"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning."
C.S. Lewis
"The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly."
Charles Reznikoff
"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."
G.K. Chesterton
"Humility enforces where neither virtue nor strength can prevail, nor reason."
Francis Quarles
"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."
C.S. Lewis
Resistance Thinking Society
'Society' is a term used to describe a grouping of individuals and outlines the structures employed to ensure that the individuals within a society relate to each other in an appropriate fashion. Different societies may have distinctive cultural behaviours and different institutions. In this society section you will find news, articles and reviews that relate to Australian society, or more specifically, individuals who live in Australia.
Topics in this section will cover: science and technology - stem cell research, IVF, cloning, intelligent design, evolution etc.; politics - ideologies (communism, anarchism, totalitarianism, capitalism etc.), state and federal politics, the free market, the United Nations etc.; sociology - globalisation, prisons, welfare, government; environment - global warming, alternative energy etc.; and moral issues - poverty, homosexuality, euthanasia, abortion etc.
The role of the Christian within society is to stand for truth, for justice and most importantly, to represent God's agenda on the earth. As the Resistance Thinking journey continues, our aim is to stimulate engaging dialogue exploring the complexities of how followers of Jesus should engage with society in our day and age.
"As science continues to shed light on the secret life of the unborn child, a U.K. study has found that babies appear to distinguish painful stimuli as different from general touch from around 35-37 weeks gestation – just before an infant would normally be born.
“We are asking a fundamental question about human development in this study - when do babies start to distinguish between sensations?” said Dr Lorenzo Fabrizi, from University College London, who led the study, A Shift in Sensory Processing that Enables the Developing Human Brain to Discriminate Touch from Pain, which was recently published in the journal Current Biology.
The scientists looked at the brain activity of 46 babies at the University College Hospital Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Wing. Twenty-one babies in the study were born prematurely, giving scientists the opportunity to measure activity at different stages of human brain development, from babies at just 28 weeks of development through to those born ‘full term’ at 37 weeks.
Using electroencephalography (EEG), the scientists measured the babies’ electrical brain activity when they were undergoing a routine heel lance – a standard procedure essential to collect blood samples for clinical use.
In the premature babies the EEG recorded a response to the heel lance of non-specific ‘neuronal bursts’ – general bursts of electrical activity in the brain. After 35-37 weeks the babies’ response changed to localized activity in specific areas of the brain, which the researchers said indicated that they were now perceiving painful stimulation as separate to touch...."
For the most part it is hard to speculate about why a marriage break-up occurred. Even in regards to celebrities there remains a fair degree of ambiguity hidden behind the well-thought-out publicity statements. Perhaps it is better if the layperson does not know why celebrity couples break-up.
On occasion we are given "inside information" as to why a couple have broken up. Like, for instance, why the king of bizarre cooking Heston Blumenthal has left his wife. He left wife of twenty-two years, Zanna, for fellow chef Suzanne Pirret, author of the cookbook The Pleasure Is All Mine. It is disappointing that such a split has occurred. No doubt it will be said that twenty-two years is a good effort by today's standards, however, this does not reflect the commitment that Heston made to his wife and her to him. The union of a marriage is to last a lifetime, not a mere twenty-two years.
It would appear that Heston has left his wife to be with this younger, prettier woman. This is fairly typical of celebrities because it is a tendency that is prevalent everywhere you look. The idea is that you settle with someone until a better someone comes along (usually better aesthetically). Of course this is just ridiculous self-indulgence that outweighs the commitment to ones previous partner. Yet there is no rational reason why somebody shouldn't participate in doomed relationships in this way if they prescribed to an atheist worldview. After all this life is the only one we have and at the end of our puny existence we will all just turn to dust. If this is the case then we should always act in a way that will benefit us the greatest.
It could be said that I am only speculating as to what Heston may or may not have done (for instance, had they been separated for a while and only recently announced it publically?). However, this is irrelevant. What is important is 1. marriage is meant for life; and 2. many people (particularly young adults) participate in "upgradable relationships". I would challenge anyone who has such a mindset to consider the good of the other person in the relationship. Relationships are not an end in themselves. A dating relationship should bring a couple towards marriage (which is a commitment for the rest of your life). Anything else is unfair to both parties and doomed to destruction. Marriage is not merely a government-prescribed institution it is God-ordained as a union of strength that represents Christ and the Church.
Back on topic, I did some research on Heston's new love interest Suzanne Pirret. She, like Heston, is a chef yet while he cooks with overly dramatic flair she employs the erotic. No doubt the title of her book The Pleasure Is All Mine gives you some idea about the style she is aiming for. She has been compared to Nigella Lawson who combines her cooking with innuendo and all kinds of sensual techniques:
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Now I love cooking so much that I went out and bought 16 new cookbooks yesterday (cheap, from South Wharf DFO), however, the fact that sexuality is now intermingling with cooking states how inundated our society has become. Suzanne Pirret is of the same cloth. Here is an excerpt from her book dripping in sensuality and passion. There is extreme danger in a passion not tempered by biblical wisdom. Though, perhaps, this is typical of feminist philosophy.
Galations 5:24
Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
Andrew Bolt criticises Channel 9's 'Sixty Minutes' episode featuring John and Jenny Deaves, the father and daughter incest couple from South Australia and demonstrates that the station's cover-up and promotion of the issue reveals a deep problem in our society.
Kiss and tell just rubbish Herald Sun, Andrew Bolt, April 11, 2008 EVERY country has moral cretins like John Deaves, who has had two children already by his daughter, Jenny. But it's how we react to such people that shows whether the rest of us are sick, too.
So to hear that John, 61, and Jenny, 39, from Kalangadoo, have lived together for eight years is no big deal.
But when a big-rating current affairs show of a respected TV station such as Channel 9 excuses, rewards and covers up for a man such as Deaves - well, that's suddenly a sign something in our culture has sure gone rotten.
Sixty Minutes reporter Peter Overton last Sunday interviewed John and Jenny, announcing that theirs was a relationship "many would say (is) immoral". Many would, but Overton wouldn't - or certainly not on air.
He and his team have picked up from our cultural vibe the new defence that's offered for much that was once - rightly or often not - called sinful.
It's the defence often given for everything from gay sex, gay marriage and euthanasia to abortion and prostitution and even drug taking and self-mutilation.
It's the one now given for Thomas Beatie, for example, the Oregon woman who cut off her breasts, took male hormones, grew a beard, married a woman and got pregnant, proudly showing her bump to Oprah Winfrey on television last week.
If consenting adults agree, and no one else is directly hurt, then whatever they do to themselves is fine. Right?
That's precisely the defence that Jenny Deaves gave on 60 Minutes: "John and I are in this relationship as consenting adults . . . We are not going out there to hurt anybody."
And it's this modish argument that John and Jenny needed Overton's willing help to concoct.
I say "concoct" because Overton hid, ignored or (perhaps accidentally) overlooked facts that showed Deaves might have groomed his daughter when she was still a child, and that the harm he's since caused with his incest might in fact have been deadly.
Let me quote from Overton's report - and contrast his gush with the facts. Overton: (F)or years John and Jenny Deaves have been hiding a dark secret . . . Now they're about to reveal their deepest secret, one they've always tried to hide. Secret? John came back from a holiday with Jenny to Dubbo in 2000 to announce to his then third wife, Dorothy, that he'd enjoyed with his daughter "the best sex he'd ever had". Hide? The couple had already given an interview last month to Britain's Closer Online, which splashed with the headline: "I've had a baby with my dad".
Overton: On the surface, they appear to be the picture-perfect family. They do? Only if you ignore that, "on the surface", this couple comprise a father and daughter who between them have four broken marriages, at least six children from four relationships, a huge age difference, a prison record for armed robbery and two convictions for incest. What, on the surface, would strike Overton as an imperfect family?
Overton: Jenny's story began when her parents split up. She was just a year old. She went on to marry and have two kids of her own and had little contact with her dad for almost three decades. At the age of 31, Jenny was meeting her dad for only the third time in her life. Overton wants you to see this as a meeting of two adults with virtually no social history of father and daughter to keep them from having sex. But John's third wife says Jenny had in fact met her father when she was 15 and stayed again with him at 16. She stayed a further three times before that holiday to Dubbo.
What difference does that make? It shows that John knew his daughter at an age when it should have been brilliantly clear to him that his role was that of a father, not a lover.
John had seen her as baby and adolescent, and before him at their meeting in 2000 stood not "a woman" but unmistakably his daughter. Worse, it was a daughter who was vulnerable twice over. She'd already stayed with him as a teenager, a vulnerable age when most daughters badly want their father's love and are taught how to earn it. And now she was again seeking his love and reassurance because her marriage was crumbling.
She needed a father's help. Instead, he took her for sex.
Overton: But then they would break the greatest taboo of all - Jenny fell pregnant with their baby. Nine-month-old Celeste seems blissfully happy and perfectly healthy. Despite the odds. Children born to close-relative couplings are six times more likely to die at birth . . .
Overton let Deaves hammer home this partial truth's implied message: John: The way I look at it, it's just like if I was married to Jennifer and she was not my biological daughter and we had a child . . . The child is not deformed. It had no mental difficulties. Quite a normal, healthy child.
The implied message is that this couple are happy with healthy children, and hurting no one. So butt out.
We regularly hear the statements that all people want is same-sex marriage or abortion and to claim there is a desire to push things any further towards polygamy etc. is just ludicrous. However, their protestations do not hide the fact that this is what is happening.
Let's consider the abortion issue in Canada. It was reported yesterday that a lady who strangled her newborn son has been given a three-year suspended sentence for her crime. That is, she gets to walk out of court a free woman. And you know why? Because Justice Joanne Veit believed that the "onerous demands of pregnancy" should determine such an outcome. Yep, that's right. Here is a clear example of the concepts of legalised abortion undermining other areas. Now this woman is able to claim infanticide and receive a mere blot on her record for killing a fellow human being (after all, even pro-abortionists cannot argue that a newborn is not a human).
What is more, our talented Judge believed that the grief that Canadian's have for the murder of the child is comparable to the grief they have for this woman as she had an unwanted pregnancy. It is true that the law and morality are not the same. In this case they are not even in the same ballpark. Sure there are struggles in life and one that a woman may face (particularly with sexual activity) is pregnancy. And, yes, pregnancy I have no doubt is tough. However, the difficulty of being an only-parent does not allow you the right to extinguish the life that you are responsible for.
"Pro-life advocates have warned for years that widespread acceptance of abortion will open the door to greater societal acceptance of infanticide, beginning with the euthanizing of disabled newborns. Infanticide proponent Peter Singer, a top ethicist at Princeton University, has said, for example, "there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby."
Though he once was considered to be on the radical fringe, Singer's views are becoming more mainstream. For example, the world's most prestigious bioethics journal, The Hastings Center Report, published in 2008 an enthusiastic defense of the Netherlands' practice of euthanizing newborns.
"Where will it end: a one month old child whose parent has decided is not worthy of life, a six month old child, a two year old child, a special needs child or how about a teenager?" asked Hughes.
"It is time that Parliament, whose duty it is to protect and legislate regarding the Constitution, examine its duty with regard to the first constitutional right - 'the right to life' and enact legislation which recognizes that life begins at conception and must be protected from that time until natural death," said Mary Ellen Douglas, national organizer of CLC. "The mother's stress cannot equate to the loss of a lifetime for the child.""
Edit: Peter Singer can and does defend a mother's "right" to commit infanticide:
“The liberal search for a morally crucial dividing line between the newborn baby and the fetus has failed to yield any event or stage of development that can bear the weight of separating those with a right to life from those who lack such a right.”
Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 142
A friend recently told me of a session at a Christian University group where the speaker addressed the large contingency on theistic evolution. Theistic evolution is the belief that evolution is merely the mechanism which God designed as a natural process to be used after creation.
Now creation and evolution are contrasting views, even if somebody says they believe in both a creator and the evolution mechanism, such a union is incompatible. And such a union is dangerous as it undermines the authority of Scripture, particularly that of Genesis. Ken Ham elaborates on this compromise:
I believe this is what happened: The older generations in the Church allowing the teaching of evolution and/or millions of years to be added to the Bible. They didn’t realize the true nature of what was happening. Most of these people believed the Bible to be the infallible, inerrant Word of God. They just added evolutionary teaching (e.g., millions of years of history) to this. But the next generation then grew up already disbelieving Genesis. This, I’m convinced, has led to generations in the Church being sceptical about the Bible’s teaching in many other areas. They lost a sense of absolutes.
Creation Evangelism for the New Millennium, Ken Ham, pg 83
So the danger rests in our interpretation of scripture. As R.C. Sproul affirms “the Bible becomes a chameleon changing the color of its skin against the changing background of the people doing the interpreting” (Knowing Scripture, R. C. Sproul, pg 53). Albert Mohler also decries theistic evolution: “[i]n my view, any Christian form of theistic evolution is a contradiction in terms. At the end of the day, the theological modifications required by the acceptance of evolution are vast and utterly disastrous for biblical Christianity” (http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/10/11/science-and-religion-arent-friends/). Also check out Albert Mohler's radio program.
If you still maintain that that theistic evolution is not dangerous, read this article from creation.com. We are faced with a choice. We either reinterpret scripture because of the self-proclaimed “scientific evidence” or we can remain grounded on the inerrancy of the Bible. The first is such a compromise (particularly by any Christian leader) that we should question how we could give any credence to their interpretation of scripture. Or indeed on any social issues. For example:
“When America had the foundation [of creation] (God’s Word is truth), then when someone said “abortion is wrong,” on this former foundation a person would say, “Yes, you are right. Abortion is sin.”
Because the culture has changed its foundation to “man’s opinions determine truth” (evolution), then when the same message is preached, “abortion is wrong,” the answer is more like this: “What are you talking about? I have a right to do what I want with my body. We’re just animals anyway. No one has a right to tell me what to do”.”
Creation Evangelism for the New Millennium, Ken Ham, pg 88
Unfortunately there are many Christians who do not understand this and teach a compromised message of Genesis that fits neatly within what vocal scientists declare is reality. One such website is The BioLogos Forum, founded by Francis Collins. This website seems to genuinely seek an interrelationship between science and faith. Unfortunately, in doing so, there is a compromise of biblical understanding. As stated on the About Us page:
We have found that the methods of the natural sciences provide the most reliable guide to understanding the material world, and the current evidence from science indicates that the diversity of life is best explained as a result of an evolutionary process. Thus we affirm that evolution is a means by which God providentially achieves His purposes.
Perhaps humanists have a greater grasp upon the stupidity of the statement above than those who profess to be a Christian yet continue to believe in evolution do.
“If all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement, upon which the current teaching based Christian emotion and morality, collapsed like a house of cards.”
The outline of history — being a plain history of life and mankind, H. G. Wells, pg 616
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Tonight at 8:30pm on SBS Eva Kor, a survivor and patient of the Auchwitz 'doctor' Mengele's cruel experiments demonstrates the power of forgiveness by revealing her decision to forgive her tormentors.
Forgiving Dr Mengele Sydney Morning Herald, Doug Anderson, January 2, 2008
A former "patient" of the infamous Auschwitz doctor shocks Holocaust survivors when she decides to forgive her tormentor.
Type: Documentary Channel: SBS Date: Wednesday January 2 Time: 8:30 PM
Lies written in ink can never obliterate truths written in blood. But, says the Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, if you forgive your worst enemy it will heal your soul and set you free.
She speaks from an unenviable experience that gives her credence in such matters. When Eva was a kid of 10, her family was sent to Auschwitz by Hitler's loons. Mum and dad were "processed" while Eva and her twin sister came to the attention of the demented Dr Josef Mengele, whose quest for medical knowledge overrode every ethical consideration and fundamental respect for life.
