Good Reads 03/24/18

What I’ve Been Reading, Listening to, and Watching this Week

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What Mark Steyn Says: “Eight days ago The Sunday Mirror reported on “Britain’s ‘worst ever’ child grooming scandal“. The headline editor’s sub-quotes are most prudent: This is the “worst ever” at the time of writing, but who knows what’ll come along next week? This time it’s the Shropshire town of Telford:

Hundreds of young girls raped, beaten, sold for sex and some even KILLED

If you’re saying, “Hey, wait a minute. Telford? Surely you mean Rotherham? Or Rochdale? Or Oxford? Or [Your Town Here]?”, well, yes, this story reads (especially for yours truly, who spent several days with the poor damaged young ‘uns of Rotherham) with a certain numbing familiarity:

“Hours after my second termination, I was taken by one of my abusers to be raped by more men.

“The worst moment came just after my 16th birthday when I was drugged and gang raped by five men.

“Days later, the ringleader turned up at my house and told me he’d burn it down if I breathed a word of what had happened.”

As in Rotherham and everywhere else, all this was happening in plain sight. The Spectator‘s Douglas Murray:

Every arm of the state – including council staff, social workers and the police – allowed the mass gang-rape of children to go on in their town. And we learn – once again – how fear of accusations of ‘racism’ meant that the identities of the culprits were hidden and cases were not investigated.

Because, as in Rotherham, it was white working-class girls being gang-raped by “Asian” men – “Asian” being the coy euphemism for Muslim males of Pakistani origin, notwithstanding that it’s immensely insulting to Indian Hindus, Sri Lankans, Chinese, etc. When Douglas indicts the various “arms of the state”, we should also add the politicians – Labour and Tory – for whom these stories are not helpful to the multiculti narrative. Which is why, in the week of Telford, they chose to ban and deport more explicit threats to public order and social tranquility such as, er, Lauren Southern and Brittany Pettibone. But, as Douglas notes, we should also indict another arm of the state – the dominant national broadcaster. The BBC was so panicked by the mass sex-slavery of Shropshire children by Pakistani men that, as the German media did after the Cologne assaults, they chose not to cover it at all.”

My Take: This is very hard to take, yet very real. And it is going on in many parts of the West. It is what happens when society bows to the idol of diversity. And when the church follows society’s lead and promotes diversity as a response to white racism instead of proclaiming the Gospel and unity through Christ’s ministry of reconciliation. If you have the stomach for this, you should read all of Steyn’s article.

Bible and Science

What Peter Leithart Says: “Stephen Jay Gould famously offered a solution to the religion v. science conflict: Consign each to its separate corner; they belong to separate domains; they don’t conflict because they don’t overlap. Problem solved. Not so fast, says John Lennox (Seven Days That Divide the World). One problem is that Gould’s solution often carries the covert implication “that science deals with reality, and religion with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and God. The impression that science deals with truth and religion deals with fantasy” (27-28). More importantly, the two contenders won’t stay in their corners. Their subject-matter overlaps: “the Bible talks about some of the things that science talks about,” and Lennox says it’s perfectly legitimate, when warranted, to draw scientific conclusions from Scripture (28).

My Take: As often as not, scientific consensus is not a whole lot more than an educated guess–if even that. Think global warming (see the next story). Christians, and everyone else for that matter, should pay a whole lot more attention to what the Bible says about the world and less attention to the scientific consensus. For instance, knowing that all humans stem from one human being (and from two after the flood) should be a help to biologist tracing DNA. Similarly, knowing that Adam was created with the ability to speak and that the multitude of languages we speak today originated at Babel would greatly assist linguists.

Flawed Climate Models

What David Henderson and Charles Hooper (Hoover Institution) Say: “The atmosphere is about 0.8˚ Celsius warmer than it was in 1850. Given that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen 40 percent since 1750 and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, a reasonable hypothesis is that the increase in CO2 has caused, and is causing, global warming. But a hypothesis is just that. We have virtually no ability to run controlled experiments, such as raising and lowering CO2 levels in the atmosphere and measuring the resulting change in temperatures. What else can we do? We can build elaborate computer models that use physics to calculate how energy flows into, through, and out of our planet’s land, water, and atmosphere. Indeed, such models have been created and are frequently used today to make dire predictions about the fate of our Earth. The problem is that these models have serious limitations that drastically limit their value in making predictions and in guiding policy.”

My Take: The Vikings didn’t call Greenland “green” for no reason. But after inhabiting the island for a while, there was a rapid change in the temperature. One report found that “Average temperature dropped 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) in only 80 years.” Within two hundred years of this change, the Vikings had left. It is no surprise atheist scientist would develop anthropocentric theories about everything, such as man being the main contributor to climate change. Christians should know better.  God created the heavens and earth. And ever since He did, the climate has been changing–long before the industrial age and major man-induced emmissions of CO2. We should pay attention to such things. But to call CO2, a naturally occuring and extremely important gas, a pollutant is to ignore God’s design of this world.