Philosopher Ron Nash lectures on capitalism, morality and freedom

Watch the lecture. (H/T Luis)

Nash speaks from 0:06 to0:45. Then he takes questions.

His two favorite economists are… WALTER WILLIAMS and THOMAS SOWELL! Just like me!

Christianity isn’t something you do in church to have happy feelings, or to get along with your parents and friends. It’s a worldview. And the whole point of it is that is is true, and helps us to make sense of the world because it is true.

By the way, he even talks about how Jesus uses hyperbole to get people’s attention in the question and answer time. I blogged about that a while back because one of our Christian commenters told me that Jesus never uses hyperbole. (She is a Calvinist, so… you know… ). F.A. Hayek also comes up in the Q&A time. Hayek is my third favorite economist. I think all Christians should have favorite economists. I think we should think about how Christianity relates to every area, from science to history to philosophy to ethics to marriage and family. And to politics and economics, as with this lecture!

We should all have favorite scholars, just like non-Christians have favorite musicians and movie stars. Ron Nash is one of my favorite philosophers.

Who is Ron Nash?

I learned about economics by listening to all the lectures in this course taught by Dr. Nash. He presents a view of economics that is consistent with the laws of logic and the Bible. And this course is comprehensive. I’ve moved on from Dr. Nash’s course to read F. A. Hayek and Thomas Sowell, and then Walter Williams. And I found that Dr. Nash’s course was excellent preparation for these more advanced books.

Take a look at some of the topics:

  • the role of the government in regulating commerce
  • the meaning of justice
  • capitalism and socialism
  • interventionism vs free market capitalism
  • introduction to economics
  • marxism
  • wealth and poverty
  • liberation theology and the religious left
  • judicial activism vs legal positivism
  • pollution
  • public education

You can grab the lectures here.

A little blurb about Dr. Nash

Nash taught theology and philosophy for four decades at three schools. He was chairman of the department of philosophy and religion and director of graduate studies in humanities at Western Kentucky University, where he was on faculty from 1964-91. He was a professor at Reformed Theological Seminary from 1991-2002 and at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1998-2005.

Nash wrote more than 35 books on philosophy, theology and apologetics, including “Faith & Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith,” “Life’s Ultimate Questions” and “Is Jesus the Only Savior?” Nash received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University; his master’s degree from Brown University; and his undergraduate degree from Barrington College.

From this Baptist Press article.

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Republican primary debate tonight features eight candidates

From Humans Events.

Excerpt:

Eight Republican presidential candidates will debate on September 7 at the famed Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is currently at the front in many national polls, will join Mitt Romney​, Newt Gingrich​, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Ron Paul​ on stage.

NBC News and POLITICO will moderate the debate, and it will be co-hosted by NBC Nighlty News anchor Brian Williams​ and POLITICO’s editor-in-chief John Harris.

The debate will be significant because it is Perry’s debut on the national debating stage. Even more so, it is first debate in which someone other than Romney will most likely be the leader in the polls.

This dynamic can impact debate strategy in a number of ways.

Will Perry be above the fray and take a page out of Romney’s playbook or will the combative Texan go straight after Romney?

Will Romney act like an underdog and make it seem as if he is punching up in a weight class to Perry?

For Ron Paul, who has been at a stable 10-15 percent in the polls, how will he break out? Can he put together a crisp debating performance that highlights the areas where Republicans have moved toward his views and not come across as too professorial and absent-minded?

Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain will come into the debate sharing a similar set of debate experiences. Both splashed onto the national scene during a debate. For Cain, it was in South Carolina. For Bachmann, it was in New Hampshire. But both candidates have not been able to maintain the initial burts of momentum they received from their respective debates due to a mixture of gaffes and staffing questions though Bachmann did win the Ames Straw Poll, which, in the end, seems to not have given her a bounce in the polls.

Newt Gingrich, fresh off his last stellar debate performance, must kick his campaign into gear. He said his campaign would be like Walmart in terms of being innovative. September seems like the time when he should be rolling out his campaign innovations.

The debate is going from 8 PM to 10 PM Eastern. I am concerned about the moderators being mainstream media. I hope they don’t ask stupid questions like John King did last time.

UPDATE: Newsbusters warns about the liberal bias of the debate moderators.

Excerpt:

Tonight Brian Williams will moderate, along with Politico’s John F. Harris, the GOP presidential candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. If recent performances by the NBC Nightly News anchor are an indication, candidates (particularly those favored by the Tea Party) should recognize his hostility to their agenda and be prepared for a number of topics and questions from the left.

Ever since its emergence, Williams has undercut the Tea Party, its champions within the GOP, and its cause of fiscal conservatism. At the same time, Williams has heralded its chief opponent Barack Obama.

In the summer of 2010 Williams began mocking the Tea Partiers as unsavvy paranoids. On the August 23 Late Show With David Letterman, Williams made fun of the signs he had seen at Tea Party rallies, as he told the late night talk show host: “It makes people feel better to say ‘Take our country back.’ If you ask them, they would say from, ‘from the Trilateral Commission, from the big bankers, from the Council on Foreign Relations.’…You see a lot of signs, ‘Federal Government Out of My Social Security,’ ‘Federal Government Out of My Medicare and Medicaid,’ but for the federal government, of course, those programs would not exist.”

[…]Williams has also attacked those in the GOP who have championed the Tea Party cause, namely – Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry, former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and current Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Williams introduced Perry to his viewers, on the August 16 Nightly News, as a name-caller who came out “swinging and talking” and alerted his audience that the White House had already warned him “to watch what he says.”

“On the broadcast tonight, fighting words. Rick Perry comes out swinging and talking, and the White House tells him to watch what he says….The rest of the country is learning what Texans already know about their Governor, what he says, what he does, how he does business….Today’s debate had to do with money, name-calling, and whether or not the President of the United States loves his country.”

Uh oh. I don’t think the Republicans should let radical leftists moderate their debates. It’s just stupid. Let Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio be the moderators.

Stephen Harper says Islamicism is the biggest threat to Canada

From CBC. (H/T Blazing Cat Fur)

Excerpt:

In an exclusive interview with CBC News, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the biggest security threat to Canada a decade after 9/11 is Islamic terrorism.

In a wide-ranging interview with CBC chief correspondent Peter Mansbridge that will air in its entirety on The National Thursday night, Harper says Canada is safer than it was on Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda attacked the U.S., but that “the major threat is still Islamicism.”

“There are other threats out there, but that is the one that I can tell you occupies the security apparatus most regularly in terms of actual terrorist threats,” Harper said.

Harper cautioned that terrorist threats can “come out of the blue” from a different source, such as the recent Norway attacks, where a lone gunman who hated Muslims killed 77 people.

But Harper said terrorism by Islamic radicals is still the top threat, though a “diffuse” one.

“When people think of Islamic terrorism, they think of Afghanistan, or maybe they think of some place in the Middle East, but the truth is that threat exists all over the world,” he said, citing domestic terrorism in Nigeria.

The prime minister said home-grown Islamic radicals in Canada are “also something that we keep an eye on.”

Harper said his government will bring back anti-terrorism clauses that were brought in in 2001 but were sunset in 2007 amid heated political debate.

Can you imagine Janet Napolitano taking the threat of Islamic terrorism as seriously? She thinks that screening Muslim males under 35 who enter the United States is “not good logic“. But groping babies and grannies is good logic.

Here’s more:

Janet Napolitano, 51, is President Obama’s new Homeland Security Secretary. She spoke with SPIEGEL about immigration, the continued threat of terrorism and the changing tone in Washington.

SPIEGEL: Madame Secretary, in your first testimony to the US Congress as Homeland Security Secretary you never mentioned the word “terrorism.” Does Islamist terrorism suddenly no longer pose a threat to your country?

Napolitano: Of course it does. I presume there is always a threat from terrorism. In my speech, although I did not use the word “terrorism,” I referred to “man-caused” disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.

Making judgments is wrong for people on the secular left – everyone has to be equal, and no one is ever right or wrong. This moral equivalence is going to get a lot of people killed, as in the Major Nidal Hasan incident. Political correctness kills, but you won’t get that from Stephen Harper.

“You’re not using good logic there. You’ve got to use actual intelligence that you received. And, so, you might — all you’ve given me is a kind of status. You have not given me a technique for tactic or behavior. Something that would suggest somebody is not Muslim, but Islamic, that has actually moved into the category of violent extremists,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said at a forum on U.S. security and preventing terrorist attacks.

“We have ways to make some of those cuts. And they involve the intel that comes in, the analysis that goes on. For example, we often times, for travelers entering the United States, we won’t not do what is called a secondary inspection just because they are a 35-year- old male who appears to be Muslim, whatever that means. But we know from intelligence that if they have a certain travel pattern over a certain period of time, that should cause us to ask some more significant questions than if we don’t.”