ie:missional

Yesterday I took my 17 and 12 year olds with me to see Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the new movie concerning discrimination in the scientific community regarding some scientists who hold to Intelligent Design. Hosted by actor/comedian/talk-show host/activist Ben Stein, Expelled attempts to demonstrate that a “Berlin Wall” has been erected in science and that only those scientists and theories on the “Darwinian” side of the wall are able to get a hearing, tenure and publication in scientific journals.

First, the movie itself. It was better than I expected it to be, though not as good as it could have been. There was almost a consistent use of video clips, some of which were funny, but many of which were just distracting or overblown. The way I see it, those clips will merely feed those who see the movie as primarily entertainment, rather than a serious documentary.

Most of the interviews were enlightening and informative. Anyone who has read ID materials would recognize the names of Stephen Meyer, William Dembski and Jonathan Wells. To their credit, the producers also include agnostics like David Berlinski rather than those who can easily be traced back to religion or “young earth creationism” (which, it seems, no one in the movie holds). Berlinski, a virtual unknown to evangelicals, was thusly described by Slate magazine:

A secular Jew born in New York City, the 66-year-old began his career in academia. After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton, he spent time teaching at Stanford, working as a management consultant, and completing postdoctoral work in mathematics and biology. Nothing took—as he describes it, he “got fired from almost every job [he] ever had.” And then, at some point in the last few decades, he decided to remake himself as a maverick intellectual operating out of a flat in Paris.

For an entertaining and wide ranging interview with Berlinski see here. It didn’t take long to determine that he was probably the smartest person being interviewed in the film.

Interviews with Darwinists were also enlightening. One, with a prof named Provine, easily demonstrated that Darwinists are as closed minded as they accuse Christian fundamentalists of being. Atheist Richard Dawkins’ arrogance comes across as clearly here as in his books and debates. Interestingly, he does admit that an intelligence could be responsible for “seeding” life on earth, but said intelligence would likely have been beings from a super-advanced civilization from another galaxy who would “necessarily” have evolved according to Darwinian evolution. How does he know this evolution would be necessary? He doesn’t say.

(In an interesting turn, ID theorists tend to reject the idea of “alien seeding” even though the theory itself does not rule out that very possibility. Upon rejecting the possibility that super intelligent aliens could have planted the first cell which became the common ancestor, they have nowhere to turn for the intelligent source but God which then becomes self-fulfilling of the accusation that ID is mere religion in cheap scientific terms or creationism in sheep’s clothing.)

Second, as might be expected, the basis for the movie (loss of tenure and/or grants for ID promoting professors and scientists) has already been challenged. The website Expelled Exposed is claiming that there were plenty of extenuating circumstances in each situation that renders the claims of ID discrimination impotent. I am not persuaded by each of the arguments, but if you are going to debate the veracity of Expelled, you need to be aware of the objections as there are always two sides to each story.

The most important part of the movie, IMO, is not the ID issue, but the inextricable tie between Darwinian thought and both Nazism and eugenics. This was not news to me, but it will be for many who see the movie and while critics will cry “foul,” it will make no difference, it is absolutely true. But further, if Darwinism is true, then there was nothing wrong with either the holocaust or eugenics. Survival of the fittest, we know, is an ugly, bloody, violent concept and whether you are talking about lions, tigers, bears or humans, the ones who adapt and find a way to maintain their existence are the ones best suited for survival. Ergo, it matters not that huge gas chambers were built all over Europe and vast ovens for the disposal of corpses, the Nazis were simply better suited to survive than 13 millions Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and crippled. The same with eugenics: why cry over the fact that scores of imbeciles were sterilized? The strong and smart were simply asserting their superior fitness to survive. As ugly as it is, that is the logic of naturalistic Darwinism. To appeal to morality or conscience is to recognize an objective law or truth outside ourselves.

The reality is that we don’t need Darwin as an excuse to kill and maim each other; as sinful creatures we did that quite efficiently before he ever came around.

Expelled is rated PG for a curse word, thematic material and holocaust film footage.

Has Paula Abdul ever said anything original IN HER LIFE!??!?!?!

That’s it.

You cannot imagine how bad these are:

Worst Album Covers

About a month ago, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper advertised for the opportunity to participate in a book discussion for Douglas A. Blackmon’s provocative work of history entitled, Slavery by Another Name. Those who desired to attend the discussion were to send a 100 word email describing themselves and why they would like to be a part. I sent mine and was pleasantly surprised two weeks later, with no acknowledgment or other response, to find a complimentary copy of the book in my mailbox with an explanatory letter. I began reading the book immediately (I had about 10 days to read the 400+ pages not including the notes section) and attended the discussion Wednesday night hosted by the AJC’s Richard Halicks, moderated by editor Jay Bookman and attended by the book’s author and around 13 other readers.

Sub-titled, “The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” the volume deals with a little remembered period in the southern US that followed emancipation and continued into the first decades of the Jim Crow era during which “separate but equal” led inevitably to “colored” water fountains, back of the bus riding, serving African Americans out of the back of restaurants, turning a blind eye to crimes against African Americans, etc. Having lived in the south my entire life this book was intriguing on its face, but I had no idea just how ignorant I was about the history of the places of my raising. The essence of the book is that slavery in the US did not end in the 1860’s as we have believed, but in the mid 1940’s. The argument is bulletproof. Slavery did not disappear; it simply changed names.

Immediately following Lincoln’s Proclamation that granted freedom to all slaves in the US there was confusion in the South. Was it really freedom? Where would these millions of freed slaves live and work? Could they really vote? What would happen to the land belonging to whites? Would there be an occupying army from the North for months or years? How would the economy, which had become substantial in steel and cotton production, be rebuilt without slaves? It would not take long for these questions to be answered in the most horrifying way-a way that would make some antebellum plantations and the sipping of mint juleps while black hands deftly cleared cotton bolls under the threat of the lash pale by comparison. Blackmon writes, “By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites.”

The core essential to the re-enslavement was the “convict lease” program entered into by many corporations and plantation owners. In order to provide cheap labor for the burgeoning mining industry, lumber yards, mills, and turpentine production, businesses as large as U. S. Steel (via its subsidiary Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.) would “lease” convicts for labor–convicts that could not pay off the fines and debts charged to them in court. The problem was that the legal system that grew from this arrangement had a single purpose: the arrest and conviction of African American men who had no means of paying the fines and fees assigned to them so that they could be “leased” to a corporate entity for a period of time (say, 100 days) after which time they would supposedly be freed.

Across the “Black Belt” of the old South, small town governments gave wide latitude to local sheriffs, constables and justices of the peace to arrest, on the flimsiest of evidence, convict, sentence and lease prisoners. The laws that were passed and enforced were, primarily, those of which African-Americans would be found “guilty”: vagrancy (vaguely defined as not being able to prove at a given moment that one has a job), making a pass at a white woman, leaving employment without permission from the employer (creating permanent servitude). At sentencing a “friend” or corporation would pay the fine and associated fees thereby taking possession of the prisoner until the debt was paid or lease the prisoner from the controlling government. The “convict” would then be taken to a place such as the Pratt Mines in Birmingham, the Chattahoochee Brick Company in Atlanta or one of any number of plantations or forests across the south. Once in the system, any person could be sub-leased any number of times making it almost impossible for concerned family members to ever find them. Powerful Atlanta families as well known and honored in memory as the Woodruffs and the Hurts were involved in this chicanery to various degrees.

Additionally, once leased, any infraction could add days, weeks, months or years to a sentence that might have been as short as 30 days. Broken tools, stolen food, lack of productivity and others infractions real and imagined could and did accumulate at the time of impending freedom for many, if they were blessed enough to live that long. Because of the endless supply of African Americans to be arrested, there was little to no incentive for the corporations or landowners to take care of those they had leased. In the slavery era, each slave represented a capital investment from which the slave owner expected a return. To kill a slave was akin to throwing money in the wind. The convict lease program removed all need for such “compassion.” At the Slope No. 12 mine outside Birmingham, AL, men were daily loosed from their barrack shackles at 3:00 AM, taken into a labyrinth of tunnels underground, worked all day in excrement fouled waters, brought back above ground after nightfall only seeing the sun on Sunday. That, of course, was the Lord’s Day and the white folks did not work.

Murder, contagion, rape and intentional sickness from drinking the defiled tunnel water were common. Those who died were dumped unceremoniously into unmarked graves at the edges of the massive compound. The call would then go out for more workers. Which meant more trumped up charges. More arrests. More money changing hands. In a single year, 25% of the income for the State of Alabama came from the convict lease program.

With the exception of an extended investigation under President Teddy Roosevelt and a tenacious, heroic effort by an Assistant U. S. Attorney named Warren Reese, virtually nothing was done to stop, as the author phrased it during our discussion, this “malevolent exclusion of justice.” In the aftermath of the Civil War and the still tenuous relationship between North and South, the investigations ended in minor penalties on some very guilty men with most sentences being suspended. Had he been supported with a little backbone from those in Washington, DC, Reese may well have gone down in history as the William Wilberforce of his generation. But it was not to be.

Anyone raised in the south should read this book. Anyone interested in racial understanding or reconciliation issues should read this book. IMO, it will set a standard for understanding this period of American history. It is a deep and profound work.

On Wednesday evening last the selected readers gather at the AJC building on Marietta Street in Atlanta. What was to be a two hour discussion lasted a little over three and I did not get the sense that anyone was really ready to leave. If my memory holds, the group consisted of nine African Americans and five of anglo heritage, among us a judge, state representative, community activist, grad student and college dean all of whom spoke openly and passionately about how the book made us feel and the issues that it raised. While the subject matter was limited to the substance of the book itself, I could not shake the feeling that another two hours and we would have begun making progress on how these issues affect each of us personally. It would have been time well spent.

Today’s AJC featured a summary of the meeting which can be found here.

My friend Richard Mark Lee at First Baptist Sugar Hill, GA, (“The Family Church”) lit it up yesterday with a message seeking forgiveness from those in society for the church’s judgmental attitude. It was called, “We’re Sorry, Really.”

You can read about it here, from Joe Westbury of the Christian Index, or listen here.

Great job, Richard!

A California District Court handed down a ruling this week declaring home schooling in the state to be unconstitutional. From the article:

“California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. “Parents have a legal duty to see to their children’s schooling under the provisions of these laws.”[...]

The ruling was applauded by a director for the state’s largest teachers union.

“We’re happy,” said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. “We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting.”

Of course, Lloyd.

Our three children have never been in a public school for classroom instruction. When our oldest was about nine, she was invited to be the guest of a neighbor child by doing the reading time for his class. The teacher was shocked at how well she did. Of course, she’d been reading the newspaper since she was 5.

Our middle child, Timothy, recently opted to try for the GED. On his evaluation test he scored as a high school graduate in each section. When we sat down with the instructor for the explanation, he began with the reading scores first saying, “I always start with the reading scores first. Unfortunately, we still have people go through high school who are functionally illiterate.” Astoundingly, functional illiteracy does not seem to be a problem with home schooled students.

Our youngest probably reads 300 books a year (no exaggeration), most of which have to do with some aspect of world and US history. She usually greets each new section of history with, “Oh yeah, I read about that in ______________.”

Like most kids, each of them have areas in which they have excelled and each of them have had areas where they have struggled. They weren’t (and aren’t) perfect as students, nor are we as teachers.

Though many homeschoolers can be virulent and even insolent about their position, most that I have encountered came to the decision after lots of thought and prayer. Most do not claim Deuteronomy 6 as their basis, but simply what is best for the family in a given situation or distinct period of time. Our original decision was made because we had two options for our kindergartener: drive 40 miles cumulative daily taking her ourselves or put her on a K-5 through 12th grade bus at 7:15 am and let her be dropped off at 5:00 pm. Neither situation was right for us, so we opted to homeschool.

Most homeschoolers do not get a tax break for purchasing their own textbooks, workbooks, study guides, tests, beakers, bunson burners, modeling clay and the rest. At the same time, most pay property taxes to furnish everyone else’s child with all the same equipment. We pay for the public system and yet receive no compensation for our homeschool expenses. It is an inequity that most willingly accept for the option of making sure their kids are not overwhelmed by a 180-day a year education that ignores or mocks the existence of the biblical God.

Another statement from the judge is equally as troublesome. Citing a 1961 case, Judge Proskey wrote:

“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”

Uhm…educating children is not on the menu? The educational system in the United States of America, circa 2008, has absolutely nothing to do with “protecting the public welfare.” It has to do with getting the almighty tax dollars allocated to the various states and school districts via the No Child Left Behind legislation. The 1961 ruling could surely have been updated to reflect the new reality that “The primary purpose of the educational system is to brainwash school children in bad philosophy, materialism and subservience to the state and nation as a means of prolonging the public fealty.”

The U. S. government educational experiment has been (with some exceptions) a dismal failure and (as my Momma used to say), “Anyone with one eye and half-sense can see that.” I hope that California parents are successful in getting this ruling overturned either through lawsuit or legislation. I also hope that the U.S. supremes, if given the opportunity, leave it as an issue for the states to decide rather than pulling another Roe v Wade.

Ah, California. The state likely to let a parent kill a child, but will not let them educate it once it is born.

My Quotable Boss

Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher has written a marvelous piece on the commercialization of Christmas. From the article:

To be sure, as exploitative as the right-wing outrage sometimes is, it really is appalling to have to endure the pettiness of the American Civil Liberties Union and sundry village atheists, who seem deathly afraid that somebody somewhere might have some theistically inclined fun this time of year. That said, I can’t recall an actual ACLU lawsuit or politically correct blue-nosery interfering with my celebration of the holiday. Can you?

and…

Here’s the thing: Aside from acquiring a Christmas tree, little of this involves commerce. It’s crazy talk, I know, but trust me, it really is possible to enjoy the season without giving oneself over to the frenzy and anxiety of the shopping ritual. In fact, actively resisting the commercialization of Christmas has become the only sane response in a culture where compulsive shopping has taken on the trappings of mass psychosis.

You can read the entire article here.

Charlie Brown would be proud of you, Rod.

Each year the resort known as Lake Lanier Islands, which is a mere 1 mile from our campus, hosts a very popular Christmas attraction called, “The Magical Nights of Lights.” Thousands upon thousands of people pack into cars, vans and buses and pay a hefty amount to drive through a million light display commemorating partridges in pear trees, elves, and the birth of Christ among other things. One feature of recent years has been a living Nativity Scene sponsored by a local church about 10 miles from us. I think that they do it nightly for about 3 weeks leading up to Christmas.

Last year for our New Bethany Christmas presentation, we did a musical drama called, A Christmas Tale, which won rave reviews from our church. The house was pretty full for the three nights that we held it. This year, as a result of the vision of our Worship Pastor, Dan Brothers, we will be doing 24 performances of A Christmas Tale at the Magical Nights of Lights–four performances a night for two consecutive Fri-Sun weekends. A total of three casts, a choir and live band (not to mention sound and lighting personnel and more than 30 volunteers for greeting and inviting). Our performance area will be across from the area known as, Santa’s Workshop, the home of shops, eats and the Holiday Carnival which is a small amusement ride area. Performances have been promoted both in the local news paper and yesterday on the morning show of on of the major Atlanta news channels.

This type of ministry opportunity is exactly what we are regularly hoping to do–it’s outside the walls, it’s different from what people expect and it speaks the cultural language.  We really don’t have any idea what to expect as far as crowds go; we could play for as few as 25 or to a full house (about 300 portable chairs) at each performance.  Our hope is that by being where people are that the glory of God will be displayed and the gospel declared in a way that breaks down barriers, overcomes disillusionment and plants seeds in the lives of many.  Who knows, we might even get to experience a harvest!

[This is the first in a series of reviews of books in the recent New Atheism controversy as well as responses to these books. I hope, at a rate of one every 1-2 weeks, to review The End of Faith, by the philosopher/skeptic Sam Harris, Breaking the Spell, by author and professor Daniel C. Dennett, and The GOD Delusion, by the British Darwinist, Richard Dawkins. On the opposing side of the debate, I'll look at What's So Great About Christianity, by author and former Reagan staffer, Dinesh D'Souza, The Spiritual Brain, by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, and the oldest of this list, A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism, by philosopher and lecturer Ravi Zacharias.]

Christopher Hitchens is, quoting the inside cover of god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything: “a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School…He was named, to his own amusement, number five on a list of ‘Top 100 Public Intellectuals’ by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect.” The New Yorker calls him, “An intellectual willing to show his teeth in the cause for righteousness” (the last being an odd choice of terms to say the least), while the Village Voice lauds Hitchens as “American’s foremost rhetorical pugilist.”

The best place to summarize this book is by beginning with a quote from its final two pages:

Religion has run out of justification. Thanks to the teleschope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important….Confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.” If is as if someone, offered a delicious and fragrant out-of-season fruit, matured in a painstakingly and lovingly designed hothouse, should throw away the flesh and the pulp and gnaw moodily on the pit.

Then, pining for a renewed Enlightenment, he closes:

Only the most naive utopian can believe that this new humane civilization will develop, like some dream of “progress,” in a straight line. We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection. “Know yourself,” said the Greeks, gently suggesting the consolations of philosophy. To clear the mind for this project, it has become necessary to know the enemy, and to prepare to fight it. [Emphasis mine.]

god is not Great is a call to philosophical war by a man who is not himself unprepared to wage it in the public arena. Hitchens does not write as a intellectually doughy, scholastically lacking philosophical pit bulldog. On the contrary, he has seen the world and is convinced that religion is the primary cause of the woes observed there. Attacking the three dominant monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity and Islam (but with a little Hinduism thrown in for good measure) he attributes nearly every single problem in the known universe to mankind’s stubborn belief in the supernatural and argumentation over the right way to serve God, who Hitchens regards as a “totalitarian.”

Drawing from his personal experiences, this outspoken representative of positive atheism (or, even further, “anti-theism”) relates stories from “Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem and Baghdad.” Each gives a different perspective of his thesis that religion is the problem and rationalism is the solution. He states over and over again that religion (and thus God) is “man-made,” a leftover relic from the infancy of our “species” that awaits eradication as soon as we evolve past our, using Freud’s concepts, fear of death and proneness to wishful thinking. In fact, Hitchens lists, as his “irreducible objections to religious faith:”

That it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.”

Thus chapters such as, “A Note on Health, to Which Religion Can Be Hazardous,” “The Metaphysical Claims of Religion Are False,” “Revelation: The Nightmare of the ‘Old’ Testament,” and “The ‘New Testament Exceeds the Evil of the ‘Old’ One.” It bears remembering that Christopher Hitchens writes, not as a sniper who never knows or interacts with his victims, but as a ground soldier who has read the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon and each of the other “holy books.” And yet…

In reading Hitchens, and in listening to his public debates there simply seems to be a disconnect between his reading of the Bible and his grasp on what it actually says. It is as if he’s merely looking for any connection no matter how tenuous between it and other practices whether those be Judaistic, Islamic or Aztec, so that he might trash them all as fruit from the same tree with the titular poison. Any Old Testament tie to Christ seems lost on him or characterized as a scheme, a la the theory of the passover plot. His critique of “contradictions” in the gospels is below elementary and, while he is more than willing to allow for the ultimate progress of science and reason, he will not even concede the possibility that future excavations or historical research will confirm currently problematic interpretive challenges (as in Luke’s census dating). Another oft lodged complaint is that the entire biblical doctrine of hell came from “gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” to use his non-biblical phrasing, while he is seemingly ignorant of the perfectly clear statement of Isaiah 66:24 which Jesus references.

[To hear Hitchens in action is to hear the fire and brimstone that he brings to this "discussion." One has only to listen to the multi-part debate with Dinesh D'Souza (#038;feature=related" target="_blank">beginning here. It will reaffirm Hitchens practice of referencing scripture when it helps prove his point, yet ignoring it when challenges his stance.]

In the end, it is Hitchens himself who gives all the clue that anyone needs to determine his motivation: self-determination (including repeated assertions of sexual freedom) without the interference of any outside being, and certainly not a “totalitarian god” who he had no say in electing. Hitchens, as all anti-theists, wants nothing to do with a fixed, objective morality that is the product of a Creator. Romans 1 continues to raise itself in my head as if Darwinism and materialism were anticipated long ago, “They turned the glory of God into four footed beasts and creeping things,” then reaching that haunting conclusion, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

It is with no small amount of frustration that I must, however, admit agreement with much of Hitchens rant. Religion does poison everything, most of all blocking the possibility of a genuine reconciliation to and relationship with God since man, not God, is the actual center of religion, while God, not man, is the center of redemption. His primary disagreements with Christianity stem from the preponderance of misbegotten and unbiblical actions of the Roman Catholic institution–not so much its adherents as its leaders. Leading the way are its 1940’s friendliness with fascism in both Italy and Germany, the Inquisition and its active cover-up in the “child rape” scandal of the last 20 or so years. (Hitchens coarsely and straightforwardly calls this “no child’s behind left.”)

It is difficult, as it always has been, to distinguish for some the difference between the kingdom of God, with those attempting to live under its rule and reign as actually proposed by Jesus, and the RCC which is commonly and errantly referred to as “the Church,” inclusive of all its theological and historical absurdities. Thus, readers of the book will note that, despite his disagreement with the Bible itself, Hitchens’ (other than an occasional slap at ready targets Robertson and Falwell) primary identification of Christianity is with the RCC. This is both unfortunate and inaccurate. Frankly, he should know better.