Supporters of Planned Parenthood (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This crime is really too horrific to dwell on comfortably, but it is an example of what happens when human life is thought to be cheap. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for the murder of  infants who survived their late-term abortions. He uses a procedure called snipping which basically involves cutting the baby’s spinal cord with scissors. While this sounds like the stuff of horror movies, it is real life. The acts are not denied. It is more of a matter of whether this behavior is wrong in the eyes of the law. This is a mirror held up for the American people to consider what happens when we say it is okay to kill certain innocent humans. Where do we draw the line? Please go to Colson Center to learn more about what we can do to stop this kind of heinous crime. The documentary about this crime is called 3801 Lancaster… the street address of the clinic.

Fox News to air 1 hour special broadcast this Sunday

YouTube Documentary of Gosnell’s “medical” practices

English: Detail of Preamble to Constitution of the United States Polski: Fragment preambuły Konstytucji Stanów Zjednoczonych (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some people are upset about sequestration. I do not think that sequestration is the most intelligent way to proceed with spending cuts. But spending cuts have to happen. If sequestration is a way to move the ball forward on cutting spending, then let’s proceed. Cutting back our spending on programs will always upset someone. Course corrections are not fun, just necessary. This is like when we have overspent our family budget and need to cut back on our lifestyle. That is not fun, but if we understand that it is necessary and that we have a higher goal in mind, we can bite the bullet. I think this is what lies at the heart of the rancor over increased taxes versus cutting spending. The people who have grown dependent on the programs of the federal government are going to be upset when those programs decrease. But if those cuts do not happen then a little way down the road our house of cards falls down upon itself.

English: Rep. Albert Wynn (left) joins Gloria Feldt (right), President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, on the steps of the Supreme Court, to rally in support of the pro-choice movement on the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although widely criticized from both sides, the callous video celebrating 40 years of abortion-rights Roe v. Wade  featuring actor Mehcad Brooks dovetailed perfectly with the Marxist call for the “community of women” in which the Communist Manifesto basically calls for women to have no restriction on who, when, and for how much they will sleep with men. Really what they meant was for women to be community property. I can imagine that this sounds great to an amoral Marxist man but what woman feels properly valued in that state? If you don’t believe me read it for yourself below. Then ask yourself if the current state of morality on high school and college campuses more closely approximates the “Communist ideal” or a practice that is actually healthy for women?

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

–from Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto

English: Flowchart of the steps in the Scientific Method (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

How do we ensure that our children do not abandon the faith during their teens or early adult years? John Stonestreet from the Colson Center and Summit ministries recommends that we train our children up in a robust worldview. A worldview that is broad enough and deep enough to handle the challenges of real life. I agree. We need to encourage our children to think deeply and consider the various issues that they will face, so that people do not come along and rob them of their foundation. Teaching our children the rules of sound logic and thinking, the scientific method, Christian apologetics and reasons for belief, and the basic principles and ideas of the major competing worldviews. These practices should help to give our children the foundation that they need to securely build their lives upon.

Related articles

• Youth Apologetics…More than Just Worldviews Training (renovationstory.wordpress.com)
• If we transform the worldview without transforming the worldviewer, we will not transform the world. (christiantheology.wordpress.com)

Life is like a Jigsaw Puzzle

Life is like a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle. When you are building a puzzle, first, you find all the border pieces. The ones with the flat sides – the edge pieces. Once you’ve completed the edge pieces or border of your puzzle, the best strategy to follow is to pick out major, easy to identify sections of the puzzle. Pull out all those pieces. Fit them together. Put them in their place within your puzzle. Then select out the next easy to identify section. Separate out those pieces. Put them together as best you can and put them in their relative position within the puzzle framework.

As you move along through this process of identifying specific areas of the puzzle and putting those in order in their relative positions, the overall puzzle begins to take shape. Not all at once… it doesn’t come together immediately. But over time different areas of the puzzle begin to form as you concentrate on them.

And after a while those pieces which at first you did not recognize as being part of one of the earlier sections, you start to notice patterns of where they belong. Pieces that are all one color, for instance, are really hard to identify where they belong. You start to notice shades of color difference that you hadn’t noticed before. Pieces of the sections you had already isolated and built but were missing a few pieces, you find those pieces mixed in with the hard-to-identify pieces because they just didn’t have that easy-to-find characteristic.

And over time the process builds on itself as you get more and more sections in order and put together, until eventually you’re almost picking up pieces and putting them directly in their places one after another.

Growing as a person is like this. When you find and identify the boundaries to build your life within that’s the beginning. This is like finding the foundation for your life. It gives you a starting place. You want to find the firm foundation that is true – that conforms to reality. We find this true foundation in the Bible and in the person of Jesus Christ.

Then you begin working on certain areas of your life and try to put them in order. It might start with your finances, your marriage, your work life, or your spiritual life. As you put the different areas together, your life starts to take shape. Getting additional areas under control and in focus and in order and productive starts to become easier. Unfortunately life is not completely the same as a jigsaw puzzle. For the puzzle there is finally a finishing point, a finite amount of time when you can put the whole thing together and say you’re done. With life however, although there is a definite finishing point for our lives, we never reach a state of being done on this side of eternity. We leave that to our Lord and Savior for the next life.

We can use this principle of focusing on specific areas of our lives, getting them in order as best we can, getting things in place and moving on to another area. This principle can help us move the ball forward in our lives toward reaching our goals.

Marriage Goal-setting Retreat

Goal-setting

Ku Klux Klan members and a burning cross, Denver, Colorado, 1921

I recently enjoyed a segment on the The World and Everything in It with Alonzo Rachel giving a brief overview of black American history vis a vis the Republican party. I’ll include a brief synopsis below.

The fact is that it was the Republican Party under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln that paved the way for black emancipation from slavery. The Republican Party was actually a fairly new party arising from the growing popularity of abolitionists. It was the Democrats that actually seceded from the country and formed the Confederate slave holding States. After losing the Civil War, it was the Democratic Party that formed the KKK in order to violently kill Republicans both white and black and convince them with basically terrorism to stop trying to have influence in the South.  Decades later the opportunity for the civil rights movement was helped by Republicans who drafted the 1960s civil rights legislation during a session of Congress before LBJ, a Democrat got behind it. That civil rights legislation actually passed with 100 percent of the Republican vote but only a portion of the Democrat vote.

I agree that we have forgotten so much history. I recently was talking to a new acquaintance on a plane ride home. He mentioned how the Republicans had a lot of work to do to overcome their sordid past. He mentioned the KKK as one example. People need to be told that all that was from the Democratic party. Myself, I don’t hold to party loyalty. I hold to principle loyalty. I consider myself a Christian first, a conservative next, and a Republican as long as their candidates stand for Christian principles. Historically the Republican party has tended to stand for what is right. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of misinformation in the last 150 years. And there has been resulting slippage and confusion of direction. There are some changes that need to be made in the Republican party, but not in the liberal direction.

Alonzo Rachel also made a spoof of the recent ad celebrating the 4oth anniversary of Roe v. Wade. He makes it clear how abortion is welcomed by many as a racist practice.

Entropy on the Beach

Civilization is a lot like houses on the beach. You can see from the picture that I took on a recent trip to the beach that houses not maintained tend to decay over time. The dilapidated house stands out especially when the rest of the neighborhood or block has been well maintained, The interesting thing about this is the fact is that the run down house is moving toward the natural state of houses and other things on the beach. The humidity, extra salt, intense sunlight and the radical changes in weather causes things to fall apart. 

Abortion card001 (Photo credit: John Ensor)

As we reflect on the 55 million missing Americans who were murdered in last 40 years following the legalization of abortion, where would our nation be if we had those 55 million people? …if we had 55 million more hard-working creative, productive, taxpaying citizens? Could we have discovered a cure for cancer? Maybe we snuffed out the life of the inventor who could have solved our energy crisis. Did we do away with a modern day Mozart or a 20th century George Washington? What about the over 100 million missing women in East Asia? With whom will those preferred sex men marry and raise families? And why couldn’t we pass a ban on sex-selective abortion here in America? Don’t we believe in equal rights for women even before birth?

As we teach our children in our classrooms, stop and think about the fact that each one of them is actually an abortion survivor …because for the last 40 years it has been legal to murder children in America.

Related articles

• What Abortion Has Brought Us… (thelostgenerations.wordpress.com)
• Words About Protecting Our Children Ring Hollow (gadabout-blogalot.com)

If you aim at nothing, you’ll be sure to hit it. [Target by Jasper Johns (Photo credit: cliff1066™)]

I’m a relative newcomer to goal-setting. I’ve only been writing personal goals for the last four years or so. My goals before that were more… abstract. The process has helped me to define what I am working toward with more precision and persistence. In many cases, my goals have provided an impetus for getting started in a new or risky area that otherwise would not have been there.

For my goals, I use a resource from Dan Miller, one of my podcast sources for inspiration. He recommends setting goals in seven different areas of your life: financial, physical, personal development, family, spiritual,  social, and career. If we neglect one or more areas of our life we will end up with problems in the long-term. For instance, one of my personal development goals is to read 24 nonfiction books this year. This as been one of my more successful areas the last couple of years. I also have some physical goals for exercise and eating right. These have been a little tougher for me to follow through with, but I need to continue to give them attention.

I try to use Zig Ziglar’s advice to track my goals, in fact, getting better at tracking is one of my goals. I’ve noticed that the goals I track regularly have a much higher chance of getting accomplished.

Finally, I try to be specific and measurable in my goal-setting. Dave Ramsey says a goal has five characteristics. A goal is specific and measurable, has a deadline, is owned by the goal setter (not put on them by someone else), and is written down.

If you haven’t already, take some time to think about and write down some goals for your life.

Here’s to a great new year!

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Indoor Shooting Range at Sarasota, Florida, USA. Taken by Kenn. Shooting a Glock 23 (.40 S+W) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I, like most other Americans, want to express my shock, sadness, and sympathy to the grieving survivors. My prayers have been with you since I first heard of the tragedy.

I would also like to add my voice to the meaningful debate about what should be done about school shootings. The most important part of the conversation should not center on guns, but on the content we emphasize in our schools and media. The secondary part of the conversation, which many would like to make primary is what to do to make our schools safer from attackers.

First, about the society we are influencing with media and education. As a teacher I cannot help but think that we must stop teaching the lie that there is no right or wrong. We cannot teach the lie that humans are just advanced animals and should not be treated with special dignity and respect. This is the same line of thinking that Hitler used to justify his extermination of so many Jews. Teaching morals, the difference between right and wrong, and the fact that we will have to answer for our actions in either this life or the next would help our nation more than any additional gun laws.

We must not allow the liberal bloc to use this tragedy as an opportunity to disarm America. I agree with Wayne LaPierre and Louie Gomert. There is a reason why these malevolent shooters go to schools and malls and movie theaters. They do not go to local hunting clubs, shooting ranges, or police stations. The shooters go where there will be no armed resistance. People bent on this kind of violence will obtain weapons whether or not there are laws in place.

My proposed solution to protecting our schools is to arm school staff members. It is time for us to put a comprehensive firearms training program in place in our nation’s schools. Every school building should have trained and armed staff members who can respond immediately to this kind of heinous violence. Arming school staff members whether teachers, administrators, or classified staff would be much more cost effective than hiring an entire new group of officers to be at the school. The costs would include training for the staff members and for the weapons themselves. I am impressed with the courage displayed by those teachers and principals who attempted to shield and protect their students with their wits and in many cases with their own bodies. Wouldn’t it have been better if those teachers had been armed with some means of taking out this unhinged madman?