A new experiment suggests that the Sun may play a bigger part than first though in climate change. But since this challenges the current orthodoxy, "The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions" from that experiment. Further, a peer-reviewed study using NASA satellite data shows that the Earth is releasing more heat into space than climate computer models assumed.

Anders Breivik, the madman who was responsible for the recent massacre in Norway, is often referred to as a "Christian terrorist". Granted, he called himself "Christian", but his aims were political. But the Left really, really wants to use him to equate radical Islamic terrorism and so-called "Christian terrorism". The Blaze asks,

Have any churches or clergymen openly celebrated Breivik’s slaughter of innocents? Are young Christian children dancing in the streets anywhere in Europe, as young Muslims did in Gaza on September 11, 2001? Could any honest observer of the world over the past 30 years believe that Christianity and Islam have played equal parts in terrorist attacks?

And Chuck Colson notes, the secularization of Europe, with its refusing to understand the problem of evil and sin inherent in human nature, is not helping Norway work through this or prevent it happening again.

More rationing of health care in England. This will happen here under ObamaCare. History has already spoken.

What G. K. Chesterton had to say about the Tea Party. (Sort of.)

Obama may have inherited a mess from Bush, but y’know Reagan inherited a similar mess (in some cases, a worse mess) from Carter. And he did far better with it.

The US accuses Iran of aiding Al Qaeda. Are pitiful sanctions really helping things out here? AQ would love to get its hand on a nuke, and so would Iran.

Government, apparently in the pocket of Big Agriculture, bringing more red tape and expense to the family farm.

The Obama administration admits "the White House doesn’t create jobs". It’s about time you realized that, guys. Congress doesn’t either. Government can get out of the way (or get in the way) of business, which does create jobs.

When Sarah Palin came onto the scene, with her history of speaking truth to power, even within her own political party, I noted that the Democrats, who purport to love that sort of thing, went on the attack instead. Like watching "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and rooting against Jimmy Stewart. Now, the same Dems who purport to want grass-roots groups to help fix Washington ask the media to ignore the biggest grass-roots effort in a long time. True colors: Shown!

And speaking of "terrorists" (click for a larger version):

Timothy Dalrymple starts out by noting that the Budget Control Act just signed by the President really only shaves off a bit of the manic growth of the federal budget; it doesn’t really cut anything. Instead, we continue to mortgage our childrens’ futures. He continues:

One of the great difficulties of this issue, for Christians, is that the morality of spending and debt has been so thoroughly demagogued that it’s impossible to advocate cuts in government spending without being accused of hatred for the poor and needy.  A group calling itself the “Circle of Protection” recently promoted a statement on “Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor.”  But we don’t need to protect the programs.  We need to protect the poor.  Indeed, sometimes we need to protect the poor from the programs.  Too many anti-poverty programs are beneficial for the politicians that pass them, and veritable boondoggles for the government bureaucracy that administers them, but they actually serve to rob the poor of their dignity and their initiative, they undermine the family structures that help the poor build prosperous lives, and ultimately mire the poor in poverty for generations.  Does anyone actually believe that the welfare state has served the poor well?

Read the whole thing. Seems some Christians see any attempt to reign in entitlements or reform these program ergo an un-Christian attack on the poor. It isn’t.

Chuck Colson highlights some new archeological findings that continue to lend credence to historical Biblical accounts.

Relative bias in the media vs actual bias. A new book from a UCLA political science professor demonstrate how, because the media is so generally slanted to the left, outlets like Fox appear more right-slanted, when in reality they’re far more centrist.

Rosalina Gonzales had pleaded guilty to a felony charge of injury to a child for what prosecutors had described as a "pretty simple, straightforward spanking case."

Trevor Phillips, chairman of Obama’s Equality and Human Rights Commission accused Christians, particularly evangelicals, of being more militant than Muslims in complaining about discrimination, arguing that many of the claims are motivated by a desire for greater political influence. Hmm, define "militant".

What if Charles Schultz had done cartoons of Doctor Who characters? The result would probably have looked like this.

"Smart" diplomacy; cozy up to dictators, snub our friends.

Democrats pilloried George W. Bush for "not listening to his generals" when he made decisions counter to the Pentagon. When Obama does it, not so much.

Would ID requirements for voting amount to a Jim-Crow-style poll tax on blacks? E. J. Dionne thinks so. James Taranto wonders if ID requirements for Amtrak, hotels, air travel and employment are equally as "racist"?

Nancy Pelosi said that they had to pass the bill before we could find out what’s in it. Apparently, some surprises are buried in there.

President Barack Obama’s health care law would let several million middle-class people get nearly free insurance meant for the poor, a twist government number crunchers say they discovered only after the complex bill was signed.

The change would affect early retirees: A married couple could have an annual income of about $64,000 and still get Medicaid, said officials who make long-range cost estimates for the Health and Human Services department.

Whenever there is a budget shortfall, taxes are always on the table. How about we take them off just this once?

Medicare spending is unsustainable, and the CBO itself admits that its tools for determine any consequences from Obamacare are flawed. Yeah, that should "fix" health care.

And finally, define "emergency" (click for a larger version):

C. Michael Patton, writing at Parchment & Pen (highly recommended), takes on the idea of what is essential in Christianity and what is non-essential. Further, what is essential for salvation vs what is essential for historic Christianity or vs a particular denomination. It’s said to be "in a nutshell", and though it is still rather long, it’s probably condensing something even larger. But it is a fantastic starting point for understanding what’s worth dying for and what’s pure speculation. Different groups put different things in different levels, but Patton does a great job of being fair regarding where certain ideas generally fall. His point is not to argue for certain doctrines, only to give a good starting point for discussion. To this point, he says:

But (as the criticism goes) it is not that easy to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials. More importantly for now, many Evangelicals have simply never been exposed to this and therefore practice their theology in a much more legalistic way, believing every conviction that they have to be representative of a hill upon which they should die.

A good read, and a good bookmark to keep.

"Ku Klux Klan protests Westboro Baptist Church"

From the article:

WBC member Abigail Phelps said the KKK “have no moral authority on anything.”

“The Bible doesn’t say anywhere that it’s an abomination to be born of a certain gender or race,” she said.

And the WBC has…what moral authority, exactly?

Harold Camping was "flabbergasted" when the world didn’t start to be destroyed with earthquakes on May 21st, when he had predicted that Christ’s second coming would happen. Many Christians, including those of us that write for Stones Cry Out, were, shall we say, less overwhelmed. Every generation has had its doomsday predictors, of differing specificity, all of them wrong, and Camping has added his name to the list.

You didn’t hear much about the whole kerfuffle here. For myself, this was because I don’t take much stock in "date-setters", as they’re sometimes called. Not that I don’t think there are end time coming. It’s just that:

• Not even Jesus would set a date (Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 17). What makes any of us think we can?
• One should be living like Jesus is coming soon (or that we’re going to die; same difference) any time now. That is to say, our love for God and our actions resulting from that should not change quite so much even if we knew the date. (We’re sinful, and thus these things do change, but they shouldn’t because of some date.)

And now, backpedaling, Camping is saying that Judgment actually did come last Saturday; we just didn’t see it. The earth’s been judged and no one else can come to Christ, and on October 21st, the actual end of the world will come.

Look, here’s the deal. Camping and his followers have received big media attention for preaching "The End". Yeah, the media loves those kinds of stories, and they’ll spend more time on an already-discredited preacher with a calendar and a billboard than they will the Christian on an inner city street ministering to prostitutes and drunks, or the missionary who’s given up everything to bring Jesus to an obscure group of people in Africa or Asia. But this whole over-emphasis on "The End" is not what we’re supposed to be about.

Preach Christ and Him crucified, as Paul said. And "The End" will take care of itself.

I recently was a part of a rather lengthy blog comment discussion about same-sex marriage on the site of a liberal Christian. I noted that Genesis 2:24 was pretty clear what marriage was defined as, and that when the Bible mentioned marriage, it was always heterosexual. (Another commenter picked up on the idea that, even when polygamy is mentioned, it is one-man-many-women.; each of the women were married to the man, not to each other.) Every mention in history, in a parable, or even just talking about a particular married couple, it was heterosexual. There’s even a whole book (Song of Solomon) devoted to heterosexual marriage and the sexuality within it. But nothing–no press at all–on same-sex marriage.

And the mentions of homosexuality in general? Again, 100% negative. You can argue the contexts, I suppose, but ever time homosexuality is mentioned, whatever the context, it is sin. I’m willing to listen to arguments as to where homosexuality is mentioned positively, or even neutrally, but I don’t recall ever hearing it.

I find this significant. The Bible talks about marriage quite a bit, and yet nothing at all about same-sex marriage. Now, the arguments against me included the idea that, while Genesis 2:24 says what marriage is, it doesn’t say what marriage isn’t. I found this laughable, and surprisingly legalistic for someone who, I’m pretty sure, did not appreciate legalists. In this particular case, it sounded like this person required that the commandment must include fine print and enough provisos worth of a car commercial. "This command should not be construed to permit situations such as, but not limited to, marriages of minors (under the age of 18), animals, toasters (including other mechanical and/or electrical objects), and/or siblings. Tax, tag, title and dealer prep extra."

Another objection was that the Bible didn’t mention nuclear power, either, but we don’t take it as a handbook on that. Indeed,the Bible says nothing about all things nuclear, nor energy sources in general. But it does talk about marriage, a lot, and when it does, it’s all about the man and the woman.

I was also told that there were so very few verses at al that even talked about homosexuality that it wasn’t enough to really draw any concrete conclusions. This from guys who were literally ridiculing my point about 100% of the Bible talking exclusively about heterosexual marriage. Amounts only matter, it seems, in certain cases.

Anyway, that’s what the Bible has to say. Over the millennia, a lot of smart guys have looked at the issue and have come to the same conclusion.

Church history is crystal clear: Homosexual practice has been affirmed nowhere, never, by no one in the history of Christianity. . . .

Christianity is a tradition; it is a faith with a particular ethos, set of beliefs and practices handed on from generation to generation. The Christian tradition may be understood as the history of what God’s people have believed and how they have lived based upon the Word of God. This tradition is not only a collection of accepted doctrines but also a set of lifestyle expectations for a follower of Christ. One of the primary things handed down in the Christian church over the centuries is a consistent set of lifestyle ethics including specific directives about sexual behavior. The church of every generation from the time of the apostles has condemned sexual sin as unbecoming a disciple of Christ. At no point have any orthodox Christian teachers ever suggested that one’s sexual practices may deviate from biblical standards.

Concerning homosexuality there has been absolute unanimity in church history; sexual intimacy between persons of the same gender has never been recognized as legitimate behavior for a Christian. One finds no examples of orthodox teachers who suggested that homosexual activity could be acceptable in God’s sight under any circumstances. Revisionist biblical interpretations that purport to support homosexual practice are typically rooted in novel hermeneutical principles applied to Scripture, which produce bizarre interpretations of the Bible held nowhere, never, by no one.

This applies to a host of other churches and traditions, not just the orthodox ones. Ignore all of that collected wisdom at your peril. Indeed, sometimes there does need to be an overturning of established understanding (see: Martin Luther), but there had better be an extremely good Biblical foundation and argument accompanying it. The reasons I’ve seen so far trying to establish a Christian imperative for same-sex marriage could just as easily be applied to many other actions that the church considers sinful. Jesus loved the woman caught in adultery, and did not condemn here there, but told her to "go and sin no more". He called it what it was and didn’t affirm her behavior just because it was forgiven.

We should do the same. The  Christian Left will complain, but while they can come up with their own arguments, they have little (if anything) to stand on, biblically speaking. When the Bible speak of homosexuality, it is always negative, and when the Bible speaks of marriage is it always heterosexual. This is significant.

Question: What government program costs us 7 times what NASA does?
Answer: The department of Improper Payments.

Question: In a study looking at data from over 50 years, towards which political party does the NY Times lean? 
Answer: Well, do you really have to ask? And it’s more about what stories are covered than about bias within stories.

Question: Why do movements like pro-democracy or the Tea Party seem to balloon overnight?
Answer: The "Preference Cascade".

Question: What are 5 truths about Planned Parenthood that you’re not likely to hear in the media?
Answer: Read them here.

Question: How could you defend the use of sola Scriptura, "Scripture alone", to someone who objects on the basis that humans are fallible, so you just can’t be sure what is Scripture?
Answer: C. Michael Patton has a good response.

Question: Has Paul Krugman ever flip-flopped on an issue for politics’ sake? Not a little quibble, but on really substantial stuff?
Answer: Oh yeah, he has.

Question: Has Nancy Pelosi ever flip-flopped on an issue for politics’ sake?
Answer: Well, she blamed high gas prices on "two oil men in the White House" before. Wonder who she’s blaming now.

Question: Is Syria, a country that is killing its own citizens for protesting the government, really being considered for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council?
Answer: Oh yeah, it is. And the UN is divided on whether it should even investigate their recent human rights abuses.

Question: Was Stanley Ann Dunham punished with a baby.
Answer: No, the baby (Barack Obama) was not a punishment, even though Barack’s campaign rhetoric would tend to suggest otherwise.

Question: Has Hamas moderated, since it had to take on political leadership and run the Palestinians?
Answer: Oh no, it hasn’t.

Question: Did Fox News push the whole "birther" issue the most?
Answer: Oh no, they didn’t.

Question: Does Europe want us Yanks, with our neo-con aggression, out of their backyard?
Answer: According to this Norwegian liberal, oh no, they don’t.

Question: Shouldn’t the federal government be a limited one?
Answer: Click for a larger image.

From CBN News:

Rev. David Wilkerson, founding pastor of the Times Square Church in New York City, was killed Wednesday in a car crash in Texas, according to a source close to CBN News.  He was 79.

Wilkerson’s wife Gwen was also involved in the crash and rushed to the hospital.  Details of the crash are still developing. Stay with CBNNews.com for an update.

Wilkerson posted a blog dated April 27 — the day of his death. In the post, titled "When All Means Fail," he encouraged those facing difficulty to "hold fast" and stand strong in faith.

"To those going through the valley and shadow of death, hear this word: Weeping will last through some dark, awful nights, and in that darkness you will soon hear the Father whisper, "I am with you,’" Wilkerson wrote. "Beloved, God has never failed to act but in goodness and love. When all means fail-his love prevails. Hold fast to your faith. Stand fast in his Word. There is no other hope in this world."

Read all of Wilkerson’s final blog here.

I recall reading the comic book adaptation of the book "The Cross and the Switchblade" at a Salvation Army summer camp where my parents worked. The comic came out in 1972. If you look at the front page of the comic book, between Nicky Cruz’s feet you’ll see the name of the illustrator; Al Hartley. He also drew some other Christian comics using the Archie gang, all under the Spire Christian Comics label.

Seventeen or so years later, and since then, I’ve been hearing sermons preached by Al’s son, Fred Hartley. Talk about a small world.