skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Not sure if you noticed, but there was a movie that opened this past weekend that actually has a great message, as opposed to most of the movies that were celebrating at the Oscars last night. "Amazing Grace" is a movie you can take the kids to, a movie that will teach you some history, and a movie that is trying to make a change right now.
"Amazing Grace", by Walden Media, opened to just 791 screens, yet finished the weekend with the 3rd highest take per screen. On the Hugh Hewitt show, producer Ken Wales said that at a screening in Washington, D.C. on the National Day of Prayer, viewers were in tears at the end of the movie. Viewers at a screening in New York were moved to give a 4-minute standing ovation at the end.
Alex Field at Relevant Magazine has a great review of the movie. He also tells about a movement called The Amazing Change Campaign, which aims to fight against modern-day slavery. One interesting fact you might not know is that more people are in slavery today than at any other time in history. Field writes.... . .less than two years ago the International Labor Organization, an agency charged by the United Nations to address labor standards and social protection, estimated that there were 12.3 million people enslaved through forced labor, bonded labor, forced child labor, sexual servitude and other forms of involuntary servitude. The ILO also reported data showing that roughly 600,000 to 800,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders each year, 80 percent of whom are women and girls.
Even more recently, Kevin Bales, the president of an organization called Free the Slaves, conducted a study at the University of Roehampton, the findings of which say that there are actually about 27 million people enslaved around the world today.
This is a movie you can take your family or a friend to, with plenty of things to talk about afterward. And plenty of things to do to help fight slavery today.
Grant Swank has a great commentary at The Conservative Voice about how Christians are increasingly being attacked in Muslim countries, with authorities turning a blind eye, passing on the story of a 78-year-old Christian man in Egypt who was killed while at church. A Muslim stormed into the church with two long knives and stabbed several people, shouting "god is great!"When these atrocities occur, little if nothing is done by the authorities. They too are extremist Muslim. They too read the Koran and its demands that non-Muslims be put out. Therefore, why should Christians be guarded when they are to be extinguished?
What free nations need to realize is that Christians living in these conditions elsewhere put up with this murderous threat every day of their lives. It is not just an occasional trap. It could happen any day, any hour, any time. Christian children are brought up to be on the watch for fear of their lives.
Again, in free countries Muslims demand freedom of religion. They expect freedom to erect their mosques, have their clerics teach whatever they want to preach, hold their secret meetings, run their propaganda-filled web sites and see through the eventual Islam World Rule.
On Muslim web sites, for instance there are stark warnings to Muslims to watch out for persecution in free nations. They are instructed step by step how to report any discrimination and then press for immediate, accurate action.
However, when Christians are slain in a Muslim country such as Egypt, it’s over and out for the Christians. Another life lost. So it goes. It’s just another "Christian story."
Swank goes on to describe the dangers that women, both Muslim and non-Muslim, face in Islamic countries.The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in a recent report said that violence against women had increased alarmingly, with some of the incidents incited by Mullahs opposed to women’s emancipation.
"Islamists also campaigned against the Women Protection Bill which was recently passed by parliament, which seeks to provide protection to women who have suffered discrimination under Islamic Sharia laws.
"Women make up just over 20 per cent of the lower house of parliament, according to the country’s main human rights group, and there are three women ministers in the cabinet of the federal government. But widespread discrimination against females continues to be a problem in what remains a male-dominated society, particularly in the countryside, where most Pakistanis live."
It is time for "moderate" Muslims to step up in countries where they can speak freely and speak out against the atrocities that so-called extremist Muslims are committing against mankind. If they don't speak out soon, there will be no need to use the word "extremist" when describing these terrorists.
A few months ago, I posted an article about the College of William and Mary removing the cross from their chapel so that all students of every religious persuasion would feel welcome in the building. Well, the college is in the headlines again. CNSNews.com tellsof how they recently welcomed "The Sex Workers' Art Show" to campus.The show is described as "an eye-popping evening of visual and performance art created by people in the sex industry to dispel the myth that they are anything short of artists, innovators, and geniuses."
When college President Gene Nichol was confronted by students and alumni over his decision to allow the show, he was quoted as saying, "I don't like this kind of show, but it is not the practice ... of universities to censor or cancel performances because they are controversial."
But critics of Nichol's decision late last year to remove from the university's Wren Chapel a cross that had been located there since 1940 called his latest stance hypocritical.
He can't stop this so-called art show, but he can censor Christians' displays. Wonder how this latest action (or lack of action on the president's part) will affect alumni donations.
You gotta start training them early...
When I was growing up, my father, a minister, would preach about the need for taking personal responsibility for sins that we commit. He would talk about how people loved to blame something or someone else for the mistakes they made, citing the song lyrics, "The Devil made me do it."
In a recent "Breakpoint" article, Charles Colson discusses the new "Devil". Now, our society blames their failings on a variety of causes--alcohol, stress, racism, sexual abuse by priests, a bad childhood--everything but ourselves.If you ever doubted the complete triumph of the therapeutic culture in America, look no further than this week’s news. Take NASA for example. How did it respond to the sad and bizarre story involving a love triangle and an astronaut charged with attempted murder? It wants to tighten psychological screening procedures for astronauts! Now, I find it hard to imagine more rigorous screenings than those already given to naval aviators and astronauts.
How about sin? It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what happens when you crowd attractive men and women into a space capsule.
Or take the recent case of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. Following his election in 2003, Newsom was considered a rising political star. Times have changed: Now, he’s the butt of late-night comedians’ jokes, and his political future is, at best, uncertain.
A few weeks ago, Newsom confirmed reports that he was involved in an affair with his campaign manager’s wife. He claimed that he was “deeply sorry about that,” but then announced that he was “seeking counseling for alcohol abuse.”
“Upon reflection” he told reporters, “I have come to the conclusion that I will be a better person without alcohol in my life.”
His three key words: How about sin? In today's postmodernism, where right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, sin has no place in the discussion. The concept of sin implies a standard. A standard implies an authority that is higher than ourselves. And man's nature is to rebel against authority.
Here's an ironic thought: all of the daytime talkshows like to urge us to just look within ourselves for strength during adversity. No need to appeal to a higher power for help. It's right there inside of us. But yet when we fall short and just plain screw up, it is no longer ourself that is to blame. It's [fill in your excuse here] that's to blame. In the end, though, we will all be held responsible for our own actions. God help us all.
Got this in an email from an Air Force friend of mine. Not sure who the guys in the photo and video are, but they sure do take their hobby seriously. From the text of the email...A B-52 flying model with 22 foot wingspan! Actually has 8 "real turbines" at about $1500 each! Took over 2 years to build. Takes multiple pilots, as there are so many things to control.
Click HERE to see the video of its first flight. It's 8 minutes long, but pretty cool.
After all the publicity that the recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary of its upcoming report on how man is causing global warming, you'd think that the sky is falling. However, in it's most recent editorial, National Review Online has actually done a little research and comparison with the last such report released by the IPCC in 2001. NRO's take on it is quite a bit different than what the media frenzy this past week would have you believe.The shock, however, is that the latest summary contains very little that was not in the IPCC’s last report, in 2001. Moreover, what is new represents a pullback from the gloomier claims of 2001. Notwithstanding the authors’ bold assertion of 95-percent confidence that human activity influences global warming, it appears from this short summary of the full 1,400-page report — which, inexplicably, the IPCC won’t release until May — that there has been only slight progress over the past five years in refining our climate models and resolving key uncertainties acknowledged in the last report.
Gone from the latest summary is the infamous “hockey stick” of the 2001 report. This was a graphic purporting to show that the planet is warmer today than at any time in the last thousand years, a demonstration which required erasing the inconvenient medieval warm period and the little ice age. The new IPCC report has also reduced its estimate of the human influence on warming by one-third (though this change was not flagged for the media, so few if any news accounts took notice of it). That reduction is one reason the IPCC narrowed the range of predicted future warming, and lowered the new midpoint — i.e., the most likely prediction of temperature increase — by a half degree, from 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2001 to 3 degrees in this report. The new assessment also cuts in half the range of predicted sea-level rise over the next century. Now the maximum prediction is about 17 inches, as compared with the 20 to 30 feet Al Gore dramatizes in his horror film. (Which truths are inconvenient now?) There are murmurs from the green warriors that the new report is a disappointment, and no wonder.
Interesting that the IPCC released the summary so far ahead of releasing the actual report. Call me cynical, but methinks that by releasing the summary with such Chicken Little drama, the IPCC is hoping that no one will actually pay attention to what the report says. The IPCC has achieved its desired effect, which is to put politics in front of science in an attempt to get politicians to make a knee-jerk, shallow-minded reaction in their never-ending quest to appease the voting masses.
BEARS 31 COLTS 21
LaShawn Barber has a great column at The Examiner.com which suggests that instead of focusing on the past and the wrongs that were committed against blacks, let's look at the state of blacks now and work to strengthen the black family. Barber examines the life of the man who began the observance of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson. And then she asks what he'd think if he saw the state of black society today.First, I believe Woodson would be appalled by the rate of black-on-black crime. Black men kill other black men at disproportionate rates. At 13 percent of the U.S. population, blacks commit more than half the reported murders. White lynch mobs from back in the day have got nothing on modern day black thugs, who make sport out of preying on their own people.
Second, Woodson would shake his head in disbelief at the devastating collapse of the black family, caused by immorality, not white racism. In 1963, more than 70 percent of black families were headed by married couples. In 2005, 35 percent of black children were living with two parents, compared to 84 percent of Asian children, 76 percent of white children, and 65 percent of Hispanic children.
Seventy percent of black boys in the criminal justice system come from single-parent homes. Fatherlessness is correlated with criminality, poverty and low academic achievement. Fatherless children are more likely to beget fatherless children — and the cycle continues.
Third, the institutionalized and deeply ingrained system of government-mandated lowered standards for blacks would infuriate Woodson. Born in 1875 during Reconstruction to a poor family with nine children, Woodson couldn’t attend school regularly because he had to work to help support the family.
After years of working and going to school when he could, the son of former slaves received a B.A. in literature and became a teacher. He studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris, received a master’s from the University of Chicago in 1908, and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1912 — all accomplished without race preferences.
Woodson would be ashamed, I’d imagine, to see blacks advocating race preferences and fighting to maintain the position that blacks cannot be expected to compete with people of other races.
He would be deeply disappointed to hear them tell the world that blacks living in the greatest country in the world are the weakest people in the world, unable to achieve anything without the help of a patronizingly paternal central government.
The key phrase was that the collapse of the black family has been caused by "immorality, not white racism." By saying that, Barber forces blacks to take responsibility for their own failings and doesn't let them blame someone else. It's always easier to blame someone else for your own screwups. But in the end, God calls each of us to account for our own lives and won't accept "but look at what they did to me" as an answer.
