A Mass Murderer Goes On Trial, and Nobody Notices

Daniel Doherty has Everything You Need to Know So Far about the Gosnell Trial over at Townhall.com today. If you haven't heard of the Gosnell trial, then you have been too dependent on the lamestream media, or as Rush Limbaugh likes to call them, the drive by media. Go read the linked site. I vomited a little in my mouth, so don't want to go back and rehash what has already been written. To its credit, the Washington Post has decided to send a reporter to cover the trial, after being shamed.  Had this murderer committed his crimes with a gun, we surely would have been hearing all about it.  But because he used a pair a medical scissors, we have not.  Perhaps it is also that the media feel shame precisely because calling out Gosnell would have been politically incorrect. 

Putting aside for now the filthy conditions and unsanitary medical malpractices the Gosnell clinic maintained, can we now discuss the horror, and the immorality of aborting our children?  Even from a purely legalistic point of view, the Constitution requires that a person can not be deprived of life or liberty without due process.  But these children are routinely killed by their own mothers without any sort of warrant being issued, or trial held.  And using semantics as the Left is so fond of doesn't really change the facts.  You can call him or her a "fetus" if you want, and there may be good medical reasons for designating a growing child still in the womb by a different name, but the fact is that the growing child in the womb will become a person if the pregnancy is not deliberately terminated.  The rights of the mother to terminate her pregnancy for convenience can not be greater than the right to life of the child.  For if the mother's convenience is greater than the child's right to life, then what prevents a mother from killing her child at any age up to 18, when the child reaches legal majority?  If it is simply outrage, we have seen how the public can be manipulated and desensitized to where no outrage is expressed.

"Medical ethicist" have argued that what they call "after birth abortions" should be legal because the child can not yet appreciate his or her life. But since when has one's appreciation of one's life been a determinate for personhood? And notice once again the use of semantics to mask the fact that if this procedure were sanctioned, people would be allowed to murder their own children. Is this really any different than the ancient practice of sacrificing the first born son? The Bible condemns that practice (witness Abraham being stopped from sacrificing Issac.) So should we. Also notice that the ethicist don't venture an age where the child becomes a person, leaving open the option at any point in the child's development where a parent can murder his or her children without a by your leave from society.   According to the National Catholic Register:

The second we allow ourselves to become the arbiters of who is human and who isn’t, this is the calamitous yet inevitable end. Once you say all human life is not sacred, the rest is just drawing random lines in the sand.

The Gosnell trial features gruesome partial birth abortions and afterbirth abortions in which the child was screaming.  Nobody knows how many such abortions were performed, but it could be 100 or more.  How the people who worked there could calmly go home at the end of a shift, only to return the next day speaks to the desensitisation these workers must have gone through.  It is not unlike the death camp murderers in Nazi Germany.  It was a horrifying death cult, and the  "medical ethicist" want to expand that death cult.  Such a death cult results from man substituting his own notion of morality for God's firm laws. Every civilization that has tried to do that came to ruin. But even you don't believe there is a God, surely you can see that no good thing can come from ignoring the experience of history.

Not One More Inch

Daren Jonescu has a piece over at the American Thinker today entitled Where's the Progress in Progressivism. To what Utopia are the modern day Progressives leading us knuckle dragging Neanderthals? In itself, it is an excellent explanation of the so-called philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of Socialism in all its forms, whether Communism, Fascism, Fabianism, or Progressivism. Jonescu:

The propensity for what we may call pseudo-theorizing has been at the heart of progressivism from the start. The nineteenth century spawned a mutant philosophical subset, intellectuals for tyranny, who produced ersatz scientific, moral, and even metaphysical arguments to persuade men that their desire for unlimited state power was in fact an unavoidable inference from an objective reasoning process, rather than the authoritarian impulse plain and simple. This philosophical mutation -- reason as handmaiden of authoritarianism, rather than as its natural rival and limit -- was made possible by the anti-rational turn in German thought during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most dramatically signaled by Immanuel Kant's condemnation of previous Western philosophy as a "dialectical illusion," in his Critique of Pure Reason.

snip...

This was the seed of modernity's deadly invasive plant, political historicism. In effect, this nineteenth century weed, authoritarianism in the guise of theory, was the latest and greatest revival of Socrates' old nemesis, sophistry -- the art of rhetorical persuasion in the service of political efficacy, grounded in the denial of any distinction between truth and power. The basic method of this newer, more devilish sophistry was to obliterate the truth/power distinction by flat-out denying the reason/politics distinction. In other words, the intellectuals for tyranny reduced the mind itself to the play of political forces, hence conflating logic, the abstract method of development in the search for knowledge, with power struggle, the practical mechanism of political development.

One of the things the Christianity introduced to the world was the notion that individuals count, not merely collective peoples. The Prophets preached to the whole collective of Israel, and promised pain if the collective Israel did not repent. But suddenly Jesus is saying that even if your neighbor doesn't repent, or your wife or brother for that matter, if YOU repent, and believe in God's saving grace, YOU will be saved. That was something new, and it carried down through Christian philosophers including St. Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther to John Locke, and ended up as practical politics in the Constitution of the United States, and its precursor document the Declaration of Independence.

Marxism, on the other hand, proclaimed that history, rather than being the collection of the choices of individual men, was in fact the driver of those choices.  Jonescu again:

 

For one thing, the individual human being becomes, if not an outright logical fallacy, then at least an insignificant term in the new morality which flows from the elevation of political history to the status of a logical argument, or dialectic. Ethical individualism is thus obliterated, in favor of a collectivism that is as much metaphysical as it is ethical. (I have repeatedly noted that progressivism literally denies the logical priority of the individual human being, and declares instead that the individual is derived from the collective. Some may have found this description hard to believe; nonetheless it is not only true, but absolutely unavoidable if one radically reverses our relationship to history, as progressivism does.)

Secondly, if reason is reduced to political history, and the brute force of collective action identified with the force of logic, then death and oppression, the practical means of progressive authoritarianism, are as objective and amoral as a syllogism. In this way, historicism becomes man's most ingenious moral sophistry: the rationalization of mass murder, and of carelessness about life itself. What, after all, is mere individual life against the glorious march of history? Furthermore, what is individual moral responsibility in the face of collective historical necessity? This is perhaps the ultimate explanation of every progressive atrocity, real and prospective, from the Communist Manifesto to Bill Ayers' projection of the need to kill twenty-five million Americans who resist re-education; from the millions slaughtered by Stalin, Hitler and Mao to Barack Obama knowingly ignoring the cries for help from the victims of Benghazi for over seven hours, or his support for death panels and post-birth "abortion."

Of course, Marxism has proven to be a lie. But the Marxists can not admit to that lie, and so have constantly changed their language to fool the public in the hopes that they can keep their true agenda alive, namely the Tyranny of the Elites. Despite the fact that history (properly understood) has shown that Marxism has failed wherever it has been tried, Marxists dare not admit this to themselves, for their egos could not take it. Thus they change names from Marxist, to Socialists, to Fascists, to Communists, to Liberals, to Progressives, each one meaning whatever one wants it to mean, like Social Justice. Just as Global Cooling became Global Warming, then Global Climate Change, but always it had the same solutions, so the Progressives have maintain the same solutions no matter what they called themselves.

One of their "solutions" has been to ban all guns in the United States.  They will tell you they don't want to ban all guns, just these dangerous guns (which have been conveniently demonized by a compliant media) and whose owners have been made to seem like crazy kooks out to terrorize innocent mothers and children.  In another age, it was "Saturday Night Specials," cheap handguns that black men supposedly carried to threaten and mug families out for a good time on a weekend night.  Clearly such overt racism is no longer acceptable, so they move on to demonizing southern white men.  The impulse is the same, however, and so are the people involved.

Lewis Dovland has a piece up at American Thinker entitled Guns: The Left's True Aim and How to Thwart It, that explains the Progressives strategy in banning all guns in the United States. It involves trickery, demonizing guns and people, of course, slight of hand, and possibly more outright fraud by the Senate Majority Leader. Doveland:

To understand progressive methodology, let's use another similar issue: the gay marriage agenda. Say the current definition of "marriage" as it has been for thousands of years is represented by "A" on a continuum of A to Z, with "Z" being the left's ultimate goal. Asking for "Z" now would be a major overreach (and "Z" is much farther than just gay marriage), so progressives ask for "N," which is just enough of a stretch to make people push back only a little.

So to protect a foundation of society, the people of California overwhelmingly vote a law that defines marriage -- an appropriate state's rights issue. The left goes to court and has California's decision overturned. The people next pass a state constitutional amendment, and again the left gets it overturned, and now it is in the Supreme Court. The left also applies public pressure through the media to brand anyone who doesn't agree as a homophobe or hater, all the while controlling the educational curriculum so only one side of the argument is taught to our children.

Eventually, progressives will get only "C" this time, which is really all they wanted for now. But note something powerful here. "C" becomes the new "A." So there is never a way to back it up to the original "A." Over time, they will win another "C" that becomes "A."

It has been a successful strategy so far on every front. The first Federal gun control, the National Firearms Act, was passed in 1934, during the crime wave of the 1930s. A few of the most notorious criminals had the new automatic firearms such as the Thompson Submachine gun. At close range, the Tommy gun was an awesome weapon, and the police claimed to be outgunned by gangsters wielding Tommy guns. I think this was a lie, because all of the people that were terrorizing the public at the time from Bonny and Clyde to Baby Faced Nelson were eventually put down by ordinary weapons and good police work. In any case, under the NFA, you could still own a Thompson, if you had the permission of your local officials, paid a $200 tax, and registered your ownership of that weapon with the ATF. In essence, the NFA made ownership of these weapons unattainable by the average guy in the street, while leaving them available to the rich and powerful-the Elites.

Of course, there were more gun laws to come, such as 1938, and the Gun Control Act of 1968, after the assassination of President Kennedy, his brother Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. Once again the public was panicked, and gun grabbers were able to use emotion to crack down a bit more on gun owners. Even President Reagan got in the act with the so-called Firearms Owners Protection Act, which did little to protect firearms owners, but further restricted ownership of NFA weapons, making them available only to the very very rich. Each time a new gun control bill was passed, that became the starting point for more "common sense" restrictions. We started out with no infringement, and now we find ourselves battling to keep semiauto rifles and push back a plan to register all our guns so they can be confiscated.

Enforcing the universal background check will require registration of all guns in a national database; otherwise, how and where do we prevent private sales without background checks? And the details of how to enforce the background checks will be handled by the legislation, neatly out of the direct view of the public. Once that occurs, the government will have a list of all legal guns and owners in the U.S., making confiscation extremely easy when the time comes.

We must make clear to our "representatives," who will be only too happy to cave to the Left in order to appear to be willing to compromise, "Not One More Inch." Remember the words of Jessie Helms:

“Compromise, hell! That’s what has happened to us all down the line — and that’s the very cause of our woes. If freedom is right and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as if it were a roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?”

We believe in freedom, in liberty, and we believe those telling us how to live should mind their own business. We can compromise on certain things, for instance how long it will take us to return to a balanced budget. But we can not compromise these fundamental principles. Not one more inch (and oh, by the way, we are gunning for all those laws that infringe our rights.)

Army Now has Evangelicals and Catholics in its Crosshairs

Please take time to read this post by Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugged entitled U.S. Army Labeled Evangelicals, Catholics as Examples of Religious Extremism. Would that it were so, and I count myself as part of the problem. We are no where near extreme enough. Every time an abortion is performed, we should be wailing in the streets, for another child has been murdered. Indeed, whenever an injustice occurs, and these days the injustices are hard to ignore, we should be shouting at the top of our lungs, as the prophets did of old. But even if we did these things, the Army still should not consider that too extreme. After all, even at our most extreme, we are not killing people.

As to why this is happening, I can only guess that the regime is trying to strongarm the Church into going along with the ruling by HHS that the Church must hand out abortificients to its employees under ObamaCare.  The Church has vowed to resist, on principle, and has filed lawsuits against the regime.  You see, the Church, and the Jews before them, have considered that life begins at conception, and that to abort the child is to murder him or her.  Murder is a sin against God.  But like Communist and Fascist regimes around the world, this regime can not have anyone disagree with it.  Instead, they must smear the ones who disagree and resist, and make them out to be evil.  Eventually, if they don't change (and the Church is not going to change its mind) the regime starts imprisoning or killing them.  By making us out to be terrorists, and with the NDAA as "authority" the regime believes it can silence the Church.  Good luck with that.

You can insult us with things like "Piss Christ" and we will follow the Biblical injunction to turn the other cheek. But the Army would be well advised not to make us out to be the enemy. Remember that you took an oath not to the current Commander in Chief, but to uphold and defend the Constitution. Remember that Christians have a duty to defend themselves and their families. While no doubt you will bring enough force to bear to ensure your short term success, how many martyrs are you willing to create? How many peaceable citizens are you willing to kill?  The lesson of history is that the Church grows stronger with each martyr you create.  Rome is dusty history, but the Church still stands. 

Christians must fight, fight, fight...

On April 3, 2013, Fay Voshell published a piece in the American Thinker that I think all of us need to read and understand entitled Stomping on Jesus: The Iconoclasm of the Left. There are two definitions of iconoclasts. One is someone who seeks to overthrow, or to change popular ideas, or commonly held beliefs. When such commonly held ideas are wrong, as is the case with the gun grabbers, of global warming alarmists, such people are thought to be good. By thinking independently, and searching for the truth, such people enlighten us all. The other definition of an iconoclast is one who literally destroys religious icons for purposes of destroying, or weakening the faith tradition. It is iconoclasm of the second sort that Ms. Voshell refers to here. Ms. Voshell views the order by a Florida Atlantic University professor to students to stomp on Jesus's name written on a piece of paper as a recent, crude attempt at modern day iconoclasm. Mr. Voshell:

The attempts to exterminate Christians and the images of their faith have a long and bloody history, and certainly have not been confined to pre-modern Japan. While persecution has remained a constant of Christian history since the time of Jesus and the apostles, iconoclasm, the concerted attempt to rid a given civilization of Christian religious images, has been a recurrent issue, especially during the eighth and ninth centuries. During that time period, imperial legislation of Byzantium attempted to bar the use of figural images. Existing icons were destroyed by those who had a theory that sacred images were "graven images," and therefore idolatrous.

But some scholars believe the rise of Islam, which forbids religious images, coupled with the Byzantine emperors' desire to make the State rather than the Church the sole authority were at the heart of the iconoclastic movement. The movement aimed at destroying religious images gave the political rationale necessary to justify the persecution of Christians who would not bow to the almighty State. Stomping on or eradicating Jesus' image indicated subservience to the government and its imperial leaders.

In an age when many were illiterate, and books were rare and expensive because each one had to be copied by hand, icons were a way of teaching the people about the life of Jesus, and of explaining his saving grace to each of us who believe in him. As such, icons are not "graven images" forbidden in the Bible, but teaching aids. Take away the teaching aids, the aids to evangelizing and preaching, and you undermine the faith.

Ms. Voshell explains all of this as a prelude to her real message: The Christian community has been too meek in its reaction to the vicious attacks both here and abroad to the Christian faith. In Egypt, for instance, while the President hands over military hardware and millions of dollars, Coptic Christians are being slaughtered. In Syria, amid the civil war, a genocide of Syrian Christians is proceeding apace. Meanwhile, here at home, nobody has been killed yet, but Christians are under attack. Every year at Christmas, there are cities who want to ban Nativity scenes, or put up "holiday trees," as if the name "holiday" did not derive form Holy Day. People everywhere urge us to drop "Merry Christmas" and instead use "Happy Holiday." I am always torn here because much of the Christmas symbolism is pagan in origin, but has become so attached to Christmas that many think somehow a lighted tree is somewhere in the Christmas story. In the end, like the icons of old, if putting up a tree and decorating it allows parents to teach their young about the miraculous birth of Jesus, who am I to complain. Now, of course, the atheists have taken aim at the central event of the Christian faith: Easter. Of course, decorated eggs have nothing to do with Easter, which is about the Crucifixion, dying, and Rising of our Lord and Saviour. He is Risen. Again, if coloring eggs, and hiding them in the lawn allows parents to teach their children about this miraculous event, who am I to complain.

Christian response (to the attack on Christianity) has generally been weak. There are many reasons for the lack of concerted outrage, but there are at least two reason Christians are allowing their immense contributions to American society and its culture to be attacked and sidelined.

One is the generally pacifist view many Christians have toward conflict of any type. Most denominations embrace a view of Christ that is gentle, meek and mild, a Christ that advised patience with one's enemies. Jesus did advise patience. But many forget the Christ who excoriated the leaders of his day for their oppression of the masses and who strongly confronted their idiocies with scalding contempt. Almost forgotten as well is the Christ who condemns and judges evil and who is committed to its complete eradication.

This attitude wasn't always so. I remember as a child the many hymns that used military metaphors to teach Christian theology. Onward Christian Soldiers, and A Mighty Fortress are examples of hymns that no longer feature in the regularly sung hymns of the Church. We need to revive the image of Jesus as a strong, masculine man, who was attractive to both men and women. We also need to revive the image of the Jesus who experienced the full range of emotions we all deal with. He could be tender with women and children.  He could be angry with the money changers. He could be understanding of the tax collectors, and saddened by the rich young man who would do what it took to follow Him. He could be compassionate with lepers and the lame. He could be frightened of His coming Crucifixion, yet courageously take all our sins unto himself, and ask His Father to forgive those who had crucified Him.

There is only one way to stop the marginalization. There is only one way to stop the iconoclasm of the Left that would eliminate Christian symbols and influence from society. That way is to fight, because if Christians don't resist with all their might the attempts to deprive them of their symbols of faith, their constitutionally protected right to express their faith and their right to influence the society in which they live and work and worship, the next step by the iconoclastic Left will be overt persecution and attempts at elimination from any significant role in society -- and seventeenth century Japan shows how far human beings are able to go down that path.

As Christians, we must become more militantly so. Yes, we must be like Christ in all things, but we must be prepared to defend our beliefs at every turn as well.

Senator Kay Hagan's True Colors

David Codrea pointed me to this article at his War on Guns website. The article appears in the Greensboro New and Record, entitled Sen. Kay Hagan favors expanding background checks for guns. Well, she is a Democrat, after all, and as such favors all sorts of things that stomp on your freedoms and liberties. The NRA and GOA both list Hagan as "F" rated, meaning they don't expect much support from Hagan on issues favorable to gun owners. Hagan doesn't disappoint with this latest pronouncement.  But, if she is reading this, and if she doesn't have a hidden agenda, then here are some reasons not to support extending the background check system.

The first reason is that background checks don't prevent a determined criminal from getting a gun.  Most such criminals know not to go into a gun store to purchase their armaments, for reasons we shall soon see.  Instead, they go on the black market.  After all, if they can smuggle drugs into this country, they can smuggle guns right along with them.  Do you honestly think that if background checks become "universal" that black marketers are now going to run background checks on their "customers?"  Then there is the fact that the Sandy Hook shoorter would not have been deterred by having universal background checks because he simply stole the gun he used after killing his mother, the rightful owner.  The colmbine shooters obtained their weapons illegally as well, so no background check would have spotted these two.  Many others obtained their weapons through legal channels and there was nothing in the system to flag them.  But I talk about that later too.

On principle, there are several problems with background checks.  The first problem is that once you have a background check system in place, the prospective gun owner is forced to prove, to the satisfaction of unelected bureaucrats, that he is not guilty of one or more of the items for which a person currently may be prohibited.  This turns the American justice system on its head.  After all, a person is innocent until proven guilty.  But here, to exercise a fundamental right, a person has to prove himself innocent.  The way the system works, you fill out a form 4473, which asks a number of questions of you, after which you sign it swearing it to be true. Then they do a background check. If they find that everything sworn to is not true, you have just self incriminated. I don't know how a court might rule in a case brought up on such grounds, but I would think they might have some qualms about a system that requires a criminal to self incriminate. If, therefore, criminals can not be held to this standard, who is the system designed to catch?

Then there is the problem of continuously adding classes of people to the list of prohibited persons.  In every legislative session throughout the country, there are bills advanced to make more and more behaviors illegal, to ban ever more objects, and to make the law tougher by making more of these prohibitions a felony. The Overcriminalization of America by John Whitehead describes governments at all levels making crimes out of perfectly legal activities. Further, mens rea, the "criminal mind" is no longer required. Simply doing whatever has now been determined illegal is enough to bring the government, complete with SWAT teams down upon you. For any number of new crimes, you could find yourself suddenly a prohibited person.  If the activity for which you now find yourself in hot water was a legal activity at the time, fairness says you should be able to keep your guns, but of course, the law requires that you forfeit your rights to self defense.

Then there are people who are charged and convicted in foreign courts for crimes that may or may not be crimes here.  In most cases, the conviction occurred in an environment where the rules of evidence are, shall we say, less strict than our own.  Should we uphold convictions that do not meet our own standards of justice?  Also, is there no statute of limitations to the background check system?  How is it that a man who had a conviction 40 years ago for simple assault (with mitigating circumstances), but served no time, has retired form the Navy with an honorable discharge, and led an exemplary life ever since now finds himself a prohibited person?

Then, there are the mentally ill.  Most who have looked at the rampage shootings that have occurred have concluded that there was something mentally wrong with the people who committed the shooting.  Most have noted signs beforehand that in retrospect should have been acted upon to get the individual some help, or if he or she did not want help, then seek to involuntarily intervene to help them.  Understand that most of the mentally ill are totally harmless, which is why there is so much reluctance to single out people with mental issues for public humiliation, so nothing will really be done about them. These problems, and others are highlighted at The Gun Guys, a liberal pro-gun site. Author Cindy Hill talks about the many failings of the Brady background check. Go read what she has to say. Then, if you still feel that we need a background check system, work to make it fair and narrowly limited.

The 80 million gun owners who didn't commit these crimes, and who vote, will be grateful to you.

Way Up North: A Christian's Use of Lethal Force

Way Up North: A Christian's Use of Lethal Force  Go read the whole thing.  Nothing more needs to be said, and thanks to Rev. Paul for providing this useful post.

Thoughts on the series "The Bible"

Yesterday, I was discussing "The Bible" series with a co-worker. The 4 part series was hailed by Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Rielly, and probably others before its premier in the History Channel. My friend thought it was somewhat of a let down, in the parts that were glossed over, and some of the acting. Overall, I like it, and have been watching it. Certainly, the producers, Roma Downey and her husband deserve credit for even attempting to make a modern film about the Bible.

Discussing it however, brings up an interesting point: namely that the Bible is notoriously difficult for the modern reader to slog through and understand. The Old Testament, in particular, can be difficult to understand without some background and history. I know this will offend some of you, but to read it as if it were the literal words of the Almighty is to miss much of the message. Much of the Bible was first written down during the Babylonian Exile, as a way for the Jews to keep the faith. What must be understood is that the Bible stories showed God's grace in time after time saving the people of Israel, His Chosen People. It is written from their point of view.  To appreciate it, one must also take on their point of view, and look at things as the ancients looked at them.

Take, for example, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  God says to Abraham that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are so evil, that he will destroy them. What their great evil was is never mentioned in the Bible, probably because it wasn't that important to the story.  What is important is that Abraham knows that his nephew, Lot, lives in one of the cities.  Abraham then begins a thinly veiled negotiation with God with the result that if even only 10 righteous men can be found, God will not destroy the cities.  Now, to the nomadic sheep and cattle herders sitting around a camp fire at night, and hearing this tale, cities were places of evil in any case.  Of course, as it turned out, only one righteous man could be found, Lot.  But God does not punish the innocent, so he send two angels to get Lot out of the cities before they are destroyed.  God's great grace is shown by his being willing to spare the cities if even just 10 righteous men can be found, and the herculean efforts to spare Lot, the lone Hebrew living in the cities.  The men of the cities, however, are throw away characters who aren't even named.

The Bible also often doesn't tell us any extraneous details, details that the people who heard these stories would assume, but that we may not.  A modern writer might write that "He went out the door to his ground floor apartment, and found the keys to his red,1965 Mustang.  He backed it out of the parking space and turned west."  But the ancients didn't bother setting the scene for us, for they lived there.  They were more interested in understanding God's will.  When God told Abram to come out of the city of Ur, to a land he would show him, no mention is made of anyone else.  The modern reader gets the impression that Abram and Sarai set out alone across 500 miles of wasteland to the Promised Land.  In fact, Abram was probably a leader of a huge tribe of people, who brought their tents, their belongings, their cattle and servants with them.  After all, Abraham brought 10,000 men to war against the Kings of  the Plains to rescue his nephew.

Also, the Bible is not history, at least not as we understand it here in the West.  The Old Testament only contains a few dates, and these are relative.  The only date I am familiar with in the New Testament is the date of the Resurrection, which takes place on the first Sunday after the Passover.  The closest writing to that we understand in the modern sense is Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Letters from Paul.  Place names often shift, and it is difficult to get the context of certain peoples and places. For example who, or where are Gog and Magog? If you click on the link, you will see that even scholars have trouble placing these two names, but evidently in the 6th century BC these two names must have been known. Of course, no modern map will help you find the Hittites (Central Turkey), Persia (Iran), Babylon (Iraq), or the Philistines, who apparently came from Crete.