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How do parents determine whether they have been successful in raising their children? By more than a two-to-one margin (62% to 28%), they define success as having done the best they could, regardless of the outcomes. Less than three out of ten parents say the fruit of their efforts is the defining factor.

--The Barna Group; The Barna Update: February 28, 2005; "Parents Describe How They Raise Their Children."

I hear a lot of guilty parents saying "it's not our fault."  Although American parents are gravely concerned that their kids are not being prepared for life, they now say that if the kids are not prepared, the parents are not to blame.
They're not?
Well, whose job is it to prepare them?  Contrary to popular belief and practice, it is the parents' job, not the school's or church's.  Parents who have done poorly should admit it and take steps to mend what they've left broken, rather than blame the school, the church, social factors or the nature of their child.  The parents polled above think that "success" is trying to help a child learn to read--as opposed to the child actually reading.

Perhaps people really don't think it's possible to teach a child anything.

(Now would be a good time to read the Bible with your kids.)

On February 19, 1945 American Marines landed on Iwo Jima. The volcanic island was a fortress of underground barracks saturated with Japanese soldiers—despite a previous three months of U.S. bombardment—and was a vital location in the war. The United States would need it in order to land and launch bombers and fighters for the invasion of Japan. In one month the island was declared secure, but at the high cost of 6000 Marines and 21,000 Japanese. The most famous portion of the invasion was the fight to the top of an extinct volcano, Mt. Suribachi, where on the fifth day of the landing, February 23, American forces planted the U.S. flag on the summit. Photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the Marines later raising a larger flag, and the picture quickly became a symbol of American ideals and heroism. Japs shot from windows in their earthen defenses, making flamethrowers like the one below essential weapons.

Click to read more ...

This BreakPoint commentary is a must-read for anyone who is sympathetic with the left because of their general policy on social issues.  (Which I'm not, by the way.)  Chuck Colson talks about members of the "religious left" such as Jim Wallis, whose book "Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It" is making waves in liberal and conservative groups alike, and Colson argues that the Wallis types cannot legitimately support policies catering to the poor and underprivileged unless they completely oppose abortion. 
If you want to learn more about Wallis, read this interview from yesterday.




P.S.  I know I promised to post pictures from the Iwo Jima reenactment, and I haven't forgotten about it.  I'm just having trouble finding the time to blog.  Not to mention the pain of working over dial-up.  But being in 70-degree Florida instead of 40-degree Indiana tells me to quit complaining.

Updated on Sunday, February 20, 2005 at 11:23PM by Daniel James Devine

Updated on Tuesday, February 22, 2005 at 09:00PM by Daniel James Devine

Tonight I'm blogging from the great state of Texas. Saturday I had the privilege of attending a recreation of the battle for Iwo Jima on a steep hill outside of Fredericksburg. Present for this 60 year commemoration was Oliver North and historian Richard Frank, who narrated the event over loudspeakers as it unfolded on the field and hill in front of us. The combatants included reenactors from the U.S., Australia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan.

Click to read more ...

Either deconstructionists are among the dumbest people ever to get university teaching positions, or there is something sinister going on. But deconstructionists are not dumb, though at times they can put on a convincing act. So what are they really up to? As we learn from the hermeneutics of suspicion, whatever a text is hiding has to do with power, never with truth. It hardly seems a coincidence that many deconstructionist are Marxists. Naturally, this does not mean they are Marxists in any sense that the historical Marx or even Lenin would approve. Marxian deconstructionist recognize that most nontrivial sentences in the writings of Marx and Lenin have been falsified. They know that Marxian economics is a fraud. After years of watching Russian and Chinese and Cuban leaders impoverish every citizen in their nations, except the rich and powerful people at the top, we know that no Marxist cares about poor and oppressed people. Their entire program is keeping the power they have and smuggling as many American dollars as they can to their Swiss bank accounts. As for Marxian intellectuals in America, the name of their game is also power. They know that deconstructionism is bunk. The real purpose of the deconstructionist power brokers is to separate as many Americans as possible from their families and from their literature and traditions. If we cannot know the meaning of any text, then we cannot know the meaning of the Bible, including the Ten Commandments. Neither can we know the meaning of the United States Constitution or any other text that might sustain social order or provide meaning and direction to life. Once students become alienated from their families, their religion, their values, and their traditions, they will be like lambs prepared for the slaughter. And when that day comes, who do you suppose all the people with empty heads and empty chests will look to for their orders? They will look to their deconstructionist, Marxian, power-seeking professors who introduced them to the mysteries of a world without meaning. The real name of the deconstructionist game is not meaning or truth; it is power, raw political power.

I didn't write this.  Wish I had.  It's awful heavy-handed, I know, but simply beautiful.
Written by an anonymous author quoted in Ronald Nash's Life's Ultimate Questions philosophy textbook (page 240).

By soaking tiny cubes of pine and poplar in acid and then a silica solution--and then cooking them in an argon gas-fillled furnace, Yongsoon Shin has made his very own petrified wood.  Although the story says that natural petrified wood takes "eons" to form, the new experiment proves that wood can petrify very quickly under the right conditions.

Antony Flew, the famous atheist whose recent acceptance of the existence of God was compared to Billy Graham renouncing Christianity, was interviewed here by Biola professor Gary R. Habermas.  Here are a few excerpts.

HABERMAS: Once you mentioned to me that your view might be called Deism. Do you think that would be a fair designation?
FLEW: Yes, absolutely right. What Deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.
HABERMAS: Then, would you comment on your “openness” to the notion of theistic revelation?
FLEW: Yes. I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. (10) That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.

Flew would currently call himself a Deist--a believer in an impersonal God who does not give revelation.  However, he is not 100% closed to the idea of revelation.  Flew mentions the ideas of Gerald Schroeder, who, as explained in this article by Victor J Stenger of the University of Hawaii, proposed that each day in Genesis 1 corresponds with so many million or billion years, adding up to a grand total of 15.75 billion--a couple billion higher than some secular estimates of the universe.  So although Flew accepts Intelligent Design behind evolution, he still believes that science has given substantial evidence for an old earth.

As an aside, the Stenger article ridicules Schroeder's theory and indirectly calls Antony Flew "mathematically and scientifically illiterate" for accepting the idea that a deity was involved in Creation.  Stenger uses the same argument everyone has been using recently to criticize Michael Behe:  Just because it seems impossible that life formed doesn't mean it didn't, or that supernatural intervention is required.  Yes, Professor Stenger, but there comes a time when a theory becomes so scientifically unlikely that it is embarrassing to continue believing it.  Flew has recognized this.

(Stenger goes on to give proof for his view: "As we know from everyday experience and scientific observations, complex systems develop from simpler systems all the time in nature, with no high intelligence needed. A drop of water can freeze into an ice crystal. Winds can carve out great cathedrals in rock."  By the word "cathedrals" we assume he is not being literal.)

But I get off the subject.  Says Flew,

It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account. Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.

Asked about the problem of evil in light of his Deism, he responds,

Well, absent revelation, why should we perceive anything as objectively evil? The problem of evil is a problem only for Christians. For Muslims everything which human beings perceive as evil, just as much as everything we perceive as good, has to be obediently accepted as produced by the will of Allah.

I think Flew is right here.  Actually, I heard Ravi Zacharias say almost exactly the same thing last week at Moody Church.  To begin to resolve the problem of evil, I think we need to conform our ideas of good and evil to the LORD's ideas.  As Flew states, revelation is the only thing which can establish an objective definition of evil.
Flew goes on to compare Christianity with Islam, as I am doing, especially with relation each religion's sacred texts. Flew says,

Whereas St. Paul, who was the chief contributor to the New Testament, knew all the three relevant languages and obviously possessed a first class philosophical mind, the Prophet [Muhammad], though gifted in the arts of persuasion and clearly a considerable military leader, was both doubtfully literate and certainly ill-informed about the contents of the Old Testament and about several matters of which God, if not even the least informed of the Prophet’s contemporaries, must have been cognizant.
This raises the possibility of what my philosophical contemporaries in the heyday of Gilbert Ryle would have described as a knock-down falsification of Islam: something which is most certainly not possible in the case of Christianity. If I do eventually produce such a paper it will obviously have to be published anonymously.

Sometimes I wonder if I should post anonymously, too.
On the Bible:

The Bible is a work which someone who had not the slightest concern about the question of the truth or falsity of the Christian religion could read as people read the novels of the best novelists. It is an eminently readable book.

And may I throw in: "If you haven't read it, read it."
Flew does not believe in the resurrection of Christ but says the evidence for it is better than most other claimed miracles, including "run of the mill Roman Catholic miracles."  I like that.
Asked if he thought he might ever become a Christian:

I think it’s very unlikely, due to the problem of evil. . . But some things I am completely confident about. I would never regard Islam with anything but horror and fear because it is fundamentally committed to conquering the world for Islam. It was because the whole of Palestine was part of the land of Islam that Muslim Arab armies moved in to try to destroy Israel at birth, and why the struggle for the return of the still surviving refugees and their numerous descendents continue to this day.

It will never be possible for Flew to resolve the problem of evil in his mind until he believes in the work, person, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who demonstrates comprehensively that God is good.

 

"For goodness sake," says Antony Flew to wrap up, "Jesus is an enormously attractive charismatic figure, which the Prophet of Islam most emphatically is not."

It just needs an exclamation mark.
Check out the whole interview, it covers a lot of topics.

 

In a public statement today, North Korea declared it has nuclear weapons and is building them for defense against the second-term Bush administration.

We have shown utmost magnanimity and patience for the past four years since the first Bush administration swore in. We can not spend another four years as we did in the past four years and there is no need for us to repeat what we did in those years.

NK makes it clear that they reject further talks toward disarmament and internal policy change.  In hostile language they call U.S. policy towards North Korea "a far-fetched logic of gangsters as it is a good example fully revealing the wicked nature and brazen-faced double-dealing tactics of the U.S. as a master hand at plot-breeding and deception."
It says the U.S. has "defiled the dignified political system in the DPRK [NK government] chosen by its people and wantonly interfered in its internal affairs."
Whether that government was really "chosen by its people" is a highly debatable point.

North Korea Zone has links to news coverage and the full statement.  KoreaWatch and One Free Korea are blogging on this.

This announcement, by the way, comes just days before Kim Jong-il's 64th birthday.  Most people are just viewing it as a political tactic.