Voting Correctly
Here's how to vote on Tuesday, or technically, here's what to do before you vote:
Do research.
Take a look at what the voting records of the candidates involved of every office you vote for, if possible.
Do not project your wishes and hopes onto a candidate. In other words, vote for who the candidate is, not who you want him or her to be. Look at the hard truth about the candidates. It's kind of like dating when you realize, I need to look at who the person really is and ask myself, can I live with that?
Repeat that last step again.
Pray.
Vote. If you get to vote at our church's polling place, you are a lucky person. They have free food!
"Expelled" and the right to be outraged
Have you seen the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" yet? It's a fantastic presentation of how the evolutionist scientific "establishment" has treated the Intelligent Design arguments. Five stars, highly recommended.
Here is an article about how some of the atheists, including Richard Dawkins, a very vocal presenter of atheism ("The God Delusion" is one of his recent works), were upset at the movie. They felt the filmmakers had deceived them because the original title of the film was different; they believed that the premise or focus of the movie was misrepresented and thus, they, the evolutionists, were asked to be interviewed under false pretenses.
I don't know if Ben Stein's film company misrepresented anything to the evolutionists; I hope not. However, my question to the evolutionists is this: if we are all evolved from a single celled organism in the distant past, and there is no Creator or God outside of the system, from Whom we get our sense of morality, then this universe (closed system) is all we have, and science is the only true realm of knowledge. How, then, can you justify being outraged? To be outraged, you must examine what has been done to you (the observable action) and compare it with an invisible standard of
what should have been done to you.
The question is, where did you get this invisible standard? How can you define what should have been done to you? Where, scientifically, does this come from? How can you hypothesize about it, test it, measure it, and repeat it? If you only have non-directed evolution to explain your existence, your brainwaves, your thoughts, then do you really have a right to claim that a
moral injustice has been perpetrated by Ben Stein's filmmakers? Where'd you get your moral standard on which to base your claim?
If atheistic evolution is true, then all's fair in love, war and the evolutionary process -meaning the totality of life on this planet. Thus, if Ben Stein & his crew deceived the atheists, they had every right (according to atheistic evolution) to do so. Perhaps that's just part of the next stage in human evolution - deceiving others for profit or other motive. Who are the complaining atheists to stand in the way of evolutionary progress - even if that progress involves lying to the atheists?
The fact is, the atheists don't have a leg to stand on. To affirm atheistic evolution, they must deny the existence of an overall, intangible (or "spiritual") standard of morality, apart from the evolutionary process. (And if morality is just a part of the evolutionary process, then we should actually celebrate deviations from that morality, because deviations, in the form of mutations, are the way that evolution moves forward). Yet to justify feeling outraged, they must accept an overarching moral standard which should apply equally to them and to Ben Stein, and claim that Stein violated that standard by deceiving them.
In short, they're in a philosophical mess. And that's the point of the movie.
The Fairness Doctrine & The Dark Knight
Here's an article about how one Senator thinks bringing back the Fairness Doctrine is a great idea. Even more disturbing is that the article mentions a poll in which 47 percent of Americans think the government should require stations to "balance" their on-air viewpoints with opposing ideas. This is a terrible, terrible idea. Why? Not just because it may end conservative talk radio (some of which isn't great anyway). But because who determines what is "balanced?" The government. That means fallible people with power.
This country was founded on the idea that the individual human being had the
responsibility and the
ability to make up his or her own mind about different ideas. When a newspaper column or a street corner preacher presented a viewpoint, the average citizen was expected to use some common sense and discernment to decide the speaker's believability. That is what is behind freedom of speech and freedom of the press - the authority of the individual person to think for himself. The Fairness Doctrine says "We, the government, don't believe that you, the citizens, have the right or the ability to discern truth on your own. So we are going to decide truth for you. We, fallible human beings, are going to tell you what balance is, and make sure that you are getting a 'balanced' view, based on our definition of balance."
This, friends, is one more step toward tyranny, where the government assumes power and authority over an area in which it is not supposed to have that authority - the ability to determine truth. Never forget that "the government" is just flawed human beings like you and me. It can only do so much.
And that brings up one reason why I didn't like "The Dark Knight" despite having eagerly awaited it for 3 years. The reason is that in the end, Batman decided that the citizens of Gotham were too stupid and too immature to handle the truth that Harvey Dent turned bad. Instead, he took the blame for Dent's crimes, allowing Gotham to believe a lie. The "self-sacrificing superhero" protected the "naive citizenry" from the truth.
And, the would-be enforcers of the Fairness Doctrine no doubt see themselves as the benevolent, enlightened "public servants" who "heroically" protect the naive citizens from such terrors as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The real tragedy is that 47% of the citizens apparently don't believe they can discern the truth for themselves, either.
Discipleship ingredients
Seth Barnes has a
great blog today on the ingredients for discipleship. It's an important reminder to make it PERSONAL. Programs can't make a disciple.
