Global Warming

In the liberal views of Global Warming, Christians are often attacked for not caring about the planet they live on, well we have a very different view on this. I think this article from the Ohio Apostolic News gives a very good view to our side of the story.


GLOBAL WARMING
BRIAN HOLLAWAY



In recent months, the news has been filled with the discussion of “Global Warming.” “Global Warming” is a phrase that describes the conclusion of a significant number of scientists who have interpreted a recent upswing in the earth’s average surface temperatures as an indication that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has produced a “greenhouse” effect. The long term effects of such a greenhouse effect is variously reported to include increased ocean levels that would swallow low-lying cities, increased cataclysmic weather events such as hurricanes, and structural changes to the climate of many parts of the earth. As Christians who love truth, Oneness Pentecostals should have no qualms with the science of observable changes to the world’s climate. If our climate is truly changing due to human activity, it is not unreasonable to attempt to avoid the possible destruction that climate change could produce. However, the priorities of those who would attempt to preserve the earth’s present condition seem to be in stark contrast to the Biblical description of the inevitable destruction of the earth during the end times. For example, Peter preached on the day of Pentecost that the sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood at some point in the future, and the Apostle John, in the book of Revelation, points out the various judgments of God that will be poured out upon the inhabitants of the earth before the present earth passes away. Furthermore, Peter’s second epistle tells us that the earth will melt with fervent heat, and Jesus himself mentioned that heaven and earth will pass away, yet the Word of God will never perish. In fact, one of the brightest hopes of the Christian walk is the promise that our life will be preserved beyond our time on earth. Paul the Apostle told the Thessalonians that, in the last days, the saints who are still on the earth will be taken off of the earth to meet the Lord and to be with Him in heaven for the rest of eternity. Instead of proposing a plan to save the earth, the Bible implores us to plan to save ourselves from a world that will not exist forever. The problem, then, with the “Global Warming” movement is that it has moved beyond the realm of science and into a crusade to preserve our earthly environment. To “save the earth” has now become a religion, where “unbelievers” are mocked for their “immorality” concerning their inattention to the dire effects of “Global Warming.” The underlying assumption is a
humanistic teaching that humankind can avoid any and all impending danger without regard for God.
The Biblical record, on the other hand, seems to imply that future judgment is inevitable, and therefore our highest priority should be to make our relationship with God whole. Efforts to save the earth, while often well intentioned, should not be allowed to rise above the Church’s number one priority: to prepare ourselves and the rest of humanity for eternity. If anything, the Church’s response to “Global Warming” should be to redouble our efforts to alarm the world of impending judgment. In fact, since every person’s time on earth is limited, let our prayers include a petition that a “Global Warming” to the
Spirit of God would develop in these last days in a great spirit of revival!
Brian Hollaway holds a Master’s Degree of Theological Studies from the Urshan Graduate School of Theology, and serves
as Assistant Pastor at the First Apostolic Church of Dublin (pastor Richard Collins.)

Sen. Cornyn: Amnesty proponents failed to dupe Americans

Jim Brown
OneNewsNow.com
June 29, 2007

One of the senators who led a successful effort to block the so-called "comprehensive immigration reform" bill is welcoming the measure's second death. John Cornyn says for the second time, the American people did not believe claims that the legislation would help secure the country's borders

The Senate has failed to invoke cloture on President Bush's plan to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S. The bill's supporters fell 14 votes shy of the 60 needed to limit debate and clear the way for final passage of the legislation.
Following the vote, Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) took to the floor and said claims from the bill's proponents were too hard for most Americans to believe. Addressing the president, Cornyn said: "The American people are pretty smart."
"When people said 'the only way you're going to get border security is if you agree to a path to citizenship for twelve-million people' ... they can see through that," the senator asserted, "and they know there's no obvious linkage between border security and a path to citizenship for twelve-million people. They know that if we really were serious about border security we would have already done it."
Cornyn said pro-amnesty Senators should have listened to the American people instead of trying to push the bill through without a transparent process. As he put it: "[T]he American people, [including] my constituents in Texas, are profoundly skeptical of big government solutions with a lot of moving parts based on big, grandiose promises when our history has been one of not delivering consistent with what we promised."
President Bush says he's "sorry" Congress did not reach an agreement on the bill, noting, "Legal immigration is one of the top concerns of the American people, and Congress's failure to act on it is a disappointment."
The immigration bill may possibly come up for consideration again in the Senate because the measure has not been permanently killed. However, on the House side, Republicans overwhelmingly oppose the measure, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has said she would not bring up the bill without 70 GOP votes.

Ken Ham explains contrast between Democrats, GOP on evolution

Jim Brown
OneNewsNow.com
June 14, 2007

A leading Christian apologist says he's not at all surprised by the results of a new Gallup poll that finds most Democrats and Independents believe Darwin's theory of evolution is true, but Republicans disbelieve it by a more than 2-to-1 margin. Church attendance, according to the poll, plays a role in those findings.

The poll found that those who go to church on a regular basis reject evolution more than those who do not. Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, also says Republicans are likelier than Democrats or Independents to attend church services.
Dr. Ken Ham is the president of Answers in Genesis (AIG), a Christian ministry that recently unveiled the new high-tech Creation Museum in northern Kentucky. Ham does not find it surprising to find that people who would be considered on the more conservative end of the spectrum would believe that God created the heavens and the earth and its inhabitants.
"Because after all, if there is no God and there's no absolute authority, who does decide right and wrong? Who does decide good and bad?" he asks. "Those on the other end of the spectrum who believe in moral relativism, of course, wouldn't want to be accountable to God and would want to believe that everything evolved by natural processes. So you'd more suspect that those people would say they believe in evolution ...."
Ham also believes that the education system fosters this belief in evolution. "What's being taught in the public education system is that life can only be explained by natural processes," the Christian apologist laments. "That is totally atheistic, the religion of naturalism, and that's not where the majority of Americans are at."
"But if you bring a whole generation [or generations] through an education system like that -- [a system that tells them] life is a result of natural processes and God has nothing to do with it -- then that's very much going to affect how they view morality and how they view themselves," Ham claims.
Ham says "creation versus evolution" has been a hot topic in the recent presidential debates because the biblical creation movement has been able to get a lot of information out into the culture, and more and more college students are starting to question their professors concerning the issue of origins.
In addition, he believes the opening of AIG's Creation Museum last month created an international media buzz that has brought the issue to light.

DVD highlights new alliance between Iran, Russia

Chad Groening
OneNewsNow.com
June 11, 2007

A Middle East expert and best-selling author hopes a new DVD he has produced will make people aware of the dangerous relationship developing between Iran and Russia

Last year Joel Rosenberg released his book Epicenter: Why The Current Rumblings In The Middle East Will Change Your Future. Now the best-selling book is being released as a DVD featuring interviews with Israeli leaders like former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the crisis in the Middle East.
Rosenberg says the release of the was timed to correspond with the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War in which the Jewish state won a huge victory over its Arab enemies. The author explains that the DVD focuses on the huge threat now posed by Iran.
"The president of Iran [Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] is vowing to wipe Israel off the map -- and it is a situation very similar to what Israel faced in 1967," he says. "Forty years ago the enemies of Israel were threatening to throw the Jews into the sea and they were building up their forces armed, supplied, and encouraged by Russia."
Rosenberg says 40 years later, Moscow is once again playing a central menacing role. "Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, seems to be leading his country away from friendship with the West and toward an alliance with radical Islamic regimes such as in Iran," he says.
The Russian president, he points out, has become very cozy with Ahmadinejad. "Putin is now talking about changing the constitution and extending the term of the presidency from four years to as many as seven years," says Rosenberg. "At the same moment ... Ahmadinejad said that the countdown to Israel's destruction has begun.
"So it's exactly this Iranian-Russian alliance that's emerging that has me concerned -- and that's really the focus of the documentary film that we have just released."
Rosenberg says Epicenter is a must for evangelical Christians who understand the biblical significance of Israel in end-times events.

Kucinich tells debate crowd he wouldn't order bin Laden assassination

from the Plain Dealer
Posted by Sabrina Eaton June 04, 2007 12:46PM
Cleveland Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich spent the weekend campaigning for president in New Hampshire, where he participated in a Sunday night debate among Democratic candidates at St. Anselm's College and addressed a state Democratic Party convention.

Kucinich set himself apart from the other candidates during the nationally televised debate when moderator Wolf Blitzer of CNN asked whether Kucinich would launch a missile strike against Osama bin Laden if he knew the terrorist leader would be at a target in Pakistan for 20 minutes and that innocent civilians would also be killed.

"I don't think that a president of the United States who believes in peace and who wants to create peace in the world is going to be using assassination as a tool, because when you do that, it comes back at your country," said Kucinich, adding that bin Laden should be tried for his crimes in an international court. A video of the exchange has been posted on YouTube.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama lacked such reservations.

"I don't believe in assassinations, but Osama bin Laden has declared war on us, killed 3,000 people, and under existing law, including international law, when you've got a military target like bin Laden, you take him out," he said.

All the other candidates raised their hands when asked whether they'd authorize a missile strike under those circumstances, although some offered qualifications.

"That is very difficult to answer in the abstract," said New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, who noted that a missile strike authorized by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, failed to kill bin Laden. "If we could do it without a tremendous amount of collateral damage, I think maybe with one or two exceptions, we would give the order to do it, knowing what a weighty responsibility that is."

Kucinich's presidential campaign posted highlights of his Saturday speech before New Hampshire's Democratic party on YouTube. An account of the event in the Concord Monitor newspaper reported that Kucinich, despite his low poll numbers, "perhaps rallied the most enthusiasm, drawing several sustained ovations from the crowd."

After that speech, an enthusiastic Kucinich gave a video interview to BuckeyeStateBlog, where he discussed his Ohio campaign operation. Saying that he has "a very strong base in Ohio," Kucinich said the issues he'll pursue in the state include opposing NAFTA and protecting the state's industrial base.

"There is no other candidate running for president who has the understanding of Ohio that I have, and frankly there might not be many that have the understanding of New Hampshire that I have, which is why I got the response I got," Kucinich told the blog.

Fisher faces accusations of favoritism

Columbus mayor's wife's hiring, pay probe at issue

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Reginald Fields and Aaron Marshall

Plain Dealer Reporters

Columbus -- Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher gave the wife of a powerful political ally a $70,000-a-year state job without a clear job description and without interviewing anyone else.

During her first weeks at the Ohio Department of Development, Frankie Coleman -- wife of Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman -- told co-workers that she wasn't sure what her job would be or even what title she should put on her business cards.

Fisher is director of development. His hiring of Coleman and questions about whether she cheated on payroll timesheets have ignited accusations of political favoritism and a state investigation in the early months of the administration of Demo cratic Gov. Ted Strickland, who has vowed to rid state government of corruption.

The timesheet issue was raised by Glenda Williamson, Coleman's supervisor and a holdover from the previous Republican administration. Fisher fired Williamson two days after she confronted Coleman.

Fisher said Williamson's termination was based on his wish to bring in his own leadership team and was not related to her complaints about Coleman.

For years, Michael Coleman has been important to Fisher and Strickland.

He signed on in 1998 as a running mate in Fisher's unsuccessful campaign for governor and more recently helping Strickland - a former congressman from Appalachia - connect with urban and black voters.

Mayor Coleman was the Democratic gubernatorial front-runner in late 2005 before his campaign imploded, clearing the way for Strickland to win the party's nomination.

His wife's drunken-driving crash and arrest in October 2005 was among Coleman's campaign setbacks. When Frankie Coleman was arrested, her blood-alcohol level was more than three times the state's legal limit.

Michael Coleman stayed in the background for months but emerged last June to publicly back Strickland. After winning the governorship, Strickland appointed Mayor Coleman to head his transition team.

 

see entire article--http://www.cleveland.com/open/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1180859505294500.xml&coll=2

 

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The Goal Is Freedom: A Democracy of Dunces?

News & Commentary

June 1, 2007

by Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and "In brief." TGIF appears Fridays.

When pro-free-market critics of democracy explain why laissez faire is not a winning election issue, they usually say that voters have a no incentive to research economic policy because one vote won't sway the election and the expected payoff to any individual voter is infinitesimal. So they, quite rationally, vote on other bases. This "rational ignorance" leaves space for special interests to have their way, despite the fact that if the voters paid attention to what was going on, they wouldn't put up with it.

That explanation leads to the conclusion that democracy does not work because outcomes diverge from what people really want but are powerless to obtain. On the other hand, fans of democracy think that the rejection of laissez faire shows the system is working just fine. But both sides agree that voters are rational (employing reason) under the circumstances.

Which story is true? Maybe neither.

Bryan Caplan's new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, which is beginning to make a splash (see this New York Times Magazine article), offers another reason why consistent pro-market policies don't do well: Voters feel that interventionist policies are good policies and have no incentive of any kind to acquire information that would upset long-held preferences.. He turns to this explanation because he finds too many problems with the rational-ignorance alternative. As Caplan writes,

In the naive public-interest view, democracy works because it does what voters want. In the view of most democracy skeptics, it fails because it does not do what voters want. In my view, democracy fails because it does what voters want.

For Caplan, as for other economists and political theorists, the basic problem is that in a democracy, individuals don't pay the price for their preferences:

In economic jargon, democracy has a built-in externality. An irrational voter does not hurt only himself. He also hurts everyone who is, as a result of his irrationality, more likely to live under misguided policies. Since most of the cost of voter irrationality is external -- paid for by other people, why not indulge? If enough voters think this way, socially injurious policies win by popular demand.

If bad economic policies are winning political platforms, the majority of voters are getting what they want. This is not good news.

Caplan says lots of people systematically (not randomly) make foolish choices at the ballot box about economic policies because they dogmatically believe those policies are good for the country. They don't understand the benefits of the free market, and would resist the evidence. He quotes Ludwig von Mises in agreement: "There is no use deceiving ourselves. American public opinion rejects the market economy." But this doesn't imply that they also make foolish choices in their private lives, because the political and personal arenas are substantially different. At the level of personal economic choice, the chooser bears most of the costs. If you want to buy Cheerios, your choice is decisive, you enjoy or suffer the consequences, and act accordingly in the future. If you vote for a protectionist, your choice is not decisive (the winner would have won anyway) and you don't bear all the consequences but only a minute fraction of them. I nearly applauded when I read Caplan's words asking us to "drop specious analogies between markets and politics, between shopping and voting."

When shopping, you won't refuse to examine a bad idea for long because it's costly to you. But, Caplan writes, "the price of ideological loyalty is close to zero. So we should expect people to 'satiate' their demand for political delusion, to believe whatever makes them feel best."

Antimarket Bias

Why do people have faith that bad economic polices are good? Because they incorporated biases into their worldview as they grew up and have no desire to examine them. Most people don't study economics, and most who do don't let their studies "corrupt" their biases. Market ideas are not intuitive. Caplan points out that while political scientists have been empirically documenting voters' systematic bias against free markets, economists have failed to assimilate the findings. "Economists' blind spot is particularly hard to excuse because they stand at the end of a long tradition with a lot to say about bias," Caplan writes. "Many of the most famous economists of the past, like Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat, obsessed over the public's wrongheaded beliefs about economics, its stubborn resistance to basic principles like opportunity cost and comparative advantage." (It's why Bastiat wrote about "what is not seen" and why, in our time, Manual Ayau called his article on comparative cost "The Most Elusive Proposition" [pdf].)

Caplan breaks the bias down into four varieties: antimarket bias, antiforeign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias. Antimarket bias refers a "tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of the market mechanism." This comes from the counterintuitiveness of spontaneous order ("invisible hand"), win-win exchange, general good arising from self-interested action, the social role of profit, market pricing, and so on. I think this bias stems partly from the derogation of self-interest so common in religion and moral philosophy. Caplan writes, "...[Adam] Smith's thesis [that general good grows out our private gain] was counterintuitive to his contemporaries, and remains counterintuitive today."

Antiforeign  bias means underappreciation of the benefits of trading with people in other countries. This apparently results, primarily, from some natural but unreasonable fear of foreigners, as well as a lack of understanding about the division of labor and law of comparative advantage, or costs. The result is a disposition against unconditional free trade. Even when trade is liberalized, it has to be done in a perverse way -- by promising it will lead to more exports, which is irrational since it's imports (consumption opportunities) that people ought to be concerned about. That misplaced concern goes back to the reason Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nation, the public's mistaking money for wealth.

The make-work bias, Caplan writes, is the "tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor." It shows up whenever something -- technology, foreign competition, whatever -- makes particular domestic jobs unnecessary. Here's a way to think about that bias. Imagine that a person from America circa 1800 traveled to our era in a time machine. You show him your iPod and explain what it does. He says, "That's wonderful, but really, you people are foolish. How can you have workers making those things when they are needed to grow food?" The answer, of course, is that they aren't needed to grow food because machines and knowledge enable us to grow far more food than was grown in 1800 with a far smaller fraction of the population. Yet popular prejudice would have it that when people were no longer needed on the farm, they faced a life of unemployment. What's missing? That fact that wants always exceed resources and labor. So when we can accomplish a task with fewer resources and less labor, the savings are available for new things we couldn't afford yesterday. There's no need to make work, which wouldn't be hard to do anyway. We can create jobs whenever we want -- by, for instance, outlawing any machinery invented after 1920 -- but we wouldn't be creating prosperity. Quite the opposite.

The final category of bias is the pessimistic bias -- "a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the (recent) past, present, and future performance of the economy." This is the prevalent belief that the present does not live up to some golden age. Of course, back in that supposed golden age, people were saying the same thing about some previous golden age, and so on, ad infinitum. Caplan notes that this belief has been attributed to the gradualness of progress (Smith) and to human nature (David Hume). Regardless of the cause, the tendency toward pessimism seems resistant to facts. People think ours is an era of decline, while economists argue over whether the rate of growth is slowing or not.

Caplan's thesis is more complex than I've indicated here, so interested readers should buy the book. (Here's an extract [pdf].) I've not dealt with many questions, such as the role of special interests and whether government's systematic historical intervention on behalf of business has tainted people's sense of what "free markets" and capitalism mean. But the core of the thesis strikes me as sound. It's not what voters don't know that brings them trouble, but what they know that isn't so. (That's Artemus Ward applied to politics.)

Caplan's solution is to "rely more on private choice and the free market." Good idea, though you'd have to get people to vote for that, so I'm not sure how effective that will be. Economic education for the public also would also seem in order. But just straightforward teaching won't be enough, for as Caplan elaborates, people hold fast to their errors through "emotional commitment." "A good teacher could change some minds, but the best teacher in the world would be lucky to convince half," he writes. Dogma dies hard.

At the very least, this implies that the case for liberty must be pressed across the entire cultural front, especially in movies and novels where emotions as well as reason can be appealed to.  We must find emotional commitments in the population that are consistent with freedom. Libertarian strategic wisdom may well begin with Jonathan Swift's insight: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

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Speaking Up for Freedom

By Fred Thompson
Friday, June 1, 2007

 

Well, he's done it. Hugo Chavez was already systematically silencing criticism of his autocratic rule through threats and intimidation. Journalists have been threatened, beaten and even killed. Now he's shut down the last opposition television networks in Venezuela and arrested nearly 200 protesters – mostly students. It's a monumental tragedy and the Venezuelan people will pay the price for decades to come. Americans are also at risk as he funds anti-American candidates and radicals all over Latin America. It's equally tragic that the U.S. is in no position to provide the victims of this emerging dictator with the truth. There was a time, though, when Americans were on the front lines of pro-freedom movements all over the world. I'm talking about the "surrogate" broadcast network that included Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, often called "the Radios." In this photo released by Miraflores Press Office, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez speaks during a meeting with retired people in La Guaira, Venezuela, Tuesday, May 29, 2007. Chavez defended his decision not to renew the license of a popular opposition-aligned television network and warned he might crack down on another critical TV station, accusing it of trying to incite attempts on his life. (AP Photo/Miraflores Press Office) When Ronald Reagan was elected, he greatly empowered the private, congressionally funded effort and handpicked the Radios' top staff to bring freedom to the Soviet Union. Steve Forbes led the group. Cynics still say that the USSR fell of its own weight, and that President Reagan's efforts to bring it down were irrelevant, but Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev say differently. Both have said that, without the Radios, the USSR wouldn't have fallen. The Radios were not some bland public relations effort, attracting audiences only with American pop music. They engaged the intellectual and influential populations behind the Iron Curtain with accurate news and smart programming about freedom and democracy. They had sources and networks within those countries that sometimes outperformed the CIA. When Soviet hardliners and reformers were facing off, and crowds and tanks were on the streets of Moscow and Bucharest, the radios were sending real-time information to the people, including the military, and reminding them of what was at stake. Then we won the Cold War. The USSR collapsed in 1991, and America relaxed. Military downsizing began and the Radios began to reduce broadcast air time to target countries. Now, of course, we know that the Islamofascists, many trained by the old Soviets, were making plans and plots of their own. Unfortunately, the plans to broadcast a pro-freedom message into Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Kurdistan and Ukraine were shelved or diluted. Reagan's ideological audacity was replaced with a more "diplomatic" tone. And see where it's got us? Not only has Islamic totalitarianism spread without a true ideological challenge, many of the freed Soviet bloc countries are slipping back into repression. Russia is making the same old threats and even protecting Iran's efforts to build nukes. We'll never know if Afghanistan might have rejected al Qaeda if America had actively engaged that country as we did those Eastern Europeans. We can't know if Venezuelans would have chosen liberty over the false security of authoritarianism if they had been challenged to face the issues. I do know, though, that it's time for a new generation of Americans to stand up for freedom -- like others before us. And this time, we'll have a whole new set of media technologies.

Fred Thompson is an actor and former Senator. His radio commentary airs on the ABC Radio Network and be blogs on The Fred Thompson Report.

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