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CREATION AND THE NARROW WAY

Filed under: APOLOGETICS, Evolution/Creation, FAITH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS — 2 Comments
December 27, 2017

Have you been intimidated into thinking that if you were to confess to believing that God created, you would be the odd one out, and the object of universal scorn and derision?

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A Gallup poll conducted In May of 2012 found that in the United States forty-six percent of Americans hold the view that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God’s guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process. More broadly, some 78% of Americans today believe that God had a hand in the development of humans in some way, just slightly less than the percentage who felt this way 30 years ago http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold-Creationist-View-Human-Origins.aspx

I’M PROUD TO BE A WACKO

In the UK, my country of origin, it’s a commonly held view that too many Americans are “religious”, and that the US is the home of the Christian Fundamentalist wacko. It’s therefore not surprising to Brits that so many Americans are, in their view, “ignorant of the facts”, as represented in the Gallup poll. I’ll put it a different way: the United States as a whole has not abandoned its faith in the Biblical God while much of Europe has.

Despite all the determined efforts of evolutionists, atheists, the media and many in the education establishment to indoctrinate everyone into the ways of naturalism, many Americans have a lot more savvy and independence of thought when it comes to faith, and aren’t so easily swayed or brainwashed by those determined to get rid of the Christian God. On top of this, freedom-of-speech laws allow creationists and intelligent design ministries to thrive in the US, whereas in Western Europe there’s far more legal and political opposition to such ministries.

The common and caustic charge that creationists are ignorant and stupid is just a smoke screen-an obfuscation (my new favorite word) designed to hide the facts. While they’re fewer in number (because there’s resistance to their hiring and because they don’t get massive government funding and secular media backing as the priests of Darwin do) creationists are in many cases at least as well educated, credentialed and informed as evolutionists. It’s a matter of world-view, not one of who’s most intelligent.

Neither does a majority of scientists in a position of influence prove right: it only helps to dictate who will have the upper hand in public exposure and debate. Ultimately one with God is a majority. The earth belongs to God and not to his deniers, who are, after all, only tenants.

There’s a culture war going on: a spiritual battle for individual hearts and minds. It seems sometimes like the “nays” have it when it comes to God and creation, and that’s intimidating to many people. But those of us who’ve chosen to follow the clear evidence in nature, in scripture, and in empirical science (rather than philosophy without evidence posing as science) see it God’s way. We recognize that Jesus Christ said:

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few” (Matthew 7:13,14 ESV).

 

 

 

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LIFE FROM SOUP…?

Filed under: APOLOGETICS, Evolution/Creation, FAITH, Philosophy, Uncategorized — Leave a comment
July 23, 2018

Just once in a while, if you’re looking for it, you’ll find a glaring example of double-speak in evolution. You may, if you’re lucky, even catch an earth-shattering admission…

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Ben Stein’s movie “Expelled” is several years old now, and I’ve reviewed it before, but I would still highly recommend it to anyone who’s really seeking some truth. In Expelled Stein exposes some of the strong arm tactics being employed to shut out of science, education and the media anyone who may believe in a Creator or Intelligent Design.

As a brief but amusing review, I want to draw your attention to the most striking part of the movie. Towards the end Stein interviewed the great Richard Dawkins, and gave us all a fabulous glimpse into the mind of one of the world’s leading evolutionists. Dawkins began by reading from his book “The God Delusion”, and proceeded to call the Judeo-Christian God (not Allah, of course) all the names you wouldn’t dare call Adolph Hitler, Ghengis Khan, Jo Stalin, Pol Pott or any other tyrant you can think of.

Then Stein asks Prof. Dawkins (for all of us to see and hear) how the process of the origin of life started. Dawkins replied:

“Nobody knows how it started…we know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life”.

Stein: “What was that?”

Prof. Dawkins: “It was the… origin of the first self-replicating molecule.”

Dawkins had just made a gigantic leap from nothing to the first self-replicating molecule, an interesting omission on its own. The conversation continued…

Stein: “Right. And how did that happen?”

Prof. Dawkins: “I’ve told you, we don’t know”

Stein: “So you have no idea how it started?”

Dawkins: “No, no, nor has anybody.”

I’m sure that since the movie Prof Dawkins has determined to be more prepared for pesky God-believers with tricky questions. Anyway, he went on to suggest that some remote and highly evolved civilization out there in space may have “designed a form of life which they then seeded onto perhaps this planet”.

My point is that a man who doggedly fights Creationism and Intelligent Design, and who says that the evidence for evolution on earth is “totally overwhelming”, and who has helped millions of people become convinced that evolution is conclusively proven, was offering his speculation (and not evidence) that life on earth may have been “designed” and “seeded” from somewhere else in the universe. He was also admitting that apart from this neither he, nor anyone else, knows how life began.

If it had indeed been “proven” that life evolved from soup, as hundreds of millions of people have been led to believe, then Prof. Dawkins and all his militant atheist colleagues would be trumpeting the results and demonstrating how it’s done.

A very relevant read on my blog would be the post “Photosynthesis: Fact and Fiction” (see the link below).

https://nickyfisher.com/2018/01/05/photosynthesis-fact-and-fiction/

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THE OLD BRAVE NEW WORLD

Filed under: APOLOGETICS, Philosophy, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS — Leave a comment
July 21, 2018

When I attended school, in the days when classical works were still considered to be a vital part of good education, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” was required reading, as was Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four“. Looking back, I’m not so sure now that the intention of everyone involved in writing the school syllabi was to warn us of the evils of totalitarianism, as we thought at the time…

Written in 1931, Brave New World is still remarkably relevant today, though not often read. It imagines a future in which a world state governs all the affairs of humanity, to the extent that it produces humans without any need for a womb or a family. From “conception” the state places people within prescribed and fixed classes, rather like castes, each with its own level of intelligence and ability. The state then conditions the minds of its offspring to accept their positions in life happily, and to conform without complaint to everything the world state has instituted.

The reason the book is still relevant in many ways is that it expresses some of the goals and dreams of many socialist-minded people over the last couple of centuries, up to the present time. In fact, you could probably find most of its suggestions within Marx’s “Manifesto”. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that all socialists want everyone to be equal and on the same level: those in the forefront of the movement want to be more equal than the rest of us.

Huxley, the brother of a famous evolutionist, was opposed to religion and the nuclear family (Marx’s Christian “bourgeoisie family”) and rather partial to the concept of eugenics. In Brave New World he was not warning us all of future evils, as most people, including myself, were led to believe. His imagined society was not intended to be dystopian: he was surreptitiously encouraging our consideration of its benefits. He was pushing it into our faces, much as Hollywood does today.

Growing numbers of people today, particularly in the feminist movement and among extremist liberals, have similar dreams and desires for the transformation of our world. Those desires include eugenics; total government power over a compliant and suitably re-educated populace; amorality; the end of the traditional family; the complete preoccupation with entertainment; a news media entirely in the pocket of the politically-correct establishment; totally revised or forgotten history; the end of the Church; radically controlled reproduction; the despising and vilification of anyone who does not comply; the homogenization and simplification of thought; the use of euphemisms and ambiguity for all institutions and agencies (like the current DOJ); total control over all education from birth; the moral corruption of children; a world government, and the loss of all national identity and culture.

Perhaps the only big difference between Huxley’s future utopian society and the real movement towards such a world today is that Huxley’s society worked.

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WHY DOESN’T GOD STOP BAD THINGS FROM HAPPENING?

Filed under: APOLOGETICS, FAITH, Uncategorized — 4 Comments
July 15, 2018

You stub your toe on a table leg. You passionately address the table, and perhaps even the gods who you may not believe in, with certain derogatory words and accusations which your mother would never have approved of…

You wonder why the gods allowed your throbbing toe to make contact with such a solid object at all. Couldn’t they have moved the table aside one second before contact?

Why does the Biblical God allow us to suffer? Isn’t he a God of love? Why, if He’s omnipresent and omnipotent, isn’t he one step ahead of us, preventing all the terrible things which happen in our world every day? There are a number of answers to this, which none of us like. We can’t know them all, but we can know some of them…

First of all, God created a physical universe for physical beings to live in, and a physical universe must have natural laws to govern it. Why would God create a physical universe, and then negate its natural laws? If you drop a concrete slab, you can be sure that gravity will rapidly draw it with some considerable force and momentum towards your toe, already bruised and throbbing after its connection with the table leg.

We don’t know whether Adam and Eve, before the Fall, were susceptible to concrete slabs dropping on their toes. We do know, however, that once they began to rebel, they were susceptible to anything including death:

“For in the day that you eat thereof, you shall surely die.”

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Something happened when Adam disobeyed God, and he began to die, just as God had warned him he would. It took him a long time to die, but die he did, as a direct consequence of his disobedience. His disobedience, and later our own, led to our downfall also. It doesn’t take us so long to die as it took him, because he was still a fresh and extremely healthy creation. We Christians-those of us who believe the Bible-talk about the Fall of man and of nature, at which time humans and all of creation became subject to adverse events and circumstances. When Cain struck down Abel, God didn’t stop him…God let Cain do it. Why did he? Why didn’t God say, “Hey Abel! Look out-your brother has a knife!” Why didn’t he make whatever weapon Cain used turn to dust before it could do the dirty deed?

Since the Fall God has intentionally allowed us to face consequences: consequences of our own actions and of others’ actions; consequences of natural laws such as gravity, and consequences of the fall of nature, so that our bodies degrade and become ill. There can only be one alternative to perfect health forever, and that’s illness, decline and death. God refuses to allow fallen man-in rebellion and disobedience-to live forever, or to live without natural consequences.

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Free will is an amazing gift to us from God, as a vital part of His creation. God wants man to have his own mind and spirit, and to choose to love Him and each other, rather than creating him with robotic compliance. However, free will comes at a price. It’s the driving force behind all the hatred, unrest, unhappiness and evil we see playing out in our world. If God had turned Cain’s weapon to dust before it killed Abel, Cain would no longer have free will. If God froze our tongue moments before we made our feelings clear to someone, in the process hurting them, we would no longer have free will.

In suffering we learn and grow. If there were no consequences to our actions and our words, we would not learn to control them. We would not mature. We would remain like children in our character.

Perhaps the hardest lesson for us all to learn is that it’s God’s will that we suffer, in this world. He-not the devil- instituted the Curse. The Curse is one of those natural laws that God created. It affects all of creation. He’s able to negate those laws when he sees fit (in what we call a “miracle”) but for the most part, it’s His will that we endure suffering. How we respond to that suffering and those challenges is of great interest to God. It’s how God, and everyone else, finds out what we’re really made of. Even Jesus Christ was sent into the wilderness, by the Holy Spirit of God, to be tempted. In the Bible the words “tempt” and “test” are interchangeable.

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To that end, God even allows that rebellious spirit-Satan-to test us. You only need to read the story of Job to see that. Satan is able to afflict us physically and to sorely test us mentally and spiritually-if he receives permission from God to do so. While Satan probably doesn’t afflict all of us directly (he has his own minions) his hateful exploits have devastating affects on our world. But the most important message of Job’s story is that God-and Satan-were vitally interested in how Job would react to his suffering. What was he really like inside? What were his real motives for acting as he did, and for claiming to care about his creator? Did he really love God? Would he maintain his humility before God? Had he really only been following the Lord because life had been rich and trouble-free, or was it because he saw the Lord as his Master, for better or for worse? In marriage our love for our spouse is put to the test and seen for what it really is when we have problems and disagreements, not when all is going well.

God knows that human nature is contrary to His, and that even if He made sure that everything went smoothly for us, we would not feel the need to seek Him. In fact, in many or most cases we humans will only seek God, and humble ourselves to him, when we are suffering or struggling in some way. Somehow, God knows that we grow spiritually under adverse conditions.

Our universe is temporary, and this physical, limited world we live in is a proving ground for all of us. In time, we will be judged for our responses and actions. The most relevant fact that we need to respond positively to is that God has provided his own Son as a sacrifice, so that we can know Him. If we accept God’s gift of his Son, we can escape the limitations of our mortal, temporary bodies in the future, when he will restore all of nature to a state of perfection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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BLOGGING AND THE “LOV-CAB” AWARD

Filed under: Philosophy, Uncategorized — Leave a comment
July 10, 2018

Hey bloggers… have you heard of the LVCAB award? No? Well then, who’s heard of a “misere ouvert“?

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Misere Ouvert is a rule in some card games which gives you a chance to win, even if you happen to have been dealt the worst hand possible. By intentionally losing every trick, you win. You need conviction, tenacity, sharp thinking, and a bad hand to take advantage of the rule.

I sometimes like to apply the misere ouvert principle to my life in creative ways. For example, by achieving the lowest view count in all of Blogdom, I may actually win the “Lowest View Count In All Blogdom” award, or the LVCAB. This award is affectionately known in my house, or rather, in my head, as the “LOV-CAB”.

Is there such an award? As far as I know, there isn’t. But I think it’s a good idea…

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IS GOD CRUEL?

Filed under: APOLOGETICS, Evolution/Creation, FAITH, The Meaning of Life — Leave a comment
July 7, 2018

One of the countless reasons people give for not having faith in the God of the Bible is that He’s cruel, angry and sadistic. Are they right?

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Perhaps the most important answer to this question is that the universe is not a democracy. The God of the Bible created it and sustains it. He has no equal, and He therefore has every right to do with it what he wants to do. God is God, and we are not. Not only that, be we can’t stop him doing what he wants to do. So perhaps the question should be worded differently: Can I believe that there is a God such as this, one who appears to be so cruel?

Surely, even if God were terribly cruel and sadistic, the fact would not rule out the reality of his existence, except perhaps from the point of view that no all-powerful being who is also mean and sadistic could or would create and maintain such an amazing and  beautiful cosmos. So then the question must be more correctly worded this way:

Is God so cruel that I don’t want to know him?

Here we’re getting down to the nub of the problem, because such questions are usually-but not always-thrown out as an argument from people who have no desire to know God in the first place. It’s a cop-out; an excuse.

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But what about it: is the God of the Bible cruel? He doesn’t claim to be cruel. In fact, scripture says that, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 NIV).

The gospel is all about the love of God for the pinnacle of his creation-mankind. He didn’t send his son to condemn the world, but to save it.

What about suffering? Why, if there is a God of love, do humans suffer so much, and then die? This is a subject for another post, and I’ve answered this question to the best of my ability in several posts. Please see the links below *

The skeptic will raise the subjects of God’s treatment of the Canaanites and the ancient Israelites, and the whole concept of hell.

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God told the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanites under the leadership of Joshua, including women and children. This is seen as extreme cruelty. The charge is made by people who are either ignorant of all the facts, or who are determined to deny God the right to decide how mankind will behave on his earth. The Canaanites had descended to the lowest pits of human depravity, so that they were sacrificing their own children to their idols. They had abandoned their creator and were worshiping wood and stone. They were engaging in every depraved activity they could imagine. And God did not suddenly decide to swat the Canaanites without giving them a chance to change. In fact, he gave them more than four hundred years to repent (Genesis chapter 15).

We humans don’t have a “right” to do what we want without consequence, because we are owned by our maker. Our maker has standards. I’m personally very thankful for that. How could The master mathematician, biologist, scientist and philosopher, not have standards? Why should he not want to enforce and maintain those standards? Does he not have a right to run his universe his way?

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And what about hell? Is the concept really so awful? Well, it certainly is awful for anyone who may go there. But suppose for  now, if you don’t believe, that God is indeed our creator and the creator of our universe, as the Bible claims he is. Where then can those people go who do not want to know their creator and refuse to adhere to his standards? Where can they go, if once having failed his standards, they then refuse his mercy also? Can they create their own universe? Can they go and settle another part of his universe? Unfortunately, God cannot, according to his nature, tolerate willing rebellion, anywhere in his creation.

He therefore has a special place reserved which we call “hell”, away from Him and the universe which those who love him will inhabit. Without God Hell can have no light, no love, no comforts, no hope, no fun, no beauty. It can only be a terrible place without God. Choose Him or lose Him and all his benefits.

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There is, therefore, no part of His universe people can move to to escape his will. And if he sent everyone, against their will, to his heaven, it would be mean to those people who hate him, his ways, and his people, to make them endure all three for all eternity. Not only that, but it would be cruel also to those who do love him and his ways, to then have to endure the godless for all eternity. Heaven would be just like the earth is now, with war, aggression, immorality, hatred, abuse, decadence, and all the evils men and women perpetrate upon each other.

The  Bible says that “God is love”. God created love, and God is love. But that doesn’t preclude the need for right, wrong, and the necessary judgment of wrongdoing. God is as just as he is loving, and the two go hand in hand perfectly. True justice is a beautiful as is true love, for all eternity. Glory to God!

*Below is a link to the first part of my series on the subject of suffering. You can search for subsequent parts in the search box above, using the words “Why do we suffer? Part 2”, Part 3, etc. You can pay a lot for some “expert’s” book on the topic, or you can read these for nothing:

https://nickyfisher.com/2017/05/31/why-do-we-suffer-part-1/

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