Commentary, analysis and opinion.

World Vision, Christian organization? Part 1

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Marsha West probes for answers to some of the questions World Vision supporters have been asking since the organization shocked the Christian community by announcing its plan to help advance the gay agenda:

The dust has settled a bit since Christian humanitarian aid organization World Vision’s March 24 announcement that it would hire gay couples who are legally married in the state in which they reside. Since “World Vision-gate” remains a hot topic, it’s time for some introspection; likewise to do some digging to find out if WV truly is a Christian organization, as it claims.

When WV announced its decision to hire gay people, not surprisingly Bible believing Christians found the decision unsettling. Clearly, WV’s Board of Directors chose to ignore the plain teaching of Scripture regarding homosexuality. As a result, a large number of believers, including some high-profile evangelical leaders, took to the blogosphere in protest and thousands stormed WV’s website. Board members hadn’t counted on the huge uproar their unbiblical decision would cause. Certainly they expected WV’s financial support to take a minor hit from unhappy sponsors. But evidently no one anticipated just how big the hit would be. According to one source, 10,000 sponsors pulled out.

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Read Part 2

Addressing Concerns Over ‘Son of God’ Film

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Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. Ephesians 5:11

Not surprisingly, the movie “Son of God” has created quite a stir in the Christian community. Before I gave the theater my money I read several reviews, blog posts, Facebook comments and viewed TV interviews of husband and wife team Mark Burnett and Roma Downey promoting their film. Roma is a familiar face to many and is best-known for her role on the successful TV show “Touched by An Angel.” Mark Burnett is the executive producer of a string of hit TV shows such as “Survivor,” “The Voice, “Celebrity Apprentice,” “Shark Tank,” and he has won several Emmys.

When I first heard that another full-length feature film about the life of Christ was coming to the silver screen, I was skeptical for several reasons. First, Mark and Roma are Catholic and I was concerned that the movie would be produced from this perspective; a perspective that in many cases I disagree with.

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Big ‘Gay’ Brother is Watching You

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Eric Holmberg – Christian Apologist, Filmmaker, Writer, Reformer – writes:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. George Orwell, 1984

In Orwell’s classic dystopian novel, the fascist government of Oceania and its enigmatic dictator Big Brother attempt to brainwash the masses to accept non sequiturs like “war is peace” and “ignorance is strength.” But in the real world such paradoxical memes inevitably lead to mindlessness – or madness – or are forced to eventually give way to the constraints of cognitive dissonance: the psychological stress that results from holding conflicting ideas or values simultaneously. Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies have shown that people are profoundly motivated, consciously or subconsciously, to achieve consonance – to reduce this conflict or dissonance – by eliminating or at least suppressing one of the conflicting ideas.

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God Have Mercy: Nation’s First Birthing Center / Abortion Clinic

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Tami Jackson, writing on The Black Sphere:

The assault on our national character took a giant offensive drive with Roe v. Wade: SCOTUS, with no reliance on precedence or sound jurisprudence, ruled that a woman’s convenience out-weighed the right to life of her unborn child.

With one careless ruling, America commenced aborting babies.

Far from the Leftists’ mantra, “Safe and Rare,” abortions were not safe to mother nor child, and were less and less rare. Over 56 million unborn children “terminated” since 1973 is not rare: that is an infanticide of Hitlerian proportions.

Each year since 1973 has brought new, grisly abortion methods and later term procedures.

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A Culture of Counterfeit Christians

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Have you ever run over a dead skunk in the road? I have, during a heat wave. The smell got into my tires and permeated our garage for days! I’ll go out on a limb and say that no one takes pleasure in the highly offensive smell of skunk spray, dead or alive. My point in telling you this is that to God the stench of sin is much worse than skunk. For an example of just how much the Lord hates sin, grab a cup of coffee and read First and Second Kings. Given our penchant for getting things fast, here’s an illustration of the way in which God dealt with Baasha, one of Israel’s most ruthless kings:

Since I exalted you out of the dust and made you leader over my people Israel, and you have walked in the way of Jeroboam and have made my people Israel to sin, provoking me to anger with their sins, behold, I will utterly sweep away Baasha and his house, and I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat. Anyone belonging to Baasha who dies in the city the dogs shall eat, and anyone of his who dies in the field the birds of the heavens shall eat. (1 Kings 16:1–4)

God had already destroyed Jeroboam for his flagrant sins, yet Baasha repeated the same mistakes. God rebuked the Israelites for their sinful ways and vowed to punish them.

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LGBT Film Fest a Labor of Faith for Two Seminary Students

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The liberal L.A. Times would have us believe that there is a category called LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) evangelical Christian. Since the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin against God, this is a contradiction in terms. According to the writer, Kurt Streeter, instead of repenting (turning) from their sin and doing what’s right in God’s eyes, some in the LGBT community have made a choice to ignore the clear teaching of Scripture and to falsely claim they’re evangelicals.

Chelsea McInturff and Samantha Curley were eager for a public conversation about film, gay sexuality and Christian life, but they weren’t sure whether it was the right time — or the right place.

They stood nervously inside an auditorium at Pasadena’s evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary last spring, worried the drama they were about to screen –— about a teen coming out as lesbian — would end up offending an audience of students and professors who didn’t necessarily approve of its story line.

“Should we even do this?” they recently recalled wondering. “Maybe we should we just skip this one and move on.”

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Genetically Modified Babies

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A few days ago the FDA participated in a summit that was held to consider radical biological procedures that would produce genetically modified human beings. Marcy Darnovsky. executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, wrote this article for the New York Times. Darnovsky believes these modification techniques are dangerous because of their medical risks and societal implications:

These techniques would change every cell in the bodies of children born as a result of their use, and these alterations would be passed down to future generations.

The F.D.A. calls them mitochondrial manipulation technologies. The procedures involve removing the nuclear material either from the egg or embryo of a woman with inheritable mitochondrial disease and inserting it into a healthy egg or embryo of a donor whose own nuclear material has been discarded. Any offspring would carry genetic material from three people – the nuclear DNA of the mother and father, and the mitochondrial DNA of the donor.

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Enough With the Gay Mania

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Quin Hillyer, contributing editor of National Review, implores: “How about a little old-fashioned privacy for sexuality of all stripes?”

It’s one thing to be tolerant of what once were known as “alternative lifestyles.” It’s another thing to be asked to celebrate them, as the exuberant mythologizers of Michael Sam and Johnny Weir ask us to do. And it is way beyond the pale to hold forth on any sort of sex life — perhaps apart from self-restraint — as if it’s a form of heroism.

Yet the culture of the professional Left, enthusiastically aided by the establishment media, is going bonkers in pushing active homosexuality (or any one of several exotic variants thereof) as an absolute virtue. One can hardly turn around these days without facing, in fiction or in real life, what amounts to homosexual chic. From the amount of primetime air time afforded to gay Americans, one would think they constitute at least a large minority of the population, rather than the 3 to 5 percent they actually do.

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Back to Christian Basics

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Apologist and ethicist Bill Muehlenberg reminds us how important it is for Christians to read and meditate on the Word of God daily.

One of the most tragic realities of contemporary Western Christianity is the fact that so many Christians simply do not read their Bibles. Certainly many – if not most – do not read the Bible regularly, daily, and determinedly. This has to be one of the great scandals of today’s church.

How can we claim to be lovers of God and disciples of Christ if we neglect perhaps his greatest gift to us: his written Word? Scripture is not just our guidebook, our rock, and our sustenance, but it contains God’s love letters to his own people.

How can we claim to love God yet ignore and treat with disdain his love letters to us? Just remember when you were first in love, and perhaps separated from your beloved. You looked forward every day to a letter in the mailbox, or today, an email in your inbox. You could not wait to hear from the one you loved.

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The Other Shoe Drops in Kentucky: Federal Court Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage in the Commonwealth

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Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, expresses his dismay over a Kentucky judge’s decision to grant full recognition to same-sex marriages legally performed in other states:

As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.” Those are the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, drawn from his dissent in the case United States v. Windsor, handed down last year. In that case, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, ruling that the United States government could not refuse to recognize same-sex marriages. The Court struck down a law passed by massive majorities in both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. While the Court did not rule that all fifty states must immediately legalize same-sex marriage, it set the stage for this eventual result. Justice Scalia made that point clear in his dissent.

Now, Justice Scalia’s prophecy has come to pass in Kentucky. Today, U. S. District Judge John G. Heyburn declared that Kentucky’s ban on recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states violates the equal protection clause of the U. S. Constitution. Judge Heyburn did not rule that Kentucky must now marry same-sex couples, but that the state must grant full recognition to same-sex marriages legally performed in other states. Nevertheless, Judge Heyburn recognized that his decision points to that eventual result, stating that “there is no doubt that Windsor and this Court’s analysis suggest a possible result to that question.” If anything, that is an understatement. As with Justice Kennedy in his majority opinion in Windsor, Judge Heyburn now clearly points to the striking down of any state’s prohibition on same-sex marriage. As Justice Scalia predicted, we did not have to wait long for the other shoe.

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