Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about self-defense

Grab the mp3 file… listen while cleaning your guns or doing push ups/ 🙂 GE

WINTERY KNIGHT

Reformed Baptist theologian Wayne Grudem speaks on the Bible and the right of self-defense.

About Wayne Grudem:

Grudem holds a BA from Harvard University, a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, Grudem became Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. Prior to that, he had taught for 20 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was chairman of the department of Biblical and Systematic Theology.

Grudem served on the committee overseeing the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and in 1999 he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a co-founder and past president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of, among other books, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, which advocates a Calvinistic soteriology, the verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the…

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Doug Casey on the Morality of Money | The Market Oracle

… Louis: People say money makes the world go around, and they are right. Or as I tell my students, there are two basic ways to motivate and coordinate human behavior on a large scale: coercion and persuasion. Government is the human institution based on coercion. The market is the one based on persuasion. Individuals can sometimes persuade others to do things for love, charity, or other reasons, but to coordinate voluntary cooperation society-wide, you need the price system of a profit-driven market economy.

Doug Casey: And that’s why it doesn’t matter how smart or well-intended politicians may be. Political solutions are always detrimental to society over the long run, because they are based on coercion. If governments lacked the power to compel obedience, they would cease to be governments. No matter how liberal, there’s always a point at which it comes down to force – especially if anyone tries to opt out and live by their own rules.

Even if people try that in the most peaceful and harmonious way with regard to their neighbors, the state cannot allow separatists to secede. The moment the state grants that right, every different religious, political, social, or even artistic group might move to form its own enclave, and the state disintegrates. That’s wonderful – for everybody but the parasites who rely on the state (which is why secession movements always become violent).

I’m actually mystified at why most people not only just tolerate the state but seem to love it. They’re enthusiastic about it. Sometimes that makes me pessimistic about the future…

via Doug Casey on the Morality of Money :: The Market Oracle

On Killing | Market-Ticker

How many of those calling for gun control have ever killed another living thing?

I mean up close and personal.  Not eating a hamburger that was in a package in the store, or grilling some chicken breasts that were all nicely-packaged in cellophane?

And I’m not talking about smashing a mosquito, spraying a hornet’s nest with wasp spray or similar or taking a shovel to a rattlesnake in the back yard either.

Progress | Ol’ Remus & The Woodpile Report

Many reasons have been given for the fall of the Roman Empire—greed and decadence, Christianity or the want of it, a decline in industriousness, lack of new territory to plunder, internal wars and over-reliance on the military and so forth. These are “civic virtue” arguments. More objectively, Tainter says the total cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the total return from the empire. The notion appears to confuse cause and effect if you squint and look at it just so. An automobile will eventually cost more in maintenance than the worth of its service justifies, but the deterioration itself isn’t due to the cost of maintenance. An asset has a trajectory apart from our mitigations of its effects.

What Kind Of Power Should Government Have Over Your Life? | ZeroHedge

… Really, who needs terrorists when you have a government like ours?  If it is the widespread destruction of the principles that founded our society that you fear, then the last enemy you need worry about is the Muslim boogie man.  The greatest threat to our way of life is an institution that has always operated right under our noses and acted with impunity sheltered by the very borders it is tasked to defend.  It is the only group in existence that has the resources, the military backing, and the proven intent to undermine liberty in America.  It is the supreme threat to individual freedom in the world today.  And, the worst irony of all is that it commits every one of its crimes in our name.

Organ donation: crossing the line | Mercator.net

Organ donation: crossing the line. by Nancy Valko, Thursday, 6 October 2011.

“… Linking the so-called “right to die” with organ donation…has truly opened a terrible Pandora’s Box. Unfortunately, choice rather than principle is becoming the overriding ethic.”  See here.