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.

‘He Who Would Valiant Be’

I have no idea whether the hymn I selected will appear here. Everything on this computer is chaos today.

What I wanted–and I don’t know if that’s what you’re seeing–was He Who Would Valiant Be, accompanied by video of a scenic, soothing little ride on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway.

Pray for my head not to explode today.

‘The Difference Between Us’ (2014)

Now let’s see if I can avoid botching it again, and post this yesterday and schedule it for publication today.

https://leeduigon.com/2014/03/29/the-difference-between-us/

What they believe is several orders of magnitude sillier than anything that we believe.

‘There Is No God like Our God’ (2015)

What a dazzling light was switched on in my mind, when I realized that God is a person–like I am, like you are. He made us in His image: that’s why we are persons, too.

And what’s the most important thing to any person?

Love! What else could it be?

https://leeduigon.com/2015/11/20/there-is-no-god-like-our-god/

Working Now…

See the source image

I’m finally ready to type up my review of Curtain by Agatha Christie, the story of Hercule Poirot’s last case. It might seem kind of an odd thing to publish in a magazine devoted to Christianity, but I think it’s pertinent.

Here’s what I find so interesting. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was written almost exactly 100 years before Curtain; and in the interval between the two, the Christian culture of Britain and the other Western countries changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. In what way did it change, and how did it happen?

Sort of a challenge.

Well, here goes–

‘Away in a Manger’ (Fountainview Academy)

Youtube has this mislabeled as Joy to the World, which is what I expected to hear when I clicked it. But what comes out is this beautiful performance, by the kids at Fountainview Academy, of Away in a Manger.

Think about it. To a world boiling over with wickedness, suffering, sin, and death, God sends, to repair it and redeem it… a baby in a manger.

Christianity is an excitingly wild idea. The more you think on it, the wilder it gets. But as C.S. Lewis said, “He’s not a tame lion.”

An Ignoramus’ Gripe Against ‘Religion’

Image result for images of chattering dummy

Wind ’em up and see ’em flap their jaws. No thought necessary.

We were reading an interview with a Scotch actor whose name is not important: call him Legion. They asked him, “What makes you angry?” and he answered, “Religion!” And went on to say, like they all say, that “religion” causes all the world’s wars and every other problem you can think of, and what a paradise this world would be without it, imagine no possessions, be sure to wear a flower in your hair, etc. etc.

Completely disregarding, or else completely unaware of, the fact that communist governments, officially and aggressively atheist, murdered more people in the 20th century alone than all the world’s religions put together managed to bump off in a thousand years. Or two thousand.

Heart of stone, and head of thickest fat–does he really, truly believe in some kind of atheist utopia? What does he think it would be like–a theme park for sex, drugs, and not having to pay for things?

It’s not surprising to hear an actor from the UK say such things. It’s sort of required of them. But I would like to know where they get it in the first place. From their parents? Their schools? What they see and hear on television, growing up? Is there someone who sits down and teaches them how to be morons?

It takes a special kind of stupidity not to see the camps, the barbed wire, the piles of dead bodies strewn in communism’s wake.

It is true that Christians throughout Western history have not been good Christians. It was not Our Lord Jesus Christ who told us to launch the Thirty Years’ War. We have not obeyed the word of God. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with God’s laws. No one proposes to discard man’s laws because criminals break the law. Although I can easily imagine a leftid coming up with that.

Christianity–and even, to a certain extent, other religions–seeks to restrain the ferocious evil that dwells in the human heart.

Atheism’s habit is to turn it loose.

Mao and Stalin, Pol Pot and Castro–you could look it up.

Pagans and Christians

I read a very wise thing in John MacArthur’s Parables. Consider it well:

“The underlying error… the belief that people can gain God’s favor by being good enough–is the central lie that dominates all false religion.”

In pagan religions, worshipers are always trying to buy the gods’ favor, or, as it were, hire the gods as their employees, by promising to do this or that good work, or sacrificing this or that prize animal. And where does it get them?

In Homer’s Iliad, Zeus, the king of the gods, is upset by the sight of Hector fleeing from Achilles. Zeus exclaims, “Confound it, I love that man whom I see hunted round those walls! I am grieved for Hector, who has sacrificed many an ox on the heights of Ida or the citadel of Troy. And now there is Prince Achilles, chasing him round the city of Priam. What do you think, gods? Just consider, shall we save him from death or shall we let Achilles beat him?” (W.H.D. Rouse translation)

And of course, in spite of Hector’s piety, in spite of all the sacrifices he gave the gods throughout his life, it turned out Zeus couldn’t save him, after all.

In contrast to every  religion ever invented by man, Christianity teaches that we cannot hire God, we cannot buy His favor, there is no magic word or special kind of prayer that will compel Him to do our bidding.

Instead, His favor, His grace, our salvation, eternal life, forgiveness of sins–these are all free gifts, given by a sovereign God and paid for, paid for on the cross, by Jesus Christ the Son of God. God saves us; but when we reach for our wallets, we discover the bill has already been paid. By Jesus Christ.

At the root of it, Christianity is very simple. How simple? In Acts 16:30, during a crisis in which he was within an inch of taking his own life, the jailer in Philippi asks of Paul and Silas, temporarily his prisoners, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”

And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. (v.31)

And that’s the whole theology.

You couldn’t possibly do enough good works, sacrifice enough bulls or rams, donate enough money to the church, to earn, to deserve, eternal life. But God can give it to you. It’s as simple as that.

A Satire That’s Become Reality (Aaaagh!)

Remember Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, who predicted the disaster and wound up saying, “I hate being right, all of the time”? I’m beginning to get a sense of how he felt.

Just over two years ago, in the June 26, 2011, edition of NewsWithViews ( http://www.newswithviews.com ), I published a satire entitled, “A New Bible for a New Age.” It was a satire making fun of liberal churchmen trying to rewrite the Bible to make it conform to their own asinine and indefensible beliefs. My New Age Bible included a “New New Testament.”

And behold–now there really is a New New Testament, compiled by some clown from the Jesus Seminar–an outfit devoted to “disproving” the divinity of Christ–and the usual gaggle of renegade churchmen and ministerettes from the usual flatline demoninations. (Sorry, but I don’t want to call them “denominations” anymore. “Demoninations” is more accurate.)

What they did was to add to the New Testament ten “new books,” actually old books rejected by the Church centuries ago for being full of Gnostic heresies. This is not just diluting the New Testament; it’s poisoning the well.

Why did they do that? Says the publisher’s PR guy, for two reasons:

*To advance a feminist agenda

*And to stress “the importance of the teachings of Christ, rather than His redemptive death, which has alienated Christians [sic] who seek to square their faith with reason.”

So, as is always the case with these fimbos, their real object of worship is not God, but themselves and their own sin-corrupted, severely limited power of “reason.” And their authority is not the word of God, but what they think the word of God should be. None of this “redemption” stuff, thank you! Wonderful people like these don’t need redemption.

But in the meantime, how about that? I write a satire, a lampoon, a joke–and then they do the very thing that I imagined them doing! Right down to the bleedin’ title: A New New Testament.

Satires are not supposed to come true; but this one did.

God help us.