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News

It’s official: Obama’s socialism will lead to fascism

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Homeland Security's new enemy!
Homeland Security's worst enemy! (H/T Nice Deb)

Looks like Obama suspended the war on terror abroad… only to start it up again… at home!

What is fascism and how is it caused?

Fascism is the political system that results when the state imposes its values on its citizens and represses individual values. The traditional view of free-market capitalist conservatives is that socialist efforts to “fix” financial inequalities by redistributing wealth in a planned economy inevitably ends in fascism. This is despite the fact that fascism is never the desired or intended result of well-meaning socialists.

This thesis is presented in a famous book called “The Road to Serfdom“, written by Nobel prize winning economist F.A. Hayek. This is the book that guided champions of free-market capitalism and individual liberty such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and today, Stephen Harper.

What the Department of Homeland Security wrote

Let’s take a look at the latest report from Barack Obama’s Department of Homeland Security.

Michelle Malkin has the complete story here. (H/T The Western Experience)

Yesterday, Roger Hedgecock and the Liberty Papers posted an unclassified DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis report titled:

Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.

The “report” (PDF file here) was one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS. I couldn’t believe it was real.

…I spent the day chasing down DHS spokespeople…[and] the press office got back to me and verified that the document is indeed for real.

Below, Michelle has the actual quotes from the DHS report.

Here are some questions for you:
Are you for federalism? Are you for limited government? Are you for immigration law enforcement? Are you pro-life?

If you answered “yes”, then the Obama regime thinks that you are a potential terrorist:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

Here are some more questions for you:
Are you a free-market capitalist? Are you in favor of personal responsibility? Are you for legal firearm ownership?

If you answered “yes”, then the Obama regime thinks that you are a potential terrorist:

Rightwing extremists are harnessing this historical election as a recruitment tool. Many rightwing extremists are antagonistic toward the new presidential administration and its perceived stance on a range of issues, including immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use. Rightwing extremists are increasingly galvanized by these concerns and leverage them as drivers for recruitment. From the 2008 election timeframe to the present, rightwing extremists have capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns, thereby reaching out to a wider audience of potential sympathizers.

And there’s more in the report:

Over the past five years, various rightwing extremists, including militias and white supremacists, have adopted the immigration issue as a call to action, rallying point, and recruiting tool. Debates over appropriate immigration levels and enforcement policy generally fall within the realm of protected political speech under the First Amendment, but in some cases, anti-immigration or strident pro-enforcement fervor has been directed against specific groups and has the potential to turn violent.

And more:

DHS/I&A assesses that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat. These skills and knowledge have the potential to boost the capabilities of extremists—including lone wolves or small terrorist cells—to carry out violence. The willingness of a small percentage of military personnel to join extremist groups during the 1990s because they were disgruntled, disillusioned, or suffering from the psychological effects of war is being replicated today.

And more:

DHS/I&A will be working with its state and local partners over the next several months to ascertain with greater regional specificity the rise in rightwing extremist activity in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the political, economic, and social factors that drive rightwing extremist radicalization.

The Anchoress, unlike me, is more calm and circumspect. But, with her characteristic perceptiveness, she adds this warning:

Dissent – normal, healthy political dissent – which was “patriotic” just six months ago, and expressed without encumbrance throughout our history (until now) seems to be under attack….

As some of us have noted, everything that was projected on to the Bush administration is finding real expression in the Obama administration. I’m still waiting for the part where those who predicted that “Bush will declare martial law and never allow another election” pooh-pooh the right who say it of Obama. You know it will happen.

So, you see…we’re in a bad place, in these United States.

So let’s be clear. In my opinion, the United States is now on the road to fascism. Every single person who voted for Obama put us on that road to fascism. The United States of the Founding Fathers has been obliterated by the government-run schools, the leftist media, and our own invincible hedonism. Our liberty, and the liberty of nations struggling against socialism, (i.e. – fascism), worldwide, is now in jeopardy.

To end on a positive note, Open Market has something hopeful to say about possible remedies:

Government agencies that investigate people for their “politically incorrect” views can be held liable for violating the First Amendment, as happened in White v. Lee (2000), where a federal appeals court held that federal fair-housing officials could be sued individually for punitive damages for investigating citizens who spoke out against a group home for the disabled (in that case, mentally-ill substance-abusers).

Let’s hope that Bush appointed enough strict constructionist judges, he was pretty good at doing that.

Further study

Nice Deb is making light of the story here by comparing Democrats like Obama’s friend Bill Ayers, (a non-terrorist who just tried to blow some innocent people up), with authentic terrorists like little Republican girls who still believe in the Constitution.

Here are books on liberty that people today don’t read, but they should. They really should. Because God knows, those secularist socialists in the government, and the people who voted them in, sure haven’t. Atheistic communism lead to the deaths of 100 million people in the 20th century alone. Is that what we have to look forward to in this country? Ideas have consequences.

An abridged version of The Road to Serfdom is here.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin’s syndicated column is here.

Polemics

Early, independent sources for the empty tomb

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Bill Craig’s “Question of the Week” feature at Reasonable Faith recently addressed the problem of the number and dating of the earliest independent sources for the burial and empty tomb stories. I found that my own views were somewhat mistaken, so I thought we would all benefit from a closer look.

Let’s take a look at the independent sources for the empty tomb story.

1) The portion of Mark that recounts the burial is an early source

Mark is the earliest gospel, but even he relies on an earlier source for a portion of his gospel.

The burial account is part of Mark’s source material for the story of Jesus’ Passion. This is a very early source which is probably based on eyewitness testimony and dates to within several years of Jesus’ crucifixion.

…The empty tomb story is syntactically tied to the burial story; indeed, they are just one story. 

Bill talks about the dating and significance of this early source:

…Whereas most of Mark’s Gospel consists of short anecdotal stories strung like pearls on a string, when we get to the final week of Jesus’ life we encounter a continuous narrative of events from the Jewish plot during the Feast of Unleavened Bread through Jesus’ burial and empty tomb.

…According to James D. G. Dunn, “The most obvious explanation of this feature is that the framework was early on fixed within the tradition process and remained so throughout the transition to written Gospels. This suggests in turn a tradition rooted in the memory of the participants and put into that framework by them” (J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 2003, pp. 765-6.)

The dominant view among NT scholars is therefore that the Passion narratives are early and based on eyewitness testimony (Mark Allen Powell, JAAR 68 [2000]: 171). Indeed, according to Richard Bauckham, many scholars date Mark’s Passion narrative no later than the 40s (recall that Jesus died in A.D. 30) (Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006, p. 243)….

Wow, this independent source is almost as good as 1 Corinthians 15:3-7! What else is a good source?

2) Matthew has an independent source for the empty tomb story

Craig writes:

As for the other Gospels, that Matthew has an independent tradition of the empty tomb is evident not only from the non-Matthean vocabulary (e.g., the words translated “on the next day,” “the preparation day,” “deceiver,” “guard [of soldiers],” “to make secure,” “to seal”; the expression “on the third day” is also non-Matthean, for he everywhere else uses “after three days;” the expression “chief priests and Pharisees” never appears in Mark or Luke and is also unusual for Matthew), but also from Matt. 28.15: “this story has been spread among Jews till this day,” indicative of a tradition history of disputes with Jewish non-Christians.

This one was new to me.

3) A source used by Luke and John for the empty tomb story

The inspection of the empty tomb by Peter implies the empty tomb. Craig writes:

Luke and John have the non-Markan story of Peter and another disciple inspecting the tomb, which, given John’s independence of Luke, indicates a separate tradition behind the story. Moreover, we have already seen that John’s independence of Mark shows that he has a separate source for the empty tomb.

This one was also new to me.

4) The early sermons in Acts support the empty tomb

Acts was written by Luke. Craig writes:

The early sermons in Acts are likely not created by Luke out of whole cloth but represent early apostolic preaching. We find the empty tomb implied in the contrast between David’s tomb and Jesus’: “David died and was buried and his tomb is with us to this day.” But “this Jesus God has raised up” (2:29-32; cf. 13.36-7).

This one I had heard about before, from Gary Habermas.

5) The creed recited by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 is an early source

This passage does not explicitly mention the empty tomb, but it does imply the empty tomb. We moderns are not free to re-invent the meaning of the word resurrection. Ancient Jewish theologians who believed in the resurrection had a definite definition of the word: the word means that the body is gone from the tomb.

Craig writes:

…the old tradition handed on by Paul to the Corinthian church, which is among the earliest traditions identifiable in the NT, refers to Jesus’ burial in the second line of the tradition. That this is the same event as the burial described in the Gospels becomes evident by comparing Paul’s tradition with the Passion narratives on the one hand and the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles on the other. The four-line tradition handed on by Paul is a summary of the central events of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial by Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of his empty tomb, and his appearances to the disciples.

This creed has been dated to within 5 years of the crucifixion, as I mentioned before.

Further study

A scholarly-level article where Craig makes the case for the empty tomb is found here. Atheist commenters: be sure and read this article before commenting.

I’ll be posting a follow-up later this week on the empty tomb, but I wanted to write about the sources separately.

News

Licona vs Ehrman debate DVD is now available to order!

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From the Apologetics Book Store web site.  (H/T Mike Licona)

Details:

UPDATED: APRIL 11, 2009

DVDs of my recent debate with Bart Ehrman are now available for purchase for $10 at http://theapologeticsbookstore.com/licona-ehrman-debate.aspx.

A review of the debate is linked here.

I like these two new guys, Mike Licona and Tony Costa, a lot. I think we are in good shape on the resurrection debate front, going forward. If we could only find a few good philosophical debaters. Anyone know of any?