Human Rights

What is the source of human rights? For the Christian, this answer is easy. Our rights come from our Creator. We are made in his image and thus imbued with the dignity that flows from this. Thus, we have the right not to be killed. Since we are made in the Creator’s image, and we have been made for dominion, we are able to work God’s earth and as analogies of the Creator, we can create value and worth from our mind and the materials of earth. Thus we have the right not to be stolen from. For the Christian, human rights stem from the imago Dei, and God’s law.

However, many no longer live with the truth as their worldview. They reject the living God and embrace a materialist worldview. They believe that man is the result of a long evolutionary process, and God is a creation of man. However, these individuals quite like the Christian concept of human rights. So they want to steal them from our worldview. Of course they can’t get them from their own, for where could rights come from in a chance evolutionary system – a system that by its very nature requires bloodshed and might as right for evolutionary progress to occur.

So how do they back up their rights? With their own ‘god’ of course. And who is that God? The state! I recently heard some womble on the radio talking about the right to adequate housing. So I looked into this concept and found the Human Rights Commission espouses the right to ‘adequate’ housing. In a brochure on this, they write:

The human right to adequate housing is binding legal obligation of the State of New Zealand. This means the State of New Zealand has agreed to ensure that the right to adequate housing is progressively realised in New Zealand. It is an “international obligation” that must be performed in New Zealand.

The State has a duty to protect the right of people in New Zealand to enjoy adequate housing and a responsibility to provide remedies.

While this sounds nice, and of course we want everyone to have nice housing, God has not given us a ‘right’ to adequate housing. Nor has he given the State the role of ensuring we have it. He has given us hands and feet, a mind and ingenuity. And he has called us to exercise dominion over the earth he made. Work is how we get houses. The State does not have the right to make rights. Only God has that right, because he alone is the sovereign Creator. The State can only recognise the rights he has given people in his Word. When they attempt to make new rights, they are usurping the throne of God.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where the people have turned from the God whose yoke is easy and burden light to Leviathan who we think will look after us and care for us. And so our god State has benificently given us a right to adequate housing.

But for every right, there must be a corresponding duty. For example, I have the right not to be killed or stolen from. That means you have the duty not to club me over the head with a blunt instrument to steal my wallet. What does it mean that we all have a right to adequate housing? It means others have a duty to ensure this human right is not thwarted. According to the UN, it is the State that has this duty. Yet the State does not create wealth. Unlike the one true God, it cannot make something out of nothing, so it must plunder its people. Which ultimately means we have a duty to pay for the adequate housing of others who do not have it.

Ultimately this means that we do not have a right to our own resources, because somebody who needs them has more of a right to them than us. So this ‘human right’ is the right of the hungry Leviathan to take money from unwilling people to provide for others who do not have ‘adequate‘ (and that term is defined very generously by the UN) housing. His yoke is hard and his burden is heavy. Turn from the idol of State and come to Christ the true king of the universe.

The Problem With “Progressives”

The battle line between good and evil runs through every human heart, said Solzhenitsyn. Those who attempt to bleach the world of sin are sinners themselves, and the more ambitious they are, the more swaddled up in pride and ignorance they become. People who want to bring heaven up on earth have turned the earth into hell and made rivers run red with blood, because the first thing they must do is the something they cannot do, which is to cure themselves. If we are to be healed, we must walk the way of the Cross. the progressive cannot diagnose his own disease. But that does not mean that he rejects the way of the Cross entirely. He makes everyone else walk it. It is the rule of what the Catholic anthropologist René Girard tabs as the default position of mankind. Do not give up your lusts. Do not sacrifice yourself. Sacrifice the other. Other people must be to blame.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

Jabba the State

It is not that everything has been politicized. Everything has been stolen from the polis and given over to Jabba the State – bloated, disgusting, corrupt, without conscience, accountable to no one, and voiding the results of his meals into the land and the drinking water and the air that everyone has to breathe.

We want our authority returned to us – or we intend to take it up again – because it is ours by right. We want not to be reduced to idiots and barbarians with a nominal and trivial vote. Our opponents here talk a great deal about diversity, which seems only to refer to the variously mottled patches of flesh over Jabba the State’s tumid paunch. We want a diversity that strikes terror into their hearts: the natural diversity you get when the school board of East Springfield hires and fires and orders books with a different plan in mind from that of the school board of West Springfield; or when the Christian baker conducts business by his best lights, and the Jewish baker by his; or when men congregate to do something more conducive to the common weal than watching a ball game and getting drunk; or when women organize a father-daughter dance and do not thereby mean a mother-daughter dance or anything else besides what the words obviously denote; or when the citizens of North Springfield begin their meetings with a prayer; or anything else, Jabba, that is not your business, or yours, Jabba’s creatures otherwise known as lawyers, college professors, social workers, and judges.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes

Prickly Like a Porcupine

Any reader who pays even the slightest bit of notice to the world around them will be aware of how easily offended modern man is. Some will even be offended by the penultimate word of the previous sentence. Outrage is a national staple. Particularly outrage about perceived racist slights. But in all of this, it is wonderful to catch these turkeys in their own traps. Cue the outrage of touchy Seini Taufa, a lead researcher in Moana Research and Senior Pacific Advisor for the Growing up in New Zealand Longitudinal Study.

Seini objects to the terms Pacific Islander or Polynesian, because they are apparently degrading and insensitive. She said, ‘We did not name ourselves Pacific Islanders, we did not name ourselves Polynesian. These are terms that were constructed by palagi within a colonial context.” Oh the delicious irony. I could slightly arrange her sentence. “We did not name ourselves palagi. This is a term that was constructed by Pacific Islanders within a colonial context.” You know, because since the 1970s, Pacific Islanders have been colonising New Zealand.

I don’t write that because I’m offended by the word palagi. Honestly. I don’t care. I don’t expect someone to look at me and go, “That guys’ ethnic origins are 50% English, 25% Irish, with a little bit of French and German thrown in. I don’t expect a Samoan chap to figure out (or care!) what my ethnic origins are. If I look white, palagi will do. Not something I call myself – I tend to think of myself as Kiwi, but whatever. My identity is not based on what someone else refers to me as. I am a son of the king, and that is my ultimate foundation of identity and significance. Perhaps that’s what’s missing for many of these prickly porcupines.

The Directory for Private (Family) Worship #11

For some time we have been working our way through the Directory of Private Worship. What put me on this track was a sermon where this directory was mentioned, along with the concept that family worship was taken so seriously by the Church that fathers who did not ensure their family engaged in it could be admonished and even debarred from the Lord’s supper. Today we move to the eleventh stipulation.

XI. Besides the ordinary duties in families, which are above mentioned, extraordinary duties, both of humiliation and thanksgiving, are to be carefully performed in families, when the Lord, by extraordinary occasions, (private or publick,) calleth for them.

Though the language is somewhat archaic, I think the general idea is likely clear to most readers. From time to time, it is important for families to go above and beyond normal Bible reading and prayer in their family worship. There are special occasions where it may be necessary for families to humble themselves before God, perhaps in repentance over sin, or even in sorrow over a nation’s sin. Recent laws and proposed laws in New Zealand might be examples of such occasions. At other times, when God works mightily on behalf of his people, special thanksgiving might be appropriate. I’m not sure whether the framers of this directory would have held to special traditions of thanksgiving around the celebration of Christmas and Easter, but I think these are a great way opportunity for both humiliation and celebration in family worship. Both my wife and I were not brought up in ritual following families. Sure there were some traditions, but we have tried to extend this a bit as we raise our children. One that has become a helpful tradition is a celebration of the last supper / Passover meal where we eat roast lamb, drink wine (or grape juice for the children!), wash each other’s feet and read the Passion story.

NCEA Change Programme

Few parents are aware of the dire state of education in New Zealand. If they were, and if apathy were not so prevalent in our country, they would already be aware, there would be a general public outcry about what is being foisted upon our children. It is bordering on criminal the way we are short-changing our children of an academic education while brainwashing them with the latest degeneracy and inciting fear of an imminent environmental disaster.

Take for instance the NCEA Change Programme which a reader alerted me to. As if NCEA was not a farce already, our educational leaders and experts have decided to weaken it still further. How? Apparently, the aim is to “improve well-being, equity, coherence, pathways and credibility – for students and teachers alike.” The reality? A backward qualification that will lead us to Woketearoa.

So the first reason for change is to make NCEA more accessible. Apparently, the current assessment standards were not “designed with New Zealand’s diversity in mind, and don’t do enough to include students of all cultures, identities, disabilities, genders, and sexualities.” What does this even mean? How does belonging to the alphabet cult mean one is unable to access knowledge like everyone else?

But let’s leave the crazy alphabet cult for now and focus our time on the second of seven reasons for the change. The goal here is to ensure equal status for mātauranga Māori in NCEA. Mātauranga Māori means Maori knowledge. We are informed here that the changes are designed to “integrate te ao Māori (Maori worldview) and mātauranga Māori (Maori knowledge) into the new ‘graduate profile’ for NCEA, and into the design of achievement standards.”

Let me give you an example of what this nonsense looks like in terms of assessment. I took the following screenshot from here on June 28th.

You will note that in the proposed NCEA level 1 Chemistry and Biology Assessment standards for Chemistry and Biology, matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge) is put alongside Western science understandings. For those of you who have a Science background, you will no doubt be horrified by the broad and seemingly ill-defined body of knowledge that is being assessed.

A couple of questions are in order. What exactly is matauranga Maori with respect to chemical reactions and microorganisms? My New Zealand history might not be the best, but even I know that pre-colonisation, Maori were not exactly world leaders in Science. Sure their ancestors had impressive navigational skills, but their knowledge of chemical reactions and microorganisms was rudimentary to non-existent. To add the words ‘matauranga Maori’ to these assessment standards is pure tokenism or historical revisionism.

Now this is not to denigrate Maori. Geographical isolation was a good excuse for their lack of scientific know-how. They had not the advantage of learning from others which cultures of Europe had. Furthermore, their animistic beliefs were an obstacle to scientific knowledge. As Herbert Schlossberg puts it in Idols for Destruction, “Animist cultures…are not likely to produce large numbers of skilled engineers as long as they believe that physical objects have spirits.” Beliefs like not being able to step over cut flax because it contains the spirits of one’s ancestors, or that people should not stand on the top of mountains because they are tapu are examples of primitive animist fear which ultimately cripples learning and development of knowledge.

With the coming of Christianity, Maori were freed from this unfortunate and debilitating worldview. It seems our wokeocracy is trying to celebrate and reintroduce it again. Fortunately, as many of you are aware, a number of academics protested this in a letter to the Listener. They pointed out that maturangi Maori has no well defined or agreed-upon definition, that it is not science and they argued that “if mātauranga Māori is to be included so fully into the education system at all levels, then it needs to be subjected to full critical scrutiny – as do all science claims.” It should not surprise anyone that these brave souls were pilloried and ‘cancelled’ by the usual suspects – spineless cultural elites like the president and academy executive committee chair of the Royal Society as well as activist agitators. This only proves the point they were making. We are not dealing with a scientific view that can be critiqued and argued about. We are dealing with something more akin to a blind faith.

Now I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but when I relooked at the Assessment standards for Biology and Chemistry on August 8, they had been altered. The screenshot of these standards is below.

You’ll notice that the words matauranga Maori have been removed from each of these assessments. What we have is not a whole lot better though. The first assessment is, “Explore a microorganism within the mauri of the taiao.” Translated this means, “Explore a microorganism within the life force of the earth. This sounds rather pantheistic to me. I’m sure it won’t just be Christian families who oppose this approach to Science. I imagine materialists would be rather concerned also.

What to do? Get your children out of public schools. The power in our public system is in the hands of people who support this approach. If you want your children to have a decent education, you are almost certainly going to have to make a financial sacrifice. Put them in an independent school that teaches an internationally recognised curriculum like Cambridge. The good news is that this should pay dividends because children brought up on this nonsense are going to be no match for children who have been given an actual education.

The Parlous State of Media in New Zealand

Recently in a short post entitled Department of Truth, we noted that more and more, the mainstream media seems to be transforming into a department of government: the Department of Propaganda Truth. Karl du Fresne has written an excellent article highlighting this, and in this post we will pick out some of the important points he makes.

He notes that of the $55 million ‘Public Interest Journalism Fund’ more than $2.4 million is being spent in the training and development and training of 25 cadet Maori, Pasifika and “diverse” journalists. As du Fresne points out, the “latter category will presumably include those who identify as transgender or non-binary and other aggrieved minorities that we haven’t got names for yet.” Then there is the ominous $300,000 given to Stuff to produce a cultural competency course which is promised to “to fundamentally shift representation in NZ media”

What benefit is there to the public in any of this? As du Fresne rightly points out, “our money will end up being spent on advocacy journalism.” In applying for this public money, “media organisations must commit to a set of requirements that include, among other things, actively promoting the Maori language and ‘the principles of Partnership, Participation and Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi’“. Our mainstream media have been bought with our money like tacky whores with no principles. What is our answer to this? Stop consuming their products. Stop subscribing to them! Turn to other sources of news that are not being bought off by the government to be their propaganda wing.

Barbarians or Idiots

Whatever is good about democracy rests upon a simple assumption. It is that ordinary people are capable of managing their ordinary affairs, as individuals, as families, as members of a neighbourhood or a parish, as local businesses, and as citizens of a village or town. If they are not permitted to do so, they have been reduced to what the Greeks called barbarism. If they are unwilling to do so, they have reduced themselves to what the Greeks called idiocy.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes