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A Huge Embarrassment?

From ‘J.D.’

His letter is printed (indented black text) with point-by-point responses (dark red) by Dr Jonathan Sarfati and Dr Don Batten, interspersed as per normal e-mail fashion.



Your web site is a huge embarrassment to people with common sense and logic.

We’ve yet to find anyone with these qualities who is embarrassed. ;)

The PBS show shows a Wheaton student say he wanted a warm fuzzy feeling — that’s why most young people believe your nonsense. They have these false hoods ‘embedded’ at an early age, with no opportunity to learn other views and make their own decision. After that it is peer and family pressure. Shame on you.

Actually both of us and many of our colleagues did not have this peer or family pressure — quite the opposite! AiG staffers, associates and supporters world wide include a considerable number of ex-evolutionists, many with significant scientific credentials, even one who wrote books on evolution. See our

Creationist Scientists page. Rather, it’s our detractors who are usually following the academic crowd rather than providing logical arguments.

 

Please contact your Congressmen and ask that In God We Trust be taken off our coins and bills; this is a violation of the separation of church and state.

First, We should point out that you reached the Australian office, so this is hardly appropriate for us, even if we agreed with the request. But even Australians like us know that ‘separation of church and state’ is not actually in the US Constitution (although one of us (JS) did hear Dr David Barton of Wallbuilders <http://www.wallbuilders.com/> when he was in your country last September). Rather, your first amendment reads ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion …’ i.e. it’s a directive on Congress to keep them from interfering, not a directive against churches. Also, Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase to which you allude was a wall to stop the State from encroaching on the church (as happened with other countries with a state church), not to interfere with the Church’s role in society. Many of the pilgrim fathers who founded the colonies in America were fleeing state church persecution or discrimination (Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican). They aimed to have a country where all Christians could worship without such duress. The First Amendment reflects that ideal — it was never intended to make the US an atheistic state (which would be a violation of the First Amendment!). Evidently ‘In God we Trust’ was not thought to be a violation of the establishment clause in 1864 when it first appeared on your coinage. Perhaps you’d also like to abolish your Declaration of Independence as well, because it states: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’?

Also, the religious cults, such as Baptist, Mormons, and Catholics, should pay tax on thousands of acres of property. It is unfair that 15% of us have to take this government regulation in favor of religion.

If we’re all just rearranged pond scum — a chance assemblage of atoms — as you must believe, where does your concept of ‘fairness’ come from? How can chemistry form a basis for fairness? In any case, why should the State be able to use religious organisations as cash cows simply to please God-haters? Especially those who use emotive words like ‘cults’ to sloppily embrace genuine Christian denominations as well as those that are regarded as cults.

Lastly, the pledge of allegiance was just fine before the religious cults inserted Under God in 1954; another violation of separation of church and state.

Again, you might wish to study your own history — this phrase goes back to at least Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 19 November 1863: ‘… that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom …’

Indeed it is ‘under God’ that nations and individuals have gained incredible freedom. I take it that you would rather live in the US than in any of the countries, past or present, that were inspired by atheism (USSR, China, Albania, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia under Pol Pot, Vietnam, etc.)? And if you could not live in the US, I’m sure your choice of where you would like to live would basically rank countries as to how they have been most influenced by the Gospel of Jesus Christ (as rediscovered in the Reformation). People who work to minimize the influence of Christian churches on the public life in the US (and other countries) are actually working to ultimately re-enslave citizens and bring about the demise of their nations. As the Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), said in The Brothers Karamazov, ‘Without God, everything is permissible; crime is inevitable.’ And as the Good Book says, in Proverbs 16:34, ‘Righteousness exalts a nation.’ The personal liberty of Americans is already suffering as moral restraint fades with the declining influence of the Gospel (abetted by the teaching of materialism in the country’s schools under the guise of ‘science’, viz. evolution) — how many people lived behind locked doors with security systems, fearing to walk the streets at night, in the 1950s?

J.D.

Dr Jonathan Sarfati and Dr Don Batten

Published: 4 February 2006