According to a new study, the newspapers are again reporting that students in U.S. middle and high schools are abysmally weak in science. Even after several years of pushing for better training, there is no real improvement. American children are still far below students in other developed countries. School districts struggle to find qualified teachers for science. Michael Petrelli, vice president of a conservative think tank, is quoted in today's Wall Street Journal as saying, "It's hard for any CEO to look at this report and not feel pessimistic about the future of the American work force." The educators continue to look for causes, but perhaps their prejudices cause them to look in the wrong direction. Modern science was developed because men believed in God and in His consistent plan in an organized universe. As we have turned from God, we no longer believe in any absolute authority. Why, then, should we strive to understand the universe? It has no meaning. All that matters is our present experience. That has been the emphasis of education for decades. As we turn further and further away from God, we should expect to become more and more of a third-rate country.
I am not sure what to think of an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal by Theodore Dalrymple, but I believe his claims need to be heard. He claims that heroin addiction is not as easy to obtain nor as difficult to overcome as thought and claimed by most doctors and most addicts. According to Dalrymple, the average heroin user does not become addicted until they have been taking it for a year. "Heroin doesn't hook people; rather, people hook heroin." That is, they become an addict because they want to, not because an experimental trial hooks them. He has seen thousands of addicts withdraw and has concluded that the suffering is not as great as is claimed. In watching the addicts without our their knowledge before they entered his office, he saw them cheerful. As soon as they entered his office, they doubled over in pain, claimed to have never suffered so much, and threatened suicide if they could not get what they wanted.
On January 13, 2006, the Wall Street Journal had an article about the Roman Catholic Church being ready to abandon the idea of limbo as the place of rest for good people who were not believers (like Plato and Virgil) and for unbaptized children. The doctrine, though widely believed, had never been official church doctrine. Pope Benedict XVI had said long before he was pope that the church should "let [limbo] drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis." Other religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism, have limbo-like doctrines. The Mormons "believe that there are three kingdoms or 'degrees of glory' in the afterlife. Like limbo, the 'terrestrial' kingdom is the lesser abode of those who led honorable lives on earth but refused baptism into the Church of Latter-day Saints." In Catholicism, limbo was developed to solve the problem caused by the teaching that the baptism of babies was necessary for the removal of original sin. However, the emphasis has changed. The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" (1994) say of these unbaptized children that "the church can only entrust them to the mercy of God." No real answer and no real hope. Or as others have said, everything changes and everything stays the same.
In "The Failure of the American Baptist Culture" (p.83), James B. Jordan argues that there was freedom of dissent in the Puritan society of colonial New England. "To be sure, Quaker women were not permitted to parade nude in the street, and Roger Williams was made to leave when he persisted in disrupting society (and not because he was a Baptist, by the way), but there was a good deal of diversity in New England, and those holding private opinions contrary to the religious establishment were not molested unless they stirred up trouble."
In the "Houses of Worship" spotlight by Heather Wilhelm in today's Wall Street Journal, there is a report on the growing cooperation between evangelicals and liberals in politics. The National Association of Evangelicals, representing 52 denominations and almost 30 million members, has recently put global warming on the evangelical agenda (with the help of Rick Warren). Richard Cizik, a vice president for the group, has joined "Hollywood stars, left-leaning politicians and radical professors" to endose Al Gore's film on global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." In another initiative, evangelicals are pushing a book called "Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger" that rails against the "ghastly injustice' of the free market. More than 40 denominations are represented in a push for the ONE campaign, whose mission is to dedicate 1% of the U.S. budget to foreign aid. This is only a sampling of many indications of the marriage between evangelical groups and big government. The downhill slide is in rapid progress.
