Yes, Bill, I saw your post. You didn’t bother to link here, so I’m not going to bother to link to your upstart either. I also maintain my commitment to not work with you so long as you harbor the known liar Mike Sabot. With that said, your post does deserve a response, and here it is:
Free Will.
It is God’s greatest gift to mankind – the very gift that necessitated the Mosaic Law (which was always meant to be temporary) and the Cross (the permanent Sacrifice).
The Big Government Party, with its proxies the Tea Party and the Coffee Party, wants to infringe upon that penultimate gift from God to humans. I hold that in doing so, you try to put yourselves above God Almighty.
As a Christian, I believe that NO ONE is higher than God and that each and every man, woman, and child who ever lived, lives, or will live, must choose each day whether they will serve God or sin. It is NOT my place to tell them how they should live, though I am certainly free to act as an individual and peaceably let my feelings be known.
I was raised a Southern Baptist. Indeed, my pastor throughout my teens, Wayne Hamrick, sat on the Georgia Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee and rose to its Presidency. My dad is still a deacon at the church I grew up in, and my parents and brothers still go there virtually every time the doors are open, as they have done for nearly three decades now. While I lived in Cartersville, I was right there with them. I personally taught Royal Ambassadors, worked on various Brotherhood missions projects, and served on both the church’s bus ministry and choir. I took a Biblical Literature class at KSU where I was the only conservative, fundamentalist Christian in the class, and I learned how to defend my beliefs against the acolytes of the Jesus Seminar. I left that church in my late teens/early 20s to go to an Independent Baptist Church that my parents had been married in 25 years before (my mom had attended there as a teen), and it was at this Independent Baptist Church that I learned even more about truly conservative, fundamentalist Christianity. Ironically though, it was at this church that I also experienced the full freedom of Grace that eventually inspired the “Freedom: Laws Redefined” tattoo I now have on my left shoulder. (Listen to some of my former pastor’s recent sermons here.)
I noted those things in the last paragraph mostly to illustrate that I do, in fact, have a SOLID Biblical training and background. When it comes to the Bible, I can stand toe to toe with virtually anyone you want to put in front of me, and at a bare minimum I’ll be able to hold my own in the debate.
But that does not lessen my central thesis above. In fact, it enhances it. I was a Biblical scholar before I was ever a scholar in any other subject, and all of my Biblical studies and my personal relationship with Christ have brought me to the conclusion above: Without Free Will, the Cross means NOTHING. Indeed, without Free Will, the Cross would never have happened! The entire Bible, all of history even, revolves around that basic fact.
Human government will NEVER be able to legislate (control) Free Will. Only God can, and He chooses not to.
Choose this day whom you will serve, Bill. Do you want God to dictate your life, or government?
Me? I stand where I always have.
I am both Libertarian AND Christian.
I choose God.
