No, I don't like those people...

[an email reply]

I'll listen to that. The first great awakening was a strange phenomenon. Modern - most - Reformed academics play it down. It doesn't fit their modern narrative. Many of them don't believe in any kind of experience called regeneration. They called it 'enthusiasm', like a fainting spell. The first people to deride and belittle and wave off an awakening are the establishment clerics. A recent example is the resurgence of Calvinism among young people in the last decade. Immediately it was the establishment Reformed clerics who belittled it, mocked it, discounted it, even sneered at it and treated it with contempt. It threatened them because anything with the Holy Spirit in it threatens them.

John Owen wrote:

"As among all the doctrines of the gospel, there is none opposed with more violence and subtlety than that concerning our regeneration by the immediate, powerful, effectual operation of the Holy Spirit of grace; so there is not scarce anything more despised or scorned by many in the world than that any should profess that there hath been such a work of God upon themselves, or on any occasion declare aught of the way and manner whereby it was wrought... yea, the enmity of Cain against Abel was but a branch of this proud and perverse inclination."
- John Owen, A Discourse Concerning The Holy Spirit

The modern Reformed academics would scream, but John Owen is one of us!!! Really? John Owen told a surprised King that he'd give up all his learning to possess what John Bunyan had in his ability to preach. He was referring to the Holy Spirit in John Bunyan. John Bunyan, a lowly tinker, uneducated by the 'standards' of modern academics (the standards of cultural Marxism). Modern Reformed academics wouldn't even allow John Bunyan to enter their churches since he'd spent so much time in prison. "This is a family environment, sir. Yes, I'm sure you're a great believer and very 'holy', and so on - 'regenerated', as you people say - but you need to go back onto the street. This is a family church. We have children here."

- C.

"Christians, we hate you, but don't stop feeding and protecting us..."

ATHEIST: Reason produces sense-based ideas. That's how farmers grow wheat, composers write music and businessmen create products for a market. Faith is the acceptance of ideas without the senses and mind. Faith is a morality of death. Reason is the morality of life. Its the difference between America's scientific-industrial-capitalist civilization and the Christian Dark Ages, the difference between Atlas Shrugged and the Bible.

I RESPOND: The problem with your juvenile, a-historical, philosophically ignorant rhetoric is all you need to know about atheists is they live wherever Christians are. And if Christians move, atheists move with them. Without Christians, and Christian culture and civilization (which includes the western scientific enterprise, you know all those universities, hospitals, research institutes founded by Christians, and all those discoveries and inventions made by Christians) atheists would starve or be killed. Without Christians to produce food for atheists and to protect atheists atheists don't survive.

I RESPOND FURTHER: Whenever atheists do attempt to strike out on their own and make it without Christians feeding and protecting them they end up causing famines and engaging in orgies of murder. Murdering anyone they can get numbers on, including each other. See the French Revolution and the wonderful Bolshevik Revolution and the great atheist empires that followed known as world Communism of the 20th century.