I was in the tea room this week talking to one of my fellow academics and referred to my personal blog where my odd combination of reformed theology and libertarian politics. He replied that he was socialists. Good guy, Means well, but like the Salvation Army, he’s making a mistake.

We have two clear choices here: one is to continue the path we have been on more or less continuously for the past three decades, concentrating wealth and influence, and driving the marginalised further into the shadows, with yet more restrictive welfare entitlements and a yet more punitive criminal justice system. The other is to act more inclusively and to work consciously and deliberately at ways of ensuring that the most marginalised New Zealanders, and in particular, many poor families and unemployed young people, feel as though they are valued and valuable members of our society.’— from the Foreword, by Major Campbell Roberts, director of the Social Policy and Parliamentary Unit.

This brings me to one of the conversations that I had with another colleague. This one is working on strengths models… and we were talking about self esteem “you are good, you are great” as not very useful, but pride at achievements is useful. The idea of the strengths model is that you DO something. Probably difficult. That you hate. Then when you have done it, there is a sense of achievement. Sitting on you bottom, doing nothing, leaves you feeling marginalised, and patronised by the very left who say that they are your saviour.

The cure for marginalisation is work. Work comes if there is minimal regulation (there is a balance between letting people set up businesses and hire people and safe working & living conditions. If you make hiring a person risky, firms will avoid hiring. Locally, at least. For example, Macpac and Kathmandu now make all their (locally designed) bags and clothes in china. The only group that don’t that I know of are Cactus Climbing, who make excellent gear.

There is one place where the Salvos have got it correct: we pay the CEOs of the various government departments at commercial rates. This is wrong. They cannot be sacked at will, and their department is not allowed to fail. We pay commercial CEOs highly … for their time in power is short. It will end at the second  bad quarterly report.  And commercial enterprises grow wealth. The government is more like an essential parasite.

For it is not how we feel. We are allowed to feel powerless and despair.

Psalm 56:1-4

¹   Be gracious to me, O God, for people trample on me;   all day long foes oppress me; ²   my enemies trample on me all day long,  for many fight against me.  O Most High,³ when I am afraid,  I put my trust in you.     In God, whose word I praise,   in God I trust; I am not afraid;   what can flesh do to me?

Now the poor will always be here. There are some people who simply don’t have the drive or the skills to service a large mortgage, and use their wages to pay rent. There will be those who lose the ability to work from illness age and accident. But we need to care for these people, not set up evil processes in the hope of doing some good.

1 John 3:11-18

Let’s start with a little taste of sarcasm this morning. Gabriella says… (about the current US administration).

It is really quite genius of him. What is a more appropriate place to wage war on the Church than by defending the inalienable right to consequence-free sex? It is the surest way to get all the women on his side and most of the men.

This brings me back to the antichrist again, or in this case, antichrist. There is a sense among the elite that Christianity is Victorian, passe. That the church is sexist. But let us continue with John…

1 John 3:1-10

¹See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. ²Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. ³And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

⁴Everyone who commits sin is guilty of lawlessness; sin is lawlessness. ⁵You know that he was revealed to take away sins, and in him there is no sin. ⁶No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him. ⁷Little children, let no one deceive you. Everyone who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. ⁸Everyone who commits sin is a child of the devil; for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. ⁹Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God’s seed abides in them; they cannot sin, because they have been born of God. ¹⁰The children of God and the children of the devil are revealed in this way: all who do not do what is right are not from God, nor are those who do not love their brothers and sisters

Now, there is a tendency to move into the error of the Holiness movement. We are impure. We sin. But we neither pretend that without Christ we are worthy to approach God, nor do we hide our sin but daily confess it and turn again… one day at a time.

And we do not promote sin. Every man is aware there are consequences for sexual activity. If you sleep with a woman, you have to be willing to support any child that comes from that act (and in our feminist driven law system, you have no choice about accepting this). I will not continue to discuss diseases, civil charges (harassment) and what Dalrock called the nuclear option of unilateral divorce.

Our elite now hate Christians. They love homosexuality, minorities, and paradoxically Islam (which hates and in fact kills homosexuals when they have sharia law). We live in a time if Institutionalised Christophobia.

But the elite forget this is nothing new. The Romans hated the Church. The Angles and Saxons killed missionaries. But the Church is Gods, and God is bigger than any of us.

One of the things I have just done is out myself, by linking explicitly to my university profile. The fact I blog as a reformed tory is no great secret. But it means that I can talk a little more about the science part of the title.

Ingvild M Tollefsen, Erlend Hem and Oivind Ekeberg have just systematically reviewed all studies on the reliability of suicide statistics. This is not a trivial question. One of the outcomes that clinicians try to avoid when dealing with those who are mad or in despair is suicide. The rate is much higher in psychiatric patients than the general population. There is a entire literature on the variability of suicude rates by country and over time.

What these authors, claim however, is that the official statistics are unreliable, and tend to under report.

SUmmary table from BMC Psychiatry

One of the basic issues in epidemiology is reliability. Your statistics may not be valid — I’d argue, for instance, that the US race classification is not valid — but they need to be reliable. You can’t have validity without reliability. It looks like the human bias to call suicide anything but (and avoid the shame of this event) is hiding the problem from populations, and not allowing researchers to be certain about anything. Clear, reliable data helps generate hypotheses, whcih can then be tested and out of the detritus of failed explanations we winnow out truth.

But without reliability, the scientific method does not have much power. We are all running blind. We cannot suggest ways to improve what we measure poorly. This paper confronts us all: the institutionalised practice of silence hurts the living, because we cannot learn from the tragedies of the past.

Reliability of measures matters. Methodology matters. And anyone who claims to be working in the social sciences and tells you otherwise is a fool or a liar.

No clever comments this morning, for this passage is serious.

1 John 2:18-29

This morning the news is not exactly joyful. There has been a series of terror attacks, one of which was clearly performed by a Persian man, against Israeli targets. In the Herald, there is an illiterate, entitled screed from Harawira — that most noxious of the treatifarians, which I will not link to. And while Europe freezes and Australia floods, NZ has just got dull weather.

Last night my son decided to tell a story about a camera I found second hand when on holiday. It was in very good order, cleaned and adjusted, and well priced. But the budget was straining, so I walked away. But son, every time I went past the shop, reminded me to go in and check it.

I’m paying the bills. It took some prayer not to get that toy, but the money was needed elsewhere. For school uniforms. Besides the score in this life is not the toys you get.

1 John 2:12-17

Today is Valentine’s day, but the three martyrs whom this day was named after are long missing from the current legends. The day is no longer in the Church calendar. Wikipedia notes.

In the 1969 revision of the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints, the feast day of Saint Valentine on February 14 was removed from the General Roman Calendar and relegated to particular (local or even national) calendars for the following reason: “Though the memorial of Saint Valentine is ancient, it is left to particular calendars, since, apart from his name, nothing is known of Saint Valentine except that he was buried on the Via Flaminia on February 14.”^[14] The feast day is still celebrated in Balzan (Malta) where relics of the saint are claimed to be found, and also throughout the world by Traditionalist Catholics who follow the older, pre-Second Vatican Council calendar. February 14 is also celebrated as St Valentine’s Day in other Christian denominations; it has, for example, the rank of ‘commemoration’ in the calendar of the Church of England and other parts of the Anglican Communion

The Reformed calendar is stripped more bare than the Anglicans, who celebrate, for instance the death of Charles I. But the reformed noted that this date was conflated with the troubadour ideas of courtly love and smacked of not only Papism but paganism. So it disappeared from the calendar,

Anyway, today is a day where you are supposed to declare your secret love. Where girls cry because they got no cards, and boys are sad because their gifts are rejected.  I do not see much fun in this day, instead I see pain, hurt, and commercial exploitation. And today I am thankful the boys go to a single sex school. There will be no hearts given out there today.

Today I am thinking more of the grandaughter, in Canada, where this meme is rampant, and where the making of these things is seen as a nice craft activity. I pray that she will not be harmed, for there is enough pain in that family at present. It is a horrible day for my daughter, for her husband is very unwell. For them, Valentines Day, this year, has barbs.

But  God is more merciful than this.

Psalm 103:6-14

The LORD works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed.
⁷   He made known his ways to Moses,  his acts to the people of Israel.
⁸   The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
⁹   He will not always accuse,   nor will he keep his anger for ever.
¹⁰  He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.
¹¹  For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
¹²  as far as the east is from the west,   so far he removes our transgressions from us.
¹³  As a father has compassion for his children,  so the LORD has compassion for those who fear him.
¹⁴  For he knows how we were made;  he remembers that we are dust.

For none of us are adequate. None of us are perfect. Courtly love is a convenient lie: it makes our lust into an idol as we define that woman as perfect because we see her as beautiful. There is a person is a person under that skin, who wants to be accepted, as Christ accepted us, flaws and all — and then be allowed and ecnouraged to grind the flaws away. The reason marriage is a holy estate is that it forces us to change, to think of our spouse, and moderate our quirks, faults and irritability for the sake of their feelings and our children.

There is not much romance in that hard work. But there is something deeper — and if it gets destroyed, as our no fault divorce does time and time again, something breaks.  This society is damaging women and men. The fun is gone. We are left with broken, suspicious, and isolated.

Let the romantics grieve. Their time is past. Today is Feb. 14. Let the commercial world do otherwise. We can enjoy this as an ordinary day, or turn it into a time of hurt.

I’m finding at the moment that I am splitting the comments on what I find with the lectionary posts. Kirk yesterday was about the need to be in a position of worship in prayer.  Not to be just asking for more (which is like what happens with our rulers — we want more but we don’t want to pay).  Now the pastor had been concerned that Jesus had walked past people and left them alone when he healed tPeter’s mother. I reminded him that it was the Sabbath. Good, observant Jews did no work on the Sabbath, and healing was work. They therefore waited to sunset, when the Sabbath ended, and bought everyone there.

But Jesus is Lord of the Sabbath, not the Pharisees with their precedent and regulations.

John 9:1-16

¹As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. ²His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” ³Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him. ⁴We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. ⁵As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” ⁶When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, ⁷saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. ⁸The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” ⁹Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.” ¹⁰But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” ¹¹He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” ¹²They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

¹³They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. ¹⁴Now it was a sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. ¹⁵Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” ¹⁶Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the sabbath.”

The first point here is that being blind was not karma, or a curse on the family. The man was born blind… so that he could be healed. Christ is LORD, and this man was born so this would be made apparent. The superstitions we have about the sins of our parents affecting our children or that we are paying now for previous lives are tosh, Rubbish.

The second is one of thest things we struggle with in the Church. For many of us are like the Pharisees: in our passion to do right we make rules, regulations, and precedents. These bind the people of God — they kill life, for they hold the Spirit in contempt. As a result, in many generations, there has been a return to the roots — from the monastic reforms to Luther stripping his churches bare.  The querulousness of the scholastics lives in us all.

And Jesus ignores this, He heals on the Sabbath — because that is what his father does. This is a theological status, like eating sausage on Friday, It is one of the reasons why the Reformed turn to scripture as the definitive rule, and not to the church fathers and tradition.

Over the last two centuries we have learnt — in mission field and concentration camp — to strip the faith back. To hold to life, and let traditions that hold us back go. We must not forget that, for the respite that Christendom has had from Socailism has ended, and the current oppressor (Miliant Islam) is allying itself with the remnants of socailism. We may have to hide the candles, use rough wine, and hide our crosses.

But the church will survive. The enemy will not, nor will our regulations. Christ is the Lord and law of the chuch, not (praise God) committees of the presbytery or canon lawyers.

The Herald today starts with something that sounds like it was written when I was a schoolboy in short pants.

Higher petrol prices, road tolls and even a rise in GST are being dangled in front of Aucklanders as options to pay for a $2.4 billion inner-city rail loop and other transport projects.

Mayor Len Brown today releases a long-awaited discussion paper on transport funding options to stop dodging what he says are the tough decisions to get Auckland moving.

“We just can’t do the same old, same old and just meander along and postpone everything to another generation,” he said.

“We know what we have got to do, but that requires Aucklanders putting some real skin in the game.”

Mr Brown said Aucklanders – faced with a rapidly growing population and an already congested roading network – had to make some hard decisions to meet a $10-15 billion shortfall for a package of major transport projects over the next 30 years.

This is on top of $50 billion of largely road-user charges and rates budgeted to be spent on transport over 30 years.

When I was a kid the Mayor wanted to (this was 40 odd years ago, I remember it)  build a rapid rail system and develop Auckland along that (which is the way London developed: the suburbs followed the railways. The tramways were being torn up and motorways were being built.  It appears that this could occur in my grandchildrens time, but only if Auckland can tax its inhabitants.

The problem is that Auckland city has special legislation… which I can see being extended, and every region doing the same thing. But this is another reason not to live there.

Moving to the Waikato or Northland… or even to the South Island, will be an option. Because people’s wages will not increase to meet these new imposts.