Lux Lucet

Ark Encounter rainbow lights.

We’re down to the last day of 2016. To say the least, it’s been an interesting year. One which, Lord willing, I’ll review in a little more depth later this weekend. But for now, here’s a few thoughts on the news from this past week.

The Ark and the Rainbow

Since the Ark Encounter theme park is located just a little south of Cincinnati, from time to time articles about it appear in the local paper. For those who may not be familiar with Ark Encounter, it’s a park built around a full sized replica of Noah’s Ark. Having opened in the summer of 2016, the attraction is part of Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis ministry, which runs the Creation Museum, located in the Cincinnati area.

The main message of both Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum is that the history presented in the early chapters of Genesis is just that, actual, literal history. Adam and Eve were actual people. There really was a Noah who built an actual ark of a certain size and shape. God really did end the world as it was know by means of a cataclysmic flood that wiped out all human and most animal life except what was on the ark, etc.

This is sound Bible teaching, but definitely not the sort of thing that plays well in some quarters. In some cases, opposition comes from within the Evangelical community. In others, it comes from without.

LGBTQ activists are the latest group to be put off by Ark Encounter, this time by a light display that baths the replica ark in rainbow colored lights at night.

As Ham puts it, the rainbow is not a symbol of “freedom, love, pride or the LGBTQ movement.” It is the sign of the Noahic covenant, God’s promise to never again destroy the earth by water.

Naturally, LGBTQ activists reacted with scorn to Ham’s comments, with one expressing concern for the effect Ham’s message will have on younger people.

But who has the real compassion for young people wrestling with the sin of homosexuality? A man who presents the truth of what God says in his Word, or a man who peddles the lie that homosexuality is merely a lifestyle choice with all the ethical weight of a decision on what color carpet to install in the family room.

The Death of George Michael

George Michael, 53, was found dead in his home on Christmas day. And as is generally the case with celebrity deaths, his passing has been the occasion for a great deal of public discussion.

Michael was a known homosexual, which has led some to speculate that his death is AIDs related. As of this writing, no cause of death has been officially determined. This report from Reuters indicates autopsy results are “inconclusive.”

While following reports concerning Michael’s death, I recalled a dust-up from this year’s election cycle. Bob Marshall, a senatorial candidate from Virginia, found himself in hot water for his remarks that homosexual behavior “cuts your life by about 20 years.”

Although Marshall was roundly denounced for his comment, it appears that there is a scientific basis for what he says. According this study done in Vancouver, Canada in the early 1990s “the life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 21 years less than for all men.”

These results are unsurprising. As the Word of God testifies, those who practice homosexuality “[receive] in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.”

That sort of language sounds harsh to modern ears. And indeed it is harsh. But it is also the truth.

Whatever the actual cause of death turns out to be for Michael, it would not at all surprise this author if it is in some way related to his openly sinful homosexual lifestyle.

One wonders whether the LGBTQ rights activists who so vocally promote the homosexual agenda and claim to care for bullied young people ever counsel them about the destructive effects a life of homosexuality has on both the body and the soul.

My guess is, probably not.

The Russians are Coming!

On the fake news front, the Obama administration continues its attempt to pin the origin of the devastating Wikileaks emails on Russian hackers.

The whole “Russian hacker” meme the Democrats have to explain Hillary Clinton’s shocking upset loss to Donald Trump has always struck this author as a sort of a lame “the dog ate my homework” sort of excuse.

Hillary Clinton lost because she was the single most dishonest presidential candidate in my lifetime, and very likely in the history of the nation.

And not only was she profoundly dishonest, she was also incompetent. Did the Russians make her blurt out the line about the “deplorables”?

Or how about Obamacare. Was Vladimir Putin responsible for the monster hike in hike medical premiums two weeks before the election?

Just this week, Obama announced that he has signed an executive order requiring the removal of 35 Russian diplomats from the US and the closing two Russian compounds.

The basis Obama’s action is an FBI report that supposedly details how Ivan “compromis[ed] and exploit[ed] networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election.”

The document gets off to a rather odd start, featuring the following disclaimer:

Not being one who often reads FBI reports, the significance of this statement wasn’t immediately clear to me. Do all FBI reports have this disclaimer? former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, who has written extensively on the Russian hacker meme indicates in this interview that he has never seen of report issued by an intelligence agency backing up a hostile act by one government against another with a disclaimer (you may see Roberts comments in this interview at the 6:05 mark).

Roberts has written a column analyzing the report here. According to Roberts, “The report does not provide any evidence that the tools and infrastructure were used to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. The report is simply a description of what is said to be Russian capabilities…Thus the DHS report makes it completely clear that the Obama regime has no evidential basis for its allegations on the basis of which it has imposed more sanctions on Russia.”

In other words, the FBI and DHS are guilty of issuing fake news.

It’s as if a prosecutor were to show a jury a picture of a dead body with a bullet hole in it and proceed to argue that the defendant was guilty. That would never make the grade as proof in a court of law. In order to prove guilt, it is not enough to show the picture of a dead body, the prosecutor must link the dead body and the gun to the defendant. Unless he does this, there is no case.

If the Obama administration expects the American public to take these charges seriously, they need to actually show proof that the Russians were involved in the hack. For that matter, they need to show that there was a hack in the first place. They have done neither of these things.

By way of counter evidence, Julian Assange of Wikileaks has stated emphatically that the source of the emails was not Russian or some other state actor.

In an interview with Sean Hannity, Assange stated emphatically that Russia was not the source of the emails. “In order to prevent a distraction to our publications, we’ve had to come out and say, ‘no, it’s not a state party’…Our source is not the Russian government.”

For my part, Assange is much more credible than the Obama administration which has been caught in numerous, significant lies. Not the least of which was Obama himself claiming that he knew nothing about Hillary’s illegal email servers, only to have it come out that he was emailing her on those very same servers using a pseudonym. I wonder how they “liar, liar pants on fire” in Russian.

At any rate, it seems to me that the Democrats would do well spending more time reflecting on how they might better appeal to the American voters and less time concocting conspiracy theories and fake news stories about Russian hackers.