Atheists acting badly

It seems like some of our atheistic fellow citizens took it upon themselves to visit the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky. Apparently some 285 self-described atheists came to the Creation Museum and unfortunately a small minority of them caused a ruckus, were disruptive, were mocking the exhibits and events and generally being rude. This is not much of a surprise because it was apparently their goal to cause a ruckus. Read the article above regarding the disruption the group from the "Secular Student Alliance" caused. A number of times members of this group had to be asked to not disrupt other visitors and one person was escorted off the property after being repeatedly warned. Keep in mind that the Creation Museum is private property. Read this account of some of the chicanery going on:

Other incidents (but which were probably not disruptive for our guests, except for those driving into the property at the time) … The prof and a few dozen of his followers walked off the grounds and held a rally in front of the museum entrance. There, a ram’s horn was blown (I suppose this was borrowing from Joshua 6 when a ram’s horn was blown, signally that the walls of Jericho were to come tumbling down. I guess it was their “statement” that the SSA had “conquered” the museum, but I did not hear what was said). Also, our security staff indicated that a mock communion service was held out front where crackers with cheese were served.

Apparently, this sort of stuff is what passes for intelligent discourse. It is pretty telling that a "professor" was leading this circus for students. I wonder who has the more honest and open position, the Creation Museum which tries to explain it's position in a polite and intelligent way or a circus atmosphere of mocking something like the Lord's Supper? I will let the discerning reader make their own decision here. You can also read the accounts of this trip and the planning beforehand and see just exactly what sort of deep thinking, open-minded people you are dealing with on the Secular Student Alliance webpage.

Contrast this with the outrage shown by many people on the Left that citizens are expressing themselves at town hall meetings.

There is of course a big difference between tax paying citizens expressing themselves at a public forum that is supposed to be a forum for citizens to express themselves to their elected officials and people disrupting families that spent their own money to visit a private museum. Many families travel great distances, at great expense to voluntarily come to the Creation Museum and enjoy themselves. It is a sign of the general coarseness and rudeness of our society that these atheists saw fit to try to disrupt through overt actions and mockery what was intended to be a family experience.

You can also read about the incident at ABC News here.

Being fruitful

Last Friday Dr. Russ Moore filled in for Dr. Mohler (he is on a missions trip to Turkey) and the show, Encouraging the Blessing of Children, was just chock full of wisdom. The topic was on how the church can encourage Christian couples to embrace families, even large families with lots of children. Given my recent focus on abortion, I thought it was a very pertinent topic of conversation. How should the church approach children? Shouldn’t the church be counter-cultural and say that even as the world rejects the blessing of children, the church embraces and desires to receive that blessing as much as possible?

The evangelical church in all its forms is mighty quick to condemn homosexual marriage as sinful and reject the world’s interpretation of its normalcy, but when it comes to kids? Not so much. It could just be that it is always easier to preach against “them”. “They” are doing this or that and it is wrong, but it is harder to say things that impact those in the pews. I think that is true of lots of stuff that rarely makes it into sermons. Why not speak out about modest dress? What about headcovering? Because it makes people in the pews uncomfortable to talk about issues that reflect poorly on them instead of pointing the finger at the vague, amorphous “other”. Virtually every church is dominated by married couples and those are the people that need to hear that children are a blessing, a great wealth. When you say to people that children are usually the natural result of and one of the primary reasons for marriage, that might just prick the conscience of the couple that is “waiting for the right time” to have kids or who is limiting their family size to just a couple, a “nice little family”. It is sad that saying that children are a blessing and exhorting families to not shy away from but instead to prayerfully seek out those blessings is something of a controversy in the church. The world says wait until you accumulate financial blessings and then accept kids. The Word tells us that children are a blessing. There is nothing a married couple can do, nothing, that will truly prepare them for having children.

One of the most important things we can do is raise our children up to view having children as a great blessing. I worry that we are doing a poor job of this in our home. The last thing I want is for our kids to see us viewing a large family as being a burden and not wanting to have a large family of their own. So we are trying to do more as a family. Our new home will help, we are unable to all fit around the table in our current place because the dining area is so small, so we are looking forward to breaking out the big table that seats 12, putting in all of the leaves and all sitting down for meals again. We are also working out a pretty hard and fast weekly schedule so that we have more of a plan instead of letting the week happen to us. We are looking to schedule time for dad and daughter, mom and son, mom and daughter, dad and son time. That will mean that I will have to set aside doing some of the things that I do to unwind, but since I am driving all of 2 minutes to work starting next week I hardly have an excuse to need time to “unwind”. The incredible importance of family is something is that is Scriptural but is also passed on generationally. If your parents discouraged you from having kids, you are probably less inclined to have them. If you don’t encourage your children to have children and show them from the Word of God that children are a blessing, not a burden and that waiting for the “right time” to have kids in your marriage is kind of missing one of the key components of marriage, you can expect your children to emulate the world’s view that children are a necessary evil, an expense to have but not until as late in life as possible.

One of the things that the mormon church does very well is encouraging marriage in their young people. Show me a mormon missionary and I will show you a 20 year old guy who values marriage and is eager to get home, get married and start a family. Now the theological reasons behind that are seriously flawed and heretical, but what mormons have created is a marriage and family culture within their church. I am not recommending we emulate the mormon church, but we can and should do a better job in teaching our children to value marriage. Not just don’t have sex until you get married, but to value marriage, to seek it out, to have a culture of marriage that has as an integral component having and raising children. If we treat marriage and children as separate components, I think we are doing a disservice to our children. Just as I would strenuously reject my child marrying an unbeliever, I would be very hesitant to see my children marry someone who does not share their views of children. Once you are married, it is a pretty poor time to figure out what your spouse thinks or desires regarding children. That is not to say that there are not circumstances of infertility (an issue I want to discuss in the near future and the proper Christian response to it) or couples that for a variety of reasons get married later than usual. But for an average couple getting married in their twenties, the priority should not be vacations to Europe now and putting off children until later.

As Dr. Moore’s guests demonstrate vividly, this is where the older Christians should be discipling the younger. That is such a vital part of a healthy church and has clear Scriptural mandates (Titus 2: 2-8), but what do we do? In many churches we segregate the young couples from the old, the married from the single. What a shame that is! Where should young Christian couples learn about marriage? From other young couples or from older, more experienced couples? Where should Christian singles learn about and see demonstrated the blessings of a Christian marriage? From other singles or from married couples? Let’s look at it from a secular source. Where do you want your doctor to learn to perform heart surgery, from an experienced heart surgeon or another medical school student? Older saints with forty, fifty or more years of marriage are a treasure trove of wisdom, but instead we let younger couples just stumble along and figure it out on their own.

The church must take the Scriptural teachings on the blessings of children seriously. Not just in passing but as a core value of its doctrine. If we are going to sponsor Dave Ramsey seminars, which are fine, we ought to be spending far more time on encouraging the blessing of children among Christian couples than we do about making budgets. We should teach on money so that it doesn’t become an impediment to Christian families, but we should teach on the blessing of children because that is one of the main points of having a family and an integral part of the church and of God’s plan for humanity. What good is a family with a great financial plan that rejects the blessing of children in their home? We are not commanded to leave our mother and father and cleave to a financial plan, we are to cleave to our spouse and become one flesh and be fruitful and multiply.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1:28)

More stuff from the New York Times

This time the subject is Darwinian dogma in the Texas public school curriculum. It kills me how the apostles of evolution speak so confidently of how accepted and airtight Darwinian evolution is, yet when it is suggested that a public school textbook designed for practical education of a variety of students of various backgrounds actually look at various theories on the origin of life, they flip out. How dare anyone not blindly accept a given theory! Don’t you people know that every scientific advancement has been made by asserting one “scientific” fact to be true and excluding the discussion or even consideration of any other ideas! Exploring various theories and ideas in science, bah! From the article:

In Texas, a Line in the Curriculum Revives Evolution Debate

AUSTIN, Tex. — The latest round in a long-running battle over how evolution should be taught in Texas schools began in earnest Wednesday as the State Board of Education heard impassioned testimony from scientists and social conservatives on revising the science curriculum.

The debate here has far-reaching consequences; Texas is one of the nation’s biggest buyers of textbooks, and publishers are reluctant to produce different versions of the same material.

Many biologists and teachers said they feared that the board would force textbook publishers to include what skeptics see as weaknesses in Darwin’s theory to sow doubt about science and support the Biblical version of creation.

“These weaknesses that they bring forward are decades old, and they have been refuted many, many times over,” Kevin Fisher, a past president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas, said after testifying. “It’s an attempt to bring false weaknesses into the classroom in an attempt to get students to reject evolution.”

In the past, the conservatives on the education board have lacked the votes to change textbooks. This year, both sides say, the final vote, in March, is likely to be close.

But several biologists who appeared in the hearing room said the objections raised by Mr. Meyer and some board members were baseless. The majority of evidence collected over the last 150 years supports Darwin, and few dissenting opinions have survived a review by scientists.

What is really being dealt with here is whether or not a textbook can include opposing viewpoints on a controversial and far from universally accepted theory on the origins of life. I would think that a real academic who was convinced that the questions surrounding Darwinian evolution would want the chance to interact with and show conclusively that evolution is the only possible explanation for the origins of life. Especially when you consider how many people, a huge percentage of Americans, believe in some variation of the creation narrative or at least the existence of an intelligent designer who was behind it all. Instead they refuse to even consider opposing viewpoints, which really makes it look like they are afraid of the debate and are hiding behind their own dogma. Huh, and I though religious folks were the closed-minded ones…

More from the article…

“Every single thing they are representing as a weakness is a misrepresentation of science,” said David M. Hillis, a professor of biology at the University of Texas. “These are science skeptics. These are people with religious and political agendas.”

Whew, it is good to know that there is not an agenda among the academics and scientists!

Of course we also see the most grotesque of scare tactics, the notion that somehow having a textbook that seeks to ask question and explore knowledge will drive employers away…

Business leaders, meanwhile, said Texas would have trouble attracting highly educated workers and their families if the state’s science programs were seen as a laughingstock among biologists.

“The political games we are playing right now are going to burn us all,” said Eric Hennenhoefer, who owns Obsidian Software.

“Yeah we were going to build a $250 million dollar steel plant in your state, but then we looked at you high school science curriculum and pulled the plug.” I couldn’t find much about Obsidian Software other than it was founded in 1997 by three engineers. I looked into Obsidian’s hometown of Austin, Texas and it doesn’t even list them as one of Austin’s biggest employers, much less Texas. So I am not sure what qualifies Mr. Hennenhoefer as a “business leader”.

Really, in the grand scheme of things do employers really look at high school textbooks when deciding whether or not to relocate their business to a state? Even if they did, would the mere suggestion that perhaps the case for Darwinism is not as airtight as the dogma of the evolutionist priesthood makes it out to be serve as a signal for poor preparation and academic achievement? Those sorts of arguments are unserious and shrill, but all too often unchallenged. Give a company enough tax breaks and other incentives and they will move to your state. You can have the image of Charles Darwin branded on every high school student's forehead and if your business climate stinks, no one is moving there.

I don’t really have a dog in this fight. The public schools are free to do whatever they want. After all, no rational person sends their kid to a secularist government school and expects them to learn anything other than a secularist worldview that runs contrary to Christianity and the Bible. The only reasons I bring this up for comment are to remind parents that you cannot think that your kids in public schools are getting an education that is God-honoring and indeed what they are getting denies Christ and His Word, and also that your kids really aren’t getting much of an education at all when you look at how narrowly they define what knowledge is or is not approved and how much political and dogmatic agendas play into what your kids are learning. Text books, curriculum, teacher training, education programs at colleges, teachers unions all have an agenda and not much of it is supportive of the Christian worldview. There is a definite and intentional agenda defined by a secular worldview that drives what kids are learning in public schools and parents who choose to send their kids off to those schools need to get their collective heads out of the sand and realize not only what your kids are not getting (i.e. a Christian worldview education) but also what they are getting (i.e. an education that has as its core a denial of the basic truths of Christianity). There is no such thing as a value neutral educational choice, where and how your kids are educated may be one the most important decisions that a Christian parent makes. You and your kids will have to deal with the aftermath of that decision, one way or the other.

Media bias? What media bias!?

There are few things held in more disdain by the "mainstream" media quite like people serious about their faith and traditional sexual mores. So imagine the pleasure of the media when a report came out that teens who signed purity pledges to remain chaste until marriage were not any different in their sexual behavior than teens who didn’t sign them. “Hah, see it is all a sham!” crowed the media. From the Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn Like A Virgin: The Press Take On Teenage Sex :

The chain reaction was something out of central casting. A medical journal starts it off by announcing a study comparing teens who take a pledge of virginity until marriage with those who don't. Lo and behold, when they crunch the numbers, they find not much difference between pledgers and nonpledgers: most do not make it to the marriage bed as virgins.

Like a pack of randy 15-year-old boys, the press dives right in.

"Virginity Pledges Don't Stop Teen Sex," screams CBS News. "Virginity pledges don't mean much," adds CNN. "Study questions virginity pledges," says the Chicago Tribune. "Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective, Study Finds," heralds the Washington Post. "Virginity Pledges Fail to Trump Teen Lust in Look at Older Data," reports Bloomberg. And on it goes.

In other words, teens will be teens, and moms or dads who believe that concepts such as restraint or morality have any application today are living in a dream world. Typical was the lead for the CBS News story: "Teenagers who take virginity pledges are no less sexually active than other teens, according to a new study."

But not so fast…

Here's the rub: It just isn't true.

In fact, the only way the study's author, Janet Elise Rosenbaum of Johns Hopkins University, could reach such results was by comparing teens who take a virginity pledge with a very small subset of other teens: those who are just as religious and conservative as the pledge-takers. The study is called "Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers," and it was published in the Jan. 1 edition of Pediatrics.

The first to notice something lost in the translation was Dr. Bernadine Healy, the former head of both the Red Cross and the National Institutes of Health. Today she serves as health editor for U.S. News & World Report. And in her dispatch on this study, Dr. Healy pointed out that "virginity pledging teens were considerably more conservative in their overall sexual behaviors than teens in general -- a fact that many media reports have missed cold."

What Dr. Healy was getting at is that the pledge itself is not what distinguishes these kids from most other teenagers. The real difference is their more conservative and religious home and social environment. As she notes, when you compare both groups in this study with teens at large, the behavioral differences are striking. Here are just a few:

- These teens generally have less risky sex, i.e., fewer sexual partners.

- These teens are less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, or to have friends who use drugs.

- These teens have less premarital vaginal sex.

- When these teens lose their virginity they tend to do so at age 21 -- compared to 17 for the typical American teen.

- And very much overlooked, one out of four of these teens do in fact keep the pledge to remain chaste -- amid much cheap ridicule and just about zero support outside their homes or churches.

Let's put this another way. The real headline from this study is this: "Religious Teens Differ Little in Sexual Behavior Whether or Not They Take a Pledge."

So the reality is that virginity pledges aside, the bigger factor in teen sexual behavior is their religious upbringing. Far from being a discouragement, this should encourage parents that what they are teaching their children has an impact on the way they live later on. The numbers are still very disturbing and we still live in a sensuality driven culture that wars against what we try to instill in our kids, but the effort is worth the while. (jumping on soap box) I would still insist that trying to stem the tide of the secular worldview with a couple of heart to heart talks, an hour of Sunday school and another hour of youth group is not going to counteract the pervasive diet of sexual permissiveness that is rampant in public schools (jumping off soap box) .

This is yet another example of selective “reporting” designed to twist data to reach a predetermined outcome. This was not accidental. It is either sloppy journalism or more likely a willful attempt to twist data to push an agenda. That agenda is a simple one, and one that manifests itself in ways subtle and not-so subtle and seeks to tear down every wall of morality in our society and give cover to every sort of sin. We do a fine job of justifying our own sins as it is; I am a champion at it. I certainly don’t need the media helping me out in trying to rationalize away my own sinful behavior. Every Christian, heck any thinking person period, needs to examine what is coming out of media reports with a keen eye. All the more reason to base our worldview on the unchanging rock of Scripture. Media fads come and go but the Word of God is true and endures forever!

(Dr. Mohler featured this issue on his radio program Tuesday, I haven’t downloaded it to my iPod yet but I am sure it was excellent!)

Does the Bible mandate homeschooling?

That is the question asked by Nathan Busenitz at the Pulpit Magazine blog. The question is a dodge, a distraction because it is the wrong question. The question is not does the Bible mandate home school? The question ought to be: should a Christian send their child to a secular school where God is mocked and if not, what are the other options?

Does the Bible specifically mandate homeschooling? Not explicitly no. You won't find a verse that says "Thou shalt educate thy child at home". But that doesn't mean that we are left without any guidance in raising our children.

Which seems the more God-honoring choice? To send our children to a bureaucratized public school, where God is forbidden and Biblical teaching is not only absent but opposed? Or to teach our children at home where God is worshipped and the teaching is all done in the light of Biblical teaching?It seems like a no-brainer for the Christian parent. Read the Bible and see what it says about honoring God in our lives, in the raising of children, in being a part of society.

Homeschool is not a viable option for every family, I get that. Some homes are single-parent, some have both parents working full-time. Not every Christian can homeschool their children, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be the preferred option. But at the risk of being combatitive, too many parents ship Suzie and Johnny off to public school because the world tells them to and quite frankly because it is a lot more convenient and easy. Homeschooling is hard, time consuming, often frustrating. It is little wonder that so many Christians choose to send their kids on the bus for eight hours a day, but is that really what God would have us do?

Having said all of that, there is a danger among homeschoolers to look down our noses at those who send their kids to public school. Our reaction should be one of loving admonition, support, prayer and education. We are not "more Christian" because we home school, and our words to those who don't homeschool should be tempered with love and grace.

Speaking of overwrought...

US doomed if creationist president elected: scientists

Oh no, what will we do if someone who believes the same way that tens of millions of Americans do (and Western civilization as a whole for centuries) gets elected president!? It will "doom" the U.S.!

How can we ignore the advice of the high priest of secularism? Since they are "scientists", those of us who are in the ignorant masses are duty bound to kiss their rings and accept what they say without question. The arrogance of the academy is grotesque to say the least...

"The logic that convinces us that evolution is a fact is the same logic we use to say smoking is hazardous to your health or we have serious energy policy issues because of global warming," University of Michigan professor Gilbert Omenn told reporters at the launch of a book on evolution by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

"I would worry that a president who didn't believe in the evolution arguments wouldn't believe in those other arguments either. This is a way of leading our country to ruin," added Omenn, who was part of a panel of experts at the launch of "Science, Evolution and Creationism."

Yet another example of American believers being told to keep their mouths shut and keep their faith confined to the shadows and maybe Sunday, as long as they don't really believe what they are saying. We are to accept without question what "scientists" tell us, which is precisely what they accuse us of doing. Again I say, does anyone else see the irony in that?

The New Inquisition

I came across just a great editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer today.

The author, Clyde E. Stauffer, has a PhD in biochemistry and makes a ton of sense in a short letter. He starts off strong and goes from there:

In the 16th century a large, powerful institution saw itself as threatened by heretics - people who didn't agree with all its dogmas - so it began to identify and punish those dissidents. Five hundred years later a similar effort is under way.

In the 16th century it was the Roman Catholic church; today it is Big Science. The only real difference is that today heretics are simply deprived of their livelihood; burning at the stake is no longer in vogue.

Dr. Stauffer makes the point that in today's world, self-annointed "scientists" have declared certain truths to be dogma, and above questioning. It has become heresy to even so much as question the dogmas of the secular establishment: global warming, evolution, the Big Bang theory. Dr. Stauffer gives a few examples of scientists who have been run out of the academy because they dared question the establishment. Far too much of what passes as science these days is merely political correctness dressed up with scientific terms.

As a doctoral student I was taught that good science sought reliable facts about the world around us, and hypotheses followed wherever those facts lead. Sadly, that no longer seems to be the case. Instead, selected facts have led to politicized conclusions, and countervailing facts are no longer tolerated. This is not good science.

This letter is worth reading, especially by those high priests of secularism who have no real answers but revile those who do.

Is that cartoon a bit harsh? Perhaps. But while it may be heavy handed, the truth is that is exactly what is being taught to our children, a nihilistic worldview where God is absent and people are just animals waiting to die and turn into compost.

Most people, myself included, didn't read the last words of Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the school shooter in Finland who killed eight people in his rampage. But Answers in Genesis posted them, and they are a chilling reminder of the secularist worldview:

I am prepared to fight and die for my cause, . . . I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection. No, the truth is that I am just an animal, a human, an individual, a dissident . . . . It’s time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on tracks!

If that sort of statement sounds vaguely familiar, it should becuase it is the same sort of philosophy advocated by Nazi Germany. The weak, the racially impure were not part of the master plan and because human life has no intrinsic value, it simply made sense in a mad sort of way to exterminate them. In Stalinist Russia, those who opposed the revolution were murdered by an atheistic regime. The same holds true in the Killing Fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot. The most murderous regimes in the 20th century all had a common thread, the rejection of God.

I guess that raises a question that may seem harsh, but again needs to be asked: if there is no God and there are no moral absolutes, why NOT shoot up your school? As a Christian, I can answer that question pretty easily: all people, Christians and unbelievers, are created in God's image. God has expressly commanded man to not murder one another (that raises the specter of just war theory, but that is not the topic du jour). So therefore we have been taught, and teach our children, that human life is sacred. But taking that God out of the picture makes moral decisions simply a matter of personal preference. I think killing is wrong, you think it is OK, so who am I to tell you not to kill others. Virtually every decision we make has some sort of consequence to others, so that is not a valid qualifier. Without moral absolutes that stem from an absolutely moral and holy God, each person is left to develop their own moral code and that leads inevitably to people shooting up schools in Colorado, Georgia, Finland and Ohio.

Unlike many Southern Baptists, I am not an advocate for prayer in public schools because I am not an advocate of public schools at all, but as we see in general God being pushed out of the conscience of our country we see a rise in murderous behavior. Moreover, not just violence but a general callous indifference. Man has always killed man, but where God is denied it takes on a coldness that is jarring at first and numbing later on.

The more man learns, in his own limited way, about the wondrous creation that God has made, the more that man seeks to supplant God. Rather than worship Him more for the wonders He has made, man takes his pitiful knowledge and ascribes godhood to himself. The story in the Garden is little changed today, man seeks knowledge to become like God and always fails and always will.

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Romans 1: 19-25 ESV)