Many people today would never think to post anything critical of LGBT. That includes many “conservative” Christians and even many popular Christian apologists. But, I have to speak about these things, because I have to defend the Bible on every point where it disagrees with the culture. It doesn’t make me feel good. It doesn’t make me popular. But it has to be done.

Here is the latest news story from Christian Post:

A same-sex Georgia couple who pleaded guilty to aggravated sodomy against their two adopted sons were recently sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole.

Zachary and William Zulock, a wealthy couple who adopted two boys with the help of a now-defunct Christian adoption agency, faced sentences for multiple other charges, including child molestation, sexual exploitation of children and incest, according to a press release from the Alcovy Judicial Circuit District Attorney Randy McGinley.

“These two defendants truly created a house of horrors and put their extremely dark desires above everything and everyone else,” McGinley said.

[…]Judge Jeffrey L. Foster sentenced both men on Dec. 19 to a century in prison, followed by life on probation.

I remember prior to the legalization of same-sex marriage, many people on the secular left put yellow equal signs on their cars, to signal their support for same-sex marriage. And not just famous atheists from Seattle, Washington who like to talk about “objective morality”. Even many “compassionate” Christians put these yellow equal signs on their cars. Big corporations slapped the yellow equal signs on their web sites, too. They signaled support for homosexual behaviors and lifestyles. The people who endorsed same-sex marriage were saying that gay relationships are the exact same thing as opposite sex married couples. And that gay couples should be allowed to adopt children not biologically related to them, just like heterosexual married couples.

Now, if you look in the Bible, you’ll find that God doesn’t see things the same way as “don’t judge” atheists or as “just love everyone” Christians or as big “celebrate diversity” corporations.

Here’s what Jesus says about marriage.

Matthew 19:1-11:

1 Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the region of Judea beyond the Jordan.

2 And large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?”

4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female,

5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?

6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

To be a Christian, minimally, is to be a follower of Jesus Christ. That means that we accept what Jesus teaches, on whatever he teaches about. We don’t overturn the teachings of Jesus in order to make people who are rebelling against God feel better about their rebellion. It is central to the Christian worldview that Christians care more about what God thinks of them than what non-Christians think of them. In fact, Christians are supposed to be willing to endure shaming, blaming, and even suffering, rather than side with non-Christians against God’s authority.

By the way, it’s not the first time that we’ve had stories like this about gay men adopting boys.

Not the first time:

This story reminds me of the Two Gay Dads story that I wrote about previously, where a white female progressive journalist did a fawning story about two gay dads and their new boy adopted from Russia. She titled her article, “Two Dads are Better than One”.  She was so proud of herself for being all affirming, tolerant and compassionate. Same-sex marriage is something to be proud of, she said, because children do better with two gay dads.

But then, the Sydney Morning Herald reported how this example of gay adoption went awry.

Excerpt:

Standing before an American court convicted of the most heinous of child sex crimes, the double lives of Australian citizen Mark J. Newt0n and his long-term boyfriend Peter Tru0ng were laid bare.

[…]Moments later Newt0n was sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing the boy he and Truong, 36 from Queensland, had ‘‘adopted’’ after paying a Russian woman $8000 to be their surrogate in 2005.

Police believe the pair had adopted the boy ‘‘for the sole purpose of exploitation’’. The abuse began just days after his birth and over six years the couple travelled the world, offering him up for sex with at least eight men, recording the abuse and uploading the footage to an international syndicate known as the Boy Lovers Network.

[…]Evidence before the court revealed the abuse began before the couple returned to Australia. One video is said to show Newt0n performing a sex act on the boy when he was less than two weeks old.

Judge Barker said the pair brainwashed the child to believe the sexual abuse was normal. Newt0n was also said to have trained the boy to deny any inappropriate behaviour if he was ever questioned by authorities.

Newt0n and Truong came to the attention of police in August 2011 after their connections to three men arrested over the possession of child exploitation material came to light. The couple had visited the three men in the US, New Zealand and Germany with their son.

[…]Newt0n and Truong claimed they were being targeted because they were homosexual.

I could show you a dozen examples like that without even trying. Democrat judge in Wisconsin. Duke University administrator. Penn State University coach. USC professor. Head of a Scottish youth organization. San Francisco Human Rights Commission staffer. Same-sex marriage activists. Seattle mayor. Co-founder of g4y advocacy organizations. Designers of education curriculums designed to sexualize children. It’s everywhere and it happens all the time. Children don’t have any rights, only selfish adults have rights. This is the core belief of the secular left. They want to get rid of Christianity from the culture, because Christians side with the children against the adults. They don’t want Christian rules slowing down their pursuit of pleasure. They don’t want Christians to offend them by disagreeing with their actions.

UPDATE: We just posted our interview with Dr. Günter Bechly on the Knight and Rose Show podcast. Subscribe to the Knight and Rose Show wherever you listen to podcasts, and we also upload them to YouTube, Rumble and Odysee.

Lately, when I ask parents and church leaders how a person comes to Christ, the responses I get most often is that people need to be invited into a welcoming community first and foremost. To me, this is a very strange answer. When I think about Jesus working miracles so that people who didn’t believe in him would have reasons to trust him, I don’t see this emphasis on welcoming community.

Along those lines, I found a very interesting faith story at Salvo magazine, written by a prominent paleontologist named Dr. Günter Bechly.

First, let’s see his biography, though:

Günter Bechly, PhD, is a German paleontologist, senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and senior research scientist at Biologic Institute in Washington state. He has written about 160 scientific publications, described over 180 new species, and been advisor for 3 BBC nature documentaries.

Here is the captivating introduction to his faith story:

When atheists hear conversion stories that begin with, “I was a staunch atheist and then . . . ”, they tend to roll their eyes and doubt the claim. However, this is exactly what happened to me. I had been a 150-percent atheist and materialist for almost forty years before I embarked on a spiritual journey that ultimately, after many twists and turns, led me to belief in God and Christianity. I had no life crisis, no epiphany, and no spiritual experiences at all. It was the result of purely rational, scientific, philosophical, and historical arguments that gradually changed my mind as a scientist. Here is my story.

I grew up in a medium-sized town in southwestern Germany, where the Mercedes-Benz factory is located. My parents were both irreligious. My mother was simply not interested in religion, and my father was agnostic. We never talked about religion or God, and we never prayed or visited any church service. My parents pushed to opt me out of religion class in school, which was then still compulsory, resulting in my being ridiculed as the village atheist.

I first saw churches from the inside as a young adult, but it was only as a tourist taking photos.

He had a fabulous career and a dream job in paleontology, but he started looking for answers when he realized the problems with naturalism:

It all started in my late thirties when I became interested in modern physics. I read popular books by Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Michio Kaku, John Barrow, David Deutsch, Brian Greene, and others. I was fascinated by the weirdness of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, as well as the mind-blowing implications of modern cosmology.

While I had started from a materialist, clockwork-universe perspective, I soon discovered certain implications of modern physics that did not fit well with such an obsolete, 19th-century worldview. I stumbled upon further problems, such as the questions of causality, the ontology of time and space, the status of mathematics, and the laws of nature. This brought me even deeper into metaphysics with issues like the problem of universals, the one and the many, the persistence of diachronic (personal) identity, free will, and the hard problem of consciousness.

I soon realized that materialism is untenable, and I searched for a new worldview that could explain these problems and make sense of the world we experience.

The first step in Dr. Bechly’s journey was investigating evidence for design in the universe, and finding it compelling:

Around this time, I also came into contact with intelligent design theory, though for totally different reasons. I was the project leader for a large special exhibition on evolution at our museum for Darwin Year 2009, which celebrated the double event of Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of his magnum opus On the Origin of Species. In preparing for this exhibit, I read some books by Darwin critics, because we wanted to refute and mock them.

This did not go as intended. I was surprised that the arguments of the ID theorists were nothing like the distorted picture painted by their opponents. The more I studied ID arguments, the more I became a critic of Neo-Darwinism and an ID proponent myself.

I was still into process philosophy when I embraced intelligent design theory, so my support for ID had nothing to do with religion, but only with scientific arguments. I had come to see that Neo-Darwinism simply fails to explain the diversity and complexity of life and that these are better explained by an infusion of information from outside the system. The information does not have to come from a divine, miraculous intervention, but of course that would be compatible with such a view.

So, he accepts design in the universe at this point, but still doesn’t accept theism, and even further away from Christianity.

But he’s not done exploring:

So I finally decided to check out the belief system that was the last thing I wanted to be true: Classical theism. I had previously read all the New Atheists’ books, but even then, as a non-theist and fan of the authors, I had found them quite shallow and unsatisfying.

He goes on to explain how he explored the arguments for classical theism, and then the specific evidences for Christianity, such as prophecy and the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. Eventually, he just went for the worldview that answered the questions raised by the progress of science, that also solved the metaphysical problems he had encountered.

You can read the whole thing, if you’re looking for a wonderful testimony filled with lots of apologetics. I wish that this testimony was seen as the “normal” testimony by Christian parents and pastors. Then we would be taking a completely different approach to parenting and church. We would put the emphasis on evidence.

Since it’s Christmas Day, I decided to play a new turn-based tactical wargame that was gifted to me by Desert Rose, who co-hosts the Knight and Rose Show podcast with me. I really enjoy reading military history, and learning about strategy and tactics. And in order to learn from a different angle, I enjoy playing realistic (but not gory) military simulations. So today I’ll show you what it looks like.

First, here’s the description of the game itself, which was developed by Giant Flame, and published by PLA Studios, based in London, England:

On the morning of the 6th June 1944 the Western Allies began the largest seaborne invasion in the history of warfare. D-Day would mark the start of a vicious campaign to wrestle North West Europe from German control. The following months would see the ancient fields, farms and villages serve as a battleground for new, lethal weapons that would become legendary.

The Troop follows the campaign of British and Canadian forces as they face the German Heer and SS in Normandy. Take command of infantry, motorised and armoured units in desperate tactical turn-based combat against an AI opponent that is challenging and unpredictable, but fair and fallible. Play as British/Canadian or German forces across over 30 maps and 4 play modes.

Simple, complete control – The Troop embraces the best traditions of classic tabletop war gaming combined with the interactivity and excitement the digital format affords. You have complete control over your units’ actions; tanks will not expose their weak side armour with unexpected pathing, hidden guns will not reveal their positions by firing prematurely, infantry will not flee inexplicably when victory is a few heroic paces away. You are free to take your time… but any mistakes are yours and yours alone.

The Troop contains stylised depictions of casualties being sustained in combat including representations of injury and death. The Troop does NOT contain any depictions of gore, blood or wounds.

I am a huge fan of games like Combat Mission, Steel Panthers, and Close Combat, and I have been delighted to see that The Troop is an even better game than all of my previous favorites. It’s the perfect game for me to put the lessons I learned from reading military history into practice.

Regarding the game mechanics, it is an I-go, you-go turn-based system on a hex map. Infantry units can move up to 4 hexes, but if they move 2 only, then they can remain prone. If they move 4 then they cannot fire. The more they move, the less accurate their fire. Also, if they were shot at and suppressed by enemy fire in a previous turn, then they will be less accurate. If an armored unit fires it’s main gun, then it ends its turn and cannot move further. This game models terrain effects, line of sight, smoke, armor penetration, morale, opportunity fire, and other features of realistic warfare.

So, in the two gameplay videos below, I am playing as the British armed forces, just after the June 1944 D-Day landings in Normandy, France. The first map is a beach landing, and the second map is a bocage / urban setting. In each case, my forces were pre-selected, but in other scenarios, you can purchase forces with points.

Here is the first scenario I recorded, “Per Mare, Per Terram”:

And here is the second scenario I recorded, “Crossroads”:

I posted these videos on my personal channel, to keep them separate from the Knight and Rose Show uploads. I want to thank Desert Rose again for gifting me this game. I hope that you all had a happy Christmas, got a great gift, and had as much fun as I did playing The Troop. If you have a Steam account, and want to get the game, it’s on sale for a few more days.

If you like these videos, let me know in the comments on YouTube, so I know to make more of them. It’s fun to play these scenarios, but it’s also fun to look at the maps and read them and think about them. It’s fun to be able to read terrain and make plans, and then make decisions, and see those decisions produce a result. I think it’s a very masculine behavior. It certainly appeals to my male nature to make plans, carry them out, and see the good result. I love it when a plan comes together.

By the way, I got myself a solitaire wargame for Christmas, as well: Carrier Battles: Philippine Sea, which you can read about on Boardgame Geek. It’s highly rated, and I am looking forward to doing the tutorial missions over the holidays, and then playing a real game.