A Politically Incorrect Christmas in Baghdad

Ken Joseph jr | Walking the streets of Washington DC leading up to Christmas, I have come across a most interesting phenomenon..
Nowhere, and I mean absolutely nowhere, is Jesus to be found!

It is truly amazing!

Extensive Christmas decorations are everywhere, in the stores, on the streets, wherever you turn it is Christmas!
I started to talking to people and asking them the simple question, “Isn't Christmas celebrating the birthday of Jesus?”
The answers I got were quite amazing.

Literally everybody I talked to, paused and said, “You know; you’re right! It is supposed to be His birthday. What happened to Jesus?"
Imagine if you had a birthday. Your friends all came over, they partied, they ate, they exchanged presents and everybody acted if you didn't even exist.

Keep power with the people

Janet Albrechtsen | ANALYSING calls for so-called reforms should always start with a few golden rules. Follow the money. And follow the power. This week both paths lead you straight to the legal profession and to the heartland of politically driven activists. Like pigs sniffing for truffles, lawyers can smell the enticing waft of money and power in the air as they push open new legal industries. For the activists, it’s about influence as they seek to move from the irrelevant fringe of political life to the centre of the action.

Is government just a 'necessary evil'?

Judge Roy Moore | President Ronald Reagan once observed, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" Those who promote "big government" with all its welfare programs and social engineering believe government agencies and money can and should solve all problems of life.

At the same time, many of us who yearn for a return to "small government" that sticks to its limited roles and powers are tempted to agree with founding-era patriot Thomas Paine who said that "government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil."

Paine was half right: Government is necessary, but as a gift of God to man it cannot be evil. As the details of our Constitution were being hammered out in the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin reminded his fellow delegates on June 28, 1787, that they ought to appeal to the "Father of Lights" to illuminate their understanding of government. James 1:17 states, "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." Just as God ordained the jurisdictions of the family and the church, he also ordained civil government for our good. According to Romans 13:1-4,

Denying people right to conscience akin to fascism

Professor Greg Craven | ONE of the great truths of life is that everyone loves rights. We love them when we have them. But we particularly love them when we can loftily confer them on somebody else. So satisfying. The problem is that being a rights-giver carries its own challenges. Anyone will defend a right they like or a minority of which they approve. But the real test is whether you are prepared to stick up for the uncongenial rights of groups you just do not care for.

This is the test set by proposed abortion legislation for various members of the Victorian Parliament and assorted civil liberties glee clubs such as Liberty Victoria. So far, they are failing it like a fencepost sitting VCE physics.

Oddly enough, the immediate issue here is not the vexed one of abortion, which admittedly raises vastly different reactions in different sections of the community. Rather, the issue is freedom of conscience.

Speaking to a Secular Age

It’s possible to argue that the greatest advance in civilization is the change from fighting with weapons to fighting with words, and the most important of those word battles is in formulating our collective values, our "shared ethics". We are currently engaged in a major reassessment – which sometimes manifests as powerful cultural conflict – of what those values and ethics should be.

Words matter and, as "word warriors", you are the people who can give other people the words they need to formulate and communicate the ideas and concepts that will protect human dignity and the essence of our humanness, and our physical and metaphysical worlds - all goals that are currently under unprecedented threat. And it is not enough to protect these entities in the present; we need the words that will enable them to be held on trust for future generations.

Prejudices stripped bare

Andrew Bolt | THERE must be excellent reasons to let an artist strip and photograph a 13-year-old girl so rich men can hang pictures of her bared breasts over their beds.

There must be - for why have so many seemingly cultured people been so hot to defend Bill Henson?

But here is the odd thing. In their stampede to justify Henson's right to make sexually charged pictures of naked children they've given us none.

In fact, ever since police last week knocked on the door of the Sydney gallery that was about to show the acclaimed Melbourne photographer's latest works, I've read only excuses for excuses from Hansen's apologists.

It's as if the tribe of opening night habitues feel they should stick up for these pictures of budding bare-breasted 13-year-olds without quite knowing why. Their brains can't justify what mere habit insists they must, and in this collision of reason with prejudice they've bruised themselves badly. Observe a few of the worst:

America Still Needs Prayer

Judge Roy Moore | Tomorrow is the National Day of Prayer, a day when our government follows a long tradition of encouraging the people of the United States to pray for our nation. Though the day was first made official by President Harry S Truman in 1952, prayer has always been an important part of American civil proceedings. But one of the dangers of a "tradition" is that we tend to forget the purpose of the act and, in the case of prayer, the powerful God we are supposed to be addressing.

Much to the chagrin of the ACLU and other secular groups, public prayer has a long and distinguished place in American history.

In 1774, the First Congress began with prayer for wisdom and blessings from God. Benjamin Franklin, remembering these daily prayers, reminded the Constitutional Convention 13 years later of the need for "imploring the assistance of heaven" lest their proceedings fare "no better than the Builders of Babel." To this day, both houses of Congress and most local legislatures open their sessions with a prayer.

Feeling burned over a cause for concern

Andrew Bolt | I'VE proved it often: The Age won't tell the full facts on global warming. Now its own reporters admit they were forced to be biased.

 What a sad insight into how media salvation-seekers and carpet-baggers are whipping up panic about a warming that actually halted in 1998.

And a warning, too, of what can go wrong when the media adopts global warming as a cause.

In a statement of protest last week, 235 Age journalists confirmed that their coverage of last month's Earth Hour had been, in effect, propaganda.

"Reporters were pressured not to write 'negative' stories and story topics followed a schedule drafted by Earth Hour organisers," they said.

That confession came after the ABC's Media Watch released an embarrassing email sent by the green group WWF to Age editor-in-chief Andrew Jaspan under the creepy header Re: Any last requests?

When Preaching Becomes a Crime

Judge Roy Moore | In 1774, a young James Madison, while traveling through Culpeper County in Virginia – well before he became our fourth president – passed by a jail where a number of Baptist preachers had been incarcerated for nothing more than preaching without an official government license. One of these "criminals" preached from a window of the jail to any who would listen. Madison would never forget the dedication of those brave preachers – nor the audacity of the officials who had jailed them.

So profoundly moved was he by what he described as this "diabolical hell-conceived principle of persecution," that Madison would dedicate much of his life to defending religious freedom. He authored the "Memorial and Remonstrance," a summary of fundamental religious liberty cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions, and the Virginia Bill of Rights, after which the United States Bill of Rights was modeled. As a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he proposed the wording of the First Amendment and his overall effort and influence earned him the compliment of "chief architect of the Constitution."

According to Madison biographer Ralph Ketcham, there was no principle in his public or private life "to which he held with greater vigor and tenacity than this one of religious liberty." Madison believed, as he wrote in the "Memorial," that "religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging [that duty, could] be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." Moreover, that duty was an "unalienable right" from God to which every man was entitled.

Media should jump off Rudd bandwagon

Andrew Bolt | ISN'T it time the media got off Kevin Rudd's bandwagon?

 Agreed: the polls show the Prime Minister is wildly popular. Agreed: the Opposition has fallen in a heap.

But let's agree on this, too: the media is cheering Rudd when it should be reporting. Three recent examples show just how cuddly they've got.

First example is the media frenzy to join Rudd's ludicrous "ideas summit".

Rudd promised last month to assemble 1000 of our "best and brightest" over a weekend to help draw up a plan for our future. These would not be handpicked yes-men, he swore, but people selected "on merit" by an independent panel "at arm's length" from the Government.

That promise was no sooner made than broken, when Rudd personally invited ABC hosts Kerry O'Brien and Jon Faine -- on air -- to speak at his summit. At least both declined, properly noting there was a conflict between reporting and participating

The Unbelieving Poet Catches a Glimpse of Truth

John Piper | Since all humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and the work of God’s law is written on every heart (Romans 2:15), and the heavens are telling the glory of God to everyone who can see (Psalm 19:1), and God has put eternity in man’s heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and by God’s providence every person is set to grope for God (Acts 17:27), and in God we all live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28), it is not surprising that even people without eyes to see the glory of Christ nevertheless have glimpses into the way the world really is, and then don’t know what to do with them.

Stephen Dunn is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and not a Christian. “I think of God as a metaphor. God is a metaphor for the origins and mysteries of the world. . . . I think of beliefs as provisional. They’re not things that constitute anything fixed.” In an interview recently for Books and Culture (March/April, 2008, pp. 26-27), Aaron Rench asked him about his book The Insistence of Beauty.

In regards to your book The Insistence of Beauty, what is this notion that beauty has a demanding, compelling quality to it? Why is beauty that way?

Notes for Christians on Understanding - A Common Word Between Us and You

Mark Durie | A Common Word Between Us and You is a letter addressed to Christians by 138 Muslim scholars. It invites Christians to agree on certain ‘common ground’ with Muslims as the foundation of interfaith dialogue and mutual understanding, for the sake of peace in the world. Key points addressed in these notes include:

• The letter presupposes that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

• It has the appearance of being an exercise in da‘wa or Islamic proselytism.

• The letter uses a ‘bait and switch’ tactic whereby Christians are invited to agree with Muslims on loving God and loving one’s neighbour, but this is exchanged by the end of the letter for an invitation to agree on tawhid, the Islamic understanding of the unity of Allah. In effect, Christians are being asked to accept Islamic monotheism as the foundation for interfaith dialogue and peaceful relationships.

• However Islamic monotheism explicitly denies the incarnation, and is incompatible with other aspects of Christian belief.

Testing time ahead for Labor P-platers


Andrew Bolt | HOW odd. The Rudd Government claims it will keep the test that we make migrants sit to qualify as citizens. But there's a catch.

Because the test fails exactly the people you'd expect, Immigration Minister Chris Evans now wants to change the questions.

Yes, it's that simple and that stupid. Evans wants to make sure the kind of people who now rightly fail the test will pass it more easily, especially if they have no English.

So why have a test at all?

Here's yet another sign of what I suspect will be the defining trait of this government - a love of spin over substance, whether on global warming, a "sorry", or citizenship.

This citizenship test was introduced last year by the Howard government to sort out a growing problem and a deepening concern.

It wanted immigrants who applied to become citizens to show they at least had the interest and commitment to learn some important things about their new home and neighbours, including our language, values, institutions and history.