Everyone Stop Breathing

BreakPoint | by Chuck Colson | Oct. 16, 2009

OK, global warming is no laughing matter. But it is also not a scientific fact, as the new movie Not Evil Just Wrong makes clear. But that’s not stopping leaders in wealthy Western nations from pushing radical “solutions” to this dubious problem.

Not Evil Just Wrong does a great job of clearing the air over some contentious issues. Take the hysteria over CO2 emissions, for example. CO2 is not a pollutant. It’s an odorless gas that every living being gives off when he or she exhales. As Patrick Moore, once a founder of Greenpeace, says in the film, “Anybody who knows anything about biology knows that carbon dioxide is the most important nutrient of all of life. It is the currency of life.” [Read more…]

Welcome to the School of Social Engineering

Center for a Just Society | by Ken Connor | Oct. 16, 2009

In the wake of the controversial dismissal of Green Jobs Czar Van Jones, another of the President’s men has been attracting negative attention.

The President has chosen teacher and GLBT activist Kevin Jennings for advice and guidance on how best to foster a safe and drug-free environment for America’s school children. Much has already been written about Jennings’s controversial background, his troubling associations, his questionable ethics, and his obvious lack of qualification and suitability for the job of Safe Schools Czar. Given Obama’s need to stay in the public’s good graces in order to advance the cause of health care reform, it would hardly be surprising to see Kevin Jennings gently shoved off the President’s roster of advisors if this criticism continues. [Read more…]

Signature in the Cell


Spectrum Magazine | by Ken Peterson | Sep. 23, 2009

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. The book set off what has been at times a ferocious argument concerning the validity and scope of his theories. A new book by Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, is not about the transmutation of species over time. Rather, it is about a much older controversy that has extended for thousands of years concerning the origin of life, something that Darwin did not really address in his book. This old controversy has often been between two essential poles: materialistic naturalism (time plus random, undirected chance) or God.

For example, we can see elements of this controversy played out in the Bible over the centuries of its development. For the sake of brevity I will only note Genesis 1:1 (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”) and Psalms 14:1 (“The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”) In the 150 years since 1859 the dominant scientific establishment has, it is fair to say, fully embraced the “materialistic naturalism” model generally and specifically as applied to origins. [Read more…]

Become Like a Little Child

BreakPoint | by Paul Miller | Sep. 16, 2009

On more than one occasion, Jesus tells his disciples to become like little children.

The most famous is when the young mothers try to get near Jesus so he can bless their infants. When the disciples block them, Jesus rebukes his disciples sharply. “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mark 10:14-15). Jesus’ rebuke would have surprised the disciples. It would have seemed odd. Children in the first century weren’t considered cute or innocent. Only since the nineteenth-century Romantic era have we idolized children. [Read more…]

Nazis And Commies

American Thinker | by Bernie Reeves | Oct. 11, 2009

Is the fascination with Nazis in Western culture a product of natural interest, or is it an unspoken pact by novelists and filmmakers to obscure the greater atrocities committed by the Soviets — most notably under Stalin, who ruled in the same era as Hitler?

A recent documentary on the Turner Classic Movie cable channel illustrated the point. Said the commentators, when all else fails in selecting a villain, make Nazis the sinister evil force and success is assured. Yet the idea to create Soviet villains never appears to occur to novelists and filmmakers, except in spy thrillers where each side is usually defined as morally equivalent. [Read more…]

Nobel’s Stockholm Syndrome

Townhall | by Jerry Bowyer | Oct. 9, 2009

It was because of a woman named Bertha Kinsky. She was a pacifist and a free-thinker (which means anti-religious). He fell in love with her, and they married, but she left him. He was wealthy, but not intellectually respected. He inherited his father’s industrial business, which was, horror of horrors, an arms manufacturer. He was not a college graduate, but he learned chemistry anyway and developed dynamite, and became one of the wealthiest men in the world. He went on to write poems and anti-Christian plays, but they never respected him. She never really respected him. Alfred Nobel had money, but not status. [Read more…]

Flush with Self-Righteousness

American Thinker | by Rosslyn Smith | Oct. 5, 2009

Environmentalist dreams are starting to rub Americans raw. Greenpeace has turned its attention to an issue that invites both the reporter and readers to make them the butt of jokes, but which is no laughing matter in the end. They are dumping on the manufacture of plush toilet paper on the grounds that it helps destroy the environment. [Read more…]

Without God We are Nothing

by + Cardinal George Pell (Archbishop of Sydney) | Oct. 4, 2009
Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Opera House

My claims this afternoon are simple. It is more reasonable to believe in God than to reject the hypothesis of God by appealing to chance; more reasonable also to believe than to escape into agnosticism.

Goodness, truth and beauty call for an explanation as do the principles of mathematics, physics, and the purpose-driven miracles of biology which run through our universe. The human capacities to recognize these qualities of truth, goodness and beauty, to invent and construct, also call for an explanation.

The Irish philosopher Brendan Purcell cites the frequently used quotation from Einstein that: ‘The one thing that is unintelligible about the universe is its intelligibility”[1] ; and he might have added the fact that human intelligences are able to strive to understand the universe is also unintelligible of and by itself. [Read more…]