THE RISE AND TRIUMPH OF MODERN SELF

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I am a fan of Professor Carl Trueman and have and will continue to use him to expose where our western society is headed. Carl Trueman is professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He has written more than a dozen books, including Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History, Luther on the Christian Life, The Creedal Imperative, Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, The Road to Sexual Revolution and his latest book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.

In this interview, John Anderson former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia and Professor Trueman, discuss his latest book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. It deals with self in an age of culture wars, including the societal shift of the perception of happiness and gratification, the technological revolution, and the sexual revolution and its ties to authoritarianism.

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS VIDEO:

00:16 Introducing Professor Carl Trueman 1:00 How does history give us a unique understanding of where we currently are as a society? 3:41 How do today’s trends have similarities to the Reformation? 6:42 Abolition of the private sphere in the technological revolution 8:38 What is the modern self? 11:08 The morality of capitalism and the right to be happy 12:43 The old and new atheism 14:36 The danger of great ideas and fascism 16:35 What is anticulture? 25:00 Social Darwinism 26:18 Cultural Marxism and the sexual revolution 30:42 How is modern society Freudian? 33:29 Gratification and discipline in the modern age 35:42 Victimhood and the modern dissatisfaction phenomenon 37:16 The transgenderism movement and authoritarianism 41:21 The ideological affirmation model 47:00 Freedom of speech is under attack 52:50 Cancel culture led by the elites 54:20 What can we do as individuals amid a divided society? 58:50 How can Christianity shed light on our culture for a return to decent humanity? 1:03:30 Are things going well for progressives?

If you enjoyed this video of John Anderson interviewing Carl Trueman then you might want to subscribe to his channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtnY. as he interviews the world’s foremost thought leaders about today’s pressing social, cultural and political issues. John believes proper, robust dialogue is necessary if we are to maintain our social strength and cohesion. As he puts it; “You cannot get good public policy out of a bad public debate.”

DEFEND GOD’S WORD – GET EQUIPPED

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In the famous tale from Homer’s “Odyssey” the fortress of Troy was defeated by the Greek army leaving a large wooden horse (secretly filled with soldiers) behind as a supposed gift. The Trojans willingly took it into their city leading to their defeat.

This video retraces how ‘deep time’ infiltrated the church in a similar way, and led to the lack of biblical authority we see today.

Non Christian Professor recognizes that Creation demands a Creator

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Natural God by Beth Houston

 

The author of NATURAL GOD – Deism in the Age of Intelligent Design, Beth Houston, is a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of California and several other universities. She covers a lot of material rarely reviewed in books critical of molecules to man evolution. What does she offer to the creation-evolution debate? The answer is a fresh approach, written in an engaging style, that reflects a good understanding of psychology, logic, biology and history. She stresses that science, especially Darwinism, has become a form of dogmatism the needs to be challenged.

One point documented is that Darwin’s central ambition was not to explore the world to let it reveal itself, but to become famous. Houston also carefully documents her position that evolution theory (no meaning, no purpose, no Creator) caused its developer to lose both his aesthetic sensibility and his appreciation of aesthetic beauty. Darwin openly admitted that his appreciation of aesthetics had dynamically changed.

“Up to the age of thirty ….poetry….such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, gave me great pleasure and even as a schoolboy I took great delight in Shakespeare. I have also said that formerly art and pictures gave me considerable pleasure and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for art and music.”

Darwin admitted that the ” loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probable to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of nature.”

Beth Houston concludes that what was wrong with Darwin was that “the dimension that gives life lived to the fullest its zing” was gone.

“By the time he had finished ORIGIN and certainly his later Autobiography, beauty had ceased to be beauty at all ….beauty was observed and used like a prostitute for a distant satisfaction of an immediate need, never for love of beauty for its own sake, never for the pleasure of intimate contact (with nature).

She goes on to say, “Mechanistic agnostics like Darwin…. know intellectually that nature is beautifully constructed while emotionally denying that it is. The aesthetic atrophies when the spirit does, or when the spirit lies dormant and inactivated. It is … mechanistic determinism and Darwinian natural selection.

There is never any death of God, only murder or suicide of the killer’s own God – given faculties.”

Houston speculates that: “Darwin’s insistence that natural selection is ultimately brutal is a projection of …. the brutal side of his own nature. Natural selection justifies brutality and sanctifies the guilt. The brutal cannot face a God who might not condone brutality. Therefore, religions create their gods in the image of their own brutality to justify and sanctify brutality, and science creates its god, natural selection, the shadow of civilized man, for the same purpose.

Summary: Professor Houston makes a convincing case that the natural world provides clear evidence for a creator. She also documents the adverse effects of Darwinism on society and persons using Darwin himself as a prime example.

Extract from book review by Jerry Bergman, Journal of Creation Vol 29, 2015

 

 

Darwin’s destructive influence on the world.

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Apostate - The men

The fact that Christianity has lost an enormous amount of cultural influence in Europe, America and even Australia is without dispute. A recent book, Apostate – The Men who Destroyed the Christian West documents how and why the decline and fall of Western Christian civilization occurred.

Charles Darwin is of course the dominant person on the list of men who destroyed the Christian west.

Darwinian Evolution theories now dominate at least 99% of higher education in America, only 1% of all public and private universities maintain a God centered epistemology and metaphysics in the matter of origins. In 1850 (before Darwin and the Theory of Evolution) virtually all leading scientists and philosophers were Christian men. The world they inhabited was created by God. He had created wise laws that brought about the adaption of all organisms to one another and to their environment. The basic principles proposed by Darwin stand in total conflict with this worldview.

Eliminating God from science enabled Godlessness to prevail everywhere, in classrooms, media, entertainment and politics. Charles Darwin’s naturalistic materialism has so changed the Western metaphysics that the average person hardly senses God’s providential interaction with the world, let alone His existence. The Southern Baptist denomination reports 88% of children raised in Christian families leave the church as soon as they leave home (p. 254)

Swanson concludes: “the impact that Charles Darwin has had on the lives of hundreds of millions of Christian families is overwhelming. It is an undeniable fact that the Christian faith was far stronger 150 years ago in Europe and America. Now their 21st century grandchildren are pagans, atheists, homosexuals, witches and atheist scientists. The sheer number that will be in hell because of Charles Darwin’s commitment to ‘murder God’ is too much – and too tortuous to fathom.” (p. 142).

The other men Swanson says played a role in the decline of Christianity, Hitler, Karl Marx, John Dewey, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, , Friedrich Nietzsche were all powerfully influenced by Charles Darwin.

As stated in my last post, sadly leaders of the largest Church denominations have unwittingly accepted Evolution as fact and distorted Scripture to fit, with disastrous consequences. Fortunately, God has raised up organisations such as Creation Ministries to equip His Church with powerful resources such as the recent “Evolution’s Achilles’Heels” to counter this threat. Check out this valuable resource on http://www.creation.com.

 

EXCITING DOCUMENTARY – EVOLUTION’S ACHILLES HEEL

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This 96-minute documentary interviews 15 Ph.D. scientists about the greatest weaknesses of modern evolutionary theory. The public generally only hears one side of the origins debate, but with stunning animations and dramatic footage, Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels presents a powerful ‘warts and all’ critique of textbook evolutionary orthodoxy. You’ll also discover just how much this debate impacts your view of yourself and the world around you.

“Never before have this many scientists been brought together for a project of this type. … Visually stunning 3D animations and dramatic footage help to show how the theory’s supposed strengths are, in fact, its fatal flaws—Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels.”
CFDb (Christian Film Database)

“If we could award Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels more than five Doves, our best rating, we would! … the fifteen experts in this film blow open the door for God’s foot, the Grand Designer, to walk in boldly.”
The Dove Foundation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEkJezGRJPc

You need to get the video when it becomes available in November from http://www.creation.com

Professor’s atheistic pulpit—his classroom

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David-Barash

Professor David Barash

Biology Professor David P. Barash from the University of Washington now thinks that his biology class is the proper forum for explicitly attacking his students’ religious convictions, as he shamelessly announced in his recent New York Times op-ed.1

Barash says, in a class on animal behaviour, Evolution proves that (a) living things were not designed, (b) humans are not exceptional, and (c) God cannot be both all-powerful and all-good.

This religion-bashing seminar is a severe abuse of power. As a public university professor, Barash’s role should not be to proselytize, but to educate—fairly informing students about all sides of legitimate academic disputes. Sadly, however, Barash’s approach to education is nothing more than a prejudicial, intellectually dishonest attempt to indoctrinate students into his own anti-Christian worldview.

If Barash’s New York Times summary is truly representative of his teaching, he hardly even acknowledges, much less addresses, arguments that challenge evolution or support biblical creation. Instead of dealing with the best creationist arguments, he presents caricatures that informed creationists are careful to avoid (e.g., denigrating evolution because it is called a ‘theory’).

Instead of allowing students to hear from all sides of the controversy, Barash tells them evolution is beyond question. He insists, “Teaching biology without evolution would be like teaching chemistry without molecules.”1 His statement would clearly have been news to leading chemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Philip Skell (1918–2010), the ‘father of carbene [CH2] chemistry’, who pointed out: ‘Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor for that matter did Alexander Fleming’s discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin’.

Furthermore, are Barash’s students prompted to consider how men like Linnaeus, Pasteur, and Mendel founded sub-disciplines of biology without any help from Darwin? Are they told that Dr Marc Kirschner, founding chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, has admitted, “Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all”? Have they heard how evolutionary assumptions have often hindered scientific investigations, encouraging scientists to write off so-called ‘vestigial organs’, and ‘junk DNA’, for example, as non-functional by-products of the evolutionary process? Perhaps Barash himself would do well to learn about how creationists accept rapid adaptation and even speciation, and yet recognize why these types of changes are precisely the wrong sort of change needed to turn microbes into men.

In the centres of intellectual power today, creationists and other Darwin dissenters have a hard time maintaining their positions even when keeping their heads down, and they often get expelled anyway. But an evolutionary professor can openly proclaim that his lectures will argue against basic truths of Christianity, and there is hardly a public outcry.

If creation is disqualified from public education because it is too ‘religious’, then why isn’t Barash called on the carpet, for getting too ‘religious’ as well?

  1. Barash, D.P., God, Darwin, and My Biology Class,New York Times, 27 September 2014; nytimes.com.

Abbreviated article, “Darwinist Professor David Barash gets ‘theological’ in the classroom” by Keaton Halley and Jonathan Sarfati on http://www.creation.com

Universities breeding atheists

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Since its initial release Ray Comfort’s video “Evolution vs God” has garnered thousands of hateful, demeaning and even violent comments from evolutionists. After watching this video you will understand why people who attend universities come out believing that science has proved God does not exist certainly not the God of the Bible.

Ray Comfort was criticized relentlessly for his use of “kind” and not “species”. However the observations of the living world are highly consistent with the Biblical described concept of original created kinds, and inconsistent with the idea of evolution. From Genesis 1, the ability to produce offspring, i.e. to breed with one another, defines the original created kinds. We can cross-breed a zebra and a horse (to produce a ‘zorse’), a lion and a tiger (a liger or tigon), or a false killer whale and a dolphin (a wholphin) so these are the same kind.

 

Creation is FOUNDATIONAL to knowledge of GOD

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Prof Bernard Brandstater

So says, medical pioneer Professor Bernard Brandstater. He is in his eighties and still doing part-time operating theatre work at Loma Linda University, California. He has many firsts in his distinguished medical career. He introduced prolonged intubation to assist infant breathing. This landmark technology spread rapidly. It triggered the quick appearance of neonatal intensive care units around the world.

“God made us”, says Professor Brandstater. “That’s His identity: the Creator, the sovereign Lord of the Universe. God as Creator is foundational to our understanding of anything”. According to Professor Brandstater, a Creation that deserves a central place in our worldview cannot include a long process that is abhorrent to us with millions of years of pain, suffering and death. The process of Creation must fit the character and purposes of God who does all things well, who is generous and merciful and delights in beauty. This is the God we can trust, seek to know and love. The Creation is clearly described in God’s Word as a brief time-limited event with a clean ending on Day Six and a celebration the following day. Moreover God tells us why he made the universe in six days, it is a pattern for mankind, six days we will work and rest the seventh day and it’s significant we still have a seven-day week. Dare we add a drawn out process that distorts this picture. Sadly most people do, adding long ages of evolutionary time. As Darwin’s Theory of Evolution does not make sense under the scrutiny of the latest scientific findings so why should we bow to such conjectures? God’s mode of creating tells us about His mind, His heart. In the Bible there is no indication of a long incubation. “He spoke and it was done.” Psalm 33:9. Evil and death certainly exist in the world today but they came later, not as part of God’s original Creation. They were a tragic result of the FALL; mankind’s disobedience. For the full article by Don Batten on Professor Bernard Brandsater, Medical Pioneer: Creation Foundational go to http://www.creation.com

APPLIED MATHEMATICS JOURNAL apologizes for censoring Intelligent Design article.

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University of Texas mathematics professor Granville Sewell submitted an article critical of neo-Darwinism (“A Second Look at the Second Law”) to the journal Applied Mathematics Letters, it was peer-reviewed, and accepted for publication.

Unfortunately a Darwinist blogger wrote to the journal editor to complain about the article, who then retracted it. This delighted the pro-Darwin blogosphere, which speculated that the article was withdrawn because it wasn’t really peer-reviewed, or because it was somehow substandard.

But the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, has now agreed to issue a public apology, reiterating that “Dr Sewell’s article was peer-reviewed and accepted for publication” and making it clear that his article was not withdrawn because of “any errors or technical problems found by the reviewers or editors”.

However, Applied Mathematics Letters did not agree to reinstate Sewell’s article, although it did grant him the right to continue to post online the digital pre-print version prepared by the journal.

One suspects that the editor was only too aware of what happened to evolutionary biologist Richard Sternberg after he, as editor of the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, had allowed an article on intelligent design to be published in 2004.

Ben Steins documentary video “EXPELLED – Intelligence Not Allowed shows just how fanatical certain evolutionists are about silencing argument, as does the book Slaughter of the Dissidents both available at creation.com/store.