Deeply Political

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There are people who say that the Bible is not political. If you define political as: you should support this political party or that political party, then the Bible is not political. It doesn't lower itself to that level. But if you define political as commentating on how a nation should be run and critiquing the leaders and policies of a nation and holding them to a standard of judgement and inquiry, then there is no book that is more political in the history of the world than the Bible.

The most important political message that the Bible tells us is this: you king, you governor, you emperor, you politician, you are not really the highest power. There is a God above you, who will judge you for how you rule and lead. This is a phenomenally political statement, and it is a phenomenally religious statement. It is both, because both are realities of the world we live in and are relevant to our lives. And so both are intertwined throughout the Bible. How could they not be?

Drunkenness and Too Many Homes

 

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Those who buy up lots of houses, are as bad as drunks, according to the Bible:

"8 Woe to those who join house to house,
who add field to field,
until there is no more room,
and you are made to dwell alone
in the midst of the land.
9 The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing:
“Surely many houses shall be desolate,
large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.
10 For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath,
and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.”

11 Woe to those who rise early in the morning,
that they may run after strong drink,
who tarry late into the evening
as wine inflames them!
12 They have lyre and harp,
tambourine and flute and wine at their feasts,
but they do not regard the deeds of the Lord,
or see the work of his hands." (Isaiah 5:8-12). 

Excess of all kinds kills people and kills nations.

I remember about 12 years ago making a similar point about this in a Bible study when going through this passage, and someone was so offended he refused to ever come back, because he felt I had insulted family of his who owned multiple homes. I had no idea this applied to his extended family, I barely knew the guy. I was simply commenting on this passage. But over the last 12 years, I have seen more and more people start to get what the problem is when people hoard homes.

I often wonder what that person would say today? Maybe he still feels the same way. Maybe not. But it is obvious that more and more people are seeing the evil that this brings on society. 

The fact that God puts owning too many homes in a list of other dangerous evils is pretty phenomenal, isn't it?

Sadly, it has had to get to a point where it is effecting the vast majority of people in our nation, especially young people, before people woke up to how dangerous this was. But the flip side of this is that more and more people in the culture, young and old, are seeing how bad society can get when this happens. And this could have a positive effect on our nation. They say that politics is downstream of culture. I don’t believe this is always true, sometimes it goes the other way. It is probably better to say that culture is downstream of constant messaging. But the fact that so many people are seeing how bad this is means there is a possibility we could see political change in our lifetime.

Australia has had a pretty good run. But our nation is not really known on the world stage for anything really remarkable. We popped up after most of the modern reforms that made the western nations great had already been entrenched. We benefitted rather than added to these developments. But maybe this is an area where we could build a culture that can set an example to the rest of the world? Maybe this is an area where Australia could forge reforms that could benefit other nations that learn from them?

Imagine the impact it would have on the greatness of this nation if it were to solve a housing crisis like the one we face, and make housing affordable for families again? As the famous Darryl Kerrigan once said, “Tell him he’s dreaming.” But why not dream? Just over ten years ago I remember most people looking at me blankly when I spoke about these issues. Now, people all over this nation are talking about them because they are being adversely affected. Cultural change can happen. Why would we not do what we can to work for a better society for our children?

It is something to ponder at least. 

I do not want to live in a nation where my kids and grandkids are forced to live on some pseudo-aristocrat’s land where they do not have the freedom that so many of us have taken for granted over the years. Every time our houses go up in value, we all actually get poorer because our money is rendered more and more worthless. This is not wealth. This is an illusion of wealth. It is time that our nation stopped getting drunk on housing prices and sobered up.

 

Prosperity In Australia Appears To Have Peaked

 

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Prosperity appears to have peaked in Australia. Even though the average Australian has a relatively high income compared to other nations, it is being extracted for less and less in value return. Less than a couple of decades ago you could rent a nice unit for about $185 per week. It would not be flash, but it would have at least two toilets and a full bathroom, two bedrooms, a backyard, and you could find a place like this close to some nice shops and other locations. You would likely be living with either young couples just starting out in life, or nice elderly neighbours. Now, you can’t get anything even close to as reasonable as that for the same price, and the wealthy are really starting to take advantage,

“Australia's rental crisis was thought to have reached a new low when a tent pitched in a living room went on the market, but new listings prove it can always go lower.

The tent has started to look cosy after a rundown boat was offered for $200 a week and, keeping the nautical theme, a shipping container has also been listed…The boat, located 18kilometres south-west of Perth CBD, even comes with a small dinghy so the happy couple can get to dry land without swimming ashore…

…Several people have offered to let people pitch a tent in their backyards, but for those who like the idea of a tent but not the outdoorsy vibe, the solution came with one pitched in a family's apartment.

The downside was that the husband, wife and two children would also still be living in the unit, but the upside was you got your own bathroom…If that sounded up your street, the cost was quite a bit steeper than riverboat living at $350 a week for the tent, which is $18,200 a year.”[1]

To be fair, the situation is not just the rich taking advantage, though that is the driving problem to this housing crisis. But now battler families are trying to cover their growing rent and mortgage payments by renting out spare rooms, living rooms, backyards, and even putting up tents on their property. I personally know people living in a tent, and I have observed that this trend is growing. The kind of money that could once rent you a very nice house, or the kind of payment that could pay off a very nice house, is barely enough to get yourself somewhere to sleep for the week now.  

I once heard a prominent Australian academic note that when Australia was first described as the “lucky country”, the implication was that this luck would one day run out. Australia rose as a nation in one of the most prosperous periods of world history, the era of Colonialism. As a nation our country has never really faced true hardship, resources are plentiful, land is abundant, success was far easier for more people than most other nations in the world. Australia was lucky, because although it had mediocre leadership, it was not hard to take advantage of Australia’s privileged position in the world.

But it appears that luck has run out. All the land has been divided, and now the wealthy are gobbling up more and more, and it is becoming harder and harder for ordinary people to find a way to build just the humble kind of life that was once the norm in this country; each family with their own home.

Now, rather than being the lucky people, it is obvious that the wealthy have worked out that Australia’s greatest mining resource is not under the ground, it is the Australian people themselves, with our relatively high incomes and astronomically high land prices. Australians are being extracted for their financial resources, and rather than protect us from that, our governments increasingly allow foreign ownership and push high immigration both of which exacerbate the problem. Aussies are no longer lucky, they are increasingly either indebted, or forced to rent at exorbitant prices, just to live in our own land.

Aussies don’t have the ability to quickly move across a border to another country. We don’t have very many major cities which can compete with each other for lifestyle and employees. But we do have lots of money and the elites have found a way to extract it very successfully. What is the use of earning high incomes, if the cost of living just extracts most of what you earn anyway?  

Three things could end this. The government could:

1)     Cancel debts, allowing people to be free of bondage. This would free up people from paying interest, and enable them to redirect money to better causes. It would need to be accompanied by banning usury and limiting more debt going out, though as well.  

2)     Reduce immigration and send some immigrants (temporary residents) home so that renters and buyers don’t have to compete with foreign people for places to live. This would help with driving house and rental prices down.

3)     Increase taxes on those who own more than one home, so investors are incentivized to sell in large numbers so that house prices tumble, encouraging the wealthy to put their money into other aspects of the economy (like production and industry) and allowing people who do not own a chance to buy at far lower prices.

These policies would be just. Especially for those who have not had a chance to buy yet, who should be a priority for our governments. Especially young families. But all of these policies are nationalist and anti-globalization. So, I wonder which way our government is going to go? The problem is that if they continue to allow more of what they are currently allowing, this is going to crush Australians and drain our resources. How long can this extraction process continue? Time alone will tell.

But we know it won’t end well, because the scriptures warns us,

“8 Woe to those who join house to house,
    who add field to field,
until there is no more room,
    and you are made to dwell alone
    in the midst of the land.
9 The Lord of hosts has sworn in my hearing:
“Surely many houses shall be desolate,
    large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.
10 For ten acres of vineyard shall yield but one bath,
    and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.” (Isaiah 5:8-10).  

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[1] https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/australia-s-rental-crisis-new-low-with-rundown-boat-offered-for-200-a-week-in-western-australia/ar-AA1dVp1O?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=f0c3df2e4d624ab980e453abab597b85&ei=22

Women Are Not The Victims In Abortion

 

I have seen the same problem that Jeff Durbin is speaking about here. Not in the context of legislation, because there is no large political party in Australia that would ever bother to try and stop abortion. Does anti-abortion legislation even get a consideration in any parliament in our country today? Our nation is given over to this evil at the moment, though this can change[i].

But as Durbin highlights, many Christian advocates on the pro-life side see the vast majority of women who practice abortion as victims and not as the perpetrators they really are. I have seen this a lot over the years and it is just not true. Some women are victims. Some woman are pressured into abortion by their abusive boyfriends, or controlling family or even in some cases church leaders (though they could ultimately tell the doctor and get help if this is the case), or they are coerced and bullied into it in other ways. This does happen, but it is by far the minority of reasons, as the data shows.

The act of abortion is on the whole an act of choice by the woman to improve her circumstances. It is a fundamentally selfish act,

"The most commonly reported reasons for abortion in 2004 (selected from a researcher-generated list of possible reasons with write-in options for other reasons) were largely similar to those found in the 1987 study [11]. The top three reason categories cited in both studies were: 1) “Having a baby would dramatically change my life” (i.e., interfere with education, employment and ability to take care of existing children and other dependents) (74% in 2004 and 78% in 1987), 2) “I can’t afford a baby now” (e.g., unmarried, student, can’t afford childcare or basic needs) (73% in 2004 and 69% in 1987), and 3) “I don’t want to be a single mother or am having relationship problems” (48% in 2004 and 52% in 1987)."[ii]

Economic, or lifestyle reasons are the dominant reasons for abortion. These women do not want to have to make the necessary adjustments to their lives that having a child, or another child, would entail.

It is really about power in the most basic sense; their desire to control their circumstances. Or to put it more bluntly: they care more about their education or career than the child they have conceived. It is a mere inconvenience. This does not mean that this is an easy choice, or a happy choice for many of these women. But just because they may be unhappy about doing it, does not mean that they are not exercising the ultimate power over another persons life, the child’s, and showing where their true priorities lay. 

It matters not that many women do not see it as an actual child. The slave owners did not see slaves as fully human. This did not make them any less guilty. It only explains how they rationalized their evil.

If, as I know many Christian people believe, ultimately the man is responsible for this sin being tolerated in society, then it is incumbent on us men to call out the act of evil for what it is, and not to say the perpetrators are the victims. The real victims of slavery were not the slave owners who saw the slaves as less than human and were "tricked" into the benefits of free labour, it was the slaves that were dehumanized who were the victims. The real victims of abortion are not the women who may not see that they are killing a child, the real victims are the children who are killed in the process of an abortion. Tens of thousands a year, just in Australia. Many more worldwide.

I am convinced that the best strategy for undermining abortion, is working towards a society that sees a woman wanting an abortion, or a man pressuring his woman for an abortion, as distasteful as the person who wants to own another human being. We should already see it that way, since abortion is far more evil than even slavery. Showing the evil of what the slave owner was doing to the person they had as a slave - that is correctly identifying the perpetrator and the victim - helped lay the foundation for slavery to be seen as disgusting, even by many modern unbelievers. Taking the position that the women who have abortions are victims is undermining the pro-life position. Because it is wrong and it is the fundamental foundation that the left uses to justify abortion.

Progressives cast the women as helpless without abortion to help justify it. Many conservatives cast the woman as helpless in the face of relentless pressure to prefer or practice abortion. Both sides are infantilizing women and removing their responsibility from the act.

“We feel sorry for you, that you felt you needed to make that decision,” is clearly a failing strategy at the society level, even if it occasionally works with some individuals to druve them to repentance. Abortion needs to be recast as a thoroughly disgusting and disgraceful act, that even to consider practicing can cast aspersions on one’s character. Until we make that switch, it is going nowhere.

This does not mean those who have had an abortion need stay condemned in the eyes of God. Paul, the Apostle, and David the king, were both guilty of shedding innocent blood. God forgave them both. There is grace for every sinner, we are all seriously damaged goods compared to God. Jesus' mercy is abundant and vast. But to receive forgiveness from God someone must repent of their sin. To repent of their sin, people have to be shown very clearly that they were culpable, not the victims.

References

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[i] We should never forget that it has been worse and it can get better.

[ii] https://bmcwomenshealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6874-13-29?fbclid=IwAR3ApsgNqLbwvStuj4gPgMRN4NEipP8aWnMxgpd99Hf6wJXaEqktqYycYmY

Immorality Is Costly

 

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Immorality is costly. It is harmful. In the modern world there are few things more harmful than gender “affirming” healthcare. And health insurers are becoming aware of this,

“One of Australia's leading medical insurers has dumped cover for private practising doctors who initiate hormone treatment in adolescents with gender dysphoria, a decision that may put even more pressure on public hospital waiting lists.

MDA National said it will also no longer insure private doctors, such as general practitioners, from legal claims arising from the assessment of patients under 18 as suitable for gender transition treatments, such as cross-sex hormones and gender affirmation surgeries.

The Australian Professional Association for Trans Health (AusPATH), representing hundreds of health professionals who provide care to transgender people, is aware of some GPs who have already stopped gender-affirming care — a model that supports the child's choices and can lead to medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormone treatment.

AusPATH is concerned the MDA National decision will particularly affect trans youth living outside major cities, who struggle to access public gender services.

"It's going to stop a number of children ever being able to access gender affirming care before they turn 18," AusPATH president Professor Ashleigh Lin said.

The MDA National decision, effective from July 1, comes after the insurer reviewed the medico-legal risks amid what it described as "growing criticism globally of the research that underpins medical and surgical transition of children in response to gender dysphoria"

It was made in response to "the risk of potentially high-value claims arising from irreversible treatments" provided to children and adolescents.

Gender-affirming hormonal therapies with testosterone or oestrogen may cause temporary or permanent infertility…[1]

This is a good move in the right direction, but of course does not go far enough. Until those who do such surgeries are stopped with the full force of the law, so they cannot hurt kids anymore, it will not have gone far enough. Throughout history pagan societies have enacted harmful practices including various forms of cutting of the body and other abhorrent acts. Our modern pagan society is no different. And this is an intolerable evil. May it become untenable and unacceptable in every quarter of society to practice such barbaric medicine.

Men and women are created in the image of God. Male and female he created them, we do not have the power or the authority to override biology and to try to do so can only cause harm and disfigurement. And people often regret doing such harm to their bodies. The fact that insurance companies are starting to reject insuring this kind of Frankenstein "healthcare" is a really good move. It is also a sign that reality is pushing back against people's insane fantasies. Which is a good thing. Immorality is costly and harmful. The greatest cost being those who suffer the damage that is done to them by those who practice it. 

May this end in our lifetime, so our children and children’s children don’t have to ever encounter it. 

References

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[1] ABC Health, 2023, “Medical insurer drops cover for private doctors who initiate hormone treatments in adolescents with gender dysphoria” https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/medical-insurer-drops-cover-for-private-doctors-who-initiate-hormone-treatments-in-adolescents-with-gender-dysphoria/ar-AA1dMswI?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=5ca2bc05a6eb459d9b886aa78478b136&ei=10

The Bible Is Irrelevant?

 

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If you look through Isaiah chapters 3 to 5 you will see that these incredible chapters describe to us the state of Judah in the prophet’s day. What is remarkable about these passages is how much they overlap with our own modern western culture. A summary of the topics these passages will cover is:

-        Supply chain problems.

-        The lack of leading men.

-        Rule by youths.

-        Disrespect for the elders.

-        No honour.

-        No one wants to lead.

-        Pride of sin like Sodom.

-        Rule by children and women.

-        The elders and rulers use their power to fleece the people.

-        The poor have nowhere to turn.

-        Feminism/Haughty women/Women not led by men/Sexually licentious women.

-        Decadent prosperity.

-        Military defeats pile up.

-        Women are feeling the pinch of providing for themselves and clinging to any man that is left. 

-        Israel cannot flourish until their feminists are soundly rebuked.

-        Injustice and bloodshed increase.

-        House and property hoarding by the wealthy.

-        Drunken revelry and wild music parties.

-        Ignorance of the works of God.

-        Lies are everywhere supporting wickedness.

-        Evil is called good and good is called evil.

-        Individuals become their own standards of wisdom and truth.

-        People brag about being heroes of the drink.

-        Corruption overrides their courts.

-        The innocent’s rights are trampled.

-        Far off nations are preparing to rise against them.

       

Now that we have summarized this chapter, what nation does all of this sound like? And people say the Bible is not relevant, when it is more relevant than they could ever imagine.

 

 

The Sound of Freedom

 

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The media reaction to The Sound of Freedom movie has shown that the movie makers have hit a very sore and open wound in our society. The media clearly "doth protest too much."

The purpose of good rhetoric is to point to the truth in such a way that it gets an emotional response from its intended target. You don't have to see the movie to know that it must be incredible rhetoric, because of the recoiling reaction it has caused among the media; the mouthpiece of the elites. They are clearly upset. 

It is good to see Christian movies stepping up. They have been getting better and better for years. My favourite new movie this year is still Jesus Revolution. It was just a really well told character story, with an inspiring message. I have not seen The Sound of Freedom, but from what I have heard it is not the kind of movie you watch for entertainment, but the kind of movie that very effectively highlights that evil is real and there are good men fighting against it. Which is an important message. The kind of support it has gotten shows there is a market for well told Christian movies that effectively point to uncomfortable truths, and a fear among the secular culture of what they can achieve.

Movies, stories and drama inspire and move people, and can have a great impact on the pursuit of justice in society. They can also have a strong impact on moving people towards an immoral lifestyle. It is encouraging to see Christian moviemakers gaining traction with well told and powerful stories. May this increase. And when you can, get out and see these movies, because the more that people support them, the more they will succeed in reaching people.