Except men give Credit to the principles of natural, they will never believe the Principles of revealed Religion. --Increase Mather

From the Calvinist International, reporting on a recent dissertation.

Online reading:

George Friedman writes

It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious.

Read more: Geopolitical Journey: Nostalgia for NATO | Stratfor

Doug Wilson writes,

Life is not a seminar classroom, where we can stroke our chins and grant certain points that merit further discussion. We have to go to war. We have to execute people. We have to excommunicate other people. We have to believe the climate change screechers, or we have to snort at them, preferably the latter. We have to make life and death decisions, and God wants us to do so faithfully.

And we should never forget that certainty is an inescapable reality -- the human mind cannot function without it. This means that, in a relativistic era like ours, the certainties will be invisible to everybody, but every bit as mandatory. All civilizations know things, but the corrupt ones don't know that they do. In our time, for example, even in our rootless time, we know that the slaughter of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook was wrong, and we are even teetering on the brink of knowing that what went on in Gosnell's clinic was wrong. And, given the sorry excuse for an education we all received, such certainties, when they become visible and apparent, baffle and bewilder us.

So uncertainty is a luxury for the rich and rootless (and unchallenged), and when it grows pervasively throughout a culture, it only creates a deracinated sophistry that cannot even tell the difference between boys and girls. It reminds me of the old child's joke -- "What's the difference between a mailbox and a hippopotomus?" "I don't know." "Well, I am sure not going to send you to mail any of my letters!"

Finally, The Calvinist International is making an exegetical case for natural law.