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Home > Church and Worship
In Matthew 16:18 Jesus promised He would build His church. All serious Bible students agree that He did build His church in the first century. At that time, there was only one church belonging to Jesus and all saved people were in that one church. You can read about that church on nearly every page of your New Testament.
Ephesians 3:10,11 says that the church is part of God's eternal plan. The church was so important to God that He planned it from eternity. Surely we need to understand what the church is and make sure we are following God's plan regarding it.
The word "church" in the New Testament (Greek ekklesia) refers to a group of people who are brought together for some special reason. In the religious sense, the word refers to those people who have been brought together by God by being forgiven of their sins; they have become children of God and have the hope of eternal life.
* Some people use the word "church" to refer to a building where people worship God.
* Some think church membership is not essential to salvation.
* Some think of the church as a specific denomination: Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, etc.
* Others think the church consists of all the different denominations together.
* Still others think the church is just individual Christians. They see no difference between the church and the individuals, so whatever Christians can do the church can do.
* Some have denied that the local church is a functioning unit or that it has any right to arrange programs of work that members are expected to participate in.
In the Bible, the word always refers to a group of people, never to a physical building.
We will study two primary uses of the word "church" in the Bible: the church universally and the church locally. Then we will conclude by briefly observing a use of the word that is not in the Bible: the church in the denominational sense.
It includes all those who have been redeemed by Jesus' blood, have received forgiveness of their sins, and have been born spiritually into His family.
This is the sense in which the word church is used in Matthew 16:18. Jesus promised to build His church. Other Bible examples of this usage of the word are:
Acts 20:28 - Jesus purchased the church with His own blood. But Jesus shed His blood to save us from sin and make us His (Ephesians 1:7; Revelation 1:5; Romans 5:6-9). So the people who have been saved and purchased by that blood are the people who are in the church!
Ephesians 5:23,25 - Jesus is Head of the church, and He is Savior of His body. He gave Himself up for the church. So the church is the body of all people who have been saved by Christ.
Acts 2:47 - The Lord added to the church daily those who were saved. The "universal" church consists of all saved people everywhere because, when God saves people, He puts them in the church. In this sense, the church is always singular.
This also shows us why it is important to be in the church. Many people believe that one does not need to be a part of the church to be saved. It is true that Jesus is the Savior, so the church does not save us. Nevertheless, all those whom Jesus has forgiven are in the church. If a person is not in the church, he is not among those whom Jesus has saved from sin.
[See also Ephesians 1:22,23; Colossians 1:18,24; 1 Timothy 3:15; cf. 1 Corinthians 12:12-14 to Acts 2:38; 22:16; Mark 16:16.]
1 Timothy 3:15 - The house of God is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. [Cf. Ephesians 2:16,19; Galatians 6:10]
In the Bible a person's family is often called his "house" or "household." The church is the family or household of God because God is our Father and we are His spiritual children.
This shows God's authority over the church. As children we should obey our spiritual Father. [Matthew 7:7-11; 12:46-50]
Matthew 16:18,19 - After saying He would build His church, Jesus promised to give Peter the keys of the kingdom. The terms "church" and "kingdom" here refer to the same thing.
Colossians 1:13 - God delivered us from the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love. The kingdom is the church (v18) - remember, we already learned that, when the Lord saves people, He adds them to the church. Some people believe that Jesus' kingdom has not yet been established, but Jesus will establish it when He returns. Instead the Bible shows that Christians in the first century were in the kingdom, the church.
This term shows that Jesus is the absolute ruler over the church. He makes the laws we must obey. He has all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18).
[Revelation 1:9; Hebrews 12:28]
Ephesians 1:22,23 - Jesus Christ is the head of the body, the church. Like the head guides the body, so Jesus has made the rules that govern the church. The members of the body must cooperate and work together to accomplish the will of the head.
Note that each illustration of the church shows how intimately it is connected to God. That, in turn, shows how essential the church is to salvation.
Also note that Jesus is the only head of the church and He rules through the Bible. This means there is no centralized earthly headquarters, governing body or centralized organizations of any kind to supervise the work of the church.
[Ephesians 4:4-6; 4:23-25; Colossians 1:18]
Some people see no difference between the church and the individual. They believe the local church can do whatever the individual can do. Others do not believe that the local church has the right to function as a unit, establishing and supervising programs of work. These misconceptions result from a failure to understand what the local church is.
According to the Bible a local church must possess all the following characteristics:
Many passages show that individual Christians were included in local churches.
Acts 8:1 - The church which was at Jerusalem.
Acts 13:1 - The church that was at Antioch.
1 Corinthians 1:2 - The church of God which is at Corinth.
Revelation 1:4 - Jesus through John wrote to the seven churches of Asia. Each church was then addressed directly, describing the works of each group, distinct from the works of the other churches. Each one had its own lamp stand, which would be removed if it became unfaithful (1:20; 2:1,5). (Note 2:7,11,17,23,29; 3:6,13,22; 22:16.)
Philippians 4:15 - No church shared with Paul but only the Philippians. Note how this distinguishes the local churches as distinct one from another. One church did this work, but others did not [compare 2 Corinthians 11:8 below].
Local churches did exist, and individual Christians were part of local churches. These churches were viewed as distinct from one another, such that each church acted independently from the others.
[Note Acts 9:31; 11:22; 14:23; 15:41; 16:5; Romans 16:1,4,16; 1 Corinthians 4:17; 7:17; 11:16; 14:33,34; 16:1,2,19; 2 Corinthians 1:1; 8:1,18,19,23,24; 11:8,9,28; 12:13; Galatians 1:2,22; 1 Thessalonians 2:14; 1:1,4; Colossians 4:16]
Because Christ is the head of the church, He gave rules to guide the local churches.
1 Corinthians 16:1,2 - Corinth was to do as the churches in Galatia had been ordered to do.
Revelation 1:4; chapters 2 & 3 - Jesus addressed specific comments and instructions to various local churches.
In the Bible the Lord has given commands and teachings for the local churches to follow.
[1 Corinthians 11:17ff; chap. 14]
Titus 1:5 - There is an "order" or pattern for how local churches should be overseen.
Acts 14:23 - Elders should be appointed in every church. In each case there was a plurality of elders.
1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9 - In order to serve as bishops, elders first must be the kind of men who have the qualities listed. They are appointed to the work if they have the qualities.
If a church has a plurality of such men, they should be "appointed" or "ordained" to do the work. Before a church has qualified men, it may function in an immature state of development (like the churches in Acts 14:23 and Titus 1:5 before men were appointed.) But there is something lacking (Titus 1:5).
[Compare Philippians 1:1; Acts 20:17,28; 15:2-6; Titus 1:5-9; 1 Timothy 3:1-7].
Note the words used to describe their work and their relationship to the members.
Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2,3 - "Overseers" who "take the oversight." [Translated "bishop" in 1 Timothy 3:1,2; Philippians 1:1.]
Ephesians 4:11 - "Pastors." The verb form in Acts 20:28; 1 Peter 5:2,3 shows they should "feed" or "tend" (ASV) or "shepherd" (NASB, NKJV) the flock.
1 Timothy 5:17; 1 Thessalonians 5:12 - "Rule" "over you." [Hebrews 13:7,17,24 use a different word translated "rule."]
Hebrews 13:17 - Members should "obey" and "submit."
Elders exercise the leadership in a local church, but they must not lead people to do things for which no Scriptural authority exists. They teach the members what God's word says, refute error, and guard the members from straying. Within the realm of authorized church work, there are decisions that need to be made to carry out that work. The elders are responsible to see that these decisions are made wisely.
Acts 14:23 - Elders should be appointed in every church [Titus 1:5].
1 Peter 5:2,3 - Elders tend and oversee "the flock" (singular) which is "among you." Their jurisdiction is expressly limited to the local congregation. [Acts 20:28,17]
Each local church should have its own elders. Their work pertains to the church where they were appointed, and their oversight is limited to that congregation.
This necessarily implies that each congregation is separate and distinct from every other one in organization and supervision. No church and no members of a church have authority over the affairs of another local church.
[Compare Acts 20:17; Philippians 1:1; Acts 16:4].
1 Corinthians 16:1-4 - Churches took up funds to care for needy members. [2 Corinthians 8 & 9; Acts 6:1-6]
Philippians 4:14-16; 2 Corinthians 11:8,9 - Churches also used funds to support preachers. This requires the church to have a regular income and to maintain funds to pay these men.
Acts 5:4 - Individual members have their "own" funds under their "control." From their personal funds the individuals make contributions to the church collection (see 4:32-5:11).
The Christian serves as God's steward, having funds under his "control" [Matthew 20:15]. But when he gives them to the church, they pass out of his control into the control of the local church under their leadership (Philippians 4:15-18; 2 Corinthians 11:8,9; Acts 6:1-6). [2 Corinthians 9:6,7; 1 Corinthians 16:1,2; 1 Timothy 5:4,8,16]
So local churches are authorized to have a pool or treasury of funds belonging to the group to use to carry out its work. The church receives income by taking collections from the members. These funds are separate and distinct from the funds of the individuals.
This work can be summarized in different ways, but it includes the following:
* Teach God's word to those who are not Christians - 1 Timothy 3:15; Acts 11:22-26; Philippians 4:14-18; Acts 13:1-3; 1 Thessalonians 1:8.
* Provide opportunities for worship and praise to God - 1 Corinthians 11:18-26,33; 14:15-26; 16:1,2; Hebrews 2:12; Acts 20:7.
* Edify, instruct, and if necessary discipline those who are members - Ephesians 4:16; 1 Corinthians 14:19,23-26; chapter 5; Hebrews 10:24,25; Matthew 18:15-17.
* Provide for the physical needs of certain destitute members - 1 Corinthians 16:1-4; 2 Corinthians 8 & 9; Acts 4:32-35; 6:1-6.
Individuals are authorized to do some activities that are not authorized for local churches to participate in.
* Individuals may marry, have a physical relationship as husband and wife, bear children physically, and raise them - Hebrews 13:4; Genesis 1:28; 2:18-24; Ephesians 6:1-4.
* Individuals may operate businesses to make money - Ephesians 4:28; Matthew 20:1-15; 2 Thessalonians 3:7-12; 1 Thessalonians 4:11; Acts 18:2,3; 1 Corinthians 9:7; Acts 20:34; Matthew 25:14-30.
* Individuals could own, operate, or make donations to a college, hospital, benevolent institution, etc. - Luke 10:34,35; Acts 19:9; 7:22.
* Individuals may purchase, provide, and participate in entertainment, recreation, and social activities such as athletics, orchestras, plays, parties, social clubs, etc. - 1 Timothy 4:8 Mark 6:31; 1 Corinthians 9:24,25.
* There are also differences regarding who controls individual vs. church funds, and regarding what needy people they care for - 1 Timothy 5:4,8,16; Acts 5:4; 2 Corinthians 9:6,7; etc.
We do not say that individuals may never do things that churches may do. But we do say there are works we may do as individuals that are never granted to the local church to do.
The Bible gives principles by which a local church should be able to determine who is or is not a member of that local church. Members should commit themselves to be part of a particular local church and to labor to help accomplish the work of that church.
Acts 9:26-29 - When Paul came to Jerusalem, he sought to join himself to the disciples there. He was working among them preaching and teaching God's word.
Acts 18:27,28 - When Apollos went to Achaia (Corinth), the church in Ephesus sent a letter to the brethren there to receive him. He then worked diligently among them.
Matthew 18:15-17; 1 Corinthians chapter 5; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15 - The church has the God-given duty to withdraw from members who continue in sin and will not repent. So the church excludes from itself those members who do not remain faithful. [Compare Romans 16:17]
Members should identify themselves as part of a local church so they have men who watch for their souls and lead them in the work - Hebrews 13:17; Acts 20:28-30. But the supervision of elders extends only to the local church where they have been appointed. So elders must be able to know which sheep they are responsible for and which they are not responsible for.
A local church is not just any group of Christians. It has limits that define who is and is not included in the group. Those who are members should be identified and recognized apart from those who are not members.
[Acts 11:22-26; Romans 16:1,2; 2 Corinthians 3:1; Hebrews 10:24,25; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 16:1,2; 1 Thessalonians 1:1; Galatians 1:2; Revelation 1:4]
This point follows from all the previous points. When members commit themselves to be part of a local church, they understand and recognize that they become part of the group that follows the rules God has given for local churches and that follows the oversight of the elders. They should give so the group has funds of the group to do the work of a local church.
All this means that a local church is not just a group of Christians, but a group of Christians that are ordered, arranged, or organized to work and worship together as a local church. They intend for this group to continue indefinitely in this work (it is not intended to be a temporary arrangement).
Illustration: A pile of bricks is a group of individual units. The same group of bricks may be organized to form an office building, hospital, or school. What the bricks make up depends on how they are organized, arranged, or patterned together.
So a group of Christians does not constitute a local church until it is arranged, patterned, or ordered so as to constitute a local church. The same group of Christians could be arranged to form a business corporation, a school, a college, or a local church. Which they form, or in what capacity they are acting at any given time, depends on what pattern or arrangement they are following, and what they intend to be acting as at the time.
The local church is an organized or arranged group of Christians with work, funds, and supervision to be a local church.
We have described the church as it was in the New Testament - the universal sense and the local sense. Denominations are a perversion of that pattern.
A denomination is not just a local church, but is an affiliation of many local churches. But neither is it the church universal, since no denomination claims to include all saved people. Each denomination claims to be composed of Christians, but it does not claim to contain all faithful Christians. Denominations are organizations that are more than just local churches, but less than the universal church.
So denominations constitute a change in God's plan that was unknown in the Bible. Those who advocate membership in them are preaching a gospel different from what is revealed in the New Testament (Galatians 1:6-9). Those who join them do not abide in Jesus' doctrine and so do not have God (2 John 9).
[Proverbs 3:5,6; 14:12; Matthew 15:9,13,14; Isaiah 55:8,9; Jeremiah 10:23; Col.3:17; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; 2:1-5; Revelation 22:18,19]
Each denomination has its own peculiar name, doctrine, organization, plan of worship, etc., contradicting the practices of other denominations. Yet they say God will accept all this. "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you worship God sincerely," etc.
But Jesus prayed for all who believe on Him to be one as He and His Father are one (John 17:20-23).
Paul instructed the Corinthians to have no divisions among them - 1 Corinthians 1:10-13.
We must strive to keep the unity of the Spirit (Ephesians 4:3-6). This requires one true body, the church, and one true faith, just as surely as it requires one true God and Father.
[See also 1 Corinthians 14:33; 3:3; 12:12,13,20; Philippians 1:27; Ephesians 2:16; Galatians 5:19-21; Romans 12:4,5.]
We must be part of the universal body of all saved people, then we must affiliate ourselves with a faithful local church. We must refuse to be part of any group that claims to be a denomination, or that excuses, justifies, or condones denominationalism. [2 Corinthians 6:17,18; Ephesians 5:11; Romans 16:17; 2 John 9-11; Matthew 15:1-14; Titus 3:10,11.]
Acts 2:38,47 - If you repent and are baptized for remission of sins, God will then add you to His true church.
Obeying Jesus' true gospel made people members of Jesus' one true church in the first century. It did not make them members of any denomination. That gospel can have the same effect in your life as it did in theirs. You can be a member of Jesus' one true church and part of a faithful local congregation of God's people today simply by obeying the teachings of Jesus and avoiding all man-made religious doctrines.
Copyright 7/1992, 9/2006,David E. Pratte; gospelway.com
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Posted 13 years ago
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At Flatstock 25 - By the Bay on July 10, 2010, poster artists Carolyn Ferris and David Singer (that's them in the left photo) had tables and display space right next to each other. Carolyn represents a new generation of poster artists while David is known for his work for the Fillmore West and Winterland. He did more posters for Bill Graham, including the Fillmore West's final poster, than any other artist, which is a record I believe he still holds. Happily I was able to purchase a poster from each of them.
Carolyn's poster (the center photo) is a feast of red, with metallic silver lines that do not photograph well (or, I should say, I'm not a good enough photographer to show how beautiful this poster really is). I got a signed and numbered print, 3/40. I love the floral and garden references in this one, a nod to the show's location at the Hall of Flowers. The whites of the eyes are also a nice touch.
David's poster (the right photo) was for a concert earlier this year by a band called Moonalice (he's about to do his 50th poster for Moonalice, which has commissioned more than 300 posters under the art direction of Chris Shaw). The central image features a Billiken, which jfcutter posted about a few weeks ago on Show & Tell:
David signed this one for me (you can see his scrawl at the bottom of the poster). I love the name of the venue, the Domino Room, and the handmade font he created for it and the band.

subset: commoncrawl


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Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Who Needs the Family?
But who really needs it anymore?
Governments have come to serve as undying guardians of human society, ushering new life into the world and ushering old life out of it. New parents are as likely to turn to the government for help as they are to their extended family. When their child is old enough to look around for a career, it is the government that they expect to provide the education and the jobs. And when they grow old, the child can keep on working at his government job and paying off his student loans knowing that the government will be there to make all the difficult and expensive decisions about their care.
With all that taken care of, who needs parents or children anyway?
People once had children to pass on wealth, genes and beliefs. But wealth is now thought to be the collective property of society, which is taxed to death or often just given away on some quixotic quest to stamp out disease in Africa or illiteracy in Antarctica. The thought of passing on genes carries with it a tinge of racism for the European and European-descended populations whose birth rates are dropping, but raises no such concerns for minority groups with high birth rates. That only leaves beliefs, which are also thought to be the collective property of the society and the state. Public education, mandatory in some countries, means that the best way to reproduce your beliefs is not to have children, but to get a job as a teacher.
The family has been displaced and replaced. In some places it is even repressed. Like an old station wagon, it idles by the side of the road, while its former owners drive away in their new sleek electric government compact car built for two or a micro-car built for one into a wonderful childless future of unfunded pensions, social collapse and death panels.
Marriage rates have dropped sharply. Not only is divorce more commonplace, but many couples aren't even bothering to marry at all. And many of those who do marry don't bother having children. Childfree is the new Zero Population Growth, not on behalf of the planet, but on behalf of the self. Modern society has made the price of children extremely expensive and many couples have found it easier to end the family with their own deaths.
The future of the West has been aborted or never conceived. It has been broken up, divorced and never married.
The state gave its citizens the impression that it could fulfill all the functions of a family far better than the real thing. Its appeal was the power of bigness, the stability of a system too big to fail and rooms full of experts working night and day to improve on the fallible family. With its vast industrial social services bureaucracy, the state would be able to provide a more stable social safety net, save everyone money on health care, educate their children, care for their elders, perpetuate their values, protect their income, safeguard their way of life and usher in a bright new future.
Unfortunately not only can't the state do any of these things better than the family, but it can't do them at all without the family. And the family has collapsed, falling apart into disassociated lonely individuals, looking for their father and mother, their children and their future, in the great soulless body of the state.
"The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else," Fredrick Bastiat wrote. At its most basic the state is a pyramid scheme into which everyone pays into and from which everyone expects to extract more than their fair share. At the very least they expect the state to function like a wise investment fund, taking their taxes and investing them in ways that will maximize their social return.
Unfortunately the state is more like an actual pyramid scheme whose schemers squander as much of the money as they can while pressuring the suckers to throw in more and more, promising big returns and parading around the model investors who made a fortune as their success stories.
Invest more in education, the schemers of the state urge, presenting as an example a few individual students from the diminishing percentage of college graduates who are actually able to find a full-time job based on their degree. Invest more in healthcare they cry, trotting out the elderly and the children who depend on social services, even while those same schemers are robbing those services blind. Invest in foreign aid, in the war on poverty, in infrastructure and the environment and a thousand other social funds, they cry, even as all the trillions of their former investments have gone up in smoke.
Money however is replaceable. Children are not. And nowhere has the pyramid scheme of the social state schemer proven more disastrous than in the collapse of the family. The state has usurped the family, but it depends on the family to crank out industrious little taxpayers, small men and women who will work the shops and factories, toiling night and day, paying their fines and fees dutifully while raising the next generation of taxpayers. Without the family, the pyramid scheme of the state faces a demographic collapse.
Europe has turned to the American solution, bringing in huge numbers of immigrants to fill the demographic dead zone left behind by the progressive state. And America has doubled down on that same solution. But the solution is no solution.
Importing large numbers of immigrants into a vital and booming society is a shot in the arm, but doing the same in a troubled society in decline is a shot in the head. The difference between integration and conquest is a matter of demographics. If the numbers are not on your side, then you aren't expanding your own country, you're giving it away.
Immigrants from the Third World have fared the worst. Caught between a declining West and a backward East, they have produced large and broken families that explode into violence as their children carve out their own rough tribal identities in ethnic gangs and religious terrorist groups across a lost and bewildered land. Not only have they failed to become the taxpayers of the future, upholding the oversized pensions of tomorrow with the labor of today, but they have become an even larger drain on the social services that they were meant to bail out.
In 1848, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto fearsomely declaring, "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." At that time the birth rate in Germany was five children. Today it isn't even two. The spectre of Communism is no longer haunting Europe. It has come and gone. Under Socialism, it is the spectre of demographics that haunts Europe. It is the dead children, no longer killed in factories or protests, but in clinics and for convenience's sake, that float aimlessly through the streets of Munich, London and Paris. Europe is no longer haunted by its dead, but by those who were never born.
Socialism has left behind a terrible bill and there is no one left to pay it. The population is crashing in every Western country. The elderly are losing their generous benefits, the men and women of middle age worry for the future and the youth no longer believe in the future at all. The streets are full of angry foreign teenagers, grinning and glaring, cutting and smashing, and the veiled women shop for goat in small dirty butcher shops. The old native men and women, of the stock that once made world empires, dream of leaving it all behind for Greece or Spain where they hope for a familiar foreignness, rather than the foreign foreignness that has overwhelmed their countries and made their cities no longer their own.
The state replaced the family. It told men and women that they no longer needed to make permanent commitments to each or to their parents and children. So long as they paid their taxes, the state would bear the burden of their commitments. And so men and women gave up on each other, parents gave up on their children and children gave up on their parents, the family fell apart and now the state that took its place is also falling apart.
When a civilization destroys its families, then it destroys itself. A man cannot cut out his own heart and live. A society cannot destroy its own capacity for life and regeneration, and continue on blithely occupying itself with the wars on obesity, poverty, racism, cough syrup and gendered pronouns. The state may seem impressive, but it is only a scheme by which people pay officials to make life better for them. When the number of people begins to decline while the number of officials increases, then the man touches the place where his empty heart was, stumbles and falls.
American cities and states have built up a vast social infrastructure of schools and hospitals that there will not be enough children to use. From Detroit to California, the future is four teachers to an empty classroom and eight nurses to an empty hospital. The state that is too big to fail has grown bigger than its people. Like Saturn, the progressive revolution has devoured its own children leaving behind only the empty hallways and empty treasuries of the state.
15 comments:
Damn, now I feel bad for not having children. But I can barely afford to live without them.ReplyDelete
There are really two factors that affect whether a society can maintain its numbers: how "traditional" the women are and how hopeful the population is. When women becoming educated and abandon old cultural traditions, population densities collapse. You can like this, hate it, but it makes no difference. Hopeless populations in general don't reproduce, and Obama isn't exactly inspiring hope other than among the most dedicated hope-n-changers, who don't reproduce anyway outside of some segments of their least desirable demographics.ReplyDelete
None of this is accidental. The left (not liberals who are the left's "useful idiots") must destroy American society because it is the primary obstacle to world domination. The family is the foundation of American society so naturally it is a primary object of attack.ReplyDelete
The left has spent the last 50+ years indoctrinating succeeding generations through the schools and the mass media. Knowing full well Lincoln's dictum that, "The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next."
The left is attacking our Constitution, again understanding full well Lincoln's warning, "Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
The left attacks our liberties through seeking to obviate the Constitution because as long as it is constrained by Constitutional limits its victory will always be incomplete and reversible.
- Anonymous20/2/13
Family and Civilizaton by Carle Zimmerman, written in 1947 predicts exactly what has happened to the family and its affects on our civilization.ReplyDelete
... illiteracy in Antarctica ...ReplyDelete
That's a huge problem. The government really does need to address this, especially in the face of global warming and the melting of the Antarctic ice. It was one thing for all those Seomikse natives to be illiterate when they could live by fishing for penguins and hunting for roller bears. But if the ice melts, and they have to start working at Wal-Mart and Starbucks to get by, they need to be able to read.
Sadly, I'm guessing about 25% of the American people will agree with me.
Brilliant essay.ReplyDelete
Western governments are now busy destroying the cornerstone of the family - marriage. Marriage will now include homosexuals. What next?
Yes, brilliant and true unfortunately! We have very little support for families who would like to take care of their own children (not daycare) and teach them their values. It's all part of that moral decay that you've written about before. Sad.ReplyDelete
Brilliantly stated.ReplyDelete
You articulated why I choose not to reproduce. The tide could not be turned. I will live out my life and leave it to the progressive fools.
voluntary extinction is not at all my messageReplyDelete
A liberal pope called it in 1968-ReplyDelete
It all keeps coming back to personal responsiblity. We no longer teach our children to be self sufficient or to take responsiblity for their actions good or bad and own them. I have two children in college and I can't tell you how many of their room mates they have taught to do small things like laundry or cook a simple meal for themselves. It's a tragedy that we have allowed our children to become less than useless and utterly selfish.ReplyDelete
Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he will not depart from it.ReplyDelete
Get in there before the 'educators' do.
Always check what they are 'learning' at school, especially R.S and history and guide them from parental guidelines because they will get a liberal 'answer' from school - kate b
Men don't want to marry anymore either let alone have children. The Peter Pan syndrome is one problem and another is that men are either unemployed or under employed and lack drive to fix that.ReplyDelete
I agree that the family is the basic building block of society. The family is under attack and the best one can do is provide a happy and productive family life for one's children. This often entails economic sacrifice (perhaps only one family car; no fancy vacations). But the benefits and joy more than make up for the material deprivations. As far as passing on one's blood or race this is one value but the greatest value is to teach our Holy Faith. If you teach this and a love of freedom then the youth will have the hope, love and courage to carry one when we are gone.ReplyDelete
- VA_Rancher22/2/13
The Progressives have been attacking the family for almost 100 years.ReplyDelete
Almost nobody has been fighting the defensive side of this battle, so guess who is winning...
I homeschool my kids, and I always will. Yes, they love Faith and Freedom.
I believe the current generation of Homeshooled kids, call it the Tebow generation if you will, is the last, best hope for our Nation to halt the slide into Gomorrah...
Be well,


text:
I had the distinct pleasure of talking to Dr. Fleming this afternoon.
A couple of years ago I started auditing Dr. Fleming's class on Chaucer and found out that Dr Fleming is the premier American scholar on Chaucer, for good reason. Unfortunately I had to drop out of the class for reasons outside my control, but the next Fall I enrolled again in his class, which was the last semester that he taught that class.
You can listen to the podcast
After the introduction, here's the interview:
F: Today's theme will be, what do we learn from the Middle Ages? The reason I thought of this theme is not only because of talking to you, but also because the first blockbuster movie of the year, The 300, is about the battle of Thermopylae among the Spartans and the Persians and that was one battle that was remembered very much throughtout the literature of the Middle Ages, was it?
JF: Well yes, and no. The Western Middle Ages which I studied, that is, the Latin speaking Middle Ages lost sight of Greek during the fairly early period, so they did not have direct access for many centuries to those classical historians, Thucidides and others, that modern scholars do study; But there was a large cultural memory and a general idea that Christendom was surrounded either by bleakness or by positive enemies, and of course with the rise of Islam that became a very real thing, so to that extent people were aware that there had been great victories by our forefathers that we had to somehow live up to.
F: On the Earlier Middle Ages, I've heard a lot about the Dark Ages and now the theme has changed to the Earlier Middle Ages, and I found out from reading in your class and other places that many of the things we think of as modern, were created during that period, such as cloth manufacturing, banking, mail delivery. So what makes the Dark Ages dark? Was it the cycle of invasions they had all the time?
JF: Well, what made the Dark Ages dark was Edward Gibbon in the 18th Century, that is, the particular view that you get in his famous book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, [which] glorifies the ancient empire and thinks that there's a kind of hiatus between the arrival of Christianity and the Rennaissance in the 14-15th century.
Of course, when we use the term "the Middle Ages" it's notoriously elastic, it runs for a thousand years, from say, the time of St Augustine on the cusp on the 4-5th centuries down to the time of Erasmus at the end of the 15th century. So that thousand-year period covers a vast geographical area – just talking about the Western Middle Ages we're talking about the whole of Europe… but among other things that developed was the concept of the modern state. Our own great historian, Joseph Strayer has among his most widely read books a book about The Medieval Origins of the Modern State.
Another institution uniquely developed during this period is the University. There really is there nothing else in the world, in other cultures, exactly like the Western university, and it was developed during the period of the 12th and 13th centuries.
F: And the University is what saved the Ancient world for us?
JF: Absolutely. At least in this sense, the precursor of the University was the monastic school.
Christianity, as you of course know, is a text-based religion. It has to study and preserve the Bible and its commentaries, and for many long centuries the chief occupation of monastic life… was reading the Bible, commenting on the Bible, explaining the Bible, and in order to do this, they felt that they had to have access to the whole body of Classical Latin literature.
One of St Augustine's very famous books, De Doctrina Christiana, On Christian Doctrine, tries to explain that if you're going to study the Bible you've got to know, for example, what the words in the Bible mean. This is actually not very bad advice for some modern Christians. You have to understand how they exist within a historical context, you have to know what were the animals of the ancient Near East, and things like that. So it is that kind of scholarly motive that led them to read the Classics. And there's not a single major Latin text, not Ovid, not Virgil, that had not been saved for us by these monastic scribes. That's the point of that popular book, How the Irish Saved Civilization.
F And if I remember correctly, St. Augustine emphasized reason as a means of getting closer to God.
JF: Absolutely. We're used to the idea that there's some great divide or conflict between faith and reason. This idea, in a sense, grew in the Late Middle Agesn when Thomas Aquinas and other great theologians of that period had to deal with the rediscovery in the Latin West of Aristotle and a system of moral theology that seemed to be totally independent of the Christian revelation.
But, say, for Augustine, and for most of the early fathers of the Church, there was no conflict between faith and reason because faith seemed, on the basis of their empirical experience, a reasonable proposition. So, although Augustine would never do what Thomas Aquinas did, which is to sit down and in academic fashion try to prove the existence of God, you find in the Confessions and elsewhere lines of argument that basically are doing the same thing: argument by design. Some of this is highly relevant to theological controversy even today.


text:
Earlier this week, I received a wood-framed clock in the mail. It was a promotional tchotchke from the people making Dishonored, the kind of thing a big video game company sends a gaming reporter to make sure they remember their game exists—and perhaps to cultivate some favorable emotions about the game.
It is, of course, a bit weird. What does one do with this unrequested clock?
It's also unnecessary, because Dishonored needs no clock to help me remember it, and won't need a clock for you to give a damn about it.
Dishonored is an ambitious game made by some talented folks in Texas. It's a first-person game that you can play as an action blockbuster or as a stealth adventure. It might remind you of some other very good games, but it has lots of distinct flair.
Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, the game's co-creative directors at Arkane Studios, showed me the game in New York City last week. I watched as one of their colleagues played an early mission. They played through it twice, to show the flexibility of the Dishonored experience. I won't give you a blow-by-blow. Instead, I'll tell you what jumped out at me:
- The prevailing fantasy in this game is to be a "supernatural assassin". So picture a first-person game in which you might emit magical powers with your left hand, slit throats with your right, while jumping/warping from rooftop to rooftop and then possessing the person next to the guy you've been assigned to kill.
- The game is set in a beautiful, strange city called Dunwall, which had its look designed by Viktor Antonov and Sebastien Mitton, the former being the artist who conceived the look of Half-Life 2's City 17. They're going for a mid 1850s America look mixed with Victorian England. Dash in a bit of whaling town, and don't call it Steampunk, because it's not exactly that. There will be no rivets or brass in this game, Antonov mentioned, at least as a general goal. There's also no clear sense of day or night, because they want players to feel more of a dreamlike mood where it could always be sort of either time.
- You may peek through any door that has a keyhole as you skulk through the game, which tells you plenty about the level of technology in this game's world and the game developers' interest in letting you snoop. The main level we were shown was set in the Golden Cat Bathhouse, which, you can imagine, would have some secrets on the other side of its keyholes.
- You can possess a fish, thanks to the game giving you the power to possess any living thing, including the people you're trying to save, the people you're trying to kill or even the rats scurrying at their feet. This is one thing that qualifies you as a "supernatural assassin."
- If you possess a rat, a guard might step on you. Just know that you can't possess anything or anyone forever; only for a few seconds.
- This is a linear game with more powers than you can get in one playthrough. It's a game that will have you acquiring special powers, attaining more potent versions of them, accruing weapons. Basically, you're building your own arsenal that suits your strategy and the whole point of the developers showing me the same level twice was to show how differently you could handle it, depending on your abilities and interests.
- In this game, there are lots of ways to do the same thing.Take the Bathhouse building I saw during the demo. It's where the action was going to be. And while we could possess a fish to go inside, there were supposedly seven other ways to get in there, too.
- One of your best powers is called Blink. It lets you scoot forward a few yards in space, like a short-distance warp. Combine this with agile jumping and you can dart not just across rooftops but through open space, suddenly appearing in a crowd or getting to the other side of an open doorway without ever walking past it.
- One of the powers they didn't mean to give players, but did involves free-falling from the top of a building but then possessing a guard before you smack into the ground. The designers said that their test players figured it out and it seemed too terrific to remove. So, yeah, kill a guy on a balcony, and then jump off the balcony before his bodyguards can seize you, drop a few stories but body-hop into a regular citizen who is walking down the street in the nick of time.
- You can see where your enemies see if you activate a special power that causes their vision cones to be visibly emitted from their eyes. If they see you, trouble. If they see a painting on a wall, they might comment about it.
- If you have to compare this to another game, think more Deus Ex than BioShock. Co-creative director Smith waved off my guess that all these player powers mixed with combat might make BioShock the closest apt comparison to Dishonored. No, think more of the Deus Ex games, he said (and, hey, he was one of the main creators on the first two, so it all makes sense). The difference? As far as I can tell, while both games offer the players lots of choices, Dishonored offers a wider range of them and is more explicitly designed to let you play in stealth.
- And with your right hand you will kill, because that's the hand that will wield the games guns and blades. The first person melee combat you'll do with the knife got me wondering about another comparison, to Colantonio's former project Dark Messiah: Might & Magic but he said that game's focus on first-person melee is not exactly replicated here. There will be a block and counter system in Dishonored, but not one with Dark Messiah's depth.
- Two corrupt aristocrats needed killing in the level I was shown. These brothers, the Pendleton Twins, are two of the many scumbag aristocrats who are keeping the people of Dunwall down while trying to avoid whatever mysterious illness is now plaguing the lower classes.
- You, by the way, are Corvo Attano, former bodyguard of the Empress, wrongly accused of her murder.
- You can dispose of your targets in many ways, some of them fatal, some of them wickedly clever. Imagine, say, you discover one Pendleton Twin in a room with a prostitute. You may walk in and shoot him or knife him or summon a pack of rats to eat him (and possess one of those rats while you're at it). But you also could have never entered the room and just locked it, turned up the steam in his room and boiled him alive. But why not just help out a local crime boss by breaking into the Bathhouse and finding the combination to a safe he wants access to. Give him the combo and he'll take care of the Pendletons by shaving their heads and sending them to work in the mines they ruthlessly run. You know, you don't have to give the crime boss the combo before you go open that safe yourself and take what's in it. This game is supposed to be open to any branch you can imagine taking. You're expected to experiment.
- You could go through the game without killing anyone, but then you'd never have approached the second Pendleton twin, poisoned him, possessed him, walked him over to the balcony, jumped out of his body (yours appears when you do this), pushed him over the edge and then bailed.
- The world will adapt to you, Smith told me, saying that you might hear different conversations or see more guards or even witness entirely different scenes of squalor or hope depending on how brutally you're playing. He refrained from describing any pat formula, so I couldn't tell if playing without killing, for example, equals seeing more cheerful things. It seems like they're going for something subtler than that. We'll have to see how that plays out.
- The walkers you'll remember seeing are called Tallboys. They appeared in a more action-heavy sequence that took place in an area called The Flooded District. There are men in those powerful walkers and, yes, you can possess them.
Dishonored showed well. Its world is vivid and interesting and it does appear to offer a good range of play styles that will let players figure out just how bloody they want their revenge quest to be. All games are best judged when you play them yourselves, doubly so for malleable games like this that are pitched as letting you dabble and push at its seams to see what's possible.
This is the kind of game that entices you to try and break it. Say, let's see what happens if I try to kill this guy this way or try to finish this level as a rat!
This, therefore, is the kind of game it's easy to get excited about. No clocks necessary, though I should mention who sent the timepiece. Arkane is owned by Bethesda/Zenimax, the Skyrim people. They know how to push games, so you're going to be hearing a lot more about this one—with good reason.
Dishonored will be out later this year for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.


text:
The Secret Beyond Matter
The world has gone through several crises since that of 1929, in which business lost 72% of its value, or 60% of volume. The last 20 years (1990-2008) in particular have seen major crises closely connected to the economy today; the 1992 European crisis, the Mexican crisis, the Asian crisis, the Russian and Brazilian crises, the Argentinean crisis and the latest US crisis…
The factor triggering a crisis may differ from country to country, and may be internal or external. For example, a significant change in the domestic political balance, or an economic collapse in a field such as real-estate or the banking sector, which previously enjoyed an unlimited flow of capital, may trigger a crisis inside a country. However, whether it be the latest U.S. crisis or the crises in the economies of the other countries of the world, the fundamental cause of all crises is moral degeneration.
Moral degeneration such as corruption, unequal distribution of income, bribery, and people tending to – rather than production – based revenue (the interest system, in other words) lies at the heart of all such crises. These are all things forbidden by God.
People with no fear of God, who do not live according to His commandments, have no hesitations about going down unlawful paths. In a society that knows no moral bounds, that fails to administer justice and that acts solely for the sake of its own interests, the climate of confidence essential if the economy is to remain healthy disappears.
Crises will naturally follow on one another's heels when there is no climate of confidence. In addition, the post-crisis period bring with it a time full of injustices. As with Argentina, which suffered an economic crisis in 2001, mass protests on the streets, acts of looting and pillaging and even the deaths of many people are all fundamentally the result of moral deficiencies.
The true solution, therefore, lies in abiding by the moral values of the Qur'an, which prohibits injustice, corruption and bribery and instead commands people to help one another, to aid the poor and orphaned, to give alms and to compete with one another in performing good deeds.
Everything is under the control of God. Believers who know this and have a sincere faith in Him submit to our Lord under all circumstances, material and physical, in the awareness that they are following their destinies. God has flawlessly created every detail from the creation of the world right up to Doomsday. Everything, including the latest economic crisis, is recorded in the book known as the "Lawh al-Mahfuz" [the Tablet of God's Decrees]. Everything has already happened in a single moment in the sight of God, Who is unfettered by time and space. The timing and place of every event has already been ordained, as set out in the verse, "communication has its time, and you will certainly come to know." (Surat al-An'am, 67)
* In the middle of September (2008) the 158-year-old Lehman Brothers, America's fourth largest investment bank, filed for bankruptcy, as it was unable to weather the difficult conditions of the economic crisis.
* Merrill Lynch, the world's largest investment bank, suffered losses of around $46 billion because of the global crisis. As a consequence of those losses, it was bought by Bank of America, the second-largest US bank.
* Following the collapse of investment banks, the USA's largest savings bank, Washington Mutual, filed for bankruptcy at the end of September (2008). This brought the number of banks folding in the USA since the beginning of 2008 to 13.
* According to a report by the US Department of Employment, the number of those losing their jobs in August stood at 73,000, compared to 159,000 in September. This figure, the worst redundancy level for the last 5 years, brought the total number of job losses for the preceding 9 months to 760,000.
* Japan, the world's second-largest economy, has also been affected by the global crisis. Yamato Life Insurance, an insurance company dating back 98 years with debts totaling $2.7 billion, declared bankruptcy in October 2008.
* Iceland, standing in third place on the United Nations' List of Most Prosperous Countries, has been severely affected by the economic crisis. The country was unable to meet its external debt, and its three largest banks, with total debts of 44 billion euros, were taken over. Long queues began forming in front of Icelandic bank branches.
* A public opinion poll in Belgium showed that 57% of the public were worried about their savings.
* The Hertie retail chain, with 4,100 employees and 73 branches across Germany, declared bankruptcy in July 2008. The finance company affiliated to Hertie announced losses of 30 million euros.
* XL, Britain's third largest tourism company with a fleet of 21 planes, went bankrupt in September 2008. British Airways also cited the crisis as the reason for making 1,200 employees redundant.
Qur'anic Moral Values Are the Only Source of Social Justice and Economic Stability
Since people who take the moral values of the Qur'an as their guide, act out of a fear of God, they strive not only for their own interests but for the interests and well-being of everyone. Because unity, togetherness, mutual aid and solidarity are very important in Islamic moral values. Nobody trespasses on anyone else's rights, because God has forbidden such ugly behavior. No bounds are transgressed. No system that exhibits the injustice of atheism, that is based on self-interest, in which the strong oppress the weak and in which people misappropriate what rightfully belongs to others is possible in a society that lives by the moral values of the Qur'an. There is no waste nor wasteful consumption of resources in a society guided by the Qur'an. Thanks to solidarity and justice, people's economic strength grows. A wealthy society emerges. This is one of the clearest proofs of the Age of Happiness, when people lived by Qur'anic moral values, and which is renowned for its wealth and well-being.
It must not be forgotten that various temporary solutions to poverty may be proposed. But the important thing is to believe that the true solution, as with all problems, is to live by the moral values of the Qur'an. Because the superior moral virtues revealed in the Qur'an, such as feeding the poor and orphaned even though one is in need oneself, never giving other people things one would not want oneself, and helping others without making them feel a sense of obligation, can only emerge when people fully live by Qur'anic moral values. God has revealed in Surat an-Nur how materially powerful people should behave:
Those of you possessing affluence and ample wealth should not make oaths that they will not give to their relatives and the very poor and those who have emigrated in the way of God. They should rather pardon and overlook. Would you not love God to forgive you? God is Ever-Forgiving, Most Merciful. (Surat an-Nur, 22)
Adnan Oktar's article on Wadsam Afghan Business News:
http://www.wadsam.com/what-is-the-main-reason-for-the-crisis-in-countries-economies-324/2014-01-30 18:07:20


text:
I voted absentee in JerusalemSunday, November 2nd, 2008 by Sandra
Shabbat was a glorious day. Bright and sunny and temperature in the mid 70's. I visited and ate lunch with friends at Focaccia, walked around Jerusalem and ate again. It's not a visit to Jerusalem with eating at Focaccia. It was indeed a time of resting and refreshing.
Today dawned another bright and crisp morning. After Shabbat, the city is really coming alive with the sounds of building, cars everywhere and people back to their weekly work. Another stop at Aroma Cafe for my annual almond croissant, and I am ready for the day. I cannot believe I leave this evening for the States. I am so blessed to be coming back on the 15th with a group.
I voted absentee at the U.S. consulate last week in Jerusalem. What an experience. Ken Berg, Jeff and myself were not going to make it back to the States in time to vote, so we headed to the consulate. Went through security and waited in a room that looked just like the ones back home—you know, with the plastic chairs arranged in two rows back to back. There were lots of pictures of the President, VP, and Secretary of State, and of course the American flag. A piece of the States right in Jerusalem! We waited and waited and were finally helped by a sweet lady from Ft. Worth. We wrote in our picks and were out of there. I am hoping my vote really makes it to the States.
Thank you for your prayers for this tour. God bless America. God bless Israel.


text:
Britain's Mafia State
EUROPE, 14 Sep 2015
George Monbiot – TRANSCEND Media Service
Where does legitimate business end and organised crime begin?
Be reasonable in response to the unreasonable: this is what voters in the Labour election are told. Accommodate, moderate, triangulate, for the alternative is to isolate yourself from reality. You might be inclined to agree. If so, please take a look at the reality to which you must submit.
To an extent unknown since before the First World War, economic relations in this country are becoming set in stone. Is not just that the very rich no longer fall while the very poor no longer rise. It's that the system itself is protected from risk. Through bail-outs, quantitative easing and delays in interest rate rises, speculative investment has been so well cushioned that, as Larry Elliott puts it, financial markets are "one of the last bastions of socialism left on earth."
Public services, infrastructure, the very fabric of the nation: these too are being converted into risk-free investments. Social cleansing is transforming inner London into an exclusive economic zone for property speculation. From a dozen directions, government policy converges on this objective. The benefits cap and the bedroom tax drive the poor out of their homes. The forced sale of high-value council houses creates a new asset pool. An uncapped and scarcely regulated private rental market turns these assets into gold. The freeze on council tax banding since 1991, the lifting of the inheritance tax threshold and £14 billion a year in breaks for private landlords all help to guarantee stupendous returns.
And for those who wish simply to sit on their assets, the government can help here too, by ensuring that there are no penalties for leaving buildings empty. As a result, great tracts of housing are removed from occupation. Agricultural land has proved an even better punt for City money: with the help of capital gains, inheritance and income tax exemptions, as well as farm subsidies, its price has quadrupled in 12 years.
Property in this country is a haven for the proceeds of international crime. The head of the National Crime Agency, Donald Toon, notes that "the London property market has been skewed by laundered money. Prices are being artificially driven up by overseas criminals who want to sequester their assets here in the UK."
It's hardly surprising, given the degree of oversight. Private Eye has produced a map of British land owned by companies registered in offshore tax havens. The holdings amount to 1.2 million acres, including much of our prime real estate. Among those it names as beneficiaries are a cast of Russian oligarchs, oil sheikhs, British aristocrats and newspaper proprietors. These are the people for whom government policy works, and the less regulated the system that enriches them, the happier they are.
The speculative property market is just one current in the great flow of cash that sluices through Britain while scarcely touching the sides. The financial sector exploits an astonishing political privilege: the City of London is the only jurisdiction in the UK not fully subject to the authority of parliament. In fact, the relationship seems to work the other way. Behind the Speaker's chair in the House of Commons sits the Remembrancer, whose job is to ensure that the interests of the City of London are recognised by the elected members. (A campaign to rescind this privilege – Don't Forget the Remembrancer – will be launched very soon). The City has one foot in the water: it is a semi-offshore state, a bit like the UK's Crown dependencies and overseas territories, tax havens legitimised by the Privy Council. Britain's financial secrecy undermines the tax base while providing a conduit into the legal economy for gangsters, kleptocrats and drug barons.
Even the more orthodox financial institutions deploy a long succession of scandalous practices: pension mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance con, Libor rigging. A former minister in the last government, Lord Green, ran HSBC while it engaged in money laundering for drugs gangs, systematic tax evasion and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Sometimes the UK looks to me like an ever-so-civilised mafia state.
At next month's Conservative party conference, corporate executives will pay £2,500 to sit with a minister. Doubtless, because we are assured that there is no link between funding and policy, they will spend the day discussing the weather and the films they have seen. If we noticed such arrangements overseas, we might be inclined to regard them as corruption. But that can't be the case here, not least because the invitation explains that "fees associated with business day & dinner are considered a commercial transaction and therefore do not constitute a political donation."
The government also insists that there is no link between political donations and seats in the House of Lords. But a study by researchers at Oxford University found that the probability of so many major donors arriving there by chance is 1.36 x 10-38: roughly "equivalent to entering the National Lottery and winning the jackpot 5 times in a row". Why does the Lords remain unreformed? Because it permits plutocratic power to override democracy. Both rich and poor are kept in their place.
Governed either by or on behalf of the people who fleece us, we cannot be surprised to discover that all public services are being re-engineered for the benefit of private capital. Nor should we be surprised when governments help to negotiate, without public consent, treaties such as TTIP and CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement), which undermine the sovereignty of both parliament and the law. Aesop's observation that "we hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office" remains true in spirit, though hanging has been replaced by community payback.
Wherever you sniff in British public life, something stinks: I could fill this newspaper with examples. But, while every pore oozes corruption, our task, we are told, is merely to trim the nails of the body politic.
To fail to confront this system is to collaborate with it. Who on the left would wish to stand on the sidelines as this carve-up continues? Who would vote for anything but sweeping change?
About George Monbiot: Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency. Here is what I fear: other people's cowardice.
Published in the Guardian 9th September 2015
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