The Hijacking of Earth Day

by Gilbert Ross, M.D. –
The last weekend in April saw the confluence of Earth Day and World Malaria Day. The very first Earth Day back in 1970 found many of us devoted to saving the world from polluting corporations and their toxic smog. And in fact, over the course of the next two decades or so, major strides were made in cleaning up our air and water. The sky over Los Angeles was even seen to be blue on occasion, and Hudson River fish were pronounced safe to eat again.

The momentum flowing from the first Earth Day led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that same year. Its first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, was appointed fresh out of an environmental advocacy nonprofit, whose agenda included banning the insecticide DDT.

DDT had become the poster child target of the nascent environmental movement, thanks to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. Ruckelshaus — ignoring the voluminous testimony of his own scientific advisors demonstrating the unique effectiveness and lack of toxicity of DDT — signed the DDT ban in June 1972. He may as well have signed the death warrant for millions of victims of malaria and other insect-borne diseases. [Read more…]

Gay Activists Bullying the Boy Scouts

Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson

by Chuck Colson –
I’ve been warning you that the current push to legitimize homosexual conduct and so-called gay “marriage” represents today’s greatest threat to religious liberty. I’ve told you about attacks against iPhone apps for the Manhattan Declaration and Exodus International, as well as a boycott of Chick-fil-a.

Their crime? Supporting marriage as only between a man and a woman and having the temerity to not support so-called gay “marriage.”

The Boy Scouts’ politically incorrect stands on homosexuality and atheism have long put this great organization in the extremists’ cross-hairs, and now the pressure is getting even more intense.

The Scouts prohibit open homosexuals from serving as leaders. That’s because the organization believes that “homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the obligations in the Scout Oath and Scout Law to be morally straight and clean in thought, word, and deed.” [Read more…]

Education that Corrupts

Education communist brainwashing by Chuck Rogér
It is the job of educators to “change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students.” So proclaimed psychologist Benjamin Bloom, originator of Outcome-Based Education. The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1979, setting the stage for Bloom’s decree only two years later. In the 1980s, the already ugly transformation of America’s schools gained momentum.

Many of today’s K-12 and university classrooms serve as laboratories in which instructors breed minds poor in knowledge and logic but rich in political correctness. Morally bankrupt values like “tolerance” and “diversity” are recurring themes. Such conditioning often aims to create “citizens of the world,” despite there being no planet-wide entity of which people can become citizens. But educators wedded to utopian visions have no time for such mundane reality. Time is precious. Students must be conditioned to join the “global community.” [Read more…]

God: The Central Question of Worldview

God Trinity - Father, Son, Holy Spirit by Tom Gilson

Of all the issues affecting every person’s picture of reality, nothing is more fundamental than questions about God. Is there one God, Creator and Sovereign of all? Could there be more than one god? Or no God at all? If there is a God (or gods), then what is that God (or gods) like? Nothing determines your worldview—and the course of your life—more than how you answer those questions.

And yet some atheists like to make light of the God question. Richard Dawkins brushed it aside this way in The God Delusion:

I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon-Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.

I like to call that the arithmetical atheism argument. Its force (such as it is) depends on the idea that in counting gods, as in counting inches on a ruler, the distance between one and zero is no different than the distance between two and one. [Read more…]

Pelosi and Progressive Neo-Leninism

Pelosi communist leninism by Marvin Folkertsma
Nancy Pelosi’s ascension to the speakership in 2006 launched exuberant encomiums to the democratic process, inspiring her further to shout to her vote-challenged opponents in a tone somewhere between a chortle and a boast, “We won the election!” The Democrats’ victory was sufficient to inflict ObamaCare on the nation as well as to impose tighter controls over American financial life, but ran out of steam when it came to a few other progressive pet projects, such as cap-and-trade and card check.

No matter: the Environmental Protection Agency is picking up where Congress faltered in regulating carbon output, and the National Labor Relations Board is doing its best to relegate American free enterprise to that utopian level of economic stagnation and misery known as pre-Thatcherite Britain. In the meantime, now-Minority Leader Pelosi is lamenting about how elections really shouldn’t matter as much as they do. [Read more…]

Defending Constantine and Christendom

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom by Mark Tooley
The destruction of Osama bin Laden underlines how many U.S. church voices, even since 9/11, have adamently insisted that Christianity demands pacifism.

Much of the Evangelical Left, so influential on Christian college campuses and increasingly prominent in Washington, D.C., relies on neo-Anabaptist beliefs. Sojourners activist Jim Wallis, who last week launched a crusade against “cuts” in the 2012 federal budget, adheres partly to this tradition. These neo-Anabaptists demand total pacifism and reject the military. Unlike traditional Anabaptists, they are not separatists, and many exuberantly advocate Big Government control over medical care, food, energy, and virtually all of life. The godfather of sorts for these disjointed neo-Anabaptists was the late Mennonite theologian and Notre Dame professor John Howard Yoder. He joined most Anabaptists in assuming that Christianity was massively corrupted by 4th century Roman Emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity. The resulting Christendom created over 1,600 years of wars and oppression ostensibly in the name of Christ.

Constantine famously professed Christianity after winning a military battle before which a cross had appeared to him in the sky. His conversion largely ended Rome’s persecution of Christians and facilitated Christianity’s eventually becoming the majority faith for the West. [Read more…]

The Danger in Severing God from America’s Identity

America In God We Trust by William Sullivan –
It is beyond dispute that there is a link between socialism and American progressivism. Both flawed ideologies are predicated upon the soundness of a large and powerful government designed to disperse the fruits of labor by seizing means and property from the productive. And as many conservatives are quick to point out, nothing could be more antithetical to the ideals scribed in the Constitution

But beyond the insidious application of socialism under the less condemning titles of “progressivism” and “social justice,” the liberal left poses another threat to America that is less defended. It has, for over a century, laid perpetual siege upon Christianity, seeking to excise all Christian influence from American government and its institutions piecemeal, from banning prayer in schools to seeking taxpayer-funded abortions. [Read more…]

The Welfare State and the Selfish Society

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –

In the contemporary world, where left-wing attitudes are regarded as normative, it is a given that capitalism, with its free market and profit motive, emanates from and creates selfishness, while socialism, the welfare state and the “social compact,” as it is increasingly referred to, emanate from and produce selflessness.

The opposite is the truth.

Whatever its intentions, the entitlement state produces far more selfish people — and therefore, a far more selfish society — than a free-market economy. And once this widespread selfishness catches on, we have little evidence that it can be undone.

Here’s an illustration: Last year, President Obama addressed a large audience of college students on the subject of health care. At one point in his speech, he announced that the students will now be able to remain on their parents’ health insurance plan until age 26. I do not ever recall hearing a louder, more thunderous and sustained applause than I did then. [Read more…]

Death by Liberalism

Death by Liberalism - book by J.R. Dunn
Many AT readers are aware that I have been working on a book project for the past several years. I have mentioned it occasionally on this site, more often in the past few weeks as publication drew nearer. Now zero hour has arrived: Death by Liberalism. The Fatal Outcome of Well-Meaning Liberal Policies is available as of today. (Buy it here.) It’s the first publication from Broadside Books, renowned editor Adam Bellow’s new conservative imprint.

Simply put, DbL deals with the appalling and overlooked fact that liberalism kills. This is no metaphor, no exaggeration, and no mistake. Liberal policies put in place by liberal politicians to achieve liberal goals kill thousands of Americans each year. In the past half-century, liberalism may have killed up to 500,000 American citizens (and this is not even counting DDT or ethanol, which are responsible for a death rate orders of magnitude larger in the international sphere). We have known for years that liberalism is corrupt, wasteful, and futile. Now we know that it is even worse. Liberalism is lethal. [Read more…]

Celebrating the Resurrection

Christ Resurrection - Pascha Orthodox by Mark Tooley
Hundreds of millions of Christians will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday. And after a century and a half of liberal Protestant attempts to redefine the resurrection into merely a metaphor, the vast majority of Christians still believe that Christ’s body physically arose. Revisionist theologians still find airtime on the History Channel or PBS, but their project never gained a mass following. Even most secular media coverage about religion today focuses largely on orthodox expressions of Roman Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism. Whatever their own beliefs, most reporters and pundits intuit that rationalist liberal theology does not command a lot of adherents.

The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 to adjudicate over which Scriptures were historically accurate, and which always excluded any talk about miracles, once gained widespread attention for its routine objections to traditional Christian belief [Read more…]