Are You 'Cool'?

Being cool, being in, being faddish, is simply going along with others.  A person who tags along just because something is cool says, "I don't know who I am; I don't have my own values, so I'll just do what everyone else does."

Josh McDowell and Dick Day, "Why Wait?" p.128

Inventing a 'Disease' vs Curing a Real Disease

Is it not interesting how so many new diseases are being discovered just prior to the launch of a new drug which can be used to treat it?  While the drug companies are creating so-called diseases to treat with their newest drugs, the world is still dealing with AIDS, cancer, heart disease, killer bacteria and viruses, and a host of other real diseases.  Then again, it is a lot harder to cure a documented disease than it is to create one to fit a drug already in the company's pipeline.

David M. Tyler, Ph.D and Kurt P. Grady, Pharm.D,  ADHD: Deceptive Diagnosis, pg.128

The Demand for 'Participation' Trophies

When you hear the rhetoric of wealth redistribution and “paying a fair share,” it is rooted in the belief that someone must pay for others to receive the “participation” trophy. Instead of economic policies that inspire more people to engage in the free enterprise system and the opportunity economy, progressive socialists advance policies to punish the players on the field. When you can stand up and profess in America “if you own a business, you didn’t build that,” it reflects a sense that the sweat from the brow of the individual to produce – to score touchdowns, goals, runs – is no longer regarded. The efforts of those on the field only serves to produce the required resources for some to make “participation” trophies for others.

We are slowly moving away from what the American dream truly represents – creating victors, champions. We have those who through the giving away of the little plastic trophy are making victims.

The liberal progressive governing philosophy is based upon an expansion of dependency; the welfare nanny-state. By doing so, they raise taxes on the producers, the earners, the folks scoring touchdowns for our country. They must do so in order to produce the “participation” trophy that some will place upon their mantle – and it results in a sense of entitlement, and false esteem. But the givers of the little plastic trophy feel good about themselves, at the expense of those from whom they take, by way of redistribution. The result is a reticence by those who are on the field, in the market, because they recognize the diminishing return on their commitment to excellence.

The progressive socialists embrace this principle of egalitarianism and call it “social justice” and fairness. We see it when schools begin to eliminate the recognition of valedictorians and salutatorians to protect the esteem of others because they did not achieve similar excellence. When we punish those who embody Jefferson’s assertion that we have an unalienable right to pursue happiness then we erode the fundamental aspect of the equality of opportunity.
It is then replaced by a government guarantee of happiness, which must be resourced as the goal becomes equality of outcomes.

In the end, the “participation” trophy becomes that which some long for and worship as they lose their sense of individuality, and the ability to seek out their own personal accomplishments.

Allen West, “The Fallacy of the Participation Trophy”

Denial of God Equals Death of Meaning

Great thinkers have repeatedly warned over the centuries that a departure from God denudes humans and results in the death of meaning.  The denial of God and the death of meaning cannot be severed from each other, though interspersed with all the learning, education, and hyperactivity of postmodern human beings.  The farther we move from God, the more we devalue man.

Ravi Zacharias in "The Real Face of Atheism," pg.79

Cohabiting Leads to Difficulty in Marriage

Cohabitors experienced significantly more difficulty in their [relationships] with adultery, alcohol, drugs, and independence than couples who had not cohabited.  Apparently this makes marriage preceded by cohabitation more prone to problems often associated with other deviant lifestyles -- for example, use of drugs and alcohol, more permissive sexual relationships, and an abhorrence of dependence -- than marriages not preceded by cohabitation.

Michael D.  Newcomb and P. M. Bentler, "Assessment of Personality and Demographic Aspects of Cohabitation and Marital Success," Journal of Personality Assessment, 44 (1980): 11-24.  Cited by  Glenn T. Stanton, The Ring Makes All the Difference, pg.44

Values Clarification Is A Fraud

The growth of self-expression in our classrooms in the last two decades has not served to bring a glorious increase in student happiness and mental health.  If anything, the great rise in student violence and the continued decline in student test scores are evidence that the opposite has occurred.  In short, the assumption about the complete natural goodness of the self, which stands at the heart of the values clarification theory, is false.  This weakness alone is enough to remove it as a sensible candidate for a theory of moral education.

Paul C. Vitz, "Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship," pg.70

Intolerance

Death Penalty Unconstitutional?

The death penalty was also on the statute books of every single state when the Constitution was adopted.  The Founding Fathers who adopted the Bill of Rights banning "cruel and unusual punishment" did not have a problem implementing the death penalty.

Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, p.151

Purpose of Sexual Desire

Sexual desire--and the promise of sexual pleasure--is meant to draw us into marriage, toward children, and into fidelity and responsibility.  Lust is sinful precisely to the extent that sexual desire and passion are stripped from this moral context.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of Sexual Tolerance, pg.17

The Schemes of the Drug Companies

Modern drug companies have made big bucks capitalizing on the power and ubiquity of the placebo response.  The best way to get great results with a pill is to treat people who don't really need it -- the highest placebo response rates occur in those who would get better naturally on their own.  The really brilliant marketing trick was to persuade doctors to treat patients who weren't really sick, while at the same time convincing normal people that they were really sick.  Expanding market share to include the worried well not only greatly enhanced the customer pool, but it also ensured the most satisfied of customers.  Placebo responders often become long-term loyalists to medication use even when the medication is perfectly useless, both because they have no way of knowing it played no role in their getting better and because they are often untroubled by side effects -- a cunning combination that creates the dream customer base for drug companies and their shareholders.

Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," pg.99-100

Nonsensical Freudian Assumptions

The common denominator of virtually all counseling and psychotherapy is the Freudian assumption that intrapersonal and interpersonal problems originate in childhood experiences, especially in one's relations with mother and father.  Shyness, difficulty in making a commitment, depression, anxiety, obsessiveness, slovenliness, substance abuse, eating disorders, trouble-making friends, inability to find meaning in life--virtually all problems are said to have the same origin.

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., in "Freudian Fraud: the Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture," p.208

Get Away from the Government Trough

Bias

Atheists, agnostics and revelationists (and theists) hold to religious positions; and what they do with the evidence will again be determined by the assumptions (beliefs) of their religious positions.  It is not a matter of whether one is biased or not.  It is really a question of which bias is the best bias with which to be biased.


Ken Ham, The Lie, pg.9

Socialists and the Family

The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control of social processes.  Therefore, the anointed necessarily find themselves repeatedly on a collision course with the family.  It is not a matter of any subjective animus on their part against families.  The anointed may in fact be willing to shower government largess upon families, as they do on other social entities.  But the preservation of the family as an autonomous decision-making unit is incompatible with the third-party decision making that is at the heart of the vision of the anointed.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," p.172

Children's Rights in the Womb

Only One Way Works

The moral message my father wanted me to learn from my attempts to fix all those broken clocks is that only one way works.  America’s founders understood this message as well.  They acknowledged that although there may be many different ways to structure human society, only one way works.

But, some may counter, don’t we see many societies structured entirely differently that seem to work?  The answer is that for brief snatches of time, almost anything can work.  Even adultery seems to work during the short moments of stolen bliss.  Running your care without regularly changing the oil might seem to be a new and more economic breakthrough in car ownership, but only for a while.  Eventually the mistake becomes painfully evident.  As mature citizens we have to learn to hear the sinister footsteps of approaching consequences to the well-intentioned policy decisions of today.

We tossed out the moral message of the clocks only a few decades ago.  Until the early 1960s most Americans accepted, often without even thinking about it, the basic ethics of Judeo-Christian thought.  Until the early ‘60s few among our populace doubted that the best citizens are produced in a family in which both a man and a woman raise the children.  Until the early ‘60s nearly everyone believed that it was important for all to work for a living and that living on the dole was sad and even a little shameful.  Until the early ‘60s we even understood that shame was a legitimate component in shaping our society.  “What will the neighbors say?” was a noble expression of concern for community standards.  Today it would be more likely mocked by children raise in the spirit of permissiveness and contempt for any kind of authority.

For less than fifty years we have been living with the result of saying that all ways of organizing families and societies are equally valid.  It is still too early to see impending doom.  Remember, though, that communism (a disastrous rejection of a biblical blueprint if ever there was one) survived just seventy years.  And for those peering ahead into America’s future, the signs are become dismayingly clear.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.73

God or Tyrants

If we are not governed by God, then we will be ruled by tyrants.

William Penn, cited David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times, pg.633

Abortion is Unregulated

Amazingly, this dangerous and brutal procedure [abortion] is the only surgery which is legally protected from any sort of government regulation.  There are laws that dictate how tonsils may and may not be removed.  There are laws that dictate how broken bones may and may not be set.  But there are no laws that dictate how abortions may or may not be performed.  Even tort liability restraints upon the abortion industry are being dismantled by the child-killing zealots in government--from the White House to the courthouse.

George Grant, "Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood," pg.88-89

Darwinian Morality is Bankrupt

Since its advent in the mid-nineteenth century Darwinism has stirred up debate about many questions touching the very heart of human existence.  Not least among these is: How should we live?  While many philosophers and theologians ruled this question outside the purview of science, most prominent advocates of Darwinian theory—including biologists, physicians, social theorists, and popularizers—believed Darwinism had far-reaching ramifications for ethics and morality.  Many argued that by providing a naturalistic account of the origin of ethics and morality, Darwinism delivered a death-blow to the prevailing Judeo-Christian ethics, as well as Kantian ethics and any other fixed moral code.  If morality was built on social instincts that changed over evolutionary time, then morality must be relative to the conditions of life at any given time.  Darwinism—together with other forms of historicism ascendant in the nineteenth century—thus contributed to the rise of moral relativism.

But, interestingly, many Darwinists were not willing to live with complete moral relativism.  They still retained one fixed point of reference—the process of evolution itself.  Since morality arose through evolution, they argued that the purpose of morality is to advance the evolutionary process.   They thereby imported the nineteenth-century cult of progress into evolutionary theory.  The problem with this is that it presupposed that some forms of morality are “better” than others.  But, of course, Darwinism provided no basis to consider some form of morality “better” than any other, or for that matter, it gave no reason to think that morality was “better” in any real sense than immorality.  Yet most used morally charged language quite freely, apparently oblivious to the contradiction this entailed.

Those Darwinists who made the evolutionary process the new criteria for morality radically altered the way that people thought about morality.  Since they generally affirmed that good health and intelligence were key factors in the upward march of evolution, improving physical vitality and mental prowess—especially of future generations—became the highest moral virtue.  The greatest sin was to contribute in some way to the decline of physical life or intellectual ability.  This kind of evolutionary ethics flew in the face of Christian morality, in which one’s health, vitality, and mental faculty play no role in determining moral or immoral behavior.  While Christian morality demands a relationship of love toward God and one’s neighbors, which involves self-sacrifice, evolutionary ethics focussed on breeding better humans, even it if meant sacrificing other people in the process.


Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, pg.229-230

Marriage As a Social Construction

When traditional marriage is merely a social construction, no principled reason keeps the state from permitting virtually any marital union.  For example, marital arrangements that include two brothers, two sisters, a mother and a son, a father and a son, a mother and a daughter, or a grandfather and a grandson, would be consistent with the philosophical assumptions undergirding the same-sex marriage defense.

And this is not all.  Nor is a polygamous marriage of one man and numerous spouses--which also may include his mother, his grandmother, his grandfather, as well as his adult daughter and son--inconsistent with the same-sex marriage worldview.  Given sexual politics today, one can easily imagine polygamy being reintroduced by an appeal to the sad plight of the bisexual, a person who is incapable of fulfilling his or her marital aspirations with merely one spouse of one gender.  The rhetorical question could be raised: Why should he or she be forbidden from marrying the ones he or she loves?

Of course, we cannot ignore the marital rights of the person who has a deep and abiding affection for the family pet, for then the animal-rights crowd may pipe up and accuse us of speciesism, the prejudice favoring human beings over nonhuman animals.

To be blunt, the state and its institutions (including public schools) could not say that a heterosexual monogamous couple raising three young children in a traditional Christian, Jewish, or Muslim home is a better arrangement for the moral ecology of the community than the marital union of a father and four of his adult children who make their living producing pornographic films of their sexual encounters.  After all, they are all adult consenters, nobody is being coerced, and the state should not prefer one sexual lifestyle over another.

We believe these counterintuitive results occur because most proponents of same-sex marriage presuppose that marriage and family are merely matters of convention and positive law.  That is, because family and marital arrangements aren't particularly sacrosanct or normative, individual members of society may tinker with them as long as they don't interfere with other people's choices.  The state must be "neutral" and assume no overarching good or purpose to human life, relationships, and communities.  Thus those who uphold the philosophy of same-sex marriage must be willing to embrace marital and familial anarchy.


Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air,” pg.121-122

Sin Becomes Master

At first, sin is like an occasional visitor, then like a guest who stays for a while, and finally like the master of the house.

Rabbi Yetzhak, Genesis Rabbah 22:6.  Cited by Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, pg. 146

Tyranny for 'Good' of Victims

Of all the tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.  To be cured against one's will and of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on the level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles and domestic animals.

C.S. Lewis, cited by Dr. Tana Dineen, Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People, pg.67

Compulsory Education

Laws making education in public schools compulsory have historically been found in the most totalitarian of governments where state-sponsored indoctrination was a major goal of the educational system.

Erwin W. Lutzer, When A Nation Forgets God, p.98

Conception Makes You A Mother

The pregnant woman has made a prior choice to have intercourse, a choice that brought another party into her life, a separate little individual whose rights now limit her own freedom of choice.  Choices often lead to conditions that are physically or morally irreversible.  Her choice as to what happens to and in her body should have been made earlier.  It is too late to choose for or against motherhood.  The pregnant woman is already a mother.

Robertson McQuilkin, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, pg.320-321

The Choice Is Whether to Have Sex

The mother's first two matters of control--sex and birth control--were personal and private.  The issue of abortion is not personal and private.  It directly involves the life of another person and therefore becomes the concern of a decent society.  As a society would protect the life of the mother if someone tried to kill her, so it must protect the life of the child if someone tries to kill him.

Randy Alcorn, "ProLife Answers to ProChoice Arguments," p.115

It's Not About Civil Rights

Greg Koukl puts this very well:  "Same-sex marriage is not about civil rights.  It is about validation and social respect.  It is a radical attempt at civil engineering using government muscle to strong-arm the people into accommodating a lifestyle many find deeply offensive, contrary to nature, socially destructive, and morally repugnant."  Same-sex marriage advocate Andrew Sullivan understands this.  he writes, "Including homosexuals within marriage would be a means of conferring the highest form of social approval imaginable."

Frank Turek, Correct, NOT Politically Correct, pg.12

The Logical Results of Abortion

Once you permit the killing of the unborn child, there will be no stopping.  There will be no age limit.  You are setting off a chain reaction that will eventually make you the victim.

Your children will kill you because you permitted the killing of their brothers and sisters.  Your children will kill you because they will not want to support you in your old age.  Your children will kill you for your homes and estates.

If a doctor will take money for killing the innocent in the womb, he will kill you with a needle when paid by your children.  This is the terrible nightmare you are creating for the future.


Dr. R.A. Gallop, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.  Cited by John Powell, S.J.,  Abortion: the Silent Holocaust, pg.134

It Isn't 'Orientation' They Want Legalized

Make no mistake about it:  It's not homosexual orientation for which gays seek legal protection, but homosexual conduct.  It's not orientation alone which gays want to promote in America's classrooms as being socially acceptable, but homosexual behavior.  Nor is orientation the issue at stake in the movement to gain legal recognition of homosexual marriages and adoptions.  And if you take a close look at the criminal statutes that gays find so offensive, not one prohibits "homosexuality" or "orientation," just sodomy as the expression of this orientation.

F. LaGard Smith, Sodom's Second Coming, p.59

Sin vs 'Mental Illness'?

Unfortunately, what is done all too often is this:  A disease that may not exist is treated with a drug whose action in humans no one really understands while the person undergoes months or years of psychotherapy with no defined therapeutic, measurable endpoints.  Fifty years of research has yielded only symptoms, no biological basis, no cause, and certainly no cure.  Is mental illness a disease or are issues of the heart and people relationships the core issues?  Could sin be to blame?

David Tyler & Kurt Grady, Deceptive Diagnosis: When SIN is called SICKNESS, p.71

It Isn't About Marriage 'Equality'

Traditionally, when any of us seeks a marriage license, we

* can't already be married

* must be an adult and must marry an adult

* can't marry a close family member

* must marry someone of the opposite sex

Now if two people meeting all these criteria go to city hall to get a marriage license, and the clerk asks whether either are homosexual and denies them a marriage license based on an affirmative answer, that would be discriminatory.  Current law does not keep homosexual individuals from marrying.  It just keeps them -- as well as heterosexuals -- from redefining marriage by marrying a person of the same sex.  Our current marriage laws treat everyone equally.

This debate isn't about equality or access to marriage; it's about redefining marriage, making it something it has never been before.


Glenn T. Stanton and Dr. Bill Maier, Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting, pg.33

March Of Dimes Is Evil

Founded in 1938 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the March of Dimes is one of the world's premier private-sector health and medical associations.  Dedicated to the prevention of birth defects, it raises millions of dollars each year for education, research, and service.  It works to improve maternal and newborn health.  It makes basic clinical grants to hospitals and universities for perinatal and genetic study programs.  It sponsors medical conferences, coordinates symposia, and publishes literature.  Since it successfully led the fight to cure polio during the early fifties, the March of Dimes has become a symbol of hope for millions of parents all around the globe.  But it has also placed itself at the forefront of the Planned Parenthood movement.

Since the early sixties, it has increasingly turned its attentions away from curing genetic disorders and birth defects to detecting and eliminating them.  As a result, amniocentesis and abortion have become its chief concerns, consuming a vast majority of its funding.  Instead of trying to solve the problem of birth defects, the March of Dimes now disposes of those problems by funding "search and destroy" missions.

Eighty-eight percent of all March of Dimes geneticists favor abortion-on-demand.  Seventy-one percent argue that if amniocentesis diagnostic tests prove a child to be defective, he should be terminated regardless of the stage of pregnancy.  A large number even revealed that hey were involved in live fetal experimentation and fetal harvesting.  This despite the persistent claims of the organization that it is "abortion neutral."

The connection between the March of Dimes and Planned Parenthood is not just philosophical.  Many faithful donors would be shocked to discover that the money they have given over the years to "help fight birth defects" has actually wound up in Planned Parenthood coffers.  In 1980, for instance, the March of Dimes gave more than $0.5 million to a Planned Parenthood abortionist for a major research project.  The results of the study, published in Obstetrics and Gynecology, have been widely heralded in pro-abortion circles and selectively circulated by Planned Parenthood affiliates all around the country.

In response to prolife criticism of its close relationship with Planned Parenthood, the national office of the March of Dimes called its critics "ideological zealots eager to invent new enemies."  Today, the kinship between the two groups is friendlier than ever.  They display and distribute each other's literature.  They refer clients back and forth to each other's programs.  They cooperate in sponsoring genetic research and perinatal medical conferences.  And they support each other in their political lobbying efforts.


George Grant, Immaculate Deception: The Shifting Agenda of Planned Parenthood, p.139-140 (1996)  [And things haven't changed a bit.]