Beware of Antidepressants!

A large number of studies have linked antidepressants with suicidal thoughts and a greater tendency to act upon them.  Antidepressants have also been linked to violent thoughts accompanied by seemingly irresistible compulsions to act upon them -- even if such thoughts and behaviors are inconsistent with a person's character prior to receiving these medicines.

Elyse Fitzpatrick & Laura Hendrickson, M.D., "Will Medicine Stop the Pain?", p.51

The Reason Homosexuality Is Condemned

The reason for the biblical prohibitions [on homosexual behavior] is the same reason why modern loving homosexual partnerships must also be condemned, namely that they are incompatible with God's created order (heterosexual monogamy).  And since that order was established by creation, not culture, its validity is both permanent and universal.  There can be no "liberation" from God's created norms; true liberation is found only in accepting them.

John Stott, Same-Sex Partnerships?: A Christian Perspective, p.43

Marriage vs Cohabiting 2

The fact that couples choose to cohabit rather than marry indicates there is a difference between the two relationships.  Marriage involves things the cohabiting couple - or at least one of them - would rather not deal with.  This is why cohabitation even exists.

Glenn T. Stanton, The Ring Makes All the Difference, p.43

Self-Esteem Doesn't Alter Accountability

Self-esteem, whether high or low, does not determine our actions.  We are accountable for our actions, and we are responsible for trying to do good and avoid evil.  Low self-esteem does not make someone an alcoholic, nor does it enable a person finally to admit his or her addiction and do something about it.  Both of these decisions are up to each of us, whatever our level of self-esteem.

Paul C. Vitz, "Psychology As Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship," p.20

Democrat Money Base

Federal Election Commission data shows the Democrats obtain most of their money not from average working Americans, but, overwhelmingly, from super-rich trial lawyers, Hollywood entertainment executives and billionaire financiers like George Soros and Warren Buffet.

As of July 2004, trial lawyers had donated $112 million to Democratic political candidates compared to the entire oil and gas industry which donated a mere $15 million to the GOP.  Wealthy lawyers give seventy-one percent of their money to Democrats and only twenty-nine percent to GOP candidates.

Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, p.61

Sexual Fulfillment

It is well known that male and female sexual experiences differ.  The male sexual appetite is largely physical, it is quickly aroused and quickly satisfied.  With women, however, sexual intercourse is not in itself a wholly satisfying experience, for it arouses other desires which are not so easily met -- desires for the security of a husband, home and children.  For men to arouse such desires, when they have no intention of fulfilling them, can only be described as cruel.

John Stott, Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today, p.55

Do You Hate Truth?

We love the truth when it enlightens us.  We hate the truth when it convicts us.

Augustine of Hippo, cited by Frank Turek in Stealing From God, p.220

Atheism is Self-Refuting

For a worldview that prides itself on reason, a look under the covers reveals that atheism is anything but reasonable.  It’s a self-refuting worldview that steals from God in order to work.  An atheist is like someone who claims not to believe in guns, but then steals your gun and tries to shoot you with it.  The atheist’s hope is that no one will notice.

Frank Turek, Stealing From God, p.215

Why Doesn't God Stop Evil?

While nearly everyone asks why God doesn’t stop evil, few people ask why God doesn’t stop pleasure.  Stopping pleasure would be an effective way of stopping evil while maintaining human freedom.  That’s because no one does evil for evil’s sake.  We do evil to get good things, such as money, sex, and power.  Take away pleasure and the incentive to do evil would vanish.  But if God were to stop evil by ending pleasure, would the human race continue?  If it did, would anyone like the pleasureless world that remains? 

Frank Turek, Stealing From God, p.142

Why Can Atheists Play God?

The source of all life is justified in taking life whenever He decides.  We are not.  Yet Richard Dawkins recently affirmed his pro-abortion stance by declaring, “A fetus is less human than an adult pig.”  That echoes the thoughts of fellow atheist Peter Singer of Princeton University who believes that parents should have the right to kill their children even after they are born!  Let’s see.  According to the new atheists, when God plays God and kills children, He is immoral.  But when atheists play God and kill children, they are exercising their moral rights.  Can anyone justify that for me? 

Frank Turek, Stealing From God, p.128

Moral Law Means a Moral Lawgiver

Atheism cannot even justify the existence of good and evil without smuggling in the moral argument for God.  To put it simply, when you assert that there is such a thing as evil, you must assume there is such a thing as good.  When you say there is such a thing as good, you must assume there is a moral law by which to distinguish between good and evil.  There must be an ontic referent by which to determine what is good and what is evil.  When you assume a moral law, you must posit a moral lawgiver because the questioner assumes the intrinsic worth of humanity in raising the question of evil, an assumption that is not warranted by naturalism.  But this moral lawgiver is precisely who atheists are trying to disprove.  Without that moral lawgiver, humanity is an existent entity without an essential worth other than some self-referencing sleight of hand.

Frank Turek, Stealing From God, p.x

Satan's Favorite Subject is Sex

The devil is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favorite subject.  He is as good every bit at catching you through generous romantic or tender motives, as through baser or more animal ones.

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, cited by R. Albert Mohler, Jr, in Desire and Deceit: The real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance, p.3

Eugenics Replaced By Newgenics

Today we are faced with a potential return to eugenic discrimination, not under national flags or political credos, but as a function of human genomic science and corporate globalization.  Shrill declarations of racial dominance are being replaced by polished PR campaigns and patent protections.  What eugenics was unable to accomplish in a century, newgenics may engineer in a generation. The almighty dollar may soon decide who stands on which side of a new genetic divide already being demarcated by the wealthy and powerful.  As we speed toward a new biological horizon, confronting our eugenic past will help us confront the bewildering newgenic future that awaits.

Edwin Black, "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race," p.xviii

If You Want Her, Marry Her!

Unless a  man is prepared to ask a woman to be his wife, what right has he to claim her exclusive attention?  Unless she has been asked to marry him, why would a sensible woman promise any man her exclusive attention?  If, when the time has come for a commitment, he is not man enough to ask her to marry him, she should give him no reason to presume that she belongs to him.

Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity, p.154

Psychiatric Fads

Fashions in the psychiatric diagnosis have recently become almost as fickle as the popularity of rock stars, trendy restaurants, and travel destinations.  Because there are no biological tests or clear definitions that distinguish normal from mental disorder, everything in psychiatric diagnosis depends on very easily influenced subjective judgments.  Whenever rates of a mental disorder jump explosively, the safe bet is always on fad.  Assume that many, if not most, of the newly identified "patients" are really "normal enough."  They have been mislabeled and will likely be over treated.

Psychiatric fads start when a powerful authority gives them force and legitimacy.  The DSM system, and the "experts" who fashioned it, have been the main fashion setters -- the driving force in identifying new mental disorders and defining milder forms of those that had been previously described.  Unfortunately most experts suffer from an intellectual conflict that biases them toward diagnostic inflation.  Focused on their specialized research, they miss the big picture -- always worrying so much about not having a diagnosis for a patient who needs one that they ignore the risk of mislabeling someone who doesn't.  There is also an emotional element.  Experts become true believers who really come to love their pet diagnoses and want to see them grow.  While each one presses for only a small expansion, their aggregate pressure blows up the inflationary balloon.  In my thirty-five years of herding experts, not once has anyone every suggested raising the bar to narrow the scope of his pet area.

Allen Frances, M.D, "Saving Normal," pp.28-29

Psychiatrists Are Witchdoctors

The techniques used by Western psychiatrists are, with few exceptions, on exactly the same scientific plane as the techniques used by witchdoctors.  If one is magic, then so it the other.  If one is prescientific, then so is the other.

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists: The Common Roots of Psychotherapy and Its Future, p.11

Government Sexuality Ideology

SIECUS [Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States] argues that hurt feelings provide a further reason not to teach about sex within marriage as the preferred social standard.  It claims that the idea that sex is only appropriate in marriage "may prove particularly harmful to young people who are or have been sexually abused," because "it requires telling these students that the behaviors in which they have involuntarily participated go against society's 'expected standard.'  Such statements are likely to produce additional feelings of guilt and shame."  That's right: according to SIECUS, schools should not teach about reserving sex for marriage because it might make the victims of incest and molestation think that the sexual acts they were coerced into were somehow illegitimate.  What does SIECUS believe schools should do instead?  Assure victims of sexual abuse that they shouldn't feel bad because the acts perpetrated against them were simply the expression of a different set of values?  SIECUS's complaint is eerily reminiscent of claims by an earlier generation of SIECUS officials that the most traumatic part of molestation was that society disapproved of it.

John G. West, "Darwin Day in America: How our politics and culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," p.320

Self-Esteem Teaching Run Amok

At the theoretical level, however, [Dr. Benjamin] Spock can be accused of being permissive insofar as he has promoted the theory of Sigmund Freud.  Parents were told to be exceedingly careful not to damage puerile psyches by disciplining them, for undoing such damage might entail years of psychoanalysis if it could be accomplished at all.  In Spock's view children are fragile reeds who are extremely sensitive to minor parental inconsistencies and emotional innuendo.  Indeed, if one takes psychoanalytic theory seriously it is possible to imagine that bad days for a mother at a crucial stage of childhood development can irrevocably arrest the child's development at one stage or another.  The inevitable outcome of Spock's -- and Freud's -- theory of emotional development has been many parents who are inappropriately overwhelmed by guilt, paralyzed by inaction, and too often unable to say "no."

Spock has acknowledged that attempts to follow his child-rearing prescriptions frequently lead to permissive parents at the same time as he had vehemently denied that he is personally permissive.


E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., "Freudian Fraud: the Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture," p.140-141  (1992)


(This ideology resulted from the whole practice of raising children to remain children rather than to be adults.  Is it any wonder why those who run our colleges, universities, and politics are the way they are -- spoiled brats who always want their way?)

Socialism Destroys Liberty

It may be said of Socialism, therefore, very briefly, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty.  On the one hand it was said that the State could provide homes and meals for all; on the other it was answered that this could only be done by State officials who would inspect houses and regulate meals.  The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history.  It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it.  Since it was supposed to gain equality at the sacrifice of liberty, we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality.  Indeed, there was not the faintest attempt to gain equality, least of all economic equality.  But there was a very spirited and vigorous effort to eliminate liberty, by means of an entirely new crop of crude regulations and interferences.


G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, p.100-101 (1922)

The World Is Insane

The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, p.15

Resist Tyranny Before It Exists

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt.  It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt.  People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late.  It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.  It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air.  A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils, p.1

Moral Absolutes Are Disintegrating

Christian absolutes -- those truths and standards of Scripture which cannot be altered -- are becoming less and less tolerated in society.  Eventually this must result in the outlawing of Christianity.  When Christian absolutes were the basis of society, immoral activities such as homosexual or lesbian lifestyle and pornography were outlawed.  There has been a fundamental shift.  Our society is now based on a relative morality: that is, a person can do what he likes and is answerable to no one but himself as long as the majority of people can be persuaded that their interests are not being threatened.  This results in society's being told that no one can say anything against those who choose to be sexual deviants, go naked publicly or do whatever they want (within the limits of the law, which is also changing to become more "tolerant" of people's actions).

God's absolutes dictate that there are rules by which we must abide.  Christianity cannot co-exist in a world community with relative morality as its basis.  One or the other will yield.

Ken Ham, "The Lie," p.5 (1987)

Vision of the Anointed

It is widely taken as axiomatic that ordinary people's lives lack meaning, which must be brought to them by the anointed via various political crusades or social activism. . . . 
In other words, the purpose of a tax-payer-supported institution is to express the ideologies of those who run it and to brainwash the visiting public with the vision of the anointed.

Thomas Sowell, "The Vision of the Anointed," p.20

Sorry, But No Life Exists Except Here

The reason for this determination to see life in outer space where no evidence yet exists is simple to see.  It is a rule of mathematics and statistics that no random event happens only once. . . .  If indeed life on earth were a random event; if just by chance bacteria became Bach, then it absolutely and positively must have happened somewhere else in the universe too.  Unless, of course, God made it happen here, which is an unthinkable position because if God did make us, then He also gave us instructions on how to live.  This would spell doom to secular humanism.

To Americans of faith, whether God did or did not create little green men with waving antennae is largely irrelevant.  To the secularist, since God did not create us in the first place, the same random forces that put us here must have also put our first cousins somewhere else.  If we acknowledge that humans are unique and that we have no reason to suspect life exists elsewhere, then anti-Godists face a crisis of faith.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," p.65-66

The Need For a Higher Law

If God has given man a means of discovering and implementing divine law, then the true and just legal system must be based on this revealed law.  [Carl F.H.] Henry says, "One reason law has lost its power in modern life is the failure to recognize divine law as the fundamental law."  Without divine law, the individual has not standard for judging any legal system imposed upon him.  "If a man cannot know, according to a higher law, what is just or right in a given situation," says [John W.] Whitehead, "he cannot protest and criticize legitimately any particular course of action as unjust."

David A. Noebel, Understanding the Times, p.551

No Liberty With Corrupt Manners

Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.

Samuel Adams, signer of the Declaration of Independence

"Victimism"

An exaggerated or selective enforcement of tolerance, or "sensitivity," can easily become a pretext for new forms of oppression.  The prime oppressive ideology in current America is termed "political correctness," the foundation of which is the view that the greatest sins are intolerance and insensitivity.  Philosophically, political correctness has links to Marxism, but I prefer to give it the more generic label of "victimism."  The basic premise of victimism is that society is divided into two categories of persons, victims and oppressors.  The oppressors are always wrong, and the victims are always right.  The goal of political activity (and everything is deemed to be political) is to disempower the oppressors and to empower the victims, often so that they can do some oppressing of their own.  Anyone who has spent much time in one of our great universities will know what I mean. Rules that were formerly thought to be absolute, such as freedom of thought and expression, are discarded whenever the victims' interests so demand.  An oppressor who says something that offends a designated victim is sentenced to sensitivity training, but the victims may abuse the oppressors all they like.

Victimism is supposedly based on a passion for tolerance, but the passion lasts only until the victims have enough power to turn on the oppressors.  Under the rules of victimism, tolerating the oppressors is absurd.  Of course, this philosophy is self-contradictory.  If the victims truly were victims, they would not be given the extraordinary advantages that victim status confers.  The designated "victims" really are victimized in another sense, however; because often the effect of the philosophy is to keep the victims in a state of dependency so they can be manipulated by demagogues.  People who are festering with resentment for real and imagined grievances can be persuaded that their welfare depends on following bullies and extortionists who promise to wrest concessions from the oppressors.


Phillip E. Johnson, The Right Questions: Truth, Meaning & Public Debate, p.122

Sex Education Illusion

The truth is, Planned Parenthood's sex education programs have backfired, actually increasing teen pregnancies.  According to its own survey, conducted by the Louis Harris pollsters, teens who have taken "comprehensive" sex education courses have a fifty percent higher rate of sexual activity than their "unenlightened" peers.  And yet the courses had no significant effect on their contraceptive usage.  The conclusion, one that even Planned Parenthood researchers have been unable to escape, is that sex education courses only exacerbate the teen pregnancy problem. . . . 

In 1970 fewer that half of the nation's school districts offered sex education curricula and none had school-based birth control clinics.  Today more than seventy-five percent of the districts teach sex education and there are more than one hundred clinics in operation.  Yet the percentage of illegitimate births has only increased during that time, from a mere fifteen percent to an astonishing fifty-one percent.

In California, the public schools have required sex education for more than thirty years, and yet the state has maintained one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation.

According to the Harris poll, the only things that effectively impact the teen pregnancy problem are frequent church attendance and parental oversight, the very things that Planned Parenthood has been railing against for three-quarters of a century -- the very things that sex education courses are designed to circumvent.


George Grant, "Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood," p.32-33


This citation is dated from 1992; imagine how much worse it has gotten.

Criminals Not Necessarily Responsible?

By rejecting human free will, many psychiatrists argued that responsibility as it had be traditionally conceived was misguided.  However, they generally argued that society had a right to protect itself against morally "aberrant" individuals, so they were not necessarily advocating reduced penalties for criminals.  However, they thought penalties should be determined on the basis of the threat of the individual to society, not based on the particular crime.  The medicalization of criminal justice could sometimes result in longer sentencing, but for "medical" reasons, not retributive justice.

Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p.41

Multiculturalism

[M]ulticulturalism is a new form of racism because it reduces a matter of the intellect to a matter of racial or ethnic membership.

Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Koukl, “Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air,” p.95

Lethality of Homosexual Practices

We can only wonder how many twenty-year-olds (who were five when AIDS first appeared in America) might have been spared had activists made it their number-one priority to protect individual lives rather than the gay lifestyle. For as the recent survey The Social Organization of Sexuality makes clear, the vast majority of youngsters who at some point adopt homosexual practices later give them up.

These young people, however, are the very ones told by educators to treat homosexuality as equally good — and safe — as heterosexuality.  In one typical incident in the Northeast, a generally liberal, nonreligious mother of a nine-year-old boy reported her son’s return home in tears from public elementary school.  He hung his head in embarrassment and shame and finally told his outraged mother how the teacher had explained to the class how to perform anal intercourse “safely.”

These courses are careful to avoid presenting anal intercourse as the predominantly homosexual practice that it is. . . .  Students are taught to accept homosexual behavior fully without being instructed as to its typical features and typical consequences.  But this subtle distortion of reality is minor compared to the major one that becomes common and lethal — that anal intercourse is safe so long as a condom is used.

The word lethal is deliberate.  Even before we have examined the evidence, I cannot stress too strongly that anal intercourse is not safe for anyone, under any circumstances.  As the evidence makes abundantly clear, anal intercourse is a terribly dangerous practice whose dangers mount with the frequency and multiplicity of partners, conditions that predominate among male homosexuals.  Gay activism is critical in the arena of education.  Teachers of youth should surely consider carefully before advising a course of action that in thousands of cases has led to preventable death.

Jeffrey Satinover, M.D., Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, p.22-23