Friday, April 02, 2010

 

All Your Bases Are Belong To Us!

.
The Rev. Mark H. Creech, described as the executive director of the Christian Action League of North Carolina, Inc., is over at the American Family News Network's OneNewsNow "Christian news service" declaring victory over the world.

Praising a book by someone named Erwin Lutzer, Senior Pastor of The Moody Church in Chicago, Creech claims that "a number of prominent foes of Christ in the last 100 years ... have gone by the wayside." Among them are Karl Marx (Dang! Then we don't need to worry about Obama being no dirty Commie!), Sigmund Freud (Okay, Freudian analysis is serious ill), Voltaire (!) and, of course, Charles Darwin!:

"Darwin took the stone of science and rolled it in front of Christ's tomb," writes Lutzer. "Though he himself possessed belief in God, he thought that evolution could explain the origin of life, and the next generation of scientists building on shaky evidence said that God was an unnecessary hypothesis."

Yet evolution is constantly changing and contradicting its own findings. The evidence is accumulating more and more that there is an intelligent design to the universe. Some scientists are so convinced of this that, at risk to their own careers, they are speaking out and challenging the truth claims of evolution as patently false.

Science changes? How come no one ever told me this? I thought we were still using stone tools to make computers and 747s!

And, of course, there is exactly the same "evidence" for Intelligent Design as there was when William Paley took age-old arguments and wrote them down in 1802. Now that's unchanging!

And do those vanishingly small number of scientists who espouse ID really claim that evolution is patently false? Then how come they keep citing Michael Behe's acceptance of common descent?

Oh, well ... I guess that's what you get when one pastor listens to another about science ... patent nonsense.

But this part amuses me:

These are trying times in which to live. Christianity is under a cruel assault as never before in American history. There are the foes of Christ who have endeavored to remove all reference of him from the public square. They are well-funded, resourceful, and have taken much of the field of battle. As time passes, socialistic principles are introduced more and more into American economics, which is far removed from the teaching of Holy Scripture that every man has a God-given right to his property -- a right that should be protected by the government and never usurped.

I'm no Biblical scholar but it's funny that I don't remember those passages. But I remember these:

[S]ell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. Luke 18:22

Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. Matthew 22:21


Comments:
Science changes? How come no one ever told me this?

Ironically, Michael Shermer did. I believe it was in Borderlands. One of the characteristics of science, as opposed to pseudo-science, is that the theory changes over time whenever new information appears that contradicts old theories. Invariant theory could be called a "spotting feature" of pseudo-science.
 
John,

I'm surprised you don't recall 'Blessed are the wealthy, for the Earth is theirs and always will be.' And 'God helps him who helps himself.' And if you look it up, the story of the rich man punished for stepping over the poor Lazarus on his doorstep is about God punishing the rich man for letting Lazarus lie on his property instead of kicking him off it to go out and get a damn job.

Mike from Ottawa
 
I note in passing that the Court of Appeal in the UK has decided in favour of Simon Singh in the libel case brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association. This has rightly been described as a "stunning" decision.

However, what caught my attention, in the context of your post, was a quote from the "Reverend Thomas Burnett (1635-1715) writing in Telluris theoria sacra" posted by one of the commenters and which, I believe, deserves to be more widely-known:

Tis a dangerous thing to engage the authority of scripture in disputes about the natural world in opposition to reason; lest time, which brings all things to light, should discover that to be evidently false which we had made scripture assert.
 
Michael:

Thanks for reminding me of the Blessed are the Corporate verses.

Ian:

I have noted that the British courts may be catching up to the Colonies in freedom of speech jurisprudence, which I applaud ... but if I noted every rational thing a court did I'd spend ... oh ... five minutes as day on it.
 
Its a wonderful religion that motivates some adherents to surrender their wealth and take vows of poverty, and for other adherents of the same religion to accumulate wealth and take it as a sign of divine favour.
 
Woody Guthrie had it exactly right in his song "Jesus Christ." From the final verse:

Yes, if Jesus was to preach like he preached in Galilee,
They would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.
 
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