[ JBEM Index / Volume 6 / Number 3 ]
Dander
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) has settled its federal lawsuit against the California Department of Education on terms very satisfactory to the Institute. The Department of Education and, especially, its Superintendent Bill Honig, had tried to shut down the graduate school operated by ICR. The lengthy list of stipulations declared by the judge included “that a private postsecondary educational institution may teach the creation model as being correct provided that the institution also teaches evolution.” While the Institute chooses to teach evolution so that its students will understand this common, erroneous dogma, it remains a shame that the state mandates that a private graduate school must teach error.
From a recent issue of Parenting magazine, Penelope Leach gives us some reasons to quit spanking children as a means of discipline. Included among them is that “almost everybody agrees that it’s wrong for people to settle arguments or impose their will on each other with blows.” We are further told that “physical punishment used to be an accepted part of all relationships that gave one individual legitimate authority over another — master over slave, servant or wife; officer over enlisted man; law enforcer over lawbreaker. But that has all been consigned to the history books by a society that prides itself on universal human rights.” Almost everyone but God (II Sam. 7:14, Prov. 22:15, Prov. 13:24).
The Rutherford Institute (P.O. Box 7482, Charlottesville, VA, 22906-7482) is planning to file lawsuits against state school systems in California and Massachusetts “for allowing condom distribution to students in tax-payer funded public schools … without parental permission or involvement.” Schools are inherently religious in that their curriculum and methods must depend upon empirically unprovable presuppositions which are taken on faith. In a “pluralistic” state, Christians can expect increasing difficulties with public schools. We need a strategy to recover all of the aspects of the education of our children, not only the egregious departures of pluralism.
“One of the continuing fascinations of clinical medicine is the inability of any physician, no matter how experienced, to predict with certainty the course of disease … Medicine, like no other profession, continues to make its practitioners humble.” Arthur W. Feinberg, “The Evaluation of Amaurosis Fugax,” Hospital Practice, April 30, 1992, p. 57.
The Christian Brotherhood Newsletter (P.O. Box 832, Barberton, Ohio, 44203) had been publishing the medical needs of its Christian subscribers for years in order that they may assist one another with the expenses attendant to illness. [See the Fall, 1989, issue of this journal.] Nondrinking, nonsmoking Christian subscribers who are faithful in their church attendance send checks directly to one another, after the Newsletter has verified the expenses and participation according to the plan the subscribers choose among themselves. One check per year goes to the newsletter publishers for their service. Though the activity is clearly planful Christian charity, the insurance commissioners of several states are trying to move against the Newsletter to prevent it from being circulated in their states, charging it with being a “pyramid scheme” in which the latecomers will be suckered into paying the bills of the earlier subscribers. We have statist housing, education, and medicine. Having done so well in those endeavors, the state now wants a monopoly on charity, notwithstanding the fact that funds collected under coercion (taxes) are, by definition, not charity (II Cor. 9:7). Will churches which take up offerings to indemnify a loss suffered by someone need a state insurance commissioner to oversee the collection plate after it is passed? As for a “pyramid scheme,” the pot calls the kettle black. What, after all, is Social Security but one massive involuntary pyramid scheme?
In the February, 1992, issue of Good Housekeeping, we read how a woman discovered that her shoplifting was “an addiction.” Through group support by telephone with Shoplifter’s Anonymous and counseling she came to understand the psychodynamics of her shoplifting and changed her behavior. Nowhere in the article does the author acknowledge the sinfulness of her behavior. The issues she dealt with were internal and horizontal, but there was no sense of her “vertical” responsibility before God. The public is heeding the medical profession’s medicalization of sin. We are providing a capacious vehicle for mankind to bypass God’s Law and His offer of forgiveness in Christ.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, says Jim Brady, “can usher in the dawn of a new age for Americans with disabilities. If we get the printed words off the pages of the statute books and into the hearts and actions of the people.” The press secretary to Ronald Reagan who was severely wounded in the assassination attempt on the president was thus quoted in “The Independent,” a publication of Walton Rehabilitation Hospital. Whereas outward morality can be legislated, inward morality cannot be achieved by Congressional ink. See II Corinthians 3:3, Jeremiah 31:33 and Hebrews 8:10. Christians should not seek to use State coercion to accomplish ends for which the State is not charged by God to accomplish. Palingenesis is not something the civil state can or should attempt. The Americans with Disabilities Act may create a severe backlash against the very persons it is intended to help.
[ JBEM Index / Volume 6 / Number 3 ]