Republicans Polled and Rolled Again:"Browbeaten by the polls and a pro-Obama press, the House of Representatives Thursday caved in to the White House on the payroll tax 'cut.' Result: cash for pizza now — and smaller Social Security checks later."

Principles of science such as cause and effect may war against the private spiritualities of orthodox secularlists and greedy politicians (who pretend to create money out of nothing), but they are right at home in the reality-oriented information given in the events of Christmas No. 1.

That is to say: 

Cause and effect has little to do with modern-day religion, private spiritualities, personal ethics, Eric Hoffer’s “true believer,” varieties of religious experience, or with assorted “people of faith.”

Let us also not discriminate against orthodox secularists and naturalistic scientists who create their own private truths and valued feelings in an effort to cope as humans with an otherwise unbearable life.

The standard line these days is that questions directed to these private realms are considered impolite, out of bounds, and over the line.

Presidential candidates get to pass “Go” and collect votes if they promise their faith really is just theirs -- that is, something merely private and inward, not public and not applicable to policy.

The Creator, and the information he communicates about life in the world, is permitted to inspire during devotions inside closets or during limited times of public tragedy, but he shall have no substantive impact on public life, foreign policy, and so on.  

In contrast to a retreat into subjectivity, the Biblical mentality, including the world-altering events that launched Christmas in the first place, has much to do with the natural order.

The Bible knows that messages and songs and other intellectual and aesthetic content come not out of nothing.

Roman edicts are the creations of Roman Caesars, inns too full are the effects of a finite number of rooms plus many travelers hitting the road at the same time.

First-century people did not have electricity, but they knew night skies are not illuminated to reveal familiar daytime geography without a cause of light.

What is given in the Bible is a framework for distinguishing between campfires and angels, both of which are natural phenomena in a cosmos that is the product of a living Creator.

But both of which are also supernatural in a cosmos that is reduced, as some theorize, to particles cold and unaccounted for, arranged without reason in greater or lesser degrees of complexity. 

Joseph and Mary knew where baby humans come from, how they are conceived, and how they arrive.

“There is one thing often said about our ancestors which we must not say,” C.S. Lewis writes in his essay “Miracles,” in God in the Dock.

“We must not say ‘They believed in miracles because they did not know the Laws of Nature.’ This is nonsense.”

Why? Because “when St. Joseph discovered that his bride was pregnant, he was ‘minded to put her away’. He knew enough biology for that. Otherwise, of course, he would not have regarded pregnancy as a proof of infidelity.”

Mary and Joseph had questions that speak to this issue of cause and effect.

How could she be pregnant without physical relations with a man? Should Joseph reconsider marriage since knowledge of the natural order indicates Mary is not the virgin she claims to be?

They received answers that are reasonable in light of information from a Creator who has within himself the power of being and is free to act into history, just as human beings are empowered to act as well.

In effect, the God of Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and David says he will again act into human history, into what after all is his cosmos, to bring about a physical change in the living, physical environment he created in the first place.

Though she is not married, and although people will talk, Mary is asked by God whether she would like to be the virgin mother of the Messiah (see Luke 1:26ff).

For his part Joseph is asked, in effect: “Do you take this virgin with child as your lawfully wedded wife, seeing as I have used my power to create to conceive a baby in her womb?”

Joseph also knew eyebrows would be raised, but he agreed to move forward (see Matt. 1:18ff). Mary showed herself to be a woman of strength who by her choices maintained her dignity.

The above is excerpted from my "Christmas Spirit in Space and Time." Additional excerpts are forthcoming during this Christmas season. If you'd like to read ahead, go here.

Catherine Herridge reports at Foxnews.com:

In a textbook for 10th-graders, printed for the 2010-2011 academic year, al-Ahmed said teenagers are taught barbaric practices.

“They show students how to cut (the) hand and the feet of a thief,” he said.

In another textbook, for ninth-graders, the students are taught the annihilation of the Jewish people is imperative.

One text reads in part: “The hour (of judgment) will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. . . .  There is a Jew behind me come and kill him."

Have you considered that one of the charming things about Christmas is the way it confronts cults of faith, secularism, religion, and politics? Thus:

In contrast to pagan, religious, media, and secular stereotypes, Christmas is about real people living and working in a real world.

The inaugurating events of Christmas occur in and around Bethlehem of Judea. They concern watchful shepherds, pregnant women, and surprised husbands.

All are flesh-and-blood people. All are individuals who think, act, wonder, emote, and make choices in situations of life that are less than ideal.

In the foreground of Luke 2:20 are shepherds. They are persons who work, can be frightened by sudden events, are curious, and are willing to check out things for themselves.

They are not identified as “believers.”

Rather, they are choosing beings who process information and labor outdoors in the fields day and night in all sorts of weather. They do not live six feet off the ground, tip-toeing through life on a cushion of holy air, protected by a nice God from the ups and downs of existence in a broken world.

They face predators and thieves, living and dying. They search for stray lambs, and they respond appropriately to unexpected beings who go bump in the night.

Critical Distance
In their work, the shepherds keep a protective physical distance between flock and predator, whether man or animal.

In their humanity as creatures made in the image of God, they keep a protective critical distance between well-grounded information about God and new but untested messages from angelic beings who show up without so much as a knock at the door.

The events of the Nativity concern God, man, angels, and words of salvation, but it is a mistake to conceive of them as “religious.”

Quite unlike “faith” in a progressively fragmented world today, the data about the birth of Christ in the Christmas of history is about a tangible world and knowable events in an objective universe of space and time, cause and effect.

It is about hopes and dreams connected to geography, dirt, history, and fields, not private imaginations and imperishable souls being released from the dark confines of matter in an escape to Mt. Olympus and the comforting arms of gods made in the image of Greek mortals.

Identifiable places matter when you’re talking about a living God who has decided to act into human history.

The Creator of matter respects the space located between the ears of human beings and knows the human brain is more than so many pounds of meat atop a set of shoulders.

Rejected here are politically correct beliefs about the brain as a product mysteriously organized by chance (or by unaccounted-for “law”) to achieve a savage but temporary survival of the strong over the weak in a meaningless, dying universe.

Instead, we have in the Biblical data a regard for persons as thinking individuals of great intrinsic dignity; they are not regarded as easily unpluggable though complex machines that process bits of information.

The Creator expects shepherds and carpenters, students and rabbis, prostitutes and tax collectors to concentrate their minds and to think freely about facts and evidence in a search for wisdom that may challenge current understandings.

The shepherds occupy an external, orderly world that provides a stable context in which ideas can be communicated and truth-claims checked for their veracity.

In contrast to mythology about warfare between science and the Creator, the Biblical worldview affirms matter as good and orderly and provides a foundation for the scientific enterprise, as Nancy Pearcey discusses in her article "Christianity Is a Science-Starter, Not a Science-Stopper."

The Biblical framework also gives a basis to resist cults of religion, politics, or holiday sales. It challenges the imposition of any pious imagination, activist agenda, or news broadcast that refuses to subject theory to fact.

The Christmas of history operates in this kind of earthy framework. It is good, wholistic news for a splintered, fragmented world that can no longer complete the circle.

That good news doesn’t make life easy, as a pregnant woman who traveled by donkey some 90 miles from Nazareth to Bethlehem might be able to tell you.

The events of Luke 2 show a respect for time. The action occurs at night, those hours of the 24-hour day between the setting and the rising of the sun. At a particular moment in the history of a particular night, darkness was pushed back by light.

The content delivered by angels required a quantifiable number of moments to communicate, as did the shepherds’ trip into Bethlehem, as did their return, as did the trip of a mom to Bethlehem, as well as the passage of a baby through a birth canal.

The long-promised flesh-and-blood child was placed in a manger at a particular moment of world history.

Quirinius was governing in Syria, Caesar Augustus was emperor of Rome. He had been the leading power in the empire since 31 B.C. when he defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. All was made official in 27 B.C. when Augustus became Rome’s first emperor.

The above is excerpted from my "Christmas Spirit in Space and Time." Additional excerpts will be forthcoming during this Christmas season, but if you want to read and think ahead, go here.

Chad Groening reports at OneNewsNow:

A pro-family activist contends that if Mitt Romney wins the GOP presidential nomination, it would be a serious hit to those working to stop the government's "normalization" of the homosexual lifestyle.

In Fox News Channel's recent GOP debate, the final one before Iowa's January 3 caucuses, Mitt Romney said he has always been a supporter of "gay" rights.

Those who support "gay" "rights" are also by implication supporting a radical philosophy of government that is the antithesis of the American and human mainstream. 

The American mainstream is rooted in the concept of unalienable rights from a real Creator, but homosexual "rights" are merely creations of extremist interest groups and activists who reject the Creator and his liberating norms for family life and human relations.

A bunch of religious god-talk or relativistic secularist piety about "tolerance" does not change this fact. They speak of love but despise the God of love. That's a sale job that free-thinkers need to resist.

The human mainstream affirms the holistic unity of mind, body, and spirit, but the radical homosexual agenda rejects this in favor of a fragmented self, where "gender," ethical norms, and family structure are all reduced to "social constructs."

If you are into a centralized power establishment imposing upon Americans its private, secularized feelings and values, then the homosexualist movement is for you.

But do not think you are advocating life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of brokenness is not the pursuit of "happiness," even if you get everything you want and even if you have a thousand Obamas or Romneys preaching that false gospel from every rooftop or bathhouse.

But if you are for freedom under God and his liberating norms and unalienable rights, then the Republican field offers other candidates who appreciate and respect what is both the American and human mainstream. 

If you want freedom, it's probably a good idea to follow the rules for freedom. 

A few thoughts on the meaning of Christmas as a fact of life:

The joyous Christmas season has become increasingly secular, religious, and fragmented, helping make the most wonderful time of the year perhaps also the most manipulative.

We celebrate, and that is good, even healing. And given the hectic pace of life in America, there is much to admire in our ability to rise to the occasion of Christmas festivity every December.

But on a deeper level, the awe and cheer that attend a Holy Night and a Christmas Day seem more than ever to rest upon cultural understandings weak and eroding.

Consider how fact today is alienated from meaning, “faith” from life, spirit from matter, and wonder from the real things of life in a searching, troubled world.

The optimism of a new beginning in a New Year fades when we lose touch with secure points of reference by which to measure hope and find comfort in progress.

Power elites employ malleable symbols of religion and politics to manipulate money and masses towards results that overturn the original content of words and action rooted in history.

There is a remedy for this, and it is found in the humane and concrete realities of the events that started it all some 2,000 years ago.

What follows is a kind of Christmas and New Year’s debriefing related to information given in Luke 2, where familiar but revolutionary words await: “And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them” (Luke 2:20).  

What Luke gives us is part of a narrative that has comforted many millions of people around the world and throughout history.

And yet, in this passage is no mere comfort. For in it is a cosmos of light and humanity that challenges settled expectations about what many regard as normal life in enlightened society.

The above is excerpted from my "Christmas Spirit in Space and Time." I plan to provide additional excerpts during this Christmas Season, but if you want to read and think ahead, go here.

Ben Johnson writes at LifeSiteNews.com:

It looks like a cross between a genuflection and Rodin’s “The Thinker.” The characteristic kneel Tim Tebow makes to thank God after a big play has become a worldwide phenomenon, creating a new craze and stirring controversy over the role of religion in public life.

Billy Hallowell writes at The Blaze:

The battle over a nativity scene in Athens, Texas, reached new heights this weekend when up to 5,000 supporters flooded the town square. Their purpose? To stand firmly opposed to the attacks a prominent atheist group has waged on the religious display. . . .

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group that frequently targets the presence of faith and religion in the public square, is demanding that a nativity scene be removed from public property.

On Saturday, thousands of supporters assembled in Athens Town Square to rally around and support the religious display. According to WTKR, some likened the ever-intensifying scenario a “holy war.”

The Belfast Telegraph reports:

English-American author and journalist Christopher Hitchens has died after losing his battle with cancer.

The outspoken atheist had been undergoing chemotherapy after being diagnosed with oesophageal cancer last year, but died aged 62 at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, Texas, on Thursday night.

At Newsmax:

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann said Wednesday she is not concerned that she has been lagging behind in national polls since she was considered a top Republican contender in the spring and her upcoming 99-county tour of Iowa will show caucus voters in her home state that she is the only “true constitutional conservative” in the presidential race.  

John Hayward writes at Human Events:

Freedom means choice, does it not? A free man chooses how to use his time, and dispose of his property. In other words, a free man owns his capital. Ask the people who spend their days denigrating capitalism to refute that simple truth, and watch the supposed moral superiority of collectivism dissolve before your eyes.

Obama says "fairness" and "equality" are fundamental value feelings of modern America. That being so, of course Iran should keep the highly technologically advanced U.S. spy drone that somehow landed in their lap.

How so?

Imagine how unfair and unequal it is that we in the U.S. have so many of our spy drones and the Iranians have so few of our spy drones.

And now they have one.

That's still unfair and unequal, but shouldn't Obama feel a little better that the world is now just a little more fair, a little more equal?

Keep your chin up, Obama. "Losing" a spy drone is just "spreading the wealth around" by other means.

Andrew Malcolm writes at Investors Business Daily:

The economy may be weak, unemployment strong and the first family soon to vacate the White House for another half-month of vacation in Hawaii.

But the Obamas have gone all out in decorating their house this year, including a nearly quarter-ton gingerbread White House.

They have also installed 37 different Christmas trees. Thirty of the trees are live, or were, including one nearly 19-feet tall from Wisconsin. Seven of the three dozen Christmas trees are artificial or homemade including, of course, one from recyclables.

Another comeback win for Denver, this time against the Chicago Bears.

Bob Unruh reports at WND:

A new California state law that is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1 is being put in the bull's-eye of a new campaign that would rescind its most egregious impacts, according to organizations trying to overturn the effect of SB48.

The law, approved by the California legislature in 2011 and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, mandates that all children from kindergarten through 12th grade in all "instruction" be taught to admire "the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans."

WND also reports, "Critics have said children as young as 6 years old will be taught to admire homosexuality and same-sex 'marriages,' and to support the political activism of so-called "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Questioning" (LGBTIQ) political groups."

And what of the parents, whose stewardship over the education of their children is a God-given responsibility not to be trampled upon by the state or by anti-family activist groups? 

"Parents will neither be notified of the teaching requirements nor allowed to opt their children out of such indoctrination," critics also have warned, according to WND.

At American Spectator, Charles C. Johnson writes:

In 2008 America elected a president whose pastor for 20 years preached anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, advocated bizarre pseudo-scientific racial ideas, opposed interracial marriage, praised communist dictatorships, denounced black "assimilation," and taught Afrocentric feel-good nonsense to schoolchildren.

When Americans discovered the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's views during the 2008 campaign, they rightly wondered if Barack Obama, like his pastor, really believed that HIV/AIDS was created by the American government to kill black people. Even to this day, no one knows for sure whether Obama shares the views of Wright, whom theChicago Sun-Times once described as Obama's "close confidant."

Fox News reports:

A group of east Texas pastors has decided enough is enough -- declaring their intentions to fight back against Wisconsin atheists who are demanding that a Nativity located on the lawn of the Henderson County courthouse be torn down.

“It’s time that Americans stand up and take America back for the faith that we were founded upon,” said Nathan Lorick, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Malakoff. “We’re going to stand up and fight for this.”

Lorick, and a group of other pastors in Henderson County, are organizing a large rally to defend the traditional Nativity from an attack by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

"Religious beliefs and cultural values do not justify the failure to uphold the human rights of homosexuals, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the United Nations in Geneva on Tuesday," reports CNSNews.com.

Excuse me, Ms. Clinton, but a lifestyle built on ethical brokenness and human fragmentation is not an unalienable right from the Creator.

The metaphysical, moral, and epistemological estrangement of Obama and Co. from the Founding Fathers, the Declaration, the Constitution, from fact and science, from God and man, and from "the laws of nature and of nature's God" continues to reveal itself with greater and more shameful clarity.

The divorce of liberal politics from reality is a seedbed of tyranny for its narrow program can advance only by the manipulation of language and the imposition of an agenda through raw power, be that of an oppressive majority or minority, or through the barrel of a gun.

A vision-for-freedom resists. A so do lovers of freedom.

Monty Perelin writes at American Thinker:

Our economic problems rightfully dominate the news. However, they are merely symptoms of a bigger, underlying problem: government.

For many, the previous paragraph is heresy. They "know" that government is necessary and good. They "know" that government solves problems and brings order to the chaos that would prevail in its absence. "They" are wrong!

Government has become little more than a carefully crafted myth based on propaganda disseminated by government itself. It has devolved into a scheme of plunder whereby the elites plunder the masses.

Government in America today has become an unnecessary evil. This is especially the case with regard to what is dispensed from Washington, D.C.

Both the Democrat and Republican Parties are at fault. Big time. This includes the Carters and the Clintons. And it includes the Bushes and their enablers.

In fact, authentic government is a necessary good. But as the example of the Founding Fathers shows, that necessity is not automatic: It requires human beings making wise choices based on reality-oriented information from the Creator.

This is clearly the emphasis we observe in the Declaration of Independence, and this worldivew is what must govern our vision, principles, policies, and practice if the United States is once again to be a "shining city on a hill." Not perfect, but still shining.

From Gateway Pundit:

While we were preoccupied with other disastrous Obama policies, military bureaucrats under Barack Obama passed a new rule that barred loved ones from bringing Bibles to wounded soldiers.

The Declaration of Independence respects human rights as being based upon the Creator ("endowed by their Creator"), but in Obamaland the Creator shall not trespass upon sacred public secular property.

The Constitution was written to structure a government that would safeguard those rights the Creator has endowed upon all people, but in Obamaland the verifiable and publicly actionable information we have from the Creator, as given in the reality-oriented content of the Old and New Testaments, is to be forbidden.

This secular aggression and regression is called "fundamental transformation," people -- away from a country where people are free to a collective of dependency wherein they are not free.

The attempt to have a free and just society without the Creator who is freedom and justice is insane.

But if this makes Michelle and Barry and their followers more proud of their country (whatever that is and wherever that is), who are we to protest?

Besides, insanity and unfreedom are a small price to pay for a nation that finally is "fair," "equal" (in poverty and dependence), and blah-blah-blah, according to the ever-dimming lights of Obama and his comrades and comradettes.

On the other hand, a free and dignified people of America who remember who they are may well insist on freedom over against tyranny. Some might even pledge their sacred honor. 

Demon Memo to the Obama-Hive: Do not under any circumstance let those American fools read the Book of Freedom. Keep it out of their hands and minds at all costs. Otherwise, before you know it, all Heaven could break out! The work of generations ruined. Our Father Below would not be pleased. 

From the Des Moines Register:

Social conservative Phyllis Schlafly has endorsed Michele Bachmann for president and is urging Iowans to caucus for her, Bachmann’s campaign told The Des Moines Register tonight.

In a written statement, Schlafly says: “Most important, Michele has the courage to be a leader among her peers. She is a real champion in speaking up for values we care about. Michele is a woman of faith and the mother of a beautiful family. She has a 100 percent pro-life record and is a strong supporter of traditional marriage.”

At Real Clear Politics Video:

Donald Trump attacks NBC's Chuck Todd on his MSNBC show after the host talks poll numbers that say people will not take the Trump debate seriously. At one point, Trump even suggested Chuck Todd could get "better ratings" if he would tell the truth.

"I wish you would just sort of say it like it is. I think you’d really do better. Honestly. I think you’d get better ratings if you did that. I’m doing MSNBC a favor by coming onto your show," Trump said.

The on-air fight began after Chuck Todd implied that it was Trump who wanted to come on the show to respond. Trump says it was MSNBC who begged him to come on.

MyFoxAtlanta reports:

Herman Cain might be out of the running as a Republican presidential candidate, but his voice still carries weight with his many loyal supporters. Since he bowed out of the race Saturday, there has been much speculation on who he would endorse.

Sources tell FOX 5 News that Herman Cain plans to endorse fellow Georgian Newt Gingrich on Monday. They say details of a formal announcement are still being worked out.

Newsmax reports:

Rep. Ron Paul is being banned from a major GOP debate on Jewish issues in Washington this week, according to the NY Sun, because of his “extreme views” on Israel and the Mideast.

Paul has stood out at GOP debates by advocating liberatarian foreign policy positions that would put him, in some cases, to the left of the Democratic Party. He has called for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, Afghanistan other countries, has suggested that an Iranian nuclear bomb would not be a threat, and has questions the billions of dollars in foreign aid given to Israel.

Herman Cain tells a New Hampshire newspaper "that ending his campaign is 'an option' he is considering." 

Judge Andrew Napolitano writes:

Can the president use the military to arrest anyone he wants, keep that person away from a judge and jury, and lock him up for as long as he wants? In the Senate's dark and terrifying vision of the Constitution, he can.

How can this be? "Last week, while our minds were on family and turkey and football, the Senate Armed Services Committee . . . drafted an amendment to a bill appropriating money for the Pentagon," Napolitano writes.

"The amendment would permit the president to use the military for law enforcement purposes in the United States," the judge explains, "a radical departure from any use to which the military has been put in the memory of any Americans now living."

What's the upshot? Well, asks Napolitano, "Can you imagine an America in which you could lose all liberty -- from the presumption of innocence to the right to counsel to fairness from the government to a jury trial -- simply because the president says you are dangerous?"

This could never happen in the United States of America, right?

Think again. Or better it, think along with the Founders, says Napolitano:

Nothing terrified or animated the founders more than that. The founders, who wrote the Constitution, had just won a war against a king who had less power than this legislation will give to the president. But to protect their freedoms, they wrote in the Constitution the now iconic guarantee of due process. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says, "No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Note, the founders used the word "person."

"If this legislation becomes law," Napolitano concludes, "it will be dangerous for anyone to be right when the government is wrong. It will be dangerous for all of us. Just consider what any president could get away with. Who would he make disappear first? Might it be his political opponents? Might it be you?"