Moshe Averick writes at Algemeiner.com:

Although the general public is disconcertingly unaware of it, it is a fact that scientists do not have even the slightest clue as to how life could have begun through an unguided naturalistic process absent the intervention of a conscious creative force.

Read more here (don't neglect the comments).

Moshe Averick is author of new book Nonsense of a High Order: The Confused World of Modern Atheism.

Billy Hallowell reports at The Blaze:

Artist Charlie Mackesy recently revealed the details of his journey from atheism to Christianity, telling the CBN News about how a key moment 25 years ago led him to embrace God and truly discover his artistic abilities.

While standing in a London park 25 years ago, Mackesy said that he suddenly had a feeling that "there must be more to this than meets the eye" -- an idea that truly set him on his professional and theological paths. "Jesus quietly introduced me to a journey into finding people really beautiful, which is how my art really began," he told the outlet.

Read more here and here.

Here is Mackesy's website, where you can view his paintings, drawings, lithographs, and sculpture. The "About" page is here.

A San Antonio atheist apparently ignorant of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (which allow for freedom of religion and are rooted in the existence of a real Creator who is the source of unalienable rights -- see the Declaration of Independence) is filing a lawsuit because a big cross is being built on Interstate 37 in Corpus Christi (which means, "Body of Christ," as Todd Starnes points out).

According to Starnes, atheist Patrick Greene "did not file a lawsuit because he believes the cross is tacky. Nor did he file a lawsuit because of potential safety hazards."

Instead, "he filed a lawsuit because the mayor and other city leaders attended a groundbreaking ceremony for the cross," Starnes writes.

"When I saw the mayor in her official position and the council in their official positions were attending a groundbreaking ceremony for a Christian symbol -- that smacked right in the face of the Constitution of the state of Texas," the atheist said, according to Starnes.

Does Mr. Greene mean the Texas Constitution that begins like this?

Humbly invoking the blessings of Almighty God, the people of the State of Texas, do ordain and establish this Constitution.

Christianity as a verifiable and publicly actionable worldview enacted in human history embraces human freedom and elevates the mind, something atheism has never had the intellectual and moral resources to do.

Yes, in their extremism against the enduring American mainstream -- purposely rooted in a real Creator -- folks who are atheists can file lawsuits.

But the worldview of atheistic materialism is intellectually bankrupt and unable -- as a matter of principle -- to ground or sustain human liberty and freedom of thought.

Or you could put it like this: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Ps 14:1). And even more foolishly, the fool says to his society, "There is no God in public life."

Read the entire column by Todd Starnes.

Fox News reports:

Until a few days ago, a war memorial in a public park in North Carolina included a metal sculpture depicting a soldier kneeling in prayer before a cross. But city officials voted to remove the sculpture to settle a lawsuit claiming the artwork promoted Christianity.

King, a small city of about 6,000 people 15 miles north of Winston-Salem, dedicated the memorial about a decade ago. But the statue was removed Tuesday night, immediately after The King city council voted 3-2 to end the lawsuit. Now, an empty hole can be seen where the statue once stood. . . .

As part of the agreement, the King city council also said it would stop flying the Christian flag over the memorial and would pay $500,000 to Americans United for Separation of Church and State for the legal costs the group incurred bringing the lawsuit on behalf of local Afghanistan War veteran Steven Hewett.

Comment: First, nothing in the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits the the city of King, N.C., from supporting artwork that exclusively promotes Christianity. The 1st Amendment explicitly tells Congress (and thus the federal government) that it "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Nor shall Congress prohibit the "free exercise thereof."

The people of King, N.C., are entirely within their constitutional rights to publicly and governmentally affirm their respect for and commitment to historic Christianity.

Second, the entire edifice of the American system of governance rests explicitly upon a real Creator who is the ultimate source of human rights ("unalienable rights"). That foundation is the way of life respected by the Declaration of Independence, which specifically and purposefully states that "all men are created equal" and "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" and that "among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

The purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to fulfill this vision, to incarnate it in our politics, governance, and in our civil society. "To secure these rights," the Declaration states, "Governments are instituted among Men."

Those who reject this liberating stance are therefore embracing not liberty but instead non-liberty. And they do so against the defining mainstream of the American experiment, a mainstream rooted in the verifiable Creator who calls his people to live on the basis of truth across the whole of life, including public life and including political life.

Anti-Declaration extremists know full well what the people of King city "are about" and "what this community stands for." Anti-Declaration extremists know it and they despise it, which is why they roam throughout the land seeking to destroy it.

And they no doubt enjoy a pay day of $500,000, as well. What an outrage -- a free people being forced to fund the liquidation of their liberty.

These rejectors, these executioners of freedom in America, are the true extremists in our midst. 

Therefore, if you are looking for those who war against human freedom, human dignity, and the American mainstream, be sure to take a good look at radical activists and at radical organizations such as People United for the Separation of Church and State.

What they never could have created in the first place, they now seek to destroy.

But freedom shall not rest. What extremists destroy, lovers of freedom and dignity in community with God and man rise up to rebuild, protect, and defend.

American Atheists (AA) last week launched a "billboard campaign featuring a young girl writing a message to Santa Claus that reads: 'Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is to skip church! I'm too old for fairy tales'," reports Stoyan Zaimov at Christian Post. 

"The AA billboards have gone up in major cities like Memphis, Nashville, St. Louis and Fort Smith, as well as in more residential areas near churches and schools," CP reports.

A church in Alma, Ark., responded with its own billboard ad, which states, "Questions, Doubts, Curiosity? All welcome at Grace," according to CP.

"Our goal is not to oppose their message, but rather to respond with love and support. We actually welcome their desire to support those who have felt alienated by believers and start discussion between and among the Atheist and Christian communities," Grace Church states on its website. 

Two comments. First, the church does well to welcome those with doubts, who question, and are curious. The Biblical worldview affirms the human mind as sourced in the rationality of the Creator. Therefore, churches and the Christian community in general ought to be safe places for those who want to consider and discuss whether Christianity is true and therefore warrants their commitment. 

Second, there is no need to think "love and support" is somehow an alternative to opposing the message of atheists. If atheism is false and harmful to human freedom and dignity, to "love and support" includes refuting that unfortunate message. "Speaking the truth in love" is how Ephesians 4:15 puts it.

Jesus epitomizes love, and yet his Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) directly challenged the settled opinion and cultural powers of his day, even as it now challenges the settled opinion and cultural powers in our own day. This is good news for thinking human beings, but not so good news for the fairy tales and superstitions of atheism.

Todd Starnes writes at Fox News:

The injured player was on the ground being tended to by trainers and coaches.

So the Seminole High School football team did what many football teams do. The teenage boys took a knee, bowed their heads and prayed for their injured teammate.

But that simple act of compassion and humanity in Sanford, Florida sparked outrage from the Freedom From Religion Foundation -- a group of perpetually offended atheists from Wisconsin.

An FFRF attorney fired off a letter to the superintendent of Seminole County Public Schools -- accusing them of having an adult lead the prayer for the injured child.

Memo to these tyrannical atheists: Nothing in the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits players, coaches, teachers, cheerleaders, principals, janitors, mayors, governors, pastors, moms or dads, presidents or congressmen, etc., etc., from praying for injured football players at any time or in any venue.

The limitation demanded, by force of law, in the 1st Amendment is on the U.S. Congress. The Congress "shall make no law respecting an establishmet of religion, or probiting the free exercise thereof."

So as long as a coach, player, teacher, or pastor, etc., acting as Congress, is not making a federal law that establishes a national state church over the entire United States, well, they can pray to their hearts' and minds' content.

Equally so, as long as the aforementioned are not making a law that prohibits "the free exercise" of religion, well, they again are in the clear.

It's called freedom, under God. Just like the Declaration of Independence talks about (you remember that part about "unalienable rights" given by the Creator, don't you?). 

And, of course, the point of ratifying the U.S. Constitution was to establish a body politic that fleshed out the norms and principles of the Declaration.

Freedom under God is an everlasting norm of human freedom and dignity.

Not only is this true, but it happens to foster the creation of societies more humane and more free that what one might find in alternative approaches -- say, in the consistently atheistic USSR, the inhumane Red China of Mao, or in the humanity-hating and Christianity-hating Germany under National Socialism.

We know from logic and the evidence of history where the dictates of the likes of the FFRF lead. Go ahead and huff and puff, dear radicalized atheists. 

Meanwhile, we shall stand for freedom, for humanity, which happens to include living in community with God and man. In free America, you get to speak in public. Even to God.

Todd Starnes writes:

The American Humanist Association (AHA) is about to learn a very important lesson -- folks around Gainesville, Georgia, don’t take kindly to out-of-town atheists trying to bully their children.

More than 200 people turned out in defiance of the self-described atheist group early Wednesday morning for an impromptu prayer rally in the middle of the Chestatee High School football field.

 

 

 

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The previous day, the atheists (acting on behalf of a single, unnamed citizen) sent a letter to school officials demanding that the football coaching staff stop participating in team prayers and that they remove all biblical references and religious messages from team documents.

"The American Humanist Association said the coaches are using their positions to promote Christianity and they said it appears that such religious activity is not an isolated incident," Starnes writes.

"Guilty as charged, said Congressman Doug Collins," according to Starnes. "He represents Georgia’s ninth congressional district."

"The liberal atheist interest groups trying to bully Chestatee High School kids say they have a reason to believe that expressions of religious freedom are 'not an isolated event' in Northeast Georgia," Starnes quotes Collins as writing in a statement.

"They’re right," the congressman is quoted as stating. "In Hall County and throughout Georgia’s 9th district, we understand and respect the Constitution and cherish our right to worship in our own way."

Stoyan Zaimov reports at Christian Post:

HBO talk show host Bill Maher said in a Monday interview with the Daily Show's Jon Stewart that he does not find President Barack Obama's Christian faith to be genuine, arguing that he is really an atheist, and mocked former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent comments that the Bible is her biggest influence.

"You know who's a liar about this, is Obama," Maher said about the president's religion.

"Obama is always spouting spiritual [expletive] and I don't believe it for a second," he continued. "He's a drop-dead atheist, absolutely."

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"Media Research Center Pres. Brent Bozell today denounced the CPAC conference, saying 'no conservative should have anything to do with this conference' because it is giving voice to groups, such as American Atheists, that attack conservative principles," CNSNews.com reports.

Here is Bozell's complete statement, as reported by CNSNews.com:

The invitations extended by the ACU, Al Cardenas and CPAC to American Atheists to have a booth is more than an attack on conservative principles. It is an attack on God Himself.

American Atheists is an organization devoted to the hatred of God. How on earth could CPAC, or the ACU and its board of directors, and Al Cardenas condone such an atrocity?

It makes absolutely no difference to me that CPAC and ACU have backed down and removed the booth. I am sick and tired of these games. I will continue to denounce CPAC, ACU and Cardenas.

No conservative should have anything to do with this conference. If you do, you are giving oxygen to an organization destroying the conservative movement.

"The GOP's dilemma," and apparently the conservative movement's dilemma, "is that it is double-minded," as I have noted elsewhere.

"On one side, some embrace a secular vision that sees the Creator of the Founders and of the Declaration as a kind of nice 'religious' touch or 'values' touch. But also in the GOP are those who show an appreciation of the connection between a real Creator and real freedom in the real world.

"What the New Resistance senses is that neither the single-minded secularism of the Democrats nor the double-minded imbalance of the Republicans is an adequate foundation for freedom, whether we are talking about July 1776, March 2010 or 100 years from now."

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"An atheist group in Canada has claimed that a Vancouver billboard company has violated their human rights by refusing to run advertisements carrying 'No God' slogans in the city's downtown area," Christian Post reports.

"The Centre for Inquiry Canada (CFI) plans to put ads featuring a young woman with the words, 'Praying won't help. Doing will' and 'Without God, we're all good,' in downtown Vancouver. However, Pattison Outdoor, the billboard company they contacted, says the adverts do not meet their guidelines," according to CP.

"We made every effort to avoid this situation by making the ads as soft and as gentle as possible," CP quotes Pat O'Brien of CFI telling Canada's Global News as saying. "We just promote our particular world view, which is a humanistic, secular world view," O'Brien says. 

CP reports that the atheists' claim "their message is meant to be pro-secular, not anti-religion."

For more, go here.  

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A new biography of Jack London has just appeared and is garnering lots of reviews. But it does not reveal who "London's God" was. Are your kids picking up his evolutionist religion in literature class?  

From Saving Leonardo:

Jack London was the best-known representative of literary naturalism, a movement that fleshed out in fiction the tenets of philosophical naturalism. These were novelists and playwrights who portrayed humans as biological organisms with no real freedom, determined by their genetic heritage and social environment....

Largely self-taught, London acquired his education by devouring books in the public library. There he came upon the works of Herbert Spencer, a British philosopher who was the most influential popularizer of evolution in nineteenth-century America. Immediately the young writer underwent what one historian calls “a conversion experience.” In Spencer, he found evolution projected onto a large screen, applied not only to biology but also to sociology, art, literature, commerce -- evolution expanded into a complete worldview. It was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” (Charles Darwin borrowed it from him). And he saw the process at work everywhere, not only in nature but also in human society. Spencer, more than anyone else in the nineteenth century, brought evolution to America.

And London, more than anyone else, integrated an evolutionary worldview into American fiction. Through Spencer he discovered Darwin, whose works he read so thoroughly that he could quote entire passages by heart. He embraced other materialist thinkers as well, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet it was Spencer who remained his “god,” the deity to whom “he would remain faithful for the rest of his life.”

The way he served his god was by writing stories expressing Spencer’s evolutionary worldview. In “The Law of Life,” an old Eskimo named Koskoosh is abandoned by the tribe and left to die in the falling snow. Weak, blind, and waiting for the wolves that will inevitably devour him, he reconciles himself to his fate by musing that, in the evolutionary scheme of things, the individual does not really matter anyway. Nature assigns the organism only one task: to reproduce so the species will survive. After that, if it dies, “what did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?”

The story pounds home the naturalistic theme that humans have no higher purpose beyond sheer biological existence.
. . . 

Books like these are taught in the classroom as simply "the classics."  It's up to us to make sure our own children are equipped as critical thinkers to recognize and wrestle with the worldview themes that are being taught -- not just in words, where they're easier to recognize, but also through plot, characterization, and story line.

Billy Hallowell reports at The Blaze:

An Ohio pastor says he was savagely beaten after Sunday’s church service by a man one local outlet called a "self-described militant atheist," who left him with a broken nose, cuts, stitches and bruises.

Rev. Normon Hayes of the Bridge Community Church in North Hampton, Ohio, says he feared for his life during the attack, which unfolded inside the house of worship. The 57-year-old preacher apparently drew the ire of James Maxie, 28, after asking the man’s girlfriend after the service if Maxie was abusing her, Dayton’s WHIO-TV reported.

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"A former Methodist minister-turned-atheist has been fired from her high-ranking post at Harvard University last week after it was discovered that she had falsified her resume," reports the Christian Post.

"Teresa MacBain was formerly a United Methodist pastor in Florida before announcing at the American Atheists convention in 2012 that she had lost her faith and had decided to become an atheist. MacBain's announcement led to a large amount of publicity, including the American Atheists organization naming her the 'Atheist of the Year' for 2012. Additionally, she was named the organization's public relations director in the same year," CP reports.

"Earlier in September, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., offered MacBain the job of project director for the college's Humanist Community Project. The purpose of the newly-created project was to form local communities for humanists across the nation through schools and various organizations. MacBain's job would have been to travel to these various places to start the communities," according to the Christian Post.

"The New York Times profiled MacBain on her new position at the high-ranking university in an article that appeared earlier this month. The article claimed that MacBain had received a Master's of Divinity from Duke University. After the article ran, the newspaper was contacted by the university to clarify it had no record of MacBain's reception of a master's degree," CP reports.

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The Atlantic has an excellent report on a survey asking why young people are leaving the Christian church. The survey was conducted by Larry Alex Taunton of Fixed Point Foundation, and the college students surveyed included members of Secular Student Alliances or Freethought Societies. Most of the students had been raised in Christian churches and families.

In an article titled "Hell Hath No Fury Like an Atheist Scorned," Craig Brown writes at the U.K. Daily Mail:

Over the past few years, evangelical atheists have switched places with fire-and-brimstone Christians: Where once it was the Christians who brooked no disagreement, now it is the atheists. . . .

A weaselly self-righteousness is now the hallmark of the celebrity unbeliever. Meanwhle, it is the Christian who nods diligently in any discussion, taking pains to reassure the atheists how very much he respects their point of view.

Keep reading here for Brown's remarks on Christopher Hitchens, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin.

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The New Atheists say the death of God is good for humanity, but Damon Linker at The Week (UK) disagrees. He writes: 

If atheism is true, it is far from being good news.

Learning that we're alone in the universe, that no one hears or answers our prayers, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, that we have no more intrinsic dignity than non-human and even non-animate clumps of matter, that we face certain annihilation in death, that our sufferings are ultimately pointless, that our lives and loves do not at all matter in a larger sense, that those who commit horrific evils and elude human punishment get away with their crimes scot free -- all of this (and much more) is utterly tragic.

Honest atheists understand this. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, but he called it an "awe-inspiring catastrophe" for humanity, which now faced the monumental task of avoiding a descent into nihilism. Essayist Albert Camus likewise recognized that when the longing for a satisfying answer to the question of "why?" confronts the "unreasonable silence of the world," the goodness of human life appears to dissolve and must be reconstructed from the ground up.

Atheists often accuse Christians of covering up harsh truths with sappy sentimentalism. But Link argues that New Atheists are the ones covering up when they claim atheism makes us free and happy.

"It's one thing to catalogue the manifest faults within this or that religious tradition, which the new atheists have ably done . . . over and over and over again," Linker writes.

"It's quite another to claim, as these authors also invariably do, that godlessness is not only true but also unambiguously good for human beings," Linker protests. "It quite obviously is not. . . . Honesty requires more than sentimental, superficial happy talk."

Hat Tip: Chris Hodgson

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