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A R C H I V E S

NOVEMBER 2005

November 26, 2005
Another Good Reason to Homeschool
Litigation has been ongoing for some time now about Islamic religious coercion in a California public school district. The school authorities, apparently zealous for multicultural experiences, gave twelve-year-old students a heavy dose of Islamic faith and practice in a three week program. The non-profit law center that argued the case on behalf of several parents wrote the following summary:

"For three weeks, impressionable twelve-year-old students were, among other things, placed into Islamic city groups, took Islamic names, wore identification tags that displayed their new Islamic name and the Star and Crescent Moon, which is the symbol of Muslims, were handed materials that instructed them to 'Remember Allah always so that you may prosper,' completed the Islamic Five Pillars of Faith, including fasting, and memorized and recited the 'Bismillah' or 'In the name of God [Allah], the Merciful, the Compassionate,' which students also wrote on banners that were hung on the classroom walls."

Christian parents were understandably concerned about this apparent endorsement of Islam in the classroom. Characteristically, the ACLU did not pick up on this case, even though it is always happy to litigate over the slightest mention of the Bible in public schools. And also characteristically, the infamous Ninth Circuit Court issued a bizarre opinion last week, declaring these practices constitutional. This comes from the same court that had declared the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional a couple years ago for its inclusion of the words “under God.” This court would be demonstrating itself to be absolutely schizophrenic, except for its general consistency in ruling against Biblical positions. 

| Posted by Lael Weinberger |

November 23, 2005
Jobe Martin
Last week on Sunday and Monday we had the opportunity to attend a creation seminar conducted by Dr. Jobe Martin, hosted by our friends at Dyer Baptist Church. Dr. Martin is featured in a three documentary series, “Incredible Creatures that Defy Evolution,” and is the author of The Evolution of a Creationist. We thoroughly enjoyed his presentations, which surveyed the creation-evolution conflict in an understandable and very interesting way.
 

Dr. Martin was in private medical practice as a dentist at NASA, and then became a professor at Baylor College of Dentistry. He was a Christian at the time, but also believed and taught that God had used evolution to create, and that Genesis should conform to the mainstream evolutionary views.

Then he was challenged by two of his top students, both of whom believed that the Bible didn’t need corrected when it recorded a creation in six days, only thousands of years ago. “Surely, there must be a simple way to prove that their six-day view of creation was wrong,” Martin thought, and so he began to research the issue. Before long, he was questioning some of the big-bang “orthodoxy” that he had learned and advocated. And that was just the beginning. Today, Dr. Martin travels the country presenting the scientific and Biblical case for a six-day creation in such varied settings as secular universities, church seminars, and even the NEA convention. (That last forum was particularly hostile to creation, and Dr. Martin, a homeschooling father, is quick to warn of the dangers to children in the public school system.  You can read about his experiences there in this article.) Some of his favorite tools in showing the fallacies of evolution are the wonderful creatures in creation, such as the bombardier beetle, which have no reasonable evolutionary explanation. You can read about these creatures along with other arguments that convinced Jobe of the truth of creation in his book, The Evolution of a Creationist.

Dr. Martin's family ministers with him often, addressing such topics as courtship, modesty and music, topics that we also are very interested in and talked about at our conference last year.

| Posted by Lael Weinberger |
 

November 13, 2005
Sarfati on Medicine, Evolution, and the Shema
One of my favorite Christian apologists is the brilliant Dr. Jonathan Sarfati, author of Refuting Evolution volumes 1 and 2 and Refuting Compromise.  He is a frequent writer on the Answers in Genesis website, and I found two of his recent articles on very different topics particularly interesting.  If you have been following the debates over creation, evolution, and intelligent design in the mainstream media recently, you will have noticed that a connection is often made between evolution and medicine.  Does medicine really have any use for evolution (or, as some editorialists would have it, does medicine need evolution)?  The answer is a resounding no!, and to read Dr. Sarfati's article debunking this myth, you can click here.  The second article relates to Jewish apologetics and the trinity.  Here, Dr. Sarfati answers the question, does the doctrine of the trinity conflict with the doctrine, "Adonai echad," the Lord is one?  Dr. Sarfati, himself a Messianic Jew, shows how these two Biblical doctrines fit together in this article.

| Posted by Lael Weinberger |