Dad Links Son's Suicide to The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

The following article is from World Net Daily, December 12, 2008. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Bob Unruh, World Net Daily -- A New York man is linking the suicide of his 22-year-old son, a military veteran who had bright prospects in college, to the anti-Christian book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins after a college professor challenged the son to read it.

"Three people told us he had taken a biology class and was doing well in it, but otherstudents and the professor were really challenging my son, his faith. They didn't like him as a Republican, as a Christian, and as a conservative who believed in intelligent design," the grief-stricken father, Keith Kilgore, told WND about his son, Jesse.

"This professor either assigned him to read or challenged him to read a book, 'The God Delusion,' by Richard Dawkins," he said.

Jesse Kilgore committed suicide in October by walking into the woods near his New York home and shooting himself. Keith Kilgore said he was shocked because he believed his son was grounded in Christianity, had blogged against abortion and for family values, and boasted he'd been debating for years.

After Jesse's death, Keith Kilgore learned of the book assignment from two of his son's friends and a relative. He searched Jesse's room and found the book under the mattress with his son's bookmark on the last page.

A WND message seeking a comment from Dawkins or his publisher was not returned today.

The first inkling of a reason for the suicide came, Keith Kilgore told WND, when one of Jesse's friends came to visit after word of his son's death circulated.

"She was in tears [and said] he was very upset by this book," Keith Kilgore said. "'It just destroyed him,' were her words.

Jesse Kilgore

"Then another friend at the funeral told me the same thing," Keith Kilgore said. "This guy was his best friend, and about the only other Christian on campus.

"The third one was the last person that my son talked to an hour before [he died,]" Keith Kilgore told WND, referring to a member of his extended family whose name is not being revealed here.

That relative, who had struggled with his own faith and had returned to Christianity, wrote in a later e-mail that Jesse "started to tell me about his loss of faith in everything."

"He was pretty much an atheist, with no belief in the existence of God (in any form) or an afterlife or even in the concept of right or wrong," the relative wrote. "I remember him telling me that he thought that murder wasn't wrong per se, but he would never do it because of the social consequences - that was all there was - just social consequences.

"He mentioned the book he had been reading 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins and how it along with the science classes he had take[n] had eroded his faith. Jesse was always great about defending his beliefs, but somehow, the professors and the book had presented him information that he found to be irrefutable. He had not talked … about it because he was afraid of how you might react. ... and that he knew most of your defenses of Christianity because he himself used them often. Maybe he had used them against his professors and had the ideas shot down."

He then explained to Jesse his own personal journey of seeking "other explanations of God's existence" and told of his ultimate return.

"I told him it was my relationship with God, not my knowledge of Him that brought me back to my faith. No one convinced me with facts. ... it was a matter of the heart."

Keith Kilgore believes it was a biology class that raised questions for his son, and a biology professor at Jefferson Community College in Watertown, N.Y., where his son was attending, who suggested the book.

A school spokeswoman told WND that the "God Delusion" was not a part of the biology curriculum, and several of the professors she contacted said they had not even read the book. However, the spokeswoman was unable to contact all of the professors in the department and could not state that none of them had suggested the book to Jesse.

Local police also did not respond to WND inquiries about the investigation into the death.

"One of his friends, and his uncle (they did not know each other) both told me that Jesse called them hours before he took his life and that he had lost all hope because he was convinced that God did not exist, and this book was the cause," Keith Kilgore told WND.

Keith Kilgore, a retired military chaplain who has dealt with the various stages of grief and readily admits he's still in the "anger" stage over his son's death, said his son apparently had checked the "Delusion" out of the college library.

"I'm all for academic freedom," Keith Kilgore said. "What I do have a problem with is if there's going to be academic freedom, there has to be academic balance.

"They were undermining every moral and spiritual value for my [son]," he said. "They ought to be held accountable."

He suggested the moral is for Christians simply to abandon public schools wholly.

"Here's another thing," he continued. "If my son was a professing homosexual, and a professor challenged him to read [a book called] 'Preventing Homosexuality'… If my son was gay and [the book] made him feel bad, hopeless, and he killed himself, and that came out in the press, there would be an outcry.

"He would have been a victim of a hate crime and the professor would have been forced to undergo sensitivity training, and there may have even been a wrongful death lawsuit.

"But because he's a Christian, I don't even get a return telephone call," the father told WND.

He said he tried to verify the book assignment himself several times, without getting a response from the school.

Jesse Kilgore blogged on NetPotion and Newblog, and the writings that remained mostly addressed social ills and how anti-Christian many of the world's developments appeared to be.

He used the pen name JKrapture because, his father said, "He believed in the rapture, the evangelical concept of the Lord coming back."

On the Web, Jesse described himself as "conservative and mainly independent. I am a culture warrior and traditionalist. I have been debating since I was in 5th Grade, and never looked back. It is a habit I can't let go of."

One of Jesse's uncles, writing on the same website as Jesse, wrote: "While I knew he was having struggles with his faith, I had no idea that it ran that deep. … There are not enough words to describe how devastated I am at his loss. I know that some of you got to know him pretty well and (since I already started getting some questions about him) felt that you all should know that he is no longer with us."

From among the online community came these responses: "I am shocked and so sorry for your loss – our loss. My prayers are with you and all of your family at this difficult time," and "I AM at a loss of words.....I am sooooo sorry to hear your loss. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family."

Keith Kilgore told WND he feels, by allowing his son to move into the atmosphere of a secular school, like "I put a toddler in the front of my car."

"My son is the Adam Walsh of the culture war. That's who my son is," he said, referring to the child abduction victim whose case was used to create a wide range of amber alert and other programs to protect children.

He said he has a wake-up call over the anti-Christian agenda of public education. And he has some goals.

"I want to hold schools accountable for what they're teaching our kids. This was malpractice," he said.

Dawkins, considered one of the world's most outspoken atheists, is a professor in the United Kingdom. He came to prominence in 1976 with his book "The Selfish Gene," promoting evolution.

In his "Delusion" treatise he claims that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a "delusion" – a fixed false belief.

The Large Hadron Rap: We All Learn Differently!

Muslim Fingerprints in Obama's History

Mike Huckabee with Janet L. Folger of Faith2Action

by Janet L. Folger (http://www.f2a.org/), 10/7/2008

I've misspoken before. I've misspoken before on national television. I've mixed up words, reversed orders, but I have never once misspoken concerning my faith and the God in whom I trust. Even in the most heated debate on Islam, never did I ever utter the words "my Muslim faith." Nor, even when talking about Buddhism, have I ever slipped up and referred to "my Buddhist faith." Ever. Why? Because my Christianity is so ingrained in me, so a part of who I am, that the thought of adhering to a false religion is so foreign, so blasphemous, that the words would never cross my lips.

Not the case for Mr. Obama. On ABC's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, Obama said:

"Let's not play games, what I was suggesting – you're absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith. And you're absolutely right that that has not come."

Watch it online.

Matthew 12:34 says: "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks."

Notice that Obama didn't correct himself. He was "corrected" by George Stephanopoulos who interrupted Obama, with the words: "Christian faith."

Let's just say he misspoke. Did Obama misspeak when he told the New York Times that blasphemy was one of the "prettiest sounds on earth at sunset"?

That's right. In a Feb. 27, 2007, interview with the New York Times' Nicholos Kristof, that's how Obama described the Muslim call to prayer. That prayer, which Obama recited with a "first-class [Arabic] accent," begins with this:

Allah is supreme!
Allah is supreme!
Allah is supreme! Allah is supreme!
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet ...

Really? No god but the false god Allah is the prettiest sound on earth? Really.

Speaking of slip-ups, here's the clip of Obama saying he's visited 57 states. He's such a "global citizen," perhaps the 57 member states of the "Organization of the Islamic Conference" was more second nature to him than our own 50 U.S. states.

While Obama's campaign site declares: "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim" and "was not raised as a Muslim," the records say differently.

As was documented by Jerome Corsi in his best-selling book, "The Obama Nation," in January 1968, Obama was registered as a Muslim at his primary school under the name Barry Soetoro. Even the Associated Press has released a photocopy of the document where Barack Obama is registered as an Indonesian citizen of the Muslim religion. (Listen to Dr. Corsi on yesterday's Faith2Action radio program at http://www.f2a.org/ discussing it).

Obama also claimed he never attended a mosque. Not so, according to eyewitnesses. As was reported in WorldNetDaily, childhood friends and even his school principal said they saw Obama attend the mosque with their own eyes. In response, the Obama campaign issued another statement: Instead of claiming Obama was never a Muslim, as they had previously posted, they then claimed he "has never been a practicing Muslim."

Even in Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," he called his school "a Muslim school" and admits he studied the Quran during his formative years from age 6 to age 10: "In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Quranic studies."

He could have never made faces in Quranic studies if he wasn't studying the Quran.

So this weekend on national television, he referred to his "Muslim faith." Last year he said that praising Allah as the one true god was the prettiest sound on earth. He said he was never a mosque-attending Muslim, but eyewitnesses say otherwise. Despite what Obama and his campaign have claimed, by his own admission, he studied the Quran.

Add to the fact that on June 13, 2008, Obama's half brother, Malik Obama, who lives in Kenya, told the Jerusalem Post that "if elected his brother will be a good president for the Jewish people despite his Muslim background."

In that same article was a picture of Malik with his half brother Barack in traditional Somali elder dress with a turban on his head in 1985. Like many pictures of Obama in Muslim attire readily available on the Internet, he was not between the ages of 6 and 10 when the photos were taken.

Let's pretend all of this is just part of some smear campaign. Forget everything that I've said and take a look of who's backing this guy.

According to Islamic expert Brigitte Gabriel, author of Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America and her new book, They Must be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, there are some very interesting campaign supporters of Barack Obama. Beyond the support of unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, Obama has backing from some other notorious groups, from "al-Qaida to Hamas, to Hezbollah," to "Islamic Jihad" to the "Muslim Brotherhood," to "all the terrorists organizations" who "are coming out in force for Obama for president," stated Gabriel on the Sept. 3, 2008, Faith2Action radio program (on the "Archives" section of http://www.f2a.org/).

On the same program, she spoke of the Muslim Brotherhood project for North America, in 1982, whose plans were to get Muslims actively involved in politics.

Gabriel claims that the Islamic websites and terrorist organizations are calling Obama the "first Muslim president of the United States."

As far as they are concerned, said Gabriel, these groups claim "Obama can say anything he wants to get elected – he is a Muslim." They claim that if he had renounced his Muslim affiliation declared early in life, he would have changed his Muslim name.

What is interesting is the Islamic world has not renounced Obama for becoming a Christian – a capital offense under Shariah law.

What is perhaps more interesting is that Sen. Barack Hussein Obama has never renounced his Muslim ties. He was too busy pretending they didn't exist until the documents and eyewitness accounts surfaced recently.

Let's not play games. By way of review, on national television Obama "misspoke" about "his Muslim faith." Last year he said the words "there is no god but Allah" were "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset." Then he said that he's been to "all 57 states" (57 states coincidently belong to the "Organization of the Islamic Conference"). According to eyewitnesses, he was a mosque-going, Quran-learning, Muslim (according to official documents released by the AP). His friends say so. His principal said so. His own brother said so. He wears the Muslim turban and Somali elder dress for photo-ops, apparently for fun. While he hasn't renounced any of this, not one Islamic extremist has called for his death as an apostate from Islam.

Obama is right about one thing. Sen. John McCain isn't talking about Obama's Muslim faith. But the rest of the country is beginning to.

LHC Helium Leak will Shut Collider Down for 2 Months

Scientific American, September 20, 2008 -

More glitches for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): The same day operators announced that a 30-ton transformer that cools part of the particle smasher had broken within hours of the LHC's launch last week, a mishap yesterday resulted in "a large helium leak" into the collider's tunnel.

According to a press statement, "the most likely cause of the problem was a faulty electrical connection between two magnets, which probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure."

No workers were at risk, according to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which runs the LHC.

The leak means that the LHC will be down for at least two months, because workers must now warm up the faulty sector of the tunnel in order to repair it. The liquid helium is used to cool the LHC's magnets -- which guide protons and accelerate them so they can be smashed together -- down to within 1.9 kelvins (3.4 degrees Fahrenheit) of absolute zero.

For more on the LHC, see our in-depth report. It may be even longer now before we find out how long it takes the LHC to defrost a pizza.

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Image of one of the LHC's superconducting magnets superimposed on an aerial view of CERN's accelerator complex near Geneva with the path of the LHC marked in red, courtesy of CERN.

Parts of Liver Created using Umbilical Cord Stem Cells

Arlington, VA- Sept 19, 2008- Small sections of human liver have been created from umbilical cord stem cells, say scientists from Newcastle University, UK. The researchers say this technology could eventually be used to grow small livers that could be used for drug tests - doing away with the need for human volunteers to take risks. Earlier this year six volunteers became dangerously ill during a drug trial in the UK.

The scientists warned that it will be tens of years before we are anywhere near producing whole new livers for transplants. However, within the next 15 years, tiny livers could be produced and used for treating patients.

Team leaders, Dr. Nico Forraz and Prof. Colin McGuckin, have set up ConoStem, a company aimed at marketing their stem cell research results.

The researchers said they used a microgravity bioreactor, which creates a weightless environment, to grow liver tissue from stem cells.

Professor McGuckin said "We take the stem cells from the umbilical cord blood and make small mini-livers. We then give them to pharmaceutical companies and they can use them to test new drugs on. It could prevent the situation that happened earlier this year when those six patients had a massive reaction to the drugs they were testing."

This technology, if it really can replace human and animal testing, will be welcomed by people who are against using animals for testing drugs. Umbilical cord stem cell research is also a much more attractive prospect for those who are against using embryonic stem cells for research.

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CordStemCellResearch.com is committed to providing up-to-date information about cord blood stem cell science. We provide meaningful, peer-reviewed content to help you understand this novel area of medicine. Visit us at www.cordstemcellresearch.com.

Cord Stem Cell Research
1414 Glebe Road
Arlington, VA 22204
USA

Fireproof debuts September 26th - Watch the Trailer

Fireproof - The Movie - Coming September 26th

Dr. R.C. Metcalf joins CrossExamined.org Team

Dr. R.C. Metcalf has joined the CrossExamined.org team.

Let's solve the 75% problem and reach our youth with the reasons they can confidently affirm their Christian faith in public. Please prayerfully consider inviting us to your church for a free seminar. Contact Dr. R.C. Metcalf at rcmetcalf@thinkagain.us after reading about our program.

3 out of 4 Christian teens walk away from the church after they leave home.

Dr. Frank Turek and the CrossExamined team are committed to reversing this alarming trend. Invite us to your campus and we'll present a dynamic interactive seminar that'll show you why Christianity is true and why it takes a lot more faith to be an atheist!

Consider these facts:

1) 75% of Christian youth leave the church after high school.
2) Intellectual skepticism is one of the major reasons they walk away.
3) Most Christian students are unequipped to resist rabidly anti-Christian college professors who are intent on converting their students to atheism.
4) College professors are five times more likely to identify themselves as atheists than the general public.
5) More than half of all college professors view evangelical Christian students unfavorably.
6) The “new atheists”—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—are writing books and are growing in popularity.

Christian youth in America are not being taught to cross examine the skeptical and atheistic views they encounter when they leave home. The good news is that we can do something about it! Browse the CrossExamined site for more information about how we're helping young people understand and defend why the Christian faith is true and reasonable, and how you can help.

“Dad, I’m not sure I believe in God anymore.”

My friend never thought he would hear those words. After all, he’s a well-known pastor with a large church and an international ministry. Yet, after just one year of college, his own daughter doubted nearly everything he tried to instill in her for eighteen years. “I now realize that I didn’t do a good job showing her why Christianity is true,” he told me. “Now, it might be too late.”

He’s not the only parent or pastor who’s failed to provide sound answers to young people. There are plenty of examples:

1) Anna, a pastor’s daughter, became an agnostic at UNC Chapel Hill.
2) Steve, son of a famous Christian, renounced biblical morality at Elon.
3) John, a high school worker for Campus Crusade, became an atheist after reading a Richard Dawkins’ book on atheism.

In fact, the problem is at epidemic levels — 75% of young adults raised in a Christian home leave the church after they leave the home. Think about that — on average, three out of every four kids attending your youth group won’t be attending any church a few years from now.

-- Frank Turek, CrossExamined.org Founder & President

Are You Paying for Atheism?

"Children spend the majority of their waking hours in school. Parents invest a good portion of their life savings in college education and entrust their offspring to people who are supposed to educate them. Isn’t it wonderful that educators have figured out a way to make parents the instruments of their own undoing? Isn’t it brilliant that they have persuaded Christian moms and dads to finance the destruction of their own beliefs and values? Who said atheists aren’t clever?" -- Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity, 2007

Why are they leaving?

Some think church is irrelevant. Others, out on their own for the first time, are attracted by all the world has to offer and put God on the back burner. Yet many leave because they’ve come to doubt Christianity. In fact, intellectual skepticism is a major reason cited by those who have left.

We can lay the blame for much of this on ourselves — that is, on the church. While there are notable exceptions, most American churches over-emphasize emotion and ignore the biblical commands to develop the mind (1 Pet 3:15, 2 Cor. 10:5). In other words, we’re doing a great job performing for our youth with skits, bands and videos, but a terrible job informing them with logic, truth, and a Christian worldview. We’ve failed to recognize that what we win them with we win them to. If we win them with emotion, we win them to emotion.

Now, I don’t want to discount the importance of emotion. If the Bible is true (as we show in the seminar), then God does want us to love Him with all of our hearts. But He also wants us to love Him with our minds (Mt. 22:37). Christians don't get Brownie points for being stupid! We're supposed to know what we believe and why we believe it. And for good reason — emotion alone is not enough to protect Christian students at college or make them bold witnesses for those they meet. If they arrive at college with nothing more than good sentimental feelings about Christ, they are easy prey for anti-Christian professors and a campus environment intent on undermining their faith.

Our mission at CrossExamined.org is to equip high school and college students to know why Christianity is true, how to defend it, and how to refute those who try to corrupt them.

Please browse the CrossExamined site to see how we are doing that and how you can help. Thanks!

-- Dr. Frank Turek, CrossExamined.org Founder & President

The Shack by William P. Young: A Review

William P. Young’s novel The Shack is creating quite a stir in the Christian community. If you haven’t heard of it, odds are you will. The Shack is a story about love and forgiveness that will resonate with many readers. Anyone who has experienced a deep personal tragedy can find solace in its pages. However, The Shack offers its readers a view of the triune Godhead that strays from the truth of Scripture, leaving the reader with false hopes and a distorted vision of the Trinity.

The Shack is a novel that tells the story of a man named Mackenzie (Mack) who has lost a daughter to a serial rapist and murderer. The girl’s belongings, along with blood stains, are found in a shack deep in the forest. Presumably, the shack is the place the girl met her demise. Mack is summoned to the shack when he finds an unmarked letter in his mailbox, which is signed simply “Papa.”

If you are familiar with the book, you may have already heard that God (“Papa”) appears to Mack in the form of a large, African-American woman. While visiting the shack, Mack also meets Jesus, appropriately cast as a Middle Eastern man, and the Holy Spirit, represented by a woman named Sarayu, the Sanskrit word for “wind.”

The author explains why he uses an African-American woman to represent God, when he puts these words into God’s mouth: “Mackenzie, I am neither male nor female, even though both genders are derived from my nature. If I choose to appear to you as a man or a woman, it’s because I love you. For me to appear to you as a woman and suggest that you call me Papa is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning.”

However, the implication of this passage is that there is something inherently wrong with religious conditioning, which derives from Scripture and denotes God in the masculine. If God’s word can refer to Him as “Abba, Father” how can the author so cavalierly toss Scripture aside and put words in God’s mouth?

And this is, in large part, one of my major concerns about The Shack. Many who read this review will claim that the book is only a work of fiction and the author should be allowed to articulate his ideas freely and without constraint. Yet, by putting “his ideas” in God’s mouth he distorts God’s truth to the wrong ends. “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine… they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4) A synonym for “fables” is “fiction.”

The cover of the book contains an accolade from Eugene Peterson, author of The Message, a paraphrase version of the Bible. Peterson claims, “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!” Yet, a book that puts words into God’s mouth, especially words that do not square with revealed Scripture, hardly approaches the brilliance of Bunyan’s allegorical novel.

On page 99, Papa tells Mack, “When we three spoke ourself into human existence as the Son of God, we became fully human.” Yet God, the Father, never became human, neither did the Holy Spirit. Only Jesus became fully human.

The author not only presumes to put words into God’s mouth, but God is also misrepresented in other ways. On page 95, Mack asks Papa how he/she can know how he really feels. “Papa didn’t answer, only looked down at their hands. His gaze followed hers and for the first time Mack noticed the scars in her wrists, like those he now assumed Jesus also had on his.” Yet, in John 4:24 we read the words of the real Jesus, who claims, “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” God, the Father, never became flesh, except perhaps in Mormon heterodoxy. And God certainly wouldn’t have borne the marks of crucifixion, a penalty Jesus paid fully to God.

My primary concern in The Shack creeps in initially on page 110, where Jesus states, “I am the best way any human can relate to Papa or Sarayu. To see me is to see them. The love you sense from me is no different from how they love you. And believe me, Papa and Sarayu are just as real as I am, though as you’ve seen in far different ways.” Note that Jesus says, “I am the best way…” The designation “best” implies that there are “other” ways, perhaps not as optimal, but other ways to come to know God. Contrast this with the words of Jesus in the gospel of John, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one cometh unto the father, but by me.” (John 14:6)

This same problem becomes even more explicit in Chapter 12, page 182, where Jesus says, “Those who love me come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims, Democrats, Republicans and many who don’t vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions. I have followers who were murderers and many who were self-righteous. Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians. I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daughters of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved.” Mack then asks, “Does that mean that all roads will lead to you?” Jesus replies, “Not at all. Most roads don’t lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you.”

Consider the words of the real Jesus:

“And he said unto another, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But he said unto him, ‘Leave the dead to bury their own dead; but go thou and publish abroad the kingdom of God.’ And another also said, I will follow thee, Lord; but first suffer me to bid farewell to them that are at my house. But Jesus said unto him, ‘No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.’” (Luke 9:59-62)

A Christian is a follower of Jesus Christ. For Jesus to say “I have no desire to make them Christian” is to distort the very plain teaching of Scripture. If the author only wished to teach that the “church universal” is not contained within the confines of a single denomination, and had stopped prior to that sentence, I would have agreed. Many Christians were Buddhists, Mormons or Muslims, but are no longer bound to such worldly institutions by virtue of their Christianity. “For the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost.” (Luke 19:10)

I had the pleasure of listening to the audio version of The Shack and I must admit the narrator was wonderful. After the conclusion of the book, my version included an interview with the author, in which William P. Young, who prefers the name Paul, insisted that he did not intend to teach Universalism. Yet, a long time friend of his, James B. DeYoung, Th.D., professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Western Seminary in Portland, OR, offers a different perspective. DeYoung insists that Paul embraced Christian Universalism, also known as Universal Reconciliation, about four years ago. Universal Reconciliation “asserts that love is the supreme attribute of God that trumps all others. His love reaches beyond the grave to save all those who refuse Christ throughout their lifetimes.” This sort of universalism is identical to that espoused by the Universalist Church in America that joined with the American Unitarian Association in 1961 to form the Unitarian Universalist Association. As one raised in the Unitarian Universalist Church, who has studied the Bible extensively, I can assure you that Paul Young’s doctrinal understanding of orthodox Christianity is deficient. You can read James B. DeYoung’s review of The Shack, however, please note that it is in PDF format. If necessary, you can download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.

Sarah Palin and National Security

John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate has brought hope to many who understand our most important issue: national security. There are many others who dread the possibility that Palin may one day become the first female U.S. president… aside from Hillary Clinton, who undoubtedly loathes the idea. After all, that was supposed to be her title.

Even as vice president, Sarah Palin will undoubtedly have a tremendous role in foreign affairs. Sam Harris, atheist author of Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith writes: “McCain not only has thrown all sensible concerns about good governance aside merely to pander to a sliver of female and masses of conservative Christian voters, he has turned this period of American history into an episode of high-stakes reality television: Don’t look now, but our cousin Sarah just became leader of the free world! Tune in next week and watch her get sassy with Pakistan!”

Harris’ assumption that Palin is nothing more than a “girl next door” is amazingly naïve. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those who dread Palin fail to comprehend the nature of our national security issues. Liberals suggest that those in the Middle East hate us for many reasons. Let’s look at a few.

From an article submitted by Linden on DanielPipes.org: “Muslims dream of a lost empire and see the wealth the West enjoys. They blame the West for their poverty.”

From Reader’s Digest: “There is a vast American imperial presence in the Muslim world… But this hatred of America should be seen for what it is: a scapegoat for the ills of an Islamic world in the throes of a deep, historic crisis. The dream of modernity in the Arab heartland of Islam has been thwarted.”

A very common misconception as to why we are hated by the Arab world is articulated clearly by one blogger: “Unless I'm mistaken, Bush invaded Iraq under the premise that Saddam had WMD's, when in reality it was to protect Israel and secure the oil fields so Halliburton could build a pipeline from Iraq to Kuwait. Now all of Islam hates us.” Yes, you are mistaken.

One website lists 87 things the U.S. has done wrong that have led to Middle Eastern animosity toward America. (http://www.isometry.com/usahate.html)

One blogger even suggests the Middle East hates us because we’re too fat! “The Middle East doesn't hate us because George Carlin dropped the F-bomb one too many times. No they hate us because we have become a nation of couch potatoes. It's true, there is an epidemic spreading across this country and pretty soon the new fashion statement will be WIDE LOAD printed on the back of a pair of Daisy Dukes.” Okay, he must be kidding... right?

Liberal pundit Andrew Sullivan, whom Sam Harris “debated” several months back on Beliefnet.com, suggests that “With Sarah Palin, America has taken one very large leap toward a completely theocratic politics.” Yet this is hardly accurate. The personal beliefs of one member of the Executive Branch of the U.S. government do not override the U.S. Constitution, under a system of checks and balances in which Congress carries the biggest stick. (One could hardly call the Harris-Sullivan dialogue a “debate” since Sullivan also did not accurately represent the majority view of evangelical Christians. He and Harris had far too much in common. )

Ultimately, the fundamental reason that Muslims in Arab countries hate America is not that they desire what the West has. They despise Western decadence. The fundamental reason Muslims hate America is that their holy book, the Qur’an, teaches that they are to seek the creation of a worldwide caliphate, a theocratic governing body ruled by Shari’a Law. Radically consistent Muslims, who strictly adhere to Qur’anic teachings, desire not only a “completely theocratic politics,” but also one that is completely unknown to most people in the West, especially Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

The Islamic doctrine of taqiyyah allows Muslims to practice deception and to outright lie if their end goal is the furtherance of Islam. This is especially true amongst the Shiite Muslims of Iran. What does this suggest regarding Barack Obama’s plan to unconditionally sit down with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Will Mahmoud negotiate a peaceful arrangement with America, the country his hero and mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, dubbed “the Great Satan”? Will Mahmoud suddenly recant his threats to destroy Israel and America when he sees Barack smiling at him across the diplomacy table? Think again.

Sarah Palin may not yet fathom the depths of Islamic deception, but her Christian background will offer her a greater understanding of the challenges we have ahead of us.

by RC Metcalf

CERN Announces Start-Up Date for LHC

The following article is a CERN Press Release dated August 7, 2008. The original press release can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

Geneva, 7 August 2008. CERN1 has today announced that the first attempt to circulate a beam in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be made on 10 September. This news comes as the cool down phase of commissioning CERN’s new particle accelerator reaches a successful conclusion. Television coverage of the start-up will be made available through Eurovision.

The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine, and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance, probably by 2010. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, it relies on technologies that would not have been possible 30 years ago. The LHC is, in a sense, its own prototype.

Starting up such a machine is not as simple as flipping a switch. Commissioning is a long process that starts with the cooling down of each of the machine’s eight sectors. This is followed by the electrical testing of the 1600 superconducting magnets and their individual powering to nominal operating current. These steps are followed by the powering together of all the circuits of each sector, and then of the eight independent sectors in unison in order to operate as a single machine.

By the end of July, this work was approaching completion, with all eight sectors at their operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C). The next phase in the process is synchronization of the LHC with the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator, which forms the last link in the LHC’s injector chain. Timing between the two machines has to be accurate to within a fraction of a nanosecond. A first synchronization test is scheduled for the weekend of 9 August, for the clockwise-circulating LHC beam, with the second to follow over the coming weeks. Tests will continue into September to ensure that the entire machine is ready to accelerate and collide beams at an energy of 5 TeV per beam, the target energy for 2008. Force majeure notwithstanding, the LHC will see its first circulating beam on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV).

Once stable circulating beams have been established, they will be brought into collision, and the final step will be to commission the LHC’s acceleration system to boost the energy to 5 TeV, taking particle physics research to a new frontier.

‘We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,’ said LHC project leader Lyn Evans. ‘It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research programme underway.’

CERN will be issuing regular status updates between now and first collisions. Journalists wishing to attend CERN for the first beam on 10 September must be accredited with the CERN press office. Since capacity is limited, priority will be given to news media. The event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch/, and distributed through the Eurovision network. Live stand up and playout facilities will also be available.

A media centre will be established at the main CERN site, with access to the control centres for the accelerator and experiments limited and allocated on a first come first served basis. This includes camera positions at the CERN Control Centre, from where the LHC is run. Only television media will be able to access the CERN Control Centre. No underground access will be possible.

For further information and accreditation procedures: http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam

1 CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Large Hadron Collider could unlock secrets of the Big Bang

The following article is from the UK Telegraph, July 4, 2008. The original article can be viewed offsite by clicking on the title.

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Richard Gray, UK Telegraph Science Correspondent -- As the world's largest and most expensive science experiment, the new particle accelerator buried 300ft beneath the Alpine foothills along the Swiss French border is 17 miles long and up to 12 stories high. It is designed to generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade.

The £4.4 billion machine - the Large Hadron Collider - is aiming to unlock the secrets of how the universe began.

Scientists will use it to try to recreate the conditions that existed just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the birth of the universe, by smashing pieces of atoms together at high speed.

The Sunday Telegraph joined the scientist Peter Higgs, a professor of particle physics at Edinburgh University, whose 40-year-old theories about an elusive particle known as the Higgs boson may finally be proved as part of the huge experiment, as he toured the site for the first time.

This weekend will be the last time visitors will be given access to the tunnel that houses the accelerator ring. From tomorrow, it will be completely closed off while technicians make the final preparations before it is turned on in July when, it is hoped, it will begin revealing what the matter and energy that created the universe was really like. What happens afterwards could change our understanding of the world. Most experts believe the explosions created when the particles hit each other will reveal the basic building blocks of everything around us. There are some, however, who fear it could destroy the planet.

A lawsuit filed last week by environmentalists in Hawaii is seeking a restraining order preventing the European Nuclear Research Centre from switching it on for fear it could create a black hole that will suck up all life on Earth.

"The Large Hadron Collider is like a time machine that is going to take us further back towards the Big Bang than we have ever been before by recreating the conditions that existed there.

"We are going to see new types of matter we haven't been able to see before," said Professor Frank Close, a particle physicist at Oxford University.

"The idea that it could cause the end of the world is ridiculous."

Housed in a subterranean lair that would provide a suitable home for a Hollywood super-villain, it is hardly surprising there are conspiracy theories surrounding the work being carried out on the collider.

The tunnel is large enough to drive a train through and so long that the curve is barely noticeable. To reach it requires a two-minute lift journey from ground level. Down below the scene is a mass of cables, tubes, electronics and metal panels.

Atomic particles will spiral though a series of rings, lined with powerful magnets that will accelerate the particles till they reach close to the speed of light. Each particle will race around the 17-mile route 11,245 times every second before being smashed headlong into each other, breaking them into their component parts, releasing huge amounts of energy and debris.

The temperatures produced by these collisions will be 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun and scientists believe this will be powerful enough to reveal the first particles that existed in the moments immediately after the birth of the universe.

This massive experiment will create more than 15 million gigabytes of data every year - the equivalent of 21.4 million CDs. The scientists have had to design a new form of the internet to cope with the data.

Six separate detectors have been positioned around the collider ring to allow scientists to examine what happens.

Among the particles they will hunt for is the Higgs boson, a cornerstone of modern physics that is thought to be responsible for giving every other particle its mass, or weight.

Immediately after the Big Bang all particles are thought to have had no mass. As the temperature cooled, the Higgs boson "stuck" to them, making them heavy. Some particles are more "sticky" than others and so gain more weight.

A massive detector known as Atlas is among those that will be hunting for the Higgs boson. As big as Canterbury Cathedral and weighing more than 100 747 jumbo jet aircraft, it is one of the most impressive parts of the collider.

Professor Jonathan Butterworth, a physicist at University College London who is among the UK scientists involved in the Atlas experiment, said: "If we find the Higgs boson then it will prove our standard model of particle physics.

"If we don't find it then nature may have another way of giving particles mass and that is going to turn science on its head."

Two elevator rides and a 10-minute car journey away on the other side of the giant accelerator, another part of the experiment, dubbed Alice, will recreate the superheated gas, or plasma, that existed when the universe was formed. The collider may also reveal more exotic phenomena such as anti-matter, the opposite of ordinary matter, mini black holes and even extra dimensions.

"At the level of energy we will be creating normal matter doesn't exist. I expect we will see some things that are entirely new and could turn our current understanding of physics on its head," said Dr David Evans, a physicist from Birmingham University who has been working on the Alice project.

"Answering these new questions will be more exciting than proving theories that already exist."

Sir John Templeton Dies at 95

July 9, 2008
Sir John M. Templeton, Philanthropist, Dies at 95
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Sir John M. Templeton, a Tennessee-born investor and philanthropist who amassed a fortune in global stocks and gave away hundreds of millions of dollars to foster understanding in what he called “spiritual realities,” died on Tuesday in Nassau, the Bahamas, where he had lived for decades. He was 95.
His death, at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, was caused by pneumonia, said Don Lehr, a spokesman for the Templeton Foundation.
The foundation awards the Templeton Prize, one of the world’s richest, and sponsors conferences and studies reflecting the founder’s passionate interest in “progress in religion” and “research or discoveries” on the nebulous borders of science and religion.
In a career that spanned seven decades, Sir John dazzled Wall Street, organized some of the most successful mutual funds of his time, led investors into foreign markets, established charities that now give away $70 million a year, wrote books on finance and spirituality and promoted a search for answers to what he called the “Big Questions” — realms of science, faith, God and the purpose of humanity.
Along the way, he became one of the world’s richest men, gave up American citizenship, moved to the Bahamas, was knighted by the Queen of England and bestowed much of his fortune on spiritual thinkers and innovators: Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, the physicist Freeman Dyson, the philosopher Charles Taylor and a pantheon of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus.
Inevitably, the Templeton charities engendered controversy. Critics called his “spiritual realities” a contradiction in terms, reflecting a fundamental incompatibility between science and religion. To many, the very idea of “progress” in religion seemed strange, and giving grants for “discoveries” in the field invited accusations that science was being manipulated to promote religion.
But Sir John was unmoved. A Yale graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, an audacious investor, a Presbyterian who preached open-mindedness and eschewed literal interpretations of Scripture, Sir John — who began annual meetings with prayers, he said, to clear the minds of shareholders — made billions as a pioneer in his globally diversified Templeton funds, often taking the old advice, “buy low, sell high,” to extremes.
In 1939, when World War II began in Europe, the 26-year-old investor borrowed $10,000 and bought 100 shares each in 104 companies that were selling at $1 a share or less, including 34 in bankruptcy. A few years later, he made large profits on 100 of the companies; four turned out to be worthless.
In 1940, he bought a small investment firm that became Templeton, Dubbrow and Vance, the early foundation of his empire. Sir John embarked on mutual funds in 1954, establishing the Templeton Growth Fund in Canada to cut the taxes of many shareholders — Canada then had no capital gains tax — and to emphasize the global reach of its investment strategy.
As investor interest widened in the 1950s, he started funds specializing in nuclear energy, chemicals, electronics and technology. In 1959, with five funds and $66 million under management, he joined a surge of funds going public. Growth was dramatic. The flagship Templeton Growth Fund reported a 14.5 percent average annual return from 1954 to 1992; a $10,000 investment, with dividends reinvested, would have grown to $2 million.
Sir John sold the Templeton family of funds — scores of them with $13 billion in assets — in 1992, and turned to philanthropies that had engaged him for decades. While he was an elder of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), he took a broad view of spirituality, espousing non-literal views of heaven and hell and a shared divinity between humanity and God.
Contending that almost nothing of God was actually “known” through Scriptures and theology, he founded the Templeton Prize in 1972 to foster “progress in religion” — an idea that included philosophy and exemplary conduct relating to love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity. He called it an effort to redress the fact that no Nobel Prize was given for religion.
Its first recipient, in 1973, was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who received $85,000 for her charities. In the 35 years since, the prize, given in London, has grown to $1.6 million. And the criterion for it has been refined in recent years to encompass “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities.”
The Templeton Foundation, based in West Conshohocken, Pa., was established in 1987 to administer the prize and promote “projects to apply scientific methodology to the study of religious subjects,” with room for theoretical physics, evolutionary biology, cognitive science and researches into love, human purpose and the nature and origin of religious beliefs. Today, with a $1.5 billion endowment, it largely sustains the controversial modern movement to reconcile science and religion.
Foundation projects have included a multimillion-dollar study of forgiveness, and a two-year study to demonstrate the effect of prayer on 600 patients about to undergo surgery.
Many critics contend that reconciling science and religion is not possible, and that studies to that end are naïve, quixotic or motivated by a desire to put religious beliefs on an equal footing with scientific knowledge.
But others defend the foundation’s approach, insisting that science has no monopoly on truth and that religion and science can cooperate productively.
“We have somehow to break down the barriers between our contemporary culture of science and disciplined academic study” and “the domain of the spirit,” Charles Taylor said in accepting the prize in 2007.
John Marks Templeton was born on Nov. 29, 1912, in Winchester, a small Tennessee town 60 miles from Dayton, the scene of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial” pitting Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan in a battle over the theory of evolution versus fundamentalist views of the Creation. The boy was only 12 then, but issues in the case dominated his later life; he wrote at least eight books on spiritual matters.
He was raised in a devout household and was the first student in town to go to college. Supporting himself at Yale in the Depression, he graduated near the top of his class in 1934, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Balliol College at Oxford University and earned a master’s degree in law. He began his Wall Street career in 1937.
That year, he married the former Judith Folk. The couple had three children. His wife died in 1951. In 1958, he married Irene Reynolds Butler, who died in 1993. His daughter, Anne Templeton Zimmerman, died in 2005, and a stepson, Malcolm Butler, died in 1995. He is survived by two sons from his first marriage, John M. Jr., of Bryn Mawr, Pa., a retired surgeon and the chairman and president of the Templeton Foundation, and Christopher, of Colfax, Iowa; a stepdaughter, Wendy Brooks, of Delray Beach, Fla., and three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Among his many gifts was the 1984 endowment of Templeton College, a business and management school at Oxford. In 1987, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his philanthropies. After many years on Wall Street, he renounced his American citizenship in the 1960s, became a British subject and moved to the Bahamas, a Commonwealth nation that has long been a tax haven.
Sir John said his investment record improved after he distanced himself from Wall Street and no longer worried about the tax consequences of his decisions. He was an early investor in Japan in the 1960’s and later in Russia, China and other Asian markets. He sold large holdings before the technology bubble burst in 2000, and warned several years ago that real estate prices were dangerously high.
In Nassau, his net worth swelled into the billions, but his lifestyle remained relatively modest. He drove his own car and spent his days reading, writing and managing his foundation. Visitors were given sandwiches, tea and courtly advice in the afternoon at his white-columned antebellum home on Lyford Cay, set on a hillside lush with citrus trees and bougainvillea, overlooking a golf course and the ocean.

Colliding with Christ Seminar at New Life Church

On a warm, Spring evening in Colorado Springs, a group of Christians interested in scientific evidence for their faith met at New Life Church to hear Dr. R.C. Metcalf present a seminar on his latest book, Colliding with Christ: The Science of the Resurrection. The event lasted two hours, which included some excellent questions that stimulated thoughtful discussion. The local chapter of Reasons to Believe hosted Dr. Metcalf, who agreed to offer the seminar again in the Fall due to the tremendous interest expressed by those who were in attendance. Check the Calendar at http://www.thinkagain.us/ for further information. The event will be posted as soon as a date is arranged. Also, look for another exciting Fall event in Colorado Springs which is currently being planned!

The following video offers a segment of the seminar in which Dr. Metcalf addresses the indiscernibility of Jesus during His post-Resurrection appearances, a topic rarely approached by modern apologists.

R.C. Metcalf v. Dan Barker Debate at Tufts

It was as perfect a day in Boston as one could imagine. Dan Barker, President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, the largest atheist organization in America, faced RC Metcalf on the question, "Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?" Approximately 75 people were in attendance at the event, which was hosted by the Tufts University Freethought Society. Dr. Metcalf's opening statement drew upon the evidence presented in his latest book, Colliding with Christ, and is presented here in four parts.