The brilliant Thomas Sowell interjects some good judgment into what he calls “‘Non-judgmental’ Nonsense.” Click here.
The New Testament writers don’t just say that Jesus performed miracles and rose from the dead—they actually back up that testimony with dramatic action. First, virtually overnight they abandon many of their long-held sacred beliefs and practices. Among the 1,500-year-old-plus institutions they give up are the following:
-The animal sacrifice system– they replace it forever by the one perfect sacrifice of Christ.
-The binding supremacy of the Law of Moses– they say It’s powerless because of the sinless life of Christ.
-Strict monotheism– they now worship Jesus, the God-man, despite the fact that 1) their most cherished belief has been, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4); and 2) man-worship has always been considered blasphemy and punishable by death.
-The Sabbath– they no longer observe it even though they’ve always believed that breaking the Sabbath was punishable by death (Ex. 31:14).
-Belief in a conquering Messiah– Jesus is the opposite of a conquering Messiah. He’s a sacrificial lamb (at least on his first visit!).
And it’s not just the New Testament writers who do this– thousands of Jerusalem Jews, including Pharisee priests (Acts 6:7), convert to Christianity and join the New Testament writers in abandoning these treasured beliefs and practices. Even references from ancient non-biblical sources attest to this Jewish movement we now call Christianity.
J. P. Moreland helps us understand the magnitude of these devout Jews giving up their established institutions virtually overnight:
[The Jewish people] believed that these institutions were entrusted to them by God. They believed that to abandon these institutions would be to risk their souls being damned to hell after death. Now a rabbi named Jesus appears from a lower-class region. He teaches for three years, gathers a following of lower- and middle-class people, gets in trouble with the authorities, and gets crucified along with thirty thousand other Jewish men who are executed during this time period. But five weeks after he’s crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion. And get this: they’re willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such importance both sociologically and theologically. . . . Something very big was going on.
How do you explain these monumental shifts if the New Testament writers were making up a story? How do you explain them if the Resurrection did not occur?
Second, not only do these new believers abandon their long-held beliefs and practices, they also adopt some new radical ones. These include:
-Sunday, a work day, as the new day of worship
-Baptism as a new sign that one was a partaker of the new covenant (as circumcision was a sign of the old covenant)
-Communion as an act of remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice for their sins
Communion is especially inexplicable unless the Resurrection is true. Why would Jews make up a practice where they symbolically eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus?
Only an “impact event” like a Resurrection could explain such a swift and monumental shift in Jewish thinking and practice. What’s an impact event? An impact event is something that is so dramatic in your life that it changes you forever. It’s something that you can’t forget. For those of you are old enough, where were you November 22, 1963? It’s my earliest memory. Although I was only two years old, I can still see my Mother weeping uncontrollably in front of the TV– “The president has been shot!” For those a bit younger, where were you when the Challenger exploded? Where were you when the second plane hit the tower?
Why can you remember where you were and what you were doing on September 11, 2001 but not September 11, 2007? Because an impact event changes everything. An impact event known as the resurrection of Jesus Christ changed everything for thousands of Jews two thousand years ago, and today it can still change you, me and the rest of the world. That’s why we still celebrate Easter.
(If you want more on this, get our book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. Some of this post is adapted from Chapter 11.)
I just had the privilege of attending an advance screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, starring Ben Stein. The movie, which opens April 18, is a must-see for any American interested in freedom (that should be all of us!). Expelled uses the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for the wall that the academic and media establishments have erected to keep any intelligent explanation for origins out of the fortress of scientific respectability. Freedom is the victim of this wall: academic freedom and freedom of the press in particular.
The movie is not so much an investigation into the evidence for intelligent design as it is an expose into the suppression of anyone who says there’s evidence for intelligent design. Investigator Stein exposes the numerous instances of institutionalized bias against professors, scientists and journalists who dare to question Darwinian orthodoxy. Some who have questioned Darwin and merely mentioned that intelligent design may be a legitimate area of study have been summarily fired from their jobs and blacklisted in their career, hence the title Expelled. Why are the Darwinists doing this? What are they hiding? What are they afraid of?
If you follow the ID-Evolution controversy, you’ll recognize the players on both sides. Stein meets with ID proponents such as Bill Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Stephen Myer and Guillermo Gonzalez, as well as Darwinists Daniel Dennett, Eugenie Scott and even Richard Dawkins. In Stein’s disarming manner, he exposes the bias and vacuousness in the positions of the Darwinists, even getting Dawkins to admit at the end that he has no idea how the first life began but that intelligent aliens might be responsible. With that, Stein points out that Dawkins is actually a proponent of Intelligent Design (for Dawkins, ID is OK if it points to aliens, but not OK if it points to God).
But Expelled is not some dry documentary with a bunch of talking-head interviews strung together. Interlaced with vintage film clips (some quite funny) and a variety of music genres (the opening is a violin version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall), Expelled moves along at an entertaining pace. Yet, it takes quite a serious tone when Stein (who is Jewish) makes the connection between the ideas of Darwin and the ideas of Hitler. Ideas do have consequences, and the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest led directly to Hitler’s quest to weed out undesirables in his plan to create the super race. Hitler even made the connection in his 1924 book Mein Kampf.
Several of the Darwinists interviewed expressed that they lost their faith in God because of Darwinism. Dawkins is famous for saying that Darwinism made him an “intellectually-fulfilled atheist.” However, as Stein points out, Darwin had nothing to say about the origin of life or the origin of the universe. Today, due to discoveries of the universe (it exploded into being out of nothing) and life (“simple” life is far more complex than anything Darwin suspected), those origin questions are even more difficult to answer for the Darwinists. There are a couple of spots where Stein lets the Darwinists hang themselves with their outlandish speculations of how life began. It’s so embarrassing that after watching Expelled, those thinking of leaving the faith because of Darwinism may want to reconsider.
My one criticism of the movie is that I wish it had just a bit more on the evidence for Intelligent Design. There is animation of the interior of a cell, but there is no explanation of what is actually going on. One key point that needs to be made is this: when we see something with the evidence of design (say Mount Rushmore), we don’t simply lack a natural explanation for it, we have positive, empirically-detectable evidence for an intelligent sculptor (see Chapters 5 and 6 of our book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist). However, due to time contraints, I understand why the movie could not go into much detail on the evidence. The main point of the movie is not scientific evidence but academic freedom.
There’s a lot more that could be said, but Expelled is better seen than said. This is exactly the kind of movie that Christians should support because it’s much more than entertainment. The movie communicates an important message without feeling preachy. You can take anyone to this– believer or not. If you’re like me, my wife and 15 year-old son, you will walk away feeling that there’s an injustice being done to us all. Freedom is being suppressed, and we need to speak up to restore the spirit of free inquiry that made this country great. Expelled is helping to break down “The Wall.” Will you help as well?
Planned Parenthood ripping off the state of California? That is the allegation by it’s former vice president of finance and administration. Read about all the details in the California Catholic Daily. To see how the drive-by media covers it, see the paltry article in the San Jose Mercury News.
Planned Parenthood was founded by racist Margaret Sanger who once said: “The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” How could an organization founded on such wholesome values stoop to theft?
I’m hearing very good things about Expelled, the movie starring Ben Stein that demonstrates the bias and hostility in academia against intelligent design. It opens nationwide on April 18, but special screenings are taking place now. I’m going to one next week and I’ll post a review on this blog. See the trailer here.
As I watched the debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, I couldn’t help but notice the inherent contradiction in their message (they both have the same message– they were both nodding in agreement with each other all night). They both say they want to bring the country together (whatever that means), but somehow they think they can do that by engaging in class warfare. According to Obama and Clinton, all Americans must come together for “change” and “hope,” unless you’re an American who makes more than $75,000 per year. Somehow, if you make money, Obama and Clinton think you are the problem.
How can the most economically-productive people in our society be the enemy of economic growth? Aren’t the people who make more than $75,000 creating more jobs and paying more taxes than those making $35,000? And for those candidates who conveniently quote scripture, aren’t we supposed to use and multiply the talents God has given us?
The class warfare rhetoric isn’t even based on fact. The truth is the top 1% of taxpayers in the U.S. pay 39% of all taxes (that’s 2 percentage points higher than when President Bush took office). The top 25% of taxpayers, pay 86% of all taxes. And the top 50% of all taxpayers, pay 97% of all taxes (HT: www.RushLimbaugh.com). Moreover, the reduction of tax rates usually results in an increase in tax revenue to the government (as the Bush tax cuts showed). That’s because tax cuts fuel economic growth, which results in more revenue to the government even though the tax rate is lower (e.g. 35% of $200,000 is more than 39% of $150,000).
But even if the rich were not “paying their fair share” (whatever that means), you can’t unify a country by political rhetoric that continually divides people by their income. Nor can you create economic opportunity by punishing those who create it.
I hope Obama and Clinton dispense with the class warfare rhetoric and give up on their proposed socialist policies. Everywhere socialism has been tried it has failed, including in health care (rich Brits and Canadians come here for their health care; gee, I wonder why?). Moreover, class warfare ignites the wrong kind of passion in the electorate– envy, revenge and covetousness. That’s wasted energy and it produces dependence on government rather than on the true engines of economic growth–opportunity, individual responsibility and hard work. After all, the government can’t give you anything unless it takes it from another citizen first. That’s not a good recipe for unity.
We are blessed to have a TV show on every Sunday night at 6 p.m. EST (rebroadcast at 11 p.m. Pacific Time) on DirecTV Channel 378. The show is called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, which will be the main topic through the month of April 2008. After that, I’ll be preaching through the book of Romans verse by verse (with an apologetics emphasis of course). Click “TV Program” in the menu to the left to see the intro. If you’d like to order DVD’s of the show, click here.
Why do 75% of young Christians leave the church in college? Because universities promote left-wing, anti-Christian barbarism like this (Warning: Graphic!).
See also this column by Mike Adams exposing the pro-homosexual agenda at NC State and its new tax-dollar funded Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) Center. ?
The CrossExamined “I Don’t have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist” tour visited NC State’s Reynold’s Coliseum on Thursday night February 7. Over 1500 students attended the seminar which was hosted by Campus Crusade of NC State (http://clubs.ncsu.edu/crusade/). My thanks to Mike Mehaffie and his CC team for their tremendous work in making the event a success. The attendance far exceeded their expectations, and both Christians and non-Christians attended.
Despite the fact that 75% of Christians leave the church during college, many of them appear to have a hunger for answers about God and Christ. So do their atheist friends. If you are a supporter of ours, thank you for helping us bring answers to college campuses.
We are currently looking for a date to conduct Part 2 of “I Don’t have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist” at NC State, so stay tuned. If you would like to bring us to your particular campus, please contact us by clicking here.
Last week we launched our invasion of college campuses for the Spring with two major events at Olivet Nazarene University (ONU is a one-hundred-year-old Christian university about 80 miles south of Chicago, but it may be best known as the site for the Chicago Bears Training camp). I spoke to 1800 students and faculty at chapel in the morning and nearly 400 at a smaller venue that night.
Despite being a Christian school, there is a faculty member at ONU who has convinced many of the students to believe in evolution. I didn’t know that going in, but I sure stirred up a lot of controversy by making a strong scientific case for creation and intelligent design. Several questions during the Q & A period had to do with evolution. Afterwards, many of the students, and even some faculty members, expressed great relief to finally see compelling evidence for creation and intelligent design. One professor, who was visibly moved by the evidence, said, “Wow, you really expanded my understanding of God and his creation with the arguments you presented.” It’s always gratifying to affect the professors positively because they have an ongoing influence with the students.
If evolution has crept into even our Christian universities, you can only imagine what’s being taught at typical secular schools. It’s no wonder why 75% of our kids are leaving the church!
Two secular schools are next. We head to NC State on February 7th for an I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist seminar in Reynolds Coliseum from 8 to 9:30 p.m. The next day I’ll spend four hours taking questions, first from the Campus Crusade team and then from the students. A return visit to Appalachian State will happen Monday, February 25.
One more exciting note: our weekly one-hour TV show called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist beings Sunday night, February 17 at 6 pm. on DirecTV Channel 378. Now, we don’t charge students for college events, and we pay to produce the TV show and the CrossExamined website. That’s why we’ll only be able to help our kids see the truth if you continue to support us both prayerfully and financially. Please pray as we again enter the lion’s den, and make a high-impact donation securely by selecting Donate on the left. Thank you for partnering with us!