This year I will be sharing brief excerpts from the articles, sermons, and books I am currently reading. My posts will not follow a regular schedule but will be published as I find well-written thoughts that should be of interest to maturing Christian readers. Whenever possible, I encourage you to go to the source and read the complete work of the author.
Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the president of the United States the power to be commander in chief of the armed forces (subject to declarations of war in Congress), to make treaties with other nations (subject to ratification in the Senate), to grant pardons, to appoint ambassadors, judges and other officers, to recommend measures to Congress. The Constitution also bestows a number of other minor powers based on these major components.
Nowhere in our nation’s governing document can one find a presidential power to regulate the minutiae of private business, much less take ownership of those private businesses. Yet that is how Barack Obama is wielding his ever-increasing power, despite taking an oath to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and … to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Liberal theology saw its heyday in the nineteenth century and raised its head again with the neo-liberalism that captured the mainline churches of the twentieth century. Yet it is by no means dead. Perhaps the place where liberalism is manifesting itself most dangerously is within the walls of churches that have historically been strongly evangelical. David F. Wells describes the crisis of the twenty-first century church as “vacuous worship.” A vacuous worship is one that is empty of content. It is satisfied with platitudes, pop psychology, and entertainment. Such worship is devoid of the Word of God and of the authentic sacrifice of praise.
According to the Supreme Court, white firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut, were illegally denied promotions because of their race. This completely reverses a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor supported as an appeals court judge.
Obama and the Democrats in Congress are trying to sell Sotomayor as one of the appellate court’s most brilliant minds. This is what happens, however, when a judge makes decisions based on his/her feelings instead of the facts and the law. The self-described “wise Latina woman” may not be so wise after all. Her past words and decisions indicate that she wants to legislate policy and law from the judge’s seat. America does not need another radical, secular progressive judge on its highest court.
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a climate-change/cap and trade bill while the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country’s carbon-emissions scheme. The reason for this change of direction is the growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens who doubt the science of human-caused global warming.
The Polish Academy of Sciences recently published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, only 11% of the population believes humans play any role in global warming. In France, Claude Allegre may soon lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Mr. Allegre, a geochemist, was once a global warming believer but has since rejected it. The New Zealand government has suspended its country’s cap-and-trade program.
The number of skeptics continues to grow:
“Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)”
The earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001. Scientific research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans.
Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist has published “Heaven and Earth,” a damning critique of the “evidence” underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing.
When McCain joined with Ted Kennedy to pass their amnesty bill, he got worked over pretty good by conservatives. When Bush ran up the national debt, he got clobbered by Republicans and Democrats, alike. But when, in just three short months, Obama tripled the deficit, nary a discouraging word did we hear from a single liberal. Massive inflation looms over all of us, but Democrats just keep smiling and giving each other high-fives while Obama cranks out funny money like a counterfeiter on speed.
Of all the terrible things Democrats are responsible for, perhaps the worst is the way they foster and promote class and race wars in America for their own political advantage. They tell black people that nothing is ever their fault — not early pregnancies, not an embarrassing school dropout rate, not an overemphasis on athletics, not selling or using drugs — that everything, instead, is the fault of white Republicans. To poor people, they say they’d be rich if only white Republicans didn’t steal all their money, just as they say to the 41% of Americans who pay no income taxes, “here’s a rebate.”
And who is feeding them all this tripe? Why none other than Charles Schumer, Keith Olbermann, John Kerry, David Letterman, Dianne Feinstein, Bill Maher, Norman Lear, the Clintons, Michael Moore, Harry Reid, Jon Stewart, Patrick Leahy, Arianna Huffington, Barbara Boxer and George Soros, all of whom are white millionaires. Clearly, P.T. Barnum was right about the birthrate of suckers and the Baltimore sage, H.L. Mencken, wasn’t being overly cynical when he observed that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. . . .
The frustration of trying to be logical in an illogical world is nothing new. In the 19th century, a clergyman named Charles Colton observed: “The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.”
There are different styles of worship that can be pleasing to God. However, all worship that is pleasing to God is worship grounded in Spirit and in truth. We can have lively worship, manifesting great interest and excitement, with doctrine and truth eliminated. On the other hand, we can have what some call a dead orthodoxy, where the creedal truths of the historic Christian faith remain central to the worship of the church, but the worship itself does not flow from the heart and lacks spiritual vitality.
“There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change; it is, ‘To use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wounds, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum amount of time.’ “
By a 62-35 vote, the Senate . . . approved the nomination of former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh for the position of legal advisor to the State Department. . . .
Conservatives have strenuously opposed the nomination because of, among other things, Koh’s belief that the Supreme Court should look to international bodies such as the United Nations and even European courts to help interpret the U.S. Constitution. Koh, an open homosexual, has also been actively involved in the push to legalize same-sex “marriage.”
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[A] study of [John] Adams’ private and public statements show that he believed that Christianity must be rooted within the nation’s culture in order for the nation to survive. Adams expressed his religious views on numerous occasions, but his call for a National Fast Day on March 6, 1799, is the most expressive:
As no truth is more clearly taught in the Volume of Inspiration, nor any more fully demonstrated by the experience of all ages, than that a deep sense and a due acknowledgment of the growing providence of a Supreme Being and of the accountableness of men to Him as the searcher of hearts and righteous distributer of rewards and punishments are conducive equally to the happiness of individuals and to the well-being of communities….
I have thought proper to recommend, and I hereby recommend accordingly, that Thursday, the twenty-fifth day of April next, be observed throughout the United States of America as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer; that the citizens on that day abstain, as far as may be, from their secular occupation, and devote the time to the sacred duties of religion, in public and in private; that they call to mind our numerous offenses against the most high God, confess them before Him.
“I have thought proper to recommend, and I hereby recommend accordingly, that Thursday, the twenty-fifth day of April next, be observed throughout the United States of America as a day of solemn humiliation, fasting, and prayer…. with the sincerest penitence, implore his pardoning mercy, through the Great Mediator and Redeemer, for our past transgressions, and that through the grace of His Holy Spirit, we may be disposed and enabled to yield a more suitable obedience to his righteous requisitions in time to come; that He would interpose to arrest the progress of that impiety and licentiousness in principle and practice so offensive to Himself and so ruinous to mankind; that He would make us deeply sensible that “righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” [Prov. 14:34]. The “Great Mediator and Redeemer” is Jesus Christ. On another occasion, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson stating, “The general principles, on which the Fathers achieved independence, were … the general principles of Christianity.”
A few years later Adams wrote a letter to Jefferson in which he stated that “Without religion this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite society, I mean hell.” (America’s 200 Year War On Terror, pp. 12-13)
The U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed global warming bill (219-212 vote, Friday). . . .
The House of Representatives passed a bill it did not read, did not understand. A bill that is based on crumbling scientific claims and a bill that will have no detectable climate impact. . . .
To illustrate just how delusional some of the supporters of the climate bill have become, imagine if in 1909 the U.S. Congress passed a bill attempting to predict climate, temperature and the energy mix powering our national economy in the year 2000. Any such attempt would have been ridiculed, but somehow in 2009, attempting to control the economy and climate of the year 2100 is seen as reasonable by many. . . .
Even Obama advisor Warren Buffett failed to tow the rhetorical line on the climate bill. Buffet came out strongly opposed to cap and trade, saying it would be “a huge, regressive tax.”
Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution grants the president of the United States the power to be commander in chief of the armed forces (subject to declarations of war in Congress), to make treaties with other nations (subject to ratification in the Senate), to grant pardons, to appoint ambassadors, judges and other officers, to recommend measures to Congress. The Constitution also bestows a number of other minor powers based on these major components.
Quoting 
Written by Marc Morano:
Samuel at Gilgal 