In the 1925 “Scope’s Trial,” the defendant, John Scopes taught from “an approved school text called A Civic Biology by George Hunter.”[1] The book is not so much a scientific defense of Darwinism but a rehearsal of “Darwinism’s social implications. In particular, chapter seventeen discusses the application to human society of “the laws of selection” and approves the eugenic policies and scientific [...]
Humphrey Bogart, playing the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlow, had some great lines in the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep. This is one of my favorites: “He’ll kick my teeth out, and then punch me in the stomach for mumbling.” No matter what happens, even when the bad guy does it to him, Marlowe can’t win. They’ll be no satisfying the opposition even when the oppositio [...]
Writing a daily column for this website is a perilous enterprise. While most of the emails I get in response are complimentary, there are always a few spoilers. One letter writer was stridently opposed to my article on “Why We Need Rich People”. Like most socialists, he quotes the Bible sparingly and most often out of context. Here was my response (with some modifications): Dear Chris, Thanks for [...]
Leftist pundit Bill Press, a political commentator for MSNBC, has weighed in on the Cobb County, Georgia, evolution controversy.[1] Press begins by assailing the 1925 Scopes Trial: “The debate over evolution in public schools should have ended right then and there—or, if not, in 1968, when the Supreme Court finally ruled that banning evolution and teaching creationism violated the First Amendment [...]
You’ve got to hand it to liberals. They can speak out of both sides of their mouth at the same time and express shock when people notice. The most recent display of double talk comes from Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich who signed the latest “sexual orientation” provision into law. “This legislation sends a clear message that we will not allow our citizens to be discriminated against,” Blagojevi [...]
Germany is using Gestapo tactics against Christian families who want to educate their children at home. If talks with German officials break down, there’s a good chance that the children will be taken from their parents and turned over to the State. All of this sounds frightenly familiar. We’ve seen this before. By capturing the youth through education, Adolph Hitler knew that his dreams of [...]
Michael Newdow and other anti-Christian crazies want every reference to Christianity removed from the sight line of all Americans. It’s time that we forced their hand. Their creeping incrementalism has kept us off guard, bleeding us to death with a million small cuts. And since the majority of Americans probably don’t care one way or another whether the president is permitted to have a [...]
Belief in evolution is not a harmless enterprise. Pro-active evolutionary propagandists claim that the debate over origins is purely about science: They have the science, and creationists don’t; it’s that simple. But it’s not. There are specific ethical implications that follow from believing and applying the major tenets of the evolutionary religion to life. The late Stephen Jay [...]
We just celebrated Martin Luther King Day. One aspect of King’s legacy that is often ignored by the mainstream press and liberal political pundits is that King was a minister. “As much as a civil activist as he was, as much as he did, Dr. King was a preacher,” said the Rev. Alexis Thomas of Pilgrim Rest Church in Phoenix. “Everything he did in society flowed out of the well of his relationship wit [...]
An editorial that appeared in The Marietta Daily Journal stated, “Judge [Clarence] Cooper’s ruling does not mean there is no God, or that one cannot believe in some combination of both evolution and God, or that after having learned the basics of evolution theory, that Cobb students cannot then choose to believe instead in creationism.” Students can believe anything they want, but they are being t [...]
When Social Security was implemented, the maximum amount any one person paid into the system was $60 per year—a total of two percent from employee and employer of a maximum $3000 per year. Today, the percentage is around 14% on $80,000+ per year. This compulsory “tax” is said to be a “contribution,” as in the “employers contribution portion of Social Security.” Try telling the Social Security Admi [...]
Michael Newdow is about to become as famous as Madelyn Murray O’Hair. For some of our younger readers, O’Hair was instrumental in getting prayer removed from public schools.[1] In a 1963 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a government sponsored prayer was unconstitutional. This has led to the banning of all things religious from public schools. The decision made O’Hair the cou [...]
Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan has told his followers that President Bush’s efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East represent “the rule of the devil.” Democracy is the “rule of the people,” and whatever the people rule is right. _Vox populi, vox dei—”_the voice of the people is the voice of god.” In Farrakhan’s case, the voice of the people is the voice of the devil—a counte [...]
A popular Christian explanation for alien encounters is that they are demonic. John Keel, a private reporter who began to collect information on UFOs in the mid-1960s, concluded that “The UFOs do not seem to exist as tangible, manufactured objects. They do not conform to the accepted natural laws of our environment. . . . The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variatio [...]
Christie Todd Whitman, like so many disgruntled politicos who see their worldview being coopted by a shift in the political landscape, has written a book slamming the conservative shift in the Republican Party. She offers some advice on how to increase the Republican base in It’s My Party, Too: The Battle for the Heart of the GOP and the Future of America. She contends that the party has bee [...]
Students in public schools are often denied the right to discuss religion except in a multi-cultural way. If Christianity is discussed, it can only be studied in the context of other religious belief systems in their historical setting. But as we’ve seen, even this approach is no longer accepted in reference to Christianity. Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San [...]
“O God, I am thinking thy thoughts after thee.” – Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)[1] Two views of life dominate worldview thinking. The first view maintains that all that really matters is the world in which we live and the physical universe that surrounds us. Only those things that can be evaluated by the senses are real and ultimately important. Any other proposal for meaning beyond the [...]
Apparently someone hacked into the Planet Preterist web site and directed users to Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind web site. The front page of LaHaye’s site informs viewers that a prequel to the Left Behind series–“Before They Were Left Behind–will hit stores on March 1, 2004. The title of the new volume is The Rising: Antichrist is Born. LaHaye and company are milking millions of uninf [...]
Stephanie Salter, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, attempts to instruct President Bush on what Jesus would do in terms of war based on the verse “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). It’s possible to disagree with President Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq, but it’s not possible to argue that the civil magistrate cannot wage war against “all enemies, both [...]
Mel Gabler is not a household name, yet he had more influence in shaping recent American life than most people ever dream of. He and his wife Norma stood in the gap for over four decades, battling the tax-funded schools’ textbook Establishment. Time and time again, the Gablers inflicted enormous financial losses on textbook firms until the publishers learned to clear their textbooks in advan [...]
