Through a friend of mine I have stumbled upon a very well written, eloquent and challenging article by David Kupelian. It is a bit long but the author does an amazing job describing the American dream, the foundations upon which it was built and the social changes that have taken place since America first became the land of the free.

I include a few excerpts below. The rest you can read here.

“Inscribed in bronze at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus’ transcendent 1883 poem, “The New Colossus,” captures the spirit of America’s big-heartedness and generosity perhaps more than anything else, except for “Lady Liberty” herself.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.”Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

There has always been something different about America, which enabled this magnanimous nation to wrap her arms around the “wretched refuse” of other nations.
This nation of immigrants was bound together by a spirit, you might say. For although one cannot become French or Chinese or Russian, one can become an American – by embracing that spirit.

Becoming a naturalized American citizen therefore meant more than passing the federal government’s screening process and stumbling through a few civics questions. It meant an implicit and heartfelt agreement to abide not only by the nation’s laws, but by its hidden, unwritten “laws” as well – the principles that made up the invisible but vital fabric of Western Civilization: the individual as citizen-sovereign; a balance of freedom and responsibility; unlimited opportunity – to succeed or fail; independence and self-reliance; tolerance; the work ethic; equality under the law; and other core Judeo-Christian values. [...]

[...] The teacher had questioned the unquestionable, injecting doubt into a room of impressionable young boys and girls. It was one of those moments you remember 40 years later because it created a spark, a momentary contact with another dimension – that alien dimension of cynicism and disbelief.

Within a few years, the gathering tides of rebellion against traditional America would come crashing down with great ferocity and on many shores. One key area was the Civil Rights Movement.Despite the fact that America had long-since forsaken slavery, and – thanks to the movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which culminated in the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act – had outlawed segregation and made great strides in moving beyond racism altogether, a demand for “black studies” nevertheless arose in the nation’s colleges.

The idea was that past denigration and mistreatment of blacks necessitated special emphasis on their culture and accomplishments. “Black pride” was born and “black studies,” “black history” and the like proliferated through the nation’s university campuses.

Although most people didn’t comprehend it at the time, “black pride” and similar “liberation movements” did not arise out of the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement, which had arrived, in King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, at the ultimate solution to racism: the “color-blind” society where people would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This enlightened vision of America – which would have completed the promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” – was hijacked by forces of the ’60s radical left. These were people who did not want peace and racial harmony. They condemned racial integration as “Uncle Tomism” and “co-optation.” Their aim was to indict America as a racist oppressor as a means to foment division, revolution and societal transformation.”

As many of you know, I grew up in a non-religious society. When I was young, we studied Greek mythology in school and I read a lot of it. In fact, I probably read the entire collection because I was fascinated with the cool stories. Somebody had quite an imagination to come up with the wild and out-of-this-world tales of Zeus and Athena and the Cyclops and the myriad of gods and demi-gods that populated Olympus. Then there were the “dark” forces of Hades, the river Styx with its ferryman and the big bad three-headed monster Cerberus. I put the word ‘dark’ in quotes because it wasn’t always obvious that the gods of Olympus were any better than the gods of the underworld. They stole, murdered, cheated and lied to one another just as they did to people on Earth. But still, the stories were awesome. They fueled my imagination with vivid pictures of battles where man stood against man and god stood against god, with heroes and villains reigning over the world in succession and with all the amazing powers each god wielded. And through it all I never had the slightest doubt that these stories were products of wild imagination of men who attempted to understand their extremely complicated world. Where they failed to use reason they filled the gaping holes with mysticism and invented new powers, new gods and new incredible adventures.

And in this highly vivid and imaginative world Jesus fit right in. He was a bit confusing, since his message was different from the gods of Greece, but hey, he had more powers than the Greek gods since he claimed to be the only god, unlimited by anybody or anything. If people wanted to believe in him, that was just fine with me. Personally, I did not see the point of going to a largely dark and gloomy church (you know what I mean if you’ve ever visited the Russian orthodox variety) filled with old people lighting some candles to icons. Aha, I said to myself, those icons are like the demi-gods in Greek mythology. All these guys have powers but they are weaker than the ultimate guy at the top.

Fast-forward to about 5 years ago. By that time I was going to college, working pretty hard toward my degrees and enjoying the experience. Also by that time, I had a few good Christian friends. Most of the time religion didn’t come up in our conversations, but now and again we would talk and battle over how it was just another form of control and how the tithes were used to cheat people out of their income to promote church’s goals. Jesus was still a great myth in my head and all this stuff about prophets and miracles fit right along the lines of all the other lustrous but dead religions that came before Christianity.

And then came one day which I remember quite vividly. I was riding in a car, debating a friend of mine on the merits of religion and at some point he turned his head, looked at me and said: “You know that Jesus is a true historical figure, not a figment of imagination, right?”

Huh? Someone has the audacity to claim that? that’s ridiculous! I mean, that’s a good story and all, but it would be absurd to claim that he is anything but a story made up by a few people.

“No, no,” my friend protested, “even the non-religious historians agree that Jesus truly lived. They might say that he was just a prophet, not a god, but it’s a historically accurate fact.”

Weird. That conversation kind of stuck to me. So Jesus is real? I don’t think so! Hmm…and yet this new claim bothered me. There were some uneasy repercussions to that statement if, indeed, it was true. Well, apparently, I was not the only one bothered by this thought. Some of the most prominent historians, archaeologists, lawyers and scholars have set out to check for themselves the validity of the stories in the New Testament.

So what have they found? Well, I could not put it better than it has already been put before me so I will refer to a couple of books that contain their analysis. Keep in mind that most of the people I quote here were atheists or agnostics who took an extremely careful and skeptical look at the evidence before deriving the answer. Many of them are the top scholars of their respective disciplines.

Josh McDowell writes: “After personally trying to shatter the historicity and validity of the Scriptures, I have come to the conclusion that they are historically trustworthy. If a person discards the Bible as unreliable in this sense, then he or she must discard almost all the literature of antiquity. “  What does he mean by that? Geisler and Turek shed more insight in their detailed study of the historicity of the New Testament: “To see if the New Testament is a record of actual history, we need to answer two questions concerning the documents that comprise the New Testament:

1. Do we have accurate copies of the original documents that were written down in the first century?
2. Do those documents speak the truth.”

The authors then spend 75 pages of their book meticulously documenting and presenting every fact that has been established about the historicity of the New Testament. Their conclusion is supported by a wealth of secular and religious archaeological, historical and legal studies. I do not have the right nor the desire to copy their work so instead I will present just a few excerpts from their writing as well as from McDowell’s book.

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I bow my head in shame and deep sorrow for the tragic events that took place this morning. No doubt you have already heard – a gunman at Virginia Tech rampaged through the campus today, leaving 33 dead and many more wounded. This atrocity cannot be comprehended. It cannot be described. It cannot be understood. All we are left with is pain, confusion and anger for such disregard of human life. These killings are meaningless. The lives lost are irreplaceable.

Please join me tonight in prayer for the students and teachers who have become unwilling victims of this tragedy. Both, the wounded and the dead need your prayers, but let us pray foremost for those who have passed away. I wish I knew their names so I could pray for each one in turn, but the names will not be released until later. Right now, my most sincere prayer goes out for the 32 souls standing at the gates of heaven. May God accept his children even as they go out of this world so prematurely.

Please pray with me.

In other news, I wanted to mention briefly that I have released a very simple yet hopefully useful encryption program today, called Enfomi. Basically, it lets you encrypt data with a password using very strong encryption algorithms (there are 27 total). It is completely open-source (free), completely standalone and completely portable (means it will run on Mac or PC as long as you have Java. Check out the rest on the official Enfomi page.

One of the last few meetings of Fusion (the young adults church group I attend at FAC) has given me an idea for a question I would like to pose to everyone. Take a look at the picture below. Each of the black dots represents a person just like you and me. Mentally place yourself (as a dot) in an area that you think describes the strength of your relationship with Jesus Christ. Consider ‘A’ to be an atheist (or no relationship) and ‘B’ through ‘D’ to be gradually strengthening relationship. Now… which area would you like to be in?

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Time magazine just ran an article on Einstein and his views on faith. What really boggles my mind is that our “post-modern”, “progressive” and “educated” culture takes such a negative stance on religion. Seriously, when some of the top scientists of the last two centuries tell us that there is a God, why do we go on dismissing that idea. Do we really think we are smarter or more educated than the people who were brilliant and visionary enough to uncover the laws of this universe in the first place? I see this as a sign of arrogance, maybe because we take our knowledge for granted and cannot imagine what type of a mind it took to discover that knowledge.

Here is a quote from the article: “But throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist. “There are people who say there is no God,” he told a friend. “But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views.” And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists. “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos,” he explained.

In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. “The fanatical atheists,” he wrote in a letter, “are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who–in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’– cannot hear the music of the spheres. [...] The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” “

Religion has been a hot topic of discussion in the media lately, this being the most celebrated week in the Christian calendar. Generally speaking, the news I read tend to portray religion negatively but lo and behold there are glimpses of hope now and again. I was really glad to see this article just a day after I happened to make my own post “Call Me Unreasonable”. Dr. Collins actually touches on a lot of experiences that have been very similar to those in my life and reiterates my point about intelligent messages. I would encourage everyone to read this article in full, but here are some excerpts that I really agree with.

“I am a scientist and a believer, and I find no conflict between those world views.

As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God’s language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God’s plan.

I did not always embrace these perspectives. As a graduate student in physical chemistry in the 1970s, I was an atheist, finding no reason to postulate the existence of any truths outside of mathematics, physics and chemistry. But then I went to medical school, and encountered life and death issues at the bedsides of my patients. Challenged by one of those patients, who asked “What do you believe, doctor?”, I began searching for answers. [...]

I had always assumed that faith was based on purely emotional and irrational arguments, and was astounded to discover, initially in the writings of the Oxford scholar C.S. Lewis and subsequently from many other sources, that one could build a very strong case for the plausibility of the existence of God on purely rational grounds. My earlier atheist’s assertion that “I know there is no God” emerged as the least defensible. As the British writer G.K. Chesterton famously remarked, “Atheism is the most daring of all dogmas, for it is the assertion of a universal negative.” [...]

I have found there is a wonderful harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith. ”

In my personal experience, I have met many brilliant scientists of diverse disciplines who have reiterated the same point as Dr. Collins so I tend to think I am not that crazy when I say that science and religion complement each other. I arrived at this particular point in my life not because I was searching for a deity but because I wanted to find truth. I did not grow up with a religion nor did I ever intend to have, what I considered, a burden placed upon me. But my views have changed because I believe I have discovered some of that truth I was seeking, even though it led me in an entirely different direction. Somewhat sadly, one of the realizations that I face is that I cannot show this truth to others because it is a highly personal journey. The path to God starts with a question. A person must be willing to at least consider the evidence and ask what C.S. Lewis called a “dangerous question” (for atheists, at least). Ask God to reveal himself. Of course, just like everybody else, I have no control over human will. The willingness to consider God has to come from within.

You know, I really get discouraged when people (sometimes atheists, sometimes agnostics) state that religion is unreasonable and men of faith go along with that presupposition without challenging it. Of all the debates about God’s existence, only a few get down to the very core of whether it is reasonable to begin with, to believe in God. Granted, I do not have a vast amount of theistic knowledge to claim that I know otherwise, but from the literature I read and from scripture itself, it is evident to me that we must use our minds along with whatever else drives us to believe: “And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength” – Mark 12:30.

Just this evening I received the newest issue of Newsweek (April 9, 2007 – yes, I know, apparently they come out a week early), and it has a huge article on the topic of God. Obviously, with the advent of science, our world view has been drastically expanded and altered. It is expected that a sharp, reasonable mind will question dogma, whether secular or religious, and uncover inconsistencies. But since when did that make the truth less true? Just because Newton did not discover the relativistic laws of gravity does not mean that his conclusions about gravity as a force are false. Religious dogma, just as scientific dogma, requires correction at times. Does a scientific discovery that the world is round necessitate dismissal of God? Science is full of special statements, called theories, that are built on the premise that they are not exact because they are human interpretations of the world around us. Certain religious claims are just that – theories – interpretations of the word of God. Religion and science simply deal in different realms. Traditionally, religion has been slow to recognize its own inconsistencies so maybe that is why it gets a bad rap. But I keep seeing more and more evidence that just like science it is a self-correcting entity that is very firm and true at the core and is still expanding (and correcting) at the fringes (in no small part thanks to science!). And by the way, science also has its share of inconsistencies, except that here we call them “paradoxes”. Regardless, I fail to see the merit in the claim that just because human interpretation is fallible, we must discard an entire discipline.

I should also say that I fail to see how atheistic claims are in any way more reasonable (in regards to God) than theistic claims. As Geisler and Turek, very acutely, point out, atheists rule out a theistic force at work prior to examining evidence for a case. So that when they look at a case, they can only come up with theories that do not involve a deity. Hearing some of these theories, I cannot help but wonder how such knowledgeable and intelligent minds can come up with such garbage! Here again, Geisler and Turek have a great example.

Let’s say you wake up one morning and go to the kitchen where you find…

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