Jesus Culture Blogspot
Jesus Culture Blogspot
Finland--land of Darwinian Terrorism
From: Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes
When I heard that a student in Finland had posted the following on YouTube:
I am prepared to fight and die for my cause, . . . I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection. No, the truth is that I am just an animal, a human, an individual, a dissident . . . . It’s time to put NATURAL SELECTION & SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST back on tracks!
My first thought (after the generalized disgust) was, "Answers in Genesis is totally going to exploit this tragedy." And the creepy misery vulture Bodie Hodges did not disappoint (well, nobody except his immediate family and descendants).
Sadly, [the above] words were among the last things said before a self-proclaimed Social Darwinist took action in a shooting rampage in Jokela High School about 40 miles from Helsinki, Finland. At least eight people were reported killed by the student gunman named Pekka-Eric Auvinen, who had an online alias “Sturmgeist89,” in a tragic event that has shocked the country that sits in the far northern region of Europe.
Sad? You pounced on the story like an evil kitten! And is it me or does it look like he had to cite the fact that Finland is in northern Europe?
Our thoughts and prayers are with the families affected by this tragedy, though nothing can replace those they have lost.
"...Secretly, however, we are absofreakinglutely delighted because we can blog about it." Seriously, human tragedy is always a morality tale for these people.
As Christians who hold that people are made in the image of God, there is a basis for the value of human life and for absolute morality.
"...See how great we are? See? See?" Of course, they are implying that people who are not Christians of their peculiarly rancid and irksome variety are incapable of valuing life. It occurs to me that one should probably not trust someone who thinks the fact that human life has value is some sort of "revelation."
[...] Finland, like many other European nations, used to be very Christian in its culture. They still have a Nordic blue cross on the flag of their country. But over the years, evolutionism began to infiltrate in schools, universities and so on. Evolutionism denies that the Bible is God’s Word and that God is the final authority. Instead it raises up man to be the supreme authority.
As you begin to understand "the evolutions," as those crazy Satan-worshiping kids call it these days, you start to realize that this is precisely wrong. Evolution puts man in his place in no uncertain terms. He is a tiny, brief, highly improbable speck in an unspeakably Vast universe. Christians think that the purpose of the world is to give them an opportunity to show God that they are worthy to stand in His Presence, like he was Elvis or something.
[...] [If] God is left out, then the only other option for supreme authority is man. If that is the case, then each person can determine what is right and wrong in his or her own eyes (Judges 17:6).
There's Bodie with the scripture! (You know what, Bodie, I think you could sue your parents giving you that name. Just saying.) When it comes to creation, these folks are bonkers for literalism, but when it comes to...anything else...who cares what words mean?
"Now this man Micah had a shrine, and he made an ephod and some idols and installed one of his sons as his priest. In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit." (Judges 17:5-6)
Well, clearly the context suggests that there was religion in Israel at the time--shrines, anyone? Anyway, what is there to suggest that "king" means anything more than a head of state? Never trust a Christian to interpret the damn Bible.
In today’s culture there is a war over true history. This war is significant, since it deals with how people live their lives. The way people view their history affects how they live their life, i.e., their purpose, goals and views of morality.[...]
Darwin’s teachings have influenced many in the past, such as Hitler, who tried to get Nazi Germany to conform to evolution. Karl Marx, Pol Pot, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin—to name a few—avidly held to Darwinian evolution to justify their actions.
GET ANOTHER TUNE, YOU THICKOS! Jesus Finger-Licking Christ! This has so thoroughly been demonstrated to be, as a brilliant blogger recently put it, "turtle-shit all the way down."
Now that evolution is being taught in all parts of the world, it is logical to assume this influence will sadly continue to bear more fruit. But after the fruit that was born by the Marxist teachings of Hitler and Stalin, can mankind afford more fruit like this?
Hitler was a Marxist, eh? Home-schooled moron.
School shootings in the US often now only invoke brief headlines because so many have occurred. Amish children were killed, and more recently in a Cleveland-area school, a shooter opened fire, wounding four while cursing.
Ooooh, cursing! You really miss the big picture don't you? I guess words can hurt. "Go on with out me! I was...hit...by an expletive...Gagging! Dying! Dead."
Few forget the evolutionary kids who made news in Columbine, where one of the two gunmen was even wearing a natural selection T-shirt while racing through the school shooting fellow classmates on April 20, 1999.
Why not blame Hitler's actions on his stupid pants? Perhaps if high school teachers weren't scared to teach evolution for fear of idiot pig-monkey-amoeba children complaining to their parents, students would realize how little natural selection has to do with Social Darwinism. (Hell, Clebold and Harris were "intelligently designing" a population.) When people seize upon "natural selection" (for whatever reason...it was the name of a video game in the case of Columbine) before they commit a heinous crime, it's clearly not because they understand natural selection (which is utterly impersonal, unintentional and undirected). Indeed, they share a fundamentalist Christian misunderstanding of natural selection, much like the unfortunately named whelp Bodie here has. Perhaps Jesus-freaks have more to do this than they are capable of understanding.
If evolutionists are upset about this tragedy in Finland (or any other school shooting), then on what basis could they make a case to condemn it? On the basis of their materialistic beliefs, what they just observed was a random set of chemicals reacting with another random set of chemicals. Do evolutionists get upset with baking soda reacting with vinegar?
You know what really pisses me off? Crystal formation.
You could look to the fact that humanity has achieved a consensus that intraspecies killing is not a good thing and that humans kill each other at a rate several thousand times less than most other species do in nature. We've gone beyond acting in the interest of our genes and developed a consensus about what constitutes moral and immoral behavior, especially when it comes to the big issues. Yeah, the little details, like whether you can share a chair with a menstruating woman, varies from culture to culture, but is that really a moral issue in any useful sense of the word?
So long as evolutionism is forced onto children (no God, people are animals, no right and wrong, etc.) and so long as they believe it and reject accountability to their Creator, then we can expect more of these types of gross and inappropriate actions.
And I can confidently say that we can expect more fatal car crashes as long as people are allowed to own pets. What a worthless and unfalsifiable hypothesis. And is Bodie saying that people aren't animals? People have claimed that for eons…long before Darwin. I believe that the Popul Vuh mentions man's similarity to primates (I could be wrong, but that rarely happens--heheh).
Often, however, even evolutionists are outraged by the school shootings, but in order for them to justify being outraged, they have borrowed from the Christian worldview to acknowledge that such things are wrong.
This is an argument that I have been seeing more frequently as of late and it is such a fatuous statement that any effect that it has can only be attributed to its rhetorical structure and not its content. Severe penalties have been meted out for murder throughout recorded history and across cultures. We see religion taking credit for things that preexist them. It is uncanny how easily a true believer can "forget" about everything that appeared before their creed came into existence. Actually, I suspect that successful religions make other historical narratives "unhistories" in the Orwellian sense. Natural selection in action, baby! I would like to point out that writings of all the major world religions have an equivalent to the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have others du unto you.” This suggests that humans’ sense of what is moral transcends any quaint parochial religion.
But the fact remains that these murderers were living a life consistent with the real teachings of atheistic evolutionism.
Committing suicide? Selecting their "fittest" genes right out of the population? Horseshit. And a feeb who couldn't identify evolution in a police line-up if it had raped him in broad daylight at noon during the summer solstice doesn't get to tell us what evolution "teaches".
Children catch on quickly and eventually put two and two together. When they are taught that there is no God, no right and wrong, people are animals, etc., then they may reason: “Why not kill or steal?” and so on. It is a logical connection.
Test it. Wait. Don't have to. The government has done this already. (I am conflating atheists and evolutionists because this tit doesn't recognize a difference.) The rate of incarceration for atheists is lower than holders of other religious positions. Response Number %
---------------------------- --------
Catholic 29267 39.164%
Protestant 26162 35.008%
Muslim 5435 7.273%
American Indian 2408 3.222%
Nation 1734 2.320%
Rasta 1485 1.987%
Jewish 1325 1.773%
Church of Christ 1303 1.744%
Pentecostal 1093 1.463%
Moorish 1066 1.426%
Buddhist 882 1.180%
Jehovah Witness 665 0.890%
Adventist 621 0.831%
Orthodox 375 0.502%
Mormon 298 0.399%
Scientology 190 0.254%
Atheist 156 0.209%
Hindu 119 0.159%
Santeria 117 0.157%
Sikh 14 0.019%
Bahai 9 0.012%
Krishna 7 0.009%
---------------------------- --------
Total Known Responses 74731 100.001%
(rounding to 3 digits does this)
Unknown/No Answer 18381
----------------------------
Total Convicted 93112 80.259% (74731) prisoners'
religion is known.
Held in Custody 3856 (not surveyed due
to temporary custody)
----------------------------
Total In Prisons 96968
Yes, I think I can site myself now. And by the way, WOW! We get arrested less than Mormons, and their principle form of worship is modest sobriety! (Wonder why Rastafarians are arrested so often? Sounds like religious discrimination to me!)
The rest of his post is a logic-twisting rationalization for the coexistence of evil and the perfect creation of an omnipotent and perfectly loving god. I have no time for that.
HJ
digg_url = 'http://hjhop.blogspot.com/2007/11/bodie-hodges-continues-to-humiliate.html';
About the Author
Your Love Never Fails Instructional (Daniel Choo) Chris Mcclarney / Jesus Culture
| Account limit of 2000 requests per hour exceeded. |
The Good Historian
The Good Historian
A Christian Approach to History
By Aubrey Lively
"He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah 6:8)
Since last spring I have been up to my eyeballs in curriculum, planning for the Logic Stage, our second time through a four-year history cycle since we started homeschooling in 2005. In these years we have seen a lot of change, from the births of siblings to the loss of grandparents. Our curriculum has endured changes, too, from Saxon to Miquon, First Language Lessons to Michael Clay Thompson Language Arts Curriculum. The one thing that has remained a constant in our lives has been Story of the World, and seeing the horizon of its end for us scared me into a state of frantic planning. It was that planning that landed me on the minefield that is history.
The telling of a story has always been a tug-of-war between conqueror and vanquished, between husband and wife, between siblings, even between friends. As long as we believe that in this postmodern era, it is the truth, at least, that we are all after, we can discuss these different points of view in pleasant conversations over coffee or in university classrooms, but mention the American Civil War, and this Utopia dissolves faster than the packet of sugar you just tapped over your bitter black drink.
So there are different points of view regarding the causes and consequences of historical events, but if the men and women who fought over those differences are long since dead and buried, why would we who live after them care about these differences more deeply than is warranted by a lively conversation between friends? This is as difficult to explain as race relations, liberty, slavery, and love for another man's wife, though the gods themselves make a gift of her to a Trojan prince. History is human, and it provokes us to pity, to pathos, to rage because it is not merely the past—history is also our very real present.
Academic fact can be poked and prodded without much consequence. While there are a few who will fume over the more delicate uses of punctuation, wars have never been fought over commas, and the greatest social outcry of an apostrophe is vandalism. What are we to do, then, with this thing that is at once academic and deeply human? I believe the only justice that can be done in history is to liberate the voices that populate our past so that they can tell their own stories. Their own passions and prejudices and fears are enough without our lens of explanation to try to pin them down like bugs on a tag board, as if their stories were not still wriggling and alive in our own breasts.
We have another responsibility in the telling of history. As Christians, our approach to history should reflect our faith, and that has specific implications for us as Christian homeschoolers. A Christian approach to history should be intrinsically just, rational, and hopeful.
First, if a Christian approach to history would be just, then the story must not be left to the victor alone to tell. We must be honest here: history is a courtroom where there is no double jeopardy. The accused are tried again and again by each new generation of students. We cannot equitably execute and re-execute history's villains without fair trials. Neither can we continue to dismiss history's victims to fall before the historians' pens again and again, like an execution squad or a nightmare.
The testimony of witnesses in history is known as a primary source document. These include diaries, minutes of meetings, letters, newspaper articles—anything that was written down by someone who was there is a firsthand account, a primary source document. Age alone does not make a text a primary source: if it is one hundred years old, but it is referring to history two hundred years before, it is a secondary source.
Secondary sources are not always bad. These include history texts, which can be helpful for compiling and interpreting data, but even the best of these will have a film over them, the lens through which the historian sees the world. That film separates us, though sometimes only by a little, from the men and women whose stories we are trying to understand.
For a good historian, these lenses are almost invisible. Like a house of mirrors, though, these lenses can be used to capture and redirect light, obscuring sources, reinterpreting history, and shaping a population's opinion of the present. The act of revising history, or revisionism, can be either positive or negative. Looking again at the data that exists in order to find strong female figures or minorities simply shows new facets of old information. These types of revision broaden our body of knowledge and our understanding of a culture.
By contrast, before World War II, revisionism was one of Hitler's most powerful weapons as he rewrote the German people's understanding of their Jewish neighbors by rewriting the history of those Jews in Germany. Instead of shopkeepers, teachers, and citizens, Jews became something from Hitler's nightmarish imagination—thieves, criminals, the constant source of all of Germany's struggles. By capturing the history classroom, Hitler was almost able to capture the world.
Justice in history asks that we be the judges, dismissing hearsay and improperly cited information. Where the defense has no counsel, we must assign counsel, we must ask questions, and we must find the truth. "These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbor; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbor; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the Lord." (Zechariah 8:16–17) We must make a sincere effort to hear both sides of a story, to let the witnesses speak and drop the gavel on historians who speak out of turn, who drowned the very voices they are supposed to represent, the voices they are supposed to help us clearly hear.
Besides being just, history must also be rational. History must be told in a way that is clear and logical, a way that can be understood and appreciated by a wide audience. If justice asks that we judge the sources upon which we depend for history, rationality demands that we don't play lawyer tricks to get our clients a plea bargain. We must follow and demand academic standards, citations, and honest context to quotations.
Jesus is the Logos and the Truth. As such, the very core of Christian curricula ought always to be logical and true. Christian history should be unbiased, a story fairly told without racism or favoritism. I believe that it is the moral obligation of Christian historians to write reasonable history and of Christians to embrace the same even when it does not promote or prefer Christianity.
This is difficult for many of us to accept. It often seems to us, I think, that Christian curricula should be an evangelical tool or perhaps a faith-building exercise. But imagine a story twisted, even just a little, with terms such as savage or blanket judgments about a group based on racism or poor research. These errors are examples of carelessness at best, but what kind of testimony is offered to people whose stories and histories are thus maligned? To them, these errors often feel much more malicious than witless historians realize. History that is biased cannot win souls.
As a faith-building exercise, history that is biased in favor of Christianity also fails. When we accept a distorted view of history as a support for our faith, we are trusting in something other than the Truth, and we are setting ourselves and our children up for crises of faith in the future. If there is archaeological evidence that runs contrary to Creationism or a people group who has suffered at the hands of the Church, it is better that our children grapple with these questions in the safety of our care. For them to do this, they need us to honestly state the perspectives they will hear when they leave us, lest they go out in to the world and end up thinking us fools.
We do not need history that favors Christianity or that unobjectively identifies God's hand in past events. In the book of Kings, we have Elijah's example. Israel had forgotten God, had turned away to Baal and to desperation in a time of drought—a physical drought, but a spiritual one as well. For the sake of God's people, that they might see His power and believe, he challenged the prophets of Baal to a holy "duel." Meet me on a mountain, Elijah said. We will see whose god will respond to his prayers with fire from heaven. Elijah met those prophets on their sacred mountain: he met them on their terms. There were hundreds of them—only one of Elijah. He let them go first. They prayed all day; they cut themselves. No fire came.
When it was Elijah's turn, he had already tipped the scales in Baal's favor, but he increased this bias. He took buckets of water—water that was precious in a time of drought, water that itself may have been a miracle—and he poured these on the altar until the rocks, the ground, the sacrifice were all soaked, making even the smallest spark impossible
And then he prayed. He did not pray for his own ego's sake, and he did not pray for the sake of convincing Baal's prophets. He prayed for a miracle, for fire from heaven, so that God's own people would believe. The fire came. It burned up the sacrifice; it burned up the water; it burned up the very stones of the altar. It burned up the prophets of Baal.
God is big. We work too hard to protect ourselves from "enemies" who might be won by God's grace and goodness if we were less occupied with telling our side of history fairly. Elijah did the opposite of our present inclination: he biased his situation against himself. And let us never forget who the enemy is: he is neither flesh nor blood nor historian nor atheist nor liberal.
Finally, a Christian approach to history must be hopeful. We must choose to see the best in people while still telling the truth. History has shown us historians who selectively choose unfavorable tales to tell about people groups: they are fascist dictators waiting for their opportunity to seize power.
Jesus told the parable of a good Samaritan, and His story stirred up controversy. I imagine it was much like the controversy a similar story might stir up today. The dominant culture hears a positive story about a minority group, and instead of a good example, they hear criticism of themselves. They assume that the teller is implying that the minority group is all good all the time while the dominant culture is all evil, and they begin to argue. It does not matter if the dominant culture is Jewish or Roman or white: human nature is always defensive.
Jesus' point was simply that we need to expand our definition of neighbor. My point is that it might be nobler to look for the good in individual races and celebrate those like we celebrate the goodness and victories of our own loved ones.
Our neighbors, according to Jesus, are the very people whose worldviews most offend us. They are the Samaritans who worship on the "wrong" mountain, they are the weak and wounded in the road, and perhaps they are even sometimes liberals who write history textbooks that seem to tell a story we find unfair.
Until recently, I had only thought about my Christian obligation as a parent, to raise and educate my children well. I had only thought about my moral obligation to help the poor, to volunteer, to show patience and love and kindness on the road, at the store. While I knew that my faith must be actively infused into every aspect of my life, a moral responsibility with regard to the telling and hearing of history had not occurred to me.
As I sift through my history options for next year, however, this debt I owe—to love my neighbor as myself, to serve others as if I were serving Christ—has become more and more clearly connected in my mind to our historical approach. History is one more way in which we must lay down our lives, our preferences, our points of view, in order to reveal to our friends, neighbors, and selves, a Savior who knows our suffering.
In choosing our history curriculum, our history texts, spines, and literature, we must face this obligation. We must question our choices and be careful what we defend, because these choices are not merely our own: these choices belong to the Lord, and for better or worse, they will represent His Name to others. They will represent His Name to our children, and when these children are grown, any dishonesty or hypocrisy we have embraced will be magnified. Let us defend our faith to them with honesty and integrity, because we are raising intelligent and curious children who will ask hard questions.
Signature
Aubrey Lively is a contributor for Heart of the Matter Online and homeschooling mother to four, aged 10 to 2. She has a BA in literature and a MEd in teaching. She loves coffee, writing, books, and great curricula. In her spare time, she writes novels, tutors, scrapbooks, sews, and rearranges furniture. Visit Aubrey online at aubreylively.blogspot.com.
Possible Pull Quotes:
. . . . [H]istory is a courtroom where there is no double jeopardy. The accused are tried again and again by each new generation of students.
I believe the only justice that can be done in history is to liberate the voices that populate our past so that they can tell their own stories.
Justice in history asks that we be the judges, dismissing hearsay and improperly cited information. . . . [W]e must find the truth.
Copyright, 2011. Used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, Spring 2011.
Visit The Old Schoolhouse® at www.TheHomeschoolMagazine.com to view a full-length sample copy of the print magazine especially for homeschoolers. Click the graphic of the moving computer monitor on the left. Email the Publisher at [email protected].
About the Author
The Old Schoolhouse Magazine is a magazine for the homeschooling market. Each issue is packed with resources, encouragement, and expert advice.
