The media claimed that conservatives must become more moderate or face permanent irrelevancy after the supposedly solid liberal millennial generation of 18-29 year olds that overwhelmingly supported reelection of Barack Obama. These dire warnings reminded me of the media geniuses who proclaimed after Jimmy Carter’s presidential victory in 1976 that the 18-29 year olds of the Baby Boomer generation would always vote as a liberal bloc. Four years later, Baby Boomers abandoned liberalism and began reliably voting as Ronald Reagan conservatives for the next three decades. As Millennial support of President Obama has plummeted this year, it is liberalism that may again be facing decades of irrelevancy.

On Election Day in 2008, 37.4% of incoming freshman women and 30.5% men identified themselves as liberals or leftists, the most in 35 years. This corresponded four years later to 33% of Millennials describing themselves on Election Day 2012 as liberals. Given that Barack Obama lost a majority of the over 29 year old vote by 50% to 48%, it was his 61% to 36% support among 18-29 year olds that swung the election in his favor. The media proclaimed that Obama’s reelection was proof the Millennials would power liberalism to dominate American politics for the many decades.

Support for Obama has fallen by 9% since Election Day, but it is the 15% collapse in support by Millennials that is driving Obama’s fall. Furthermore, first-year college students self-identifying as liberals has also dropped by five points to 26.4% for men and 32.4% for women.

The media failed to understand that after the 18-29 year olds of the Baby Boomer generation swept Jimmy Carter into the White House in 1976, initial liberal views of youth do not necessarily lock a generation into a lifetime of liberal voting. Carter won heavy Baby Boomer support for his commitment to reestablish government „as good and honest and decent and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people.” But after 4 years of poor economic growth, high inflation, rising interest rates, continuing energy crises, and the Iran hostage crisis; Baby Boomers shocked the media by abandoning Carter’s well-intentioned liberalism for the blatant conservatism of Ronald Reagan.

In David Brinkley’s biography of Carter, Unfinished Business, the former president is described as crying on election night because he had:

„lost to a man he thought immoral to the core: an unprincipled but telegenic B-grade Hollywood cowboy who had ridden into the White House on such „patriotic” themes as abhorrence of government, xenophobia, and massive tax cuts. „Reagan is different from me in almost every basic element of commitment and experience and promise to the American people,” Carter had said at a town hall meeting in Independence, Missouri, two months earlier. Years later he would go further and state that „allowing Ronald Reagan to become president was by far my biggest failure in office.””

Carter would not acknowledge that his loss of the presidency was not about a failure to communicate as well as Reagan, but rather the failure of his liberal policies to give Baby Boomers a legitimate expectation that their economic future would improve. Carter promised to efficiently manage U.S. government resources to cushion the economic „malaise” the nation was suffering due to outside forces. Ronald Reagan blamed that malaise on our own government’s bloated nanny state, whose high taxes and incompetent meddling in the private sector stifled American prosperity. Baby Boomers abandoned Carter’s compassionate malaise and voted for Reagan’s plan for prosperity.

Barack Obama convinced Millennials to vote for him as the outside change-agent to repudiate the failed economic and foreign policies of both political parties. His campaign manager David Axelrod emphasized in 2008 that America was looking for „the remedy, not the replica.” Hillary Clinton and then John McCain were viciously mocked as Washington DC insiders beholden to powerful corporate elites. In 2012, the Obama campaign effectively mocked Mitt Romney as one of those corporate elites.

According to pollster John Zogby, Obama’s support from Millennials has suffered a big drop because he hasn’t delivered the results he promised in his reelection campaign. Millennials had „high expectations and feel a sense of ownership because of their strong support.” While Obama won 61% of the 18-29 year olds’ vote in 2012, only 46% now approve of his job as president. „For young people, the failure to stop the rise of student loan rates and the NSA revelations weigh in heavily,” said Zogby. Coupled with continuing economic malaise, the millennial generation appears to be abandoning liberalism.

CHRISS STREET

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When I was a rich kid living in Great Neck, NY, I remember standing on the lawn of my girlfriend’s house and listening to her parents talk about how my girlfriend’s grandfather fought for the communists in Spain.  They were proud of him.  While the father puffed his pipe on the lawn of their estate, they pontificated on their sympathy for poor people and their desire to have a classless society.

They actually didn’t know any poor people except the maid and the gardeners.  They feigned sympathy for the poor because it made them feel more generous.  Gramps thought that by taking from the rich and giving to the poor, he was bettering society.  He gave about ten percent of his income to charities and acted like he was donating ninety percent and had switched living establishments with the poor.  He didn’t know that communists wreck the fabric of ambition and destroy Darwin’s principle of the survival of the fittest, substituting it for survival of the weakest, which makes society feeble and non-productive.

My dad was sympathetic to socialism, and due to his influence, I semi-agreed with my girlfriend’s family.  I believed in communism and what would eventually become Obama’s simplistic fair share.  I thought that Senator Joe McCarthy was a beast because he was tough on communists and made it difficult for some spoiled screenwriters to get jobs after betraying our country.  Hollywood cries; people in communist countries die.  I didn’t realize that Senator Joe was defending the American way and supporting Emerson’s self-reliance rather than the nanny state.

In my sixties I played tennis with Ben Gitlow, the son of the original president of the American Communist Party.  Even he had turned against the party.  The party was not kind.  It hurt those it pretended to help.  Only inexperienced fools who knew nothing about government remained loyal to the Communist Party. People like Ben and his dad, who had actually met with Stalin, knew that communism wrecked the economy and stole one’s life force, one’s soul.

Communists back then pretended, like Obama today, to defend the middle class and spitefully attack the rich.  But communism actually decimated the middle class and created a new power-class out of the communist faithful.  It is a party built on jealousy.  The communists, like the Occupy Wall Street crowd, are so jealous of the rich that they are willing to destroy the business structure of Wall Street without leaving themselves a viable path to success.  Imagine those unemployed rich kids and rapists setting up a new business model on Wall Street.  Failure, thy name is inexperience and youth.

Jews, of which I am one, are particularly prominent among American communists.  Maybe it’s because they feel that communism is the antidote to fascism.  They don’t care that communism killed five times as many people as fascism.  Nazis were small potatoes compared to communists.

Communist Jews follow communism’s founder, anti-Semite Karl Marx.  They forget that Jews were never really popular in communist countries.  It was ironic to see communists rationing their food in the USSR while rich limousine liberals in New York insulted capitalism as they pretended to be men of the people.

How stupid that many communists are academics.  You’d think that they’d be smarter than that, but they can’t get out of the way of their own envy and hatred of successful people.

What’s ironic is that Nazism bears a terrible reputation, whereas communism gets a pass.  Communism hides behind the lie that it is trying to give everyone a fair shake and improve life on earth.  Liberals are derivative of communism and also think of themselves as great healers, when in reality they are wreckers of society and destroyers of the competitive urge of capitalism.

Both Nazism and communism hate the bourgeois and bury themselves beneath a blanket of totalitarianism.  Both are government-heavy and restrict individual freedoms.  Nazism, communism, socialism, and liberalism are imperialistic and create an ideological theocracy on Earth.  It’s like deductive logic – everything from the top, no inductive pragmatism.  It’s time we woke up and realized that communism is as bad as Nazism, that Obama’s liberal policies are the death knell of society.

In the seventies, my liberal parents visited Russia and discovered long lines for bread and bedbugs in their supposedly four-star hotel.  In fact, they could get water only every second day and had to brush their teeth with Coca-Cola or lemonade.  Yet all the liberals back in America looked up to the USSR.  They believed that communism was nice to the masses who were really starving in the streets.  Yet I don’t remember any New Yorkers brushing their teeth with soda.

Communists have done more ill than fascists.  Yet the liberals still pat them on the back.  They make anti-Nazi movies like Inglorious Basterds.  They make pro-communist movies like Warren Beatty’s Reds.  They make Nazis out to be monsters and communists into loving people who give out bread to the poor.

Back in the real world, Che Guevara, America’s rock star, was shooting people in the back of the head.  And Fidel Castro has taken a thriving economy and buried it in his arrogant demand for power.

The Nazis starved many Jews to death.  Chairman Mao starved more of his own people.

Communism is fascism’s sister.  It’s time that they were recognized as twins and that the liberals stopped seeing communism through rose-colored glasses.  Democrats remind me of the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields, where „Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout.”

What they don’t realize is that when you don’t „get hungabout” the failures of communism, you end up hanging from a tree of your own neglect, dying in a noose of naïve optimism and the sophomoric fair-sharing of an unworkable society.

DAVID LAWRENCE

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Ancient Greek literature is replete with intimations of lost civilizations, great floods, and slow renewals of human knowledge beginning at some unspecified point in a misty past.  The most famous of these intimations is Plato’s legend of Atlantis, a great naval power which was supposedly repelled by an equally great Athens more than nine thousand years before Plato wrote of it, and which then sank into the sea following an earthquake.

Now it seems that we, watching our Western civilization sink, may at last be granted the extraordinary privilege of bearing witness to the concrete truth about which the most daring thinkers of our past could only speculate.

Weeks before Rachel Jeantel popularized the issue during the Zimmerman trial, I read the following internet news headline: „Cursive writing facing extinction in face of technology.”  The headline itself hints at the problem suggested by the article: the author or an editor has merely tacked two stock metaphors together („facing” and „in face of”) in lieu of thinking clearly about word choice and meaning, and has thus produced a two-faced monstrosity of a headline.

The article’s content, however, though barely readable, is most thought-provoking.

[W]ith the increased presence of keyboards everywhere, the days of cursive writing may be numbered and schools are seeing the writing on the wall.

As the end of cursive writing appears to be nigh, many parents and educators probably find themselves wondering: should we still be teaching cursive writing?

There are at least 45 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces (Ontario and Quebec) that have nixed cursive writing as an official part of the curriculum[.] … And why should it be part of the curriculum? With limited time to cram everything in from the curriculum as it is, cursive writing is just one more thing teachers have to help students with in light of the pervasiveness of electronic communication.

Right.  With only a dozen years of compulsory schooling, with 12,000 hours of „socialization” and arbitrarily force-fed and quickly forgotten „general knowledge,” and with each „unit” in every subject having to be concluded with a lesson on how this topic relates to social justice and environmental sustainability, how are „parents and educators” supposed to find the time to „cram in” a few hours on something so inessential as the ability to communicate with other humans through time and distance without benefit of advanced technology?

The idea that the skill of writing one’s language in the manner in which adults have written it for hundreds of years is a dispensable frivol in a modern curriculum, while „How a Recycling Center Works” is essential knowledge, is more than just a sign of the times. It may be a sign of the end times. In the foreseeable future, there will be no one left who can read the Declaration of Independence in its original form – quite apart from the issue of understanding it. That document, and so many other extant testaments to man’s greatness, will thereafter be perceived as a mere picture, a collection of dainty lines and curves, and less comprehensible than Egyptian hieroglyphics. An important means of civilizational continuity will have been lost, as future generations will be forced to rely on „translations” to read their own language.

Here, I suppose, is where the devotees of progress will jump in to object that I am merely getting carried away with a romantic notion of „the good old days.”  I don’t think so.  I am far from being anti-technology; I rely on it every day, as we all do.  Regarding the present topic, I rarely write anything by hand these days, apart from rough notes.  But I fear losing the ability to handwrite, just as I fear losing the ability to perform simple mathematical operations in my head in the age of electronic calculators.

This math comparison is not just a rough analogy.  The ability to use a calculator is a skill that may itself become highly developed; but it is an entirely different, and clearly lower, skill than the ability to manipulate numbers accurately with one’s mind.  The first is mostly manual dexterity; the second is the skill that our great thinkers, from Plato to Locke, regarded as the natural precursor to the development of philosophical reasoning.

Similarly, the ability to produce preformed letters with a keyboard is a useful manual skill, and the technology that allows us to do it borders on the magical; but the ability to form the letters and words of one’s language in one’s own hand is magic of a much higher order.  We are barely aware of this as we learn the skill in childhood, but there is nevertheless something ennobling in the realization that we have the capacity to translate our thoughts and feelings through our own fingers into a complex of lines and dots that may be understood by men a hundred miles away, or a hundred years hence.  Not knowing how to produce those lines and dots – the real windows to the soul – we would be reduced to relying on machines that can produce them for us on demand.

The keyboard is the calculator of writing, allowing us to produce without mental effort that complicated interplay of thought and symbol, nature and convention, which constitutes one of mankind’s definitive triumphs.  The imminent demise of cursive writing will be more than the death of an obsolete tool.  It will spell the end of humanity’s direct experience of the spiritual significance of written language as the most sublime interaction of mind and body, the mysterious bridge linking our animal bulk to our divine spark.  And after we have burned that bridge, will we still have access to what once lay on the other side?  Or will we be left, as increasingly appears to be the case today, to make do with the decaying remnants of our former commerce with our souls?  Will language continue its slide into virtual disuse as anything but our economy’s hammer and nails, or a ritualized way of grunting and squealing?

The manual formation of the letters and words of our native language is one of the most complex skills we learn as children.  And this early activation of the mind’s attentiveness to detail, precision, and the subtle connection between mind and motion contributes greatly to subsequent cognitive development.  „The Chinese are better at math,” we casually say, meaning not that their expert mathematicians are superior to those of other nations, but that the average Chinese youngster seems more adept at math than other average students.  If we seek to explain this at all, we typically fall back on causally unhelpful abstractions about IQs.  But take a look at their written language, and think about how much mental discipline is required of their children in learning how to read and write those thousands of minutely differentiated characters.  I suspect a strong connection here.  If we stop teaching children how to write their own language by hand, we are stunting the development of a wide variety of skills and habits necessary for an advanced mental life: patience, memory, attention to detail, an eye for subtle distinctions, concern for precision and accuracy.  These, among others, are the learned capacities that Miss Jeantel, like most of her generation and its teachers, defensively dismisses as „old school.”  Simply put, when handwriting becomes obsolete, and is completely replaced with the mental shortcut of technology-assisted communication, complex reasoning (including moral reasoning) will become obsolete with it.  The cognitive nexus is natural and possibly inescapable.

But why cursive?  Might not hand-printed language, which bears a greater resemblance to our standard word processing fonts, perform this same function in our intellectual development?  Apart from creating the need, noted above, for „translations” of many of the seminal documents of our civilization, or of our own family histories – for scholarly specialists to tell us what Thomas Jefferson and Aunt Mimi were talking about – perhaps hand-printing would be an adequate substitute for cursive.  The problem is that the case for dumping cursive is also the case for phasing out hand-printing: the ubiquity of keyboard-based technology and the practical necessity of keyboard skills for modern life seem to obviate the need for any kind of hand-produced language.

And, if we accept the premises of the argument against cursive, this process of antiquation will only accelerate in the coming years.  Every child will have a smartphone, a tablet, or some subsequent technology in his possession continually.  Schools, parents, and governments will demand that such technologies be in use at all times, and as all communication will be required to be produced in electronic form (for uniformity, for convenience, and for government data-collection purposes), hand-printing will soon be another outdated skill that we just won’t have time to „cram in.”  In a generation or two, virtually no one – no parent and no government „educator” – will know how to produce language by hand; an entire civilization will have placed itself at the mercy of electronic technology for all its efforts to preserve and communicate its thoughts in a visible form.

But here comes the „Atlantis” question modernity never asks: And then what?

Paradoxically, the ancients, who had relatively little known history at their disposal, were obsessed with eternity – with the inadequacy of mere time-measurement as a means to understanding our ultimate place in the cosmos – whereas we moderns, with access to a much broader and deeper historical perspective, have resolved to trip along contentedly with the existential confidence of the profoundly narrow-minded.  Modern political progressivism is our peculiar form of tyranny because it is the model most suited to an age that presumes a rectilinear conception of time.  Imagining we are moving in an unambiguous straight line comprising discrete points, and hence that the past is materially irrelevant, it becomes easy to believe that our gradual changes indicate irreversible forward development – i.e., „progress” – thus reinforcing our disrespect for the past.

The Greeks, by contrast, favored a cyclical conception of historical development.  Time itself was understood as circular – exactly the opposite of our „progressive” assumptions, whether of the Enlightenment rationalist or the Marxist historicist sort.  Perhaps this is no paradox after all.  The Greeks, perceiving their civilization as something fundamentally „new” in the known world, drew from this perception an inference that perhaps only they could draw: this cannot be the first time mankind has risen.  This noblest form of humility is perhaps bound to dissipate over time, as the evolving civilization loses direct contact with its beginnings, and hence loses the jarring effect of the juxtaposition of the infinity of being and the brevity of known history.

Thus, the ancients tended to be exquisitely aware of the precariousness of their existence, and the severely limited moment they occupied in the grand calendar.  We, on the other hand, take our existence for granted, and assume that we occupy a privileged moment in time – namely, the „latest” moment.  This is why the most profound ancient minds imagined the soul’s journey through the afterlife in three-thousand or even ten-thousand-year increments, although they had little solid historical knowledge stretching even a thousand years back, whereas we, who casually discuss the universe in terms of billions of years, can barely remember what happened last week, and never engage in serious speculation on life ten thousand years hence – let alone our own lives ten thousand years hence.

Atlantis was Plato’s mythical speculation (or development of a received speculation) regarding a more advanced human civilization that reason seemed to indicate must have existed at some point in the unending sweep of time.  Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis revived that speculation, but projected it into a semi-realizable future – as a practical hope, rather than a quest for cosmic understanding – thus demonstrating a chief intellectual difference between the ancient and modern West.  (This difference may also be observed by comparing Darwinian evolution to its most famous ancient counterpart, that of Empedocles, who conceived of a never-ending cycle, encompassing both evolution and devolution.)

This brings us back to the gradual, and seemingly inevitable, disappearance of handwritten language, and my question as to what might come next.  Our age’s progressive impulses are rooted in a foolish sense of indestructibility and irreversibility, and in dreams of impending „transformation.”  Cursive writing, like so many of our noblest and most valuable traditions, now seems disposable; we don’t need it, because technology has rendered our former needs obsolete.

And if that technology should fail?  Progressive authoritarianism has lived parasitically off the dwindling blood of Western liberty for so long, and we are so entangled in Marxist historicist fantasies about socialism as the natural completion of modern scientific man, that we may underestimate the invariable historical fate of authoritarian irrationalism: societal ruin, moral decay, economic collapse – and the loss of previous knowledge.  In the known periods of such ruin, the loss has typically remained incomplete, either because the collapse was regional, and the collapsed region resuscitated by its conquerors or neighbors, or because the past was preserved in limited form by scholarly devotion and linguistic or cultural continuity.

We know beyond any doubt that modern warfare in general, and specific modern weapons such as the widely discussed electromagnetic pulse bomb, are capable of destroying or disrupting our technological civilization in short order.  And absent such a sudden calamity, modern progressive totalitarianism, whatever its advocates’ best-laid schemes, will tear industrial society to the ground in the long run, if it is permitted to smother man’s last breath of hope and initiative.  As a global movement (made possible by the technology it is bound to destroy), progressivism’s precipitated collapse will not be regional – there may finally be no advanced (i.e., free and rational) civilization on the outside from which the world’s competing progressive rulers may steal, or to which a tattered post-progressive world may turn for restoration.

If, by one means or another, our technological society should grind to a halt, much would depend on the ability of the people around at the time to carry on the human heritage in the physical reality of 1750.  And while it may seem a trivial concern now, with a keyboard in everyone’s pocket, how would the physical reality of 1750 play out if no one – or no one outside the ruling elite – knew how to form letters and words by hand?  We are already a civilization in which fewer and fewer young people in each generation are able to comprehend, let alone compose, anything but simple, brief, ungrammatical text punctuated with electronically prefabricated emoticons to fill in the gaps in meaning where unknown vocabulary ought to be, and without any shared reference points outside today’s popular culture.  A century of compulsory public schooling has, in the name of universal literacy, conspired to restrict the majority of the English-speaking world, at least, to elementary literacy levels, or worse.  (I have no reason to doubt that a similar devolution is taking place throughout Europe, for the same reasons.)  Literacy, grammar, and a vocabulary worth the trouble of writing down are now an old man’s game.

Can we be brought even lower?  Yes we can.  The complete disappearance of both the skill and the practice of handwriting not only is foreseeable, but is now being advocated and actively pursued by education policymakers and the cultural mainstream alike.  Whether the technological collapse that traps us in our incapacity comes in the relatively near future, or many years hence, it will come – to assume that it can’t happen would be not merely imprudent, but also hubristic and narrow-minded.  And when it comes, as we can now see, modernity may have officially, by custom and by law, cut itself off from the miracle of manually produced language that constitutes the great leap forward in the development of all civilizations, and in the evolution of man as a spirit that has learned how to use its own flimsy, temporary body to extend itself across space and time.

We appear to be fulfilling a prophecy of the ancients, preparing ourselves for an eventual return to our roots – namely, oral tradition.  Or rather, to the precursor to such a tradition: a semi-verbal state of disjointed, prefabricated phrases that carry only vague signification, interspersed with emotive grunts and squeals – and a devouring sea of violence, which is how men communicate when reason and language fail them.

Daren Jonescu

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The crucifixion of Jesus Christ (33 A.D.) is the most attested historical fact of the ancient world.  In addition to the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is also widely attested by Greco-Roman and Jewish writers.  Closely related, history also confirms that the tomb of Jesus Christ on that first Easter morning was indeed empty.  Every vested party knew where Jesus was buried after he died.  Yet on Easter, the tomb was found empty, and nobody has ever been recovered.

In fact, the gospel of Matthew showcases that there was a still a heated debate going on between certain Jewish leaders and the Christians in the apostolic church over whether or not the disciples had stolen the body (Matthew 28:1-15).  As such, both sides knew full well that the tomb was empty.  More surprising, both sides also knew of the presence of Roman guards.

With a plethora of similar historical details connected to the empty tomb, Greco-Roman historian Michael Grant concedes, „The historian cannot justifiably deny the empty tomb … if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty.”

Once the reality of the empty tomb sinks in, this stubborn fact substantially narrows down the historical possibilities of what transpired on Easter morning.  Outside the resurrection itself of Jesus Christ, only a handful of other historical scenarios have been propagated in its place – all of which can be routinely dismissed through a quick process of elimination.

One of the most popular answers to explain the empty tomb over the centuries is that the disciples stole Jesus’s body during the night.  The biggest problem with this supposition is it cannot explain the later behavior of the disciples, who became stalwart apostolic pillars in the church founded upon the preaching of the resurrection of Christ.  The apostles lived very difficult lives.  Many of them were martyred.  If they had stolen the body of Christ, they would have known that Jesus was not raised from the dead.  They thus would not have spent the rest of their lives sacrificing themselves for a lie.

Others have tried to implausibly advocate that the women who first visited the tomb Easter morning went to the wrong one.  The very fact that the gospels admit that women were the first ones to visit the empty tomb gives historical authenticity to the entire account.  In such a male-dominated world, no one in his right mind would ever want to acknowledge that women were the first to notice the tomb was empty – especially when a new religion was essentially founded upon such an embarrassing fact.

Some have tried to suggest that Jesus’s death was staged, or that it was a hoax.  This is impossible for the simple reason that no one could have survived the cross.  Jesus was beaten to a pulp and whipped out of his mind before he was crucified.  Once he was nailed to the cross, his fate was sealed.

Others have tried to say that the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples were hallucinations.  Hallucinations, however, are individual occurrences by definition.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul wrote that whole groups of people, along with hundreds of eyewitnesses, saw the resurrected Lord.  In 1 Corinthians 15, the apostle Paul tells his followers in Corinth that more than 500 witnesses saw the resurrected Christ at one time, most of whom were still alive at the time of Paul’s writing (1 Corinthians 15:1-8).

Still others have tried to venture the idea the resurrection accounts were based on fictitious folklore.  However, such legends typically require 200-300 years in order to be established – which is precisely what did happen with all of the fanciful apocryphal gospels that have helped spur the modern interest in The Da Vinci Code.  In great contrast, the apostles were preaching the resurrection of Christ from the very outset, and even some of the most radical skeptical scholars of the German Protestant Enlightenment, like Ferdinand Christian Bauer (1792-1860), admitted that Galatians, Romans, and the Corinthian epistles were penned by the apostle Paul – who emphasized the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Bauer believed that much of the New Testament was written much later by pseudo-authors.

However, one of the most eminent ancient church historians of all time, English scholar J.B. Lightfoot (1829-1889), established very early dates for two important church fathers – Clement and Ignatius – both of whom quoted or alluded to most of the New Testament around the turn of the 1st century.  Sir William Ramsay (1851-1939) then established the surprising accuracy of the book of Acts, stating that Luke was one of the greatest historians of the ancient world.  In 1976, John A.T. Robinson (1919-1983) demolished the entire edifice of Protestant Germany’s skepticism by writing a book called Redating the New Testament.  Robinson placed the entire New Testament back to the 1st century because it everywhere presumes that the Jerusalem Temple was still standing.  Since the Romans destroyed the temple in 70 A.D., the New Testament must have been written before that time.

This leaves modern man faced with the startling conclusion that Jesus Christ may have indeed been raised from the dead.  A little more than a century ago, Dr. W.H. Griffith Thomas wrote an outstanding book entitled Christianity is Christ, where he strongly concluded that the resurrection of Jesus was one of the best-attested facts of the ancient world.  Much later in the 20th century, Josh McDowell compiled a vast array of Christian evidences that demand a verdict, and Lee Strobel has an excellent Case for Christ.  In fact, Strobel persuasively contends that the very historical existence of Christianity cannot be explained apart from the historicity of the resurrection of Christ.

Just because the resurrection of Christ cannot be placed in an experimental scientific test tube does not mean that it is an irrational fairy tale.  In 1 Corinthians 15, one of the longest chapters in the New Testament, the apostle Paul strings together a series of arguments for the resurrection of the dead – everything from the authority of the Old Testament to historical eyewitness accounts to his own apostolic authority and personal life – and even for the sake of morality itself.  Paul even points out that nature itself teaches the resurrection of the dead every year a farmer plants his garden anew (1 Corinthians 15:36).

It was Jewish German scholar Karl Lowith (1897-1973) who acutely observed, „The Christian hope is almost rational, for it rests on faith in an accomplished fact.”  However, because the apostolic writers depicted the historical events of the gospels as a decisive once-for-all cosmic salvation event, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ invariably offends, contradicts, and upsets „the normal historical consciousness of both ancient and modern times.”  The Christian faith offended the classical mind because it rendered a onetime historical event with ultimate significance.  The Christian faith offends the modern mind because it exempts its own specific history of salvation from the generalized history of multicultural godlessness.  Such unforgiveable offences are why the resurrection of Christ will often continue to be ignored and attacked in spite of its historicity.

Mark Musser is a missionary/pastor and a contributing writer for the Cornwall Alliance, a coalition of clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics, and policy experts committed to bringing a balanced biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development.  Mark is also the author of two books, Nazi Oaks: The Green Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust, which has been recently expanded, updated, and republished, and Wrath or Rest: Saints in the Hands of an Angry God, a commentary focusing on the warning passages in the book of Hebrews.

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Recently Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted that Hugo Chávez would return on the clouds with Jesus on Resurrection Day. Then, Venezuela’s left-wing „president in charge” and hopeful successor to Hugo Chávez, Vice President Nicolás Maduro, gave Hugo credit for convincing Christ to influence the papal conclave to choose a South American pope. Immediately following the white smoke puffing from the Vatican chimney, Nicolás did some puffing of his own, only his was emanating from a bodily orifice bearing no resemblance to a chimney.

Based on his comments, Nicolás Maduro apparently thinks the room-temperature despot is sitting at the right hand of God, still fulfilling the calling of dictator. In the mystical eyes of Maduro, a follower of the late Bhagawan guru Śri Sathya Sai Baba, Chávez is also a „spiritual saint and miracle worker.” The late president of Venezuela is proving so potent a force that at his funeral he actually got Mahmoud to lose his head and commit „haram” by hugging his grief-stricken mother, Elena Frias de Chavez.

Nonetheless, Maduro, who must be smoking something other than Venezuelan cigars, said, „We know that our commander has risen up there and is face to face with Christ.” That comment, which wasn’t a joke, prompted laughter in the crowd Nicolás was addressing. In Maduro’s opinion, Hugo was such a great persuader that when the conclave in Rome was having difficulty choosing a pope, Hugo „got to Christ,” pulled Him aside and whispered in His ear, and thus „influenced things so that a South American pope was chosen.”

And that’s not all. According to Maduro, „One of these days [Chávez] is going to call a constitutional congress in heaven to change the church in the world, so that the people, only Christ’s pure people rule in this world.” That sounds more like Mahmoud’s vision for Islam than Jesus’ vision for a fallen planet the Bible says is destined for destruction by fire.

Besides, if Hugo Chávez is so persuasive that he was able to move the hand of God to install Argentine Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I, how come he couldn’t persuade the Almighty to cure his terminal pelvic cancer and allow him to oppress Venezuela for another 14 years?

Everyone knows how Hugo’s story ended. Therefore, in death as in life, Chávez is so highly esteemed that there were plans to call in a taxidermist – of sorts – to preserve Hugo’s body so that he can be put on exhibition in Caracas. That way, Chávez can lie in state in a manner similar to dead dictators he has admired, such as Kim Jong Il, Hồ Chí Minh, Stalin, Lenin, and Argentine megalomaniac Evita ‘don’t cry for me’ Perón.

Based on Maduro’s assessment of the sainted Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, one would think the nation of Venezuela was in possession of an incorruptible corpse. Now we come to find out that after leaving St. Hugo’s body on display in a military academy like some sweaty salami sandwich that’s been sitting in the sun too long, embalming experts who were called in are of the opinion that Chávez’s carcass may have passed its sale date, so to speak.

Russian embalming specialists had expressed their willingness to drain Chávez’s blood from his tissues, remove his organs, pump him full of embalming fluid and submerge his sorry ass into a bathtub filled with formaldehyde, and then put the lid on it, wrap it in a white cloth, and basically pickle him in a room with „precise temperature and humidity conditions” for six months.

The Russians were even willing to instruct the Venezuelans on the upkeep, temperature and humidity requirements, the „bacterial threats,” the need for a sterile sarcophagus, the twice-weekly inspection, and the need for Hugo to be submerged every year and a half in the embalming solution for one month, then dried off, gussied up, and plopped back out on the display bed.

Now we come to find out that because Chávez was distracted by telling Jesus who His pick for pope should be, he forgot to transmit the directive to the people in charge of his preservation that if his corpse was going to be dressed up and put on permanent display, „precautionary steps would have to have [been] taken much earlier.” In other words, once again, from the smell of things, there’s something rotten in Caracas.

Author’s content: http://www.jeannie-ology.com/

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