Category: In The News!
Articles analyzing current events.
Seahawks Gospel Takes Hold
First, praise the Lord. Then, “Go Seahawks!”
After morning services Sunday, many South Sound churches will throw huge Super Bowl parties.
They’ll show the game on mammoth projection televisions normally used for worship lyrics. They’ll eat pizza and drink soda pop. And they’ll shout for the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL.
Some congregations are even shifting or canceling Sunday night services to accommodate the home team’s first appearance in the Super Bowl.
Sacrilege on the Sabbath? Not so, pastors say. The Super Bowl is a chance for churches to reach out to nonmembers and members consumed by the Seahawks, they say.
Bush Presses Alito Nomination
President Bush gave Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito a broadcast boost Saturday, calling for a simple up-or-down Senate confirmation vote despite a blocking effort by some Democrats.
A final vote on whether to make the conservative federal appellate judge the nation’s 110th Supreme Court justice is scheduled for Tuesday unless opponents win an uphill battle to impose a filibuster.
“The Senate has a constitutional responsibility to hold an up-or-down vote on Judge Alito’s nomination,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. “Throughout its 216-year history, the Senate has held an up-or-down vote on every Supreme Court nominee with majority Senate support.”
The president spoke as liberals led by Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, D-Mass., worked to deprive supporters of the 60 votes needed to limit debate. They faced resistance from some fellow Democrats as well as solid Republican opposition to the stalling tactic.
Alito, a former federal prosecutor and Reagan administration lawyer, would replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She is the court’s first female justice and the swing vote on several 5-4 rulings that maintained abortion rights, preserved affirmative action and limited the application of the death penalty.
Washington AP
USAToday.com
Analysis:
Those who have been following the confirmation hearings for the President’s nomination to the Supreme Court are aware that opponents to Judge Alito’s confirmation are most concerned with his views on abortion.
Pro-abortion advocates are afraid that the Supreme Court’s Roe V Wade decision of 1973, granting women the right to abortion, may be revisited by a more conservative court in the future. They wanted Alito on record saying that the decision is “settled law”, to pressure him to uphold the spirit of the decision as other cases are presented to the court. To his credit, Alito refused to do so, and it looks like his confirmation is imminent.
The departure of the senate from the traditional decorum and bipartisanship of previous confirmations shows just how important this is to pro-abortion advocates. Abortion rights remains a litmus test for many in America, even today.
The Bible clearly reveals that abortion is sinful, as it affirms that a fetus is human life. Here the words of the Psalmist, “For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well” (Psalm 139:13-14).
‘Brokeback Mountain’ Receives
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – “Brokeback Mountain” is moseying along the Academy Awards trail, its four Golden Globe wins – best drama among them – positioning the cowboy love story for Oscar glory.
Homosexual and transsexual themes dominated Monday’s Golden Globes with the key wins by “Brokeback Mountain,” plus acting honors for the film biography “Capote” and the gender-bending “Transamerica.”…
…The four Globes for “Brokeback Mountain,” the story of old ranch-hand buddies who conceal an ongoing homosexual affair from their families, included the directing award for Ang Lee.
The fact that “Brokeback Mountain” has found eager audiences across the country, including the conservative heartland, shows that Americans are willing to embrace stories of love in all forms, Lee said.
‘God’ Isn’t Only Source of Morality
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S quotation that “Islam is the only source of the rulings and laws” (editorial, Jan. 4) is frightening in its total rejection of the principle of separation of church and state. But we should not forget that his ideology is founded on the belief, which is central to most all deistic religions, that “God” is the only true source of morality and moral behavior.
That erroneous idea is a potentially dangerous source of rigidity and absolutism in moral thinking and behavior, and readily leads to efforts to impose one’s own group’s “true” morality on others, or to regard the “infidel other” as not worthy of the beneficence of that morality.
As is all too obvious these days, wars are fought under the self-righteous and self-justifying conviction that “God is on our side.”
The rational, secular view of morality is that it is generated only in human minds and is shaped over time in the real world by negotiating competing needs and shared benefits. There is no “Big Daddy” or “Big Mommy” up there, or out there, to tell us how to behave, or to punish us with natural disasters if we go astray. There is, however, good reason to believe that, along with murderous aggressivity, some fundamental altruistic urges have been built into the human genome by Darwinian evolution.
Given a framework of secular civil laws and enforcement, human compassion, conscience, and “the Golden Rule” of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” will take us a good long way.
RICHARD H. WOLFF
The Boston Globe
Analysis:
The Preceding opinion piece which appeared in the Boston Globe on January 10, proclaims the typical secularist attitude toward morality.
Comet Mission Returns Home
Faster than a speeding bullet — actually, more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet, Stardust will conclude its 7-year, 4.63 billion kilometer (2.88 billion mile) round-trip journey to comet Wild 2 Sunday, January 15, Pacific Standard Time (PST), making an historic re-entry in the wee morning hours to drop its precious comet cargo in the Utah desert well before dawn…
…”We are star stuff.”
Carl Sagan liked to remind people of that. Now, just a little more than a decade after the passing of The Planetary Society co-founder, Stardust is coming home with a bona fide sample of star stuff and the concept is being revisited in a very real way.
‘Book of Daniel’ Snubbed by Affiliates
NEW YORK Jan 6, 2006 – Two more NBC affiliates chose not to air the network’s new drama “The Book of Daniel,” which features an Episcopal priest with a gay son, the network said Friday.
Four affiliates nationally have rejected the series (set for a two-hour premiere 9 p.m. EST Friday). Conservative Christian groups have campaigned against the series.
Embryonic Research Survey
Two-thirds of Americans, including half of conservative Christians, approve of stem cell research that destroys human embryos, according to a recent survey. The poll, sponsored by the Genetics and Public Policy Center, also revealed an American public that is concerned about protecting human embryos but even more supportive of research that results in their destruction.
Only those classified as “fundamentalist/evangelical” failed to achieve at least 55% approval for embryonic research-and 50% of fundamentalists/evangelicals supported ESCR, with 9% strongly approving and 41% approving.
The survey results, released Oct. 13, came as debate continues over the federal government’s role in stem cell research. There are efforts in Congress to liberalize funds for destructive embryonic stem cell research. The House of Representatives approved such a measure earlier this year. The Senate appears to have a majority in favor of that bill but has yet to vote on it…
…So far, embryonic stem cells have produced no treatments for human beings, while non-embryonic stem cells have provided therapies for at least 65 ailments, according to Do No Harm, a coalition promoting ethics in research. These include spinal cord injuries, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis and sickle cell anemia. Taking stem cells from non-embryonic sources – such as bone marrow and umbilical cord blood – does not harm the donor.
Baptist Press, via Pulpit Helps
Analysis:
First, the fact that a majority of Americans favor embryonic stem cell research does not make it right. Men have through the ages differed in their ethics with the Almighty.
Second, the fact that so many Americans are in favor of embryonic stem cell research indicates just how ungodly is the nation in which we live. The interesting note that while Americans agree with the need of protecting embryos, they more strongly agree with ESCR, indicates a disturbing ability to rationalize away killing. In effect, they are saying that human life (in the form of an embryo) is worth sacrificing if the benefits to humanity is sufficient. Not to be too alarmist in our rhetoric, but that is exactly the rationale used by the Nazi’s for their human experimentation during World War II. Further, if we are willing to sacrifice some humans (embryos) for the “greater good”, what will keep us from later including the handicapped, the very young, the sick or the elderly?
Third, the fact that even 50% of “fundamentalist/evangelicals” are in favor of ESCR is an indication of just how pervasive societal influences can be. And, Christians are not immune to such ungodliness either. Remember the troubles in the Corinthian church due to the ungodliness in the community surrounding them? Remember God’s exhortation to, “Come out from among them and be separate… Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.” (2 Corinthians 6:17).
The Social Gospel in Action
This past week we received the January 2006 issue of “The Christian Chronicle” in the mail.
The paper chronicles events, news and “ministries” of many of the institutional churches both in America and the rest of the world. In addition to various news items there are featured articles regarding church “ministries” and trends. There were three feature articles that caught my eye:
Your Morals – Or Mine?
[The following opinion piece, (edited for space) which appeared in the Arizona Daily Wildcat, written by columnist Matt Stone, establishes a typical flawed view of morality.]
Moralism represents the self-understanding of what constitutes decent and indecent behavior – each person one’s own judge and seeking respect in the appraisal of others.
Of course, the perception of “decent” or “indecent” behavior is fluid, allowing open-endedness for society to shape its own moral code: Whereas we abhor polygamy today, it was yawningly normal for Moses to have multiple wives. Dynamism, self-respect and the dignity of the individual are the cardinal tenets of moralism.
Proposed Porn Domain Nixed
Plans for the proposed Internet domain .xxx, purely for pornography, have been dropped like a hot cake, just days before they were to receive approval.
Vint Cerf, chairman, ICANN, stunned an open meeting of the governmental advisory committee (GAC) in Vancouver, by announcing that the issue had been pulled-off the agenda of the upcoming ICANN Board meeting due to time-constraints. Cerf did not give any indication, as to when the issue was likely to be re-opened…
…The concept behind the .xxx domain, is to provide an area of the internet specifically and exclusively for pornography, that will be self-regulated.
Anti-Christmas War Wages On
John Gibson, gutsy anchor of Fox News’ “The Big Story,” is to be commended for titling his latest book The War on Christmas, for as Gibson shows, the attempt by certain groups to prohibit Christmas displays is not simply an academic difference on how to interpret the Establishment Clause but a desire, by anti-Christians, to stamp out of society any reference to Christmas. To wit, proscribing the innocuous greeting “Merry Christmas!” or placing the word Christmas over December 25 in the school calendar.
Gibson’s book chronicles schools from Eugene, Ore., to Maplewood, N.J., that have not simply forbidden singing carols but even the reading of Dickens’ literary classic A Christmas Carol. Gibson illustrates that often these decisions are made not by secularists but by school officials warned by the ACLU that it will bring the school and its officials to court unless all seasonal Christmas symbols are expunged from the premises.
Texas Passes Proposition 2
Texans voted Tuesday to make same-sex marriages and civil unions unconstitutional.
The highly contested and controversial constitutional amendment defining a marriage in Texas as a union solely between one man and one woman passed by 76 percent, as of press time Tuesday.
Previously, gay marriages were outlawed in Texas, but the law granted judges discretion to allow civil unions.
“The passage of this amendment reaffirms the will of the mainstream Texans and protects the sanctity of marriage from activist judges who might seek to redefine it,” said state Sen. Todd Staples in a statement.
Staples, R-Palestine, sponsored the bill authored by state Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa.
Chisum said he was thrilled but not surprised that the proposition passed.
“We’ve always been a conservative state that values family, and this just proves it in spades,” Chisum said. “You put the proper issue out there, and people will show up [to vote].”
Every state except for Massachusetts outlaws gay marriage. Texas became the 18th state to write a same-sex marriage ban into its constitution Tuesday.
By Marjon Rostami
The Daily Texan (Online)
Analysis:
It is gratifying that most Texans, at least, believe that marriage, by definition, is a “union solely between one man and one woman.” The amendment to the state constitution gives some protection, for now, to the institution of marriage in our state.
Genetic Map
A COMPREHENSIVE chart of the genetic differences between human beings has been drawn up for the first time, promising breakthroughs in the hunt for the genes that influence common diseases such as cancer, asthma and diabetes.
The International Haplotype Map, or HapMap, provides an index to the human genetic code, allowing scientists to identify inherited variations that affect human health with much greater speed and simplicity…
…While the Human Genome Project has sequenced the 99.9 per cent of DNA that is shared by every person, the HapMap has started to plot the other 0.1 per cent – the individual idiosyncracies that make people different and often underlie ill health.
“The human genome sequence provided us with the list of many of the parts to make a human,” Peter Donnelly, Professor of Statistical Science at Oxford University and one of the project’s leaders, said.
“The HapMap provides us with indicators – like Post-It notes – which we can focus on in looking for genes involved in common disease. This report describes a remarkable step in our journey to understand human biology and disease.”
Panos Deloukas of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre near Cambridge, which conducted much of the work, said: “Humans are genetically 99.9 per cent identical: it is the tiny percentage that is different that holds the key to why some of us are more susceptible to common diseases such as diabetes and hypertension or respond differently to treatment with certain drugs.”
The Times OnlineBritain, October 27, 2005 ~ Mark Henderson
Analysis:
Two things stand out whenever I read articles such as this, detailing the amazing progress being made in genetics research.
First, such discoveries underscore the obvious divine fingerprint that is on human life. All life, in fact. The DNA sequence is as complex as any computer code, and governs every aspect of human appearance, health, and physical characteristics. The DNA “code” demands the recognition of a “code writer.” It is ever more obvious that life is not a chance event. “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).
Second, the ethical quandaries men face continue to multiply. Just because men have developed the ability to accomplish a scientific task (stem cell research and cloning come to mind) does not mean that they have the right before God to exercise that ability. While I am certainly for progress, a willingness to brush aside questions regarding the ethicality or morality of such experiments is troublesome. Christians need to be aware of such dangers, and speak out against unethical practices that are defended by an appeal to “progress” and “the common good.” The end does not justify an unethical means.
“Intelligent Design”
Last autumn, Dover’s (Pennsylvania, SC) school board instructed its ninth-grade biology teachers to tell students the theory of evolution is an incomplete one, and that intelligent design, which says biology’s minutia presents evidence of an intelligent creator, is an alternative argument to evolution”…
…”Supporters of intelligent design say the argument has nothing to do with the Bible, God or the Judeo-Christian account of life’s origins found in Genesis. But a group of doubting parents sued the district in December, saying intelligent design amounts to a religious belief, and has no place in a biology course.
The three-paragraph statement read to students is unconstitutional, they say, because it implicitly endorses a superhuman creator, and that breeches the church-state separation wall. Thompson argues it’s ironic that a group advocating civil liberties would endorse the censorship of a particular idea.”…
…”The Harrisburg trial is not the first to consider the ideas of evolution and religion. There’s the 80-year-old Scopes “Monkey Trial,” during which defendant John Scopes was found guilty of a state law that banned the teaching of evolution. In 1968’s Epperson v. Arkansas, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Arkansas statute which prohibited the teaching of evolution. In the 1980s came McLean vs. Arkansas and Edwards vs. Aguillard, which overturned acts demanding schools give equal time to the evolution and “creation science.” And in Georgia, a suburban Atlanta district is still fighting a judge’s order to remove stickers in science textbooks which say evolution is “a theory, not a fact.”
Bill Toland
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Analysis:
Evolutionist advocates have long held it to be inappropriate to entertain in the classroom the viability of the creation account. “That is religion”, they say, “and a violation of the principle of the separation of church and state.”
Now that an argument regarding the intelligent design of the universe is being made based upon scientific principles rather than an appeal to scripture, the complaints remain.
However, the assertion that the concept of a divine being is unscientific, is just that, an assertion. Just because it contains an element of “religion” does not make it invalid. In effect, scientists are not willing to entertain a plausible explanation of the origins of the universe and life just because it does not fit into their arbitrary pigeonholes.
First Christian Church Celebration
The September 8, 2005 edition of the River Oaks News had a front page article detailing the upcoming September 18th celebration of the First Christian Church’s 150th year of existence.
In 1855, the first church in the city of Fort Worth was chartered as the “First Christian Church.” The small building built at that time has been replaced by the large structure presently occupying that same location.
