day no. 17,401: to compromise is to concede

“Every ‘Allahu Akbar’ reminds people that we're in a very serious struggle with a very depraved religion.” — Christopher Hitchens on Islam

Islam is not a respectable monotheistic religion, it is a detestable abomination. It is a Christian heresy inaugurated by conversation with a sand demon. It advances on the grounds of might makes right which is wrongheadedness incarnate. 

“There will never be peace on this earth so long as we have this book [the Quran]...it's a violent and cursed book.” — Sir William Gladstone

When the world is entirely under the footstool of Christ, weapons will be hammered down into farm implements, but not before then. The reign of Christ will be peace. If Islam were to envelop the world, wars would not end. Islam is a religion of warfare. The God of creation inserted enmity into the story in the Garden of Eden when He initiated the holy war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The goal of that war, however, is peace. God wages peace. He puts down wickedness with peace in mind. The wars will end when wickedness is ended. Peace is at war with warfare and when it wins, warfare will be destroyed. But until then, we fight the good fight of waging peace. Islam is one of those things we must fight. You cannot partner with mayhem without reaping more mayhem.

"A civilization is not destroyed by wicked men; it is destroyed by weak men who cannot defend what is good.” — G. K. Chesterton

We do not need more coexist cult apologists advocating for harmony and respect among entities that despise each other. The flesh is at war with the Spirit and the Spirit returns the favor. They are in each other's way. They want different things and go about achieving their ends in different ways. They cannot coexist. They refuse to place nice, but only one of the two is willing to admit that out loud. Wickedness often postulates a cease fire in order to advance its cause. Peace never relents. It would never suggest such a compromise. It would never allow the holy to be a little bit corrupted for the sake of preserving holiness. To compromise is to concede. To flounder is to forfeit.

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.” — Thomas Sowell

And so, we must fight the good fight as the good Lord has commanded us. We cannot except peace to materialize out of thin air and even less than can we expect it to be produced by capitulating to the cares and concerns of the corrupt.

day no. 17,400: falling like lightning

"Our streets are in a permanent dazzle, and our mind are a permanent darkness" — G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1927)

While we have figured out how to keep our street light engaged 24 hrs a day we have forgotten how to keep our minds engaged for a single minute. We may have artificial lights on all the time in our cities and never have a single light bulb go off in our mind. We have learned how to keep the night from becoming dark, but we have forgotten how to brighten our mood. We light the night on fire with electricity and we benight our brains in the maw of modernity. We have brought the stars down to our streets and fixed them intermittently along our paths to guide our ways. We have harnessed the lights and lost hold of the reins of our sanity. The light bulb did not darken our souls per se, but our dependence on it and our abandonment of the other has. In imagining ourselves masters of the universe, we have made ourselves slaves to our sinful natures; and just like Satan, we fall like lightning, which is a very bright and yet very dark ordeal.

day no. 17,399: the day everything became something

"God is not bound down and limited by being merely everything. He is also at liberty to be something." — G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity (1920)

Christmas is the celebration of everything becoming something. In the beginning, God made everything from nothing. Everything, that is, except for Himself. He was not made. He is the Maker. He is the everything who made something, all things that have been made as it turns out. So, there existed a distinction. The Creator and His creation. The one thing that He was not was a created thing. But even that did not prove too difficult an obstacle for Him to overcome.

John 1:1-3

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.

The Word that was God became like the words He spoke. He became like a created thing in order to dwell among His creation. All things were created by Him in the beginning and in the incarnation He made Himself a created thing.

John 1:14

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

The incarnation is the miracle of the One who made everything from nothing becoming something in particular. The incarnation does not destroy the distinction between Creator and creation, but it does bridge the distinction. Jesus is Jacob's ladder. He is the mediator between heaven and earth and there is no other safe way to approach the Father but through Him.

day no. 17,398: forgeries confirm the official

"All forgeries draw their significance from a signature." — G.K. Chesterton, The Uses of Diversity (1920)

Without the authentic, the fraudulent ceases. Forgeries presuppose an original and counterfeit preys upon the codified. 

You can have goodness without sin, God for example, but you cannot have sin without goodness. Sin is derivative. Holiness is substantive. Sin is contingent on good. Without a standard of goodness, there is no such thing as evil. Without purity there is no such thing as perversion. Without beauty there is no such thing as ugly. Without truth there is no such thing as lies. But because there is one, true, pure, holy, good and beautiful God, there is a way to differentiate, with confidence, what is good, true, and beautiful, and more to my point here, what is not.

day no. 17,397: a wilde idea

"But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." — G.K. Chesterton

You cannot put a price on a sunset per se, but you can pay for them. One party says that things without price tags are not worth saving up for while another saves itself for the things without price tags. The truth is priceless and so unfaithful men don't attempt to pay for it. Beauty is invaluable and so godless men do not value it. Goodness is inestimable and so wicked men do not esteem it. But you can live up to a sunset. It cannot be purchased in the way the world looks to purchase things, however. It is not so cheap as to be bought that way. It can only be bought by sacrifice. It can only be obtained by letting go. The meek shall inherit the earth by receiving it in meekness not in grabbing it from God is greediness.

day no. 17,396: the truth will not wear out, but it will wear out its opposition

"The idea of a privatized truth, or private religion, is not simply an error. It is nonsense. If your idea of the First Amendment is that everybody in the country has the ability to retreat into their own private truth zones, then your time would be better spent in sweeping water uphill."  — Douglas Wilson, Creationism, the American Founding, and Individual Rights

Truth is either public information or it isn't truth. There is no such thing as a private truth. The problem is not that the truth is being kept secret, the problem is that the truth is out in the open, but not practiced or believed openly. The game is given away, but no one wants to play by the rules. They choose to ignore the truth because the lies make it easier to be unfaithful. They choose to twist the truth because it is beginning to strike to close to home and they want to redirect its heart. They slander the truth because they want the benefits of being truthful without any of the responsibilities of having to be honest.

“The modern habit of saying ‘Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me’; the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon” — G.K. Chesterton

The truth is too big to be privatized. It is either available to the public or it isn't the truth. That does not mean that some do not lie or that some attempt to codify a lie into public discourse as a generally accepted truth. On the contrary, it guarantees that people will attempt to do things like that. Why? Because the truth would proclaim itself if they didn't. They have to invest time, energy, thought, and plot into attempting to cover up the truth. It would be obvious to all if they didn't. And it still will be once they are worn out in attempting to cover it. That beach ball of truth they are working so hard to keep under water will outlast them. It will surface when they are tired and sunk.

Romans 1:18

The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Those who suppress the truth do so in unrighteousness. They wear themselves out trying to keep it under wraps only to be overcome by it in the end. The truth will never stop pushing against the unrighteous arms of wicked men. It will float to the top for everyone to see when the wicked hands that held it down have long been drown in the sea of their willful ignorance.

day no. 17,395: inalienable rights and alienable privileges

"Creationists believe in inalienable rights. Atheists believe in alienable privileges." — Douglas Wilson, Creationism, the American Founding, and Individual Rights

Those who confess God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, confirm the imago Dei and the rights that go along with it. Those who reject their Maker reject the idea of rights coming from anywhere other than outside the individual. Granted, a creationist believes his rights come from without as well, but that is because he believes in God above who has given him rights within by making him in His image. The atheist believes his rights come from the state and can be placed within anyone or taken away from someone at any given moment. Rights, in the eyes of an atheist, are not a stable thing like the stars, they are unstable like the planets, always moving around.

Christians believe in rights because God is charitable and immutable. Atheists believe in privileges because power is their only language. Tyrants can give privileges to those they like and withhold them from those they don't. Kings under Christ must respect and defends the rights of those they do not like merely because those people happen to live under their jurisdiction.

Rights must be respected by all. Privileges must be withheld from some. And so, Christians and pagans view their governing representatives very differently.