Ben West

[まだ面白い @madaomoshiroi]

子どもの頃にこの折り方知ってたらヒーローになれた...

[taoki @justalexoki]

i have never seen a more perfect post in my entire life

[Ben West @benpwest]

@chrisstover23 @TravisReinold @DineshDSouza It seems like, in context, Jesus' quote in 6:45 is supporting his statement in 6:44, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them." Thus, "They will all be taught by God," shows the necessity of God's intervention for someone to become one of God's people.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@beready4rapture Jesus said, "All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away" (Jn 6:37). This affirms God's sovereignty in election as well as the good-faith invitation. No one will earnestly come to Jesus then hear, "Sorry, you're not my sheep."

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:

Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie

Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.

This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

The Words We’re Missing

The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.

And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.

The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism

What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.

That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.

This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.

The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.

Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It

People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.

The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.

1/2

[Ben West @benpwest]

@DineshDSouza By that logic—"If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad"—Jesus isn't free. Could Jesus have been bad? Not if he is God.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@MasterMaliq Jesus promised, "For my Father's will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day" (John 6:40). His resurrection proves he can cash that check.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@MrTimothyRenfro @DineshDSouza @HwsEleutheroi Why does God do anything other than the cross? God gains more glory through how he treats more people, whether his justice is glorified in their judgment or his mercy glorified in their salvation. Same reason why God saves billions rather than dozens.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@DineshDSouza St. Paul's story shows God has the power to save even the worst sinner, but he doesn't owe salvation to any. He is glorified in saving the repentant and glorified in punishing the rebellious (Ro 9:22-23). Only those who believe have the right to be God's children (Jn 1:12).

[Ben West @benpwest]

@antitheistdad In biblical times, miracles were clustered around giving of new revelation—Moses, Elijah+Elisha, Jesus+Apostles— with centuries of less obvious intervention. There are miracles now (e.g. Bruce Van Natta), but we shouldn't expect them as often as Jesus' ministry.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@MrTimothyRenfro Jesus said, "you do not believe because you are not my sheep" (Jn 10:26), not "you are not my sheep because you do not believe." God's choice of whom to give to Jesus as his sheep—not our choice—is primary (Jn 15:16); all the Father gives him will come to him (Jn 6:37).

[Ben West @benpwest]

@shemaistheway Perhaps your definition of free will is not biblical. Consider Jesus. Did he genuinely/freely love his Father? Of course! Could he have done otherwise? No; Jesus is God, and God cannot sin. Libertarian free will must be unbiblical. We freely choose what we want most.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@TravisReinold @DineshDSouza He might say, "You did not believe because you are not my sheep" (see Jn 10:26). No one who genuinely believes in Jesus will be rejected (Jn 6:37), yet no one can come to him unless the Father draws them (Jn 6:44).

[Ben West @benpwest]

@DineshDSouza Jesus said, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them" (Jn 6:44). "Drawing" thus logically precedes coming to Jesus (i.e. faith).

He also told his disciples, "You did not choose me, but I chose you" (Jn 15:16), showing the primacy of divine choice.

[Wes Huff @WesleyLHuff]

Seeing some buzz about the eternal generation of the Son (EGS), for those of you who might not know what all that means here’s an attempt to let you in on the topic. The EGS is a doctrine affirming that the Son possesses his divine nature through being eternally begotten of the Father, thereby holding the same divine essence/nature/being as the Father. This all has stood as foundational to the doctrine of the Trinity and has been affirmed across the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds and by virtually every significant theologian (that I can think of) over the last 1800 years.

The doctrine has several critical dimensions. The Father’s generation of the Son comprises a necessary act of God, not a contingent decision; a distinction crucial because if the Son’s existence depended on the Father’s optional choice, the Son would not possess true deity or equality with the Father. This generation occurs eternally, not as a completed event in the distant past but as a timeless act of perpetual present (simultaneously ongoing and ever finished).

Importantly, the Father generates the Son’s personal subsistence rather than the divine essence itself, while simultaneously communicating the entire divine essence to him. When the Father eternally begets the Son and communicates the divine nature to him, the divine nature remains undivided, accounting for a second divine person without creating a second God.

The doctrine employs “begetting” language deliberately. The idea is this: just as Adam fathered Seth by communicating human nature to him, so the Father has eternally begotten the Son, eternally communicating divine nature to him (though this creaturely analogy must not be used to measure the divine relation itself). While the doctrine transcends our human comprehension, limited as my thinking is by time and my finite reality, it remains a teaching (as systematic theologian Scott Swain words it) “given to us in the gospel” and grasped through faith.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@kepilar77 2 Timothy 1:9  "He has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,"
Time had a beginning; the Bible said it first.

[Iraqveteran8888 @Iraqveteran8888]

All these communists say “you just haven’t tried our version of communism”

Nah.

“YOU haven’t tried our version of capitalism”

1. Dollar on the gold standard

2. No property taxes

3. Abolish the Federal Reserve

4. Flat 6 percent Federal tax paid at the point of sale only when you put your money into the economy.

5. No gun laws. Constitutional 2A amendment.

6. Reduce the size of the federal government by 90 percent

7. End all foreign aid effective immediately

8. Nuremberg style trials for all the turn coats and traitors who sold us out.

9. No more HB1s

10. No federal manipulation of the monetary supply via reckless printing of currency

11. Complete ban on insider trading with severe criminal consequences if caught

[Ben West @benpwest]

@LarsTheBadMan @DivinelyDesined If the beaker in which the self-replicating thing arises plausibly replicates prebiotic conditions, that would refute it—or at least, the claim would cease to be true.

[Ben West @benpwest]

@DivinelyDesined Even a dead cell—the closest thing to a living cell—won't become a living cell. Additional time doesn't help but degrades.

[Divinely Designed @DivinelyDesined]

Creationists actually DO believe small changes add up over time.

Evolutionists don't understand the arguments we're making.

They cliam that if we accept MICROevolutionary change, we must also accept MACROevolutionary change.

They like to use the analogy, "It's like saying you can walk a mile, but you can't walk across the country."

This is a stupid analogy.

Their contention is, if we accept small changes happen, what is there stopping these small changes accruing into larger changes over time?

But this is not the argument Creationists are making.

We're not saying there is a specific mechanism that stops changes accruing over time.

Creationists actually DO believe small changes add up over time.

Here is the contention:
Mutations don't add up to create new things.

Mutations destroy, they don't construct.

Mutations add up over time and cause decay in the genome, leading to sickness and overall lower fitness.

The issue is evolution needs to be able to construct entirely new genes, proteins, cell types, organs, limbs, and entire biological systems.

But random mutations can't engineer these systems.

No observed evidence exists anywhere showing how evolution builds new biological systems.

Biological systems have attributes, such as functional information and specified complexity, which has only ever been observed to originate from intelligence.

So the question is not, "What stops mutations from accruing?"

The question is, "What do mutations actually do?"

And the answer is, they destroy. They don't create.

Only intelligence creates.

Life was Divinely Designed.