Now that Donald Trump has successfully mounted his political comeback and is set to become the 47th president of the United States, we can finally look forward to seeing how he’ll handle his long list of agenda items for his upcoming administration: inflation, immigration, energy, crime.

He’s got his hands full.

Both Israel and Turkey are aligned when it comes to sending money and arms to Azerbaijan for the express purpose of whittling the already-tiny Republic of Armenia down to nothing.

But for now, let’s focus on his foreign policy — particularly how he’s going to tackle the increasingly complicated situation developing in Israel and the rest of the Middle East.

Good guys vs. bad guys

Trump has come out firmly in support of Israel in the state’s crusade against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and the rest of Iran’s proxy terrorist network. But the rhetoric that’s come from both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu oversimplifies the situation.

America and Israel are the good guys.

Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah are the bad guys.

That’s been the framing of the situation from GOP establishmentarians. Simple, yet effective.

But it’s nowhere near as simple as that, and Trump’s recent moves have actually complicated his commitment to that framing as well.

You see, the Middle East is, in reality, a smorgasbord of shifting, overlapping, crisscrossing alliances. And that’s because there is so much ethnic and religious diversity within this pocket of the world.

No Muslim monolith

Contrary to common Western perception, the Middle East is not one big, brown, Muslim monolith. The Turks are not the Sunni Arabs, who aren’t the Shiite Persians, who aren’t the Christian Armenians, who aren’t the somewhat secular, somewhat Islamic Azeris, who aren’t the Maronite Lebanese, who aren’t the Coptic Egyptians.

Each one of these groups vary drastically from one another in ethnicity, culture, and religion. And therefore, there’s no clear-cut demarcation in the Middle East when it comes to political alliances. Or at least, there’s not a simple “good guys vs. bad guys” heuristic that can be used to assess the situation.

And yet, that’s the framing American foreign policy and media sticks with: "The Middle East is full of Muslim bad guys (who are all the same), and we need to protect the lone Judeo-Christian oasis of democracy in the Middle East."

Our once and future president did something recently that slightly undermined the legitimacy of that framing.

Trump gets Armenia-pilled

In the days leading up to his election, Trump announced his commitment to aiding Christians in the Middle East who had been victims of Islamic persecution. Specifically, he was referring to the 120,000 Armenians who had been ethnically cleansed from their historic homeland of Artsakh by Azerbaijan.

He even went so far as calling the patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church, his holiness Aram I, about mobilizing an Armenian restoration of Artsakh.

From where I’m sitting, this is a clear result of Trump having surrounded himself with advisors like Robert F Kennedy Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tulsi Gabbard, all of whom have all made statements signaling their support for Armenia against its various regional antagonists.

But the simple act of signaling a commitment to aiding the Christian Armenians actually creates a flurry of complications for the Trump administration.

And it all has to do with the love triangle between the U.S., Israel, and Turkey.

Aiding Azerbaijan

As the entire world knows, Israel launched a war in Gaza after the brutal October 7 attacks by Hamas.

What much of the world doesn’t know is that at the time of the attacks, Israel was already embroiled in a different conflict, aiding (along with the U.S. State Department) in its ethnic cleansing campaign against the Armenian enclave of Artsakh.

And just one week after the October 7 attacks, a shipment of arms left Tel Aviv headed toward Baku, Azerbaijan.

And Israel has not relented. In the midst of all the bombs Israel has dropped on both Gaza and Lebanon, it (along with Turkey) continues to send state-of-the-art weaponry to Azerbaijan, most recently on September 24.

If you’ve kept up with the news, you also know that there’s been a fair bit of saber-rattling between Turkey and Israel, as Turkish President Erdogan has been raising tensions with Israel for its offensive against Hamas, recently going so far as hailing the ICC decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders as “courageous” and hosting Hamas in Turkey after the terrorist group was booted from Qatar.

It certainly seems like the Islamic Turks are egging on a war with Israel from the outside.

But how much of this is theater?

After all, Israel relies on Turkey and Azerbaijan for 40% of its oil via the BTC Pipeline (which begins in Baku and ends in Ceyhan, Turkey).

And, as I already mentioned, both Israel and Turkey are aligned when it comes to sending money and arms to Azerbaijan for the express purpose of whittling the already-tiny Republic of Armenia down to nothing.

But that still doesn’t cover the total extent of Israel’s antagonistic relationship with Armenians.

Jerusalem land-grab?

You see, the state of Israel isn’t just home to Jews and Muslims. It’s home to about 187,000 Christians, some 5,000 of whom are Armenian. In Jerusalem, the Old City has historically been divided into four quarters: the Christian quarter, Jewish quarter, Muslim quarter, and the Armenian quarter.

While this Armenian community dates back to the 4th century, it has recently found itself under siege by a shadowy Israeli corporation called Xana Capital. In dispute is the "Cow's Garden," the last large, open space in Jerusalem's Old City. In 2021, the Armenian patriarchate agreed to a secret 98-year lease of the land — which comprises 25% of the Armenian quarter, to a Jewish-Australian developer.

Calling the lease illegal, the community has been fighting to invalidate it in court. Meanwhile, the Grayzone reports that Xana Capital has employed Israeli settlers to intimidate Armenians into vacating the land.

The point I’m making is that the framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict since the 10/7 attacks has been that Israel has been in a fight for its survival against the bloodthirsty Muslims and therefore needs as much aid and support from the U.S. as it can muster.

But there's one glaring flaw in that narrative: Israel’s direct involvement in the downfall of the Armenian state and diaspora.

To recap:

Israel has been sending arms to Azerbaijan, before, during, and after October 7.

Israel is currently confiscating the historic Armenian quarter of Jerusalem.

All of this is happening in the midst of its crusade against Hamas and Hezbollah.

My question is: When is the United States going to prioritize Christians in the Middle East priority over the other two Abrahamic faiths? We’re a Christian country, right?

Help wanted

This is why Trump’s pre-election commitments to Christians in the Middle East is a complicated matter. It’s not as simple as “Muslims bad, Israel good.”

As I mentioned, Trump seems to be stacking his cabinet with pro-Armenia advocates (RFK Jr., Vivek, Tulsi, even Marco Rubio). But he’s also got plenty of pro-Israel people (Elise Stefanik, Kristi Noem, Lee Zeldin, Mike Huckabee, Susie Wiles, Pete Hegseth, and, yes, even Marco Rubio) in the mix. Not to mention the pro-Turkey Dr. Oz as head of Medicare and Medicaid.

So for now, it looks like it’ll be a bumpy ride.

In a post-election interview with Tucker Carlson, RFK, Jr. recounted the time he witnessed Trump draw from memory an accurate map of the Middle East, including troop strength of each country. It’s apparent from this one exchange that Trump has a sharp understanding of the geopolitical and strategic military dynamics of the Middle East.

This means he also knows that stability in the region can never be taken for granted. I would urge him to look at the movements happening between Israel, Turkey, and Azerbaijan and take stock of the Pan-Turanic vision being cooked up by these parties.

If he’s serious about helping the Christians of the Middle East, there’s no getting around it.

'Junk DNA' is bunk! Why the human genome argues for intelligent design

In my quest to learn the ins and outs of the orthodoxy of evolutionary theory (and therefore bring to light its deficiencies), I discovered geologist and lawyer Dr. Casey Luskin, associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.

A proponent, researcher, and advocate for intelligent design, Dr. Luskin has been defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for ID for nearly 20 years.

Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy. How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?

I’ve written about it here before, but I shared with Dr. Luskin my personal skepticism concerning the religion of evolution. As a layman (relative to him), it seemed to me as if Evolution™ had an “invisible hand of God” problem that’s never been seriously addressed.

Meet me in the middle

The mythology of Evolution™ seems to have a beginning (the Big Bang), an end (modern Homo sapiens), but no middle. And as I came to understand from my conversation with Dr. Luskin, much of the evidence for evolutionary theory amounts to flimsy, tenuously linked assumptions on the verge of being disproved in various fields.

We began by discussing one of the more popular arguments against intelligent design: the concept of “junk DNA."

The argument goes something like this: If everything is intelligently designed, then why does the vast majority of our DNA seem to serve no purpose?

As Dr. Luskin explained, the idea originated in the early 1960s, when scientists mapped out the molecular protein production process: DNA encodes RNA, which then carries that information to ribosomes, which in turn use it to assemble chains of amino acids into proteins.

Because so much of the DNA that had been studied up to that point did not seem tobe doing that, it was tossed in the proverbial junk bin, hence the name.

Selfish genes

The idea really took off with the publications of Japanese geneticist Susumu Ohno’s “So Much Junk DNA in Our Genome” in 1972 and Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene" in 1976.

Ohno famously asserted that 90% of our DNA was total nonsense. Dawkins piggybacked off that and gave the junk DNA a “purpose,” saying that the only true function of the gene was to replicate itself. Whether or not the gene helps you is of non-substance.

Luskin was one of the first to push back against this idea. As an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, he experienced firsthand how the "junk DNA" theory was used to dismiss the burgeoning ID movement.

Luskin would argue with his professors and peers that it was still premature to conclude that most of our DNA could be classified as “junk,” citing the unfinished-at-the-time Human Genome Project as evidence for the lack of evidence.

Luskin seems to have been onto something. In the past few years, the “junk DNA” theory has slowly unraveled.

God don't make no 'junk'

This is in large part thanks to a groundbreaking series of papers entitled the ENCODE Project, published by biologists studying “non-coding” DNA — the goal being to uncover the mysteries of the human genome.

Since the ENCODE Project began in 2010, it has found that at least 80% of the genome has shown evidence of biochemical functionality. In other words — contrary to junk DNA theory — this DNA is transcribing information into the RNA.

And as for the other 20%?

The lead researchers of the ENCODE Project say that many of these non-coding elements of DNA occur within very specific cell types or circumstances, so to catch them in action doing what they’re supposed to be doing is simply very difficult. But they predict that as they study more and more cell types, that that 80% figure will most certainly jump up to 100%.

All this is to say that applying a Darwinian paradigm to discoveries about gene function has led to erroneous conclusions about "junk DNA" — which then, in turn, has been used to justify the same Darwinian theory that spawned it.

Information, please

Meanwhile, Intelligent Design's predictions that we would find function for that junk DNA have been borne out.

As Luskin pointed out, the origin of life is the origin of information. Life, on its face, is a very strange arrangement of matter.

It’s very easy to find things that are high entropy-high energy (think tornadoes or explosions) or low entropy-low energy (snowflakes, crystals). But life is different. Life is very low entropy, meaning it’s very ordered, and yet it’s also very high energy.

How exactly does life maintain this seemingly contradictory state?

Machinery.

Jedi mind trick?

Our cells are full of molecular machines that process and encode information to be used as applicable instructions. That is what our DNA, RNA, and ribosomes are all there for. They’re machines that process information.

Imagine you wanted to watch "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" on DVD. Would you be able to watch it without the DVD player? No.

Imagine if the instructions for building the world’s first ever DVD player were on a DVD. Could you build the DVD player just with the DVD? No.

The information and the information-processing machine are inseparable.

The question then becomes: How did these machines come into being?

Did they build themselves? No, we just showed how that can’t be the case.

The only plausible answer is — intelligence. There needed to be an intelligent designer to create both the machinery and the instructions.

Despite the initial mockery greeting Intelligent Design, the theory is gaining ground as a reliable model and explanation for the origin of life and genes. And that’s simply because the evidence is getting to be a bit undeniable.

Make sure to follow Dr. Casey Luskin’s work here.

Today's most urgent question: What is a man?

In my last piece, I reflected on the state of the NFL’s relationship with the rise of data analytics and how it’s been contributing to the progress of the transhumanist agenda.

It made me ponder more deeply the questions we as human beings are confronted with as we hurtle headfirst into a more and more technology-dependent society.

The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared. And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this? They cope.

As we become more dependent on technology to complete the tasks that human beings have always performed, we’ve come to the point where we must ask ourselves … what exactly are we?

Division of labor

My mind naturally began to think about the division of labor within traditional family households.

A wife and mother would traditionally be a homemaker and nurturer of the children. A husband and father would traditionally be the one who would labor out in the world and bring home the income and provisions.

This gender-oriented division of labor came into being almost entirely out of necessity. Sure, maybe social ideologies sprang up over time about gender roles that may or may not have been healthy. But fundamentally, a husband and wife performed the roles they did because a man can do things only a man can do and a woman can do things only a woman can do.

But now, we live in a different world, a very affluent, technology-dependent world. Everything is taken care of for us. Machines do almost all the essential work for us, and it’s only a matter of time until they do the entirety of it.

The American economy isn’t a manufacturing one any more. When most Americans go to “work,” it is not to labor but to provide some kind of service, which both men and women can do. And compared to the rest of the world, we make a lot of money performing these services.

Idle hands

It’s given us Americans security and time. And with security and time, we’ve gotten bored. So bored that we make up new problems for ourselves just to give us an artificial sense of insecurity. People are so free from their traditional gender roles (and therefore actual problems) that they now identify as new genders.

That conservative commentator Matt Walsh was able to produce an entire documentary dedicated to answering the question “What Is a Woman?” is a clear sign of how out of hand the situation has gotten. Everyone had a big, hearty laugh as they watched some blue-haired child psychologists squirm and struggle to define what an adult female human being is in exact terms.

But the problem is real, and it’s much deeper than a predatory pharmaceutical industry pushing kids and adults into gender-affirming surgery.

The necessary question

To fully appreciate the scope of the question “What is a woman?” we must ask the necessary (and more urgent) follow-up question: What is a man?

Seriously, what is a man in the 21st century … and beyond? It’s the most important question that absolutely no one is thinking about.

Think about what I’ve already said within this one article. We live in a time when all traditional roles have been stripped from both genders due to affluence, which is due to the development of automated technology.

And because we don’t make anything any more, what do we offer as an economy instead? Health care, education, retail, and entertainment.

Or in other words – nurturing, child-rearing, homemaking, and sex.

Monetizing the feminine

Any role that’s ever been traditionally feminine has been taken out of the households and plugged straight into the economy. In his book "The New Politics of Sex," political theorist Dr. Stephen Baskerville cites G.K. Chesterton on the matter:

If people cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be made economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each other’s babies. ... The whole really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants. When we offer any other system as a "career for women," we are really proposing that an infinite number of them should become servants, of a plutocratic or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are arguing that a woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody else’s baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of pinafores.

Motherly instincts have merely been bureaucratized, resulting in every woman either being cooped up in an office doing meaningless paperwork or cooped up in a shoebox apartment making OnlyFans content. Or both.

No market for manhood

Meanwhile, masculine roles got absolutely and systematically shafted by modernity.

Wanna get married to the woman of your dreams and raise a family? Sorry, the no-fault divorce and state welfare machineries have all but made real, long-lasting marriage an unappealing artifact of history.

Wanna take masculine pride in your occupation or the money you make? Good luck. America hasn't been a manufacturing economy in decades. All productive jobs involving real labor have been outsourced to China, automation, or H-1B immigrants.

Any man who currently has a “masculine” job such as farmer, truck driver, construction worker, or oil rigger will be replaced by a robot running the latest ChatGPT woke programming within the next 25 years.

That’s where we're at as men, and that's where we're going. We've been systematically disenfranchised. We've lost the means to exhibit patriarchal authority over the family unit due to the failure of marriage policy, and all opportunities to pursue productive labor and upward mobility are quickly dwindling due to automation.

The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared.

Plato's man cave

And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this?

They cope. They preach “primitivism” as the escape hatch from modernity. Go hunt. Go chop wood. Drink whiskey. Eat beef.

Even Matt Walsh gives his diagnosis on how to be a man: Don’t take any sick days from work.

Yeah, Stacey is girlbossing as she runs up racks with her nursing job and OnlyFans side hustle with $500K saved up in the bank while you're busy telling young, impressionable boys to man up and stay committed to an office job that will have him replaced within a decade, all from the comfort of your man-cave studio.

There is no “manning up” in 2024 and beyond. Wake up. The system has all but wiped out everything that once allowed men to find meaning in their lives.

So we need to tackle the question seriously and sincerely.

What is a man?

Why is the NFL so boring? Blame data analytics

So as I was watching my Philadelphia Eagles play the New Orleans Saints on Sept. 22, a realization about the state of society dawned on me.

For some context, the Eagles haven’t looked any good since their Super Bowl run in 2022. And this game was no different. Everything about this team just feels disjointed and discombobulated. Turnovers, bad defense, lack of rhythm.

No longer do teams have any desire to develop their talent, read their opponents, and learn how to gain in-game experience to get better. They just shake their magic 8 ball and wait for the answer.

Passing out

But this isn’t a problem that only my Eagles are dealing with. This is an NFL problem. If you haven’t been paying attention, the product the NFL has been putting out there, for lack of a better word, stinks. And that can partly be attributed to the NFL not being a passers' league anymore. Instead, it’s trending toward more hard-fought, defense-heavy play styles.

Through the first two weeks of the 2024 season, passing yards have been the lowest they’ve ever been since the 2007 season. Seventeen starting QBs still haven’t even been able to hit 200 passing yards in a game. Put plainly, the NFL is boring.

But there’s something deeper going on here than mere mediocrity. And something jumped out at me in this game that finally gave me the words to describe what’s deeply wrong with the NFL.

Twice in this game, the Eagles went for it on 4th and short when they could’ve put points on the board with field goal attempts. And both times, they failed.

Why did they go for it?

Why abandon all common sense?

Because the almighty data analytics told them to.

Analytics arms race

Analytics are the major fad these days in pro sports. Every franchise across all pro sports has been scrambling to assemble the best possible in-house data analytics team to keep up with the analytics arms race. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t be considered a serious organization if your team hasn’t made some kind of serious investment in it.

Funnily enough, the Eagles were the ones who spearheaded the push for analytics-based football back in the '90s and were the first football franchise to have an in-house analytics department back in 2010.

And the problem is this: Teams are over-relying on data analytics to the point that pretty much all decisions are made in some form or another based on analytics. What this ultimately does is stunt and make fragile the development of everyone involved in the success of a team, from the players to the front office.

Relieved of command

Tom Brady said it himself recently in an interview. He points out how the NFL has a developmentproblem. Rookie QBs are getting thrown into the fire and starting in their first year without taking the first few years to hang back and learn the team’s culture and program.

But even worse, QBs are no longer taking command of the game. The era of the “field general” QB is over. The QB no longer reads the defense and makes adjustments in real-time. Now, what you have is a young kid who simply takes the play his coach gives him and runs with it. And who did the coach get the play from? The analytics guys up in the booth.

No longer do teams have any desire to develop their talent, read their opponents, and learn how to gain in-game experience to get better. They just shake their magic 8 ball and wait for the answer.

It’s a very artificial, robotic process. And the product on the field is reflecting that.

So why does any of this matter?

What you’re witnessing in today’s NFL is just a small sample of society’s slow transition into full-on transhumanism.

Transhumanism? That conspiracy theory stuff?

Existential hole

Despite its conspiracy-theory-coded stigma, the transhuman agenda is very real and very apparent.

Let’s start with what it is. Simply put, transhumanism is the gradual abolition of roles human beings traditionally performed throughout history and, therefore, the abolition of what gave people’s lives meaning.

Transhumanism has been around for awhile. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has slowly made all kinds of manual labor obsolete, as the invention of new automated technologies have been able to complete tasks in place of human hands and minds. Sure, this has made life easier and more convenient.

But there is an existential hole left in its wake. When the roles that defined humanity are slowly taken away from humanity, how then do we define humanity at all?

When a rural rice farmer is replaced by a humanoid robot, what is the rice picker?

When a mother is replaced by a surrogate mother, what is the mother?

When labor no longer exists because all labor is performed by automated machinery, then what exactly are we?

Cling to the machine

The answer is that we become welded to the machine. We offload our labor (and therefore our ability to think) onto machines and, by doing so, cling to the machine in total dependence.

That is what’s happening here with today’s NFL. Owners, front offices, players, and coaches have all given away their unique ability to make high-pressure decisions at the highest level of pro sports in exchange for the almighty analytics department.

And that destroys any chance of achieving greatness.

By committing their hand in this unholy marriage to data analytics, NFL teams have stunted the organic growth of their players and coaches and, consequently, have created a debilitating dependence on the answers the computers feed them.

The ChatGPT-ization of the NFL is here, and its mediocre, boring, and robotic output is merely a reflection of what the rest of us are going through in our own lives here in 2024.

Why evolution is fake

In the beginning, there was ... a big explosion.

Which came from ... nothing?

Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses.

In order for evolution to make sense, we must accept its explanation for the genesis of all life.

Magical thinking

So let's start there: Everything that has ever supposedly existed came from this gigantic explosion from a single subatomic point of origin.

And over time, this entropic inertia of particles from the explosion eventually somehow created stars and planets.

Now, most planets are barren wastelands of nothingness. But ours? Ours is different. We are teeming with life.

But how did life come into existence here on this tiny, blue planet? Well, according to our brightest minds, we don’t exactly know. But from what we can gather, after hundreds of millions of years of particles sloshing around in this primordial soup of water, nitrogen, carbon, and some other random elements, the first protein was magically created!

And from there, it was only a matter of time before a protein magically became a single-cell organism, which eventually magically turned into a more complex organism, and so on and so forth.

Fast forward to now. Trees and animals everywhere.

Then you have us. The most complex life forms in the known universe. We have bones, muscles, organs (each with its own specific function), eyes, ears, noses, and brains.

It’s kind of funny how all of this life came to be so incredibly complex, multilayered, and perfectly symbiotic in its structure.

But there’s obviously no way any of this could have been purposely designed by an intelligent designer, because we know that this all happened by a random and chaotic process of particles smashing into each other over millions of years until they eventually began building themselves into fully functioning organisms.

OK, that’s the end of my sarcastic rant. Time to get serious.

Theory or guesswork?

My general thoughts on evolutionary theory?

To put it simply, it’s too broad, general, and discombobulated of a theory for it to be considered a serious historical account of our universe.

The process of simply recording human history is one that involves making sense of specific moments in time involving specific historical figures with the hope of compiling a coherent story of humanity.

This consists of finding primary evidence, like documents and artifacts, of those moments in time. And then it takes teams of scholars to interpret what the evidence means; to connect the dots.

And that process is never 100% accurate. It is, much of the time, guesswork. It is excruciatingly hard — in fact, damn near impossible — to know to a full extent the full scope of detail for a single moment in history. And that’s only for a single moment.

Evolutionary theory asserts an assumption that is applied to the entirety of history. That life has uniformly and unquestionably progressed to this point in time according to its rules.

The problem with that is that it attempts to cover way too many data points across time and space and yet has no real way of doing so. We’re not talking about a team of scholars debating the political motivations of Napoleon during one of his military campaigns; we’re talking about the development of all life everywhere throughout all time.

It is the epitome of theory having no evidence to back it up.

Seeds of doubt

Personally, I think our ideas on evolutionary theory need an update. We need to see it through a new lens.

Evolution asserts that nature selects the set of genetic traits that are to be passed on to the next generation of organisms. But what we have to understand is the role the thinking man plays within the evolutionary model.

As conscious beings, we humans have gotten to the point where we have direct influence on what and who gets chosen to live on. We have the power and the conscious will to change the genes of an unborn child or abort the baby before it ever gets to be born.

On a simpler scale, we plant flowers and trees in a garden in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. We hold the power of life and death in our hands, and, therefore, we essentially construct and shape our world.

A few questions arise from this. How does evolutionary theory account for this journey of “biological construction” man has been able to embark on for quite some time? How much weight can it really hold if it does not?

My initial impulse is to be skeptical of the supposed immovable object that is evolutionary theory, only because it seemingly does not possess an historical account, and therefore predictive analysis, of the times when ecosystems have been and continue to be constructed by man.

What I mean by this is simple. Take the invention of agriculture for example. Every time people fashion a wooded forest or an empty plot of land into a farm of crops, a new ecosystem is born.

This would not have happened naturally. The forest cannot evolve into a garden. It can only happen through human intervention. It needed to be constructed. Keep in mind, I'm not saying the evolutionary traits that have been passed down to every species of plant and tree don't remain, which is why hedges need to be trimmed and branches need to be pruned or else it would grow wild.

But that's also exactly my point. The farmer must intervene and choose how this ecosystem operates. He chooses what plants stay, what plants get uprooted, and what the arrangement of the crop looks like. He decides what things get to live on and what things must go.

Similarly, on a larger scale, man has waged war with man and with nature. He has erased entire genetic pools from the face of the earth. Now, is that evolution? I thought “the survival of the fittest” was a random and automatic process, one that was out of our control? How is it possible then for man to logically and consciously choose to initiate a "random" process of genetic elimination?

It would make sense if he were merely an animal, for animals aren’t conscious beings with agency. Animals are in bondage to their instincts.

(If this were the case, if man were merely a cog in the evolutionary process, then genetic elimination via anthropogenic climate change should be considered one of the forces of natural selection, but that's a discussion for another time.)

Obviously, man also can be a slave to animalistic instincts. But he has the ability to overcome them and be a freely thinking man. And this thinking man is what shatters the paradigm of the routine-like progression model of evolution. Thinking man has introduced the most unpredictable force in the universe: free will. He can steer the destiny of all life in any direction he so chooses. In this very manner and for this very reason, I am arguing that evolutionary theory is deficient.

Show me the fossils

The current model of evolution is a reductive approach that meagerly attempts to “predict the past” per se by observing biological subjects in an atomistic fashion. It doesn’t attempt to take into account an organism’s past and present relationships with its ecosystem.

What’s meant by that is that the way an organism behaves in the present day (genetic traits and all) is obviously a product of a complex history of events through generations. And what evolutionary theory lacks is an exhaustive account of generational history relating to its subjects of study.

What this means in simple terms is that there is not enough evidence to justify the acceptance of the evolution model. The biggest red flag in the evidence department is the absence of transitional fossils.

You see, evolutionary theory traditionally holds that species undergo evolutionary change via a process called phyletic gradualism, wherein species branch off into different species gradually over time. And if this were to be the case, there should have been thousands, if not millions, of fossils showing this transition.

The problem is just that. There’s a gaping hole in the transitional fossil record. Some of the most famous evolutionary theory proponents, like Darwin and Dawkins, even admit the glaring absence of this evidence. The evidence is so severely lacking that some scholars have had to come up with entirely new models of evolution to explain the phenomenon.

Harvard Professor Stephen Jay Gould, contrasting phyletic gradualism, came up with the theory of punctuated equilibrium, wherein he asserts that speciation actually occurs in short bursts in between long periods of evolutionary stability.

This new model should be able to help verify the validity of evolution, in theory. It should at least narrow the timeframes for genetic mutation down to specific time periods. Suddenly, data now theoretically does not have to be gathered from all time periods in all of history and all locations in all the world.

Needle in the hay

However, it also puts the pressure on evolution advocates precisely because it narrows down the field of view. In a weird paradoxical way, it has broadened and complicated the quest to validate evolution.

Now, not only is there a search for evolutionary change in specific times and locations (a proverbial needle in the haystack), there must also be some account for and definition of what exactly “evolutionary stability” looks like to appropriately contrast the short bursts of change.

By abandoning the search for transitional fossils, evolution advocates have doubled their work. They must be able to explain the properties of the long-term routine the biosphere experiences as well as the drastic short-term chaos that intervenes in order to produce such kinds of changes.

There’s that word again: intervene. It seems as though genetic change can only occur when there are specific instances of intervention.

And who is the only variable in the biosphere?

Mankind.

Random rules?

Make no mistake, only mankind is capable of consciously exerting its authority over nature enough to change nature itself. Because as tempting as it is to gloss over generations of history with a single doctrine like “survival of the fittest,” we ultimately don’t have any transitional fossils of ancient plants, fish, or kangaroo, but we do know about the one conscious agent who had the ability to deliberately intervene in nature’s business.

The point is that evolution implies this sort of random process whereby species unpredictably vie for survival, but what it misses is how conscious will intervenes in this process. And there’s no shortage of this human intervention.

We construct our world today in too many ways to count. Look around you. Most things didn’t evolve to be there. They were fashioned. Crafted. Placed.

The more interesting question to me is, what exactly emerges when we deliberately choose which genetic traits to proliferate and which traits to leave out?

Make no mistake, issues like the pro-choice vs. pro-life debate serve as examples of our struggle with evolution and eugenics.

We are currently shaping a new evolutionary pathway because of our tendency to intervene, whether we know it or not. Who's to say what the effects of these practices will be?

The political authority of Jesus Christ: A response to the critics

In my last article, I made the case for one simple proposition: Jesus Christ did not separate spiritual and political matters, as he himself is the ultimate embodiment of matter and spirit in one synchronous conception, the Word becoming flesh.

This caused a flurry of drawn-out, blog-sized comments in the comment section objecting to a strawman version of the point I was making. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:

Politics are not incompatible with Christ but rather political positions that attempt to hijack and commandeer his teachings while simultaneously discarding his person.

Commenter Deus Vult asks why Jesus never lectured the crowds about how the Romans ran the empire if he was indeed so politically involved:

A really misguided essay. Put simply, if Jesus cared about politics, why did he never once lecture or question the Romans about how they ran their empire? Instead, Jesus tells his Jewish followers and the Gentiles to treat each other with love (best summarized by Paul in Romans 13 as, "do not harm your neighbor").

Jesus's solution to the plague of sin was to provide each person with a path to salvation; clearly, God's population-based (and more political strategy) of the Old Testament leaders communicating his will to the Tribes of Israel did not work, because the Israelites routinely flouted His will.

Jesus compels each person to choose either a path of faith, love, generosity, charity, repentance, and most importantly, obedience to God's will, or a path of sin, death, and eternal damnation. Jesus was not a hippie preaching platitudes; he was a serious man telling the rest of to take responsibility for who we are and what we do or suffer the consequences. That he took responsibility for all my sins and sacrificed himself on the Cross so that I might have eternal life makes him the ultimate man in my view. And real men (and women) don't wait for political solutions to their sins, which slap them in the face every day.

The Lord's path actually obviates the need for political solutions. Our culture is sick with sin, and we attempt to legislate away things we find objectionable, only to find that half the population embraces the noxious. We cannot solve the sin of murdering babies, for example, through political means. We need to turn back to the Christ who came to fulfill God's law, not abolish it, and who venerates marriage, family, children, and male leadership.

Rollin L cites Jesus’s famous “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and what is God’s unto God” message:

In answer to the question of paying taxes to the Romans, Jesus made the point (by asking who was pictured on the coin produced) that what was Caesar's was Caesar's and what was God's was God's. There is also the point that the Jewish Priests were using Roman coin, not commonly used by the Jews as I understand. Hmm.

The point made in this article, if taken to the logical conclusion, should address the question of why Jesus did NOT lead a rebellion against Rome, if he was all about politics.

Here's the key. In the United States, the Supreme Law of the Land says that all power not assigned to the federal government is reserved to the states and the people. With regard to issues such as abortion, that is exactly what we fought nearly 50 years to restore. For those who think that the federal government should, by statutory law, govern a matter that is clearly left to the states, I would tell you that you are badly misguided and defy you to point to anything in the teachings or example of Jesus that suggests that the laws of a nation should be disregarded when there is already a mechanism in place to deal with the issue.

All that makes you is a statist, one who despises local governance in favor of the diktat from an overbearing federal government. Murder is immoral too, but we don't have federal laws on murder (outside of rare, specific instances that cross into federal jurisdiction) and there is a reason for this. We deliberately do not allow a national government to take that authority away from the local communities and the states. Go do the hard work of fighting in your state and working to end abortion by changing the culture, just as the enemy did to make it so common. Don't be lazy, just do it the proper way, respecting the Constitution.

And Douglas Fouts wants to see if we can take the truth of Luke 5: 31-32 and build policy around it (shouldn’t be too hard as we’ve seen how political physicians can get in recent memory):

The article is fine for what it is. There really isn't an application here and there rarely is. Let's say that you reached someone with this message, there doesn't seem to be anything to build upon.

For starters, I see the word "revolution" used in his last sentence. Define your terms. In the beginning he said that Christ brought in a "spiritual revolution". Define that, in great detail. Define a political one. Over history, political revolutions are something that i wouldn't have wanted to be part of. The outlier might be the one in the United States. The one Christ brought should be laid out in detail. I would suggest that this were to happen it might give them some pause as they try and fit the political one into Christ's work.

One example; he talks about Christ. Let's start with a single basic truth. Luke 5:31-32 "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance"
Now take that truth and see if you can build that into the "political revolution". Go back and have Him tell you why He came.

Have we really reflected why Christ came? Can we articulate it? Can we even define who Christ is? Most of the United States says they are Christian, but have no idea who He is outside of a few generalities. Can they even tell you how to enter into the New Covenant?

Each of these commenters fundamentally misses the point of my argument (granted, maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my writing).

The fundamental authority of Christ

If you paid attention to the original article, I deliberately pointed out that I wasn’t going to be quoting from scripture (although I could have) and that instead, the focus needed to be on his person. There was a reason for that.

One of the fundamental objectives of my argument was to remind Christians and make the case to non-Christians that Jesus Christ is the authority in both heaven and earth; that everything outside of that, his teachings and any other scriptural quotes, is supplementary. Obviously, scripture is important, as it’s written in 2 Peter 3: 16-17:

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

But as all the apostles of Christ understood if Christ was not indeed who they understood Christ to be, then none of it mattered. As Paul writes in the first letter to the Corinthians:

“And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Corinthians 15:15-17) [emphasis added]

All of the Law, all of scripture, all of Christ’s teachings hinge on the nature of his person; that he’s God. That’s what gives his teachings weight and authority.

Politics are not incompatible with Christ but rather political positions that attempt to hijack and commandeer his teachings while simultaneously discarding his person.

And now, coincidentally, I have a real-life example to demonstrate that.

Jesus as a communist

A notable communist, Marxist-Leninist content creator and political commentator who goes by the name Infrared Haz has recently written an extensive piece on X specifically about how (you guessed it) Jesus Christ was actually a communist.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but let’s break down some of what he wrote

He starts by making Jesus out to be exactly what the commenters thought I was making him out to be: a worldly political revolutionary. Now, his Marxist rhetoric aside, his argument starts out reasonably enough.

Jesus’ disciples did embark on a cross-continent journey to convert the masses to Christianity, which had massive destabilizing effects within the Roman Empire politically (hope that answers your questions, Deus Vult and Rollin L). But this is where things get dicey.

Quote mining

He quotes from Acts to demonstrate how the apostles actually lived their faith by selling all their goods or dividing them all among each other. Basically, he’s making the point that the apostles of Christ did not believe in private property and that this communistic essence of early Christianity was erased from the religion later on, sterilizing it as “purely spiritual.” As a result, the spiritual was divorced from “actual reality.”

This is the ironic part, because here it is Infrared Haz who is divorcing Christianity from reality with his decontextualized quote mining.

If we take a look at the beginning of the chapter in Acts 4:8-12, we see Peter give a divinely inspired monologue to the Pharisees who were questioning the miraculous works of the apostles:

“Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders,if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed,let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." [emphasis added]

The apostles attributed the effectiveness of the miracles to the person of Jesus Christ. They didn’t believe in the abolition of private property for the sake of abolishing private property.

They believed in the supernatural divinity and godhood of Jesus Christ, which then informed them of all their administrative and social decisions henceforth. If they sold and divided up all their goods, they had good reason to! They were under immense scrutiny and pressure from the powers that be. And to whom were those powers directly antagonistic to? Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity. Not communism, capitalism, or any other -ism.

This is a common trend lately (and throughout history) to cast Jesus Christ as a “prophet” of modern religious and political inventions.

“Jesus Christ was actually a communist.”

“Jesus Christ was actually a Muslim.”

And this is all done as a way of indirectly diminishing and denying the supernatural godhood of Jesus Christ. The apostles like Peter and Paul would rebuke commentators like Haz for separating Jesus’s teachings from his position of ultimate authority, not praise him!

I hope this follow-up article serves to clarify the position I originally espoused. Jesus Christ is a political revolutionary, not for the sake of simply being a political revolutionary, but because politics is spiritual. And he is God incarnate. Without him, without acknowledging who he is, you don’t have a political platform to begin with. A house can only be built on rock, not on sand.