Pro Rege Papers

Many cases are appearing all over the country where Christians are being put down, suspended, or otherwise [[gasp]] discriminated against. It all goes under the label of “tolerance” and “diversity.” But I’m wondering who is really being tolerant.

In Georgia, a student is suing the university there because she was to speak out against homosexuality, and was forced to take a “diversity” class. In Roseville, CA students are being suspended because they refused to take off their shirts that had a Christian message. The government forbids pastors in Canada to preach against homosexuality. The list goes on.

The thing is, gays, abortionists, and others speak a whole lot about tolerance, when they themselves do not tolerate anyone else besides them speaking out for their beliefs. They hate you and accuse you of “hate”-crimes. Tolerance extends to everyone…except Christians. A few more ironic statements could apply.

What about my diversity? What ever happened to that? I am diverse from you: [theoretical situation, I’m not actually talking to you, the reader, personally] you are gay; I am Christian. You are trying to force your beliefs down my throat. I am applying my beliefs to you, and asking you to repent from what I see (and God) as sin. How about celebrating my diversity? Whatever happened to freedom of speech? (This especially applies to the Canadian case.)

Liberals are intolerant of anyone who is “intolerant” according to their standards. Tolerance to them means bearing all their ideas and not saying anything contrary. In other words, brainwashing and propaganda.

I’m not saying that we should go about hating people and despising them for what they believe. I believe tolerance is in order to a certain extent with people. But what most liberals today label as tolerance is nothing of the sort.

On the other hand, this is an old topic given new life. My father has a book from the 1700s on tolerance and to what extent it should be used. The book is actually analyzing the dealing of the Synod of the Reformed Church in the Netherlands with the issue in the 1600s.

Persecution — that’s the name for it. Tolerance might be the highest virtue in our popular culture, but it doesn’t often extend to Christians these days. Christians are increasingly being driven from public life, denied their First Amendment rights, and even actively discriminated against for their beliefs.

Taken from David Limbaugh’s review of Persecution

You know, it’s interesting that there are tons of books written, studies published, and time wasted trying to disprove the authenticity of the Bible. All this work done, in spite of the fact that the Bible is one of the most proven documents in the world. Prophecies have been fulfilled, historical facts confirmed, authorship proven; but people still doubt. I guess this is why the Bible says, among other things on this subject, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the .” It is only by faith.

No one ever says that Plato or Socrates’ writings are probably faked. Nor do they say that some guy wrote the Iliad in the 1100s. Yet these documents have very little backup texts to support them.

It’s interesting to think about.

Okay, this just angers me. I just got finished watching the news. Ya, I’ve heard (actually read) Moussaoui’s talk backs and arrogant replies; but I never thought I would see the day when Americans (let alone victims of the criminal) would say that a person who wanted to kill their relatives; and still openly admits to it, deserves to live and not die. It is a very sad example of the state of this country today.

For those of you who haven’t heard Moussaoui’s comments and sneers, here are a few.

When asked by a lawyer whether he would be prepared to kill Americans, he said: “Anytime, anywhere.”

“God curse you all”

When asked by a lieutenant whether he wakes up to destroy the U.S everyday, he replied, “to the best of my ability”

There are many more, including laughing and smiling when victims testified and calling them “weak.” I just cannot see how one can know all this and still say that the guy is good at heart. Keeping people like Moussaoui alive is not mercy, it is cruelty: cruelty to the victims, to the public, and to the society. The victims need retribution. The public is in danger when a criminal is not punished for several obvious reasons:

1. The criminal will most likely do the deed again.
2. The example of justice not being implemented will encourage others to follow in crime.

Executing a criminal is not “just ending another life,” but preventing the loss of other lives by the convict or others. Much of the crime in this country is the result of a lack of justice to those who do heinous crimes. The Bible says that God will judge a society when it does not administer justice. America and other Western countries are in trouble then.

One thing that especially makes me angry is that people cite the Bible as saying that criminals should not be executed. When was the last time they read their Bibles? A better translation of the 6^th commandment is “Thou shalt not .” If God meant no, then every time you step on an ant, you’re breaking God’s law. (Oh yeah, by the way, what about the Jews going into Canaan and conquering the people there?) Besides, there are many references to executing criminals in the Bible: “If anyone kills a person, the [killer] shall be [executed] at the evidence of witnesses…” (Num. 35:30) There are many, many more clear statements in the Bible, but I’ll end here.

If this were the 1830s, (actually, the 1910s too) Moussaoui would have been dead years ago. We need to change the legal system so that it doesn’t take 6 years min. for a criminal to be executed. It is clear that Zacharias Moussaoui deserves the “unspeakable” penalty.

It’s interesting; a lot of these programs and books leading up to the release of the movie version of The Da-Vinci Code are one-sided. Yeah, there are a lot of good rebuttals, but hey, I don’t like talking about stuff that I already agree with. Anyway, we’ll just act like the good rebuttals don’t exist.

All these people on the liberal side seem to think that what’s going on now is something new. They act like the Gnostic Gospels were just discovered. In reality, the Church has known about these things for many, many years; and condemned them. The Gnostics were very active in the early days of Christianity, trying to undermine its influence with a bunch of legends. Just because they wrote fiction back then too, doesn’t mean that we need to accept those things as fact.

The real, true, canonical Gospels were written either by people who had extensive contact with apostles, or were apostles themselves. The remarkable unity in the story of these four (lacking in the Gnostic books) is tremendous evidence to their authenticity.

Another big lie perpetrated by liberals is that Paul and Peter were in disagreement with each other, and had “different versions of Christianity.” Yes, Paul had to rebuke Peter for being embarrassed to eat with Gentiles in front of Jews; but Peter obviously repented of that as evidenced by his later writings.

The books and “documentaries” now are just attempts by modern day Gnostics to undermine scripture and the Christian message. The Da-Vinci Code just goes under the cloak of being fiction.

Note: I saw a PBS show on early Christianity, and it was interesting that they didn’t interview one evangelical or conservative. There were just people from Harvard, Yale, and Union Seminary: bedrocks of Christianity. (They don’t even believe the Bible)

In the previous post, I explained the flaws in carbon dating. Now, I am going to deal with some of the other methods for rock dating. This includes isotope ratio dating (radiometric) and isochron dating.

Isotope dating is based on one radioactive element (parent element) decaying into another more stable one (daughter product) at a certain rate. Scientists measure the concentrations of each, plug them into the ratio and determine the date of the sample. For example, potassium-40 decays into argon-40 at a certain rate.

But when the samples are dated, three major assumptions are made which cannot be proven:

1. The starting conditions are known. (e.g. if there was any argon-40 in the original rock)
2. The rate of decay has been constant.
3. The systems were closed so that no potassium-40 or argon-40 were added or subtracted.

These assumptions are based on a uniformitarian point of view, which most scientists are now moving away from. These assumptions lead to problems and manipulations within the dating technique.

For example, in dating the basalt around Australopithecus ramidus fossils, researchers got dates of about 23 million years. They decided this was too old, so they examined basalt columns further away from the fossils. They chose 17 out of 26 samples from this site to be “good” ones, and the others “bad” ones. Why? Because the dates did not fit the paradigm accepted by geologists worldwide, namely, old earth evolution. There are many, many more examples of twisting the dates to get what you want; but I’ll leave you with that one.

One interesting thing is that on the form for submitting rock samples to dating and testing labs, you have to specify how old you think the sample is. Presumably, this is because the labs know the discrepancies in the dating method, and want to choose the “correct date” from the many “bad dates.”

These problems with dating are evident in many samples that give dates that vary greatly from the know age of the sample, or from other dates extracted different ways from the same rock. For example, in testing lava flows off of New Zealand that are known to have taken place within the past century; researchers got dates of up to 3.5 million years (the smallest age given was 270,000 years old). Just a little bit off. Also, in testing the same rock from the Grand Canyon, four different methods of dating were used and got the following: 117 million, 1,390 million, 1,340 million, and 2.6 billion.

Isochrons were thought to overcome all the problems above by getting a composite ratio of all the different parent and daughter elements, but this method also gives unreliable dates and way-off results.

There are many anomalies in rocks that have been found including:

1. Daughter products of elements that have a slow decay rate that don’t have any parent elements with them.
2. Missing substances of various types that should be there according to uniformitarianism.
3. Radiohalos that contain only daughter products.

These discoveries (and others) lead to the conclusion that rates of decay were faster in the past, which would give older dates. All these things suggest that the assumptions made by scientists in dating rocks are wrong.

God says: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Job 38:4

Most of the material for this article was taken from The Revised and Expanded Answers Book, Masters Books.

Many people think that the dating methods evolutionists use are infallible. It is also commonly thought that all dating methods point to an old earth. In reality there are many flaws in these processes. This entry will deal with carbon dating.

Carbon dating is one of the most commonly cited methods for the dating of dinosaurs and other organisms. It works only in things that contain carbon. Here’s how it works: Cosmic rays knock neutrons out of atoms high up, which travel downwards at high speeds and collide with nitrogen, forming ¹⁴C. This form of carbon is radioactive and decays over time. One thing this carbon can do is combine with oxygen to make a special form of carbon dioxide. This carbon dioxide is taken in by plants in photosynthesis. Animals eat the plants, and thus the ¹⁴C enters the food chain. ¹⁴C is constantly changing back into nitrogen, but in living animals it is replaced by more ¹⁴C. When an animal dies, it begins to lose the ¹⁴C in its body. Thus, the ratio of ¹⁴C to normal carbon diminishes over time; the ¹⁴C goes away, the normal carbon stays. This is what the scientists measure: the less ¹⁴C, in relation to normal carbon (¹²C), the older the rock.

Now, according to the ratio of decay, the ¹⁴C should no longer be measurable beyond 50,000 years. This is not the only thing; most plants take in less ¹⁴C than 12C thus reducing the ratio more. This causes the specimen to look older than it really is, and thus has to be counted in.

Another thing is that the ratio of ¹⁴C to ¹²C has not always been constant. (e.g. the Industrial Age, and the testing of nuclear in the atmosphere changed the levels). When I mentioned the decay of the magnetic field to Axinar, he said that it wasn’t accurate because of magnetic field reversals in the past. These polarity reversals weaken the magnetic field so that more radiation can get through, causing things to look older than they are. The Flood also lowered the ratio of ¹⁴C to ¹²C because plants were taking in more ¹⁴C and ¹²C after the Flood without the ¹²C being replaced by many animals or decaying plants. Volcanism during the Flood would further change the amount of ¹⁴C in the atmosphere.

Some of these things can be corrected for by taking tree samples etc. that have carbon and seeing the ratio at that time. But this can only be used within about 4,000 years.

Thus carbon dating is useful with things of a relatively young age, but guesswork with things older than that. Plus, as we saw, carbon dating cannot give dates larger than 50,000 years.

Most of the material for this article was taken from The Revised and Expanded Answers Book, Masters Books.

Since Easter is tommorow, I would like to remind all of you the true meaning of Easter.

Easter is not about a bunch of bunnies hopping around eating chocolate. It is commemorating the resurrection Jesus Christ. In this resurrection He conquered . Now, because of that, we can have life in Him if we believe in Him. The resurection also symbolizes the Father’s recognition of Jesus’ sacrifice.

One interesting (and funny) story is here, (under Bunny Ban) about how far this “seperation of church and state” thing is going. What it really is, is seperation of state from reality.

So, this Easter, remember the hope Christ gave to us, and the salvation He offers us.