Beware!

Dr Robin Zubrin speaks some sense into the environmentalism debate.

Antihumanism is not environmentalism, though it sometimes masquerades as such. Environmentalism, properly conceived, is an effort to apply practical solutions to real environmental problems, such as air and water pollution, for the purpose of making the world a better place for all humans to thrive in. Antihumanism, in contrast, rejects the goal of advancing the cause of mankind. Rather, it uses instances of inadvertent human damage to the environment as points of agitation to promote its fundamental thesis that human beings are pathogens whose activities need to be suppressed in order to protect a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity.

The cultural mandate determines that we are to be stewards of this creation and that most definitely does not mean anti-human, therefore let us be careful of the syncretised perspectives that can so easily creep into our worldview.
I am constantly engaging with well intentioned individuals of faith who have been seduced by the 'Green' philosophy into becoming like those warned about in the aforementioned paragraph.
One of the most damaging side effects of this 'will to power' by a group of fanatics is, that real enviromental issues such as pollution, degradation, sustainability etc are abandoned in favour of Utopian dreams and mysanthropic impulses.
Be as wise as the serpent and as gentle as the dove.

Colson translates

So Chuck is dead!
A Christian Sampson if ever there was, has gone to his reward and a significant one it will be I imagine.
As the creator of Prison Fellowship his good works will live on through the renewal and redemption of many, many prisoners and their families for decades to come if not the end of time. For 34 Easters Colson preached redemption to prisoners behind bars.
Through his many published works and his 'Point Break' broadcasts his words will continue to bring enlightenment and redemption to millions of human sufferers.

 A Transformer in our Day

In November of 2009, the Manhattan Declaration was born in the heart of Chuck Colson. This document encouraged Evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians to stand for their convictions on the issues of the sanctity of human life, traditional marriage and religious freedom. With nearly 525,000 signatures including well-known religious leaders, this document clearly reminds us what Chuck Colson said in a speech at Harvard Business Schoolin 1991, “A society without a foundation of moral absolutes cannot long survive.”

Chuck Colson trained a new generation of church and lay leaders. He challenged us by warning, “There’s too much of the world in the church and not enough church in the world.” His message through books and orations always inspired Christians to be God’s change agents in this world. His latest book The Sky is not Falling: Living Fearlessly in These Turbulent Times, cautions us not to cower in fear, but boldly restore this culture to Christian principles. (Ginny Dent Bryant)

To those who refuse to acknowledge his change of heart and the amazingly redemptive life choices he made after his fall from the apotheosis of society...he would forgive them and continue on in his life work. I am sure that that heart of forgiveness has been rewarded by now and his future is like none that his critics could ever imagine.

Well done Chuck, but more than my congratulations I suspect those same words from the King of Kings goes a long way towards strengthening your forgiving heart towards those fools who refuse to acknowledge your contribution.

Inconceivable

If there is any truth in this article:
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/04/wrong-plan-wrong-time

...then Anthony Albanese and the Gillard government ought to be tried in an Australian court of law for treason.

A pinch of salt

This excerpt might give you a glimpse of the dangerous hubris behind our 'scientific overlords' and the rush within the modern world to believing that science and technology are the means to a perfect society:

How is IVF a threat to society? What about the future?

I think I have answered that above. But let me use the words of Dr Robert Edwards, Nobel laureate and laboratory director of the laboratory which “created” the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, in 1978. He stated in a 2003 interview with the London Times marking the 25th anniversary of that birth:

“I wanted to find out exactly who was in charge, whether it was God Himself or whether it was scientists in the laboratory - it was us! The Pope looked totally stupid. You can never ban anything. You can say, ‘hang on a minute’. But never say ‘never’, and never say that this is the worst decision for humankind, otherwise you can look a fool. Now there as many Roman Catholics coming for treatment as Protestants.”

He also said in this very enlightening interview that the IVF process was not designed to make couples happy. “It was a fantastic achievement”, he conceded modestly, “but it was about more than infertility. It was also about issues like stem cells and the ethics of human conception.”

In other words, it was the next step to be taken, the next obstacle to be overcome on the road ahead to the Brave New World which technology will bring us. Now, as this ageing scientist looks to the future, he is all in favour of cloning. With regard to pre-natal sex selection (whereby parents would be allowed to abort babies of unwanted gender) he says, “go ahead and use it. Those parents have to raise those children. Why should a politician tell me what I can and can’t do?”

And Dr Peter Brinsden, Edwards’ successor at the Cambridgeshire clinic he founded, predicts that “in 50 years assisted conception will have almost become the norm. This is because screening techniques will have improved to such an extent that parents can make their children free of even minor defects.”

I doubt if many in the field have seen these quotes, and the article itself is difficult to get (I have it through a secondary source). But after meeting Dr Edwards, which I did a few years ago when the University of Chicago conferred on him one of its highest honours, I can believe all of it. [Dr. Anthony J. Caruso]

Our society places far too much 'faith' in science/technology and the scientists who administer the processes in their 'priestly' white lab-coats. A healthy dose of scepticism towards man's 'progress' as an end in itself might be an insurance against the ever present dangers of syncretism.

Liar, liar world is on fire!

What Thomas Sowell points out about Obama's 'talents' as a liar, the Australian government has been doing as baldly and twice as much:

One of the highly developed talents of President Barack Obama is the ability to say things that are demonstrably false, and make them sound not only plausible but inspiring.

That talent was displayed just this week when he was asked whether he thought the Supreme Court would uphold ObamaCare as constitutional or strike it down as unconstitutional.

He replied: "I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

But how unprecedented would it actually be if the Supreme Court declared a law unconstitutional if it was passed by "a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress"?

The Supreme Court has been doing precisely that for 209 years!

Nor is it likely that Barack Obama has never heard of it. He has a degree from the Harvard law school and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school. In what must be one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history — Marbury v. Madison in 1803 — Chief Justice John Marshall established the principle that the Supreme Court can declare acts of Congress null and void if these acts violate the Constitution.

They have been doing so for more than two centuries. It is the foundation of American constitutional law. There is no way that Barack Obama has never heard of it or really believes it to be "unprecedented" after two centuries of countless precedents.

In short, he is simply lying.

We have entered into a new definition of 'civilzation' or perhaps the collapse thereof. Most likely as the result of the 1960's rebellion against everything that appeared to restrict ones personel 'freedom', and culminating in the post-modern fallacy of truth being a subjective construction.

A lack of truth in education, manners, political life and 'civil' society results in the inevitable, though tragic
consequence of a multiplication of liars...logical and as inevitable as night following day.

Welcome to our brave new world of not knowing what to believe...that is for those without the Good Book!

one plus one equals three

The paradoxical worldview of this most misanthropic of governments:

How, you might think, can you sustain the position that bringing the budget into surplus will lower interest rates; yet running deficits has not resulted in higher interest rates? Easy! All you need do is to hold two contradictory stories as both true. Can’t manage that? Well that certainly rules you out as a budding occupant of an economic ministry in the Gillard government.

Brown, Green, Red, the new rainbow coalition!

A new Green has relaced an old Brown...read about the green dream here:
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/a_woodchip_off_the_old_block/