“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
— R. C. Lewontin, evolutionist in “Billions and Billions of Demons”, “The New York Review of Books”. 44(1):31.
“Belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if that religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.”
— Will Provine, Cornell University atheistic professor
“Creation myths lie at the heart of all human cultures, and science is no exception; until we know where we came from, we do not know who we are. The origin of life is also a stubborn problem, with no solution in sight… Biology textbooks often include a chapter on how life may have arisen from non-life, and while responsible authors do not fail to underscore the difficulties and uncertainties, readers still come away with the impression that the answer is almost within their grasp.“
— Franklin Harold, 2001. The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Origin of Life, Oxford University Press, p. 235-236.
“Life arose here on earth from inanimate matter, by some kind of evolutionary process, about four billion years ago. This is not a statement of demonstrable fact, but an assumption almost universally shared by specialists as well as scientists in general. It is not supported by any direct evidence, nor is it likely to be … The reasons for the general consensus are, first, the lack of a more palatable alternative; and second, that absent the presumption of a terrestrial and natural genesis there would be no basis for scientific inquiry into the origin of life.” (p. 236, 237)
“It bears repeating that we know very little for certain, and that it is seldom possible to formulate hypotheses that can be falsified by experiment; the opinions of scholars are, therefore, colored by personal beliefs about what should have happened, and even about what is meant by ‘life.’” (p. 239)
“A historical theory must account for historical events, and in truth there is not (and perhaps cannot be) convincing evidence that there ever was a rich broth of organic substances, or that it played the role assigned to it by the theory.” (p. 244)
— Franklin Harold, “The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Origin of Life (2001: Oxford University Press)
*“Materialists and madmen never have doubts.”
— G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), British writer and Christian thinker
George Caylor interview with unnamed molecular biologist “J”:
J: …To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times. One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself. Two, it would be insane to say you don’t believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures — everything would stop. I’d be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn’t earn a decent living.
Caylor: I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.
J: The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind’s worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”
— “The Biologist,” Feb. 17, 2000, in The [Lynchburg, VA] Ledger).
*“Of course, the other thing about evolution is that anything can be said because very little can be disproved. Experimental evidence is minimal.”
— Bryan Appleyard, evolutionist
*“Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion-full fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian… Evolution is religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
— Michael Ruse, FSU professor and evolutionist, (Canadian) National Post, (5/13/00)
“I suppose that nobody will deny that it is a great misfortune if an entire branch of science becomes addicted to a false theory. But that is what has happened in Biology…. I believe that one day the Darwinian myth will be ranked the greatest deceit in the history of science.”
— Søren Løvtrup, Swedish evolutionary scientist in “Darwinism: The Refutation of a Myth”, p. 422
*“Things don’t look hopeful for Darwinian naturalists.”
— Alvin Plantinga, Christian Philosopher
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity… there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
— Carl Sagan (1934-1996), atheistic scientist
“The cosmos is all there ever is or ever was or ever will be…”
— Carl Sagan (1934-1996), atheistic scientist
*“If we had to accept the idea of an independent creator, the explanations given in [several Buddhist texts] which completely refutes the existence per se of all phenomena, would be negated.”
— Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhist leader
“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
— Richard Dawkins, Oxford University atheist science professor
Evolution “has primarily been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science in an effort to refute all religious claims concerning a creator – an effort that has also often attempted to suppress all scientific criticisms of Darwin’s work.”
— Rodney Stark, sociologist in “For the Glory of God”
“The crazy part about science and yet the exciting part about science is you almost never have something that’s black and white.”
— Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor-in-chief, Journal of the American Medical Association (2005)
“Evolutionists have ‘Physics Envy’. They tell the public that the science behind evolution is the same science that sent people to the moon and cures diseases. It’s not. The science behind evolution is not empirical, but forensic. Because evolution took place in history, its scientific investigations are after the fact-no testing, no observations, no repeatability, no falsification, nothing at all like physics….I think this is what the public discerns-that evolution is just a bunch of just-so stories disguised as legitimate science.”
— John Chaikowsky, “Geology v. Physics,” Geotimes (vol. 50, April 2005, page 6).
“Without the original sin, who needs to be redeemed? Without Adam’s fall into a life of constant sin terminated by death, what purpose is there to Christianity? None.
“Even a high school student knows enough about evolution to know that nowhere in the evolutionary description of our origins does there appear an Adam or an Eve or an Eden or a forbidden fruit. Evolution means a development from one form to the next to meet the ever-changing challenges from an ever-changing nature. There is no fall from a previous state of sublime perfection.
“Without Adam, without the original sin, Jesus Christ is reduced to a man with a mission on a wrong planet!”
— “The Meaning of Evolution?” American Atheist, September 1979, p. 30.
“There’s a sense we as humans have kind of peaked. A different way to look at it is it’s almost impossible for evolution not happen.”
— Greg Wray, Director for Center for Evolutionary Genomics, Duke University (2005)
“Scientists are still far from understanding the ancient, intricate processes that lead to the origin of life.”
— Robert M. Hazen, of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, in “Genesis: Rocks, Minerals, and the Geochemical Origin of Life,” Elements (vol. 1, June 2005), p. 135.
“At the present there is no completely satisfactory theory for the origin of life.”
— George Cody, of the Carnegie Institution, in “Geochemical Connections to Primitive Metabolism,” Elements (vol 1, June 2005), p. 139.
“In particular, I argue that in both evolution and creation we have rival religious responses to a crisis of faith-rival stories of origins, rival judgments about he meaning of human life, rival sets of moral dictates, and above all what theologians call rival eschatologies-pictures of the future and of what lies ahead for humankind.”
— Michael Ruse, FSU professor and evolutionist in The Evolution-Creation Struggle, p. 3
“No one has ever produced a species by mechanism of natural selection. No one has ever gotten near it….”
— Colin Patterson, evolutionist, “Cladistics” Interview on BBC, 3/4/82
“It appears that the universe knew we were coming.”
— Freeman Dyson (1923-) mathematical physicist
“I’m very concerned about the religious indoctrination of children. I want to show how faith acts like a virus that attacks the young and infects generation after generation . . . It’s time to question the abuse of childhood innocence with superstitious ideas of hellfire and damnation. And I want to show how the scriptural roots of the Judeo-Christian moral edifice are cruel and brutish . . . What in the 21st century are we doing venerating a book [the Bible] that contains such stuff? . . . . The God of the Old Testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction – jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser urging His people on to acts of genocide . . . When it comes to children, I think of religion as a dangerous virus. It’s a virus which is transmitted partly through teachers and clergy, but also down the generations from parent to child to grandchild. Children are especially vulnerable to infection by the virus of religion.”
— Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor and evolutionist in “The Virus of Faith”, part of UK channel 4 series “Root of All Evil” May, 2006, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48252
“I suppose…”
— Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1859), stated over 800 times
“This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control.”
— Physicist Robert Jastrow, astronomer, physicist and cosmologist
“Bacteria, the simplest form of independent life, are ideal for this kind of study, with generation times of 20 to 30 minutes and populations achieved after 18 hours. But throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another. Since there is no evidence, for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution…throughout the whole array of higher multi-cellular organisms.”
— Unnamed British biologist in 2001 (quoted in HUMAN EVENTS, Vol. 62 No. 29; 8/28/06, p. 20.)
“I am open to [the notion of theistic revelation], but not enthusiastic about potential revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. That this biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that it is revelation.”
— Antony Flew, former atheistic British philosopher (Philosophia Christi, Winter, 2005), www.biola.edu/philchrisit
“The harmony of natural law . . . reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955) www.worldviewweekend.com/secure/cwnetwork/article.php?ArticleID=1293
“We know…almost nothing about [the] origin [of living things] when the world was young. Our knowledge is vast, but our understanding is partial and full of gaps; for all its familiarity and ubiquity, life remains fundamentally mysterious…. We must concede that there are presently no detailed Darwinian accounts of the evolution of any biochemical system, only a variety of wishful speculations.”
— Emeritus biochemistry professor Franklin Harold at Colorado State University
“Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.”
— Thomas Kuhn, Harvard physics instructor and historian in “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (1962)
“Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.”
–Jeremy Rifkin, evolutionist
“You have to understand, in the current academic climate, Intelligent Design is like leprosy or heresy in times past. To be tagged as an ID supporter is to become an academic pariah, and this holds even at so-called Christian institutions that place a premium on respectability at the expense of truth and the offense of the Gospel.”
— William Dembski, research professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, in “I.D. rift hits Baylor again” by Erin Roach www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=26372)
“I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or ‘source code’ used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence. “The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information reflects [Claude E.] Shannon’s concept of entropy [released in 1948] and his measure of ‘news.’ Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information. Yet Darwinian science seemed to be reducing all nature to material causes. “As I pondered this materialist superstition, it became increasingly clear to me that in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself on day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science? “In raising this question I was not affirming a religious stance. At the time it first occurred to me, I was still a mostly secular intellectual. But after some 35 years of writing and study in science and technology, I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field—from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics—is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous ‘information.’ In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier.”
— George Gilder, “The National Review” (July 17, 2006, pp. 30-31), reprinted in The American Christian College Journal (9/06, pp.4-5)
We “do not yet really understand how any single gene from a higher life form really works—not in its entirety…a single gene has about 50,000 component parts.”
— John Stanford, Genetic Entropy: The Mystery of the Genome, p. 135, reprinted in The American Christian College Journal (11/07, p. 6)
“The information in DNA could no more be reduced to the chemical than could the ideas in a book be reduced to the ink and paper: something beyond physics and chemistry encoded DNA.”
— Michael Polanyi chemist and philosopher in “Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy” (1958)
“Once when I was speaking to some secularists at Harvard, I asked, ‘What preceded the Hot Big Bang?’ There was a pause, and then one man said, ‘Eternal matter.’ I liked the answer though I disagreed with it – at least he was admitting there is something greater than the universe. So then I asked, ‘What is the difference, in intellectual terms alone, between believing in eternal matter on the one hand, and an eternal Creator on the other hand?’ He paused, then said, ‘Theological baggage.’ In other words, as he continued to explain, he feared that if he admitted the possibility of ‘God’ into the equation, then that would allow ‘religionists’ to force religion on him, and it also would hurt good science. His answer was not intellectual, but emotional and relational. “We who affirm a biblical faith need to listen to him. This is the testimony of someone who has been burned by religion and/or relationships, but the Bible on it own terms never imposes itself, and it is the finest basis there is for science and the scientific method (as I write about elsewhere). Do we treat such skeptics the same away we expect to be treated? Theological baggage must be removed before there is true freedom to engage in scientific, philosophical and theological discussion in this or any context.”
— John Rankin, “Darwin and the Days of Creation,” www.teinetwork.com/creation.html
“‘Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true?’ I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time. Eventually one person said, ‘I do know one thing: it ought not to be taught in high school.’”
— Colin Patterson, British Museum of Natural History, in “Darwin on Trial”, by Phillip E. Johnson (The American Christian College Journal, 1/08, p. 3)
“I conceived the idea [of uniformitarianism] five or six years ago, that if ever the Mosaic geology could be set down [refuted] without giving offense, it would be in an historical sketch…” [i.e., rewriting history].
— John Lyell (1797-1875), Father of Modern Geology and a Deist, in a letter written to George Poulette Scrope (1830)
“Observe the forms and beauties of sensible things and comprehend the Word of God in them. If you do so, the truth will reveal to you in all such things only He who made them.”
— Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 815–877), Irish philosopher, theologian and poet
“Today we are learning the language in which God created life.”
— President Bill Clinton at a White House press conference on June 26, 2000 announcing the mapping of the human genome
“I cannot believe that God would play dice with the universe.”
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955), world-renowned German Jewish theoretical physicist
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as [anatomy] Professor [Hermann] Schaaffhausen [1816-1893] has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
— Charles R. Darwin (1809-1882), “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex”, 2nd ed. (1871; reprint, London: John Murray, 1922), pp. 241-42
“No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites.”
— T. H. Huxley (1825-1895), British biologist and ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, in “Lectures and Lay Sermons” (1871; reprint, London: Everyman’s Library, J.M. Dent, 1926), p. 115
“Scientists are still far from understanding the ancient, intricate processes that lead to the origin of life.”
— Robert M. Hazen, of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute in “Genesis: Rocks, Minerals, and the Geochemical Origin of Life,” Elements, vol. 1, June 2005, p. 135)
“At the present there is no completely satisfactory theory for the origin of life.”
— George Cody, of the Carnegie Institution in “Geochemical Connections to Primitive Metabolism,” Elements, vol 1, June 2005, p. 139
“Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens — all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate.”
— Jacques Barzun, historian quoted in “Making a Monkey Out of Darwin” by Patrick J. Buchanan, 06/30/2009, www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32510
“Our uniform experience affirms that specified information—whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, encoded in a radio signal, or produced in a simulation experiment—always arises from an intelligent source, from a mind and not a strictly material process. … Indeed it follows that the best, most causally adequate explanation for the origin of the specified, digitally encoded information in DNA is that it too had an intelligent source.”
— Dr. Stephen Meyer, in “Signature in the Cell”
Culture:
“The greatest threat to our civilization comes from within that civilization itself: our $64 euphemism for it is secularism. A much blunter word is godlessness. Our civilization, for all its churches and all its churchgoers, is predominantly a secular, godless civilization.”
— Life Magazine editorial excerpt, April 18, 1949
“A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.”
— Dallas Willard, USC philosophy professor Renovation of the Heart, p. 35
“I think it’s just the loss of family values. It’s the narcissism of our age, of people thinking only of themselves – not even of their family. When you lose those values of morality, you suddenly have no footing. And I think that’s when these people think there’s no problem with doing evil.”
— David Conn, Los Angeles prosecutor
“[K]ey persons within journalism (especially publishers and editors, and also journalism professionalizers from the ranks of the universities and the active press) actively sought to minimize and ultimately to undermine traditional religion”.
— Richard Flory, in “The Secular Revolution”
“The secularization of the institutions of American public life did not happen by accident or happenstance?.[It was] an achievement of specific groups of people, many of whom intended to marginalize religion. The people at the core of these secularizing movements, at least, knew what they were doing, and they wanted to do it”.
— Christian Smith, edtior, “The Secular Revolution”
“…College [has] more and more replaced the church as the source of new values, of new ethical outlooks.”
— Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), American fiction writer
*“Just as a tree without roots is dead, a people without history and culture also becomes a dead people.”
— Malcolm X (1925-1965), civil rights leader
“[Star Wars is] designed primarily to make young people think about the mystery. Not to say, ‘Here’s the answer.’ It’s to say, ‘Think about this for a second. Is there a God? What does God look like? What does God sound like? What does God feel like? How do we relate to God?’”
— George Lucas, “Of Myth and Men,” Time (4/26/99), p. 93.
“The men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell . . .”
— G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), British writer and Christian thinker
“It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.”
— Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), French philosopher, sociologist and theologian
“The only ground of hope for the continuance of our free institutions is in the proper moral and religious training of the children, that they may be prepared to discharge aright the duties of men and citizens.” “The only ground of hope for the continuance of our free institutions is in the proper moral and religious training of the children, that they may be prepared to discharge aright the duties of men and citizens.”
— President Zachary Taylor (1784-1850), on July 4, 1849
“Private opinion creates public opinion…That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.”
— Jan Struther (Joyce Anstruther/Placzek, 1901-53), British poet
“Culture is religion incarnate.”
— Chuck Colson, “BreakPoint”, 11/19/07
“Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), French political/cultural researcher
“I fear we are too much concerned with material things to remember that our real strength lies in spiritual values.”
— President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), in 1946
“A culture that does not aspire to the divine becomes obsessed with the fascination of evil, reveling in the frivolous, the depraved, and the bestial.”
— George Gilder, Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute, scholar and author
“A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists. His research shows that the more diverse a community is, the less likely its inhabitants are to trust anyone—from their next-door neighbor to the mayor. “‘In the presence of diversity, we hunker down,’ said Putnam. ‘We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.’ “Professor Putnam found trust was lowest in Los Angeles, ‘the most diverse human habitation in human history.’”
— “The Financial Times”, October 2006, quoted in “California, Here We Come!” by Patrick J. Buchanan, 06/26/2009 www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=32465
“It is not easy to conceive of anything that would be more unfortunate in a community based on the ideals of which Americans boast than any considerable development of intolerance as regards religion.”
— President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), in 192
“But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in “Brave New World Revisited”, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In “1984”, Huxley added, “people are controlled by inflicting pain.” In “Brave New World”, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
— Neil Postman (1931-2003), American author, media theorist and cultural critic in “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, 1985)
“Anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration.”
— Neil Postman (1931-2003), American author, media theorist and cultural critic in a talk given at the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart.
“Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information — misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information — information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”
— Neil Postman (1931-2003), American author, media theorist and cultural critic in “Amusing Ourselves To Death” (1985)
Evangelism/Outreach:
*“The problem is not only to win souls but to save minds. If you win the whole world and lost the mind of the world, you will soon discover you have not won the world.”
— Charles Malik (1906-1987), President of the UN General Assembly
*“Build bridges of friendship that will bear the weight of the truth.”
— Kim Gustafson, Common Grounds Consultants
“I preach the gospel all the time…sometimes I use words.”
— St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226)
“We must not expect the power of Christ if we reject the program of Christ.”
— Charles Erdman
“The defense of the Gospel is most effective when combined with the demeanor of Christ.”
— Art Lindsley
“You’re invading our territory. Get back in your church, where you belong.”
— Jehovah Witnesses in Arlington, TX when they found Christians doing ministry in the streets
*“Will we bow before the god of culture? Or will we…give an account to all those who ask us not just what we believe but why?”
— Voddie Baucham, Baylor University professor
“All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification.”
— Judge Learned Hand (1872-1961)
“Let’s pretend that you are someone who might be willing, in theory, at some point, possibly, to consider maybe doing something that, while not ‘evangelism’-type evangelism, still could be in some way construed as a sort of sharing of hope. Kind of.”
— Steven C. Bonsey, A Shy Person’s Guide to the Practice of Evangelism
“Evangelism is not selling Jesus, but showing Jesus; evangelism is not mere telling about Christ, but about being Christ.”
— Lee C. Camp, in “Mere Discipleship”
*“Untilled ground, however rich, will bring forth thistles and thorns; so also the mind of man.”
— St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), Spanish Catholic mystic
“Whom you would change, you must first love.”
— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), civil rights leader
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), Scottish novelist and poet
“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”
— Unknown
“Be sure you do not treat those who do not share our true convictions in such a way that we make them glad we’re going to end up in separate destinations!”
“Be sure you do not treat those who do not share our true convictions in such a way that we make them glad we’re going to end up in separate destinations!”
— Dr. Andre Ong, Senior Pastor, International Christian Church, San Deigo, CA
“You know how many seeds are in an apple. But you don’t know how many apples are in a seed.”
— Rev. Robert Schuller (b. 1926), former Crystal Cathedral senior pastor
“Evangelism is: every day, in every way, helping my unsaved friend take one step closer to Jesus.”
— Dr. Dave Geisler, founder of Meekness and Truth Ministries
“I’ve always said, you know, that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize, I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever, and you think that, well, it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward; and atheists who think people shouldn’t proselytize, ‘Just leave me alone, and keep your religion to yourself,’ ah, how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you and you didn’t believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you, there’s a certain point where I tackle you, and this [topic of proselytizing] is more important than that.”
— Penn Jillette, half of the “Penn and Teller” show, magician/artist/comedian, and self-professed atheist, http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=245243