David Engelhardt > Quotes

“The cultural response is: how dare a religious system, a god, or man tell me who or what to be. But we see at the most fundamental level of identity, sexual anarchy ultimately destroys the identity of the individual. The immovable rocks of the fireplace have been thrown away, and the fire moves on.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“Our hierarchy of moral order cannot be based upon experience, especially in a world of manipulated media. It must instead, be based upon scripture. Scripture gives us a consistent framework to establish moral orders of importance.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“Mercy without justice doesn’t just bring disorder, it brings death. Fixed order, fixed justice, is necessary for moral orientation.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“The Cartesian starting point of “thinking” demands that God prove himself to us rather than us responding to his cosmic initiation. Speaking, as representative of cognition is certainly central to who we are since we are made in the image and likeness of a speaking God. However, our being comes not first from cognition or speaking, but the essence of our being comes from the breath of God. If I am merely a thinking being, I will value things differently than if I know that the entirety of my animate force is reliant upon the first breath of God. The organization of breath as speech then holds not just me, but the universe together.[”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“This is the complexity of the Biblical paradox, freedom and danger. The abolishment of prisons, but execution for adultery.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“This is the reason pundits speak so often about violence in cities like Chicago. Not getting killed is very helpful when trying to function inside a society. If you are advocating for defunding police officers while your neighbor is being shot, you may not accurately understand the moral hierarchy.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“Adultery is not a crime even though it destroys children, family, community fabric, and other sectors. Whereas we have essentially done away with executing even mass murderers, and so our prison system proliferates with–primarily–men in cages. I would advocate for more execution, as I would also advocate for vastly lower prison populations with fathers, sons, and brothers not taken from communities.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“year. We are not advocating for a theocracy, but we do believe that we are counseled by the “general equity thereof.” The best translation I have seen of “the general equity thereof” is that the civil law of Ancient Israel-now done away with—is a counselor that we can look to that helps us establish the bounds of moral law.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“Like the snakes play for power, the incredibly shallow reductionism of the BLM Incorporated worldview establishes a world at odds with itself where there can be no reconciliation without a redistribution of wealth. In fact, that is exactly what Dr. Anita Philips states in the video entitled Body Language. Philips states, “We do not want reconciliation. We want restitution.”[104] Definitionally, reconciliation is about inner peace with another while restitution is about financial equality via redistribution. But the phrases are always shrouded, and like the Edenic lie, a shrouded phrase allows for the lie to live.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“God has shown us in Scripture and in the natural law the unequivocal pattern for human life, which is the classic nuclear family. All sexual acts out of the bounds of marriage between a husband and wife are sinful—that they miss the mark of God’s intended design and so bring us death.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“Practically, we should have an immigration policy that allows individuals that desire to contribute to our polity to freely come and join our national tapestry, holding fast to our ideals while working towards their dreams. The answer is not “no wall” or “no enforcement,” it is a wall with open and guarded gates, divine paradox, beauty in the standard. Chesterton quipped, morality is like art, you must draw a line somewhere, and further, you may need a fence.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“is further true that there are currently 40 million slaves around the globe today.[”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“love how magnificent and tragic our faith is. I am compelled to release the vilest sinner, but if you do not forgive your brother then your Father in heaven will not forgive you. And even further, the Christian is not called just to forgive the deviant or murderer but to love him. Forgiveness is so large it's scary, but there is a paradox. We are called to hate sin so much that we cast those in sin out of our midst, 1 Corinthians 5, that when our own members walk in rebellion we call them witches’ 1 Samuel 15, or fools (Luke 24:25), and even if angels start turning others away from Christ we damn them to hell, (Galatians 1). This is not a faith full of weak edges, pulling punches. It is provocatively violent in mercy and in justice.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“One of the startling facts about the Old Testament system of law is that there is no imprisonment for the violation of any civil laws. On the other hand, there is capital punishment for a litany of crimes, but there is never a case where a father is taken from his family and sent to sit in a cage for 10 years to think about what he’s done. Stealing has a punishment, that is restoration to the one stolen from. Physical harm has a punishment—that is physical harm reciprocated back upon the harmer.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“one of the great paradoxes is that God's way limits man’s actions, but also contains the fount of true pleasure. In Psalm 16:11 the psalmist states: “at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” It is in the nature of God to carry or hold an eternal spring of pleasures. But those pleasures can only be obtained by appropriately pursuing the treasure.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.[115] It is true that sexuality itself is a river of fire[116] that if not bedded and banked on every turn it will destroy the individual and the community. Fire belongs in the fireplace, not on the floor lest we burn the house down and kill our families. The degradation of sexuality and spread of the fire happens both personally and culturally, we can see that by the 20,000% increase[117] of trans-gender students in schools in the past ten years, with a third of those students attempting suicide.[118] The fire is spreading, and it seeks to consume and destroy.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“For instance, if I am Irish, and I see a news report of an Irishman beaten to death by a fireman. If that report is played for months, and I am told this is a regular occurrence, and if I am gullible, and Irish—I will certainly be terrified of every fireman I see. Even if my city has 8 million people and that literally only happened to one person. My perception will become distorted, and I will believe that firemen must be stopped, and the Irish must be free. I will demand this as the top priority of my city whether or not this is the most life-threatening evil that I face. That is to say whether or not it is the highest issue on the hierarchy of importance.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“To distill the Dinseyism, it’s okay not to be good as long as I’m the authentic me, even if it means tearing down the buildings lived in by all of society. It sounds an awful lot like the satanic occultist Aleister Crowley’s maxim: “do what thou wilt.” Be the real you, whatever that is, it’s important you discover that real you, for you will be most fulfilled when you finally discover that real you.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“When a community begins to believe that clothes, food, healthcare, and education are owed, they will rage at their kind intentioned providers, and any other individual who has more than they do because they have not based their perceived rights on a just moral economy, but merely what appears to be fair at that moment. And in the context of my arbitrary wants, all is owed.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“The family on the other hand limits the power of state through active citizenry, and it is from the family that both state and church are granted the lives of family members to serve.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“All the churches of Revelation start with the qualifier “I know your deeds.” Surprisingly, it does not say, I know your faith. It does not say, I know your heart. Jesus judges us by the deeds that we do. Yes, our entry into the kingdom is based upon the unmerited gift of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, but the determining factor once inside this land birthed by mercy, is the act of the believer in congruence with the teachings of Christ.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“we do not establish and uphold God’s moral order the fire will spread as in Genesis to the entire community: all men from every part of the city both young and old.  In the city of Sodom, the angels of the Lord strike with blindness, men who cannot say “no” and who are attempting to sexually pursue the angels. The illustration is clear that sexual anarchy results in moral blindness, destroyed boundaries, and ultimately destruction of identity itself.”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword

“For Christians, this is clearly established in biblical law. Exodus 21:12, “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.” On the other hand, if you steal, you don’t get put to death. Exodus 22:1, “If a man shall steal an ox, or a sheep, and kill it, or sell it; he shall restore five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep.” The same is true for our nation as it derived the basis of our laws from scripture. So, stealing is a lesser penalty than killing someone. In North Korea, on the other hand, stealing food is a capital crime. Most westerners believe that it is insane to execute a man for stealing food, but that belief is found rooted in a biblical hierarchy of moral value.[77]”
― David Engelhardt, Good Kills: God, Good, and The Sword