Who crashed the Republican Party?

Bush’s policies expanded government and generally disillusioned the public.  Now we have Obama doing his best to expand government well more than I could ever consider moderate.  (I didn’t like Clinton, but now he seems pretty moderate.)  The President is losing some popularity but still going strong.  I doubt the Republican Party will be ready for the next election, and I’m not certain I want them to be.  The Democrats are bound to wreck the country and the Republicans are robbing us on the way.

Several Republican politicians have been strung up for bribes and general corruption. Some voters have accused the Democrats of taking bribes, but this looks kind of like projection of guilt, and bribed Republicans seem more intuitive than bribed Democrats. Understanding how the Democratic platform can benefit businesses is intellectual gymnastics at best, although of course they don’t have to constrain all actions to the platform.

Then there are the conscientious loud-mouths who flaunt their opinion based on the Bible or just some ideology like laissez-faire. While I agree with many of their claims (and I used to be one of them), I don’t like finding them as my stereotype. And some of the flaunted opinions are conspiracy theories (sent out by the Illuminati to desensitize us). Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for Scriptural discourse in Christian politics, and even to a point in general – but have we focused so much on truth that we forgot about love? And have we not therefore brought this secular crisis on ourselves?

What I wish the GOP would do:  Ease up on war; just war is defensive.  Reform immigration policy; I’m tired of telling people to obey laws that I don’t agree with.  Focus on repealing laws rather than passing them.  Reform the political process (fat chance).  Institute internal discipline at least as fierce as its political rhetoric.  Generally adopt an open-minded, intellectual approach to politics worthy of its roots.  Santa Claus, you have exactly two months.

Did Christ go to hell? When?

(This post was partly prompted by this other one.)  Ephesians 4:7-10 says:

But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore He says:

“When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts to men.”

(Now this, “He ascended”—what does it mean but that He also first descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is also the One who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.)

I don’t understand that parenthetical…  Surely one can go up (to Heaven) without first going down?

If Jesus did go to hell, when did He do it?  On the cross or in the tomb?  And how do you know?

Note:  I know of a PDF which supposedly addresses this, but it was scanned with the text going bottom-to-top.  I’ll update this post regarding my quest to rotate it.

What does it mean to be damned?

Please see here and especially here for context.  I consider the comments of the latter as the meat of the discussion.  I’m going to juxtapose the definitions being used for the sake of clarity.  First we have the critics, emphasizing the common uses of “damned”:

SJ Camp said:

Definition of Damned: a final verdict of eternal damnation; where one is sanctioned to hell, tormented forever without relenting under God’s eternal wrath, and it is upon all who have rejected the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and died as unregenerated – vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. Damnation is irrevocable. You live once, die, and then the judgment.

gigantor1231 said:

Isn’t ‘to be damned’ a condition or action applied to the spirit only, and the only ones whom it could apply to are those who are dead of Spirit? Christ was never spiritually dead, 1 peter 3: 18-20 says that “Christ was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the Spirit.” So, since He was alive in the spirit there is no way damnation could apply!

Both of the above comments are correct regarding common usage, and any theologian who makes a comment at odds with this usage is promoting misunderstanding at the very least.  I will not defend Piper etc. on that point; however, I think the theological point represented by their misuse of the term is valid.  I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to articulate it clearly, but then I found that someone did it for me:

A. B. Caneday said:

The eternal Son of God did not need to endure God’s wrath eternally in order to redeem us, for he, bore God’s eternal wrath due unto us in the compressed time that he was upon the cross precisely because he is the Eternal One.

The rest of the source paragraph addresses an issue which confuses me, but I’ve addressed that elsewhere.  I think the definition used here can be expressed as follows:  Damnation is the dealing of God’s infinite wrath upon one’s spirit.  As Caneday explained, Christ’s spirit was able to sustain this within a small period of time because He too is infinite; He never died spiritually because He is even more infinite than the damnation of all mankind.

So I don’t think that Piper, Mahaney, and others who use such terminology are necessarily in theological error.  They are, however, miscommunicating the center of the Gospel, and I think that’s something for them to correct.  On the other hand, some of the writings quoted in those comments (Luther’s for example) may well be heresy; I haven’t taken the time to understand all of them.  But now I want to read your thoughts on this.

Spam-proof Snail-mail Inboxes

I was just considering signing up for chooseyourcolor.com (I refuse to give them a link.), but then I started thinking…  See the next-to-last sentence on that page?  “Your information will be shared with our marketing partners.”  Oh, but I can just give them one of my spam addresses.  Wait, I don’t have a snail-mail spam address, and snail-mail is really more important than email.  But how would a snail-mail spam address work?

To start, it must be indistinguishable from a conventional address, at least to corporations and/or courts.  It must be either anonymous or actually yours to circumvent this clause: “Failure to submit accurate registration information will result in loss of eligibility.”  To actually be yours, it has to be a summer home or some such, or a post-office box.  To be anonymous, it would have to be either a post office box (Would the post office give a box’s owner away?) or a commercial mail receiving agency.

Most of us don’t have summer homes, so let’s consider the other two options.  Post office boxes are commonly used as “real” addresses – check.  If the box isn’t yours, it would have to be sorted by a CMRA.  Even if it is yours, someone has to sort through all the spam.  Are CMRAs commonly used to receive “real” mail?  If not, it must somehow hide from the spammers.

So when the CMRA gets a package, it checks that it’s addressed to a customer who is anticipating it.  If not, it gets chucked.  I don’t know how long it would be kept for the customer to retrieve it, but after a certain amount of time it would probably get chucked anyway.  I wonder if this is already being done?  Maybe our post offices could do it, accompanied by a law that spammers can’t avoid the mechanism.  Hmm…  What do you think?