Providing a reasoned defense of the Christian message
Make sense?
H/T to arielb.org/archives/272
And in other news:
Al Shabaab, a hard-line Islamist group linked to al Qaeda which controls most of the southern part of Somalia, banned food aid last year and kicked many groups out, saying aid creates dependency.
Some 3.7 million Somalis are at risk of starvation in the worst drought in decades, including some 2 million in rebel-held regions were most major aid agencies cannot reach.
Casey Luskin writes:
It’s that time of the election cycle again. You know, the time when the media starts regularly deploying the “evolution test” to decide whether a candidate is mentally impaired. Those who capitulate to the Darwinian consensus are deemed of normal intelligence and fit for office. Those who don’t are subjected to public mockery and humiliation.
Summary: Yeah, scientists are smart and everyone else is dumb. Now that we have that out of the way, we can look at Casey’s list of greatly celebrated then delegated fossil hoaxes.
Yeah, no wonder that we trust scientists like we trust clairvoyants. And human evolution is fact Fact, FACT — except when it is sham, Sham, SHAM. Global cooling Global warming Climate change hype… this is not science. It is philosophical and political hypemongering, coming from a secular priesthood trying its best to mirror and out-do the religious priesthood of the pre-Reformational Catholic church.
Listen to the audio presentation below:
From Casey Luskin here: www.evolutionnews.org/2011/08/california_science_center_issu050231.html
California Science Center Issues a Press Release Full of Misleading Claims: A Point-by-Point Response
The California Science Center Foundation (herein “CSC,” as it is essentially a shell organization that is very difficult to distinguish from the California Science Center) has put out a press statement full of inaccurate and misleading information about the settlement in the American Freedom Alliance (AFA) v. CSC lawsuit. E-mail evidence disclosed during the case, as well as a myriad of other facts, directly contradicts CSC’s claims. In particular, is noteworthy that CSC’s statement makes no mention whatsoever of the $110,000 price tag they were willing to pay to settle the case and avoid trial. It seems that major detail is too embarrassing to them to be disclosed, because it implies some kind of culpability on their part.
Below is a point by point commentary and refutation of various claims in the statement issued by the CSC about the lawsuit settlement:
And so it goes on…
In a striking e-mail that shows the CSC fishing for a pretext to give the public to justify the cancellation, CSC VP of Communications Shell Amega passes a command from CSC CEO Jeff Rudolph to fish through the contract to find a reason, a pretext, for canceling the event:
“Jeff just called and is wondering if they violated an agreement — like was this supposed to be a private screening or did they say it was a public screening? If they misrepresented the event, then we can cancel them.”
In case it isn’t clear, the above statement shows that CSC first wanted to cancel AFA’s event, and then sought a reason it could give publicly to explain the cancellation. In other words, CSC wanted to cancel the contract before it knew whether the contract had been violated. Shell Amega’s own e-mail contradicts her claims in the statement that AFA’s alleged breach triggered the cancellation. In another telling e-mail, Sion then jubilantly announces the manufacture of plausible deniability: “They did receive an agreement w/the following language — hope this covers us well!”
After witnessing the anger of other LA area scientists and academics over CSC’s allowing a group to rent its IMAX to show a pro-ID film, CSC curator Ken Phillips then warned his CSC colleagues against granting a forum to proponents of ID:
“I personally have a real problem with anything that elevates the concept of intelligent design to a level that makes it appear as though it should be considered equally alongside Darwinian theory as a possible alternative to natural selection. In other words, I see us getting royally played by the Center for Science and Culture resulting in long term damage to our credibility and judgment for a very long time.”
Curator Phillips is welcome to disagree with ID, but here he exemplifies a culture of intolerance against ID within the California Science Center.
Wow. So we witness again the intolerance of the Darwinian priesthood. In a mere 500 years, we have replaced one diabolical priesthood with another diabolical priesthood. Viva the ID revolution. [Read more...]
From Casey Luskin here: www.evolutionnews.org/2011/08/stampede_the_california_scienc050221.html
Stampede! What the California Science Center Scandal Reveals about Our Scientific Culture
You’ve heard a lot in this space the past few days about the viewpoint-discrimination lawsuit settled by the California Science Center for $110,000. That’s money the CSC found it advisable to pay out to the American Freedom Alliance in order to avoid having to go to court and argue the case in public, with all that would have entailed by way of exposing a trail of incriminating emails by CSC staffers and scientists around the Los Angeles area.
Lead by Casey Luskin, ENV writers have already very clearly spelled out the evidence of duplicity and intolerance on the part of the California Science Center, the panicky attempt to squelch the airing of a viewpoint favorable to intelligent design and the subsequent cover-up. Now that there’s a little bit of a breather following the widespread reporting of the settlement, I’d like to suggest why the whole thing matters so much.
And some more:
In episode after episode in the world of science, where mild, scattered expressions of Darwin-doubting were heard, we’ve observed this panicked mentality immediately set in. Staff at the CSC and even scholars at neighboring institutions were driven into a mass anxiety attack. They feared for their reputations and their livelihoods, but there was also something almost existential about the delirium that overtook normally sober, thoughtful men and women.
In terror, our scientific buffaloes have trampled individuals and groups that merely wanted to encourage debate about a scientific issue of profound scholarly, cultural and philosophical importance. What’s changed just in the past year is that, gratifyingly, we’ve seen several instances where the trampled party fought back and won vindication through the legal process. That’s what happened in AFA v. CSC.
Look, money talks. Though Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian Institution’s American Museum of Natural History had his own account of persecution confirmed by no less than the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, he received no monetary compensation. By contrast, when the CSC reluctantly coughed up $110,000 to the American Freedom Alliance, it was an implicit admission that the CSC had done an injustice. After all, the CSC is a government entity, and government cannot discriminate against viewpoints. In fact, it’s been striking how many of the documented cases of anti-ID discrimination have taken place at state-run educational and scientific institutions.
Click the image for more info…
VALUE YOUR VOTE which was highly successful at the last election. It highlights the voting record of sitting MP's on a number of important family and conscience vote issues.
From www.chiefrabbi.org/ReadArtical1764.aspx
Towards the end of his recent book, Civilization, the historian Niall Ferguson drops into his analysis an explosive depth-charge. He quotes a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, part of a team tasked with the challenge of discovering why it was that Europe, having lagged behind China until the 17th century, overtook it, rising to prominence and dominance.
At first, he said, we thought it was your guns. You had better weapons than we did. Then we delved deeper and thought it was your political system. Then we searched deeper still, and concluded that it was your economic system. But for the past 20 years we have realised that it was in fact your religion, Christianity. It was the Christian foundation of social and cultural life in Europe that made possible the emergence first of capitalism, then of democratic politics.
Equally arrestingly, Ferguson repeats the point made by the editor and Washington correspondent of The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two years ago in their book God is Back. While Christianity is in decline in Britain and most of Europe, it is growing and thriving in China, where the number of people in church on Sunday is greater than the total membership of the Communist Party, in the land that in 1958 Chairman Mao had declared “religion free”.
The people flocking to the churches are not, as Karl Marx would have predicted, the poor and oppressed searching for the opium of the people. They are the young, hard-working, upwardly-mobile entrepreneurs for whom Christianity offers an ethical framework, a structured view of life and its disciplines, in a society experiencing rapid transition.
As a non-Christian, I find this fascinating. Europe is losing the very thing that once made it great, while China, the world’s fastest-growing economy, is discovering it. China: the home of Confucianism, Taoism and its own brand of communism. That is something no one could have foreseen.
What has China realised that the West is rapidly forgetting? That a civilisation is as strong as its faith. As a culture grows old and tired, as people borrow more and save less, as they value present pleasures over future growth, so they begin to lose the beliefs and practices that made their society successful in the first place.
It begins to resemble the Roman Empire at the start of its decline. The Roman historian Livy wrote, with great poignancy, about how “with the gradual relaxation of discipline, morals first subsided, as it were, then sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to our present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.”
A half-century ago, Will Durant in The Story of Civilization, argued that the decline of a civilization was the culmination of strife between religion and secular intellectualism, which ended by weakening the institutions of convention and morality. “In the end a society and its religion tend to fall together, like body and soul, in a harmonious death.”
The decline and fall of civilisations has been charted by the wise for many centuries. They include the sages of ancient Egypt, the prophets of ancient Israel, the great 14th century Islamic thinker Ibn Khaldun, and the farseeing 18th-century Italian philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico.
They all offer essentially the same analysis. Civilizations begin by valuing austerity, courage and self-sacrifice. This sets them on a path to growth. As they become successful, they grow more self indulgent and self centred. People are no longer willing to make sacrifices for the group. Trust declines. Social capital wanes. There are no heroes any more. Renown gives way to fame and then to mere celebrity. That, Niall Ferguson implies, is the precipice we are approaching in the West.
Societies start growing old when they lose faith in the transcendent. They then lose faith in an objective moral order and end by losing faith in themselves. But there is an alternative. The West can rediscover what Jeremiah called “the devotion of your youth.”
Judaism and Christianity share an astonishing capacity for self renewal. That is what happened in Judaism after every tragedy from the Babylonian exile to the Holocaust. That is what is happening now to Christianity in many parts of the world, and it can happen here too.
We are as strong as our faith. That truth, once the West’s unique selling proposition, now comes with a label saying, “Made in China.” But it’s still worth buying.
A snippet from an article by Peter Hitchens, brother of “new atheist” Christopher Hitchens:
So yes, I am deeply sorry for the innocent and gentle people who have lost lives, homes, businesses and security. Heaven knows I have argued for years for the measures that might have saved them.
But I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades. The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates – fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.
Just look and see how many shops are protected with steel shutters, how many homes have bars on their windows. This is not new.
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake. I have heard them in the past few days clinging to their old excuses of non-existent ‘poverty’ and ‘exclusion’.
Take our Prime Minister, who is once again defrauding far too many people. He uses his expensive voice, his expensive clothes, his well-learned tone of public-school command, to give the impression of being an effective and decisive person. But it is all false. He has no real idea of what to do. He thinks the actual solutions to the problem are ‘fascist’. Deep down, he still wants to ‘understand’ the hoodies.
Say to him that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.
Say to him that divorce should be made very difficult and that the state should be energetically in favour of stable, married families with fathers (and cease forthwith to subsidise families without fathers) and he will smirk patronisingly and regard you as a pitiable lunatic.
Say to him that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.
From Melanie Phillips at MailOnline:
So now the chickens have well and truly come home terrifyingly to roost. The violent anarchy that has taken hold of British cities is the all-too-predictable outcome of a three-decade liberal experiment which tore up virtually every basic social value.
The married two-parent family, educational meritocracy, punishment of criminals, national identity, enforcement of the drugs laws and many more fundamental conventions were all smashed by a liberal intelligentsia hell-bent on a revolutionary transformation of society.
Those of us who warned over the years that they were playing with fire were sneered at and smeared as Right-wing nutters who wanted to turn the clock back to some mythical golden age.
Indeed, “The riots have been fuelled by moral collapse”…
When Labour came to power in 1997, it set about systematically destroying not just the traditional family but the very idea that married parents were better for children than any other arrangement.
Instead, it introduced the sexual free-for-all of ‘lifestyle choice’; claimed that the idea of the male breadwinner was a sexist anachronism; and told girls that they could, and should, go it alone as mothers.
This was the outcome of the shattering defeat of Tony Blair, in the two years or so after he came to power, at the hands of the ultra-feminists and apostles of non-judgmentalism in his Cabinet and party who were determined, above all, to destroy the traditional nuclear family.
Blair stood virtually alone against them, and lost.
One of these ultra-feminist wreckers was Harriet Harman. The other night, she was on TV preposterously suggesting that cuts in educational allowances or youth workers had something to do with young people torching and looting shops, robbing and leaving people for dead in the streets.
But Harman was one of the principal forces in the Labour government behind the promotion of lone parenthood and the marginalisation of fathers. If anyone should be blamed for bringing about the conditions which have led to these appalling scenes in our cities, it is surely Ms Harman.
And this breaking of the family was further condoned, rewarded and encouraged by the Welfare State, which conceives of need solely in terms of absence of money, and which accordingly subsidises lone parenthood and the destructive behaviour that fatherlessness brings in its train.
And finally a challenge:
When church leaders stop prattling like soft-headed social workers and start preaching, once again, the moral concepts that underlie our civilisation, and when our political leaders decide to oppose the culture war that has been waged against that civilisation rather than supinely acquiescing in its destruction, then — and only then — will we start to get to grips with this terrible problem.
Until then, within the smouldering embers of our smashed and burned-out cities, we can only look upon the ruins of the Britain we have so dearly loved; the Britain that once led the world towards civilisation, but is now so tragically leading the way out.
Much profound thinking from Justin Taylor:
C.S. Lewis, in his prophetic The Abolition of Man (1943):
And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for these very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Brad Green comments:
. . . A culture—the UK or otherwise—cannot generation after generation laugh at honour and virtue and then be surprised that a culture has produced people who have no interest in honor or virtue. The most foundational question is not, “what caused these riots?”, but rather, “why are there not more riots?” That is, a culture that systematically and repeatedly and thoroughly laughs at virute and honor should not be surprised when they look up to see traitors in their midst. We cannot make “men without chests” and then be surprised to see them face-to-face. May God help the UK, and all of us.
See also Theodore Dalrymple’s comments in The Spectactor:
I doubt there are many people who have never in their lives experienced the pleasure of inflicting some kind of pain on others, physical or mental, from sheer malice and delight in doing so. It is an urge that we overcome first by effort and then by habit.
It is one of the tasks of civilisation to tame our inherent savagery. But who, contemplating contemporary British culture, would recognise in it any civilising influence, or rather fail to recognise its opposite? It is a constant call to and celebration of degradation, not only physical but spiritual and emotional. A culture in which Amy Winehouse, with her militant vulgarity and self-indulgent stupidity, combined with a very minor talent, could be so extravagantly admired and feted, is not one to put up strong barriers against our baser instincts, desires and urges. On the contrary, that culture has long been a celebration of those very urges. He who pays the savage never gets rid of the savagery; and this is only the beginning.
“The Conservative Party of New Zealand”
Here is one policy example:
That the ban on smacking be removed with a return to parents being able to use reasonable force in correcting their children.
That is likely to get my vote.
From Bob McCroskie:
More Options For Voters For Repealing Anti-Smacking Law
Media Release 3 August 2011Family First NZ is welcoming the announcement of another political party which has committed to tossing out the flawed and clumsy anti-smacking law, and says the party will benefit in the polls from the announcement.
“The newly announced Conservative Party says they will repeal the anti-smacking law and will respect Citizen’s Initiated Referendums. They join NZ First as political parties who may receive the significant voter bloc who want the law amended and will vote according to that policy,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.
In the poll of 1,000 people undertaken by Curia Market Research in March, 32% said they would be more likely (up from 22% in 2010) to vote for a party that committed to amending the anti-smacking law, and 10% said less likely (down from 12% in 2010). The response was strongest from men, but also from younger people (18-30 age bracket – 48% more likely to vote for a party that amends the law).
“That’s a potential gain of 22% for a political party, which is a significant voter bloc. NZ First and the Conservative Party stand to benefit from this policy. Yet they are simply listening to the 80-90% opposition to the law from day one.”
“The government hoped that by ignoring parents, the smacking debate would disappear, but while good parents who are trying to raise law abiding productive members of society are investigated, threatened, and criminalised for simply doing their job, the debate will not be going away – and nor will the level of opposition. The evidence has now been documented on the website www.protectgoodparents.org.nz.,” says Mr McCoskrie.
ENDSREAD MORE DETAILS FROM 3 NEWS (includes some key policies)
www.3news.co.nz/Colin-Craigs-new-party-wont-cut-electorate-deals/tabid/419/articleID/220891/Default.aspx
From here: www.ligonier.org/blog/christian-terrorist-norway/
Last Friday (July 22, 2011), a bomb went off in Oslo killing eight people and injuring many more. Soon afterward, a gunman went on a shooting spree at an island youth camp in Norway, killing 68 people. The gunman was arrested and later claimed responsibility for both attacks.
When interviewed by the police, Breivik claimed that his actions were intended to save his country and all of Europe from Marxist and Muslim infiltration. Because of his belief that it is failing on the issue of immigration, he wanted to create as much loss as he could for Norway’s Labour Party. The bomb, therefore, was placed near buildings occupied by Labour Party members, and the shooting occurred at a Labour Party youth camp.
Political terrorism has not been unusual in the twentieth and twenty-first century, but this attack hits home for those of us who claim to be Christian because Breivik has identified himself as one of us on his Facebook page. He claims to be a Christian. This has raised important questions in the minds of many. First and foremost, does Christianity promote such politically inspired violence? Some would say yes, pointing to the Crusades as an example. In the following article, however, Dr. Robert Godfrey says no: He rightly points out that it is a betrayal of Christ to “identify Him with the slaughter of political enemies. As Christians, we must seek always to advance Christ’s cause through truth joined by love and self-sacrifice, not through violence.”
Read “The Crusades” by W. Robert Godfrey
…and numerous other topics during a fascinating interview. Here is the transcript of the podcast:
Mohler: Thinking hard about those kind of issues leads me to a questions that’s drawn not so much from the kind of academic discussion or even the context of litigation but rather international relations. President Barak Obama recently set forth his plan for the achievement of a stable Middle East peace, and in it, he for instance called for Israel to return to the 1967 boundaries to use the language which the president employed. I know as a friend of Israel you have to have a strong opinion about that. [Read more...]
Israel and Turkey — Evil abounds…
Those behind the Turkish flotilla evidently see justice through different eyes than mine. Consider for example the Turkish method for helping solve the “Palestinian problem”. 1. repeatedly lobby the press with the terribleness of the Palestinian plight. 2. Load boats full with activists and set sail for Gaza. 3. Provoke the Israelis at every step. 4. Bash Israeli soldiers with metal bars and throw them off the upper decks of the ships. 5. If the Israelis use force to defend themselves against the “peace” activists, then condemn the Israeli soldiers as violent warmongers.
How stupid are people — that they gullibly fall for these sorts of tactics.
The “Palestinian problem” could be solved overnight if the oil-rich Muslim nations (with ~400 times the land area of tiny Israel) dug deep and assisted their brothers in arms. But these the Islamic nations (including Turkey) prefer to use and abuse the lives of people made in God’s image, as political and military pawns. Yes, these Muslims care little about the lives of their fellow Muslims, so long as they can be used to provoke and antagonize the Israelis, and fulfill their hate-filled demonic agenda.
Now the Turks are going to have another go at being jerks. They realize of course that Israel is effectively in a no-win. If “peace activists” again set out for Gaza, but this time with bigger ships, what are the Israelis to do? Back down and appear weak? Or just let these scoundrels run amok, ultimately letting future ships move weapons and rockets into Gaza so Palestinian thugs can rains rockets down upon Israeli civilians?
In the Palmer report, New Zealand’s Geoffrey Palmer says the Israelis used excessive force. No, this is false: the truth is that Palmer’s conclusion is an excessive farce. The Israelis did what they had to do, and if anything should have defended themselves more vigorously against the “peaceful” (do words mean anything?) flotilla.
Here are some reminder videos of the “peaceful” thugs, some wielding metal pipes and knives.
[Read more...]