Laigle’s Forum

By Don Hank

When I was a kid, there was this friend of my father’s who liked to show off what a good Bible-believing fundamentalist he was. I always suspected he was terrified of burning in hell for making just a slip of the tongue and therefore went overboard to show his rigorous adherence to the scriptures in all his conversation. My father and he were discussing the biblical concept of the “four corners of the earth” one day and Brother John said “Brother Ralph, I do believe the earth is flat.” Daddy looked at him in surprise and said “how do you explain that airplanes fly around it then and that there aren’t any corners?” John got this beatific look in his eye and sighed “I just believe that if the Bible says it’s so, then it’s so.”

Many years later, I drifted away from Christ and fell under the thrall of atheistic ideas. It wasn’t atheists who pushed me in that direction. I didn’t know any atheists them. It was people like John, who insist that you either choose God or science, and there’s no middle ground. Yes, a near-illiterate hill-billy helped to separate me from my faith.

Finally, after God came for me and took me back, I had a revelation: Many atheists (perhaps the majority) and many religious fanatics both share a very important viewpoint, namely, the conviction that science is incompatible with religion and that the intellect is therefore the enemy of God.

Both of these groups have misled numerous people into believing that they have to make a choice between God and religion. The somewhat more intellectual ones without much depth or analytical ability choose science.

But the truly wise ones eventually come to understand that God created the laws of science and created life, and that all of nature, in its most spontaneous behavior, is obeying His will.

Once in a great while, a person who disagrees with a conservative viewpoint can be brought around by just being very patient and sticking to small talk, in person or in emails, but then every now and then, sending an absolutely factual report, preferably from the MSM that supports what your view, with little or no comment. In addition, a question every now and then is helpful — the kind Socrates used to ask, which was designed to elicit a stupid answer proving to the interlocutor that he was not as smart as he thought.

I had a Christian friend who believed it was cruel to repatriate illegal immigrants. She was very adamant about it and would brook no discussion.

But I knew she lived in a bad part of Philadelphia.

Once I knew where she stood  — or thought she stood — politically, I just avoided arguments and waited, occasionally sending a factual report about illegal immigrants, without comment.

I didn’t hear from her for many months, mostly because I stopped sending her stuff — my usual stuff is pretty strong (the Bible talks about milk for babes in Christ, right? I couldn’t send “meat”). But I never got mad at her for her ignorance and I decided to continue to love her in Christian love–not because such a person is lovable, but because she was not, and Jesus had said no one gets credit for loving the lovable, but for loving the hard to love. That is the most important part, not just a side issue.

Well, a while back she wrote me and said her part of town was completely falling apart and she could hardly stand to live there because of all the gangs.

I wrote back and asked what ethnicity these gangs were.

She told me they were Hispanic. She proceeded to go on and on about illegal immigrants and sounded more furious than I ever did.

She is now on the side of law and order and I have stopped worrying about her. She will fight for what is right.

Just remember what all of us parents know: Learning is a slow, slow process.

And a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (I Cor. 13:13)

by Don Hank

Help grow my megachurch or leave!

I was recently surprised to read that Rick Warren is calling other Christians fake and calling for phony Christians to leave his church. He is targeting in particular those who fail to help his multimillion dollar Saddleback megachurch grow. Is the narrow way passé for the finger-pointing pastor?

A country preacher at a church I once attended used to say “when you point the finger of blame you have three fingers pointing right back at you.”

How about a pastor helping a Marxist get elected?

How about a pastor being unequally yoked with non-believers who deny Christ? Wouldn’t that be fake Christianity? Rick has been yoked with the Left and Islam for some time now despite Paul’s explicit command: 

“Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion hath light with darkness?” (2 Cor. 6:14).

Rick seems to have his own personal definition of “Christianity” and it doesn’t look quite the same as the Apostle Paul’s.

So who’s a fake? 

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (Matt. 7:5).

The “Christian” Left, hordes of sheep-like socialist heretics led by charismatic fanatics, almost completely took over Europe at various times in the 13th and 14th centuries. Even after they were largely subdued, they clung to their utopian fantasies and the last one of their line, Wilhelm Weitling, met and influenced Karl Marx. Charismatic leaders like Dolcino in Italy and Thomas Müntzer in Germany, condemned other Christians as fakes, preaching that all property must be held in common and strictly forbidding all private ownership of anything. They plundered, killed, maimed, destroyed and looted churches and waged war against all who stood in their way, conquering vast territories and forcing concessions from powerful princes and popes before finally being overthrown. They were convinced that they were right, based on a cursory knowledge of certain verses of the Bible, and that they were Christ’s avengers, based on nocturnal dreams.

Yet nowhere do we read that Jesus or the early Christians had urged Christ’s followers to force others to live by their rules.

Jesus flatly rejected the socialists of his day, in so many words telling them to get lost when they dunned Him to initiate a free lunch program.

The socialist heretics had their way in Europe sporadically for about 2 centuries, and then faded away. Their modern day counterparts will do likewise.

But not before causing untold hardship and leading hordes of foolish, gullible souls to perdition.

Further reading:

http://www.zimbio.com/Rick+Warren+and+Seeker+Sensitive/articles/72/James+Sundquist+statement+Rick+Warrens+invitation

http://www.amazon.com/Whos-Driving-Purpose-Driven-Church/dp/0974476455

Laigle’s Forum contributor Anthony Horvath is the Executive Director of Athanatos Christian Ministries, which is hosting an online apologetics conference coming up in the second week of May.

From the Christian News Wire:

RELEASE:  Athanatos Christian Ministries is hosting its first annual apologetics conference May 7th-8th, 2010. The conference will cast a vision for promoting Christianity through the arts, and literature in particular. The conference is unique because it will be held entirely online, allowing anyone from around the world to attend and participate.

Website: www.onlineapologeticsconference.com.

Presenters at the conference include apologist Rob Bowman Jr, Dr. Corey Olsen (otherwise known at ‘The Tolkien Professor’) and intelligent design advocate Dr. Angus Menuge. Topics range from arguments for using the arts to advance the Kingdom of God to narrower issues such as the nature of ‘myth’ and the ‘new literature’ of film and television.

Anthony Horvath, the Executive Director of ACM, will be discussing “literary anti-apologetics” and how stories such as Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” and Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series serve up objections to Christianity through the guise of fiction.

Speaking about the conference, Mr. Horvath says, “For centuries the Christian Church lead the way in supporting the arts. The Christian worldview was integrated into literature, music, and paintings. People could appreciate fine artistic expression and receive a positive impression of the Christian message at the same time. Christian artists were able to touch hearts in a way that theological arguments often did not. It is time for the Church to rediscover the arts and artists.”

New technologies have allowed creative Christians a chance to carry out their vocation in a meaningful way. The Internet in particular has allowed talented Christian artists to reach people around the world.

Horvath explains, “The Internet has opened up many opportunities for artists but also many new challenges to the Church, so it is fitting that we hold this conference online. This allows us to connect authors, artists, pastors, and apologists together in ‘one place’ to hash out how we can deliberately use the arts to promote, explain, and defend Christianity.”

Registration for the conference is $35 with students able to register for $25. Each conference participant will receive a free copy of either GK Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy” or Pascal’s “Pensees.”

Sessions begin at 9 a.m. CST on Friday and Saturday, May 7th-8th and run throughout the morning. Recordings of the sessions will be available for download for conference registrants.

To register and get more information visit www.onlineapologeticsconference.com.

God Almighty on the job after failed stint by Gaia

By Don Hank

If you live in the northern part of the US as far south as Washington, DC, you will notice that there is a lot of snow outside your window. And there was a lot of it out there this weekend too, more than you had seen in many years. Several photos appeared in various publications showing a snowed-in White House — the residence of Barack Obama, who just a few weeks earlier had tried desperately to get the world’s richest countries to pay a global tax for supposedly causing global warming.

The “global warming” strategists have created a perfect alibi. Now they are saying that if it gets colder that is because of global warming. If it gets warmer, well, you know. Their Copenhagen climate conference didn’t work out, but they are determined to do damage control. It doesn’t get much more ridiculous than this. But after all, we are talking about the Left.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think God is in charge of the weather, and if I were Him, I would send mankind an unmistakable reminder right about now.

Oh, I don’t know, maybe like a larger than usual snow storm during the Copenhagen conference, and then maybe some record or near-record snows later in the year just so folks would not forget Who is in charge.

Now, if you are a Gaya worshipper like Al Gore, I don’t really mean to rub it in, but it sure looks like God Almighty has taken back the weather-making function. Not that He had ever relinquished it in the first place, mind you, but it was time for Him to make it clear.

Let me remind you of something: The Communist Manifesto calls for the abolition of religion and religion is what global warming is really all about.

By suggesting that man could be the weather-maker, leftists defy a plethora of passages in the Bible affirming that God is in charge of the weather.

Matthew 8: 23-27 tells us Jesus stopped a violent storm with a few words.

Yet in his book “Earth in the Balance,” Al Gore deliberately chooses to write worshipfully about the pagan goddess Gaia, who was once associated in Pagan world with the forces of nature. It’s not that he really believes in Gaia. It’s just that he wants to deliberately slur the Bible, because as a leftist, he feels compelled to do so. Real leftists aren’t currently at war with other religions, especially pagan ones like Gaia worship, so they can appear religious while committing the most heinous acts of blasphemy against the living God.

They see Christianity as the real enemy, and the tantalizing concept of man made global warming as a means of defeating it just sort of fell into their laps. The trouble is, the hacker who managed to break into the computer system of the department of the University of East Anglia, which had been charged with keeping and interpreting the climate records for the entire world, proved that they were massaging the data to make it seem like the earth was warming when for any objective scientist, there could never have been a clear-cut, unequivocal conclusion based on such tenuous data.

So why would they go to so much trouble to make us believe a myth?

A lot is at stake. Modern scientists think it is their duty to demonstrate that God does not exist in order to further the “progressive” cause. Darwinists have done the same sort of propagandizing for years, particularly in the origin-of-life area. Ben Stein’s movie Expelled shows the enormous lengths to which they will go to keep certain data and ideas away from the public – including firing academics who even suggest they may believe in the Creator. They act as if defeating the notion of a living God is a matter of life and death.

I personally waged a mostly one-man debate against a group of Darwinists at the amazon.com forum on Stephen Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell” and discovered how incredibly childish and silly their little games can be. For example, when I linked to Stein’s DVD at the Amazon site to support an argument about how Darwinists bully, the moderator momentarily changed the price of the DVD from less than $20 to $999.99 (changing it back shortly thereafter to avoid detection), and during this time, someone at Amazon, without my authorization, re-activated a seller account I had closed 9 months earlier, and someone “bought” a book I was no longer selling, trying to embarrass me. However, the Amazon moderators did me a favor, proving my point that Darwinists are bullies better than I could have without that perfect illustration. Leftists never learn.

And on a higher plane, God has His ways, and all the lies and distortions of the Left always com to light, leaving the Left with a black eye. Be sure your sin will find you out.

The Tower of Babel was a symbol of the Left in Bible times. This bunch, attempting to trivialize the Almighty, wanted to build a tower that would reach to heaven, but God stopped them in their tracks by confounding the builders’ tongues so they couldn’t understand each other.

Global warming was the same kind of idea, an attempt to displace God, making people think that puny insignificant humans were in fact in charge of the weather.

But they were found out, and now the “global warming” movement is in disarray.

And best of all, while we powerless humans who opposed this diabolical agenda could do nothing but pray, God did the heavy lifting.

Just look out your window.

Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?