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Thursday 23 March 2017

The global brotherhood of Jehovah's servants rallies.



MARCH 21, 2017
RUSSIA

Jehovah’s Witnesses Mobilize Global Response to Threat of Ban in Russia

NEW YORK—Threatened with an imminent ban on their worship in Russia, Jehovah’s Witnesses are responding with a direct appeal to Kremlin and Supreme Court officials for relief through a global letter-writing campaign. The Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses is inviting the over 8,000,000 Witnesses worldwide to participate.

On March 15, 2017, Russia’s Ministry of Justice filed a claim with the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to label the Administrative Center of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia as extremist and liquidate it. The claim also seeks to ban the activities of the Administrative Center. If the Supreme Court upholds this claim, the Witnesses’ national headquarters near St. Petersburg will be shut down. Subsequently, some 400 registered Local Religious Organizations would be liquidated, outlawing the services of over 2,300 congregations of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia. The branch property, as well as places of worship used by Witnesses throughout the country, could be seized by the State. Additionally, individual Jehovah’s Witnesses would become subject to criminal prosecution for merely carrying out their worship activities. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the claim on April 5.

“The Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses wants to heighten attention to this critical situation,” states David A. Semonian, a spokesman at the Witnesses’ world headquarters. “Prosecuting non-violent, law-abiding citizens as if they were terrorists is clearly a misapplication of anti-extremist laws. Such prosecution is based on completely false grounds.”

The Witnesses’ global campaign is not without precedent. Nearly 20 years ago, Witnesses wrote to defend their fellow worshippers in Russia in response to a smear campaign by some members of the government in power at the time. Additionally, Witnesses have initiated past letter-writing campaigns to motivate government officials to end persecution of Witnesses in other countries, including Jordan, Korea, and Malawi.


“Reading the Bible, singing, and praying with fellow worshippers is clearly not criminal,” adds Mr. Semonian. “We hope that our global letter-writing campaign will motivate Russian officials to stop this unjustifiable action against our fellow worshippers.”

Media Contacts:

International: David A. Semonian, Office of Public Information, +1-845-524-3000


Russia: Yaroslav Sivulskiy, +7-812-702-2691

Addresses

 President of Russia
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
23 Ilyinka Str.
Moscow
Russian Federation
103132

 Prime Minister of Russia
Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev
2 Krasnopresnenskaya Naberezhnaya
Moscow
Russian Federation
103274


 Prosecutor General
Yury Yakovlevich Chayka
Prosecutor General’s Office of the
Russian Federation
15A Bolshaya Dmitrovka Str.
Moscow
Russian Federation
GSP-3
125993

 Minister of Justice
Alexander Vladimirovich Konovalov
Ministry of Justice of the Russian
Federation
14 Zhitnaya Str.
Moscow
Russian Federation
GSP-1
119991


 Minister of Foreign Affairs
Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
Russian Federation
32/34 Smolenskaya-Sennaya Square
Moscow
Russian Federation
119200

 The Chairman of the Supreme
Court
Viacheslav Mikhailovich Lebedev
Supreme Court of Russian Federation
15 Povarskaya Str.
Moscow
Russian Federation

121069

Predators:the plough of God

Re:Darwinian theology.

Flip-Sides of the Warfare Thesis
Cornelius Hunter

Empirical observations of the world don’t suggest that it arose by natural law and chance events. But that is what evolutionists believe, and so it is always interesting to see where they are coming from. What underlying beliefs or influences drive one to the age-old position of Epicureanism? Why would one believe the world arose by randomly swerving atoms, or randomly mutating genomes?

Dennis Venema, co-author of Adam and the Genome, a new book promoting evolution, makes his influences clear from the very first sentence:

Like many evangelicals, I (Dennis) grew up in an environment that was suspicious of science in general, and openly hostile to evolution in particular.

That speaks volumes. Venema is a Fellow of Biology with BioLogos. As he recounts, he is a refugee from creationism and what I call the flip-side of the Warfare Thesis. The Warfare Thesis holds that religion, and Christianity in particular, often conflicts with and opposes scientific advances. It can be traced at least as far back as Voltaire with his 18th-century mythical retelling of the Galileo Affair. Many later contributors embellished and established the myth that was eventually labeled the “Warfare Thesis.”

While the Warfare Thesis can be found in the evolution literature, creationists have their own version. In this reverse, or flip-side, the idea is that evolutionists are just atheists, pushed to believe in a naturalistic origins because of the rejection of God. To be sure, atheism today has been aided and abetted by evolution’s popularity. But from Epicureanism to Darwinism to neo-Darwinism and beyond, it is theism, not a-theism, that is doing the heavy lifting.

Why did Richard Bentley charge Thomas Burnet (an Anglican cleric who appealed to Scripture in his popular 17th-century cosmogony) with atheism? Burnet was indeed a latitudinarian, but hardly an atheist. Why did Charles Hodge charge Darwin’s new theory as atheism in disguise? Darwin was hardly a mainline Christian but, like Burnet, his 1859 tome on evolution was chock-full of theological discussion and claims about the Creator. Darwin’s strong arguments were based on theism, not a-theism.

These are the A-side and B-side of the Warfare Thesis. As Venema explains, he was taught that evolution was “pushed by atheists,” that Darwin and his theory “were evil,” and their mere utterance was tantamount to cursing, “and not mildly.” Evolution “was bad,” and “Science and God’s actions, at least in this case, were placed in opposition to each other.”

This flip-side of the Warfare Thesis sets its adherents up for a fall. One simply is in no position to comprehend the deep theology at work in Epicurean and evolutionary thought. Darwin presented his arguments with a patina of scientific jargon, and that formed the template for the genre. Consider this gem from Chapter 6 of the Origin:

Thus, we can hardly believe that the webbed feet of the upland goose or of the frigate-bird are of special use to these birds; we cannot believe that the similar bones in the arm of the monkey, in the fore-leg of the horse, in the wing of the bat, and in the flipper of the seal, are of special use to these animals. We may safely attribute these structures to inheritance.

One can read through such passages and almost conclude that Darwin is merely presenting empirical scientific reasoning and conclusions. And so it is with today’s evolutionary reasoning, such as this typical textbook example:

If the 11 species had independent origins, there is no reason why their [traits] should be correlated.

It all sounds so scientific. But of course it is not. This is the great deception of evolutionary thought. And those under the influence of the B-side of the Warfare Thesis — believing for certain that evolutionists are nothing more than atheist rascals — lack the tools and knowledge to reckon with it. Venema never had a chance. It was out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Unfortunately his story is all too common.

Venema also discusses another important factor in his thinking, and again, it is all too common. Evolutionists tend to place great value on theories. To be sure, theories are extremely important in science. But for centuries, we have seen an unhealthy, undue, emphasis on theories above the importance of following the data. Better to have a theory that doesn’t work very well than to have no theory at all (and no, creationism is not a theory).

Venema makes clear that this way of thinking was an important influence for him. At an early age he found biology to be a “dreadful bore compared with physics and chemistry.” Physics and chemistry were appealing because they were about principles. Biology “seemed to have no organizing principle behind it, whereas the others did.” Indeed, chemistry and physics had “underlying principles that gave order and cohesion to a body of facts.”

With this foundation, Venema was an evolutionist waiting to happen.


- See more at: https://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/03/flip-sides-of-the-warfare-thesis/#sthash.advQ4kED.dpuf

Engineering logic v. Darwinian logic.

New Skull-Hole Study Is No Evidence for Evolution
Jonathan Witt

A Science Daily headline exclaims, “Human skull evolved along with two-legged walking, study confirms.” Actually, the study confirmed no such thing. The headline is a pro-evolution gloss unwarranted by the findings.

They were reporting the publication of a scholarly paper in the Journal of Human Evolution. The paper itself waits until the first sentence of the Abstract to start overselling the evolutionary implications: “A more anteriorly positioned foramen magnum evolved in concert with bipedalism at least four times within Mammalia.” The paper doesn’t so much fail to show this; it never seriously attempts to do so. Its aims are elsewhere.

The study looked at various bipedal mammals, compared them to some quadruped relatives, and found that the foramen magnum — the hole for the spinal column in the base of the skull — tends to sit farther forward on the bipeds.

The findings aren’t revolutionary. They confirm a longstanding view. But if they hold up, they will give fossil hunters an improved diagnostic for deciding if a mammalian fossil skull was from a biped.

That’s interesting and useful, but it’s not evidence of evolution. That is the case for multiple reasons.

Engineering Logic vs. Darwinian Illogic

Having the foramen magnum closer to the front of the skull’s base makes good engineering sense in the case of mammalian bipeds. The features, in other words, appear to come as a matched set for good design reasons.

The matched set finding isn’t weird-world engineering either. The matched set phenomenon is commonplace in engineering. Bicycles have one kind of axle and four-wheeled vehicles another. On a car or wagon, those long axle shafts and the four-wheel architecture appear together because they make engineering sense.

There are also good engineering reasons to doubt the Darwinian evolution of quadruped to biped. Vast oceans of reduced fitness lie between a well-integrated quadruped design and a well-integrated biped design. Ann Gauger goes into some detail about this on pages 21-25 of Science and Human Origins. Here, suffice to say that evolving one tiny step at a time from quadruped to biped — gradually re-engineering all the numerous integrated details by random mutations — would force our aspiring quadruped to spend many generations distinctly less fit than he was before.

That’s a problem for evolution because natural selection doesn’t back less functional cripples generation after generation for the mere hope of a glorious upright and striding biped somewhere in the distant future. Natural selection is all about the here and now.

Finally, the study doesn’t describe a finely graded series of fossils moving from quadruped to various intermediates to bipeds. The study is all about the two distinct groups — biped and quadruped.

As for the misleading claims that the study confirms evolution, there is a quick fix at least for the opening words of the Science Daily article. The fix involves a deletion of information rather than the creation of new information (fitting since Darwinism’s verified success stories involve loss of biological information).

In this case, just cut the first three words, thus: “The evolution of bipedalism in fossil humans can be detected using a key feature of the skull — a claim that was previously contested but now has been further validated by researchers at Stony Brook University and the University of Texas at Austin.”


- See more at: https://www.evolutionnews.org/2017/03/new-skull-hole-study-is-no-evidence-for-evolution/#sthash.ixVBdtYZ.dpuf