“I quote others only the better to express myself.” (Michel de Montaigne)
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“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. And we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.” (Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an American, 1907)
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“I know the proud flesh wants to serve Christ by striking out new paths. Proud man has a desire to preach new doctrine, to set up a new Church; to be an original thinker, to judge, and consider, and do anything but obey. This is no service to Christ. He that would serve Christ must follow Him; he must be content to tread only in the old footsteps, and go only where Christ has led the way. It is not for you and me to be originals; we must be humble copies of Christ. There must be nothing about our religion of our own inventing; it is for us to lay thought, judgment, and opinion at the feet of Christ, and do what He bids us, simply because He gives the command.” (C.H. Spurgeon)
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“An ardent believer in human depravity and the limitations of the goodness of man, Augustine saw the necessity of government as a restraining mechanism for the good society. Augustine did not expect unbelief to spawn good civil government or liberty:- Sinful man [actually] hates the equality of all men under God and, as though he were God, loves to impose his sovereignty on his fellow men. He hates the peace of God which is just and prefers his own peace which is unjust. However, he is powerless not to love peace of some sort. For, no man's sin is so unnatural as to wipe out all traces whatsoever of human nature (City of God [New York, NY: Doubleday, 1958], 454).
One can see from these early aphorisms why Calvin thought of himself as Augustinian. The Reformation was, in the main, a return to Augustinianism. The state was remedial, protective, and ‘a corrective device for the restraint of self-centered human beings.’ Augustine saw the state as an institution erected primarily to restrain sin after Eden's Fall. Human government, for Augustine, had its root in the consequences of that Fall, not in the origin of creation. Viewing the Fall as the font of human governments limited both the successes and defeats that Christians might experience in political matters. Such a view necessarily de-emphasizes the political and restores it to its proper perspective, rendering it as less than all-encompassing. Christians during the fourth century needed the reminder that since government was established after the Fall, it should not be expected to achieve utopian goals. The reformers reemphasized these notions centuries later, as did the American founders as well” (David W. Hall, Genevan Reformation and the American Founding [New York, NY: Lexington Books, 2003], 29).
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"No, the people’s freedom’s are based in the Necessary Being, the first cause, the First Principle. The government can use power to control its subjects, but the people, if there is no God, cannot base their self-worth on anything absolute. Only if they were in control and had use of power could they. However, God does exist, our Founders knew it, and the people have their rights already, the government is only there to secure them. Not the government granting the people their rights. The former – i.e., natural rights and freedoms – government is based on “first principles,” the latter – i.e., power-mongers and tyrants – isn’t." (Papa Giorgio -- Me)
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“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them. … The relativity of truth is … a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. … The danger they have been taught to fear is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness — and the relativism that makes it plausible — is the great insight of our times. … The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.” (Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 25.)
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"Have you ever heard the story of a man who used to go to work at a factory and every day would stop outside a clockmaker’s store to synchronize his watch with the clock outside? At the end of several days the clockmaker stopped him and said, 'Excuse me, sir, I do have a question for you. I see that every day you stop and adjust your watch with my clock. What kind of work do you do?' The man said, 'I’m embarrassed to tell you this; I keep the time at the factory nearby, and I have to ring the bell at four o clock every afternoon when it is time for the people to go home. My watch doesn’t work very well, so I synchronize it with your clock.' The clockmaker says, 'I’ve got bad news for you. My clock doesn’t work very well either, so I synchronize it with the bell that I hear from the factory at 4:00 every afternoon.' If you’ll pardon the grammar, what happens when two wrong watches correct themselves by each other? They will get wronger and wronger all the time. Even a clock that doesn’t work may show you the right time twice a day…but it’s not because it’s keeping time!" ( Ravi Zacharias, “Address to the United Nations’ Prayer Breakfast.”)
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“...Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but a few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these are things born of enthusiasm without the pain of labor. Thinking on the contrary, is a difficult task; it is the hardest work man can do-that is perhaps why so few indulge in it. Thought-saving devices have been invented that rival labor-saving devices in their ingenuity. Fine sounding phrases like ‘Life is bigger than logic,’ or ‘Progress is the spirit of the age,’ go rattling by us like express trains, carrying with them the burden of those who are too lazy to think for themselves. Not even philosophers argue today; they only explain away. At best, both sides may shoot off firecrackers, creating the illusion of conflict, but it is only a sham battle in which there are no casualties; there are plenty of explosions, but never an exploded argument.” (Fulton Sheen)
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“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die." (Dorothy Sayers)
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“The mounting evidence indicting the leaders of the sexual revolution is impressive. They promised joy, liberation, and good health. They’ve delivered misery, disease, and even death.” (Drs. Alexandra and Vernon Mark noted in Medical World News)
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"The true university of these days is a collection of books." (Thomas Carlyle)
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“If you wanted to control the nation’s manufacturing, commerce, finance, transportation and natural resources, you would need only to control the apex, the power pinnacle, of an all-powerful SOCIALIST government. Then you would have a monopoly and could squeeze out all your competitors…. ‘Communism’ is not a movement of downtrodden masses but is a movement created, manipulated and used by power-seeking billionaires…” (None Dare Call It a Conspiracy, Gary Allen)
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“A home without books is a body without soul.” (Marcus Tullius Cicero)
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"The things I want to know are in books. My best friend is the man who'll get me a book I [haven't] read." (Abraham Lincoln)
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"The man who does not read good books is no better than the man who can't." (Mark Twain)
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"Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men [or women], setting out in life, it is there only capital." (Thomas Jefferson)
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“Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely…. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite…” (Death by Government, R. J. Rummel)
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"Now, there is something in my past I think I should clear up right now: I was once a speechwriter for Walter Mondale. How do I explain that? Easy. Being born one generation too late, working for Mondale was the closest I could get to being a Trotskyite -- which, as you all know, is the royal road to neoconservatism." (Charles Krauthammer)
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“... Machen insisted, it is essential that Christian scholars be alert to the power of an idea before it has reached popular formulation. Scholarly procedure, he said, ‘is based simply upon a profound belief in the pervasiveness of ideas. What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. So as Christians we should try to mold the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity.’” (William Lane Craig, Passionate Conviction: Contemporary Discourses on Chriostian Apologetics, 11-12; and, J. Menchen Machen, “Christianity and Culture,” Princeton Theological Review 11 (1913), 6.)
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“None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that -- they have to learn by experience.” (Dorothy Sayers)
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“… it absurd for the evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.” (G. K. Chesterton)
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“…To be forced to believe only one conclusion – that everything in the universe happened by chance – would violate the very objectivity of science itself.... What random process could produce the brains of a man or the system of the human eye?… They [evolutionists] challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must we really light a candle to see the sun?…” (Werner von Braun, letter to the California State board of Education, September 14, 1972)
---I must post some biography here for the younger kinfolk who do not know who von Braun is---
Von Braun [1912-1977] was born in Wirsitz (now in Poland) and studied at Berlin and in Switzerland at Zurich. In 1930, he joined a group of scientists who were experimenting with rockets, and in 1938 he became technical director of the Peenemunde military rocket establishment. It was in the 1940’s that he and his team produced the V1 (flying bomb) and the V2 rockets. In the last days of the war, von Braun and his staff, not wishing to be captured by the Soviets, surrendered to US forces. Soon afterwards, von Braun began work at the US Army Ordinance Corps testing grounds at White Sands, New Mexico. In 1952 he became technical director of the army’s ballistic-missile program. It was in the 1950’s that he produced rockets for US satellites (the first, Explorer 1, was launched early 1958) and early space flights by astronauts. He held an administrative post at NASA from 1970-1972 as well. We would have never made it to the moon if it were not for von Braun.
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“The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult, and left untried.” (G. K. Chesterton)
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[For almost 2,300 years, the universe was thought to be static. However, the Bible clearly states that it had a beginning]:
When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn't allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. In order to make the universe static, he had to fudge his equations by putting in a facto that would hold the universe steady.
In the 1920's, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaitre were able to develop models based on Einstein's theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course, this meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn't exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this the Big Bang -- and the name stuck!
Starting in the 1920's, scientists began to find empirical evidence that supported these purely mathematical models. For instance, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears redder than it should be, and this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Hubble's astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaitre.
Then in the 1940's, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the universe's background radiation -- and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There's no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and a very dense state of the universe, which was predicted by the Big Bang model.
The third main piece of the evidence for the Big Bang is the origin of light elements. Heavy elements, like carbon and iron, are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded through supernova into space. But the very, very light elements, like deuterium and helium, cannot have been synthesized in the interior of the stars, because you would need an even more powerful furnace to create them. These elements must have been forged in the furnace of the Big Bang itself at temperatures that were billions of degrees. There's no other explanation.
So predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by the scientific data. Moreover, they have been corroborated by the failure of every attempt to falsify them by alternative models. Unquestionably, the Big Bang model has impressive scientific credentials . . . . Up to this time, it was taken for granted that the universe as a whole was a static, eternally existing object . . . . At the time an agnostic, American astronomer Robert Jastrow was forced to concede that although details may differ, "the essential element in the astronomical and Biblical accounts of Genesis is the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy".... Einstein admitted the idea of the expanding universe "irritates me" (presumably, said one prominent scientist, "because of its theological implications") - (Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, from the chapter, “The Evidence of Cosmology: Beginning with a Bang,”, 105-106, 112).
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“The atheist can’t find God for the same reason a thief can’t find a policeman.” (Ray Comfort, God Doesn’t Believe in Atheists: Proof That the Atheist Doesn’t Exist, p. 14)
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“…the fossil record doesn’t show gradual change, and every paleontologist has known that since Cuvier.” (Stephen Jay Gould, “Is a New and General Theory of Evolution Emerging?” Lecture at Hobart & William Smith Colleges; Feb 14, 1980.)
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“The support which I receive from Germany is my chief ground for hoping that our views will ultimately prevail.” (Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2, p. 270)
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“Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks... Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.” (Albert Einstein)
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Even if one does not necessarily accept the institutional structure of 'organized religion,' the 'Judeo-Christian ethic and the personal standards it encourages do not impinge on the quality of life, but enhance it. They also give one a basic moral template that is not relative,' which is why the legal positivists of the Left are so threatened by the Natural Law aspect of the Judeo-Christian ethic." (Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values,35. Tammy is a pro-choice lesbian in case someone reading this is not aware.)
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"...these problems don’t remain personal and private. The drive, especially since this issue is associated with the word 'gay rights,' is to make sure your worldview reflects theirs. To counter this effort, we must demand that the medical and psychiatric community take off their PC blinders and treat these people responsibly. If we don’t, the next thing you know, your child will be taking a 'tolerance' class explaining how 'transexuality' is just another 'lifestyle choice'.... After all, it is the only way malignant narcissists will ever feel normal, healthy, and acceptable: by remaking society - children - in their image." (Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values,92 & 206.)
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"... and now all manner of sexual perversion enjoys the protection and support of once what was a legitimate civil-rights effort for decent people. The real slippery slope has been the one leading into the Left's moral vacuum. It is a singular attitude that prohibits any judgment about obvious moral decay because of the paranoid belief that judgment of any sort would destroy the gay lifestyle, whatever that is…. I believe this grab for children by the sexually confused adults of the Gay Elite represents the most serious problem facing our culture today.... Here come the elephant again: Almost without exception, the gay men I know (and that’s too many to count) have a story of some kind of sexual trauma or abuse in their childhood -- molestation by a parent or an authority figure, or seduction as an adolescent at the hands of an adult. The gay community must face the truth and see sexual molestation of an adolescent for the abuse it is, instead of the 'coming-of-age' experience many [gays] regard it as being. Until then, the Gay Elite will continue to promote a culture of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and suicide by AIDS." (Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values,90 & 99.)
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“Unfortunately, when the Attorney General, as the highest law enforcement official in the country, does not vigorously pursue justice in cases where government clearly employed improper force, a cancerous suspicion metastasizes in the body of society with potentially devastating effects. Not least of all, it encourages dangerous extremists like those in the Oklahoma City bombing.” (Dean Koontz ~ horror/fiction author ~ in the foreword of Ambush at Ruby Ridge, by Alan Bock)
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Our Founders had an opportunity to establish a democracy in America but chose not to. In fact, they made very clear that we were not – and never to become – a democracy:
- James Madison (fourth President, co-author of the Federalist Papers and the “father” of the Constitution) – “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have, in general; been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
- John Adams (American political philosopher, first vice President and second President) – “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
- Benjamin Rush (signer of the Declaration) – “A simple democracy… is one of the greatest of evils.”
- Fisher Ames (American political thinker and leader of the federalists [he entered Harvard at twelve and graduated by sixteen], author of the House language for the First Amendment) – “A democracy is a volcano which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction. These will provide an eruption and carry desolation in their way.´ / “The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness [excessive license] which the ambitious call, and the ignorant believe to be liberty.”
- Governor Morris (signer and penman of the Constitution) – “We have seen the tumult of democracy terminate… as [it has] everywhere terminated, in despotism…. Democracy! Savage and wild. Thou who wouldst bring down the virtous and wise to thy level of folly and guilt.”
- John Quincy Adams (sixth President, son of John Adams [see above]) – “The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.”
- Noah Webster (American educator and journalist as well as publishing the first dictionary) – “In democracy… there are commonly tumults and disorders….. therefore a pure democracy is generally a very bad government. It is often the most tyrannical government on earth.”
- John Witherspoon (signer of the Declaration of Independence) – “Pure democracy cannot subsist long nor be carried far into the departments of state – it is very subject to caprice and the madness of popular rage.”
- Zephaniah Swift (author of America’s first legal text) – “It may generally be remarked that the more a government [or state] resembles a pure democracy the more they abound with disorder and confusion.”
Take note that as well ArticleIV, Section4 of the Constitution reads:"The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government…"
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“Christianity has fought, still fights, and will continue to fight science to the desperate end over evolution, because evolution destroys utterly and finally the very reason Jesus’ earthly life was supposedly made necessary. Destroy Adam and Eve and the original sin, and in the rubble you will find the sorry remains of the Son of God. If Jesus was not the redeemer who died for our sins, and this is what evolution means, then Christianity is nothing.” (G. Richard Bozarth, “The Meaning of Evolution,” American Atheist, p. 30, 20 September 1979)
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“To simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous non-linier differential equations one hundred times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray super computer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more cells intersecting with each other in complex ways it would take a minimum of a hundred years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second” (John K. Stevens, Byte, April 1988)
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“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.” (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy [New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942], pp. 161-162)
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The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it's possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [Christians] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We're talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana), and the church is liable for the unjustified murder of about (taking the high number here) 300,000-women over about a 300 year period. A blight on Christianity? Certainly. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no evolutionary/naturalistic natural law is being violated in other words (as non-theists reduce everything to natural law -- materialism). However, and this is key, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law. (A condensing of Gregory Koukl's, "The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?")
 (Click to enlarge)
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“I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history.” (H.G. Wells)
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“Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon; without science and learning, he shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of school, he spoke such words of life as were never spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a single line, he set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art, and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times.” (Schaff, Phillip, "The Person of Christ," American Tract Society, 1913)
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“I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.” (Napoleon)
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“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our thought processes are mere accidents - the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else's. But if their thoughts — i.e. of Materialism and — are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.” (C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven, 97)
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“The nine founders among the eleven living religions in the world had characters which attracted many devoted followers during their own lifetime, and still larger numbers during the centuries of subsequent history. They were humble in certain respects, yet they were also confident of a great re¬ligious mission. Two of the nine, Mahavira and Buddha, were men so strongminded and self-reliant that, according to the records, they displayed no need of any divine help, though they both taught the inexorable cosmic law of Karma. They are not reported as having possessed any consciousness of a supreme personal deity. Yet they have been strangely deified by their followers. Indeed, they themselves have been wor¬shipped, even with multitudinous idols. All of the nine founders of religion, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are reported in their respective sacred scriptures as having passed through a preliminary period of uncertainty, or of searching for religious light. Confucius, late in life, confessed his own sense of shortcomings and his desire for further improvement in knowledge and character. All the founders of the non-Christian religions evinced inconsistencies in their personal character; some of them altered their prac¬tical policies under change of circumstances. Jesus Christ alone is reported as having had a consistent God-consciousness, a consistent character himself, and a con¬sistent program for his religion. The most remarkable and valuable aspect of the personality of Jesus Christ is the com¬prehensiveness and universal availability of his character, as well as its own loftiness, consistency, and sinlessness.” (Robert Hume, The World’s Living Religions, pp. 285-286)
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"If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. -- why not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A.? .... You say A. is a white, and B. is black. It is --color--, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be the slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. .... You do not mean color exactly? -- You mean the whites are --intellectually-- the superiors of the blacks, and therefore, have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. .... But, say you, it is a question of --interest--; and, if you can make it your --interest--, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you." (Abraham Lincoln, notes from the Lincoln / Douglas debate)
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"We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do, only we believe that they would best serve these interests, which are as dear to us as to them, by advocating the purity of all races, and not one alone. We believe also that the white race of South Africa should be the predominating race." (Gandhi)
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“We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events” (Lerner Gerda, Why History Matters, 117)
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"And certainly, there's no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion ... And it seems to me very clear that at some very basic level, evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism, namely, that at some level one is going to exclude miracles and these sorts of things come what may." (Michael Ruse, "The New Antievolutionism," AAAS Symposium, February 13, 1993)
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“The atheist realizes that there must not only be an acceptance of his right to hold his opinion, but that ultimately his is the job to turn his culture from religion, to eliminate those irrational ideas which have held the human race in intellectual slavery.... The atheist must abandon his defensive positions, take up the cudgels and go forward, rather than into the retreat of apathy.” (Madalyn Murray O’Hair annual convention speech in Sacramento, California, C-SPAN, April 10, 1993)
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1) On a dark street, a man draws a knife and demands my money for drugs. 2) Instead of demanding my money for drugs, he demands it for the Church. 3) Instead of being alone, he is with a bishop of the Church who act as bagman. 4) Instead of drawing a knife, he produces a policeman who says I must do as he says. 5) Instead of meeting me on the street, he mails me his demand as an official agent of the government. If the first is theft, it is difficult to see why the other four are not also theft.
(J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man, 92)
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“I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality…. We will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence -- imperious, relentless and cruel.” (Hitler, hung on the wall at Auschwitz; Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God, p. 23)
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"If there is no God, all things are permissible." (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
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“The question becomes this: What percentage of the Gross Domestic Product we spend on the military inclusive (in other words, we have military bases in over sixty countries, we have wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have the world’s largest military by far)... what percentage of every dollar that is earned in the United States goes to the military? 4.6% on our military (about a fourth of that is for the wars). We spend double that on education.” (Michael Medved)
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“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.” (Mussolini, Diuturna, pp. 374-77; quoted in, A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist, by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.)
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“Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic” (Kansan State University immunologist, Scott Todd, correspondence to Nature, 410 [6752], 30 September, 1999)
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“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology…. many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.” (Patrick Moore, co-founder of Green Peace)
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“The quantum vacuum is not nothing. The quantum vacuum is a sea of fluctuating energy, endowed with a rich physical structure, and governed by physical laws. It is no exception to the principle ‘that whatever begins to exist has a cause’.” (William Lane Craig)
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"We must challenge them [secular social activists] to discern the difference between the true repentance and 'social repentance.' The Bible says: 'For the godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret; but worldly grief produces death' (II Cor. 7:10). This was the bitter experiences of many former Russian Marxists, who, after their conversion to Christ came to understand that they had only a sort of 'social repentance'—a sense of guilt before the peasant and the proletariat, but not before God. They admitted that 'A Russian (Marxist) intellectual as an individual is often a mild and loving creature, but his creed (Marxism) constrains him to hate' (cf. Nicolas Zernov: The Russian Religious Renaissance). 'As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one.... For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God' (Rom. 3:10,23). A complete change of a society must come from man himself, for basically man is at enmity with God. All humanistic social, economic and political systems are but 'cut flowers,' as Dr. Trueblood put it, even the best are only dim reflections of the Glory of the Kingdom of God. As Benjamin Franklin in his famous address to the Constitutional Convention, said, 'Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.' Without reconciliation with God, there is no reconciliation with man. Social action is not evangelism; political liberation is not salvation. While we shall by all means have deep concern on social issues; nevertheless, social activism shall never be a substitution for the Gospel." (Lit-sen Chang, The True Gospel vs. Social Activism, 9-10. Booklet from 1976.)
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“Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1850, but they have increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory” (Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, pp. 127-128)
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“The Races Of Man – At the present time there exists upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent in structure. These are the Ethiopian or Negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the Islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” (A public school textbook, George William Hunter, A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, [The American Book Company: N. Y.; 1914], p. 196)
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“If homosexuality is really genetic, we may soon be able to tell if a fetus is predisposed to homosexuality, in which case many parents might choose to abort it. Will gay rights activists continue to support abortion rights if this occurs?” (Dale A. Berryhill, The Assault: Liberalism’s Attack on Religion, Freedom, and Democracy, p. ?)
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“Since women that believe in God are less likely to have abortions, does that mean that natural selection will result in a greater number of believers than non-believers.” (A question asked by a student attending a debate between Dr. William Lane Craig [a theist] and Dr. Massimo Pigliucci [an atheis])
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"And I wish to be very clear about who the abolitionists were, they were classical-liberals, which are now known as conservatives." (Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot)
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“I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.” (Mortimer J. Adler, “A Philosopher's Religious Faith", in Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers, 207.)
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“I shall always be convinced that a watch proves a watch-maker, and that a universe proves God.” (Voltaire)
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“A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.” (Francis Bacon)
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“Atheism is a disease of the soul before it is an error of the mind.” (Plato)
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“When a man ceases to believe in God he does not believe in nothing, he believes almost in anything.” (G. K. Chesterton)
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“President Kennedy avoided engagement with the civil rights movement for as long as possible.... Tellingly, it had been Vice President Richard Nixon who fought for the 1957 Civil Rights Act in the Senate, not Kennedy.” (Kenneth J. Heinman, God Is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and Morality in Contemporary America, 34-35)
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"But it was the southern democrats who formed the line to defend Jim Crow. Georgia governor Lester Maddox famously brandished ax handles to prevent blacks from patronizing his restaurant. He was a democrat. Alabama governor George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama schoolhouse in 1963 and thundered, ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’ He was a democrat. Birmingham Public Safety commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Conner sicced dogs and turned fire hoses on black civil rights demonstrations [that were manned primarily by Christians]. He was a democrat. In 1954, Arkansas governor Orville Faubus tried to prevent the desegregation of a Little Rock public high school. He was Democrat. President Eisenhower, a Republican, sent in federal troops to prevent violence and enforce a court order desegregating the school. As a percentage of their respective parties, more republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats! A Republican president, Richard Nixon, not John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson, instituted the first affirmative action program with goals and timetables…. And it was during the Kennedy administration that FBI head J. Edgar Hoover sought and received permission to wiretap Martin Luther King. The person granting him permission? Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy." (Larry Elder, Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, 14-16)
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“The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.” (Immanuel Kant)
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(Below are quotes from James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation ~ a book sold in Obama's church's bookstore the entire 20-years he attended.)
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"It is dangerous because the true prophet of the gospel of God must become both 'anti-Christian' and 'unpatriotic.' (55) …. Because whiteness by its very nature is against blackness, the black prophet is a prophet of national doom. He proclaims the end of the 'American Way...'" (56)
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"But this does not mean that religion is irrelevant altogether; it only means that religion unrelated to black liberation is irrelevant." (58-59)
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"... it is that whites are incapable of making any valid judgment about human existence. The goal of black theology is the destruc¬tion of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods. The God of black liberation will not be confused with a blood' thirsty white idol. Black theology must show that the black God has nothing to do with the God worshiped in white churches whose primary purpose is to sanctify the racism of whites and to daub the wounds of blacks. Putting new wine in new wineskins means that the black theology view of God has nothing in common with those who prayed for an American victory in Vietnam or who pray for a "cool" summer in the ghetto.... There is no place in black theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color. The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism.... Because God has made the goal of blacks God's own goal, black theology believes that it is not only appropriate but necessary to begin the doctrine of God with an insistence on God's blackness." (62-63)
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"White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality." (64)
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"In contrast to this racist view of God, black theology proclaims God's blackness. Those who want to know who God is and what God is doing must know who black persons are and what they are doing. " (65)
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"God comes to us in God's blackness, which is wholly unlike white¬ness. To receive God's revelation is to become black with God by joining God in the work of liberation.... Becoming one of God's disciples means rejecting whiteness and accepting themselves as they are in all their physical blackness." (66)
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"Black theology cannot accept a view of God which does not represent God as being for oppressed blacks and thus against white oppressors. Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God. The brutalities are too great and the pain too severe, and this means we must know where God is and what God is doing in the revolution.... What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power, which is the power of blacks to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject God's love." (70)
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"God is black because God loves us; and God loves us because we are black. Righteousness is that side of God which expresses itself through black liberation. God makes black what humans have made white.... Love is a refusal to accept whiteness." (73-74)
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"If creation 'involves a bringing into existence of something that did not exist before,' then to say God is creator means that my being finds its source in God. I am black because God is black! God as creator is the ground of my blackness (being), the point of reference for meaning and purpose in the universe.... Rather it is incumbent upon me by the freedom granted by the creator to deny whiteness and affirm blackness as the essence of God. That is why it is necessary to speak of the black revolution rather than reformation. The idea of reformation suggests that there is still something 'good' in the system itself, which needs only to be cleaned up a bit. This is a false perception of reality. The system is based on whiteness, and what is necessary is a replacement of whiteness with blackness." (75-76)
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"Being white excludes them from the black community and thus whatever concern they have for blacks will invariably work against black freedom.... Certainly if whites expect to be able to say anything relevant to the self-determination of the black community, it will be necessary for them to destroy their whiteness by becoming members of an oppressed community. Whites will be free only when they become new persons—when their white being has passed away and they are created anew in black being. When this happens, they are no longer white but free, and thus capable of making decisions about the destiny of the black community." (97)
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- Born Again: "They [white people] would destroy themselves and be born again as beautiful black persons." (103);
- Sin: "This means that whites, despite their self-proclaimed religiousness, are rendered incapable of making valid judgments on the character of sin.... In a word, sin is whiteness..." (106, 108);
- Salvation: "Salvation, then, primarily has to do with earthly reality and the injustice inflicted on those who are helpless and poor. To see the salvation of God is to see this people rise up against its oppressors, demanding that justice become a reality now, not tomorrow." (128)
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(Above are quotes from James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation ~ a book sold in Obama's church's bookstore the entire 20-years he attended.)
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"Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?" (Al Boliska).
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"I'm a Palin fan because she irritates just the right people for me. I mean, she drives the right people crazy, and I love the fact she's gotten $7 million up front. You know what, in the world we live, every freak and truth contortionist on the midway is makin' a buck, why shouldn't a decent dame like Sarah Palin get $7 million. Is she a genius? No. Are the people who say she's stupid everyday, geniuses? No. You know what my definition of genius is? When you get $7 million up-front for a book. That's my definition of genius." (Dennis Miller)
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"Before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe." (Thomas Jefferson)
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"What is it about Marx's grand vision that inspired his disciples to clamber up the pile of corpses to have a better look?" (Dr. Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help)
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"Beware of manufacturing a god of your own: a god who is all mercy but not just, a god who is all love but not holy, a god who has a heaven for everybody but a hell for none, a god who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and broad in eternity. Such a god is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible, there is no God at all. Beware of making selections from your Bible to suit your taste. Dare not to say, 'I believe this verse, for I like it. I refuse that, for I cannot reconcile it with my views.' Nay! But O man, who art thou that repliest against God? By what right do you talk in this way? Surely it were better to say over EVERY chapter in the word, 'Speak Lord, for thy servant heareth.' Ah! If men would do this, they would never deny the unquenchable fire." (J.C. Ryle, from Fire, Fire!)
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"[The laws of any state rest on] the basis that the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization, the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement." (Supreme Court, 1885)
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"...can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them? All nations are born in war, conquest, and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past. The United States, from its earliest colonial times, won its title-deeds in the full blaze of recorded history, and the stains on them are there for all to see and censure: the dispossession of a indigenous people, and the securing of self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race. In the judgmental scales of history, such grievous wrongs must be balanced by the erection of a society dedicated to justice and fairness." (Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, 3)
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"As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have [the] constriction of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago." (Judge Robert Bork)
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"One thing our Founding Fathers could not foresee...was a nation governed by professional politicians who had a vested interest in getting reelected. They probably envisioned a fellow serving a couple of hitches and then looking...forward to getting back to the farm." (Ronald Reagan)
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“All truth is relative!” (Is that a relative truth?); “There are no absolutes!” (Are you absolutely sure?); “Its true for you but not for me!” (Is that statement true just for you, or is it for everyone?) In short, contrary beliefs are possible, but contrary truths are not possible. (Paul Copan)
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"The progressive sees racism and other evils as stages to move beyond; they are national problems to be solved, not human problems to be guarded against and punished. In fact, these evils are often made possible by the odd progressive belief that man will stop being bad if he is no longer restricted from being bad." (Dale A. Berryhill, The Assault: Liberalism’s Attack on Religion, Freedom, and Democracy, 31)
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“If you wanted to control the nation’s manufacturing, commerce, finance, transportation and natural resources, you would need only to control the apex, the power pinnacle, of an all-powerful SOCIALIST government. Then you would have a monopoly and could squeeze out all your competitors…. ‘Communism’ is not a movement of downtrodden masses but is a movement created, manipulated and used by power-seeking billionaires…” (Gary Allen, None Dare Call It a Conspiracy)
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"If chance be the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
and when you hear:
- State of Emergency!
- Sniper Kills Ten!
- Troops on Rampage!
- Whites Go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker." (Ravi Zacharias, The Real Face of Atheism, 133-134)
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“A crucial difference between the Western tradition and the others… [is that]…. The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes. They have provoked great movements to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression, to advance personal liberty and human rights.” (Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, 76)
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“Ours is an age of religious cacophony, as was the Roman Empire of Christ's time. From agnosticism to Hegelianism, from devil-worship to scientific rationalism, from theosophical cults to philosophies of process: virtually any worldview conceivable is offered to modern man in the pluralistic marketplace of ideas. Our age is indeed in ideological and societal agony, grasping at anything and everything that can conceivably offer the ecstasy of a cosmic relationship or of a comprehensive Weltanschauung [worldview].” (John Warwick Montgomery, Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics, 152-153.)
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“Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? The sun, the moon, and the stars have been worshiped. Shall we then pluck them out of the sky? …see how much he [God] has been able to accomplish through me, though I did no more than pray and preach. The Word did it all. Had I wished I might have started a conflagration at Worms. But while I sat still and drank beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the papacy a mighty blow.” (Martin Luther, quoted in: Drinking with Calvin and Luther – A History of Alcohol in the Church, by Jim West)
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“Raising one’s self-consciousness [awareness] about worldviews is an essential part of intellectual maturity.” (Ronald Nash, World-Views In Conflict: Choosing Christianity In a World of Ideas)
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“The 2001 Houghton Mifflin literature guidelines identify certain children’s books that must be avoided, possibly because the author was not of the same ethnic group of the main characters in the book. Some of the prohibited books have received prestigious awards, including Mary Hoffman’s Amazing Grace, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, Paula Fox’s Slave Dancer, and William Armstrong’s Sounder. Ellen Levine’s I Hate English!, [is] about an Asian girl learning English, was excluded because the girl required the intervention of her Caucasian teacher to solve her problems, which was apparently offensive to the bias review panel.” (Diane Ravitch, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups restrict What Students Learn, 47-48)
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“We need historical perspective. Yes, slavery is America’s horror and shame. But slavery, unfortunately, appears throughout the whole of human history. Europeans enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Those we refer to as Native-Americans enslaved other Native-Americans. Black Africans enslaved other black Africans. Slave traders brought more African slaves to the Middle-East and to South America than to Colonial America. Yet this country fought a civil war that resulted in the eradication of slavery, no other nation can say that.” (Larry Elder, Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, 9)
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“Slaves developed a communal life too, much of it built around the two central institutions of the black church and black family. For a people oppressed, a deep religious faith helped to create autonomous spiritual space that even the master had to respect, and it offered hope that the travails of the slaves would someday end….” D’Souza continues, “The slaves embraced the white man’s Christianity…. Identif[ying] with Christ as the suffering victim who would rise again” (Dinesh D’ Souza, The End of Racism, 96)
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“People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By ‘presuppositions’ we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. ‘As a man thinketh, so he is,’ is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, ‘not many men are in the room’ -- that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions.” (Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, pp. 19-20)
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"What are the distinctive sources for our beliefs about the past? Most of the beliefs we have about the past come to us by the testimony of other people. I wasn’t present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I didn’t see my father fight in the [S]econd [W]orld [W]ar. I have been told about these events by sources that I take to be reliable. The testimony of others is generally the main source of our beliefs about the past…. So all our beliefs about the past depend on testimony, or memory, or both.” (Philosophy for Dummies, by Tom Morris, pp. 57-58)
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“In advanced societies specialization in the gathering and production of knowledge and its wider dissemination through spoken and written testimony is a fundamental socio-epistemic fact, and a very large part of each persons body of knowledge and belief stems from testimony.” (The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Robert Audi [2nd ed.], p. 909)
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“But it is clear that most of what any given individual knows comes from others; palpably with knowledge of history, geography, or science, more subtly with knowledge about every day facts such as when we were born..” (The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, edited by Ted Honderich, p. 869)
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“I believe Christianity is the only logical, consistent faith in the world” (Mortimer J. Adler)
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“Christianity is true, and its truth will be discovered anywhere you look very far” (George F. Gilder, one of our century’s greatest minds, and author of Wealth and Poverty as well as Telecosm)
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“Along with the idea of karma, Indian thinkers introduced the concept of samsara, literally ‘to wander across.’ Indian religions believe that the life force of an individual does not die with the death of the body, but instead ‘wanders across.’ The life force moves on to another time and body, where it continues to live. Many Western thinkers have proposed this idea as ‘reincarnation’ or the ‘transmigration of souls.’ Some see this process as a blessing; but in Indian thought, samsara may be thought of as a curse. One is bound to life in ignorance and pain, living over and over again through countless gen¬erations. Indeed, the goal of most Indian religions is to break the cycle of karma and samsara and be free from the burden of life. This breaking free from life is called moksha. In the Upanishads, release from life comes when there is true knowledge of the illusion of life.” (Lewis M. Hopfe and Mark R. Woodward, Religions of the World, 10th ed., 81)
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While speaking in Thailand, Ron Carlson was invited to visit some refugee camps along the Cambodian border. Over 300,000 refugees were caught in a no-man’s-land along the border. This resulted from the Cambodian massacre under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the mid-70’s (which is known as the “killing fields”) and then subsequently by the invasion of the Vietnamese at the end of the 70’s. One of the most fascinating things about these refugee camps was the realization of who was caring for the refugees. Here, in this Buddhist country of Thailand, with Buddhist refugees coming from Cambodia and Laos, there were no Buddhists taking care of their Buddhist brothers. There were also no Atheists, Hindus, or Muslims taking care of those people. The only people there, taking care of these 300,000[+] people, were Christians from Christian mission organizations and Christian relief organizations. One of the men Ron was with had lived in Thailand for over twenty-years and was heading up a major portion of the relief effort for one of these organizations. Ron asked him: “Why, in a Buddhist country, with Buddhist refugees, are there no Buddhists here taking care of their Buddhist brothers?” Ron will never forget his answer:
- “Ron, have you ever seen what Buddhism does to a nation or a people? Buddha taught that each man is an island unto himself. Buddha said, ‘if someone is suffering, that is his karma.’ You are not to interfere with another person’s karma because he is purging himself through suffering and reincarnation! Buddha said, ‘You are to be an island unto yourself.’” - “Ron, the only people that have a reason to be here today taking care of these 300,000 refugees are Christians. It is only Christianity that people have a basis for human value that people are important enough to educate and to care for. For Christians, these people are of ultimate value, created in the image of God, so valuable that Jesus Christ died for each and every one of them. You find that value in no other religion, in no other philosophy, but in Jesus Christ.”
(Ron Carlson & Ed Decker, Fast Facts on False Teachings, 28-29.)
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"Roots has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero Kunta Kinte was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage. The village elders were likewise bewildered as to what these white men were doing, carrying their people away. In reality, West Africa was a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there -- and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment. Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly. Because of the false picture of history presented by Roots and by other sources, last year we had the farce of the president of Nigeria making demands on the United States because of the enslavement of people whom his own countrymen had enslaved, and on behalf of a country where slavery still persists, more than a century after emancipation has occurred throughout the Western world. Roots also feeds the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people. The tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that. People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought across the Atlantic. Asians enslaved other Asians, as well as whatever Europeans they could get hold of. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus ever got here.” (Thomas Sowell)
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“When a statement fails to satisfy itself (i.e., to conform to its own criteria of validity or acceptability), it is self-refuting…. Consider some examples. ‘I cannot say a word in English’ is self-refuting when uttered in English. ‘I do not exist’ is self-refuting, for one must exist to utter it. The claim ‘there are no truths’ is self-refuting. If it is false, then it is false. But is it is true, then it is false as well, for in that case there would be no truths, including the statement itself. (J.P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity, 92.)
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- Chris: What if in my reality, my “island,” it is wrong for people to own things, and so when you’re not looking, I elect to play “Robin Hood” by relieving you of your new two-thousand-dollar-crystal and giving it to someone else?
- Zen: Well, uh, I guess I’d have to conclude that my Higher Self wanted me to learn a lesson about material things [as Buddhism teaches and New Age thought teaches].
- Chris: Okay, if stealing is not a sin, let’s take it further. Now let’s pretend I’m a “pedophile” – it’s part of my reality to “love” children in every way possible. So, while you’re at work I’m going to invite your children into my home to play a “game” that I’ve made up. Is that all right with you?
- Zen: It most certainly is not! It would be part of my reality to report you to the police.
- Chris: Why? After all, it’s the reality I’ve sovereignly chosen to create for myself. What gives you the right to interfere in the reality of another god? [Which are what Eastern religions teach, coming to the realization that you are one with the Brahmin.]
- Zen: Simple. Your reality is infringing on my children’s reality.
- Chris: But according to your belief system, before your child incarnated she chose you [by past actions] as her parent and she also chose whatever happens to them, including my act, and you’ve no right to interfere.
[Side Note: Ravi Zacharias makes the point that one doesn’t even know ultimately if it was something in your previous life or something in the parents previous life or the child’s previous life (or others involved) that dictated this karmic outcome! (Ravi Zacharias, The Lotus and the Cross: Jesus Talks with Buddha, 23-24.)]
- Zen: I do too… in this case.
- Chris: Can you see my point now? You are naturally and rightly outraged at the very suggestion of such an act. Something within you knows that it is wrong in and of itself! This reality is in direct contrast to what you should believe if your Buddhist philosophy holds true.
- Zen: You are right.
- Chris: But that can only be so if there are absolute rights and wrongs independent of our personal reality [which Eastern religions don’t teach]. Yet, try as you may, you will not find a ground for such moral absolutes and human value in your worldview. Your God is impersonal and amoral, “beyond good and evil,” so you can’t appeal to It [as “It” is impersonal]. In addition, since in your view [Buddhism or Hinduism] we are all equally gods, my truth about any subject is as good as your truth. So you see, Eastern beliefs fail the test of human experience – it cannot be consistently lived out.
(Elliot Miller, A Crash Course on the New Age Movement: Describing and Evaluating a Growing Social Force, 209-210)
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Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and abortions there outnumber live births by a ratio of two to one. Russia's birth rate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand find themselves in a similar predicament.
Then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the quite literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Birth rates are abysmally low in France, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. The nations of Western Europe today show some of the lowest birth rates ever recorded, and Eastern European birth rates are comparably low. Historians have noted that Europe is suffering the most sustained reduction in its population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when one in three Europeans succumbed to the plague. Lacking the strong religious identity that once characterized Christendom, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. Nietzsche predicted that European decadence would produce a miserable "last man' devoid of any purpose beyond making life comfortable and making provision for regular fornication. Well, Nietzsche's "last man" is finally here, and his name is Sven.
Eric Kaufmann has noted that in America, where high levels of immigration have helped to compensate for falling native birth rates, birth rates among religious people are almost twice as high as those among secular people. This trend has also been noticed in Europe." What this means is that, by a kind of natural selection, the West is likely to evolve in a more religious direction. This tendency will likely accelerate if Western societies continue to import immigrants from more religious societies, whether they are Christian or Muslim. Thus we can expect even the most secular regions of the world, through the sheer logic of demography, to become less secular over time....
My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. Atheism is a bit like homosexuality: one is not sure where it fits into a doctrine of natural selection. Why would nature select people who mate with others of the same sex, a process with no reproductive advantage at all?
(Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, 17, 19. See also an Economist article: Faith Equals Fertility)
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“… probably, so far as I know, there is no professor of Hebrew or Old Testament at any world-class university who does not believe that the writer(s) of Genesis 1–11 intended to convey to their readers the ideas that:
1. creation took place in a series of six days which were the same as the days of 24 hours we now experience
2. the figures contained in the Genesis genealogies provided by simple addition a chronology from the beginning of the world up to later stages in the biblical story
3. Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark.”
(James Barr, Oriel Professor of the interpretation of the Holy Scripture, Oxford University, England, in a letter to David C.C. Watson, 23 April 1984. Barr, consistent with his neo-orthodox views, does not believe Genesis, but he understood what the Hebrew so clearly taught. It was only the perceived need to harmonize with the alleged age of the earth which led people to think anything different—it was nothing to do with the text itself.)
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“To say that we cannot know anything about God is to say something about God; it is to say that if there is a God, he is unknowable. But in that case, he is not entirely unknowable, for the agnostic certainly thinks that we can know one thing about him: That nothing else can be known about him. Unfortunately, the position that we can know exactly one thing about God – his unknowability in all respects except this – is equally unsupportable, for why should this one thing be an exception? How could we know that any possible God would be of such a nature that nothing else could be known about him? On what basis could we rule out his knowability in all other respects but this one? The very attempt to justify the claim confutes it, for the agnostic would have to know a great many things about God in order to know he that couldn’t know anything else about him.” (J. Budziszewski, found in Norman Geisler & Paul Hoffman, eds., Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe, revised ed., 58)
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“… most people assume that something exists. There may be someone, perhaps, who believes that nothing exists, but who would that person be? .... no one ever consciously tries to defend the position that nothing exists. It would be a useless endeavor since there would be no one to convince. Even more significantly, it would be impossible to defend that position since, if it were true, there would be no one to make the defense. So to defend the position that nothing exists seems immediately to be absurd and self-contradictory.” (L. Russ Bush, A Handbook for Christian Philosophy, 70)
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“No matter how fulfilling life becomes, there are always certain regrets when one looks back. My deepest sense of loss involves my father, Chandrabhan Ragbir Sharma Mahabir Maharaj. How I wish he were still alive! Nor does the fact that this extraordinary man died so young and under such mysterious circumstances entirely explain my regret. So much that is even more remarkable has happened since then. I often wonder what it would be like to share it all with him, and what his reaction would be. To share it with him! We never shared anything in our lives. Because of the vows he had taken before I was born, not once did he ever speak to me or pay me the slightest heed. Just two words from him would have made me un¬speakably happy. More than anything else in the whole world I wanted to hear him say, ‘Rabi! Son!’ Just once. But he never did. For eight long years he uttered not a word, not even a whispered confidence to my mother.... ‘Why is Father that way?’ I would ask my mother when I was still too young to understand. ‘He is someone very special—the greatest man you could have for a father,’ she would reply, always patient with my persistent questions and puzzled expression. ‘He is seeking the true Self that lies within us all, the One Being, of which there is no other. And that's what you are too, Rabi’.” (Rabi R. Maharaj, Death of a Guru: A Remarkable True Story of One Man’s Search for Truth, 13-14)
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“As the professor waxed eloquent and expounded on the law of non-contradiction, he eventually drew his conclusion: ‘This [either/or logic] is a Western way of looking at reality. The real problem is that you are seeing contradictions as a Westerner when you should be approaching it as an Easterner. The both/and is the Eastern way of viewing reality.’ After he belabored these two ideas on either/or and both/and for some time, I finally asked if I could interrupt his unpunctuated train of thought and raise one question. I said, ‘Sir, are you telling me that when I am studying Hinduism I either use the both/and system of logic or nothing else?’ There was pin-drop silence for what seemed an eternity. I repeated my question: ‘Are you telling me that when I am studying Hinduism I either use the both/and logic or nothing else? Have I got that right?’ He threw his head back and said, ‘The either/or does seem to emerge, doesn’t it?’ ‘Indeed, it does emerge,’ I said. ‘And as a matter of fact, even in India we look both ways before we cross the street - it is either the bus or me, not both of us’.” (Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God?, 128-129)
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“Ours is an age of religious cacophony, as was the Roman Empire of Christ's time. From agnosticism to Hegelianism, from devil-worship to scientific rationalism, from theosophical cults to philosophies of process: virtually any worldview conceivable is offered to modern man in the pluralistic marketplace of ideas. Our age is indeed in ideological and societal agony, grasping at anything and everything that can conceivably offer the ecstasy of a cosmic relationship or of a comprehensive Weltanschauung [worldview].” (John Warwick Montgomery, Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics, 152-153)
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“Logic - ‘The science of argument. Logic is centrally concerned with the form or structure of arguments themselves. Logic proper is not concerned with whether the premises in an argument are true, but rather, supposing the premises to be true, does the conclusion follow’.” (Kelly James Clark, Richard Lints, and James K.A. Smith, 101 Key Terms in Philosophy and Their Importance for Theology 48)
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“Logic - ‘deals with the methods of valid thinking; it reveals how to draw proper conclusions from premises. It is a prerequisite of all thinking, including all theological thought. Logic is such an inescapable tool that even those who deny it cannot avoid using it, for it is built into the very fabric of the rational universe’.” (Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: Introduction/Bible, 81)
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“Natural Law ‘a philosophical system of legal and moral principles purportedly deriving from a universalized conception of human nature or divine justice rather than from legislative or judicial action; moral law embodied in principles of right and wrong’.” (Brian A. Garner, ed., Black’s Law Dictionary, 7th ed., 1049)
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“Well, I think there are two general kinds of presuppositions that people can make, one is that life, in fact, did arise naturalistically on the primitive earth by some kind of chemical evolutionary process. The second presupposition would be that life may or may not have arisen by a naturalistic, chemical process. Now, if you have the first presupposition, then the goal of your research is to work out plausible pathways of chemical development to go to the bio-polymers, then to the protocells; and what would be likely pathways that you could demonstrate in the laboratory by simulation experiment. If you have the second presupposition, your still going to be doing experiments, but your going to be more open to the possibility that the data, as they [it] come[s] in from those studies may actually be suggesting a different explanation of origins altogether.” (Dean Kenyon, Focus on Darwin: An Interview with Dean H. Kenyon, DVD)
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“Psychological Prejudice
But even a sound epistemic system, flawless deductive reasoning, and impeccable inductive procedure does not guarantee a proper conclusion. Emotional bias or antipathy might block the way to the necessary conclusion of the research. That thinkers may obstinately resist a logical verdict is humorously illustrated by John Warwick Montgomery’s modern parable:
- Once upon a time (note the mystical cast) there was a man who thought he was dead. His concerned wife and friends sent him to the friendly neighborhood psychiatrist determined to cure him by convincing him of one fact that contradicted his beliefs that he was dead. The fact that the psychiatrist decided to use was the simple truth that dead men do not bleed. He put his patient to work reading medical texts, observing autopsies, etc. After weeks of effort the patient finally said, ‘All right, all right! You’ve convinced me. Dead men do not bleed.’ Whereupon the psychiatrist stuck him in the arm with a needle, and the blood flowed. The man looked down with a contorted, ashen face and cried, ‘Good Lord! Dead men bleed after all!’
Emotional prejudice is not limited to dull-witted, the illiterate, and poorly educated. Philosophers and theologians are not exempt from the vested interests and psychological prejudice that distort logical thinking. The question of the existence of God evokes deep emotional and psychological prejudice. People understand that the question of the existence of God is not one that is of neutral consequence. We understand intuitively, if not in terms of its full rational implication, that the existence of an eternal Creator before whom we are ultimately accountable and responsible is a matter that touches the very core of life. (R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley, Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith and a Critique of Presuppositional Apologetics, 69-70)
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“Epistemology - ‘the branch of philosophy concerned with questions about knowledge and belief and related issues such as justification and truth.’ (C. Stephen Evans, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion, 39)
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In 1853, a group petitioned Congress to separate Christian principles from government. They desired a so-called “separation of church and state,” with chaplains being turned out of Congress, the military, etc.. Their petition was referred to the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees, which investigated for almost a year to see if it would be possible to separate Christian principles from government. Both the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees returned with their reports. The following are excerpts from the House report delivered on March 27, 1854 (the Senate report was very similar):“Had the people [the Founding Fathers], during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, but not any one sect [denomination]…. In this age, there is no substitute for Christianity…. That was the religion of the founders of the republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.” Two months later, the Judiciary Committee made this strong declaration:
“The great, vital, and conservative element in our system [the thing that holds our system together] is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
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“A Worldview is how one views or interprets reality. The German word is Weltanschauung, meaning a ‘world and life view,’ or ‘a paradigm.’ It is a framework through which or by which one makes sense of the data of life. A worldview makes a world of difference in one’s view of God, origins, evil, human nature, values, and destiny.” (Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, 785-786)
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“A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our well being.” (James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept,122)
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“Intellectual maturity is closely linked with one’s awareness about worldviews.” (Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict: Choosing Christianity In a World of Ideas, 9)
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“Every subject we think about is filtered through our worldview. The picture of reality we hold in our minds is what we use at the most basic level to answer every question in life. This is especially true of big questions, like those pertaining to man’s origin, ethics, life’s meaning and ultimate destiny. This makes faith central to every aspect of our lives and being. The bigger question, of course, is whether or not the picture of reality we have is actually true.... This is a book about worldviews. Everybody has one, but most individuals never really pay much attention to their own personal philosophy of life. This is a tragedy because there is no state of awareness so fundamental to living life.” (Joseph R. Farinaccio, Faith with Reason: Why Christianity is True, 9-10)
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- Professor: “Miracles are impossible, don’t you know science has disproved them, how could you believe in them [i.e., answered prayer, a man being raised from the dead, Noah’s Ark, and the like].”
- Student: “for clarity purposes I wish to get some definitions straight. Would it be fair to say that science is generally defined as ‘the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us’?”
- Professor: “Beautifully put, that is the basic definition of science in every text-book I read through my Doctoral journey.”
- Student: “Wouldn’t you also say that a good definition of a miracle would be ‘and event in nature caused by something outside of nature’?”
- Professor: “Yes, that would be an acceptable definition of ‘miracle.’”
- Student: “But since you do not believe that anything outside of ‘nature’ exists [materialism, dialectical materialism, empiricism, existentialism, naturalism, and humanism – whatever you wish to call it], you are ‘forced’ to conclude that miracles are impossible”
(Norman L. Geisler & Peter Bocchino, Unshakeable Foundations: Contemporary Answers to Crucial Questions About the Christian Faith, 63-64)
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“Every powerful movement has had its philosophy which has gripped the mind, fired the imagination and captured the devotion of its adherents. One has only to think of the Fascist and the Communist manifestos of this century, of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the one hand and Marx’s Das Kapital and The Thoughts of Chairman Mao on the other.” (John Stott)
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- “Premise: Since there is no God,
- Conclusion: all theistic proofs are invalid.
- Premise: Since the theistic proofs are invalid,
- Conclusion: there is no God.”
(Robert A. Morey, The New Atheism: And the Erosion of Freedom, 57)
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“In a certain sense, the debate transcends the confrontation between evolutionists and creationists. We now have a debate within the scientific community itself; it is a confrontation between scientific objectivity and ingrained prejudice - between logic and emotion - between fact and fiction…. In the final analysis, objective scientific logic has to prevail -- no matter what the final result is - no matter how many time-honored idols have to be discarded in the process…. after all, it is not the duty of science to defend the theory of evolution, and stick by it to the bitter end -- no matter what illogical and unsupported conclusions it offers... if in the process of impartial scientific logic, they find that creation by outside superintelligence is the solution to our quandary, then let's cut the umbilical cord that tied us down to Darwin for such a long time. It is choking us and holding us back…. every single concept advanced by the theory of evolution (and amended thereafter) is imaginary and it is not supported by the scientifically established facts of microbiology, fossils, and mathematical probability concepts. Darwin was wrong…. The theory of evolution may be the worst mistake made in science.”
(I. L. Cohen, Darwin was Wrong: A Study in Probabilities, 6-7, 8, 214-215, 209, 210)
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“The program of rejecting logic in order to accept mutually contradictory beliefs is not, however, just a harmless, whimsical hope that somehow logically incompatible beliefs can both be true…it results in nothing less than the destruction of any and every concept we could possess. Even the concept of rejecting the law of non-contradiction depends on assuming and using that law, since without it the concept of rejecting it could neither be thought nor stated.” (Roy A. Clouser, The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories, 178)
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“The belief that all religions are ultimately expressions of the same transcendent reality is at best illusory and at worst oppressive – illusory because it lacks any substantiating basis and oppressive because it involves the systematic imposition of the agenda of those in positions of intellectual power on the religions and those who adhere to them. The illiberal imposition of this pluralistic metanarrative on religions is ultimately a claim to mastery – both in the sense of having a Nietzschean authority and power to mold material according to one’s will, and in the sense of being able to relativize all the religions by having access to a privileged standpoint.”
(Alister E. McGrath, Passion for Truth: the Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism, 239)
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“Metanarratives or Grand Narratives - ‘big stories, stories of mythic proportions – that claim to be able to account for, explain and subordinate all lesser, little, local, narratives’.”
(Jim Powell, Postmodernism for Beginners, 29)
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“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely negative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
(Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy, 6)
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