Tag Archives: Roman Catholic

Commentary

MUST-READ: WORLD magazine puts Paul Ryan on the front cover

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Rep. Paul Ryan

This is the best evangelical news magazine out there. The same one that profiled Michele Bachmann a while back.

Here’s the cover story. (H/T Muddling Toward Maturity)

Excerpt:

While a student at Miami University in Ohio, Ryan thought he’d become an economist. He read the likes of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and envisioned a life of theories. But he eventually learned that public policy is the arena where ideas really live or die. “That is what built this country—good ideas,” he says.Post-graduation stints as a speechwriter for Jack Kemp, at a conservative think tank, and as legislative director for Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas led to Ryan’s successful run for an open House seat in 1998. He was just 28.

After almost a decade of near anonymity in Congress, Ryan’s 2007 ascension as the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee gave him the staff resources and the clout to let out his inner economist. He now also is senior member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. From those perches he has crafted a roadmap to privatize Medicare and Medicaid, provide vouchers for many federal programs, replace employee-sponsored health insurance plans with individual tax credits, and impose tough controls on federal spending.

The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan number crunchers, determined that Ryan’s roadmap delivered on its promises of balanced budgets and smaller deficits (unlike its projections for Obamacare). Under current policies, the CBO concludes that the nation in 2080 will devote 34 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) to government spending; under Ryan’s plan, the CBO predicts that federal spending in 2080 would fall to less than 14 percent of the GDP while the government would enjoy a 5 percent annual surplus. And all without raising taxes. In fact, Ryan proposes a flat tax of two rates: 10 percent and 25 percent.

Better read it quick, before it goes behind the pay firewall.

Lately, I have been busy working my way through the Indivisible e-book that the Heritage Foundation published. The e-book is about 85 pages long, and features leading fiscal and social conservatives, writing from the point of view that they do not normally adopt! In the e-book, Paul Ryan, a huge fiscal conservative, writes about the right to life. Check it out. I just ordered 5 more copies of Indivisible from the Heritage Foundation along with some of their new booklet on Regulations.

News

Ontario Liberals abandon plan to sexualize children in schools

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McGuinty wants children prepared for anal sex in school

First some background from LifeSiteNews.

Excerpt:

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced Wednesday that the Ontario government will be requiring Catholic schools to teach the new provincial, explicit sex ed curriculum that been slammed not only by Catholic leaders but the Progressive Conservative party and secular columnists.

“They’re part of the publicly funded school system here in Ontario and this is part of our curriculum,” said McGuinty, who says he is himself Catholic.  “If parents are uncomfortable with certain aspects of this new curriculum, they can and they are free to withdraw their children from the classroom.”

[…]The curriculum is designed to align with the Ministry’s equity and inclusive education strategy, which is seeking, among other things, to promote homosexualism and transgenderism in Ontario’s schools.

Sex ed is now set to begin as early as grade 1, where students will learn about their body parts, including genitalia.  In grade 3, they begin exploring “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”  In grade 6, students are taught that masturbation is “common” and “not harmful,” and by grade 7 they are to learn about oral and anal intercourse and how to use condoms.

Leona Dombrowsky, Ontario’s new Minister of Education, also insisted Wednesday that Catholic schools must teach the new program.  “This is the Ontario curriculum, and it’s the curriculum for all schools and all students,” said the former Catholic school board trustee.

So Catholic-educated politicians were behind this initiative.

I think that Christians need to do a better job of integrating rigorous Bible reading, theology and ESPECIALLY apologetics into our church life. There should be debates and lectures by practicing scientists, economists, social scientists, philosophers and historians. If we insist on 5-minute homilies and praise hymns, then our own children will grow up to be tools of the secular left. Church should be about truth, not feelings.

You can see how different groups of Christians vote in this graph. I think we have a serious problem in the church where Christians who are solid on socially conservative issues think that corporations are bad, taxes are good and that we need to have government control carbon emissions and health care. Fiscal liberalism means sexualization of children in the schools. Lots of naive Christians vote to “help” the poor via big government.

Thankfully, in Ontario there was a happy ending – for now.

From the National Post. (H/T 1RedThread)

Excerpt:

Just days after defending a new sex education program that would include mention of homosexuality in Grade 3 and anal intercourse in Grade 7, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty has backed down in the face of a public backlash.

[…]He insisted the new curriculum applied to “all students in publicly funded schools, including Catholic schools.”

His education minister, Leona Dombrowsky, also said the Catholic Church supported the new curriculum.

But Catholic officials made it clear they were not prepared to implement any of the more controversial elements, including talk of homosexuality and masturbation in Grades 3 and 6 respectively.

[…]Mr. McGuinty was squarely behind the new curriculum when he was first asked about it Tuesday morning.

“They are going to get this information,” he said moments after a Christian family values group alerted the media to the changes. “If we can provide [it] in a format and in a venue over which we have some control or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources, like their friends at school.

No mention of parents, who are too buy wasting their money on “beer and popcorn”, as Liberals have said in the past. No, it’s the government’s job to prepare children for sex early on so that feminists and gay rights activists can be appeased that the next generation will think that sex outside of marriage is normal. Because schools are about undermining the naive, outdated values of religious taxpaying parents.

Podcasts

Wayne Grudem explains what the Bible says about capital punishment

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Reformed Baptist theologian Wayne Grudem speaks on the Bible and capital punishment.

About Wayne Grudem:

Grudem holds a BA from Harvard University, a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. In 2001, Grudem became Research Professor of Bible and Theology at Phoenix Seminary. Prior to that, he had taught for 20 years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he was chairman of the department of Biblical and Systematic Theology.

Grudem served on the committee overseeing the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, and in 1999 he was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. He is a co-founder and past president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He is the author of, among other books, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, which advocates a Calvinistic soteriology, the verbal plenary inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the body-soul dichotomy in the nature of man, and the complementarian (rather than egalitarian) view of gender equality.

The MP3 file is here.

A PDF sermon outline is here.

Topics:

  • what kinds of crimes might require CP?
  • what did God say to Noah about CP?
  • what does it mean that man is made in the image of God?
  • is CP just about taking revenge?
  • what does CP say about the value of human life?
  • does CP apply to animals, too?
  • could the statements supporting CP be understood as symbolic?
  • one purpose of CP is to protecting the public
  • another purpose of CP is to deter further wrongdoing
  • but the Biblical purpose of CP is to achieve justice by retribution
  • does the Pope make a good argument against CP?
  • what is the role of civil government in achieving retribution?
  • do people in Heaven who are sinless desire God to judge sinners?
  • should crimes involving property alone be subject to CP?
  • is the Mosaic law relevant for deciding which crimes are capital today?
  • should violent crimes where no one dies be subject to CP?
  • is CP widespread in the world? why or why not?
  • what are some objections to CP from the Bible?
  • how do you respond to those objections to CP?
  • should civil government also turn the other cheek for all crimes?
  • what is the “whole life ethic” and is it Biblical?
  • what do academic studies show about the deterrence effect of CP?
  • how often have innocent people been executed in the USA?
  • should there be a higher burden of proof for CP convictions?

I’m not a Calvinist, because I like middle-knowledge instead. But boy, have the Calvinists got some good theologians.

You can find more talks by Wayne Grudem here.

I explained how capital punishment deters future crimes using research papers here: Does the death penalty discourage crime?