Background on the Book of Daniel

There's an interesting book of the Bible out there. It's called Daniel, and I think we should begin at the beginning of this book and see what some it might mean. What could the theme of this book be?

Well, let's first look at the context. When was this book written? It seems pretty clear that the book was written around the time of the deportation into Babylon. The first chapter covers indeed the historical background of that very time, as "Daniel and his fellows" are taken into the king's court.

Dr. Miller in my OT class last year explained this context decently well. In Old Testament times, it was commonly accepted that there was a supernatural force in the world. Indeed there are many gods in the world. And these gods are incredibly nationalist and tied to military strength.

The gods are further most powerful closest to their own temple, according to the theology of the day. So the Babylonian god is going to have its weakest sphere of influence near Jerusalem, while the actual God would have been thought to be at His strongest when the Babylonians took the Temple.

This means that public perception in Babylon is that their gods at their weakest are stronger than the God of Israel at His strongest.

We of course know this not to be true, and that God let the Babylonians take the Israelites into his hand because the Israelites needed to be punished. But that sentiment is not exactly easy to get across to the Israelites or the Babylonian people. And that is where the book of Daniel comes in.

This is not just a reading based on history either. It is pretty clear from the text of Daniel that the theme of the book is simply the sovereignty of God. And that is obvious from the very first few verses, which read simply,

"In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God: which he carried into the land of Shinar to the house of his god; and he brought the vessels into the treasure house of his god."

Before we even begin to get into the narrative text, the book of Daniel confirms that the Lord "gave" Jehoiakim into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. It was not that he was outgunned by a stronger force. The rest of the book, with the visions, the miraculous deliveries, and the miraculous desire of teenagers to eat vegetables, all point to that same theme.

And as I decide to embark on an exposition journey with you - a pseudo-series on the book of Daniel, we will see how all of these accounts point to the fact that God alone is sovereign over world affairs.

Marxist Political Thought

Karl Marx. He is certainly not the greatest political philosopher in the world. But I daresay he is not quite as bad as many would claim. His critiques of capitalism are worth noting and will probably be discussed in this blog within the near future. But today we're going to deal more with his view of history and his dialectic.

A dialectic is a form of revisionist history, where you believe that one system will come up against an antithesis, which then forms a synthesis, which of course starts the process all over again. Quite unrealistically, this dialectic is almost always supposed to be consistently moving upwards until it eventually results in a utopia. YAY!

Such is the case with Karl Marx who has a dialectic of economic systems. As history has advanced, we have been developing better and better economic systems via this dialectic. In Marx's mind, these systems from the past and future include: from family/tribal, we moved to primitive communism (which involves a bit of social organization with just a tad of division of labor, then to a feudal economy, which leads to capitalism. Inevitably, capitalism collapses, resulting in communism, which easily transitions into an anarchist communist utopia.

This dialectic is driven by a material element. Specifically, Marx believed that all of history was ultimately about class struggles, or a conflict over the means of production.

In the Capitalist phase, we find ourselves in today, Marx believes that the main problem is that the bourgeoisie (to Marx, this means the class that owns most of society's wealth and means of production) exploit the proletariat (working) class.

A primary reason for this concern had to do with the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value indicated that every object must be worth as much only as the amount of time and labor invested to make it. Thus, subjective value is lost for the sake of purely the amount of time it takes to make a product.

But since the only value is in the amount of time the proletariat puts into manufacture of the product, it is unfair for the bourgeoisie to even make any money off of the work of the proletariat, seeing as how the bourgeoisie put in no effort to make that product.

Further, Marx believes that the fact that the worker never truly gets to see the final outcome of his work, the worker becomes alienated from himself. He comes to work everyday as part of his everyday routine, but he doesn't see what impact that work is making on the world. It's simply a way he spends his time.

Inevitably, for Marx, this alienation will cause the proletariat to revolt. Without the proletariat to create the products necessary for capitalism to prosper, capitalism will collapse. A communist dictatorship will then take its place.

From here, Marx's view of human nature takes over. As he believes that man is influenced by society, and indeed is basically good, but corrupted by society. Marx believes that as we change the society,, we change the man. This then makes man perfectible and allows for the "inevitable" dissolution of government, and the anarchist communist utopia.

Of course, it doesn't take that close of a look at history to know that Marx's economic determinism hasn't exactly happened as he would have thought. The proletariat did revolt, but capitalism survived. And it isn't about to go away anytime soon. Sorry, Mr. Marx. Sorry.

Midterm Victories: What they don't Mean

Midterm elections came and went this week. As expected, Republicans have won a majority in the Senate while further solidifying their control over the House. Republicans immediately state that this means that the people of the land are now done completely with ideas propagated by those nasty Democrats that have been thrusting our country into the ground.

But in the words of the wise Treebeard, "Don't be hasty!" It has been consistent that in the midterm elections of a president's second term, his party tends to fair poorly. Such a trend has happened in years such as 1874, 1894, 1918, 1938, 1950, 1958, 1974, 1986, and with George W. Bush in 2006. 

It is such a common phenomenon that it has a name - the 6 year itch. So maybe we ought not be so sure that Republicans are now going to experience the most amazing decade in their history quite yet.

Hold The Applause: FDR and the New Deal

Oh, we all know the story. The Great Depression was a tremendous catastrophe caused by the failures of the free market. Ultimately capitalism was saved from its failings by President Franklin Roosevelt, more commonly known as FDR. FDR's excellent proposal posed a radical shift in governmental policy in response to economic depressions. Eventually, the depression resided due to these marvelous policies.

But it's just that - a story. But even at first glance, it becomes pretty clear that this is not really what happened. After all, why would it take so long for these policies (labeled the New Deal) to make a positive difference. In all recessions prior to this point, there had been a much stronger and quicker response (the government doing nothing in these instances just in case you were wondering). In fact, Robert Murphy, Ph.D. details in his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal that this recovery was the slowest in American history even until today.

Now before you all go accusing me of the post hoc fallacy, I will supply you with some causal links between Roosevelt's New Deal policies and the slower response to the American economy. At its core, Roosevelt's policies attacked the little man for the benefit of, well, no one at all.

When one wished to express the success of the New Deal, they point to Roosevelt as a hero of the little guy, how he presented opportunities for the working man to earn money to live in the harsh economy, instead of supporting big business. But Roosevelt's iron knife struck not only the big business, but also every business, especially the smaller ones.

When you regulate every aspect of how someone could run a business, big businesses will have the necessary funds to adapt to these procedures. Although they will not likely be as well off as they initially would have been, they will still be able to make a profit.

But most times, circumstances aren't quite so pleasant for a small business owner. The little guy has difficulty making a profit when the government takes away some of his creative controls. To illustrate, listen to this true story from the days of the Great Depression, told by Burton Folsom in the book, New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR's Economic Legacy has Damaged America, 

"[Jerry] Maged had been pressing pants for twenty-two years and his low prices and quality work had kept him competitive with large tailor shops in the better parts of town. The NRA [National Recovery Administration, created in a New Deal policy] Cleaners and Dryers Code demanded that 40 cents be charged to press a suit. Maged, despite repeated warnings, insisted on charging his customers only 35 cents.... Not only was Maged thrown in jail, he was also slapped with a hundred-dollar fine."

The impact to small business is obvious. Business owners (not greedy rich business owners mind you, but rather those who are simply trying to support their families) are being threatened with jail for doing something as innocent as selling their services for a discounted rate.

Cutting out the main advantage that a small business can have over a large business is not a winning strategy for economics, nor is it looking out for the little guy. Jailing a man for disobeying regulations is akin to tyranny.

But there is another consequence to this particular event as well. The government was literally ensuring that prices remained high. FDR and his compatriots were ensuring that services were not affordable to the common man. These actions are simply unforgivable and definitely strengthened and prolonged the suffering of the American people.

But that's not even the worst thing that FDR did with the New Deal. Indeed, these actions indirectly hurt many Americans and decreased the sizes of their wallets, but from an economic standpoint, nothing could be worse than the outright theft that the Roosevelt Administration committed by taking America off the gold standard.

Now you may question how the gold standard equates with theft of the American people. To be sure, the link is not readily apparent. Nevertheless, it is there. Allow me some time to explain it.

From 1873 onward, the federal government promised the American people that in exchange for their certificates, they would be given gold. Indeed that gold the United States government possessed was given by the American people in exchange for these certificates because of this promise. In this way, the dollar we owned really could be exchanged for 1.505 grams of gold. Rather, one dollar was 1.505 grams of gold. For the sake of convenience, we had stored our gold with the federal government to exchange paper which represented the gold we owned of the government's store - gold we could withdraw at any time.

Then Roosevelt swooped in and enforced a different exchange. You give me these paper certificates which indicate the gold you own, and I will give you worthless paper that is only valuable because the government says so. In this way, Roosevelt stole gold from the American people.

Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D. expressed it quite well in his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal, 

"Short of herding tens of thousands of children into concentration camps - something Roosevelt also did: remember the Japanese internment camps - it would be difficult for the president to behave in a more tyrannical fashion. The gold certificates held by the public had not been gifts from the U.S. Treasury. On the contrary, they were redemption tickets for which individuals and companies had traded away actual gold, or other goods and services, because the United States government had pledged, since 1873, to surrender physical gold to anyone bearing the certificates, at the rate of $20.67 per ounce. Ordering the public to turn in the gold certificates, in exchange for Federal Reserve Notes (noticeably lacking the phrase, "PAYABLE TO THE BEARER"), was naked theft, just as surely as if President Obama ordered the public to turn in all Iphones in exchange for Blackberries. The theft would be made quite explicit when the government officially tied the dollar back to gold the following year at the rate of $35 per troy ounce, a depreciation of more than 40 percent. (Note that American citizens still could not redeem their paper currency for gold at any exchange rate.) Ordering the public to turn over its gold - under penalty of a $10,000 fine and up to ten years in prison - was clear-cut robbery." 

All of the American people were forcibly robbed of their resources, but it's all ok because we got useless paper money in return, right? I don't think so, yet many around the world, praise this and other moves by FDR as the boost the American economy needed to find its way out of the Great Depression.

But that is not the case at all. Roosevelt was not the saviour of the free market, nor the defender of the little man. On the contrary, his policies prevented the little man from competing against the larger corporations, while stealing the gold of every American citizen in the country, all under threat of incarceration. Not only was the New Deal counter-productive, it was tyrannical, stealing by threat of force. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was surely no hero.

Hold the Applause: The Confederacy

When I wrote Hold the Applause: Why Abraham Lincoln was No Hero 2 months ago, I intended to make this a recurring theme/series. I believe it is high time I revisit this idea and make it a reality.

Today, we will examine the other side of the Civil War - the South. (I should note that I will delve into other areas with this theme than just the Civil War soon.) While our textbooks do teach us that the South was fighting to simply keep their slaves, some in America today idolize the South for their fight for federalism.

For the first time in this blog, I will defend the textbooks' views. As much as I think for the North, the war was about survival, I would say that for most of the Confederacy, the war truly was about protecting the institution of slavery.

For years prior to the Civil War, southern states were nervous about alleged northern conspiracies to gain a competitive edge against slavery through seemingly harmless bills, such as what was on full display during the 1837 tariff crisis. Whether the South was right about these conspiracy theories, it demonstrates that they were pursuing an agenda of protecting slavery.

But the best way to see that the Confederacy truly did care about keeping their slaves is to look at what they themselves said. Simply look at the very words of the Confederate Constitution. 

“Our new government is founded…upon the great truth that the Negro is not the equal of a white man.  That slavery—subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."   

Furthermore, in response to the Emancipation Proclamation, Jefferson Davis published this edict, 

“On and after February 22, 1863, all free negroes within the limits of the Confederacy shall be placed on slave status."

The South stood up for the atrocity of slavery, while the North stood up for little at all. So, typical cynical Ryan would like to remind you that when it comes to the Civil War, we should not applaud either side, as neither stood up for what was right.



(All quotations found in Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's book, A Patriot's History of the United States.)

Apologetics Series 7: The Day of Reflection

Happy 2014, Everyone! I hope your year turns out to be absolutely fantastic!

This post will conclude the Apologetics Series. For this and my future series, I will write 6 posts on the subject and a seventh post reviewing what was said. This is modelled after the days in which the Lord created the world. 6 days of work, and one day to reflect what he had made.

Framework: Assumptions Necessary

In order to form any sort of worldview, it is necessary to assume something. No matter how hard we try to prove our points without using assumptions, we will inevitably fail. There is a reason there are assumed postulates in geometry. The question we must ask ourselves is, which assumptions are more rational? 

Truth Exists

There is absolute truth in this world. How do I know this? Well, I don't. But it logical to assume that truth is absolute. For starters, as R.C. Sproul states, 

"Modern relativists...proclaim that there are no absolutes (except for the absolute that there are no absolutes!)."

Thus, no matter what anyone wants to tell you, there is a truth universally acknowledged. The question then becomes, how much? It would be easy to draw the line of absolute vs. relative on the issue of preference (i.e. vanilla vs. chocolate). All other lines seem arbitrary. For instance, do we keep morality as an absolute? Yes, we really should because the consequences of relative morality, as Nietzsche himself admits, are absurd!

A God Exists

Standard for Truth

But how is it possible for there to be absolute morals and truth exactly? There must be a standard for these concepts. As Francis Schaeffer writes, 

"If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict.  We are merely left with conflicting opinions.  Yet to say that no judgements are universally true is absurd.  Every instinct within us tells us that at least some moral judgments are absolutely correct."

There needs to be a living being to provide a standard for truth. Furthermore, this being must be immutable and eternal. After all, if this living standard changed or died, then morals would cease to be absolute; they would change with time. Thus, we need a perfect, immutable, and eternal being to provide a standard. That being could be nothing other than the God. (Note: There can be only one because multiple gods would lead to multiple standards for morality).

Recognizing Evil

As Descartes reasons, if we had no perfect being in the world, we wouldn't be able to tell that this world is imperfect. Too often we hear atheists claim that a loving God wouldn't let evil into the world, but how do they know that what they are seeing in the world is evil exactly? Because they compare it to God. 

For instance, if you had never seen a chair before and then saw a three-legged chair, you wouldn't know anything was amiss because you wouldn't have a correct version of a chair to which to compare it. As Douglas Wilson says, 

"It is far better to believe in God and acknowledge the problem of evil than to be an atheist and to have no way of even *defining* the evil that you have mysteriously come to believe constitutes such a problem."

Cosmological Argument

The Law of Causality is a universal law that applies to all of a creation. It states simply that for every effect, there is a cause. For instance, if a frisbee hits you in the back, you assume and know that someone threw it in your direction. It is illogical to believe that this universe itself did not also have a cause. If it somehow created itself, it would have to be existent before it existed. In simpler terms, it's not possible.

Teleological Argument

There is order in this universe. When we look at intricate working of this world, we are amazed. The natural conclusion is that someone formed it. This is our reaction when we look at the order of a dictionary or the beauty of a work of art. Yet that which is both beautiful and orderly, namely the world, is often thought to have come about unplanned. The problem is that unplanned order has never been observed, nor does it make any rational sense. Furthermore, it is definitionally impossible.

The Bible is The Only Book of God's Words

To know who this God we have discussed is, I desire to simply look at the various books claiming to be God's holy words. 

Unique Position of Disciples

When examining all the religions and alleged holy books in the world, only the New Testament has writers who would know whether what they were saying was true when they record for instance that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead. As Gamaliel stated at the time, if they were lying, they would not be willing to die for their beliefs. 

"Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men. For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered, and brought to nought. After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God."

The Canon 

From this view of the New Testament, we can know that the Disciples really did see Jesus after his death (unless all 11 hallucinated at the same time, which is not very likely). This is why the New Testament canon was established based on the writings of the Disciples.

Additionally, we should not doubt the works of the Jewish canon of the Old Testament (which protestants use today). It was good enough for Jesus and his disciples, it's good enough for us.

Cohesiveness

The Bible is a book written either by God, or by 40 different authors over a period of 1500 years. One would expect that the latter would be a book with a slew of contradictions. On the contrary, however, the Bible has prophecies written in one book that are later fulfilled in other books of the Bible. One may wish to nit-pick these prophecies, but as Matthew Mcgee writes, 

"Are we to believe that the Old Testament prophets each decided to write the beginning of a great story and then said, "Maybe in a thousand years or so, someone will come along and write a good ending to this?" That would be ridiculous. No man would decide to do such a thing on his own, much less a large group of men who did not know each other or even live at the same time. Therefore, the unity of scripture despite a diversity of writers is evidence of the Bible's divine authorship."

Hold the Applause: Why Abraham Lincoln was No Hero

In history, we learn all about great men who worked to advance some noble cause. Deep down, I think we all realize that history has exaggerated these men's virtues. Nowhere is this more true than in relation to Abraham Lincoln.

History would like us to believe that Abraham Lincoln was a strong idealist who led the nation to a civil war in order to advance the worthy and noble cause for emancipation of African-American slaves. I have no reason to believe Abraham Lincoln was upset at this change, but examining his true intentions with the Civil War, we should not be so quick to herald Lincoln as the great liberator in the American south.

What better way is there to determine Lincoln's motivations than Lincoln's own words? In a 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln writes,

"As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing"... I would save the Union... If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it...What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

Unfortunately, Abraham Lincoln was not an idealist hero. Instead, he was a political planner, who made every decision because "It helps to save the Union." He only freed the slaves because it became politically expedient for him to do so.

However, history has been most kind to Abraham Lincoln. He is now remembered for this exaggerated virtue, that is, idealistically fighting for freedom, rather than his political plans.