The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1010033
The Press-Dispatch Wednesday, August 1, 2018 C-11 OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg Godliness is a core value and was discussed in a previous col- umn. Biblical Authenticity and au- thority for the disciple must also be a core value. The psalmist wrote "Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in Heaven." Modernists care little about what the psalmists wrote, and the Bible itself. Since the beginnings of the Renaissance to today there has been a growing attack upon the spiritual aspects of scripture to where in our era, it has lost its place as a cultural icon. Deconstructing and delegiti- mizing the scriptures, especial- ly the New Testament has its ori- gins in Europe in the 19th century when Higher Criticism emerged. The discrediting of scripture led to the "God is Dead" movement of the mid 1960s. The attack upon the church and the message of Jesus has caused great harm to Western Christian civilization. Though few detrac- tors challenged the moral teach- ings of Jesus; they attack His di- vinity and the Holy Spirit's ability to transform the individual that is dismissed. Luke centuries before the High- er Criticism movement admon- ished the critics with the words of Jesus: "And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail." The Law of Moses was the basis of the covenant with Abra- ham's descendants [the Hebrews]. The Law, the prophets, and the psalms point- ed the faithful to Je- sus. The apostle Paul explained this clearly to the Church at Gala- tia "Therefore the law was our tu- tor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith." One who dismisses the law rejects Je- sus, and likewise one who rejects Jesus fails to recognize Jesus was the fullness of the law. The prophet Amos warned the Hebrews what was in store for their transgressing the law: "Be- hold, the days are coming," says the Lord God, "That I will send a famine on the land, Not a fam- ine of bread, Nor a thirst for wa- ter, But of hearing the words of the Lord." It happened to them, now the faithful are experiencing the muz- zling of the word of God and Chris- tianity. This time it is through the cultural agents who control our entertainment, courts, and print media. Nevertheless, Gods word remains fixed and will withstand the attacks. What the church must deal with and challenge are those within the church who are on a mission to reinvent the steadfastness of the Word. Delegitimizing the scriptures leads to reinterpreting passages which has a direct im- pact on the discipleship of the be- liever. This is a mortal danger to us all. Case in point is the revival hymn "Just As I Am" has become a met- aphor and rallying cry of pro- gressives and liberals within the church. God accepts us as we are because he made us what we are. Gone is any personal discipleship to become transformed into the image of God through Christ. Nonetheless, discipleship still means becoming Christ like. Paul makes this clear where he writes the church at Corinth "follow me as I follow Christ." No athlete can become compet- Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson Blackberries and character Senate should pass the First Step Act Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond Biblical authenticity Celebrating milestones My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Having just celebrated another milestone of my life, which is my birthday on July 29, I had a chance to go through some things I was able to keep in my files. The first item is a picture of my baptism when I was 6 months old. It showed a picture of my parents, God par- ents, the doctor who delivered me, and the priest who baptized me. It was in 1946, it took place in the southern part of the Philippines, as W WII was ending or just after it ended. My father who was a dentist for the Philippine Army and Red Cross was stationed in a Del Mon- te plantation and processing plant. The location was provided by the American firm of Del Monte prod- ucts for the Army since they had the infrastructure to sustain an en- gineering battalion. If my story is accurate, I think the engineering battalion had set up communications for the Leyte Landing of General McArthur. The Southern part of our coun- try was also closest to Australia. I think the history buffs would know more about this. Now lets get back to the mem- orabilia. I also still have the blue baby blanket that my mom used to wrap around me. I have some pictures of my kindergarten, el- ementary and college schooling. Pictures of my toddler and grow- ing up years, showing my grand- parents, aunts, uncles and cous- ins and of course my own fami- ly. It is truly amazing I was able to collect and store them in albums which from time to time my chil- dren and sometimes my grandchil- Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Minority View by Walter E. Williams Can we trust experts? Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Continued on page 12 Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers predicted that if Donald Trump were elected, there would be a protracted recession within 18 months. Heeding its ex- perts, a month before the election, The Washington Post ran an edito- rial with the headline "A President Trump could destroy the world economy." Steve Rattner, a Dem- ocratic financier and former head of the National Economic Coun- cil, warned, "If the unlikely event happens and Trump wins, you will see a market crash of historic pro- portions." When Trump's elector- al victory became apparent, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krug- man warned that the world was "very probably looking at a glob- al recession, with no end in sight." By the way, Krugman has been so wrong in so many of his economic predictions, but that doesn't stop him from making more shameless predictions. People whom we've trusted as experts have often been wrong be- yond imagination, and it's noth- ing new. Irving Fisher, a distin- guished Yale Univer- sity economics profes- sor in 1929, predicted, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Three days later, the stock market crashed. In 1945, regarding mon- ey spent on the Man- hattan Project, Adm. William Leahy told President Har- ry S. Truman, "That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The (atomic) bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explo- sives." In 1903, the president of the Michigan Savings Bank, advis- ing Henry Ford's lawyer not to in- vest in Ford Motor Co., said, "The horse is here to stay, but the auto- mobile is only a novelty — a fad." Confidence in the staying power of the horse was displayed by a 1916 comment of the aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Douglas Haig at a tank demonstration: "The idea that cavalry will be replaced by these iron coaches is absurd. It is little short of treason- ous." Albert Einstein pre- dicted: "There is not the slightest indica- tion that nuclear ener- gy will ever be obtain- able. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will." In 1899, Charles H. Duell, the U.S. commissioner of patents, said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Listening to its experts in 1936, The New York Times predicted, "A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere." To prove that it's not just aca- demics, professionals and busi- nesspeople who make harebrained predictions, Hall of Fame base- ball player Tris Speaker's 1919 ad- Why withdrawing from the U.N. Human Rights Council was the right thing to do Heritage Viewpoint by Edwin J. Feulner The definition of insanity, as they say, is doing the same thing over and over again, but expect- ing different results. And yet crit- ics insist that the United States shouldn't have withdrawn from the U.N. Human Rights Council. We're running away, they claim. Turning our back on human rights abuses. Showing that we don't care. On the contrary. Nobody has tried harder to make the Council work than the United States. We have talked, debated, argued and negotiated. We have pressed for years to get the Council to ac- tually stand up for its stated ideals — to spotlight abuses and bring re- lief to persecuted people around the globe. Yet time and time again, we've been disappointed. We've seen the Council not only remain silent in the face of abuses, but allow mem- bership to some of world's worst abusers — all while showing an unseemly obsession with vilify- ing Israel. When such a state of affairs prevails year after year, should you keep thinking things will magically im- prove if you stay the course? Can you be blamed for trying a different tack? No. But somehow, at least to the Trump administration's vo- ciferous opponents, the answer is yes. And so it was that the U.S. am- bassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, came to The Heritage Foundation recently to elaborate on the reasons the U.S. withdrew. It wasn't an easy decision to make. The U.N. was founded in the ashes of World War II "for a noble purpose — to promote peace and security based on justice, equal rights, and the self-determina- tion of people," Ms. Haley point- ed out. Unfortunately, thanks to the presence of many members who utterly reject this purpose, it often falls short of this goal. The result? Well- meaning members hoping to build con- sensus adopt a posi- tion of neutrality. Res- olutions are watered down. And, Ms. Hal- ey added, "Moral clarity becomes a casualty of the need to placate tyrants." How can the United States — a country, she said, "founded on hu- man dignity; on the revolutionary idea that all men are created equal with rights including, but not lim- ited to, life, liberty, and the pur- suit of happiness" — be a party to this? How can it sit by as the Hu- man Rights Council contradicts I loved summers at my grand- parents' farm in Muren. It was a place of fresh air and quiet before investors built a creosote plant on a nearby ridge. My grandfa- ther went out of his way to initi- ate me into family-scale farming, and so I got to experience trac- tor-driving, hay lofts and fence- mending. My grandmother cooked my favorites, and encouraged me to tend the chicken flock, hoe the beans and dig potatoes. She taught me to pick sweet corn when the silk went dark, and seldom was heard a discourag- ing word. But around this time of year, Grandma's eyes narrowed and focused on the horizon. Black- berries were beginning to rip- en on the abandoned coal mine spoil banks. And Grandma was all business when it came to ber- ries. Like a squirrel facing a long, tough winter, she couldn't rest until she had filled her freezer with the requisite store of cob- blers and pies. So far as I can tell, they were the finest cobblers ev- er created by human hands. But blackberries didn't just fall onto some conveyor belt. And they weren't a garden product. Blackberries belonged to Na- ture, and it took a sober expe- dition to seize them for our own purposes. We rose before daylight to dress and make our way to the bushes before the sun blazed in earnest. We bundled up in thick, long-sleeved garb to protect us from the thorns and mosquitoes. We got talked to about ticks and Copperheads. Then we each got our large bowls and plunged in- to the thicket. My grandmother only recog- nized two kinds of people on ber- ry-picking mornings. The first kind was diligent and conscien- tious like my sister and cousins, who cared enough to pay atten- tion to their work, push through discomfort, minimize chatter and fill the dang bowls up with the blackest, juiciest undam- aged berries that the spoil banks would yield. And then there was me. I was my own category, sui generis, as the lawyer might have said if Grandma could sue me for black- berry malpractice. I was not only color-blind, thus picking green, unripe berries, but I was hesitant and deliberative, and constant- ly consulting my fellow pickers about the color of my berries. I introduced chaos and doubt into what should have been the most intuitive, if not instinctive, tasks of hunter-gatherer survival. Our species has developed a way of articulating criticism in a wry, indirect manner that is de- signed for deflection but also for reflection. We're able to engage in mock battles with the surface of the criticism, usually involv- ing humor and colorful or imag- inative language. We avoid open- ly addressing the core criticism, yet we mull it over as we parry the superficial insults. But my grandmother was no comedian. Her disgust was un- ambiguous. Her disappointment in me was so crystalline, so un- tainted by any vulgar or playful language, that it went straight to my heart. When I read about lep- ers in the Bible now, I tap into my berry-picking experience to try and imagine what that shunning must have felt like. Anybody who knew my grand- ma can tell you that she would never be intentionally cruel to a stranger, much less her grand- child. She shouldn't have been sur- prised by my color-blindness. They'd already noticed in ele- mentary school that, although I colored nicely within the lines, I made some really inappropri- ate color choices. Luckily, they printed the words for the colors on the crayons' paper wrappers, so I soon learned to read those. Deep down, Grandma must have believed that my color- blindness was a character de- fect, an aspect of sloth, some- thing that I had to overcome or at least mitigate by willpower and It is rare these days in Washing- ton to see bipartisan support for anything, let alone for a major is- sue with far reaching implications for the nation. This is why the bipartisan pas- sage in the House, 360 -59, of the First Step Act to reform our fed- eral prisons is such big news. The 360 "yes" votes included 134 Dem- ocrats. The bill focuses on improving the management of our existing federal prison population and the abysmal statistics regarding recid- ivism — the likelihood that an ex- con will wind up back in prison. Data point to 68 percent of those released within three years, and 77 percent within five years, will be back behind bars. The bill allocates funds for educa- tion, drug treatment and job skills training programs. Risk assess- ment procedures will be utilized to assess each inmate on the likeli- hood of recidivism, and programs will be available for inmates to get credits for early release and for the opportunity to serve time remain- ing at home or a halfway house. The bill also requires more hu- mane treatment of women inmates who are pregnant and give birth in prison. You would think that Senate Re- publicans would be rolling out the red carpet for the First Step Act, particularly given that it's an ini- tiative that started in the White House. Unfortunately, that's not hap- pening. Senate Judiciary Commit- tee Chairman Chuck Grassley is not moving to embrace this bill be- cause it doesn't including sentenc- Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker