Homeschooling; A subversive activity!

Homeschooling, particularly by Christian parents is beings viewed as a subversive activity in Europe at the moment. It has come under fire in America as well and who knows how much time before the same laws are applied in Australia. The Greens and large sections of the far left in Labor currently seek to change the laws on homeschooling and religious schools funding, that is they want to abolish them and force children to attend public schools where the government sets the agenda.

Swedish authorities forcibly removed Domenic from his parents in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India. The officials did not have a warrant nor did they charge the Johanssons with any crime. The officials seized the child because he was home-schooled, even though home schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.

“The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like home schooling,” said Alliance Defense Fund legal counsel Roger Kiska. “We encourage Swedish authorities to release Domenic to his parents in light of the court’s ruling, and we hope the European Court of Human Rights will reconsider its recent rejection of Domenic’s case in light of the Swedish court’s determination. This family’s human rights have been unimaginably violated.”

In December 2009, a Swedish court ruled in Johansson v. Gotland Social Services that the government was within its rights to seize the child. ADF and HSLDA attorneys filed a lawsuit, Johansson v. Sweden, with the European Court of Human Rights in June 2010 over the matter.

And in Germany.................
BRUSSELS, September 27, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The European Court of Human Rights gave another setback to German homeschoolers by affirming that the interests of the State trump the rights of parents to educate their children. Yesterday, the Court denied a request from the parents of Joshua and Rebekka Konrad to rule Germany’s ban on homeschooling violates their human rights as parents to educate their own children under the European Convention on Human Rights.
Fritz and Marianna Konrad filed the human rights complaint in November 2003 on behalf of their children arguing that Germany’s compulsory school attendance severely endangers their children’s religious upbringing, and promotes teaching inconsistent with their Christian faith, especially the State’s mandate of sexual education.
The Konrads had appealed under Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 of the Convention which states, “No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching is in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”
However, the Court decided in favor of Germany, stating that “Parents may not refuse the right to education of a child on the basis of their convictions” and adding that the right to education in Article 2 “by its very nature calls for regulation by the State.
 

These German parents had to flee the country to avoid their children being forcibly removed from the family and put into state care. Wow!

In South Africa we were aware that we broke the law by allowing Black friends to sleep over at our house even and by having black firnds, but never in our wildest dreams would we have thought that  we being subversive by teaching our children to love God...how the world changes.

Straight talker

Dang! if this guy is not the straight-talkinest, shoot-from-the-hipiest fellow then I don't know who is. He is the John Wayne of Theologians and a tell-it-like-it-is, no holds barred commentator and I wish there were more like him.

Oh, and one last thing. There are so many of these mindless objections floating around, but one especially moronic objection coming from the purists is especially grating. As they gloat about how they refuse to vote for either candidate, they will make this incredibly foolish remark: “I vote for God”.

Yeah right. That is the most imbecile cop-out I have heard yet from these mixed-up Christians. Of course they are not voting for God. By refusing to take their civic duties seriously, by refusing to take the command to be salt and light seriously, by refusing to realise that faith without works is dead, all they are doing is voting against God. They are just living in the clouds.

But it is worse than that – they are simply allowing Obama back in, which means more abortion and more evil to take place. And they will sit back smugly patting themselves on the back, thinking how pure they are and how they did not get their hands dirty with evil. But they will have evil all over themselves.

They really need to spare us these vacuous pseudo-spiritual clichés which mean absolutely nothing. They are not only silly, they are patently false. We are commanded by God to take seriously our responsibilities in this world to be salt and light and to be good citizens, which today includes our duty of voting.

This sham spirituality really helps no one. Indeed, what would these purists tell the Jews being led to the gas chambers? “Sorry, I cannot side with the Allies who want to liberate you because they are not perfect and I refuse to dirty my hands and compromise. I must remain pure at all costs.”

There is a group which Jesus rebuked all the time – they are called the Pharisees. That is exactly what these confused purists remind me of. Whatever else, they must remain “pure” and “untainted” and “uncontaminated”. Now genuine biblical purity is of course an important thing indeed. But this is simply phony, Pharisaical self-righteousness and silliness. (Bill Meuhlenberg)

Old & Young

I have referenced this passage from Roger Scruton before, but have been confronted with the reality of what he is saying so many times in my re-reading of Francis Schaeffer, Chuck Colson and other notable but passed on saints, that it needs to be looked at again:

We have to accept that it is no longer possible to govern young people by the methods that were used to govern and influence the young of my generation. Exhortation, example, the stories of saints and heroes, the life of humility, sacrifice, penitence, and prayer-- all such moral influences have little or no significance for them. And although from time to time they encounter obstacles, and perhaps experience real love, real jealousy, real fear, and real grief, these emotions are not available to them in the regular doses and predictable circumstances in which they were available to us.

SO WHAT SHOULD CONSERVATIVES BE DOING? This is the last of my regular articles for The American Spectator, so let me conclude a happy period of my life with a few observations for future use. Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called anamnesis -- the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness. Our task, in other words, is now less political than cultural -- an education of the sympathies, which requires from us virtues (such as imagination, creativity, and a respect for high culture) that have a diminishing place in the world of politics.

Of course, we should do our best to control the growth of the state and to make it more difficult to depend upon its constant expansion. We should seek, through whatever avenues remain, to rebuild our education system with knowledge rather than “self-esteem” as its product. There are a hundred small-scale ways in which we can help the next generation not to fall completely into the trap that is being prepared for it. But there is no way, I fear, to destroy that trap entirely. For it is built from human ingenuity and baited with our own desires.
 

We are engaged in a war of cultures and the war is being waged not by the usual suspects i.e. Islam (although they are a threat) but it is a war being waged almost invisibly because it is a war of technology. It is a war that Marshall McLuhan addressed in the 1960's when he stated that it is not the content of the new technologies that are the major threat, it is the delivery system itself that is the real danger. "The message is the medium".

The phrase was introduced in his most widely known book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.^[1] McLuhan proposes that a medium itself, not the content it carries, should be the focus of study. He said that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not only by the content delivered over the medium, but also by the characteristics of the medium itself.

 His message has never been more relevant than in the society we are currently shaping for ourselves and until the leaders of our church congregations begin to address and combat these forces, we are doomed to repeat the fate of the Churches in Revelation:

These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands.

² I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. ³ You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

 ⁴ Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. ⁵ Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. ⁶ But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

 ⁷ Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.
 

This war of cultures is impacting on our worldview and our worldview is changing our practice and even what it means to be a Christian. It is a world that has young, seemingly solid Christians entering into the world of fame and fortune and within half a decade emerging to question everything about the classical Christian doctrines.
Why is that?
I believe it is because our children have not been given the real meat of the gospel, the doctrinal true truth's. They are filled up with emotional responses and shallow rhetoric and sent into a world filled with temptations and subterfuge. And this is not restricted to only the young. Are the older congregants chewing on real 'meat'.
Our world is getting tougher and tougher and we are getting weaker and weaker and it is not enough to sit back and expect God to do the work that we have been tasked to do as far back as in Genesis, i.e. the CULTURAL MANDATE shrieks at us from history.

Pessimists at large

This comment by Melanie Phillip's perfectly sums up the 'debate' between the political left and right...i.e. there can be no debate!

"...the left is governed by the Manichean belief that everything not the left is the right; that the left is the embodiment of virtue; and that the right is therefore irredeemably evil."

 

The unfortunate reality of this position is that 'debate' or difference can now only be overcome by power, and the horrible historical reality behind that is; that as soon as power passes from the strangle-hold of the luvvies they go on a rampage and given the perfect storm of negatives, war ensues.

I hope and pray I am wrong but even a cursory review of human history will support such a theory.

Post-Modern schooling

All I can say about this excerpt from Miranda Devine's blog, is; thank goodness I am homeschooling my little fellow.

NOW it’s a thought crime to regard heterosexuality as the norm in human relationships. This is called “heterosexism”, joining racism and sexism as the new no-go zone, and the Proud Schools pilot program rolled out to 12 Sydney and Hunter high schools over the past two terms is aimed at stamping it out.

The program defines “heterosexism” as the practice of “positioning heterosexuality as the norm for human relationship”, according to the Proud Schools Consultation Report. “It involves ignoring, making invisible or discriminating against non-heterosexual people, their relationships and their interests. Heterosexism feeds homophobia.” [See below for the original document]

So there it is. If you think the vast majority of people are attracted to the opposite sex and that heterosexual human relationships are the norm, you are feeding homophobia.
 

The problem with this sort of propaganda is that real homophobia gets lost in the dross.

Check the facts

There are those who call themselves Christian and who vote for abortion. There are those who call themselves Christian and vote for the most corrupted and increasingly oppressive political organisation to rule over Australia in its entire short history. There are even those who support the Green's in Australia and who call themselves Christian. I cannot say who is Christian or who isn't as I cannot see into a person’s heart. God knows there have been behaviours in my past (and no doubt my future) which would cause a thinking person to doubt my claim on Christianity. Some have voiced those doubts and I don't blame them, I have questioned it myself. But to vote for a group of people whose manifesto is irrevocably anti-God and particularly anti-Christian seems to me to belong in the realm of lunacy. Read the Green manifesto and you will see what I mean.

Equally in the United States anybody who can truly believe they live by a Christian worldview and then vote for someone like Barack Obama amazes me. Sure a vote for Romney is most definitely not a vote for a Christian, but there is no subterfuge, he does not claim to be one thing and then act like another. Obama's record is abysmal, but it is consistent with his history for those who are responsible enough to undertake a little research. Read this account; one of many, which indicates the mendacity of the man who would be president...again.

 Phony in Chief By Thomas Sowell When President Barack Obama and others on the left are not busy admonishing the rest of us to be "civil" in our discussions of political issues, they are busy letting loose insults, accusations and smears against those who dare to disagree with them.

Like so many people who have been beaten in a verbal encounter, and who can think of clever things to say the next day, after it is all over, President Obama, after his clear loss in his debate with Mitt Romney, called Governor Romney a "phony."

Innumerable facts, however, show that it is our Commander in Chief who is Phony in Chief. A classic example was his speech to a predominantly black audience at Hampton University on June 5, 2007. That date is important, as we shall see.

New Orleans after hurricane Katrina hit as they had shown for the people of New York after the 9/11 attacks, or the people of Florida after hurricane Andrew hit.

Departing from his prepared remarks, he mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the federal government does.

Senator Obama, as he was then, pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York and Florida because the people there were considered to be "part of the American family." But the people in New Orleans — predominantly black — "they don't care about as much," according to Barack Obama.

If you want to know what community organizers do, this is it — rub people's emotions raw to hype their resentments. And this was Barack Obama in his old community organizer role, a role that should have warned those who thought that he was someone who would bring us together, when he was all too well practiced in the arts of polarizing us apart.



Why is the date of this speech important? Because, less than two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the United States Senate had in fact voted 80-14 to waive the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans, as it had waived that requirement for New York and Florida. More federal money was spent rebuilding New Orleans than was spent in New York after 9/11 and in Florida after hurricane Andrew, combined.

Truth is not a job requirement for a community organizer. Nor can Barack Obama claim that he wasn't present the day of that Senate vote, as he claimed he wasn't there when Jeremiah Wright unleashed his obscene attacks on America from the pulpit of the church that Obama attended for 20 years.

Unlike Jeremiah Wright's church, the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was one of just 14 Senators who voted against — repeat, AGAINST — the legislation which included the waiver.

When he gave that demagogic speech, in a feigned accent and style, it was world class chutzpah and a rhetorical triumph. He truly deserves the title Phony in Chief.

If you know any true believers in Obama, show them the transcript of his June 5, 2007 speech at Hampton University (available from the Federal News Service) and then show them page S6823 of the Congressional Record for May 24, 2007, which lists which Senators voted which way on the waiver of the Stafford Act requirement for New Orleans.

Some people in the media have tried to dismiss this and other revelations of Barack Obama's real character that have belatedly come to light as "old news." But the truth is one thing that never wears out. The Pythagorean Theorem is 2,000 years old, but it can still tell you the distance from home plate to second base (127 ft.) without measuring it. And what happened five years ago can tell a lot about Barack Obama's character — or lack of character.

Obama's true believers may not want to know the truth. But there are millions of other people who have simply projected their own desires for a post-racial America onto Barack Obama. These are the ones who need to be confronted with the truth, before they repeat the mistake they made when they voted four years ago.

PC bollocks

When Hollywood uses its lock on entertainment to disseminate politically correct propaganda is when we the movie goers need to vote with our feet.
Lying, misrepresentation and charlatanism is what defines snake-oil salesmen, and in this vein it appears that the pc chatteratti of Hollywood are little more than carpetbaggers.

Members of the entertainment industry elite, according to Mamet, occupy two entirely distinct moral universes. Celebrities spend most of the waking hours pursuing their own self-interests, looking for “any opportunity to earn more with less expenditure of effort and in more congenial circumstances”. That is to say, they work the free market for all it is worth and yet, as Mamet confesses about his own long-time double standards, rarely question the “tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad”. They crusade for the state to redistribute the wealth of others as they themselves minimize their own taxation and carry on amassing private fortunes

Thank goodness for heavyweights like Clint Eastwood.
I for one will not be seeing this movie.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100182709/hollywood-fracks-up/

Hubris personified

A tragic but I think true reflection on the sad personalities of two prominent Western leaders. It might go some way to explain how and why our civilisation in in the process of tanking.

Gillard's feminine mystique

by Steve Kates

October 10, 2012

---

It is only now, in watching the Prime Minister in her latest episode with Peter Slipper, that it has occurred to me that, when she goes into political battle, she carries with her a magic gender shield so that no matter what anyone says about her policies or incompetence, all she hears is ‘You're useless because you're a woman’. No one actually ever thinks it or certainly ever says it, but that is what she always transmutes every form of criticism into so that nothing is personal, everything is ideological, and the ideology is some antique disdain for women that was already out of date in the 1960s.

---

For someone such as myself, who felt as strongly and positively about Margaret Thatcher as I did about Ronald Reagan, the notion that behind my disgust at the policies of the astonishingly incompetent Prime Minister that Gillard has proven to be are attitudes based on her sex is both insulting and ridiculous. But for her such beliefs are a talisman that psychologically protects her from every criticism, since she never has to take them seriously. To her, they are based on biological facts not on her personal deficiencies and incompetence.
There must be no end of such people in politics. It now strikes me that Obama is of a similar kind, transmuting political criticism into a statement on race. The colour of his skin provides a psychological shield against taking criticisms to heart, since such criticisms are, in his mind, racially based and not on political disagreement.
The question then is what is one to do to convince such people that what is being said about them is unrelated to various existentially biological facts but to their political decisions. And it may turn out that there is nothing that can be done. But if so, it is a warning to us that to elect people such as Gillard or Obama to high office carries the risk that they are incapable of responding to normal political debate since they are incapable of interpreting criticism as based on policy difference unrelated to biology.
They will therefore never respond to the criticisms they receive in the way a person - male or female, black or white - would if they were in a similar position without such beliefs about others. This will, moreover, only affect politicians on the left of the ideological divide since the right has by and largeentirely discarded categorisation by race or gender. They are, in fact, so far outside the normal thought processes of the right that it has become almost impossible to engage in debate with such people. Simply put, we are never quite capable of understanding why they are so resistant to the criticisms we make.
The inflexibility of both Gillard and Obama - over the NBN or boat people here in Australia or over health care and the budget in the US - means they plough on relentlessly in the face of innumerable facts and arguments that demonstrate how wrong such policies are. They don't listen, they are incapable of listening, because they disregard all criticisms as based on dislike of women in the one case or of black people in the other. It is simply not so, but that is how they think because that is what they desperately want to believe

Pass it on

Another worthy Bill Muehlenberg blog.
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/10/05/pro-death-madness/

Sanity in an insane world

Three cheers for the Italians. It seems that the medical practitioners of Italy have overwhelmingly chosen a culture of life over the culture of death. Read this article:
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/italys_conscientious_doctors

I have long wanted to visit Italy because of the wonderful art there. perhaps living there would not be so bad. It seems it is one of the few countries in the Western world that still recognises babies as human beings. Something I am quite sure pleases the big guy.
Look out for an upsurge in Italy's fortunes.

Apostacy in the Church

An Anglican 'priest', Dr. George Armstrong, advances the cause of a one-world religion in New Zealand. Bill Muehlenberg has some scathing things to say about 'wolves amongst the flock'. This is a brief excerpt:

His concluding words are as shocking as any he has uttered: “I can expect a teacup storm to greet ideas like those expressed here. But these ideas will be seen by most readers, many Christians among them, who have persisted in reading this far, as simply the common sense of our age. A United Religions is going to have to catch up with and work alongside a United Nations.”

There you go: one-world religion to match a one-world government. Everything the enemies of biblical Christianity have ever wished for. Destroy any differences and enforce a dumbed-down uniformity of beliefs and practices. Forget the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. Forget the truth claims of Christianity. Forget the many warnings about concentrated power corrupting absolutely.

This guy is just an utterly deluded secular humanist who still wears a collar. He is a wolf who has denied the very heart of biblical Christianity, and has proven that heretics and apostates are running riot in our churches. Why his church allows him to remain, spewing out this poison, is beyond me.
 

The full article can be viewed here:

http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/10/04/yet-another-vicious-wolf/

Post script

With reference to my previous blog this extract further develops my argument:

From the strength of his field experience in Aboriginal Australia, Mexico, India and Sri Lanka, he argued that the Western middle classes who romanticised tribal culture only did so because they had never experienced the real thing. They never understood the appeal of modernity to those locked within tribal cultures:

Whether we are talking about Indian untouchables in Calcutta, or farmers in Thailand, or peasants in Spain, all of these people want to enter the modern world and are usually quite happy to jettison the crippling cultural baggage which holds them back. Instead, the ideological defence of local and backward cultures—the promotion of the doctrine of “my culture, right or wrong”—has overwhelmingly been undertaken by radicalised Western middle-classes, on behalf of an ethnic clientèle which may or may not approve their efforts, driven by a masochistic contempt for their Western heritage, and almost as often for the lands of their birth as well.

......................................................

Roger also wrote a damaging critique of the anthropologists who brought this about. Titled “The Rise of the Anthropologue” (Encounter, December 1986) it argued that while early anthropologists had studied tribal life as disinterested observers, by the 1980s the “anthropologues” had ulterior motives, of either a political or salvationist kind, seeking means of personal redemption or models for their own political or ideological hopes. Above all, they were afflicted with a dreadful piety:

Like that prototypical anthropologue, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, they are driven by a deep emotional necessity to dignify everything in the pre-industrial world. The laughable must be made grave; the repellent must be made somehow endearing; and the downright revolting must be swathed in a language so latinate and extraordinary that it is often hard to know exactly what is going on. Words like sacred, sacral and ritualistic may be called on to produce a vaguely sanctifying effect; and if this is successful, then plain speaking about African tribal life will always seem tasteless, and usually irreverent as well.

The article reserved its most scathing criticisms for the French author Claude Levi-Strauss and his celebrated work The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (trans. 1970). It was a study of myths but, instead of the science of the subtitle, Levi-Strauss disarmingly announced that it too should be regarded as mythology, more like a piece of music, in fact an “overture” to its own “confused and indigestible pages”. Roger observed that this kind of anthropology could all too easily be regarded as little more than “the telling of tales about the tales other people tell”. According to the rules of this game, there could be no such a thing as a false tale; nor could research that was successful be distinguished from research that had failed. Once this was accepted, he said, anthropology became an intellectual disaster zone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome to the future.

Melanie Phillip's touches on a fantasy indulged in by the anti-human-progress-at-any-cost fanatics also known as NIMBY's (not-in-my-back-yard). The fantasy is that all would be so much better if we could go back to a more bucolic period of history. A 'pre-capitalistic' time where we all lived in village communities and enjoyed bartering with one another and ' good,honest work' etc etc...blah blah blah.

But life in the Middle Ages wasn’t a rural idyll of dancing round maypoles, it was marked by ignorance, savagery and terrible poverty and hardship.

The Industrial Revolution, in turn, wasn’t a hell of harsh-faced bosses and oppressed workers, but happened to be the engine of progress and modernity that produced the affluence we all enjoy today.

 The idea that industrialists are heartless tyrants and workers are helpless victims is, frankly, a fantasy that belongs to crude Left-wing agit-prop.  It sits particularly ill with a Britain plagued by irresponsible trades union activity, and where the Mayor of London recently resorted to bribing railway workers to induce them to call off strike action.
...............................................................................................................................................
In today’s Britain, objectivity has given way to emotion. Reality has been replaced by the creative imagination. Truth has been supplanted by wishful thinking. Anyone who dissents from any of these orthodoxies is treated as a pariah.
 

 In truth, those who believe that primitive peoples living in the jungles and undiscovered 'beauty spots' of our world are better off, have never themselves lived such a life and hold an overly romanticised perspective on struggle. These are people who wish to return us to some pre-industrial lifestyle that never existed, and they hope to do it by making the means of modern industrial development, i.e. electricity and fossil fuels, so expensive and so vilified that we cut back to the bare minimum. They postulate that we can replace these methods with 'clean energy', but aside form the idiotic few who actually believe such a fantasy the real 'wide-boys' of this movement have something a lot more sinister at heart.

This is the result of the long march through the institutions, and that was always a quest for power, for domination of the masses by the elite. I agree with Vaclav Havel that the Anthropogenic Global Warming scare is not really about 'sustainable living' as much as it is about who rules.

Lenin's 'useful idiots' who command the organs of communication and entertainment are the megaphones for a new world order and it will not be the idyllic mayflower pole that stands as its symbol.

Think hammer and sickle and what that might mean to your worldview!