You Don’t Believe In Adam and Eve?

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.

Christian Professor’s Potter-Mania

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?”

Fiddling with Fantasy while Rome Burns?

The world’s on fire, and you’re writing fantasy?

Mobs have trashed London, and you’re writing about a couple of kids trying to climb a mountain to ring a legendary bell. We’ve got a Marxist in the White House, and you’re writing about imaginary kings of an imaginary country.

What good does that do?

These are questions that I sometimes ask myself. I suspect every fantasy writer since L. Frank Baum has done the same. (For the video-game generation, Baum’s the guy who wrote The Wizard of Oz. “The what?” Oh, never mind…)

In fairness, fantasy is not the only thing I write. I tackle the old burning issues all the time. But to this day I’m not sure of having changed one person’s mind with any of my columns. No one has ever written in to say, “Oh, now I see! Gee, I was totally wrong to be a socialist/atheist/Darwinist nudnick–thank you so much for setting me straight.” Nope, I’m afraid that doesn’t happen.

My Favorite Authors

I’ve always said that if you want to write, you’ve gotta read–a lot. And I’ve learned a lot from my favorite authors.

If I wanted to show off, I’d say they were Henry James, Proust, E.M. Forster, Alice Walker, and so on. But that would be a lie. Serious Mainstream Literature–phooey. But without further ado, here are my favorites (in no particular order).

1. Agatha Christie. Never mind the whole mystery aspect of her work, which is justly famed. I read Dame Agatha for her wonderful and pithy insights into character. Nobody understood human nature better. And she can say so much about a character in so few words, deftly employing dialogue. Not like Stephen King, say, who beats you over the head with the character’s whole life story.

2. Edgar Rice Burroughs. The creator of Tarzan has two things going for him. First, nobody, but nobody, ever did a better job of juggling a complicated plot. When it comes to interweaving a bunch of subplots and keeping the action going, he’s up there with Charles Dickens. And second, Burroughs was one of those rare writers who let his imagination rip. I mean, he came up with some very wild stuff! And he knew how to make you believe in it. His Mars/Barsoom novels are his finest work.

Writing with the Spirit

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…

Living with Fantasy

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.

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

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.

What’s Wrong with Un-Christian Fantasy for Young Readers?

“Of course there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen …”
—Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (1911)1

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
James 1:17

Visit the young readers’ section of your local bookstore, and you’ll probably be amazed by the plethora of fantasies. There are still plenty of more or less “realistic” novels, mainly dealing with sexual issues and assorted teenage angst; but it certainly looks like fantasy is king in this market.

In this sea of fantasy, islands of Christianity are few and far between. This seems strange when you consider that among the most famous young readers’ fantasies are those written by C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) and J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings), which are widely—we cannot say universally—recognized as “Christian fantasies” written by “Christian writers.”

But the bulk of it is anything but Christian. Whether the fantasy world described in a novel is openly antagonistic to God and His Word, or simply oblivious to Him, some of these books are bound to fall into young Christian readers’ hands. The booming popularity of fantasy practically guarantees it.

What’s wrong with un-Christian fantasy? How, if you deem it necessary, might you convince your twelve-year-old to stay away from it—or at least equip him to recognize its faults? And given the powerful allure of imaginative fiction, is it possible to offer your child “Christian fantasy” in its place?

Satanism for Young Readers: A Review of His Dark Materials

Books in the trilogy:

The Golden Compass (1995)
The Subtle Knife (1997)
The Amber Spyglass (2000) If you find that you inadvertently become a satanist, you can write to the publisher and get your money back. —Philip Pullman[1]

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read. —Publisher’s Disclaimer

Showered with awards on both sides of the Atlantic; promoted enthusiastically within the public schools; hailed as the greatest children’s entertainment since Harry Potter first bestrode a broomstick; converted into a major Hollywood movie just in time for Christmas: you’ve got to admit Mr. Pullman’s trilogy suddenly has a lot going for it.

But before you run out and buy His Dark Materials as a Christmas present for your twelve-year-old, there’s something important you should know about it.

Philip Pullman has been anything but bashful about his atheism. He proudly proclaims it whenever he spots a microphone.

The message of his books, however, is not atheism.

It’s satanism.

We’re not talking about pop-culture satanism here, a bunch of dolts in black robes dancing around a pentagram. This is real satanism.

No End In Sight

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:

Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator …

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections.

Romans 1:22–26

If you’re in Oakland, California, this spring, you can walk into the Lake Merritt United Methodist Church and enroll in “Wisdom University.”

The current menu of courses includes “Creation Spirituality,” with defrocked Roman Catholic priest Matthew Fox; “Journeying with the Chakras: Evolutionary Energy and Consciousness”; “Sacred Theater: Enacting the Myth of the Goddess”; and many others, including “Voices of the Dark Goddess.” (See http://wisdomuniversity.org/off-sitecourses.html.)

In a full description of this last course, we read: “Participants will explore the antinomian, relational, embodied, cyclical, and chthonic elements of the Divine Female force … By evoking and invoking the power of the Dark Goddess through embodied practice, theory and method, we will together help catalyze the motion of personal and planetary healing.”

A search of the Internet will show that events featuring goddess worship, witchcraft, and non-Christian worship practices may be found in churches representing every mainline Protestant denomination in America. This is in addition to splinter-group churches, unitarian and universalist sects, and overtly pagan groups.

Is it all just silliness to be dismissed with a laugh? Or is it something that all Christians should take seriously?