God made me a warrior, all glory to Him. He prepared me for battle with a childhood and adolescence that toughened me with opposition and hardship and trained me in the pure logic of the natural law and strategic reasoning (though I would not recognize it until I got saved).
An alcoholic from the age of twelve, I lived on the streets from the age of sixteen, had been jailed twice by the age of twenty, and hitchhiked at least 20,000 miles through the heartland and to all four corners of the continental United States by the age of twenty-five. I’d taken and quit more than forty short term jobs but never held as much as $500 in my hands or learned to drive a car (legally) until I was twenty eight. I lived by my wits – learning by trial and error – surviving by the mastery of critical thinking and rhetoric. Although in my pre-Christian worldliness I was wrong in so many ways, I never “lost” a debate with anyone because street-sharpened skill in “intellectual judo” was what kept me alive.
I was a “progressive” then, without knowing it – a member of the first generation of boys entering puberty in the late 60s and early 70s who were subject to full-on indoctrination in Hedonism, Feminism and Social Justice dogma. When I dropped out of school in 10th grade I was a radical left-wing ideologue with the longest hair of any boy at my school, and wore a button on my tattered denim jacket reading “Smash the State.” I smoked mountains of weed and took any other drug I could get my hands on. I sowed many wild oats in many different ways in many different stops along a never-ending adventure-seeking path. I fully lived the liberal delusion my generation had been taught was reality and it almost killed me.
Writing to you today as a Bible-championing, post-conservative Constitutionalist pastor, lawyer, author and speaker, the patriarch of a strong and stable traditional family with a thirty year history of world-wide front lines pro-family advocacy and activism, I am living proof that God can transform ANYONE into an effective agent of His agenda. Again, all glory to Him – I boast only in HIM because my life under my control was a disaster.
The above is to establish my “street cred” for advising you that debating “progressives” is a waste of time unless you’re doing it in front of an audience containing potentially open-minded people, or you’re simply sharpening your debate skills without expectation of actually converting your ‘progressive’ opponent. If you have any experience at all in this, you’ll recall that whenever you effectively defeat one or more of their debate points, they change the subject, and if you refuse to follow them to the new subject, or agree and then defeat that point too, they fall back on name-calling and back out of the argument. You can’t win, because they never concede.
Why? Because they share a worldview in which logic and reason have no ultimate grounding in objective reality. Their arguments may be internally-consistent like the plot of a science-fiction movie, but only if you leave the underlying premises unchallenged. A great example is when Jewish Creationist Ben Stein got Atheist Richard Dawkins, in a debate about “intelligent design,” to invoke the seeding of earth by space aliens as his only guess at how life here could have begun, without recognizing the supreme irony of his reliance on the aliens’ intelligent design as a cause of origins nor being able to explain the possible origins of those aliens except that it “must have been by Darwinian evolution:” a perfect circular argument in which the conclusion is its own premise.
The Stein/Dawkins debate is a living example of 1 Corinthians 1:22-24 “Jews demand signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
In this and other passages, the Bible divides the non-Christian world into two classes of people: Jews and Greeks. To the Jews, our spiritual first-cousins, Jesus Christ is a “stumbling block.” But to the Greeks (the Gentiles), Christ is “foolishness.” What distinguishes them from each the other? Their presuppositions.
Torah believing Jews and Bible-believing Christians share Creationist, Natural Law presuppositions, nearly all of the theological, legal and moral principles of the Bible, and the belief in a Messiah. We differ on whether He has already come in the person of Jesus or whether He has yet to come. To a lesser extent, and with certain caveats, “Muslims” share Creationist and Natural Law presuppositions, as do other Theistic religions.
Greeks are those with an entirely different set of presuppositions that are grounded in Atheism or to a lesser extent fantasy-based Pagan religions. Christ is foolishness to them because there is no intellectual common ground on which He can be discussed and understood.
The Progressives are Greeks in this sense of the term – and that is why it is useless to debate them. Almost everything we Christians believe is “foolishness” to them except for a few common moral principles they stole from Christianity to create the Humanist “Social Gospel” in the early 20th Century as a tool to compete for for the hearts and minds of Americans and lure them away from the Bible as the source of that moral goodness. They’ll agree in principle, for example, that society should provide for widows and orphans but never admit that impulse reflects the heart of God. Indeed, the literal motto of the American Humanist Association is “Good Without God.”
As a Constitutionalist I refuse to waste my time debating and fighting Progressives in the unwinnable, strength-draining slug-fest we were lured into by the Marxist elites. They keep the masses polarized and neutralized so they can rule us without fear of being overthrown.
Instead, I am seeking to identify and unify with the Revolutionary Remnant of Bible-centered Christians willing to serve God as benevolent pro-active stewards of “secular” (meaning non-sectarian but God-fearing) society – reestablishing the Creationist natural law foundations that American law and culture were built upon by the Founders’ generations, by seeking the broadest possible consensus of Americans consistent with the Genesis 1:1 — rallying all Genesis 1:1 Theists to push the Progressives out of power as the most important first step to restoring our Constitutional Republic.
We don’t need to debate the Progressives to beat them, and in fact we can’t beat them that way. We just need get out of the Marxist-owned boxing ring and get back to pursuing our own pro-active agenda.
