Category: Articles

You Don’t Believe In Adam and Eve? REPRINT

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By Lee Duigon
January 12, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

Christian ‘intellectuals’ turn against the Bible

St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, “[L]et God be true, but every man a liar” (Romans 3:4). In other words, folks, who are you going to believe—God, or a human being infected with Original Sin, possessing incomplete and only partly accurate information filtered through his personal prejudices, and subject to every temptation in the world?

Thanks to a heads-up from General T.C. Pinckney’s Baptist Banner, we have heard of a number of “Christian intellectuals”—why is it that every time you hear the word “intellectual,” you know the next thing you’re going to hear will be something really stupid?—who have decided that “science”—another badly abused word—is right, and Evolution is the truth, and that the Bible is hopelessly, totally wrong about the origin of the human race.

As Calvin College theology professor John Schneider put it, before the college sacked him, there never was an Adam, no Eve, no Garden of Eden, no serpent, and no Fall of man. “Evolution,” he told National Public Radio, invoking the magic word, “makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost.”

Don’t let the door hit you in the can on your way out, professor.

There are, of course, just a few little bitty things that Evolution does not make clear at all.

*How does non-living material suddenly start living in the first place? This has never been observed in nature, and although scientists have tried innumerable times to make it happen in the laboratory, all of those attempts have failed.

*If evolution is a force or a pattern permeating all of nature, why do so many forms of life—most of them, if you count bacteria—never seem to evolve at all? Horseshoe crabs, ferns, cockroaches, etc., have all had, supposedly, jillions of years to evolve into intellectuals, and yet stubbornly persist in being horseshoe crabs, ferns, and cockroaches. (And please, no nasty cracks about intellectuals evolving into cockroaches…)

*As, say, an animal’s forelimb gradually “evolves” into a flipper, at what point does it become useless as either a foreleg or a flipper? Wouldn’t such “halfway-there” animals be gravely handicapped? And if the change happens all at once, how does the mother animal with legs raise a bunch of baby animals with flippers? And where do they find mates so they can reproduce? Really, the whole thing is just too silly for words.

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Conspiracy Theories and Fantasies

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I recently published a column, “Have They Skinned the Rattlesnake?” (you can see it on Lee’s Twitter), in which I posed rhetorical questions. My purpose was to move readers to think about the sorry state of our country and the world–not to solicit information from my readers.

Somehow the point of the column slipped past a lot of people, and I was snowed under with emails from readers eager to provide me with the reasons why America is going to the dogs. One and all, they trotted out conspiracy theories.

Far be it from me to deny that conspiracies exist. They always have, they always will. But the ones offered by my readers are truly grand conspiracies: top-secret plots that everybody on the Internet seems to know about, involving tiny cabals of all-powerful, all-knowing puppet-masters who micro-manage everything that happens in the world. All of our history, our politics, our economics–it’s all an illusion created by the Illuminati, or the “bankers,” or the Trilateral Commission, or the Masons, or even reptiloid space aliens who wear latex masks to make us think they’re human. The ranks of the all-powerful Lizard People include Queen Elizabeth, George W. Bush, and Boxcar Willie. If you flip a coin and it comes up heads, some conspiracy made it do that; if it comes up tails, the same conspiracy arranged for that. Let me add that a disproportionate amount of this conspiracy theorizing is virulently anti-Semitic.

The great thing about all this stuff is that none of it can be proved. You have to take the conspiracy theorist’s word for it all, because somehow he has become privy to top-secret information that the world’s most powerful plotters and schemers have successfully hidden from everyone except him and his like-minded friends. With the conspiracy in total control of all the information, it will always be impossible to prove the case. And prove it to whom? The conspiracy controls the courts, the media, the legal profession, and also rigs wrestling matches when it’s not busy faking moon landings. (A few believe that pro wrestling alone is immune to the baleful influences of the conspiracy.)

I am a fantasy writer, and I know fantasy when I see it. And a lot of this stuff is 100% pure fantasy.

Meanwhile, I am soooo sorry that I ever wrote that column!

From March 28,2012

How to Write a Fantasy Novel

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In reclaiming cultural ground for Christ’s Kingdom, even small gains count. Besides, one never knows what even the smallest victories might lead to.

Fantasy literature has long been popular, especially among young readers, twelve years old and up. When J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series made publishing history, it gave birth to a boom in fantasy. Here, at last, was something that young people really wanted to read!

But an examination of the shelves in any bookstore will show that fantasy, for all its popularity, has a major downside for Christian readers. The market is dominated by unwholesome content—books glamorizing witchcraft, vampirism, zombies, etc.

C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien have long held the fort for Christianity in the realm of fantasy. It’s time they received some reinforcements.

Religion For Atheists? REPRINT

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As civilization corrodes before our very eyes, even intellectuals have begun to say, “Uh-oh…”

Not many intellectuals, I grant you: most of them are out there rejoicing that “the Left has won the Culture War,” and made the world safe for abortion, sodomy, euthanasia, gender-bending, and out-of-wedlock births and fatherless homes. This is going to be the way it is for humanity from now on, they believe, and they are tickled pink.

But in a recent Wall Street Journal article, written to herald the publication of his new book, Religion for Atheists, Euro-intellectual Alain de Botton seems to be getting cold feet. Maybe, he suggests, the secularization of society has gone too far. In nailing down our freedom to fornicate without restriction, maybe we’ve thrown out some things we should have kept.

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REPRINT Missing Aslan: A Review of the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

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You have to be careful when you try to improve a work of art. Sometimes when you gild the lily, you lose the lily.

I’m afraid this is what has happened with Prince Caspian, the second installment in the Disneyfication of C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. They’ve lost the lily, and only the gilt is left. It’s pretty, but it’s not enough.

Caspian has gotten off to a good start at the box office. But then it’s only competing with movies based on comic books and video games. Even with its flaws, it can’t help being better than these.

Where’s Aslan?
As Lewis wrote them, the Narnia tales are centered on the figure of Aslan, the Lion—and Aslan represents Jesus Christ the Lord. It is Aslan who gives life to Narnia and all its creatures, who draws children from our world into Narnia to carry out important missions: who, by sacrificing himself on the Stone Table and then rising from the dead, is Narnia’s redeemer. Without Aslan there is no Narnia, and no Chronicles of Narnia.

But you would never get that from this retelling of Prince Caspian.

If you didn’t see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first, or read the books, you’d have no idea, from this film, who Aslan is or why he matters. You’d think he was just another fantasy creature in a fantasy world inhabited by fauns, centaurs, dwarfs, talking animals, river gods, and whatnot.

Aslan’s in this film, of course, but the filmmakers have played him down. This is where they’ve lost the lily they were at such pains to gild.

They should not have assumed that the audience, especially the children in it, already knows all about Aslan. Some will surely never have seen or heard of him before.

But even if that assumption were correct, Aslan is still the most important person in the story, and should have been treated as such. No direct mention is made here of his atoning sacrifice. If you didn’t know about it from another source, you won’t learn about it in Prince Caspian.

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My Notes ECUSA Flirting with Paganism? REPRINT

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(Originally published in 2006, by The Chalcedon Foundation)

Is a historic Protestant denomination in America falling into neo-paganism? Teetering on the brink of apostasy? And if it is, why should that concern the rest of us?

A little over a year ago, the Episcopal Church USA — already deep in controversy for having America’s only openly homosexual bishop — sank deeper when Christianity Today reported that the ECUSA’s official website (www.episcopalchurch.org) sported openly pagan rituals dedicated to a “Queen of Heaven,” complete with offerings of raisin cakes (see http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/print.php?storyid=1565/ for a reprint of Ted Olsen’s Oct. 27, 2004 article/). The ritual begins:

“Mother God, our ancient sisters called you Queen of Heaven and baked these cakes in your honor in defiance of their brothers and husbands who would not see your feminine face.”

The Bible specifically condemns such rituals in Hosea 3 and Jeremiah 7.

Writing with the Spirit from April 2011

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With Bell Mountain I began to write fiction in a way I’d never done before. But first I’d like to tell you about the way I used to write–a way which, after all, helped me to get four horror novels published.

I always started with a very general idea for a story. My first published novel, Lifeblood, began with the idea of a vampire coming to a suburban township in New Jersey. At the time, I was covering such townships as a newspaper reporter–and oh, boy, did I know a lot about them! “Write what you know,” and all that…

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Christian Professor’s Potter-Mania

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Also Posted at NewsWithViews.com

There is a professor at Covenant Theological Seminary who says the Harry Potter books are the best thing written in a century. He read the last one six times, and then read it backwards, he says. Wonder what kept him from reading it upside-down, inside-out, and sideways.

These are “some of the most beautiful books ever written,” exults Prof. Jerram Barrs. He insists they are the most profoundly Christian books around. We can’t see it. Maybe “Harry Potter” has a stealth theology. Maybe it doesn’t. But that’s not the point.

What we do see is a man who is paid to be a Christian teacher, in a world that is falling away from Christ and falling into moral meltdown, bending his knee to the popular culture. Maybe he believes in what he’s saying, but so what? To the anti-Christian world, and to the world of those who don’t know any better, his comments sound like “I surrender!”

Would you like to say a controversial thing? Try this:

“In all our dealings with non-believers, we Christians must never forget one thing—they’re wrong.”

When you say that, do you know who’s going to howl the loudest?

Christians!

Yes—your fellow Christians will be horrified when you say unbelievers are wrong. Professor Barrs might have an apoplexy. “How dare you say that? How dare you even think it?”

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The Silver Goddess from 2010

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(Originally published in 2006 by The Chalcedon Foundation)

“I inhaled deeply the earthy scent of incense … From the basket of rosaries I took into my hand a strand of vibrantly-colored beads with a silver goddess icon in place of the traditional cross … Once gathered, we began to recite together the ‘Our Mother’ and ‘Hail Goddess’ prayers … some rang bells or sounded the Tibetan bowls.”

The above is a description of a worship service at the Ebenezer Lutheran Church, San Francisco, excerpted from an article on the church’s website (“Experiencing the Goddess Rosary” by Dalyn Cook, http://www.herchurch.org/id8.html). It comes with a picture of a “goddess rosary,” showing the stylized figurine of a nude, pot-bellied “goddess.”

Let it serve as the symbol of a neo-pagan movement that is corrupting America’s mainline Protestant churches — and spilling over into unexpected places.

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Living with Fantasy from 2010

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Fantasy writers are perceived as having lively imaginations. Who can deny it? But when it comes to actually putting over one’s fantasies, and making people believe in your fantasy and even order their lives around it–well, we just can’t compete with those folks in science, the government, and the news media.

Our fantasies are clearly labeled as such. No one would dream of introducing a bill in Congress to fund an expedition to Bell Mountain. That money is already spoken for by other fantasies. Here are two of the more outrageous examples.

“Man-made global warming is real–but big government can control it.”

“Life on earth arose spontaneously from non-living materials like mud and gravel, and by an infinite series of totally random mutations, went from bacteria to Beethoven.”

Those are big fantasies! Nothing ever cooked up by C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien comes even close to these for sheer audacity of the imagination.

It’s staggering to realize that millions of people–who would never, never expect to see Mr. Toad in his motorcar passing them on the freeway–have actually been brought to believe in these colossal fantasies. You’d think they would just burst out laughing at a statement like, “Paying teachers’ union members higher salaries, and granting them tenure and fabulous pension packages, will improve your children’s education,” but they don’t. They don’t even crack a smile.

Maybe it’s saying too much, to say that anyone actually believes that particular fantasy. But people act like they believe it.

When it comes down to the serious business of telling whoppers, we fantasy writers are pretty small potatoes. But we like to believe that our fantasies, at least, are edifying: and never cost our readers anything beyond the price of a book.