Who is paying the price for my security?

Did you know that the United States' military budget exceeds that of the next 25 nations combined? Did you know that the so-called "Christian West" possesses 90% of the nuclear weapons on the planet? "Christian" America is the only country that has ever dropped an atomic bomb.

Now, try to imagine yourself as an impoverished and disenfranchised person in another part of the world who has been taught that Christians are colonialists and crusaders bent on conquest and exploitation of others' vulnerability and natural resources. (How did our oil get under their sand anyway?) Without condoning vicious acts of terrorism that have been carried out by an extremist minority, can we have some empathy for the fear and rejection of our ways that is expressed toward us? If we can find it in our hearts to have some understanding for why they feel the fear and mistrust that they do, then maybe, just maybe, we can agree that a heavy handed, threatening foreign policy is exactly what we don't need in today's world. It only confirms their stereotypes and misunderstandings of us.

Jesus told us to feed our enemies and show kindness to those who mistreat us. However one justifies bluster and threatening the unleashing of our awesome military might as a feature of American foreign policy, it is far from what Jesus taught. It arises from fear and power preservation, not love. If our security and comfort is coming at the expense of people weaker and less fortunate, it is selfish and unjust.

Maybe you think it's a good thing that the U.S. is the most feared nation on the planet; I don't. I'd much prefer we were the most loved nation. These days I find myself longing for leaders who take Jesus' words to heart and display a will for peace rather than a cocky, intimidating readiness for war. How different might the world be today if we had taken the half trillion dollars the war in Iraq has cost us and invested it instead in food for the hungry, education, medical assistance and diplomacy?

"EXPELLED"...IRONIC, ISN"T IT?

I recently viewed the Ben Stein docu-argument, Expelled. The film leaves one with little doubt that within "accepted" scientific orthodoxy there is an organized and very zealous effort to deny legitimacy to the theory that there may be evidence of intelligent design in nature. Stein compellingly asserts the thought control and censorship that is being carried out by the "mainstream" Darwinian evolutionists is every bit as dangerous as the censorship and thought control that existed in Naziism and Stalinist Soviet Union. My sense of Stein's motive in producing the film is that it was less about defending intelligent design as a theory and more about cautioning us of the dangers of allowing any group to gain a stranglehold on "acceptable" thought and speech within a community.

The priests of Darwinianism, who currently dominate the creeds (textbooks) and temples (lecture halls) of academia pertaining to the origin of the natural world, have declared as heresy any notion that the observable complexity and order in nature indicate a higher intelligence participated in the originating process. Therefore, as far as they are concerned, any member of the scientific community who would dare to speculate otherwise is a heretic. Leading Darwinian atheist, Richard Dawkins, is so adamant in his refusal to even consider the possibility that there may have been some sort of creative influence in the origin of things, that he offers a far fetched speculation from science fiction that maybe once-upon-a-time a more highly evolved extra-terrestrial life form "seeded" the design scientists observe in nature.

At the end of the day, the controversy is more about competing ideologies than hard scientific "facts". No explanation of the origin of the universe can be definitively proven. Both Darwinism and Intelligent Design employ "evidence" from what remains uncertain and unseen (i.e., faith) to explain the mysterious unknowable. So, does anyone see the irony in the fact that advocates of Biblical Creationism (an overtly religious form of Intelligent Design), who historically have been known to execute people who disagreed with them and would probably resort to that again if they could get away with it, are the ones complaining the loudest about the current hegemony of the Darwinists? In either case, whether one is a creationist or a Darwinist, if free thought and free speech are curtailed, truth loses. It is always dangerous when any one group thinks it is authorized to control what everyone else is permitted to learn about and believe.