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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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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”. 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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POLITICS, CHRISTIANS AND REVELATION

Filed under: APOLOGETICS, FAITH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, Politics, Uncategorized — Leave a comment
June 25, 2018

A good friend who is a godly man recently commented on social media that Christians should keep their opinions to themselves on the matter of politics, for fear of upsetting someone. I respectfully, but very strongly, disagree…

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John Adams and other founders of the United States feared that under a two-party system in politics the people would end up being polarized and divided. Well, like it or not, that’s what has transpired. And how could it be any other way, given human nature and the truth we Christians profess? Read the gospels, or Revelation, which is as much about division of opinion as any piece of literature could be! The division of mankind is as unavoidable as the dawn. Not only so, but it’s God’s prescription for humanity. Didn’t Jesus say, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”? (Matthew 10:34).

The U.S. Revolutionary War-itself a fundamental and open division of political opinion-is won, the nation is founded, and the internal political division has set in. What do we do now? I’m not going to say that all on the Right of politics are right and all on the Left are wrong-they aren’t. But it’s a recognized fact that most people with faith vote “right”. So should the half of us on the “right” hand the nation to the half of us on the “left”…on a plate… without comment… and go quietly to the abortionist’s knife and suction pumps? Should we smile sweetly while those who work hard to overthrow all human dignity of marriage and sexuality get their way and our children? Should we take a bow with our hands behind our back while the champions of all that’s ungodly stuff moral anarchy and propaganda down our throats, and trash the man we elected to the once-hallowed office of President? I say NO!

We have the ability to help influence how millions of people are treated; what kind of society we have; whether godly standards are implemented or if immorality will dismantle our families and our homes; whether money will be used wisely or wasted; whether or not the nation and the world is secure and whether or not we have real freedom of speech or a creeping media hegemony, and a belief system attempting to shut down our minds and our way of life. Life is all about politics!

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If we fail to engage, the enemies of all that’s right and all that is of God will not. Make no mistake, the ungodly and the anti-Christs of the world are increasingly proactive. Do we then shrink back and hand the nation…the world over to them, for fear of upsetting someone’s feelings? Do we keep pertinent information and the illumination of truth and logic to ourselves while others feed a pack of lies to all around us?

Whose world is it anyway? Didn’t God create, with the intention that mankind would dominate the earth? I’m not talking about a theocracy here, that’s the last thing we need: I’m saying that in a republic or as some call it a “democracy”, for which millions of young men and women have died and still fight to defend, we have as much right to take part in decision making and in influencing thought and opinion as does the abortionist, the socialist, the communist, the atheist, the gay and trans-gender, the Christ-hater and anyone else you can name. More than that, we have a duty to care about how all people are going to be treated in our nation, and about what kind of society our children will grow up in.

Some will say that the Bible doesn’t tell us to get involved in politics, but only be concerned with the spiritual. I don’t see how you can separate the two. Isn’t sexual immorality sin? Then isn’t it a spiritual matter as well as a physical one? So how can we, who have the ability and right to say something, stand back while some in our world promote gross immorality? Didn’t John the Baptist stand up to Herod for his immorality? Isn’t the murder of a man as spiritual as it is physical? So how can abortion, a physical act, not also be a spiritual matter? And how can we stand by silently while it goes on, supported wholeheartedly by one of the political parties?

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I know that Jesus said “My kingdom is not of this world”, and I know well that it isn’t-and thank the Lord for that. Jesus didn’t run for office or vote. But then, he wasn’t a politician, and there were no votes. There was no democracy, and there were no elections. But Jesus Christ let his opinion be known without reservation. He called the Pharisees-the politicians and bureaucrats of his day, “Whitewashed tombs!” (Matthew 23:27).

On another occasion, when Jesus had spoken very plainly to the Pharisees, the disciples tried to educate the Son of God in political correctness:

Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?” (Matthew 15:12).

Hey Jesus! Watch your mouth-you might upset someone! Keep your opinions to yourself! You’re embarrassing us! You’re going to lose us some friends, and boy do we need friends!

To those wanting to let politics be run by the ungodly, I say read about any great person in the Bible and you’ll find someone confronting the ungodly of their day:

Moses confronted Pharaoh;

Daniel confronted Nebuchadnezzar;

David confronted Goliath;

Samuel confronted Saul;

The Baptist confronted Herod;

Elijah confronted Jezebel and Ahab;

Paul confronted Peter.

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The book of Revelation is as much political as it is spiritual. Those who stand against God will have their own distinct political views-you can be sure of that, as will those they oppose. And don’t the references to “kingdoms” and their leaders refer to some sort of political structure gaining dominance?

There is no reasonable escape from politics. We either disengage and stick our heads in the sand, or we take what opportunity we have to influence as many as we can to turn against the ways of darkness, and the ways of bad logic. One side of the political world is working very hard-through education and all forms of media-to lead as many young people into a one-world, immoral, anti-Christ world as they can. Why should we not do our part to counter them? In fact, how can we not?

For God or for tyranny!

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