God Has a Lot to Do with It, Christianity and Freedom

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
by Chuck Colson –
A recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times asked “What’s God got to do with it?” The “it” being referred to was the security and freedom that Americans enjoy and often take for granted.

The answer to the question is “quite a bit,” and arguing otherwise requires taking something else for granted: our way of life’s debt to Christianity.

The man asking and answering the question was Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine. Shermer took exception to the words of a recent House resolution to keep “In God We Trust” as the national motto. The resolution read: “Whereas if religion and morality are taken out of the marketplace of ideas, the very freedom on which the United States was founded cannot be secured.”

Shermer was troubled by the “belief that religion has a monopoly on morality,” especially, he says, “in this age of science and technology, computers and cyberspace, and liberal democracies securing rights and freedoms for oppressed peoples all over the globe.” [Read more…]

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It’s Ok to Fail

Failure is necessary as part of the learning process prayer gets us through itby Fr. Gregory Hallam –
We live in a culture in which high achievement is prized above all things. Celebrity culture canonises the saints of “can do” leaving most of the rest of us feeling pretty miserable that we are not as rich, as famous, as high achieving as these public icons. A certain amount of “moral failure” can be tolerated in most; unless you are a politician that is or a celebrity on the slide of disfavour. This is mostly hypocrisy though since many are far less inclined to apply the same moral standards to their own behaviour and lives. What is certainly not recognised is the positive aspect of failure, and, indeed, it’s universality.

First, let’s tackle universality. For every 1 winner there are 99 losers. As they say “it matters rather how one plays the game.” Next, none of us is perfect. We need to cut each other a little slack; we need to practice mercy. It’s OK to fail means it’s OK to try even if you don’t succeed. [Read more…]

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Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz says Children in the Womb are Not Persons

Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D), Chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that calling a child in the womb a person is an extremist position.
Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D), Chair of the Democratic National Committee, said that calling a child in the womb a person is an extremist position.
by Deacon Keith Fournier –

On November 8, 2011, the people of Mississippi will have an opportunity to cast their vote to affirm a scientific fact, that a human being in the womb of his or her mother is a human person from the moment of conception. The lieutenant Governor of the State recently expressed what many of his fellow Mississippians believe in these words: “The Founding Fathers said that every American has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. On November the 8th, we’re going to give that right to every child in America, beginning in Mississippi”

If the people of the State pass this amendment to the State Constitution, intentional abortion, which is the taking of innocent human life in the womb, will be illegal – just like every other act of killing an innocent human person. The Mississippi amendment specifically includes them in the definition section of person in the State Constitution.

The Mississippi effort is a part of a growing trend in the States to pass such constitutional amendments to protect the lives of our youngest neighbors. [Read more…]

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Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid (Part 2)

Marcia Segelstein
Marcia Segelstein
by Marcia Segelstein –

Do you ever wonder what the world will be like in 20 or 30 years? If you’re a parent or a grandparent, chances are you’ve thought a lot about the world the next generation will inhabit. And if you’re a Christian, no doubt you’ve wondered if Christian values will be part of the mainstream culture, or whether such values will even be tolerated.

Mary Beth Hicks, in her new book, Don’t Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid, makes a good case for those concerns, some of which I wrote about in my last column.

Take the issue of homosexuality. Traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs teach that the practice of homosexuality is wrong. But gay activists and their liberal supporters have done a stunning job of shifting public opinion against those tenets. They’ve even invented a word for it: homophobia. We’ve reached the point where bringing morality into a discussion of homosexuality is considered hateful. [Read more…]

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The Emperor’s New Clothes, Breaking the Spiral of Silence

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson
by Chuck Colson –
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” researchers Rob Willer, Ko Kuwabara and Michael Macy devised a set of ingenious experiments that showed how distressingly easy it is to make people go against what they believe to be true.

One of the experiments involved wine-tasting, in which participants evaluate both the wine and one another’s wine-tasting skills. The participants were given three samples of wine. In reality, all three samples were from the same bottle. One had even been tainted with vinegar!

Before they delivered their evaluation, they listened to other participants, who were plants, who praised the vinegar-laced wine as the best. Half of the participants went against their own taste buds and joined in praising the vinegary concoction.

Even more interesting is what happened next. Another participant, who was also a plant, told the truth about the wines. But when it came time for the participants to evaluate each other, some of them were permitted to do so confidentially, and the others had to do so publicly.[Read more…]

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Take the Children to Church

Orthodox Children church by George Strickland, Ph.D. –
Based on new studies conducted by Baylor University, children from more religious families and from families with higher rates of religious attendance are better behaved and more well adjusted at home and at school. Better educated people generally had parents who attended church services twice or more a month. Among people with graduate level educations, two-thirds had mothers who were from frequent church attenders, compared to just under half of people with only a high school education. The difference is just as significant when looking at the frequency of church attendance by both parents and even larger when looking at fathers’ attendance. This evidence is highly correlated with other studies that show church attendance during adolescence helps reduce a number of the damaging long-term risk factors of disadvantaged children and leads to better education success overall.

There are a number of reasons why parents’ religious attendance might improve children’s educational and developmental outcomes. First, children may be more likely to learn wholesome values and moral commitment if they go to church. [Read more…]

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The Facts of Life Are Conservative, Even in Zuccotti Park

by Joseph Ashby –
Peeking through Occupy Wall Street’s cloudy drum sessions, group speeches, and celebrity visits are a few rays of reality’s sunlight. These glimmers of the real world show that even the campers of Zuccotti Park aren’t immune to Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that “the facts of life are conservative.”

Conservatism is the natural political outgrowth from the real life experience. Humans are naturally flawed, greedy, and untrustworthy. Conservatives recognize that fact and promote the market system and divided government in order to pit one greedy person against another.

Conversely, the left continually denies and fights against human nature (inevitably losing to it). For leftists, it’s always a matter of finding the right human to rule — the disinterested regulator, the consumer-protecting bureaucrat, the messianic president, etc. [Read more…]

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Defending Our First Freedom

Christian persecution, loss of religious liberty America by Archbishop José H. Gomez –
We are slowly losing our sense of religious liberty in America.

There is much evidence to suggest that our society no longer values the public role of religion or recognizes the importance of religious freedom as a basic right. As scholars like Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon and Michael Sandel have observed, our courts and government agencies increasingly treat the right to hold and express religious beliefs as only one of many private lifestyle options. And, they observe, this right is often “trumped” in the face of challenges from competing rights or interests deemed to be more important.

These are among the reasons the U.S. Catholic bishops recently established a new Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. My brother bishops and I are deeply concerned that believers’ liberties—and the Church’s freedom to carry out her mission—are threatened today, as they never have been before in our country’s history. [Read more…]

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No Representation without Taxation

No Representation without Taxation by Bruce Walker –
The recent Occupy Wall Street ruckus and the drumbeat rhetoric of Democrats in Washington that the rich pay too little shows the dangers of placing power in the hands of those who have no real interest beyond self-interest in the governance of the nation. One rallying cry of our forefathers when the British Crown sought to impose taxes — really, very modest taxes — on the colonies without the consent of us colonials was “No taxation without representation!”

The logic of that slogan ran something like this: if I have no say in who passes taxes that I must pay, then what prevents the officials from imposing unfair taxes on me? On the other hand, if both the burden of taxation and the voice in tax-making are roughly equal, then taxes passed will be just and sensible. [Read more…]

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