Aslan A Representation of Muhammad?

Aslan is the lion symbolising Jesus in the fictitious land of Narnia from a series of children's books written by C.S. Lewis called "The Chronicles Of Narnia. The symbolism is clear and unmistakable.

Liam Neeson, the voice for Aslan in the Narnia movies, however has been quoted as saying that "Aslan symbolises a Christ-like figure but he also symbolizes for me Muhammad...". As if any more proof was needed that good acting does not equate to good theology.

In Neeson's world I'm sure that's how he sees it, and he is perfectly within his right to make for himself any crutch he feels necessary to make sense of his life. Interestingly however, by doing this Neeson reveals that he lives his life in a world more fictitious than that of the talking lion for whom he provides the voice, for Lewis was not silent in this series on Islam.

Who could read "A Horse And His Boy" and not make the connections between the Calamarines and Islam, Tisrok and Mahammad, and Tash and Allah? Interestingly, Lewis almost prophetically anticipates Neeson's sentiments in his concluding book in the series. In "The Last Battle" A deceptive coup takes place in the land of Narnia while the King is away. The would-be new king, an Ape named Shift, is claiming that he is the new chosen spokes"man" for Aslan, and he claims that Alsan has decreed that he and the Tash are One; that in fact the Calamarines and the Narnians have always served the same deity. Much like Neeson in real life, many of the creatures of Narnia believe this and begin to commit abominations against Aslan. Shift, who in reality has no regard for Aslan but only wants to co-opt his authority to create for himself a life of ease, has no problem publicly making these universal and blasphemous claims. The Calamrines on the other hand are clearly not willing to blaspheme their Tash by speaking their agreement out loud in so many words. They simply play along seeing this as an opportunity to infiltrate and subdue Narnia.

While Neeson sees himself as a Catholic, i.e., Christian, but is yet willing to see Aslan as also symbolic of Muhammad, true to form with relativistic Christians, he forgets one important fact. Aslan was murdered. In fact he willingly gave himself over to be murdered. For the Muslim this is an untenable and blasphemous symbolism. They are not willing to join Neeson and his liberal band of brothers in their fantasy land; especially if it means the death of their profit, symbolic or otherwise.

So we clearly have a case here where the fictitious story of Narnia with its Christian symbolism is more real than the Utopian paradise created in the minds of liberal Christians.

The Run Away Skier's Dilemma

This dilemma draws its name from the amateur snow skier building speed down the slope with no idea how to stop. He is faced with two bad choices: go ahead and incur the lesser damages of a more controlled crash now, or attempt to postpone the inevitable until all control is lost at a much greater speed.

I coined this dilemma years ago due to some circumstances that then surrounded my life and it has served as a pretty good analogy since. I can't help but think of it now as I look at America's (and Europe's) fiscal woes. Anyone willing to look at the run-away debt, while also daring to take in the steepening grade of looming unfunded Utopian promises of security for all, should be able to relate to this dilemma. As with the skier, the opportunity for choosing the best and least painful choice is running out. Like the skier the natural urge is to forestall the inevitable; to lie to ourselves. This will take place by the suggestion that we can avoid pain by printing money and taxing. But we know this not to be true. Governments' consumption of money are like the grave taking in the dead, or oceans taking in rivers, or fire's consumption of wood. They are never satisfied; they never say that's enough. Such a tact will only ultimately have the effect of deception and increasing our "speed" causing the pain and suffering to be worse when we fall. The best choice is obvious to the sensible: cut spending now.

As we watch the skier barreling out of control down the icy slope, it is easy for us to know what is his best and most sensible choice. But this is not how the true tests of sensibility are presented. It is our circumstances with which we are faced, and within which we must prove ourselves sensible, not someone else's. The bottom line for us at this point of out-of-control taxing/borrowing/printing and spending is that we have accumulated too much speed for a painless resolution. The only question left for us at this point is are we a sensible people? Time will tell; and the next two years of enduring an all out 24/7 attack add posing as "news" will reveal much of that telling.

Unconsidered Luxuries

Americans enjoy many luxuries; this is true, but what kind of luxuries are they? When we hear that word, luxury, we generally think of something generated by material wealth, like big houses, boats, and cars.  But I contend that we take for granted luxuries that have nothing to do with wealth. Consider a few of them:

1. Not having to bother to vote.
2. The ability to abandon a wife or husband with ease.
3. The security, real or imagined, that comes from the government's bottomless bucket of deficit spending and social programs.
4. To live and conduct our affairs, official and personal, as if there were no God.
5. The ability to craft a God that aligns him/her self as with our desires.
6. The denial of absolute morality.
7. The conflation of compassion to an occasional trip to the ballot box to cast a vote for the politician who promises to give more of your neighbor's stuff to the poor .
8. An education system that trashes it's own country, including the tax payers who are footing its enormous and bloated bill.
9. Unlimited and anonymous access to any pornography the wicked mind can conceive of.
10. Promiscuity without the consequence of shame.
11. Ignorance of the Constitution.
12. The denial of the existence of borders.
13. Ignorance of history.
14. Pacifism without fear of harm.
15. No-expense-too-high-for-someone-else-to-pay environmentalism.
16. The ability to borrow seemingly endless amounts of cash from those who can't refuse... the unborn.
17. The pretension that evil doesn't exist.
18. The belief that this world could be perfect, and will be some day once the right people are in charge and have unlimited power.

Of course, there are costs for these luxuries, including material costs, that eventually come due and must be paid... one way or the other. There are also many ways the reaper may reap his due, paid in ways that are unassociated with materal "wealth". Here are just a few examples:

Opportunity-- Commerce depends on morality. You expect that whatever it is that you've exchanged your wealth for will operate, perform of be whatever you were told. As morality increases, trust decreases. As trust decreases, the ability to do business becomes more cumbersome. And, as the ability of business becomes more cumbersome, it not only becomes more expensive. And by business I don't mean large corporations. No, I mean you making a simple purchase.

Government Solvency--Our governing bodies at every level are bankrupt. We have thus far enjoyed the luxury of passing off the trial of compassion to government. But people in the governments are not interested in compassion. What they are interested in is keeping their jobs and foisting the cost of their "new" ideas and social experiments gone bad onto a yet born generation. But these governments are now on a collision course with reality. The payday for these promises of security is now looming large. Still, any attempt to make a course correction or to apply a little common sense are met with howls from the sedated populace as we discover that masses of people have become compassionees.

Unraveling of Society--Single parent families, for one, are taking their toll on the social fabric. Social institutions that once provided a nurturing environment for offspring that would be productive members of society have been impugned and dismantled. Now, any insinuation that out of wedlock births, or behavior that leads to them, is a moral issue are met with contempt and the offered solution of killing the child. Suggestions of real solutions are called extremism.  You can't impose your morality on others we are told. But still, morality is imposed, by way of payroll deductions as financial payments are made to fund some of the luxuries listed above.

There is also the luxury of expectation. We now have an expectation of these luxuries as a given, like the air we breath, along with the luxury of prosperity.

This brings me to the last luxury worth mentioning. This luxury will be ever persistent; exacting payment long after the other luxuries have been paid for and are collecting dust on the shelf of fading memories. And that luxury is self-delusion.

Some Thoughts On Beauty

I spend a fair amount of time contemplating beauty. What is it? Why does it draw us and bring us joy? One fruit of this contemplation is the belief that beauty is not in the eyes of the beholder, even though we don't always behold the beauty that is there. The onset of relativism has tried to teach us the opposite. Yet we instinctively know that true beauty IS. Beauty is not relative, even though much of modern art screams in our faces with its ugliness that it is. Interestingly, those screams seem to be in symphony with the "no God" proclamations.

Following are three videos that depict beauty in a unique way known as a flash-mob. Performers are incognito in crowds and present themselves much to the surprise and astonishment of patrons.

The first video ends with a woman wiping tears from her eyes. My sentiments exactly.

The third, and my favorite, has the Philadelphia Opera singing the words "He [Jesus] will reign-forever, forever, forever... King of Kings... Lord of Lords... forever, forever, forever" in Macys. More tears, especially at the conclusion. Judging from the delighted faces, there appears to be a sense of Joy and peace filling the mall. It is spectacular, beautiful and wonderful; mainly I think because of the expressions on the faces of those watching. Ohhh how I wish I had been!!!!

Enjoy



In Antwerp Station Belgium






This one Hat Tip Neil at Eternity Matters.

The End Of The Road Of Envy

Heather from The Narrow Gate left this comment on my last post concerning the election:

"On the other hand, the exposed root of "leftism" may now be obvious enough to have shaken some out of the virtual coma..."

My hope is that the last two years will have indeed pulled the curtain back and put on display for all to see, not only the connection between the leftist governing "isms" of socialism, statism and communism, and the Democratic party, but more importantly the connection between the Democratic Party, and its Anti-Christ roots in laws and policies.

But when I look at the states that have already been lost to the abyss of envy such as California and Michigan, there is some thinking that seems to prevail over the obvious problems with their current track. That thought can be expressed in one simple statement:

"Better is it for all to be twice as poor than I be half as rich as my neighbor."

STOP!!! or SLOW DOWN!!!?

It's a good rule of thumb, I think anyway, when everything you are doing only makes the situation worse... just STOP! This coming Tuesday America will, Lord willing, be doing just that. Still, we can only hope that our message will not bear itself out in the final analysis to only being "SLOW DOWN!!!". My hope is that it will be the first installment of "TURN AROUND!!!". If it is to be the latter of the two, then decades of persistent fervor like we've seen this election will have to be the mainstay. The luxury of living our lives paying scant attention to scheming socialists posing as America loving politicians has gone the way of a robust economy, hope, and decency. Does America have the stomach for it? Do those who breath today's air have the will to protect from the ravages of their demands for security those whom have yet to take a breath? The answer to that question will not be decided Tuesday, or in 2012 for that matter. It will be ongoing in answer as it has been. Man has always possessed the desire that others do his will, and liberty. The coming decade will perhaps give way to more insight into which of these two desires is the stronger, but if history has anything to say about it, even recent history, my pessimistic guess is that the message of this election will ultimately be "slow down, you move to fast". Time will tell.

Is Man Basically Good?

Is man basically good? If he were then:

1. Gun control laws would work, but would be unnecessary.


2. Welfare would work, but would be unnecessary.


3. Socialism would be the norm, and it would work.


4. Separated governmental powers would be pointless.


5. The military would be unnecessary.


6. The IRS would be unnecessary.


7. Deficits would be nonexistent.


8. Unions would be unnecessary and nonexistent.


9. A large police force would be unnecessary.


10. The religion of Environmentalism would be unnecessary.


11. Criminal rehabilitation would be unnecessary, but if it were necessary, it would work.


12. Government would only consume a pittance of man's productivity, for it would be cheap; perhaps as cheap as the price of a benevolent dictator and his staff who would earn no more than their fellow man.


13. Genocide, mass murder, the holocausts, and terrorism would be meaningless words.


14. Democrat party policies would, for the most part, be good policies.


15. He would be living in Utopia.

In fact, if man were basically good, he could not be deceived into believing that his current existence, complete with crime, scandal, oppression, deceit, prisons and big government to control his fellow human beings, is the result of the cumulative results of billions of other beings who are basically good.

Juan Williams

Here is a Victor Davis Hanson article that I think does a wonderful job of laying out the blatant hypocrisy in the firing of Juan Williams. Here are its points:

1. for NPR to prove that it is even-handed in censuring controversial speech it would long ago have had to fire reporter Nina Totenberg for a long history of venomous partisan slurs (e.g., hoping Sen. Jesse Helms and his grandkids might contract AIDS).
2. NPR CEO Vivian Schiller herself slanders Williams by suggesting that he talk with “his psychiatrist”—
3. intolerant hard-driving Fox News has no problem with liberal Williams working for NPR; Fox knows its viewers don’t care whether liberal Williams works at a liberal network; NPR fears mightily that its intolerant audience can’t stand anyone who is associated with Fox?
4. CAIR, the Islamic advocacy group, pressures NPR on Williams’s remarks, but gives a lifetime career achievement award to the anti-Semite Helen Thomas, who calls for the destruction of Israel by having the Jews “get the hell out of Palestine”
5. Note the silence of the NAACP, which is usually the first to speak out when some African-Americans are deemed railroaded. By its present vote here, the organization simply gives a green light to go after African-Americans tagged not entirely liberal
6. They apparently believe that society is inherently reactionary (family, church, community, government, etc.) and so they are not biased by openly advocating liberal positions as “balance.”

Hat Tip Geeeeez

Epithets Galore

The proverbial cow being birthed in the halls of academia and the media elite over the German Chancellor's words "multiculturalism has failed, has utterly failed" will undoubtedly unleash an increased spewing of epithets. Not the epithets that we are use to seeing swished away by the tail of the mama cow of political correctness mind you. No, I'm talking about the epithets that are as necessary to the survival of this cow as the hate that courses her udders is to the intelligentsia and their clone wannabes that suck there. These epithets are aimed at mostly middle-class conservatives, the most popular of which is either "bigot"--a favorite-- or some other word with the suffix "phobe" attached.

The sad thing about this however is that the PC crowd was at one time correct in their disdain for epithets. This correctness was once drawn from plain old civility, respect, and the deference to human dignity. I guess there is a price to pay for relegating all of humanity to the meaninglessness of pond scum, even if the ones relegating refuse to see themselves, and their corralled ideas, in that light.

Soldiers develop inhuman names for their enemies so that it is easier to kill them. Similarly, the epithets being hurled from on high today make it easier to ignore dissent. These epithets keep opposing ideas and those who hold them pigeonholed as immoral; the ever changing morality of which is drawn from some vacuum somewhere that evidently only the "intelligent" can tap. Better to pigeonhole, I guess, than to defend your argument, or to condescend to the light of critique and reason, or worse yet, to humbly consider the possibility of being wrong.

Things never change, it seems, no matter how smart we are or how much we think we know. Man is ever repeating his errors and proving the wickedness of his heart. What an amazing sight here though: to watch the closed minded who claim to be the most open minded among the peoples; the self-righteous loathers of the self-righteous; the ideologue detesting doctrinaires, glaringly morph into the very thing they so hate.

The Porn Nation

Northfield Publishing, Chicag0 IL, 2008


America is no longer a nation within which pornography is a seedy industry relegated to the back streets of her cities. It is not even a nation within which pornography is a peripheral kind of entertainment, available for those who want to occasionally stop and take a peek. No, in the words of Michael Leahy (lay- hee), America, is a Porn Nation.

This book is a quick read and well worth a few hours of investment, especially for parents and pastors. It is divided into three parts.

Part-One is basically a brief auto-biography of Leahy's life. He sets the stage in early childhood and then discusses his fist exposure to porn as he was shown a topless woman on the back of a playing card by some peers in his Christian school. He continues his story as it relates to pornography and his increasingly promiscuous lifestyle as he descends, and then spirals out of control. This part of the book reads like a gripping novel that ends in sorrow as Leahy finally looses his family. But it really doesn't end there. Part one sets the table for part two and three before he completes his story at the end.

Part-Two proves to be the meat of the book. Leahy begins this part with a chapter entitled "The Perfect Storm". Here Leahy describes three societal storm fronts of pornographic deprivation now converging on America. They are: The Hypersexual Media, Enabling Technologies, and Sociosexual Pathologies. Leahy looks at the convergence of these three fronts as the desensitizing effects of pornography take an increasing toll on the hearts and minds of society.

To understand Leahy's forecasts, it helps to understand his definition of pornography which is anything that is intended to arouse. Although Leahy's threshold for pornographic is different than current cultural standards, Leahy makes the case that this difference is not based on an objective line, but rather is evidence of a culture's deteriorating standards. This is most evident in TV programing designed to sell advertising, and in advertising itself. The result is an increasingly sexualized society which paves the way for another more insidious threat that has crept in.

To be sure, while the old-line pornography industry, with its seedy venues and residual stigmas, does still exist. This older image of the industry also aids the new industry by creating in the minds of most the illusion that it remains a "dirty old man" kind of business located down town. Yet, the new and real marketplace for the this thriving trade has become the home. It is in this marketplace that Leahy's three "A's" of affordability, availability, and anonymity are made available via the Internet and open the door wide for millions who would have otherwise not entered this world. Gone are the once stifling barriers that kept pornography on the back streets of its cities and out of the lives of families. Here, under the surface and neatly out of sight is a literal flood that has bypassed old barriers and washed away established concepts of decency. This kind of radical change necessarily promises multiplied future ramifications as a sex soaked society, increasingly pathological in its ideas of normal sexual behavior, brings up its next generation. While, to Leahy's credit, he attempts to not be the "alarmist", he does wonder what such consequences of our current path will ultimately be.

Leahy considers himself an icon for sexual addictions who speaks on college campuses across America giving talks as well as participating in formal debates with Ron Jeramey, a porn star. This interaction gives him insight into the sexual attitudes of that next generation, a generation he calls "generation sex". It is in this lot that he is exposed to the cutting edge of new ideas about sex, and where he finds what he calls the "New Pornographers". These new pornographers are young people, even minors, who understand all to well how to use the new and inexpensive technologies and networking readily available to them for the production, consumption and distribution of their own pornography for their own use. Tyler Clementi is a recent example of these new technologies. Clementi earned national attention recently when he jumped off the George Washington Bridge after a film of him having sex in his dorm room was posted to Facebook. Interestingly, unlike the old pornographers who produced their smut for profit, these new pornographers are motivated by other reasons such as celebrity status in their peer groups, or just getting noticed. With the old barriers of modesty, cultural mores, and inhibitions destroyed, the clouds seem to be gathering.

Leahy interweaves statistics into this part to demonstrate the seemingly exponential changing of trends in our attitudes toward sexuality so far. There are adequate references for anyone interested in further research.

The first half of Part-Three is dedicated to those who are themselves addicted to pornography. Working from the credibility he has gained by his own recovery path, he offers a strategy to others. He starts by pointing out the necessity, first and foremost, of being honest with self and admonishes the addict to not straddle fences. It is better, he says, to do nothing rather than to attempt to live the lie that is preventing wellness. For Leahy, he fought desperately to have his addiction and his family too, but it was ultimately the loosing of his family, and his serious contemplations of suicide that followed that finally caused him to "choose life" and to, in his words, "get well". It was in his attempts to write a suicide note to his two boys that Leahy made this choice. Leahy points out also that in the recovery process, accountability within a twelve-step program are of prime importance. He analyzes several twelve-step approaches and makes some recommendations.

The last half of this part, is however dedicated to pointing out a life available beyond "the program". As with all such addiction programs, he admits that the program itself can simply take the place of the addiction. He points the reader ultimately to Jesus Christ for a life that extends beyond "recovery" and to abundance. The book concludes with the completion of his biography and his ultimate reconciliation with those he hurt.

My Thoughts

When I purchased this book I was expecting an analysis of America's porn problem. While part two does focus on this, I ultimately got way more than I bargained for. Leahy's story is compelling as he quickly draws you into his own world of sexual addition. I found myself on the verge of tears a couple of times as his story meandered through the book. Unlike most non-fiction books, this style added an element of entertainment (for lack of a better word) that makes it a page turner. It is able to hold the attention of those not normally drawn to non-fiction, as the reader joins Leahy in his journey to redemption and reconciliation. This book, I feel, will give readers insight into the new world being inherited by their children as well as into the temptations and trials that plague most people to some degree living in a sensual society. For a hosts of reasons such as denial, desensitization, naivete, repulsion, embarrassment or shame--to name a few--the right people don't seem to be talking much about this new and intrinsic detrimental element that is upon us in our new nation; our porn nation.