"...cleanse them by water in the name of Allah, his Messiah and his Holy Spirit.” - Matthew 28:19, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Arabic version.
Posts Tagged ‘ religion ’
Ten Tortured Words and The End of Secularism
These are the titles of a couple books I read recently, and they go together perfectly. The subtitle of Ten Tortured Words is instructive: “How the Founding Fathers Tried to Protect Religion in America . . . and What’s Happened Since.” I can see the secular atheist types sharpening their metaphorical pens, but they have a minor problem: History. The distortion of the Founders intent regarding religion and state goes back to the 1947 Supreme Court’s majority decision in Everson v. Board of Education. But it wasn’t the opinion itself that offended the right ordering of the 158 years of history that came before, but Justice Hugo Black’s majority opinion in which he completely and totally perverted the Founders’ intent by absolutising Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor of a “wall” separating church and state. (A metaphor, it should be added, that was found in a letter Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury (CT) Baptist Association.) Ever since that decision, those who long for a totally secular utopia devoid of any public affirmation of religion have literally worshiped those words as inviolable absolute truth from on high. Nothing else the Founders wrote or did is allowed to alter the meaning of that
A Western Government Declares BC/AD To Be Un-PC
— and some people aren’t at all happy about it: Australia is to remove the birth of Jesus as a reference point for dates in school history books. Under the new politically correct curriculum, the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). The Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, yesterday condemned the move as an ‘intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history.’ He described the phrase ‘common era’ as ‘meaningless,’ and compared it to using ‘festive season’ instead of Christmas. The changes, introduced by the government, were supposed to be pushed through next year, but have been delayed by the row. The terms CE and BCE have been popularised in academic and scientific publications. One of Australia’s political party leaders, Christopher Pyne, also registered his objections: ‘Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilization,’ he said. ‘Kowtowing to political correctness by the embarrassing removal of AD and BC in our national curriculum is of a piece with the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people,’
“Hitler’s Bible”
On the CMI website, Russell Grigg tries to set the record straight: Elimination of the Jews in Nazi Germany was not confined to the Holocaust. It also took the form of rewriting the New Testament to ‘dejudaize’ it, i.e., to remove references to Judaism and to recast Jesus as an Aryan, generating what has been called the ‘Nazi Bible’. This has been the subject of some sensational and substantially erroneous claims, including that the project was Hitler’s brainchild. In 1930s Germany, the ‘German Christians’ (Deutsche Christen) movement arose. These were theologically liberal Protestant churches and theologians who were enthusiastically pro-Nazi, calling Hitler the ‘Führer Jesus’ and ‘God’s agent in our day’. Politically ambitious and anti-Semitic, they wanted a faith without anything Jewish in the Bible, and without converted Jews in the Church. Their ultimate membership of 600,000 constituted about 30 percent of German Protestants. In opposition to this, the so-called ‘Confessing Church’ (Bekennende Kirche) movement arose, ultimately attracting some 20 percent of Protestant pastors. It included notable opponents of Hitler such as Karl Barth, Martin Niemöller, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. However, some of its members were inclined to take other liberties with the plain meaning of the biblical text, and some
The Liberal Mind and American Exceptionalism
What is it about the term American Exceptionalism that so disturbs modern liberals. We know the term wouldn’t have bothered older liberals, say like America’s Founding Fathers, who thought their little experiment in limited government and liberty was pretty special. With the GOP presidential campaign heating up The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen is hearing too much about this American Exceptionalism and he just can’t take it anymore. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 — and I will not quibble. But the problem of the 21st century is the problem of culture, not just the infamous “culture of poverty” but what I would call the culture of smugness. The emblem of this culture is the term “American exceptionalism.” It has been adopted by the right to mean that America, alone among the nations, is beloved of God. Maybe so, but on some days it’s hard to tell. He even goes so far as to call it a cult, which he asserts should be renamed “American narcissism.” He seems to think the term is distinctly religious. As he says, the term “is infused with religious meaning, which makes it
Hitchens Rallies the Troops on Easter
The famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, in the face of imminent death, is doubling down on his atheism, and what is mildly disturbing, on his invective against people of faith. And it’s not so much the invective that annoys, but the deeply dishonest and distorted nature of it. I suppose there is a body of militant atheists so completely devoid of humility and honesty that they would actually believe Hitchens’ drivel, but I’d like to believe that most people who choose to be atheists have some commitment to the truth. I guess Hitchens thinks he might be coming close to the end, because he chose this Easter weekend to publish a letter to his fellow atheists, to encourage them to soldier on in their noble cause to rid the world of religion. Hitchens is an absolutist, a state of mind and personality by no means exclusive to atheists. In fact it is a condition fallen human beings are susceptible to regardless of their faith commitments (and yes, atheism is a faith commitment). Absolutist Christians of various stripes are just as annoying and off-putting to me as absolutist atheists. The older one grows, the more one should realize how much we just
Life is Good — Maybe Too Good — Here in the West
By Mike Gray one of us has a fully coherent solution to the problem of theodicy . But the problem is not exactly new — every great religion has dealt with it, and most of the brilliant minds in history retained their faith in God despite all the unjust suffering they saw. The difference today is that life has been so good for most Westerners that suffering is no longer regarded as part of life, but as an aberration that can be done away with. Meanwhile, the liberal wings of Christianity and Judaism are too influenced by secularism to make an effective religious case for God, whom the religious Left has largely rendered a celestial buddy. — Dennis Prager, “Why God Isn’t Doing Well These Days”
Was Cosmic Evolution the Key to Adolf Eichmann’s Soul?
By Mike Gray “I am not prepared to accept anything that disagrees with my naturalistic conceptions … over hundreds and millions of years of development man has developed downwards, to become ‘Homo sapiens’.” — Adolf Eichmann You probably have never heard of Eichmann. Russell Grigg explains who he was: Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) was one of the principal architects of the Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered. His task was to maintain the killing capacity of the concentration camps by providing a steady flow of victims. Following his capture in Argentina in 1960, he was tried as a war criminal in 1961 in a Jerusalem Court, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The Israeli Ministry of Affairs appointed a Christian missionary, William Hull, to be Eichmann’s spiritual adviser while he awaited execution. Hull met 14 times with Eichmann. As Grigg points out, the Nazi concentration camp coordinator never once admitted feeling sorry for what he did: During these discussions, Eichmann confirmed that he had been brought up in the Evangelische Church, but said that he did not believe that Jesus died to save sinners. He said he found God through nature and through what the philosophers
‘The Dawkins Delusion’
Do you believe in Richard Dawkins? Your faith in him might be shaken after listening to this. (Audio: 6 minutes 6 seconds.)
Deconstructing Jared
What I'm saying is that whatever world view you adopt, even if it's materialistic, a metaphysic comes with it. And that metaphysic provides a form for the nut's nutty ideas. Religion does not drive people to madness or violence. Religion—like ideology, and even literary theory—simply forms an armature on which the insane person sculpts his personal monster.
Genetic Basis for Religion Found
Actor-writer John Cleese explains the rock-solid evidence for atheism, in this very funny video: H/t to Bruno Behrend.
Recent Comments