Pope Francis has received numerous accolades from the faithful. One area where Pope Francis gets poor marks is in economics. It’s hard to take economic advice from someone who has taken a vow of poverty, never owned a business, and lives off the donations of people who have not taken a vow of poverty and who own and/or work for businesses that make it possible for the Vatican, College of Cardinals [...]

Pope Francis has received numerous accolades from the faithful. One area where Pope Francis gets poor marks is in economics. It’s hard to take economic advice from someone who has taken a vow of poverty, never owned a business, and lives off the donations of people who have not taken a vow of poverty and who own and/or work for businesses that make it possible for the Vatican, College of Cardinals [...]

The argument is simple enough. If a person is born a certain way, who are we to judge what they are and how they act? A person born with black skin is that way because of his or her genes, but there is no behavior associated with skin color. Skin color is a benign genetic trait like hair color. We’ve been told that homosexuality is gene-directed. A person’s DNA determines sexual attraction and ide [...]

The governor of Georgia has ordered that Bibles that were removed from lodges at government parks throughout the state be returned. Gov. Deal’s order prompted American Atheists, a group founded in 1963 by famed atheist Madeline Murray O’Hair, ((Her son, William J. Murray, denounced atheism in 1980 and became a born again Christian. He is now president of the Religious Freedom Coalition, based in W [...]

Barronelle Stutzman is the owner of Arlene’s Flowers. When one of her customers, Robert Ingersoll, a homosexual, asked Stutzman to supply the flowers for his upcoming wedding with his male “partner,” she refused. She cited her religious beliefs. Stutzman never refused Ingersoll service when he ordered flowers for personal use: “When it came to doing his wedding, I said, ‘I could not do it because [...]

Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a double mastectomy because of a genetic marker that made her chances of getting breast cancer very high — 87 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer and up to a 54 percent chance of ovarian cancer — was front page news. TV news shows and gossip columnists led with her story. Her mother died from breast cancer. Jolie is not the first prominent person to [...]

Tom Krattenmaker says that atheists can be good without God. His article in USA Today (“Good Boy Scouts Don’t Need God,” May 13, 2013) attempts to make the case that atheists are good people. They don’t believe in God and yet they perform good deeds. No they don’t and they don’t do bad deeds either. If there is no God, there are no morals for anyone. There is neither good nor evil. [...]

Sixty five years ago today, Israel became a nation again. Prophetic writers saw this event as the end-time sign that something called the “rapture” could not be far off. Within 40 years of that May 14, 1948 date, prophecy writers were telling us, Jesus would return and take His Church to heaven to be followed by a seven-year period where the temple in Jerusalem would be rebuilt, animal sacrifices [...]

A study of Church history shows that the works of Josephus were consulted by Christians very early. Heinz Schreckenberg and Kurt Schubert trace the use of the works of Josephus to the earliest of the ante-Nicene fathers beginning, possibly, with Clement of Rome (died c. 101), Melito of Sardis (died c. 190), Irenaeus (died c. 202), Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225), Hippolytus (170–235), and others. While [...]

James Hamilton, representing a hybrid view of historical premillenialism, said something like the following during the Symposium that he, Sam Waldron, and I participated in on February 23, 2013 in Reno, Nevada: “If preterists didn’t have Josephus, they wouldn’t be preterists.” I’m working from memory, but this is pretty close to what he said, and if it’s not exactly what he said, it accurately rep [...]

I received the following email from a well-intentioned by misinformed Christian about taxation: “Hello, I see that you are sponsoring an internet link to stop the Congress from passing a bill that would cause Americans to pay taxes on items bought over the Internet. “Surely I do not have to remind you that we were commanded by ‘Jesus’ Himself to pay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what [...]

It seems that liberalism is gaining the upper hand. In fact, it seems that liberalism has the upper hand. Not so fast. Empire-building is a tenuous business. Every empire that has tried to expand its borders eventually collapsed because the center could not hold. Adolf Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich turned to dust in less than 20 years. The supposed inevitability of world Communism did no [...]

Another Ten Commandments display has been removed from another school, and a nation is shocked when it reads stories about young people raping classmates and murdering school children and its government passing thousands of pages of new laws and regulations that will trample on our basic liberties. Should we be surprised that a fourth-grade student is told by his teacher to write the following?: & [...]

The lecture was titled “The Origin of the Universe.” People stood in a quarter-mile-long line for hours and paid big money to be told that they are nothing but a conglomeration of atoms. One hopeful attendee was willing to shell out $1000 for a ticket. The people who got in to hear the wheelchair-bound man were told that they are alone in the cosmos. They share space with other biological units wh [...]

[caption id=“attachment_7743” align=“alignright” width=“300”] Copyright 2013 - Glenn McCoy[/caption] Atheists Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris are often described as the “Unholy Trinity of Atheism.” When you add Daniel C. Dennett to the mix, the Unholy Trinity becomes the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. Even in their atheism these atheists [...]

The Freedom From Religion Foundation pressured Kentucky’s Breathitt County School District to remove a copy of the Ten Commandments that had been posted in the school for years. The FFRF said it had received complaints about the displays. This complaint thing seems to work only one way. What if a group of parents complained that their children were being taught that they are the product of million [...]

The mainstream media have been relatively silent in reporting on abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell who was really involved in Nazi-style executions of live babies: “In Gosnell’s clinic police found severed baby feet of various sizes kept in see-through containers and bodies of babies in a freezer and in the basement. The upper spinal cords of some of the babies had been severed." Sarah Kli [...]

Emory University President James Wagner was trying to make a point about compromise in an article he wrote in the winter issue of Emory Magazine. He made his appeal by referencing the Constitution and the “three-fifths clause,” pointing out that the constitution was a compromise. As expected, liberals were outraged, as this news item from the Emory News Center shows: “During a faculty meeting of t [...]

During the round-table discussion phase of the Reno, Nevada, Symposium on the Book of Revelation, each of us was asked what there is about the two competing positions that we say is a positive feature. When premillennialist Jim Hamilton was asked about preterism, you could tell he had a hard time coming up with something positive. Preterism is the biggest threat to premillennialism. To say anythin [...]

On MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” liberal co-host Krystal Ball (her real name) discussed homosexual marriage with her five-year-old daughter, Ella. This is from MSNBC’s site on the video exchange: “Ella explains who a person can and can’t marry and how in New York a person can marry anyone they love. ‘Girls can marry girls and boys can marry boys in New York and a girl can marry a boy in New York too,’ Ella [...]