Orthodox Editors

Debunking the Galileo Myth

January 30, 2011January 31, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Dinesh D’Souza – (Townhall)
Many people have uncritically accepted the idea that there is a longstanding war between science and religion. We find this war advertised in many of the leading atheist tracts such as those by Richard Dawkins, Victor Stenger, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Every few months one of the leading newsweeklies does a story on this subject. Little do the peddlers of this paradigm realize that they are victims of nineteenth-century atheist propaganda.

About a hundred years ago, two anti-religious bigots named John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White wrote books promoting the idea of an irreconcilable conflict between science and God. The books were full of facts that have now been totally discredited by scholars. But the myths produced by Draper and Dickson continue to be recycled. They are believed by many who consider themselves educated, and they even find their way into the textbooks. In this article I expose several of these myths, focusing especially on the Galileo case, since Galileo is routinely portrayed as a victim of religious persecution and a martyr to the cause of science. [Read more…]

The Sheep and the Goats: Work and Service to Others

January 29, 2011January 31, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Jordan Ballor –
In the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46), Jesus differentiates between those who have done good to others and those who have not. The king, taking the place of Christ in the parable, says that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Whatever good was done was counted as being done to the king, and whatever bad was done was counted the same way. And on this basis the king separates the righteous sheep and the unrighteous goats. The goats “go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” It is natural to think that the good the sheep do to others (“I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink…”) refers to special acts of kindness, things that are only done occasionally and usually within a charitable context.

Lester DeKoster, in his book Work: The Meaning of Your Life—A Christian Perspective, provides a refreshing understanding of this parable. He writes that the good Jesus refers to includes these special acts of charity, but also refers to the service we do every day within the context of work. [Read more…]

A culture exposed

January 27, 2011January 29, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Mike Aquilina –
We’ve come a long way, baby. And we’ve ended up back where we started before the rise of Christianity. In the Church’s infancy, the age of the Fathers, abortion and infanticide were commonplace events, requiring little deliberation. Archeology has yielded us a rare glimpse at the inner life of ordinary people in this time. We have a letter from a pagan businessman in which he wrote home to his pregnant wife, amid the usual endearments: “If you are delivered of a child [before I come home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl discard it.”

Indeed, most pagan cultures considered it a duty to place “defective” newborns on the dunghills at the edge of town, where birds of prey could pick them apart. Most families interpreted the word “defective” broadly, to include female children as well as those with disabilities or disfigurement. Plato and Aristotle commended the practice, and the Roman historian Tacitus said it was “sinister and revolting” for Jews to forbid infanticide.

Yet these practices created a crisis for pagans. Abortion and infanticide led to low fertility rates, high maternal mortality, a shortage of marriageable women, and an absence of familial care for the elderly. [Read more…]

Libeling the Right: The Key to the Left’s Success

January 26, 2011January 29, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –

Last week, following the murder of six people and the attempted murder of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, the American people were given a vivid display of the single most important tactic of the left: libeling opponents.

Most Americans have been naively and blissfully unaware of this aspect of the left’s arsenal against the right. But now, just as more Americans than ever before understand the left’s limitless appetite for political power in an ever-expanding state, more Americans than ever before understand that a key to the left’s success is defaming the right. …

People are awakening to the seminal fact of left-wing success: The only way the left can succeed in America is by libeling the right. Only 20 percent of Americans label themselves liberal, let alone left. How, then, do Leftists get elected? And why don’t more Americans call themselves conservative when, in fact, so many share conservatives’ values? [Read more…]

Marching on the Right Side of History

January 24, 2011January 24, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Jennifer Roback Morse –
Defenders of marriage should draw hope and courage from the pro-life movement’s success.

As an advocate of conjugal marriage, I am often told that I am on the “wrong side of History.” The justice of “marriage equality” is overwhelming; the younger generation favors it; same sex marriage is inevitable. But this analysis is false. Indeed, there is ample reason to think that the March of History storyline will be proven incorrect. The reason? We were told all these same things about abortion.

“You need to accept Roe v. Wade. The unlimited abortion license is nothing but simple justice for women. Besides, the next generation will completely accept abortion. They will grow up knowing nothing else. They will not have all your hang-ups about sex and your squeamishness about scraping a bit of tissue out of a woman’s body. Reproductive freedom is the wave of the future. You are on the Wrong Side of History.”

A funny thing happened on the way to History: the people did not perform as promised. Last year, I took a group of Ruth Institute students up to the West Coast Walk for Life in San Francisco. [Read more…]

The Miracle of Life – A Meditation on Mystery and Beauty of Life as we March

January 23, 2011January 24, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Msgr. Charles Pope –
The magnificence of life is really too wonderful to describe. But I found this description some years ago which summons reverence by its very ability to baffle the mind:

MIRACLE OF LIFE– Consider the miracle of the human body. Its chemistry is just as extraordinarily well tuned as is the physics of the cosmos. Our world on both sides of the divide that separates life from lifelessness is filled with wonder. Each human cell has a double helix library of three billion base pairs providing fifty thousand genes. These three billion base pairs and fifty thousand genes somehow engineer 100 trillion neural connections in the brain—-enough points of information to store all the data and information contained in a fifty-million-volume encyclopedia.

And then after that, these fifty thousand genes set forth a million fibers in the optic nerves, retinae having ten million pixels per centimeter, some ten billion in all, ten thousand taste buds, ten million nerve endings for smell, cells that exude a chemical come-on to lure an embryo’s lengthening neurons from spinal cord to target cell, each one of the millions of target cells attracting the proper nerve from the particular needed function. And all this three-dimensional structure arises somehow from the linear, one-dimensional information contained along the DNA helix. Did all this happen by chance or do you see the hand of God?

[Read more…]

Abortionist Brutally Murdered Hundreds of Living Newborns: Clinic Worker

January 22, 2011January 24, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Kermit B. Gosnell, MD - the Philadelphia Abortionist

by Kathleen Gilbert –
A massive, photograph-laden Grand Jury Report released Wednesday has detailed the bone-chilling practices of a Philadelphia abortionist, who clinic workers testified had delivered “hundreds” of living, breathing newborn children before severing their spinal cords or slitting their necks to complete the abortions.

Abortionist Kermit Gosnell was arrested Wednesday for eight counts of murder. One of the charges was for the botched-abortion death of 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar, a Nepalese refugee. The other seven were for children who police had discovered, by examining their remains, had been born alive and then killed.

District Attorney R. Seth Williams released the 281-page report that was the basis for the murder charges against Gosnell and nine of his associates. Included in that report were photos of some of Gosnell’s victims.

In the report, the Grand Jury notes that several agencies and groups became aware of what has become known as Gosnell’s “shop of horrors,” but did nothing. [Read more…]

Fr. Johannes: Philadelphia – The Cost of Equivocation

January 22, 2011April 13, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Fr. Johannes Jacobse –
Why such outrage over the Philadelphia abortionist? What moral difference is there between severing the spinal cord of a newborn with a pair of scissors and dismembering a baby with a scalpel a few moments before its birth? There isn’t any.

Yet the outcry over the brutality indicates that the fiction of viability may be lifting, and not a moment too soon. Viability, the idea that an unborn child has value only when it can live outside the womb, is a concept that the ignorant still believe has scientific credibility. It’s a rhetorical pretense that helps us avoid what we don’t want to see.

The cold hand of the malefactor reveals that the brutality outside the womb occurs inside it too. It’s not so easy to pretend anymore that a difference exists because we see one but not the other. Josef Mengele at least maintained the pretense that he was serving science. This butcher wouldn’t even do that. His staff kept their lunches in the same refrigerator where they stored left-over fetal parts.

Should we be shocked that the abortionist treated the newly born like a piece of pork? Why? How is it any different than how he treats the unborn? [Read more…]

Metropolitan Jonah’s Message for Sanctity of Life Sunday 2011

January 22, 2011January 22, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

Dearly Beloved in Christ:

The Orthodox Church is like St John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness, or Jesus baptizing by the Jordan. We, like them, preach a message of repentance and the remission of sins in the new desert, the decadent culture of the modern West, mired in the chaos of moral collapse.

The Orthodox Church’s message is a message of hope, of healing, of the transformation of one’s life, of the realization of the divine potential in each human being. Yet, this message requires not only acceptance, but a voluntary cooperation by those who accept this message. The Church demands a serious discipline of all who would be members, all who would follow this straight and narrow difficult path that leads to salvation. It is a way that demands that we be crucified to the world and its desires, dead to the flesh and its demands, so that we can be focused solely on God.

The culture of this world cries out for “justice.” It demands vengeance, and it despises the forgiveness of God. It cries out for bread in the wilderness; and when it is not satisfied with bread, it demands meat. It ignores the radiant Presence of God, and laments the fleshpots of Egypt. Nothing can satisfy its endless lusts for money, sex and power. In terror it refuses to even stand in silence and contemplate the abyss of death, ever trying to distract itself from the ultimate annihilation it so boldly preaches. This complete denial of death thus leads it to the kind of decadence that has overtaken us: greed, hedonism and licentiousness, which have led to gender confusion, depersonalization, and the loss of value of human life. A culture of hedonism leads only to the narcissism of a solitary individual, enslaved by his/her lusts, using others for the gratification of the passions. [Read more…]

Running for Their Lives, Christians in the Middle East

January 21, 2011January 21, 2011 by Orthodox Editors

by Chuck Colson –

“As the last of Baghdad’s and Mosul’s Christian population packs up their cares and flees for their lives,” writes international religious freedom expert Nina Shea, people are finally taking notice.

Before the Iraq War began, Christians comprised about five percent of the population of Iraq. Since then more than half have fled the country. And with last fall’s Islamic terrorist raid on Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad that left fifty-nine dead, many who are still there are planning to run for their lives as well.

The New York Times reported that an Iraqi army officer told a Christian living in hiding, “We cannot protect you.” “Cannot”? Or “will not”?

What is especially disturbing is that what is happening in Iraq is beginning to happen across the Middle East. And the implications for Middle Eastern Christians and the strategic interests of the United States and the West could not be more serious. [Read more…]