Today, some links that have been rattling around in my notes for a while, with some quick thoughts on them.
From the Church of Scotland: “We want to ensure we have the right people in the right places at the right time equipped to deliver God’s work and word.”
My thought: Those who blatantly rebel against God’s Word aren’t going to be the right people….
Another “conviction by statistic” under scrutiny: “Despite no direct evidence linking him to any of the patients….”
My thought: Can we stop destroying lives by convicting people without any direct evidence? If Colin Norris is guilty, Scripture says he should have had the death penalty. But where are the real witnesses, real evidence? People call the Old Testament penal system “barbaric,” but it had real safeguards against false convictions. Barbaric? Imprison someone for 30 years or more without any real evidence. That’s barbarism.
My thought: I understand what they are trying to say. But that name…. Irreverent? (worship is supposed to be about God, not about us) Arrogant? (other people aren’t worshipping?) Just trying to be too clever/cute? Maybe it is just me, but this rings lots of bells with me, and they are all the wrong ones.
Calling for tightening accessibility to Internet porn: “There is enough evidence to suggest that if we can put more barriers towards guys getting to child abuse images, fewer of them will do it and more children will be safe.”
My thought: Wow! A government official who isn’t brain dead! How many sex crimes and murdered children will we have before people wake up to the fact that easy access to sexually charged visual images is not necessarily a good idea?
It’s not just the Internet, though: “I think it has reached a point where we need to detox our High Streets, and make Britain a family-friendly country again.” “It’s time to tackle raunchy pop videos, and huge billboards featuring sexualised images of women, she said.”
My thought: Yes, yes, and yes. My second thought: Diane Abbott, why didn’t you actually influence policy when your party was in power and pushing the hyper-sexualisation and moral trashing of Britain? But I’m glad you are saying it now, anyway, since the current government has been no better. I hope everyone reads her comments.
Drinkers aren’t telling the truth about how much they drink: “Experts said much alcohol use went unreported, partly because drinkers did not admit or keep track of how much they consumed.”
My thought: Maybe University College London should research something that everyone doesn’t already know the answer. My second thought: Alcohol abuse may be the single biggest cause of poverty, unemployment, family breakdown, NHS overspending, crime, depression, and probably a host of other social ills. We don’t even know who is consuming half the stuff. A sane society would try to reduce its use, not encourage it. Responsible press and entertainers would stigmatise it rather than glorify it. But “responsible press and entertainers” is apparently an oxymoron.
Tax system bias against stay-home mums: “The tax system should be at the very least neutral between full-time mothers and working ones.”
My thought: It almost certainly won’t happen. The powers-that-be will not implement policies that encourage mums to stay home and actually direct the raising of their children. They are too busy glorifying aberrational “families.”
Mind Renewers 
Good thoughts all, Brother Jon, and thank you.
To your last, I would add that modern governments do all in their power to usurp and assume parental authority over our progeny, seeking to shape them toward godless societal ends. God’s people must recognize first His mandate of the responsibilities of father, mother, and church toward the training up of children, then the subtle devices of God’s enemies in attempting to undermine the divine design.
Well stated, Brother Al. All political parties here are controlled by statists, those who view the family as theirs to control, children as belonging to the state. They don’t want to encourage parents to increase their commitment to training their own children.
Regarding “Drinkers aren’t telling the truth about how much they drink: “Experts said much alcohol use went unreported, partly because drinkers did not admit or keep track of how much they consumed.”
My wife recently lost 30 pounds. She found she didn’t know how much she ate unless she tracked it and that was part of what helped her lose weight. It was also eye opening for my mother who thought she was eating sparsely but then seeing my wife measure, realized she ate 2x to 3x as much as she thought! I see this also with my kids and video games or TV, you don’t track what you enjoy, and so you minimize how much of it you got.
It’s natural, isn’t it? Undoubtedly some of it is simply that people don’t track what they enjoy. It’s like keeping track of where your time goes, or where you spend money, it can be a real eye-opener.
In this case, there will certainly be two other factors at play. Because there is a stigma to overdrinking, many who know they drink too much will under-report. They will say that they don’t drink that much (knowing that it isn’t really true), and the estimate that they give will be on the low side.
Secondly, for many it is an addiction, and they will under-estimate their usage because they honestly don’t remember how much they’ve consumed. But it isn’t just that they enjoy it, they are addicted, and they are often not even sober enough by the end of an evening of drinking to be able to keep track of how much they’ve consumed.
I’d like to echo what Sean has said, Jon. In management, there is a saying, “If you don’t measure it, you don’t manage it.” This is true, and estimates are misleading because you wildly misrepresent how much time/effort/money is in something that you have not measured.
I would go further than Al, above and say that if the state did not provide as it does for single mothers, then there would be fewer women having children out of marriage. Society does need to take care of those single mothers who are in that position through no fault of their own, like widows, but for those who have children outside marriage or frivolously divorce their spouses, and something in the region of 2/3 of all divorces are started by the (ex-)wife, there should be some means of ensuring that the law of cause and effect comes into play. But that would cause a furore with feminists and I can see politicians backing away from that. To look forward to your posting on Acts, we need to follow the money.
Which brings me to the comments of Diane Abbott, and more generally to politicians. To win in politics, many politicians try to give the impression that their party has a monopoly on good and the opposition has a monopoly on evil. Only in exceptional cases, e.g. Frank Field MP, does a government ask an opposition politician to work with it constructively. In the USA, Barak Obama is being criticised, amongst other things, for saying he wanted cross party agreement on many things and then pursuing goals and using methods which were divisive.
Hello, Fred. Good comments.
Part of the rejection of God has been the attempt to remove any negative consequences of disobeying God’s clear commands. The negative consequences can’t be removed, of course. Attempts to remove them can bring even worse consequences, such as convincing people that it is ok to kill unwanted babies.
Alternatively, some of the negative consequences can be carried by others (usually those who pay taxes). That’s what we have with single mothers. In the attempt to remove the negative consequences of immorality, we’ve transferred some of the financial costs to other people. The costs are still there. We’ve transferred more and more of those costs until there is financial incentive to commit immorality, and thus we’ve gone from trying to reduce negative consequences to actively encouraging.
If we didn’t guarantee a home for every teenager who gets pregnant, we’d solve a lot of problems.
Something is wrong when the wife and children of a man killed in a tragic accident have no better social net than a teenager with her second baby by two different men by the age of 19.
Rewind the tape a bit. Colin Norris is an innocent man in prison. He was convicted without any direct evidence by a jury (11-1) who were misled by “experts”. The experts have now been proved to be wrong in what they believed. Colin needs to be freed, so see “Jury in the Dark” on Youtube.
Hello, Richard. As I’ve said above, we shouldn’t be convicting people without any real evidence. I’ve not looked at the Youtube link, but clearly, when no one saw Colin do anything wrong, and there is no direct evidence that he did anything wrong, he should not be in prison.