Tag Archives: Charity

Mentoring

Frank Turek interviews William Lane Craig about Christian apologetics and debate

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This interview is getting good reviews on Facebook. I would say it is a must-see, because it will change your view of what we should be emphasizing as Christians. Please watch the lecture and then mail this post to all of your friends – we need to be challenged by this man William Lane Craig.

(H/T BirdieUpon)

This interview occured after William Lane Craig’s debate tour of the UK, and they talk a lot about it. I think the lesson for us is that apologetics is the best evangelistic tool that Christians have, and people really do show up by the thousands to see these debates. Maybe we should do more of them? And maybe we should be encouraging young people to follow Craig’s path and become solid philosophers and debaters? And are we going to take seriously the duty to sponsor events like this? We have to ask ourselves these tough questions, and be practical and effective about defending God’s honor when it’s called into question. Having a relationship with God is not just about us getting what we want. There are things that we need to be doing to hold up our end of the relationship. Hard things. Self-sacrificial things. Things that we may not like at all. Things that work.

In Intellectual Neutral

Here’s an article that I think might be appropriate for this interview.

Excerpt:

You may see, perhaps for the first time in your life, that here is a need in your life and as a result resolve to become intellectually engaged as a Christian. This is a momentous decision. It is a step that is desperately needed in the lives of millions of American Christians today. No one has issued the challenge to become intellectually engaged more forcefully than did Charles Malik, in his inaugural address at the dedication of the Billy Graham Center on this campus. He emphasized that we as Christians face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church, he said, is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. Listen to what he says:

I must be frank with you: the greatest danger confronting American evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind in its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. But intellectual nurture cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People who are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the gospel have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is vacated and abdicated to the enemy. Who among evangelicals can stand up to the great secular scholars on their own terms of scholarship? Who among evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does the evangelical mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode in the great universities of Europe and America that stamp our entire civilization with their spirit and ideas? For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence.

These words hit like a hammer. Evangelicals really have been living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. The average Christian doesn’t realize that there is an intellectual war going on in the universities and the professional journals and the scholarly societies. Christianity is being attacked from all sides as irrational or bigoted, and millions of students, our future generation of leaders, have absorbed this viewpoint.

This is a war which we cannot afford to lose. As J. Gresham Machen warned in his article, “Christianity and Culture” in the Princeton Theological Review of 1913, on the even of the Fundamentalist Controversy, if we lose this intellectual war, then our evangelism will be immeasurably more difficult in the next generation. He wrote,

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root.

You can get the video and audio from a later version of this talk from Apologetics 315. I was present in the Wheaton College chapel when he gave the talk I excerpted above. It was moving.

We need a three part approach. We need to be intellectually engaged ourselves. We need to be intentional about marrying well and raising up young people who are intellectually engaged. And we need to study hard subjects so we can be good earners, and support the right kinds of operations. We can’t just do whatever makes us feel good, willy-nilly, and then hope that things will work out – we have to work at this.

News

Does the United Way give money to abortion-provider Planned Parenthood?

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From Life News, a story showing how the United Way charity gave money to Planned Parenthood.

Excerpt:

Each fall, United Way focuses on fundraising campaigns. Most people encounter these requests for giving through their workplace. The United Way encourages individuals to donate to a variety of local charitable organizations or to the United Way itself. Each local United Way determines whom they will support through their grant programs and their lists of charitable organizations in the area. While most United Way organizations claim they do not fund programs for abortion services, in truth, some do support Planned Parenthood or other abortion-advocate agencies.

[…]Any finances being donated to Planned Parenthood (even if not specifically for abortion services) will free up more of their money to be used toward abortion services.

Some area United Ways, like New York City and Atlanta, provide grants to Planned Parenthood. The Dallas, Houston, and Austin United Ways do not give money directly to Planned Parenthood. However, Austin and Houston Planned Parenthoods do encourage donors to give money through the United Way’s workplace campaign. Many of the local United Ways also send volunteers to Planned Parenthood.

Nationally, the main United Way website (www.LiveUnited.org) also directs volunteers toward Planned Parenthood. Again, not every state or city agency promotes Planned Parenthood, but several do. One is too many.

If you are pro-life, you should not help the United Way in any way. They give money to people who perform abortions – even after those same groups got $363 million dollars in taxpayer subsidies, and paid their President Cecile Richards nearly $400,000 dollars. Planned Parenthood made a profit of $63 million in the most recent year for which records are available. There are plenty of other places to give your money to, like

Related posts on Planned Parenthood

News

Should Christian doctors be forced to act like atheists at work?

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The UK Telegraph has this interesting article.

Excerpt:

The General Medical Council is asking medics if it should “regulate doctors’ lives outside medicine” in a review of its guidelines on ethics.

Currently it would only be a disciplinary matter if behaviour after hours affected a doctor’s work or brought the profession into disrepute, or if they imposed their views on others.

Some respondents to an online consultation have already said they would be unhappy if health professionals “supported racist organisations” or those that “promote conflict”, or “advocated religious fundamentalism”.

[…]The GMC is to launch a full consultation on a review of its Good Medical Practice document in October.

It comes as the watchdog prepares to investigate the case of a GP in Margate, Dr Richard Scott, who is accused of upsetting a patient by offering to pray for them.

The GP says their conversation turned to religion after they had finished discussing medical options, and that he asked permission to raise his Christian beliefs with the patient, who is of another faith.

But the GMC sent him a warning letter, claiming his comments had “distressed” the patient and “did not meet with the standards required of a doctor”.

Dr Scott refused to accept a written warning, however, and so the GMC’s Investigation Committee will consider the case on Thursday and Friday, which could lead to a fitness to practise hearing.

A GMC statement on the case said: “The Committee will consider whether it is appropriate to issue Dr Scott with a warning in light of his alleged inappropriate expression of religious beliefs during a consultation, which distressed his patient.

“It is further alleged that Dr Scott subsequently confirmed, via national media, that he had sought to suggest his own faith had more to offer than that of the patient.

And this gets extended to cases where pro-life medical doctors and nurses are forced to perform abortions against their conscience. It’s not just evangelism that is threatened, it’s the freedom to not murder at the state’s bidding. This pressure to comply with the state doesn’t come out of nowhere – it occurs when the state is in control of an industry and there is nowhere else for Christians to go to find work. And it is stronger for those who work in government monopolies. Although the UK has protections for NHS doctors, things are worse in Canada and the US. Nurses in Calgary, Alberta and in New York, New York have had to perform abortions against their will.

If you are a doctor in a government-run single payer health care system, then you have a choice of one employer – the government. In the West, that government will likely be secular, and the main job of that government will be to get themselves re-elected. Conservative political parties will be able to get re-elected by delivering national security and economic growth. Even moderate conservatives like George W. Bush can deliver unemployment rates of 4.4% and 160 billion dollar deficits – so the voters re-elect conservatives because they have jobs and because they are safe. But liberal parties can’t produce jobs or balance a budget – like with Obama’s 9.5% unemployment rate and his 1.7 trillion dollar deficits. Liberals screw up the economy, and then they have to resort to bribing the electorate with government spending in order to be re-elected.

So what goodies do the liberal parties provide? Well, take health care. There is a block of voters who want to be able to engage in risky activities that make them feel good, and then get out of them by having the government take their neighbors’ money to pay for their medical bills. (Or, their neighbor’s children’s money, to be more precise, since it is much more politically acceptable to run up 1.7 trillion dollar debts than to embrace pro-growth economic policies that would lower the unemployment rate, as with Bush’s tax cuts). For example, may liberal voters want the government to provide things like taxpayer-funded abortions, so that they can engage in reckless premarital sex without being burdened by the consequences of their own choices. And the liberal party buys their votes by transferring wealth from other taxpayers to pay for these abortions.

Now, when these liberal parties go before the voters, they don’t talk about wanting to provide taxpayer-funded abortions to liberal voters. They tell sob stories about people who need medical treatment but who can’t afford it, or about hungry children who have less to eat than other children. Boo, hoo, hoo, they explain. They play on people’s fears and emotions, and, for some ignorant voters, that works. Even many Christians who decide who to vote for based on their emotions and peer pressure will fall for this – they are too busy watching “Dancing With the Stars” to read about reducing health care costs through consumer-driven health care or improving educational outcomes through school choice.

So many people vote to expand and empower government to fix problems, instead of relying on the free market. They forget about how Wal-Mart provides goods to poor families, and how Amazon.com provides a huge variety of goods to consumers at low prices. Having the government shuffle money around just seems to make more sense for them – it’s much simpler for them to understand than complicated things like Adam Smith. Wealth redistribution calms their fears and makes them feel “compassionate” – even though they are using other people’s money to solve problems instead of solving problems themselves with charity. But to be able to ensure that hospitals perform abortions free of charge for the whiny voters, government has to be big enough to have oversight over the daily operations of health care providers.

How do Christians fare in a health care system that is run by a secular government? Well, in the private sector, if a Christian doctor loses his job, he can find another job. But for Christian doctors in a government-run single-payer health care system, there is nowhere to run – you have to leave the country entirely. So many Christians will feel pressured to just settle with the secularists and perform the abortions. And the ones who resist are just crushed by the state.

And this is exactly what happens in Canadian hospitals, in their single-payer health care system, which liberal politicians and voters admire so much.

Many Christians vote for single-payer health care, or its precursor “Obamacare”, without knowing where this leads. But if Christians vote for bigger government, then they will find themselves losing the freedom to profess Christianity in public, as government grows to regulate and control the economy. When the secular government controls everything, anything in Christianity that they disagree with becomes a target. Again, we have already seen this in Canada. A secular government is good for Christians, and we support that, but it needs to be limited and respectful of human rights and human liberties, including the right to own property and the right to express your religion in public.

Helping people isn’t the government’s job, it’s your job. Stop trying to resolve your fears and uncertainties about life by making the government into God. Government shouldn’t have that power. It’s not their job to help others – it’s your job. It’s not their job to provide you with happiness in this life by taking your neighbor’s money, either.

A very good book to read about this is “The Road to Serfdom”, by F.A. Hayek. There is a free abridged version of “The Road to Serfdom” here, and it is number one on the list of books that all conservatives should read, according to the conservative Human Events.