Using Public Funds to Establish Atheist Beliefs
by Lenny Esposito
What counts as state-sponsored indoctrination? That's a question that has increasingly come under examination, especially with regard to the establishment of religion. In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise." The amendment limits the power of the Federal government from creating or giving favor to a specific religious entity or belief system.
Atheist advocacy groups have taken the first portion of that statement, known as the establishment clause, and interpreted it very broadly. Organizations such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation and the Americans for the Separation of Church and State continue to file lawsuits against cities or public agencies for displaying crosses on hilltops or Nativity scenes at Christmas. They complain that these displays amount to an endorsement of one kind of viewpoint, and since their content is religious it violates the establishment clause.
Such charges have followed into even the public school system, where attempts to teach the problems with neo-Darwinian evolutionary models have been shut down. Neo-Darwinism has at its core unguided and purposeless changes in the genome, which are then established and propagated through natural selection. If one were to challenge this viewpoint, one must presuppose some kind of non-purposeless process; we call such causes intelligent and the challenging idea is labeled intelligent design.
by John Hendryx
I often hear classic Arminians, like Jerry Walls and Roger Olson, make declarations that God loves ALL people equally without exception. But do they really believe this? If they were consistent with their Arminian beliefs, it would be much more honest for them to say that God loves all people CONDITIONALLY. That is, He only fully shows His love for those who meet the condition of faith and the rest will experience His just wrath in hell. This is not conditional love you say? Just ask an Arminian what they would do if they had a rebellious child who spurned their love but whose life was in danger in a burning house -- would he as a parent wait for his child to first meet a condition before he would run in rescue his child? or would he run in and make certain the child was safe regardless of the child's will at the time because he (the parent) loves his child and knows better than the child what is good for him? This everyday life example reveals that Arminian love is not really what we think of as love at all. It is what we call conditional love.
Almost without exception when I present John 6:37 (and 6:63, 65) to a professing Arminian they simply ignore it and change the subject, but the other day I encountered one of those rare exceptions. As you know in the passage Jesus declares, "All those the Father gives to me will come to me." The Arminian claimed the meaning was that all those the Father FORESAW would come to faith in Jesus, the Father gave to Jesus that they might come to faith in him. Ummm! Not only is this meaning not there and arbitrarily imported into the text but you can, perhaps, find no better example of circular reasoning.