Church Bulldozed

Simple disputes between Christians and Muslims in Pakistan often turn violent because some Muslims view Christians as infidels who do not deserve the same rights as the Muslim majority.

In November of last year, Pastor Sarwar Masih of the King of Kings Church near Lahore was confronted by an angry neighbor. "You cannot build a church building in this area!" Muhammad Habib Bhatti told the pastor. "We have a mosque in this village, and there is no need to build a church."

This is what is left of the church building.

Days later, on Nov. 15, Muhammad Bhatti and eight friends came to the church dressed as police officers and began shouting at the Christians. "They were chanting and threatening us," said a witness, "saying if anybody comes out of his home to stop us, we will kill him." The men then began throwing stones and bricks, one of which struck a 3-year-old on the head. Eventually, a bulldozer moved in and demolished the church building. Irate Muslims also tore pages of a Bible.

Later, a local official offered to pay church members 50,000 rupees, or $582, to forget the incident. The Christians refused and demanded that the attackers be arrested. The Christians said many of their Muslim neighbors had no objection to the church building or their prayer meetings.

(from Voice of the Martyrs newsletter, August 2011)

(for additional info, see Gary Lane, Church Bulldozed in Pakistan, CBN News)

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Why Pain and Suffering? They are Signs of Paradise Lost…

Evolutionists cannot explain why their "Mother nature" went to all the extra effort of making pain so excruciating. But those who read the Bible can understand - sorrow, pain, and death are a result of the Fall of Man, part of the curse found in Genesis 3:16-19. And God can work through our pain to get our attention. C.S. Lewis said it best: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." For those who trust in Christ, in the life to come there will be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.

Selections from from The Evolutionary Problem with Pain, by David Woetzel.

(These selections by Marko Malyj are of the article published in Creation Matters, a publication of Creation Research Society, Volume 16, Number 3, May/June 2011, to appear at http://www.creationresearch.org/creation_matters/pdf/2011/CM16%2003%20low%20res.pdf)

So much pain and suffering in the world has always been a puzzle for philosophers and theologians. Theodicy is the name given to the question of how a just and loving God would allow this situation. But most people are unaware that for evolutionists there is a similar problem with pain.

Why is pain so intense? A false step will leave an organism writhing in pain, crying out for days, maybe weeks, before healing sets in. The cry of an animal in distress can attract predators. Debilitating pain is so intense that it overwhelms the desire to eat and procreate.

It would seem that natural selection would have favored less sensitive nerves or brain sensations. As the pain sensation was evolving there should have been some “push back” against going overboard. Why go to the extra effort of making it all so excruciating?

Leading evolutionist Richard Dawkins noted that "Pain, like everything else about life, we presume, is a Darwinian device, which functions to improve the sufferer’s survival… Why so painful? What’s wrong with a little red flag? I don’t have a decisive answer."¹

Allen MacNeill, professor of biology and evolution at Cornell University, was blogging about the intense pain he suffered while passing kidney stones. He wrote,²

I describe all of this, not to elicit your sympathy, but to introduce ‘the problem of pain’ from the standpoint of evolutionary biology. All of the rest of our senses have a physical referent: heat receptors sense heat, cold receptors cold, taste receptors sugars and ions and acids and bases and certain amino acids in our food, rods and cones sense the presence of light photons, etc. But pain receptors do not sense the presence of ‘pain.’ No, ‘pain’ is an ‘artificial sensation.’ What pain receptors are adapted to sensing is cellular damage…. Yet, two questions immediately present themselves: why should passing a kidney stone produce pain at all, and why is the pain so intense?

The brain has no pain receptors, allowing patients to undergo brain surgery while fully conscious. But the rest of our internal organs acutely sense pain. There really is no good evolutionary explanation for this.

So why do we have pain? The most satisfying answer is not found in the evolutionary paradigm.

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer, stated the common question in his classic book The Problem of Pain: ^"If God were good, wouldn't he wish to make his creatures perfectly happy?"³ Lewis then examines how people tend to misunderstand “divine goodness.” We tend to view goodness as merely making us happy all the time.

We need to see that for God, loving kindness is giving us what is ultimately best for us. If suffering brings us closer to Him, then it is good. Perhaps one of Lewis’ most famous quotes is: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."⁴

Ultimately, pain is a result of the Fall of Man. Sorrow, pain, and death are part of the curse found in Genesis 3:16-19. God said to Eve, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children…” He said to Adam, “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life…”

Pain was not part of God’s original creation, and the day will come when it will be eradicated from the New Earth that He will create. Revelation 21:4 states, “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.”

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References (selected)

1. Dawkins, R. 2010. The Greatest Show on Earth. New York: Free Press., p. 393.

2. Retrieved May 19, 2011, from http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2008/03/onproblem-of-pain.html

3. Lewis, C.S. 1940. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan, p. 16.

4. Lewis, Ibid., p. 93.

The evidence is exhausted - Darwin was wrong about fish evolution

Jerry Bergman reviews two centuries worth of claims for fish evolution. No empirical evidence exists for their evolution from non-fish, even though 80% of all known fossils are marine animals, mostly various types of fish. Fully formed fish appeared very “early” in the fossil record. One common theory—that fish evolved from some wormlike life-form—does not work at all, because the fossil gap between worms and fish is considerable and has never been bridged by the scientific evidence. Additional theories, such as fish having evolved from a more complex invertebrate, also fail. Dr. Bergman's conclusion: scientists cannot improve on Genesis 1:21: “God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing which the water teems according to their kinds.”

Selections from The Search for Evidence Concerning the Origin of Fish, by Jerry Bergman.

(These selections, edited by Marko Malyj, are of the article published in Creation Research Society Quarterly Journal, Volume 47, Number 4, Spring 2011)

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Fish are one of the most common fossil types, with close to one half-million specimens in museums alone. But in spite of almost two centuries of searching, no evidence of gradual macroevolution has been found in this extremely abundant fossil record.

No Transitional Forms

The most common explanation is that few transitional fossils have been preserved. This is an incorrect conclusion, because we would also expect at least some of the modern fish we know today to be missing in the fossil record as well. However, every major fish kind known today has been found, indicating the completeness of the existing known fossil record (Benton, 2005). New fossil finds are almost always more of the same, and occasionally new species are discovered that only create more gaps in the fossil record and do not fill in existing gaps.

The evidence is exhaustive. Transitional forms have not been found, despite the expectations of evolutionists. Instead, all of them fit one of three categories:

Devonian ostracoderms, now extinct,
demonstrate variety, not evolution.

• Extinct fish, which may appear very different from familiar fish, and yet do not show evidence for evolution. Instead they demonstrate the enormous variation found in the natural world.



"Devonian" sharks are virtually
indistiguishable from modern ones.

• Fully modern fish that can easily be identified as such. (Many contemporary paleontologists admit that even the earliest known fossil fish has all of the basic characteristics of modern fish).
   



Holopychius turned out not
to be the Missing Link for fish.

• Fish once thought to be extinct such as the coelacanth and holoptychius (considered by many to be the “missing link” between fish and the tetrapods until the first Latimeria specimen was found off the east coast of South Africa in 1938).

Just One Connected Lineage of Fish Ancestors does not Fit the Evidence

In contrast to evolutionary assumptions, the fossil record of all basic classes of fish, including Agnatha, Placodermi, Acanthodii, Osteichthyes, and Chondrichthyes, began at close to the same evolutionary time, mostly during the Devonian or before (Botella, et al., 2007, p. 585).

There exists so much variety compared to all other life-forms that some evolutionists are forced to conclude that fish must not represent a single “lineage of creatures that evolved from a common ancestor” (Maisey, 1996, p. 10) but several separate lineages. But this requires even more fossils to support the separate lineages. Evidence of those kind of fossils once again does not exist.

Sometimes a single discovery can move the earliest known example of a vertebrate back by as much as 40 million years, forcing a major reevaluation of the fossil record (e.g., see Repetski, 1978, p. 529; Jablonski, et al., 2003). The problem for evolution is that new findings tend to push the origin of fish farther back in time. This makes it even harder to explain fish origins, because less time exists for them to evolve.

The Worm Theory does not Work Either

The putative oldest fish ancestor, and the ancestor of all chordates, is considered by many paleontologists to be a small wormlike fossil animal called Pikaia (Long, 1995, p. 30). But the changes required to evolve small round worms like nematodes to fish were enormous, because the “worm” that became a fish

did not look much like a fish. It probably had no paired fins, no real head, brain or advanced sense organs, jaws or teeth. Most likely, its body was cylindrical, with simple digestive organs, a nerve cord running its length from front to back, and below that a sort of stiffening, supporting rod which was its only skeleton, made of a soft material surrounded by a tough sheath. This forerunner of a backbone, or vertebral column, is called a notochord and from it the animals that possessed it, including all the vertebrates, derived their name—the chordates (Ommanney, 1971, p. 60).

Furthermore, to evolve a fish from a worm, the worm nervous and vascular systems would need to be flipped over, because the fish main organs are upside-down when compared to the worm organs. Furthermore, although some worms “have tiny eye-spots, earstones, and tactile or taste organs,” these structures are all relatively simple and microscopic in contrast to the fish’s welldeveloped eyes, rostrum, and a large head with an advanced vertebrate brain (Kyle, 1926, p. 3).

Most round and flat worms lack a heart, whereas fish have a very well-developed, powerful muscular pump that lies ventrally just behind the head. Each of the aforementioned unique fish features must have evolved, and one of the easiest to document should have been the evolution of fins because they show both “early” in the fossil record and with great clarity.

In fact, no evidence exists for any of these speculative transitions. 

Many Generations of Evolutionists are Still Stuck on the Fish Problem

Eighty five years ago the fish biologist Kyle (1926, p. vii) concluded that fishes “occupy a peculiar position in the hierarchy of animal life” and that we “cannot be sure whence they came.”

Over fifty years ago, Gregory (1959, p. 123) was forced to say that “there are still many gaps” in the fossil record among fish.

Twenty four years ago, the creationist Gish "finds all the confessions he needs” in the writings of paleontologists to support the conclusion that each of the fish classes “appears suddenly and with no trace of ancestors” in the fossil record. (Strahler 1987, p. 408)

Today, the same is still true, and any possible evidence to the contrary has been exhausted. There is a complete lack of fossil evidence for fish evolution. Darwin’s claim has been falsified, thus supporting the creation account recorded in Genesis 1:21, which reads, “God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing which the water teems according to their kinds” (NIV).

References (selected)

Benton, M. 2005. Vertebrate Palaeontology. Blackwell, Malden, MA.

Botella, H., H. Blom, M. Dorda, P. E. Ahlberg, and P. Janvier. 2007. Jaws and teeth of the earliest bony fishes. Nature 448:583–586.

Gregory, W. K. 1959. Fish Skulls: A Study of the Evolution of Natural Mechanisms. Eric Lundberg, Laurel, FL.

Jablonski, D., K. Roy, J. W. Valentine, R. M. Price, and P. S. Anderson. 2003. The impact of the pull of the recent on the history of marine diversity. Science 300:1133–1135.

Kyle, H. M. 1926. The Biology of Fishes. The Macmillan Company, New York, NY.

Long, J. 1995. The Rise of Fishes: 500 Million Years of Evolution. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.

Maisey, J. G. 1996. Discovering Fossil Fishes. Henry Holt, New York, NY.

Ommanney, F.D. 1971. The Fishes. Time Life Nature Library, New York, NY.

Repetski, J. E. 1978. A fish from the Upper Cambrian of North America. Science 200:529–531.

Strahler, A. N. 1987. Science and Earth History—The Evolution/Creation Controversy. Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY.

Christ-centered discipleship brings people out of poverty

Why are you wasting your time with us? We’re poor. We’re stuck here, and there is no way out for us.”

Believing that “there is no way out” is one of the most damaging aspects of financial poverty. If life will never get better, why try? If there’s no hope, why dare to dream?

Staff members of HOPE International, a Christ-centered microfinance organization, respond by telling these people belonging to India's two lowest castes, “But you’re created in God’s image, and He has a plan and a future for all of you.” As clients come to believe this message, they are in turn empowered to enact change in their communities. Progress is slow, but unmistakable - businesses are created, families have the financial resources to put their children in school, dignity is restored, and the voiceless speak. In one district of the slums, a savings group successfully petitioned the local government council to have electricity installed where there had previously been none. Instead of remaining resigned to their fate, these individuals now have hope and are working to build a brighter future.

HOPE is a global network of microfinance institutions focused on alleviating physical and spirtitual poverty through microenterprise development.

In HOPE’s programs, not only are clients encouraged to save, but they also learn biblically based business principles that teach them how to open and sustain a business. In India, clients receive training that equips them to make items like handbags and baked goods, as well as opportunities to sell the items they create at churches and local retailers. For example, in the slums of several cities in Western India, HOPE gathers financially poor together to save. In groups of 10 to 12, they come together to receive business training, contribute $2 a month to a joint savings account for productive investment or to meet family needs, and learn about the love of Christ.

When HOPE first entered the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, there were only 65,000 bank accounts for a population of 65 million – 1 in a thousand. For these individuals, microfinance fills a large gap, providing access to capital, savings accounts and training to those who wouldn’t otherwise have any access.

In Rwanda, HOPE has seen similar results in its partnership with the Anglican Church to provide those in poverty with training and a safe place to save their money. Of HOPE’s nearly 70,000 clients in Rwanda, school attendance increased from 28 percent of members’ children to 71 percent, even as church attendance increased from 65 percent of clients to 96 percent!!

(for more, see Peter Greer, Microfinance, A Look at the Technique as an Effective Strategy for Poverty Alleviation, Mission Frontiers, July-August 2011)

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Turkey a model for Arab revolutions? Think again!

Should Turkey, the "moderate Islamic democracy", be an example for countries going through Arab revolutions?

"Think again! Lift the covers off this mythical wonderland, and you'll find a cesspool, a government showing utter contempt for its own people by jailing scores of reporters, blocking thousands of websites, severely punishing anyone who dares utter a word of criticism."

Joel Brinkley, professor of journalism and former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, goes on to ask, "Guess which nation has jailed more reporters than any other. China? Iran? No, it's Turkey. The Turkish media say say 68 reporters are in prison right now - double the number last reported in either China or Iran. And some are jailed not just for a few days or week."

The Turkish government now blocks thousands of websites it considers offensive or insulting. Human Rights Watch says Turkey was blocking 8,170 websites when it checked early this year.

Turkey's leading Islamist political party controls all three branches of the government, and the military has been sidelined. Little will stop them from changing the rules to keep power into the indefinite future. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been in power since 2002, the recent elections are likely to be the country's last fair and free ones, according to political commentator Daniel Pipes. The AKP fell just a few seats shorts from the two-thirds parliamentary needed to unilaterally change the constitution, and will now put pressure on a few lawmakers to change their affiliation so that this can happen.

Such developments are a serious concern for Christian ministries. Here's why:

When in firm control, Islam does not allow competition. Freedom of religion is a Western concept that is only tolerated by Islamists for economic or political reasons.

Strict Muslims follow Sharia, a harsh code of laws derived from the Koran and the teachings and life of Mohammed. When circumstances allow, they normally enforce this code on others, including non-Muslims.

Sharia calls for the killing of any person who converts from Islam to Christianity. It also demands that all Christians be humiliated on a regular basis and be required to pay a special tax not assessed to Muslims.

If Islamists have their way in Turkey we can expect the deportation of most foreign Christian workers, the persecution of national believers, and the likely closure of most of their churches. Some might even have to flee the country.

To all Christian brothers and sisters: your prayers and support are important to the future of believers in Turkey!

(from a Christian prayer letter, July 2011)

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