Newsweek Poll

Newsweek has recently released poll results which may be of interest to some of our readers:

A belief in God and an identification with an organized religion are widespread throughout the country, according to the survey.

Nine in 10 (91 percent) of American adults say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion.

Christians far outnumber members of any other faith in the country, with 82 percent of the poll's respondents identifying themselves as such. Another 5 percent say they follow a non-Christian faith, such as Judaism or Islam.

This is intriguing but I wonder what the breakdown is between nominal Christians and those who take their faith seriously. It seems doubtful that 82% of the country is committed to living out the mandates of the Gospel to love God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

In any event, the following statistics were stunning:

Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view.

In other words, even among college graduates belief in what is called Young Earth Creationism is held by substantial numbers of people.

This must drive the Darwin boosters at the National Center for Science Education batty. After seventy five years of almost exclusive inculcation of evolution into students in American public schools a third of college grads still believe in that form of special creation most derided by Darwinians.

It would be interesting to see, were the question properly put, how many college-educated respondents would say that they accept some form of intelligent design, or even old-earth creationism.

There's more to this poll at the link.

RLC

Visiting Fathers

This essay by Joe Carter is must-reading for men, especially fathers. I wanted to save it for Father's Day, but it's too good and too important to hold onto.

Not everyone will agree with him, but he makes an important point nonetheless, and he makes it powerfully - children need fathers. Read the comments at the end. Also, the book he mentions by David Blankenhorn is excellent.

RLC

Partial-Birth Abortion

Late in pregnancy the baby's body is removed from the mother except for its head. Scissors are then inserted into the base of the skull, killing the child. The brains are then vacuumed out, the head is crushed, and removed from the mother.

This is called dilation and extraction or partial-birth abortion.

Most people, if they understood the details, would call it infanticide, but it had been legal until 2003 when President Bush signed legislation that banned it. Challenges to the law wound their way through the courts until finally yesterday the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the law prohibiting this barbaric practice was constitutional.

How did the major candidates for President respond? All of the Republican candidates - McCain, Giuliani and Romney - praised the decision. All of the Democrats deplored it. Senator Clinton saw it as an erosion of our constitutional rights. Senator Obama said that he strongly disagreed with the Court's ruling. John Edwards said he could not disagree more strongly and that "This hard right turn [!] is a stark reminder of why Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2008 election. Too much is at stake - starting with, as the Court made all too clear today, a woman's right to choose."

Indeed. In the last year from which statistics are available, 2000, there were 2200 of these gruesome procedures. Edwards is telling us that if a Democrat is elected president in '08 the next Supreme Court justice to be nominated will be one who thinks partial-birth abortion is just fine. Perhaps this is why some people are saying that the Democrats have embraced the culture of death.

This is also why elections matter and why it matters whether Republicans or Democrats control the levers of power. Both of George Bush's Supreme Court appointees voted to uphold the law banning this procedure but now that the Democrats control the judiciary committee there's very little chance that a like-minded justice will be appointed to fill the next opening.

RLC