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Reformed Perspective Magazine
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The foundation of human rights |
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Our rights come from what God prohibits
by Stephen Pidgeon
Human rights. A noble phrase, to be sure. But in a godless world, there are no rights, because a human right, to be a right, must demonstrate an authority greater than the authority of the state. This is why in a fascist state there are no rights, because there is no authority recognized as being superior to the state. Where there are only the edicts of the state, there are no rights, only privileges and crimes: privileges the state grants (and can take away) and crimes it forbids.
Rights, privileges and crimes all have similar natures. They all spring from prohibitions. Take the edict “you shall not commit the crime of murder.” The crime is defined by a prohibition on human behavior. Similarly, the right to life springs from the Godly prohibition on human behavior found in the commandment “thou shall not murder.”
This is the common nature between crimes, privileges, and rights. However, when the state respects no authority greater than the state (fascism), rights become nothing more than privileges that are granted by the state. Only when the state recognizes Divine Authority is there an opportunity for human rights.
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Why Men are superior to Women - a pro-life analogy |
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by Jon Dykstra
What follows is the text of a brochure that was delivered to more than 20,000 houses in Edmonton, Alberta. It got a lot of people talking... and quite a number of them screaming. It turns out the title was the cause of their conniptions - they thought the brochure was an attack on women. Of course the title was not meant to be taken seriously, but when it was explained that, rather than being an attack on women, this was a defense of the unborn, much of the screaming continued. It seems humorless feminists are also pro-choice.
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Do machines count better than men? |
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American electoral results are tabulated by machines, while in Canada national elections are still counted by hand. Should we follow the US lead?
by Jon Dykstra
Chuck Hagel was supposed to lose. In 1996 Hagel ran for an open US senate seat and while he wasn’t an unknown, he didn’t have the name-recognition of his opponent, the sitting Governor of Nebraska. So Hagel was supposed to lose.
Instead he pulled off a big upset, winning with 56 per cent of the vote and becoming the first Republican to win a Senate seat in Nebraska in twenty-four years.
How did he do it? Was it his TV ads, his campaign literature, or maybe his interviews with the press? How did Chuck Hagel sway the electorate so successfully?
Or did he sway them at all? Up until 1995 Hagel had been the CEO of American Information Systems Inc, the company that supplied the paperless voting machines that were used to count approximately 85 per cent of the votes in Hagel’s senatorial race. When this news came out years later, a host of websites sprang up denouncing the election as a fix, with several doing so using a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin:
“The people who cast the votes don’t decide an election; the people who count the votes do.”
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by Martin VanWoudenberg
With many clear dangers and temptations on the Internet, and the prolific use of it among all age groups, it’s logical that many would seek a filtering solution. How can you ensure your teen isn’t looking at things he/she shouldn’t? How can you keep your pre-teen safe from online predators? How can a family man fight the temptation he faces, when nobody monitors what he’s doing late at night? Enter Covenant Eyes. It promises a suite of tools for keeping Internet users safe and accountable.
Over the course of several months, I ran the program through its paces to see how easy it might be to trick, break, or work around its system. Its ability to prevent access to offensive sites, and report ones that may be questionable is key to its usability and success. But does it work, and should you buy it?
What it is
Covenant Eyes’ primary function is as an accountability service. A person, the “user,” creates an account, installs the software, and then selects an “accountability partner” – someone who will receive a detailed account of all the user’s surfing habits, including search terms they typed in, sites visited, and time spent online.
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Five things I wish I had known... about being a father |
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by Robert Andrews
As I have met many fathers around the country at conferences and homeschool conventions, I am often reminded of my own time as a father with three children in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s.
Charles Dickens used a phrase to describe the time of the French Revolution that in many ways describes my experience as a parent – it was the “best of times and the worst of times.” Nothing in my life has given me as much fulfillment and joy as being a father to my children. I can also now see that nothing has been as difficult, even though at the time I was blissfully oblivious to most of my weaknesses and shortcomings. Only as my children have become adults have many of my own failures surfaced.
What follows are five of those “blind spots” to which I was completely unaware as a young father and that have come to light only in the past few years.
1) I did not see that loving my children is different from worshiping them
We are all in some way unconscious idolaters in our hearts. For some of us, our prevalent idol is our job, money, success, personal recognition, fame, leisure time, entertainment, sports, sex, intellectual attainment or even religious achievement or Christian ministry. These are all perfectly innocent pursuits in themselves until they come to occupy the central place in our hearts around which all else revolves – the place reserved for God alone.
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