Books

You can get to and attain great things with books, but most people just dally with books rather than conquer them. Most people are desultory with books rather than giving dedicated effort to conquer and own the book as part of their being.

You have to read books like you're climbing a mountain. The summit is your goal. 

The higher up the mountain the more rare the book or genre, and the greater the power of the influence. There are many genre novels; there are few epic poems. The higher up the mountain the more rare the influence, and the more effort needed to engage the influence. This is how you know you're on higher ground. Works of classical literature, for instance, are rare, and for the most part they are hard to engage. 

The goal is to get parts in relation to the whole understanding of all and everything. No less is the goal for a prophet, priest, and king. Will it make you strange to other people not climbing the mountain? Yes. We're supposed to emulate Jesus, though. That will make us strange too. 

You start out catch as catch can. Then you find categories. Then you make lists. You move towards what you don't have. You go general to specific. You don't keep going over old ground. You keep climbing with understanding increasing. If you want to use academics and intellectuals as a foil or a contrast, this puts you way above academics and intellectuals. The summit, and beyond summit, is the word of God and a deep understanding of the practice of the faith.

Shitting on everything from the seminary and pulpit

Marxist Critical Theory at base is just constant shitting on things - the good, the beautiful, the true, and anything great or excellent or practically useful that Marxists could never build or create or invent or discover or maintain or grow - and really nothing more than that. 

Lately an obvious thing has occurred to me. When you listen to establishment Christian leaders and educators what you inevitably hear is constant criticizing of Christians. Constant shitting on Christians. An unending drone of negativity and fault finding. As if all Christians are ignorant or illiterate or don't read the Bible right, or don't understand doctrine, all the while being an embarrassment to the rest of the world (defined as good, smart, holy non-white Christians and idolators). 

Where does this come from? It comes from the seminaries that have been marinated in cultural Marxism since WW2. Seminary students go into these institutions naive and ignorant (apparently thinking you need an institution of so-called higher learning before you can read a book), get unconsciously and thoroughly indoctrinated while there, then stay that way after leaving; their idiot vanity and pride and sense of special insider status taking rein the rest of their zombie lives. 

Listen to their unique drone of constant shitting on everything next time you hear them. And it's all talk, too, which Marxists love their victims to engage in. "Keep talking, dumbass (useful idiot), while we thoroughly destroy you from within." 

God has the last word on them all.

Truth

There's no gospel in Islam, there's only law; and the law kills.

Interesting distinction on God and evil

In à Brakel's Christian's Reasonable Service he makes an interesting distinction that I'd not come across before. Maybe it's common (I've not read everything). Here it is.

God is often hyper protected by Reformed theologians from any connection to evil. Even though the Bible says God created evil and so on. 

The distinction is:

The evil of punishment

vs. 

The evil of sin.

God does not sin. He does punish, though. And that often involves killing, for instance.

God punished Assyrians, for instance, by killing them. Sodom and Gomorrah before that. Even his chosen people Israel were killed in the tens of thousands by plague. At the receiving end this is seen as an evil. From God's end it is righteous and holy.

God never commits the evil of sin, though.