The Creed

First Things presents its first video, The Creed: What Christians Profess, and Why It Ought to Matter. Produced by actor, director, and writer, Tim Kelleher,The Creed is a remarkable film about why the radical claims made in the Nicene Creed are so important to all of us.

Whether you are a student or a teacher; one struggling with questions of faith or a believer,
The Creed will be a challenging and rewarding experience.


A good Youtube video too:

http://youtu.be/hjO7kP96TNI

University of Hawaii professor - child pornography actually can serve a beneficial service to society

The state of higher education....


A University of Hawaii professor and director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society is postulating that child pornography actually can serve a beneficial service to society because "potential sexual offenders use child pornography as a substitute for sex crimes against children." from WND

Peter Singer Says Full Moral Status Not Earned by Babies “Until After 2 Years”

I wonder what Mr Singer sees when HE looks into the mirror?

From Secondhand Smoke:


...at a  Princeton conference around the abortion question, in which (Mr Singer) claims that human beings don’t possess full moral status until after the age of two. :

Q (beginning at 1:25:22): When discussing at which point after birth we would give full moral status, you gave…a legal or public policy point about practicality… Forgetting the practical or public policy questions, if a person is a self aware individual and self awareness isn’t conferred by birth, and we use mirror tests to determine self awarness…at what point do you think an infant would pass the mirror test and therefore be self aware and be considered a person.
Singer (beginning at 1:27:18: … My understanding is that it is not until after the first birthday, so somewhere between the first and second, I think, that they typically recognize the  image in the mirror as themselves…Really, I think this is a gradual matter. If you are not talking about public policy or the law, but you are talking about when you really have the same moral status, I think that does develop gradually. There are various things that you could say that are sufficient to give some moral status after a few months, maybe six months or something like that, and you get perhaps to full moral status, really, only after two years. But I don’t think that should be the public policy criteria.

.....The position that allows abortion also allows infanticide under some circumstances…If we accept abortion, we do need to rethink some of those more fundamental attitudes about human life....


More here...

UPDATE: Hundreds-of-riders-with-us-flags-escort-cody-alicea-to-school-today-

From Gateway Pundit:

Hundreds of American Legion Riders and fellow patriots escorted Cody Alicea to Denair Middle School this morning. They all had American Flags on their bikes.


The school getting educated in civics....

Geography 101

Innocent Bystanders reports on this gem from County Supervisor Peggy West of Milwaukee in discussions on whether the City of Milwaukee to boycott Arizona over SB1070. It appears that this official would have less of a problem with Arizona if only it were a tad closer to Mexico....huh?

“If this was Texas, which is a state that is directly on the border with Mexico, and they were calling for a measure like this saying that they had a major issue with undocumented people flooding their borders, I would have to look twice at this. But this is a state that is a ways removed from the border,”

Now after reading and perhaps even viewing such a pathetic statement one needs (besides a stiff drink) a bit of comic relief. May as well laugh as cry. Or laugh AS you cry over the state of education in our schools. Bride of Rove provides both with a comment left at HotAir who is also carrying the story.

True story. I was volunteering in my son’s fifth grade science class with two other moms and the topic of the day was the moon. I asked why there was no material on astronauts and moon landings? The two moms said they were relieved that fiction wasn’t being taught to kids.





Me: But. Lovell’s book Lost Moon. NASA. All of the video and science that has resulted in from the space program … velcro and Tang for crying out loud … do you really believe it was a hoax? Mrs. (teacher) help me out here.




Teacher: I don’t believe we actually went to the moon either so I don’t teach it.


Me: Interesting. So somehow all of those companies were in on the biggest lie ever perpetrated on the world.



I was unable to change their minds, though I made a valiant effort.

But the best is yet to come...for the punch line you have to visit the site. Made me laugh.

Time to Stand Up

Excellent post over at Bedlam and Parnassus:

If same-sex "marriage" takes hold of Rhode Island, it will be because of the "abysmal apathy" of Catholics who did not stand up for true marriage, says Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence.

Each Christian must stand up each time he sees an instance of that which is a lie or a proclamation of evil. For this reason, I note the following lies and evil statements from an article on soon-to-be-compulsory sodomite education in England. Fortunately, for the moment, Christian schools and families will have the choice to opt out of such teaching.

Terry Sanderson, head of the National Secular Society, called it "unfortunate" that the government is not forcing faith schools to teach the normalisation of homosexuality.

Unfortunate that the government is not forcing its citizens to do something? How heavy-handed would Mr. Sanderson like his government? (more)

On Campus: The Pro-Palestinians' Real Agenda

From Hudson NY


During a recent visit to several university campuses in the U.S., I discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah.

Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber.

I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel’s “apartheid system” is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.

I was also told that top Fatah operative Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life terms in prison for masterminding terror attacks against Israeli civilians, was thrown behind bars simply because he was trying to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Furthermore, I was told that all the talk about financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority was “Zionist propaganda” and that Yasser Arafat had done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of schools, hospitals and universities.

The good news is that these remarks were made only by a minority of people on the campuses who describe themselves as “pro-Palestinian,” although the overwhelming majority of them are not Palestinians or even Arabs or Muslims.

The bad news is that these groups of hard-line activists/thugs are trying to intimidate anyone who dares to say something that they don’t like to hear. ...

...What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the “occupation” as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel. ...(more)

A Change of Pace

Here are a few links you might find useful or at least interesting:

Recession putting a crimp in your pizza runs? H/T Lifehacker
Over at SimpleDollar A Guide to Making Inexpensive and Delicious Homemade Pizza

Homemade pizza night is a weekly occurrence at our house. For us, there is simply nothing that quite matches homemade pizza for appealing to all of us - it’s infinitely flexible, incredibly cheap, fun to make (and it gets everyone involved, even the small children), and quite delicious. Best of all, if you plan ahead a bit, it doesn’t take long to make, either - you can have a made-from-scratch pizza on the table in a half an hour if you’ve done some reasonable prep work the night before.
Here’s a step-by-step guide (along with some surprising and unusual hints) for making some great homemade pizza for your family. (more)


Lifehacker also has The Five-Minute Prison Workout Keeps You Fit in Any Space (cell mate not included)
Mike Rowe from Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs demonstrates how to get a great workout in any space by performing several sets of descending repetitions of the classic "burpie."


Over at Dumb Little Man:
Ditch Google For A Day: 10 Amazing Search Engines To Try out
As much as Google has evolved since its inception, the internet too has changed drastically and has spawned upon a huge number of alternative search engines, some of them being really good in what they do.


And finally over at STR a list of places to study apologetics

Obama's Concerning Lack of Principle

From VersusPolitics. A good article on the lack of principle in Obama's administration:

While we’re still very early in President Obama’s first term, one stark difference between the current President and the previous one is becoming clear. While President Bush was painted as an ideologue, President Obama has shown a concerning lack of principle in his first few weeks by endorsing contradicting ideas in multiple policy arenas.

I praised the President this week for his support of teacher merit pay and school vouchers. In the budget bill signed this week, however, is a provision to hamper the school voucher program in D.C. Does the President support school choice and competition? Does he realize that the omnibus budget sends a contradictory message?

The President says he wants to create jobs, but he supports tax proposals that will hurt businesses, and he’s supporting increased regulations in various sectors. The first act he signed in office was the Fair Pay Act, which makes employers more vulnerable to lawsuits. He’s also promising the unions support for Card Check.

He wants to protect struggling manufacturing sectors like the automobile industry, but he’s supporting environmental restrictions and requirements that only make manufacturing more expensive, and the idea of outsourcing more attractive.

In foreign policy, he wants to restore alliances with other nations, but he has been ambiguous in supporting trade protectionism. He has criticized the war in Iraq, but he’s basically carrying out the same strategy, and is calling for a counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

Perhaps the most clear example of contradiction was the President’s executive order this week to overturn the embryonic stem cell ban. The omnibus budget, which the President signed, contains a provision that bans federal spending for research of destructive human embryonic stem cells. Essentially, the President’s announcement this week was a publicity stunt.

Charles Krauthammer, a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, criticized the President for a lack of seriousness on the issue. Krauthammer’s view of President Obama’s approach creates a contrast with an account I heard from another member of the Council on Bioethics, who remembered meeting with President Bush to discuss the issue of embryonic stem cell research. This Council member said that President Bush had spent significant time considering the issue, and that the President spoke articulately in a way that demonstrated an understanding for the science and ethical questions surrounding it. Quite a difference....(More)

Elementary blots out 'In God We Trust'

From WND:

An elementary school in Tennessee, after successfully rebuffing an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over religious expression on campus, has nonetheless ordered the words "God Bless the USA" and "In God We Trust" covered up on student-made posters in the hallway.
Administrators at Lakeview Elementary School in Mt. Juliet, Tenn., told parents that the posters, promoting the See You at the Pole student prayer event, mentioned "God" and are therefore precluded by school board policy and prohibited in the hallways as inappropriate.
Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal alliance defending religious liberty, filed a lawsuit today on behalf of 10 parents and their children, seeking an injunction against banning private religious expression on student-made posters.
"Christian students shouldn't be censored for expressing their beliefs," said ADF Senior Counsel Nate Kellum in a statement. "It's ridiculous as well as unconstitutional to cover up these references to God and prayer – one of which is the national motto itself – on posters announcing a student-led activity."
Further, Kellum surmised, "School officials appear to be having an allergic reaction to the ACLU's long-term record of fear, intimidation, and disinformation, despite a previous court ruling at this very school that said students can observe these types of events on school property." ...(more)

Mein Kampus

From American Thinker:
...I thought that I could not be shocked any more by the Stalinist mindset on college campuses. I was wrong.
My wife's friend, a middle aged woman going back to school to get a degree in Criminal Justice, took a course entitled "Ethics and Criminal Justice." She lives in a very conservative community in a very conservative state. The university she attends would never be considered a hotbed for radicals. Her course of study is not political science, sociology, psychology or some other field which may naturally attract idealistic Leftists. She rather took a course in criminal justice, more of a hard-line conservative discipline.
So imagine my surprise when she shared with me "Course Paper / Fall 2008" instructions. The mandatory topic of this paper was the firing of U.S. Attorneys by the Attorney General. The "Bush White House" is accused of using the Justice Department to suppress voter turnout (perhaps this professor never heard of ACORN registering Mickey Mouse and household pets to vote in presidential elections, or perhaps this is not an ethical problem.)
The professor's written instructions harangue students to rely upon facts, not political opinions, in writing the paper and to use at least fifteen different sources. All sources, however, were not equal. Three of those fifteen sources were required to come out of the New York Times; five of those sources were required to come out of the Washington Post; two of those sources had to be the Guardian. Ten of the fifteen mandatory sources, in other words, had to come from periodicals rabidly hostile to President Bush. Three of the citations had to come from articles by Dana Priest of the Washington Post. But that was not all. No credit at all would be given for using sources that "have a reputation within the news industry for distributing their own political views at the expense of the facts, e.g. Fox News." ...(more)

Same-Sex Marriage Isn't Tolerant

From STR:

Just a few examples that demonstrate same-sex marriage isn't neutral. It's about normalization and approval as a federal judge ruled. Government can't be neutral when it's condones something in the law. And that has consequences for individuals.

• At my own children's high school there was a school-wide assembly to celebrate same-sex “marriage” in early December, 2003.
• Within months it was brought into the middle schools. In September, 2004, an 8th-grade teacher in Brookline, MA, told National Public Radio that the marriage ruling had opened up the floodgates for teaching homosexuality. “In my mind, I know that, `OK, this is legal now.' If somebody wants to challenge me, I'll say, `Give me a break. It's legal now,'” she told NPR.
• By the following year it was in elementary school curricula. Kindergartners were given picture books telling them that same-sex couples are just another kind of family, like their own parents.
• Second graders at the same school were read a book, “King and King”, about two men who have a romance and marry each other, with a picture of them kissing.
• A federal judge has ruled that the schools now have a duty to portray homosexual relationships as normal to children, despite what parents think or believe!
• A man undergoing a sex-change operation and cross-dressing was being brought into class to teach the children that there are now “different kinds of families.” (more)

Obama, Ayers, Chavez and Your Children's Education

More on his association with Ayers from the NYPost:

While denying any other meaningful link between the two, the Obama campaign says that Obama has long respected Ayers' work on education; many press accounts refer to him as a "school reformer." Problem is, those "school reforms" boil down to propagandizing for the very ideas that led Ayers to blow up buildings decades ago. ...

...But, as Stanley Kurtz and Sol Stern have pointed out, Obama helped deliver thousands of dollars to fund Ayers' education projects in the Chicago Annenberg Challenge - whose purpose, says Kurtz, is to infuse students "with a radical political commitment."
Ayers makes this very clear in all his writings. K-12 teachers, he has written, must teach "for social justice and liberation" - making classrooms into centers for creating revolutionary change.
Time has only hardened Ayers' views. Consider an interview he gave two years ago to "Revolution," a magazine published by The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, a self-described "Marxist, Leninist, Maoist" group.
There, Ayers argues that education can't be separated from "the concept of politics and political change." Urban schools are now merely preparing students "for prison, for unemployment and for war."
So, to create a genuine "progressive" education for our children, teachers must work to overturn the repressive, racist and imperialist system that governs the United States; it is imperative to fight "the most reactionary cabal of ideologues" that control the federal government and the media. (more)

Over at IBD they have picked up on this as well:

...Yeah, right: Ayers is a school reformer in the same sense, as City Journal's Sol Stern put it, as Joe Stalin was an agricultural reformer.
An idea of what Ayers has in mind for America's schools was provided in his own words not 40 years ago when Obama was eight years old, but less than two years ago in November 2006 at the World Education Forum in Caracas hosted by dictator Hugo Chavez.
With Chavez at his side, Ayers voiced his support for "the political educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how . . . all of you continue to overcome the failures of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane."
Ayers told the great humanitarian Chavez: "Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions large and small. La educacion es revolucion." It is that form of socialist revolution that Ayers, and Obama, have worked to bring to America....(more)

Obamas Education History

From the American Thinker:
...Oddly enough, even though the project produced no measurable improvement in student performance according to its own final report, educators and administrators -- participants and grantees of the CAC -- were reported by outside monitors to be often "ebullient" about the activities. For insiders, it was an excellent adventure. For the pupils stuck in the failing public schools of Chicago, an ongoing, unrelieved disaster. .. (more)

D. C. To Increase Restrictions on Home Schooling

Kinda makes you wonder what they are afraid of..
Regular review by the government to determine if your kids are getting "regular, thorough instruction." Hmm, who's giving the reviews on the government (public school) education?
WASHINGTON, D.C., Aug. 1, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The State Board of Education in the District of Columbia has approved the State Superintendent of Education's final draft of home education regulations that significantly increase restrictions on homeschooling families.
The proposed regulations have been a controversial topic since January, when the State Superintendent's Office created a first draft of new rules that sought to heighten restrictions and regulations on parents who choose to homeschool their children. The first draft included regulating the subjects parents must teach their children and a requirement that parents must permit home visits by D.C. school officials.
The Home School Legal Defense Association, spearheaded by HSLDA Staff Attorney Mike Donnelly and Senior Counsel Chris Klicka, launched a nation-wide campaign requesting homeschoolers across the country contact the D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE) and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE).
According to an HSLDA communiqué, thousands of families responded with calls and emails to the mayor, SBOE, and OSSE.
After three public sessions held to discuss the regulations, which resulted in some of the stricter proposals being removed by the OSSE, the Board passed the new regulations.
Among other things, the new regulations require annual notification of a parent's intent to homeschool on a form to be developed by the OSSE, maintenance of a portfolio of schoolwork, and up to two annual portfolio reviews by the OSSE to determine whether a homeschool program, in OSSE's opinion, is providing "regular, thorough instruction" in the required subjects.(more)

Minnesota biologist accused of defamation

You remember this "thoughtful" pseudo prof from the 3rd tier university who gets his kicks from desecrating the sacred? The University decided what he did was just fine by them. Luckily, some won't let this issue go away..From OneNews Now
It is unusual, according to Cass, for an educated person such as Myers to communicate feelings in such a fashion. "This certainly is not an issue of academic freedom. There is no academic point to be made here," Cass contends. "Even if you're a [completely] godless person and you have no faith whatsoever, this does not prove that." (more)

San Jose Professor Fired for Answering Question about Genetics and Homosexuality

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A former San Jose City College biology professor is suing the college after she was fired for answering a student's question on the relationship between homosexuality and heredity.
On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist. She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist's views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate mentioned by the textbook. Sheldon then explained that the class would learn in a later chapter of the textbook that homosexual behavior may be influenced by both genes and the environment.
The school launched an investigation after a different student in the class lodged an informal complaint that deemed Sheldon's comments "offensive and unscientific." Sheldon was later recommended for removal from the adjunct seniority rehire preference list and terminated by the district's board of trustees on Feb. 13, 2008 (more)

Not Your Ordinary Wafer

A very disturbing link to a very disturbed associate professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris:
Our Salvo editor sent me this link today, and I confess that I was both horrified and amused by PZ Myers' comments.
Because what's sadder? The anger or the stupidity behind his arguments and indignation? While reading his rant, I sat dumbfounded at his ignorance and also burst out laughing a few times because his outrage seemed...utterly ridiculous.
As a Roman Catholic, I understand exactly why Catholics were appalled and upset by the young man who ran off with a consecrated host. Catholics believe in Transubstantiation, Mr. Myers. That boy wasn't just waltzing off with a cracker - to Catholics, that is Jesus. We believe in Jesus' real, actual, divine presence in the Eucharist as strongly as some people believe we evolved from apes, the earth was created by aliens or we are all one with nature through the mother goddess.
Are we to be denied our first amendment rights to hold such a belief? Must we be mocked and ridiculed for our traditions? How would anyone like it if his or her house was broken into and something precious was stolen? (more)

Just one of the many problems facing higher education described over at Salvo..:
...Last night I had the misfortune to sit through a 90 minute lecture on "Church" History that covered the time frame from 100 A.D.-500 A.D. I was induced to attend because my sister's friend helped organize the talk and there was also free pizza and beer. Yet no amount of Home Run Inn Pizza or Coors Light beer could make the digestion of that talk go down in a pleasant manner. The professor stated at the beginning of the talk that she was going to "dismantle" what the audience thought they knew about history so that she could "build you up again" with the truth. The point of the lecture, as in, "what WAS the professor trying to teach us" is uncertain. But one "fact" that the good Ph.D. Doctor imparted was that Christians weren't REALLY persecuted by the Romans, they didn't really get killed all that often by the state, that only every 40 or 50 years or so would a Roman Emperor go on a killing spree, and that "no matter what the history books say" Christians weren't really living in fear that they might get killed.
Now, the point of why I'm writing all this is NOT to get into a debate about the treatment of Christians in the Roman Empire. What struck me then, as it strikes me now, is that this woman, who has a Ph.D. and probably spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours of study to obtain her degree, managed to learn what exactly? What was the point of all that studying to come away from university with falsehoods filling her brain---falsehoods that are being imparted on her students. ... (more)