he is operating with the persona of a woman? 

To explore this we must define the difference between a person’s being and their persona.  A person’s being does not change despite whether their persona changes.  Persona, on the other hand, is that aspect of personhood that finds its expression in the exercise of dominion, and within the context of a particular type of dominion.  A person’s persona changes if they change the nature of their dominion, even if their being remains the same. A person’s personality is the product of both their being and their persona.

If one were to ask whether the man known as Saul was also Paul, the answer would be yes and no. Saul and Paul were indeed the same person, but different personas. Saul was only Paul in the sense that Saul had the potential to become Paul, with the persona of Paul being buried in person of Saul as a seed that had not yet germinated, while Saul was still a Christian-condemning Sadducee.  “Paul” is the person that operated with the persona of Paul in the dominion of being Apostle, in contra to the persona of Saul.

Gender is the basic God-ordained male persona as man, and the basic God-ordained female persona as woman, that was intended to be expressed in the context of different but over-lapping spheres of dominion to properly reflect God’s image.  From this there are infinite specific minor God-ordained variations among each individual man's and woman’s personality, being the product of both their person and their persona.

As a man, you are less of a man when you don’t operate in the God-ordained dominion designed for men, because by failing to do so, you cannot fully realize your God-ordained man persona, even if your being remains that of a man. The same goes for women. 

Wearing gender specific clothing is one part of assuming the persona of your gender and affirming the sphere of dominion appropriate for your gender.  Deuteronomy 22:5 teaches that you are accountable to operate in the gender persona that is suitable for your sex, whether male or female.

An Analysis of Gender, Sex and Deuteronomy 22:5

The “what” in terms of what Scripture says about sex and gender boundaries between men and women are clear. Egalitarianism, aka Christian Feminism, is fundamentally an attack on the “why”. It is by introducing doubt into the church over the “why” that Egalitarians try to advance doubt over the “what”. As a friend of mine stated it well to me recently, Complimentarianism is the Gospel clarified against Egalitarianism/Feminism. While it is important to clarify the “what” of Scripture in regard to sex and gender boundaries, it is also important to clarify the “why” by clarifying how they are both something that is of part the Gospel and something that uniquely expresses the Gospel.
To begin to do this, it is important to understand the relationship between God's Image, the dominion of Man on the earth, God-created sexes of male and female, and the God-ordained genders of man and woman, and human culture. We know from Romans 1:20 that Creation has the purpose of showing the Maker through what was made. The creation of Man as male and female, having been specifically made in God’s Image, unlike any other thing that was made, has a special purpose to instruct us about the Maker. It is not God who is the direct beneficiary of having his Image revealed in Man, but us who are the bearers of God’s Image to better understand God through perceiving the spiritual significance of what God that has built into our making, so that we may relate to God as his children. The spiritual significance of our making as image bearers of God is intended to be illumined for us as we operate within Creation and in relationship to each other and to God.
In Genesis 1, God created man in His image male and female he created them to take dominion over the earth. So there is an aspect of having God’s Image that comes by virtue of being human, whether male or female, and there is an aspect of bearing God’s image that is specifically male and not female, and that is female and not male. As taking dominion flows from bearing God’s Image, so too is there an aspect of taking dominion that is human—whether male or female-- and an aspect of taking dominion that is male and not female, and an aspect of taking dominion that is female and not male.
In Genesis 2, the relationship between what God directly creates, and what God ordains as an out flow of the design from what is created can be seen as Adam names the animals. God did not specifically create the names of the animals nor did he force Adam to do so, but he created Adam to be able to produce language and to use words to relate to Creation. As God spoke Creation into existence, Adam spoke the animals into their names. So in Adam naming the animals, there is first expression of human dominion over the earth in the form of man-created language and culture, which expresses God’s image.
The relationship between what God has created and what God has ordained in the realm of sexuality is this: the male and female sexes are God-created as the basic imprint of human male and female physical and emotional wiring. Meanwhile, the genders of man and woman are God-ordained sexual identities that are designed as an out flow from the God-created sexes to be expressed in distinct yet overlapping spheres of dominion. The genders of man and woman are somewhat subject to human will, unlike the sexes of male and female which are not.
Adam naming the animals prior to Eve arriving on the scene is the beginning of a God-ordained norm of men having a unique form exercise of dominion vis a vis women. So the naming of the animals was not only the first expression of human language and culture, but also the first expression of gender, of man-ness as unique from woman-ness.
Both the God-created sexes of male and female and the God-ordained genders of man and woman are integral in expressing God’s Image. It is in operating in distinct but over-lapping spheres of dominion that men and women express the Image of God for the benefit of each other’s understanding of God and what it means to be a child of God made in His Image.
You cannot choose your God-created sex, but you can choose not to operate in your God-ordained gender, though by doing so you would be violating your design, and the exercise of your dominion would fail to reflect God’s Image. As we are corrupted by sin, our dominion is corrupted and not fully able to achieve the purpose of reflecting God’s Image. To correct this, Scripture contains rules and guidelines to guide our will away from sin into following the God-ordained genders of man and woman as they were intended to work with the God-created sexes, male and female.
Even to the extent that certain aspects of gender are expressed with some cultural variations, they are nonetheless God-ordained. This is why Deuteronomy 22:5 says "A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this." It did not stop being detestable in the New Covenant any more than any other explicitly sexually prohibited behavior, nor was it only detestable for men and women to cross dress according to the dress that distinguished gender in ancient Israel.
Cross-dressing, for any purpose other than to be comedic and ridiculous, is detestable because superimposes the gender of man over the sex of being female and the gender of woman over the sex of being male. Because it puts what is God-ordained into dissonance with what is God-created, cross-dressing, as with other sexual behaviors prohibited in Scripture, diverts sexual energy away from reflecting God’s image and toward idolatry.

Business Aphorism

Excellent customer service is the product of rising to both the technical challenge and the human challenge that lies within every task, obstacle and difficulty.

Leadership vs Rulership

You are a leader when people willingly follow you because they respect you and are inspired by you.  You are a ruler when you create and/or enforce rules.  In a position of authority, your rulership should always follow your leadership.

The Mallet Rule

There is a very basic moral principle in life when dealing with grievances with others – the Mallet Rule.  The Mallet Rule says that for every grievance that you have with another there is a proverbial toolbox at your disposal with mallets ranging from very small all the way up through hammers to a large sledge hammer.

Whenever you have a concern with another, you have a moral obligation to use the smallest mallet needed to get results, using the most polite, discreet and considerate means possible to effectively address your grievance.  After having done this, if the problem is not corrected, you should escalate to a larger mallet but only one just large enough needed to bring attention to the problem, and so on until you find the right size mallet needed for the job.  The Mallet Rule says that it is unethical to ever use a larger mallet than what is needed, to cause potential damage to relationships and reputations when it is out of proportion to the force needed to resolve the problem. 

The Mallet Rule is an extension of the Golden Rule: do not do unto others what you would not want done to you.  

The Declaration and the Constitution

A proper understanding of both the values and value of the United States of America rests on the understanding that the Declaration of Independence is the founding document equal in authority to the Constitution and should be considered part of the Constitution's preamble, and should be used to interpret the Constitution as the Constitution should be used to interpret the Declaration.

As the Declaration declared the Man's authority to dissolve his bonds with Government (King George III), the Constitution declared the establishment of Government by We The People by that same authority.  As the Declaration declared our, the People's, rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, the Constitution clarified those rights in the Bill of Rights.  As the Declaration declared a right to Liberty, and as the Constitution was established for the Common Good, a proper definition of Liberty that honor's both the Declaration and Constitution is this: License to exercise our duty to the Common Good.  

The common theme between both these documents is that authority is not granted on a whim but comes from a source with the authority to grant authority.   Authority to give power to the Government comes from the People, and the People's authority comes from the Creator.  Man does not have the authority to grant himself this power any more than Government has the authority to grant itself power.

Nature/Creation cannot itself experience happiness and is therefore not qualified to establish happiness as an end of itself or to grant such a right to Man.  Only a Creator who operated in a universe where Happiness was a pre-existent component of the fabric of reality -- who conceived Man first and foremost for His own Happiness who then created Man as a being in flesh to instantiate Happiness -- would have the authority to endow man with the Moral Patent of the Declaration: the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Man's own Happiness.  Only such Creator would have the authority to grant the Moral Patent to Man such that Man would have the authority to grant or remove power from Government.

All laws are based in one or another moral universe that is governed by one or another moral authority. Since this Creator is a self-evident truth of the Declaration, laws whose moral authority can be traced back to this Creator are not are not "laws made with respect to Religion", which by definition is that based on Faith and not which is self-evident.   The Creator --as defined and revealed in the Declaration --is the moral authority and the Creator's moral universe -- as defined and revealed in the Declaration--- is the moral universe by which laws should be judged as being Constitutional.

Hermeutical Arcanism

Hermeutical Arcanism: Relying on arcane details of the ancient world-- including connotations of words in their original language and and/or on ancient cultural realities and practices not specifically mentioned and/or elaborated on in Scripture --to interpret the meaning of Scripture, in contra to using the Bible as it has been translated into a non-original language, to arrive at a theology that depends on an understanding of Scripture that is not available to the reader of a translated Bible.

Aphorism based on Proverbs 17:21

Clarity comes from the wise, not from the merely educated.

A Couple More Aphorisms

Being a problem preempter is superior to being a problem solver

It is not true that the effort being creative in one area of your life will detract from being creative in another area.  Creativity is not a zero-sum game.  The more things you are creative in, the more creative you will be in those things.

Cultural Marxism and the Worship of Gaia

Primalism is the belief that nature is the ultimate truth and that our primal desires were designed by nature as good and should be allowed to operate as un-impeded as possible. What a different moral system calls a “base” desire --as a desire that comes from a corrupt nature needing redemption and inferior to other higher desires-- is considered a “primal” desire, and therefore more original and more authentic to our true, natural selves.

Cultural Marxism (CM) is a form of Primalism that seeks to advance the expression of our primal nature not by trying to “return to nature” to live as stone-age people but as modern, urban people. Cultural Marxists believe that the wisdom of primal nature is the “will to life” and also the “will to progress”, the Gaia force of nature expressed in collective human id that drives the progress of history toward ever greater cultural and technological advancement. Progress requires a continuous cultural revolution whereby an ever increasing variety of people’s expressions of primal desire are allowed to co-exist with other expressions of primal desire in society. Any power that any group or person that has over another is a recipe for corruption and must be aggressively managed so that primal desires can co-exist with minimal damage. Cultural groups that traditionally had more power in history need to continually cede power to less traditionally powerful groups. By showing "moral deference" to the less powerful groups the traditionally more power group shows "moral deference" to the over-arching trend of history.

A non-CM moral system would say that there are moral absolutes that transcend history. A Cultural Marxist might acknowledge that those ideas had had some limited value for the time when they existed, but that they must be put aside for a more enlightened moral fluidity for the current and future age. Cultural Marxists see our time as the "end of history" as the end of human conflict caused by pre-CM ideas that dominated humanity. CM Enlightened individuals are those who show moral deference to Gaia by continually crowd-sourcing their moral thought to a fluid collective.

The CM collective goes by many different names: the “cool”, the “times”, the “emerging concensus”. When a Cultural Marxist says “who’s to say” they are saying that no individual is wise-enough to assert a claim to having a personal rational or moral thought that is contrary to the fluid collective’s discernment of the wisdom of Gaia and the direction that Gaia is headed in any given cultural era of time. A certain degree of personal mental softness and uncertainty is encouraged for each person to cultivate so that they are morally soft and supple enough to follow the collective. / Political Correctness is the social and linguistic expression of CM. Leftism is the legal and political expression of CM. Post-Modernism is the epistemology of CM, the philosophical instrument to undermine truth claims of other belief systems.

There are those in the judiciary of our day and age who believe that by making judicial decisions according to this CM view of the world, they are ensuring that they are landing on the right side of history. Far enough in the future they will be remembered as those who made “laws with respect to religion”, a religion that was not understood as a religion in 2016, but understood by a future generation who will be able to look back on CM with a wise and knowing sadness on the fashionable foolishness taken seriously that it once was.

Aphorism of the Day 03-02-16

The profundity of the essential difference between men and women is proportional to the intensity of sexual attraction.

Aphorism of the day

Having clarity of thought is the child of having depth of thought

The Gospel and it's Competitors

Jesus clarified the gospel against the Pharisees and the Anti-Roman agitators of his day.  Paul clarified the gospel against the Judaizers in the church.  The Protestant Reformers clarified the gospel against the Catholic Church of the 15^th century.

The gospel must be clarified against the unique competitor idea that arises in each generation to compete with it.  If you teach and preach the gospel only as it was clarified against a competing idea of a past generation, your preaching will be sufficient to save but not be fully effective to disciple.