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Group behind indictment of Governor Rick Perry got 500K donation from George Soros

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Here’s an article from Commentary magazine, which talks about how Democrats are trying to smear Republicans with fake charges.

Excerpt:

On April 13, 2013, Rosemary Lehmberg was pulled over for dangerous driving. She was found with an open bottle of vodka in the car, which is against the law, and her blood-alcohol level was .239 percent. (The legal limit is .08 percent. As a rule of thumb, at .1 you’re happy, at .2 you’re drunk, at .3 you’re passed out, and at .4 you’re dead. In other words, to use the technical term, she was blotto.) Taken to the police station, she was abusive and uncooperative to the point of being put in handcuffs and leg irons. She pled guilty to DWI and was sentenced to 45 days in jail and a $4000 fine. She served 20 days. Her license was suspended for 180 days.

This sort of thing happens every night in every city in the country. What made this unusual was that Lehmberg is the district attorney of Travis County, Texas, which is the county where Austin, the state capital, is located. That gives the district attorney of Travis County a lot of power to investigate public corruption. Indeed she heads the state’s Public Corruption unit.

Governor Rick Perry, not unreasonably, thought she had disgraced herself and should resign her office. She refused. To force her out, he threatened to veto the appropriation for the Public Corruption unit and, when she stilled refused, vetoed it.

For this the governor was indicted by a special prosecutor on two felony counts that, in theory, could send him to jail for the rest of his life.

[…]This is about as blatantly a political indictment as can be imagined. Jonathan Chait, no fan of Rick Perry, calls it unbelievably ridiculous. Even David Axelrod called the indictment “pretty sketchy.” Indeed the blow back from left, right, and center is so intense that Perry may well be the first public official to actually gain political clout from being indicted.

So now, if a governor vetoes a bill, it’s life imprisonment. In Texas.

But who brought this charge? A shadowy group called “Texans for Public Justice”:

Sometimes it seems like there isn’t a single political issue that a Soros-funded group isn’t involved in. Texans for Public Justice, one of the groups behind Rick Perry’s indictment charges, is part of a “progressive” coalition that has received $500,000 from liberal billionaire George Soros.

[…]According to an Open Society Institute press release, OSI has given $500,000 to help form a coalition that “could change the way the progressive community engages public policy in Texas.” Besides Texans for Public Justice, this coalition includes Texans Together, the Sierra Club, Texas Legal Services, La Fe Policy Research and Education Center, Public Citizen, and the Center for Public Policy.

This kind of judicial persecution of conservative politicians seems to happen a lot in Texas, though.

Remember Tom Delay?

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay on Monday sharply criticized the local prosecutor’s office that indicted both him and more recently fellow Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry, calling it a “vendetta” and another example of the “criminalization of politics.”

In an interview with FoxNews.com, DeLay attacked nearly every aspect of the prosecution’s case against Perry — suggesting it was political retribution for the governor’s attempt to remove a county district attorney with a criminal record and a “conspiracy” likely traceable to Washington Democrats.

“There is no doubt [the case] is politically motivated,” the former House majority leader said. “Once again, the district attorney of Travis County presented a case, not unlike mine, that was very weak, if it was a case at all. … It’s a conspiracy to use the legal system to politicize politics.”

DeLay was indicted in 2005 by a Travis County grand jury for allegedly conspiring to break election laws several years earlier in a case that involved charges of money laundering.

He was convicted in January 2011 and sentenced to three years in prison. But he was allowed free on bail while appealing his conviction. The Texas Court of Appeals ruled in Sept. 2013 that the evidence in the case was “legally insufficient” to sustain the convictions and DeLay was formally acquitted.

It seems a slam dunk that Perry will be acquitted, too. But where does he go to get his reputation back before the 2016 election? Or is the legal system just there for leftists to use in order to criminalize people who disagree with them on policy?

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Who were the Jesus Seminar? Should anyone have taken them seriously?

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Was having a conversation Sunday evening with the woman I am mentoring and she brought up the Jesus Seminar – a small group of naturalistic, pluralistic academics. Apparently, someone’s child went to college, heard about them, and lost their faith because of their writings. I wanted to find a good article for her on this, and since Dr. William Lane Craig has debated most of the leading scholars in the Jesus seminar, (e.g. – John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Roy Hoover, Gerd Ludemann, Robert Price, John Shelby Spong, etc.), I chose an article by Dr. Craig. I also link to two debates that Dr. Craig did with Jesus Seminar people below.

First a short video (4 minutes):

If you can’t watch anything long, then watch that.

Here is the article, on the Reasonable Faith web site.

Intro:

In 1985 a prominent New Testament scholar named Robert Funk founded a think tank in Southern California which he called the Jesus Seminar. The ostensible purpose of the Seminar was to uncover the historical person Jesus of Nazareth using the best methods of scientific, biblical criticism. In Funk’s view the historical Jesus has been overlaid by Christian legend, myth, and metaphysics and thus scarcely resembled the Christ figure presented in the gospels and worshipped by the Church today. The goal of the Seminar is to strip away these layers and to recover the authentic Jesus who really lived and taught.

Excerpt:

The number one presupposition of the Seminar is antisupernaturalism or more simply, naturalism.Naturalism is the view that every event in the world has a natural cause. There are no events with supernatural causes. In other words, miracles cannot happen.

Now this presupposition constitutes an absolute watershed for the study of the gospels. If you presuppose naturalism, then things like the incarnation, the Virgin Birth, Jesus’ miracles, and his resurrection go out the window before you even sit down at the table to look at the evidence. As supernatural events, they cannot be historical. But if you are at least open to supernaturalism, then these events can’t be ruled out in advance. You have to be open to looking honestly at the evidence that they occurred.

[…][T]he second presupposition which I wanted to discuss, namely, sceptical critics presuppose that our most primary sources for the life of Jesus are not the Gospels, but rather writings outside the New Testament, specifically the socalled apocryphal gospels. These are gospels forged under the apostles’ names, like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Philip, and so forth. These extrabiblical writings are said to be the key to correctly reconstructing the historical Jesus.

In addition to that, there seems to be a third presupposition – radical religious pluralism.

John Dominic Crossan closed his opening speech in his debate with Dr. Craig with this:

When I look a Buddhist friend in the face, I cannot say with integrity, “Our story about Jesus’ virginal birth is true and factual. Your story that when the Buddha came out of his mother’s womb, he was walking, talking, teaching and preaching (which I must admit is even better than our story)—that’s a myth. We have the truth; you have a lie.” I don’t think that can be said any longer, for our insistence that our faith is a fact and that others’ faith is a lie is, I think, a cancer that eats at the heart of Christianity.

But of course, he thinks that all miracle claims are lies, because of his supernaturalism. What he is really trying to do here is redefine these claims so they are not truth claims at all, but personal preference claims.

But the main point is that the co-chair of the Jesus Seminar pre-supposes that nothing that Christianity claims that offends people in other religions can be true. Before he sits down to look at the evidence. I’m not saying that these guys can’t do history, I’m saying that the real debate with these guys should not be about history. The real debate should be about their presuppositions. We should work to defeat their pre-supposition naturalism with good scientific arguments like the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, the habitability-discoverability argument, etc. And we should work to defeat their pre-supposition of pluralism by just asking them to defend it, and maybe point out that a person’s being offended by some claim about reality being true does not make that claim false. Logic requires that people who make claims that are made false by reality are wrong and no amount of crying and sobbing can change that.

The second article in the series that Dr. Craig mentioned in the article I linked above is a generic article on the evidence for the historical Jesus. If you have not read a case for the resurrection of Jesus, then read it, too. Or you can check out this lecture by Dr. Craig on the Jesus Seminar and the historical Jesus:

If you want to see a good debate between Dr. Craig and Marcus Borg, here it is:

Dr. Borg is one of the more respected Jesus Seminar people, and a really nice guy. But also, a really wrong guy.

The key thing to know about them is that they presuppose naturalism (miracles never happen) and radical pluralism (no exclusivist religion can be correct, because that would make people in the other religions feel bad). The presuppositions are key to understanding the “historical work” of the Jesus Seminar.

 

 

 

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Robert George: United States has a moral obligation to stop the genocide in Iraq

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I found this Christian Post article via a blog post on Think Apologetics. Robert George is one of the best (if not the best) respected Christian ethicists operating today. So it’s interesting to see what he thinks we ought to do in Iraq.

Excerpt:

Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, started a petition calling on President Barack Obama, Congress and the international community to destroy ISIS as a fighting force.

In a Thursday video phone interview with The Christian Post (see below), George said he thought the petition was needed because ISIS, also called ISIL or the Islamic State, is committing genocide, similar to what happened in Rwanda in 1994. The United States did nothing to prevent the Rwandan genocide, and that was a mistake that should not happen again, he argued.

The signers of the petition, available at iraqrescue.org, include Democrats, Republicans and independents; conservatives, liberals and moderates; and various religious traditions.

Among the signers are Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; Ben Carson, retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon; Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Eric Metaxas, an Evangelical author and public speaker; and Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. (Affiliations are provided for identification only. They are not signing as representatives of the institutions they work for.) At the time of this publication, the petition had over 3,800 signatures.

“Nothing short of the destruction of ISIS/ISIL as a fighting force will provide long-term protection of victims,” the petition reads in part.

The United States “doesn’t have any real moral choice,” George said. It is “our moral obligation” to stop the genocide. George does not believe the assistance necessarily requires American ground forces. Rather, the United States can contribute with air strikes, intelligence, and strategic support for the Kurdish forces and religious minorities who are being targeted by ISIS.

I think it’s very important for us to speak out to our neighbors about this, because in watching the mainstream media cover this, they just want this issue to go away. They know that Obama withdrew our forces in Iraq and set up the conditions that led to this genocide. So it’s up to us to keep the pressure on. Eric’s post on Think Apologetics has some ideas about what to do.