Remember Lot's Wife, but Don't Forget About Job's or Adam's

Paul Edwards writes in an article titled 'Jerry Falwell was a Theophobe' in Townhall.com:

Rev. Dr. Mel White... After working with Dr. Falwell on his autobiography Mr. White announced to his family that he was gay. He soon left his wife for his male lover. He had “come out.” He now leads a pro-homosexual, anti-evangelical activist group of college kids who purport to be both Christian and homosexual...

Mel blames Dr. Falwell’s message in part for his own lifelong battle to overcome same-sex attraction. He told me:

I went through 35 years of electric shock, and aversive therapy and exorcism trying to get rid of the demon of homosexuality. I finally slit my wrists and went to the hospital, and my wife said, “You know, Mel, you’re a good person, but you’re gay and you need to accept that.” And in accepting that I began a new kind of life; my whole life changed, and I became a person who loved Christ in a whole new way, I felt His Holy Spirit working in a whole new way.

"...Mel, you’re a good person, but you’re gay and you need to accept that.” It would have been wise for Mel White to follow Job's example concerning certain suggestions from his wife...

So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.

His wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!" (Job 2:7-9, NIV)

Mr. White needed to mimic Job's reply:

He replied, "You are talking like a foolish woman. Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?" In all this, Job did not sin in what he said. (Job 2:10, NIV)

Job was apparently familiar with the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis concerning the result of a similar circumstance:

To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, `You must not eat of it,'
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are and to dust you will return." (Genesis 3:17-19, NIV)

Paul Edwards:

There is no question that there was fear inherent in the words spoken by Jerry Falwell on the moral issues confronting our nation. But it wasn’t Dr. Falwell’s fear of homosexuality (or any other sin) that fueled his passion to call this nation to repentance, but rather his fear of God. Jerry Falwell spoke the words of Christ to the nation. Jesus said, “If I had not come and spoken unto them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:22). Jerry Falwell was a voice crying in the wilderness of the moral decline of late 20th century America. He lifted up his voice like a trumpet, boldly confronting his generation with Christ’s words. The voice of the prophet may be silenced, but the word of our God shall stand forever.

The fear of the LORD versus the fear of PMS or PMDD. We preach, you decide.

Dunn on Falwell

Here are some excerpts from an article by J.R. Dunn posted on American Thinker, 'Why the Left Hated Jerry Falwell So Much':

[...] But of course, none of that is what it's really about. Falwell was despised and loathed for a very simple reason: he defied the leftist consensus, and he won. He made them back down. He frightened them terribly, by confronting them with clear evidence that the country was not what they insisted it was, and that their utopian dreams would never come to pass. That was his crime, one for which he could never be forgiven.

It was in the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter, having rescued the economy, tamed communism, chastised the Sandinistas, and humiliated the mullahs, looked out over the country in search of more work for his restless farmer's hands. What he found sore displeased him. For it seemed that down South, his very own people, the blood of his blood, worshiping the God of his fathers, had opened private schools for the education of their young ones. And Jimmy was made wroth by what he beheld, because their purpose was racist; those schools had been founded for the sole purpose of keeping blacks out. It could be naught else. You couldn't fool Jimmy. He knew what those crackers were like. [...]

That's how Moral Majority was born. Not as an American Taliban, not as a vigilance committee targeting gays, abortionists, and feminists, not as a reactionary political cult, but as an organization to protect a despised religious minority from an overreaching government. [...]

It was Jerry Falwell who gave those people a voice, who created the religious right out of whole cloth, and made it into a force that moves the country to this day. That was his achievement, and that is why he's so hated, and why the tolerant, life-affirming left has cheered so loudly at his demise. Because nothing was the same after the Moral Majority appeared.

Before the Moral Majority, liberalism went where it willed and did what it pleased. You took up against liberalism at your peril, and few carried it off successfully or for very long. It was the religious right that revealed the country's bedrock, the fact that its basic nature remained unchanged despite forty-odd years of effort to the contrary. The Evangelicals were the reef against which the left broke itself. It's impossible to imagine the conservative counter reformation that began with Ronald Reagan, one of the crucial events of our time, ever occurring if the religious right had not led the way.

That's how the history will read, after all the missteps and gaucheries are forgotten, all the lies and disinformation cleared away. That's how Jerry Falwell will at last be seen. [...]

Among all the Leftist dancing and pissing on Falwell's grave there was one 'odd man out':

The Reverend Jerry Falwell and I were arch enemies for fifteen years. We became involved in a lawsuit concerning First Amendment rights and Hustler magazine. Without question, this was my most important battle - the l988 Hustler Magazine, Inc., v. Jerry Falwell case,where after millions of dollars and much deliberation, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in my favor.

My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends. He would visit me in California and we would debate together on college campuses. I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling.- Larry Flynt statement on CBS5.com

Green is the New Red

Jeffrey Osonitsch makes some good points in an American Thinker article, 'The Paradox of Secular Scientism':

[...] When science lost its moral foundation through hostility to religion, it became preyed upon by another corrupting influence: politics. And once infected thus, science slowly transmogrified into scientism, or the religious advocacy (by elites within the scientific, academic, journalistic, and government communities) of consensus-based theories whereby a majority-rule mentality takes the place of the traditional scientific method. Under this system theories need not be proven, only agreed upon, and once agreed upon, these dogmatic beliefs become the stuff of enforced orthodoxy and woe to anyone who dissents from the majority.

This new scientism is then used as a means to justify extreme and dangerous political orthodoxies. It is how the dubious and scientifically unsupported claims (namely that the use of pesticides to control mosquito populations have a catastrophic ripple effect across the food chain) of an obscure writer named Rachel Carson led to the ban on the use of DDT as an insecticide, which in turn resulted in the loss of tens of millions of lives to a disease (malaria) which had been all but eradicated by Western science. The human cost, particularly in Africa, was disregarded by a preening elite of self-satisfied Western secularists who abused science to institute a new and infinitely more insidious form of imperialism affecting mostly poor, third world people. One wonders how long the ban would have lasted had it been Europeans dropping dead by the thousands daily.

Similarly dubious scientific claims are made to oppose such things as over-population, man-made climate change, the use of bio-engineered foods, and nuclear power. These are clearly political movements dressed up as science and have had some truly bizarre results. For example, some proponents of secular scientism are in the weird position of rejecting the consumption by humans of bio-engineered foods while supporting efforts (through cloning, selective abortion, euthanasia, DNA manipulation, embryonic stem-cell cultivation, etc.) to bio-engineer human beings themselves! They then propose to mitigate the unproven harmful effects of the consumption of bio-engineered foods by increasing the malnutrition and starvation which inevitably result from its ban. [...]

They then seek, in spite of the potential cost of millions of lives through the likely increase in poverty caused by the implementation of such radical eco-political policies as the Kyoto Protocols, to limit the potential for global economic growth through their opposition to the use of such technologies as nuclear power and the burning of fossil fuels needed by modern economies by overstating their harmful effects. These restrictions will impact worst those in the developing world least able to withstand the economic repercussions. This is not a magnanimous or moral application of science for the betterment of mankind, this is raw power politics. The cosmopolitan proponents of centralized, global power here seek to use science not to serve, but to control. Coincidence or not, Earth Day is celebrated on the anniversary of the birth of Communist pioneer Vladimir Lenin. It appears green is the new red. [...]

Francis Schaeffer called this paradigm shift of science to scientism, modern science to modern modern science, science within a closed material system.

Contrasting Truths to Contrasting Powers

Alan Sears writes in an article on Townhall.com:

[...]Leftists are especially fond of citing that old Quaker quote about “speaking truth to power.” It makes them feel brave – standing up to a gracious, polite society, calling for the decimation of the spiritual foundations of Western civilization – with no one to back them up but an omnipresent mass media, a posse of increasingly activist judges, and the glittery Hollywood Thought Police.

The irony, though, is that public prayer is the ultimate venue for speaking truth to power.

Mother Teresa understood that. Invited to share a few words the 1994 National Prayer Breakfast, she responded with some stabbingly plain truths about abortion:

“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another but to use any violence to get what they want,” she said. “This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”

Those words brought hundreds to their feet, but not President Bill Clinton – or Mrs. Clinton, or Vice President Al Gore. Seats planted, faces set like stone, that potent trio gazed, dazed, on the wizened old face of wisdom…and sat powerless, for a moment, in the face of the truth. [...]

The National Day of Prayer was established as an annual event in 1952 by a joint resolution of the United States Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman.

The A.C.L.U. is considering the exhumation of Harry Truman and all members of the 1952 U.S. Congress in order to sue them for violating the Constitution.

Today is the 56th annual National Day of Prayer.

"If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:31b,32)

Speak truth to power.