09/19/12 According to the Scriptures with Doug Hamp and David Lehman

Paul September 22, 2012 at 5:34 pm

Doug,

About 23 minutes into the programme, you say that because other countries have to buy dollars in order to buy oil, a plunging dollar means that they have to work harder to buy a gallon of gasoline.

Perhaps I’m being dim, but I don’t follow this! If the dollar is plunging, then this means its value is decreasing against that of other currencies. So the dollar will fall against the currencies in which these Arab folk are paid as well. Hence although it may take more dollars to buy a barrel of oil, the Arab folks will get more dollars for each riyal or dinar or pound or whatever — so a riyal/dinar/pound/whatever still buys the same amount of oil as before. The only way in which a devalued dollar would mean that they have to work harder would be if their currencies were somehow yoked to the dollar, so that their value tracks that of the dollar — I don’t know that this is the case, though.

I don’t know either that Somali piracy is simply the result of desperation, although I understand that Somali fishermen have had a raw deal, with for example the dumping of toxic waste off the Somali coast by foreign vessels. But hijacking foreign ships with gunboats and Kalashnikovs (do desperately poor people have gunboats?), then demanding millions of dollars in ransom sounds more like plain old criminality to me.

The alternative-view/truth movement don’t seem to have a good handle on what’s going on in the Middle East. I’ve no doubt that the globalists have their own people operating there, but I think that the alternative-view/conspiracy people are too Western in their thinking: people like Walid Shoebat and Usama Dakdok have had a better handle on what’s going on over there (not least because they are themselves Arabs).

Indeed, I think that often the alternative-view/truth movement view of the Middle East is wildly unrealistic: moreover a large section of the movement seems to be very anti-Israel (often equating the banking conspiracy with a global Zionist conspiracy). We must remember that the truth movement is NOT rooted in The Truth. That’s not to say that they are wrong about everything, but that they simply do not have the unique grounding we have as believers (and a lot of them seem to be very anti-Bible, since they see it as a control mechanism — e.g. the Zeitgeist types). There are good Christians who do dig into the world of conspiracies: for example, I like much of Christian Pinto’s work, and have found particularly interesting his investigation of the Founding Fathers (and his subsequent exposure of David Barton as an over-patriotic propagandist, who has so many American believers under his spell).

I also doubt that Obama is a Muslim. I think his primary identity is that of a black radical (with the emphasis on the latter). He’s clearly not a Christian (no more than is his former pastor for twenty years). He has to be seen to be a Christian, as that’s just the way American politics is. But David Horowitz has a much better handle on him than does Avi Lipkin. His pro-Muslim agenda is simply a part of his Leftism. Muslims are a natural constituency of Marxists like Obama, since they (along with blacks, women, gays, etc.) may be used as a surrogate for the proletariat in Marxist theory.

On the subject of seed, you’ve convinced me. In fact I think I’d go further still. …And I don’t know whether I’m straying into the realms of conspiratorial lunacy, but I believe that the Bible may be suggesting that the seed of the serpent have been on the earth ever since Genesis (I think of Christ’s words in the Gospels about the sowing of the tares, the brood/generation of vipers, his words about the Pharisees’ paternity, the synagogue of Satan in Revelation, etc.). I know that this is generally interpreted as meaning they simply do Satan’s bidding, but if one accepts that Satan & his angels can somehow produce literal genetic seed, then who knows what they’ve been cooking up…

Great programme, anyway: God bless!