Rather than a record of the rapid and mass destruction of contemporary life forms, they say that the fossil record shows the gradual development of life from the simple to the complex.

Which theory best fits the data? Are there different and distinct life forms as in the created kinds that reproduce after their kind? Or is there a continuum of transitions and indistinguishable divisions between the different life forms?

Now ask the darwinites why their theory supports the Genesis Flood model. Can they offer an explanation that will not bring both laughter and sadness to the unbelievers; laughter in its sophistry and sadness that men could believe such nonsense?

Why does the whole world so easily turn away from truth to believe a lie? The Biblical view of man is lost as well as the Gospel that constrains his depravity.

Will we acknowledge that Reformed Christianity (Calvinism) established the theological foundation on which the nation was built?

Will we acknowledge that rule of law is preferable to the rule of kings and that God’s law is preferable to man made law?

If we acknowledge these things are true and essential for liberty under limited government, how many would want to return to the founding principles?

The American Revolution against a tyrannical king was predicated on the Great Awakening. This revival of Biblical Christianity held that all men including king and governments of men were subject to law. The law they were referring to was English Common Law that was based on the Law of God given to men in the Bible.

Autonomous reason leads to naturalism and the absurd notion that everything that exists is here by natural process, even though natural law says that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed by natural process. The conservation of energy and the increase of entropy testify of a supernatural beginning as in Genesis 1 and 2. ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done...’

Vatican Adds Seven New Deadly Sins Including Damaging Environment and Drug Dealing

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

By Richard Owen

ROME —  Drug pushers, the obscenely rich, environmental polluters and “manipulative” genetic scientists beware — you may be in danger of losing your mortal soul unless you repent.

After 1,500 years the Vatican has brought the seven deadly sins up to date by adding seven new ones for the age of globalization. The list, published yesterday in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, came as the Pope deplored the “decreasing sense of sin” in today’s “secularized world” and the falling numbers of Roman Catholics going to confession.

The new deadly sins include polluting, genetic engineering, being obscenely rich, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and causing social injustice.

The Catholic Church divides sins into venial, or less serious, sins and mortal sins, which threaten the soul with eternal damnation unless absolved before death through confession and penitence.

It holds mortal sins to be “grave violations of the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes,” including murder, contraception, abortion, perjury, adultery and lust.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into Hell.”

Although there is no definitive list of mortal sins, many believers accept the broad seven deadly sins or capital vices laid down in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great and popularized in the Middle Ages by Dante in "The Inferno": lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride.

Christians are exhorted instead to adhere to the seven holy virtues: chastity, abstinence, temperance, diligence, patience, kindness and humility.

Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, said after a week-long Lenten seminar for priests that surveys showed 60 percent of Catholics in Italy no longer went to confession.

He said that priests must take account of “new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization.” Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an individual matter, it now has “social resonance.”

“You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,” he said.

Bishop Girotti said that mortal sins also included taking or dealing in drugs, and social injustice which caused poverty or “the excessive accumulation of wealth by a few.”

He said that two mortal sins which continued to preoccupy the Vatican were abortion, which offended “the dignity and rights of women,” and pedophilia, which had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the “human and institutional fragility of the Church.”

For a thousand years the church had lost the message of the Gospel. Men looked inside themselves for the graces that merited salvation rather than a righteousness wholly outside of themselves. It is to Christ that one must look for salvation, said Dr. Luther, not inside oneself. Once the religious subjectivism of the medieval church was eliminated among the Reformation countries, the energy consumed by desperately seeking and ‘earning’ salvation was turned outward, and a thousand years of intellectual, political, social, economic, and religious stagnation ended.

The Reformation gave us the Scriptures in the common tongues. The Bible was the written constitution of the church. It limited the power and authority of church leadership and made them accountable to the membership. The people could now read for themselves the proper role of the clergy and the church.

The death and resurrection of Christ had guaranteed free access of all believers to God. Justification came only by grace through faith, not through baptism, nor through the mass, nor any other sacrament, and certainly not through good works. The Reformation rebirthed the idea of the priesthood of all believers, and it became the foundation for modern political democracy; that is, the equality of all men before God and the law.

The wisdom of men says that death is the natural order leading to advancement of life. Death and suffering deny the existence of a good and loving God.

The wisdom of God says that death is our great enemy; the result of the rebellion of man and his fall into sin. Death and suffering are the constant reminder of our need of redemption for body and soul.

Herein are the foolish and the wise made evident…

‘We do not grieve as those who have no hope’ for our hope is in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Scriptures; conqueror of sin and death and the source of eternal life who has released us from the bondage of the fear of death [Hebrews 2:14-16].

It has perplexed many throughout the centuries why if there is one truth, it is so difficult to determine. Protestants believe in an infallible Bible, but who interprets it with final authority? Roman Catholics believe in an infallible church that is the infallible interpreter of the Scripture.

How do we determine who is right? Why does God allow errors in His Church? Do we accept the opinions of learned men as if their learning makes them right? Are we to believe that the number of people who hold to a doctrine correlates to its truthfulness?

Bolton gives us six special operations that truth has upon the soul. By these we may be able to evidence whether the opinions we have entertained are truth or error.

http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Asteroids3.html

By Martin Roberts

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL256586320080625?feedType=RSS&feedName=scienceNews&rpc=22&sp=true

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

[Yes, a historic day in the struggle to lower man to the level of apes.]

The pre-Reformation structure of ecclesiastical authority would not withstand the Protestant idea of sola scriptura; the doctrine that the Bible alone is the authority for faith and practice in the churches. A Christian man with a Bible was superior to any pope or council or tradition without it. The Bible was translated into the common tongues so the people could read it in their own language and not be subject to the ecclesiastical ruling class and freeing the people from ecclesiastical totalitarianism.

The Bible was the written constitution of the church. It limited the power and authority of church leadership and made them accountable to the people. The people could now read for themselves the proper role of the clergy and the church.

Consider the origin of constitutionalism; a written covenant founded in revealed truth and agreed upon for the mutual good of lawful men. Did the idea of a written constitution exist before the Reformation? Consider that there is a direct connection between the Reformation cry of sola scriptura and the American idea of the Constitution. The rule of law is a Biblical idea applied to the state in the outworking of Reformed Theology.

Yes, and neither will we acknowledge the origin of conservative principles. That would take us back to those colonial Americans who derived and implemented what we now call conservatism based on their Biblical Theology...

Autonomy of the Local Church

The local church is an independent body accountable to the Lord Jesus Christ, the head of His Church. All human authority for governing the local church resides within the local church itself. Thus the church is autonomous, or self-governing. No religious hierarchy outside the local church may dictate a church's beliefs or practices. Autonomy does not mean isolation. A church may fellowship with other churches around mutual interests.

They must advance themselves by invoking the aid of the secular power to condemn and punish those who dissent. Their ideology is assumed because they pride themselves as the advocates and defenders of truth. Their way must be forced on the culture because it’s for our good, whether we like it or not.

Now think who it was that gave us the first amendment. It was those radical Christians who suffered as the advocates of freedom of conscience in the matter of religion.

Though they believed that the Gospel of Christ was the infallible truth of God, the Scriptures taught them to abandon the use of carnal weapons for its propagation; the Bible also admonished them not to condemn those who differ. Based on Christ’s doctrine of God’s sovereignty over the conscience, the apostle reminds us who causes men to differ…

‘For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ [1 Corinthians 4:7 KJ]

The knowledge of truth is a matter of sovereign grace, not the coercion of men.

Yet, in the parable of the sower He says that many who come to hear the gospel are as barren soil; the word will produce no fruit in them. These are mysteries of the kingdom of God. In one aspect the kingdom comes gradually as the sowing and growth of seed and the seed is not everywhere fruitful, but dependent on the condition of the soil.

The defect is in men, not the word. Men dead in sin cannot hear and understand the words of life. The word must be accompanied by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the heart by the Spirit or there will be no life from which springs the fruits of the Spirit.

The apostle gives us good instruction on Christ’s doctrine...

‘And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God’ [1 Corinthians 2:1-5].

The moral philosophy of colonial America was a consensus based on Biblical Theology. A culture founded on a free state and a free church yielded the fruit of individual liberty among a self governing people unknown in the world until that time.

The truth of man’s fallen state before God was assumed. Policies were implemented with the purpose of restraining lawless men, knowing that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. The gospel of grace was recognized as the greatest principle for the reformation of all men.