News

Navy chaplain removed from unit for teaching Biblical views on sex and marriage

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This is from the Daily Signal.

Excerpt:

A former Marine and current Navy chaplain has been removed from his unit after sharing the teachings of his faith tradition in private, pastoral settings.

Lt. Cmdr. Wes Modder, a chaplain at the Base Chapel Naval Weapons Station at Joint Base in South Carolina, is an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God.

According to his legal team, a “handful” of individuals complained about his views on issues like atheism, homosexuality and sexual relationships outside of marriage.

According to Military Times, after the complaints, Modder’s commanding officer wrote in a “detachment for cause” letter that states Modder is “unable to function in the diverse and pluralistic environment” of the United States Navy.

It’s such a diverse environment that if you disagree with the secular leftist view of sex and marriage, then you can’t say anything. And we are paying taxes to pay for these people to violate the basic human rights of Christian employees. It’s not just happening to Christian business owners who refuse to celebrate gay marriage, now. It’s just regular Christians workers, too.

More:

His commanding officer has requested that Modder be removed from the promotion list (despite his ranking as “Early Promote,” the highest rating), separated from his unit, and brought before a Board of Inquiry.

The same commanding officer previously wrote in Modder’s fitness report in October of 2014 that Modder was the “best of the best” and recommended him for promotion.

The board could force Modder, who previously served as a Marine in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, out of the Navy. His case is currently under review.

I thought this was useful to see what pressures authentic Christians face as they try to earn the money they ned to provide for their families in an increasingly secular environment:

Mike Berry, the senior counsel and director of military affairs at the Liberty Institute, is handing Modder’s case.

[…]“He’s in a catch-22 between his faith and his career,” said Berry.

Berry said that Modder offered everyone who sought his guidance a “disclaimer” that he was speaking to them as an ordained Christian minister, stressing that Modder offered “spiritual advice” and “Biblical truth” according to his faith tradition in “private” sessions, not merely “unsolicited opinions.”

But after the complaints of a “handful” of individuals, Modder’s future in the Navy is in jeopardy.

[…]Modder is also approaching his 20-year anniversary of military service. If his case is not resolved by Sept. 1, his pension and retirement benefits could also be in jeopardy.

Seems like he was very careful, but that did not protect him from the complaints of a handful of individuals who wanted to get rid of him for disagreeing with them. And of course Modder’s commanding officer has to deal harshly with him, or he will not be promoted. This is the new secular Inquisition.

Now, try to think with me about how many people are teaching their views on sex and marriage, and using taxpayer dollars to do it. Public school teachers, Planned Parenthood… Heck, in Ontario, Canada, the Liberty Party’s sex education curriculum was developed by a convicted child pornographer. And yet Christian chaplains are the ones who have to face discrimination for stating their views.

News

Report: In 2008, then-Senator Obama sent emissary to Iran to undermine Bush

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A group of 47 senators sent an open-letter to the leaders of Iran reminding them that treaties that are negotiated by the President have to be approved by Congress. This is in fact how the Constitution works.

The Democrats are furious that anyone is questioning their self-confessed “bad deal” with Iran.

Breitbart News explains:

President Obama set his Vice Presidential attack dog on the forty-seven GOP senators who dared send their March 9th letter to Iran’s leadership warning them any deal signed with Team Obama may be short-lived when a new president comes to office.

But Biden, like his boss, fails to do his homework before making outlandish statements or else chooses conveniently to overlook the facts.

Livid over the GOP letter, Biden proclaimed: “In thirty-six years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which Senators wrote directly to advise another country.”

Directing his venom at the Senate’s Republican majority, Biden claimed the GOP letter was “expressly designed to undercut a sitting President in the midst of sensitive international negotiations…(an act) beneath the dignity of an institution I revere.”

Well, how about it? Has any other senator undermined diplomatic efforts by a President?

Well, yes – Obama himself, when he was a senator:

According to Pajamas Media columnist Michael Ledeen, in 2008, a Democratic senator sent a personal emissary to Tehran encouraging the mullahs not to sign an agreement with the outgoing Bush Administration as negotiations would take on a much friendlier tone following President Bush’s departure from office.

That senator was a presidential candidate at the time. His name was Barack Obama.

The plain truth is that Obama wants a nuclear Iran. That’s what this deal is about – undermining U.N. sanctions against Iran, and removing U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The leftist Washington Post explains:

We surmised yesterday that the Obama administration had the idea to go to the United Nations to pass by resolution what Congress would never agree to: a lifting of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a nearly worthless deal in which Iran would keep thousands of centrifuges and get a 10-year glide path to nuclear breakout.

[…]For quite some time, former U.N. spokesman Richard Grenell has been warning that this is exactly what is coming down the pike. Last year Grenell wrote: “President Obama’s Geneva proposal to the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council allowing Iran to enrich some uranium violates previous UN resolutions demanding the Islamic Republic stop ‘all’ uranium enrichment activity. To avoid a violation of current UN resolutions, the permanent members must ask the entire Security Council to vote to weaken and supersede their previous demands.” He continued, “The UN’s four rounds of hard-fought sanctions on Iran and several other resolutions demanding compliance call for a full suspension of all enrichment activities, including research and development, then full verification of that suspension before negotiations on a permanent diplomatic solution begin. The sequencing was strategic. It was designed to build international confidence in a secretive country’s deceitful past.” But Obama deliberately departed from these restrictions, so he has always planned to go back. Otherwise, his deal would be in violation of existing international law.

That brings us to U.S. law. The U.N. resolutions don’t automatically become law, the administration was forced to concede. But under currentU.S. sanctions law, the president can waive them. And that is just what Obama intends to do. He will get the U.N. to water down international sanctions while he suspends U.S. sanctions.

Obama’s legacy becomes demolition of the sanctions regime and an opening for Iran to either make a dash for breakout or to wait 10 years and get its stamped permission slip. The word for this is “containment.” The next president can reverse the waiver, but the Iranian economy will be on the road to recovery and the next president’s options will be severely limited. Iran might even have a bomb by then.

So Obama is trying to undo U.N. sanctions against Iran, drop U.S. sanctions against Iran – for what? What is the purpose of helping Iran to develop nuclear weapons? Why would anyone interested in world peace want to do that?

Polemics

Book review of Frank Turek’s “Stealing from God”

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This book review was posted at Apologetics 315.

It says:

From the very onset of the book, it is clear that Turek has the so-called “new atheists” in his crosshairs and his main contention is that “atheists are using aspects of reality to argue against God that wouldn’t exist if atheism were true. In other words, when atheists give arguments for their atheistic worldview, they are stealing from a theistic worldview to make their case. In effect, they are stealing from God in order to argue against Him.” [p. xviii]

[…]The author explains that since stealing is a crime, and atheists are stealing from God to make their case, the book will use CRIMES [1] as an acrostic to demonstrate the intellectual crimes atheists are committing. Each letter in CRIMES is representative of “one or more aspects of reality that wouldn’t exist if atheism were true.” [xviii]
They are:
C = Causality
R = Reason
I = Information and Intentionality
M= Morality
E = Evil
S = Science

Now look here. I am not one of these weird presuppositionalists who tries to “argue” for God by assuming he’s exists already. I do like to use evidence, so I can convince people who don’t already believe in God. But if an atheist tries to argue back and is basing his arguments on assumptions that are grounded by theism and not by atheism, then I am ready to point that out.

Here is one case:

In Chapter 4, this reviewer was interested to see how the author would handle the issue of morality. After all, arguments such as the cosmological argument and the argument from information are based upon scientific evidence and philosophical argument, but the moral argument gets personal!

Turek begins the chapter by contending that objective moral values indeed exist and that God is necessary to ground them. He then continues by taking Sam Harris and his book The Moral Landscape to task and points out Harris’ key mistake in assessing the objective morality:

Why does a moral law exist at all, and why does it have authority over us…The Moral Landscape give us no answer. It’s a nearly three-hundred-page long example of the most common mistake made by those who think objective morality can exist without God. Harris seems to think that because we can know objective morality (epistemology), that explains why objective morality exists in the first place (ontology). [p. 100]

The author continues by arguing that evolution cannot explain morality, dealing with the infamous “Euthyphro dilemma,” and contending that for atheists to offer a moral objection against God, they need God to do it.

There can be no statements about the supposed “immorality” of God without assuming a standard of objective morality by which you judge God. But then, the very standard you use to judge God could not exist unless God was there to make a standard of right and wrong that was independent of human opinions.

There was a good recent CRI article dealing with atheist attempts to ground morality, where the evolutionary accounts are evaluated.

Here’s a bit:

Paul Copan argues that evolutionary naturalism can describe how people behave, but it cannotprescribe how people should behave.15 In order to say that an action is good or evil, one needs an objective and universal moral standard that transcends individual people and individual societies. It must also be personal in nature. Moral standards deal with right and wrong, whatshould and should not be done. That implies a choice that requires personality and consciousness. A transcendent moral standard would therefore need to be grounded in a conscious, personal, and transcendent reality. Christians find this in God—the only place where such a standard can be found.16

If God does not exist, then as Francis Schaeffer explains, ethics merely explain what is rather than what should be. There is then no objective difference between kindness and cruelty because there is no standard.17 The very terms “kind” and “cruel” would be meaningless. As Norman Geisler and Frank Turek argue, atheists rule out a transcendent Lawgiver in advance:18 This creates a problem: “While they may believe in an objective right and wrong, they have no way to justify such a belief (unless they admit a Moral Law Giver, at which point they cease to be atheists)” (emphasis in original).19

As soon as an atheist says that there is a way that things ought to be objectively rather than just their personal opinion, they have used God to disprove God.