Friday Church News Notes
Volume 20, Issue 31 - August 2, 2019
The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, though this does not imply an endorsement.
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE CAPTURES MORE STUNNING PHOTOS OF GOD’S AMAZING UNIVERSE (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - America’s Hubble Space Telescope has been capturing stunning photos of God’s amazing universe for nearly 30 years. Last week, Hubble captured a photo of a spiral galaxy known as NGC 2985. It is said to be 70 million light-years away, located in the constellation Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear. “The galaxy is at a perfect orientation for astronomers on Earth to see its incredible structure, with wide arms spreading out into space. The intricate, near-perfect symmetry on display here reveals the incredible complexity of NGC 2985. Multiple tightly wound spiral arms widen as they whirl outward from the galaxy’s bright core, slowly fading and dissipating until these majestic structures disappear into the emptiness of intergalactic space, bringing a beautiful end to their starry splendor” (“Hubble Captured Gorgeous Snapshot,” MSN, July 26, 2019). Earlier in July, Hubble captured an image of NGC 972, a spiral galaxy “that shows vibrant star formation pockets that look like red flowers” (“Hubble Snaps ‘In Bloom’ Spiral Galaxy,” Geek.com, July 1, 2019). If these astronomers didn’t have willful blinders on their eyes, they would all cry out with the Psalmist, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork” (Psalm 19:1). In 1999, observations by NASA astronomers, using the Hubble, suggested that there are 125 BILLION GALAXIES in the universe. The most up-to-date star count was announced in July 2003 as 70 sextillion observable stars (70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). Of course, that is probably only a small part of the actual number, and God knows their names. “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names” (Psalm 147:4).
GOOGLE ENGINEER: “OUR TECH IS NOT POLITICALLY NEUTRAL” (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Google Engineer,” DailyWire, July 24, 2019: “The engineer, Greg Coppola, a senior software engineer in the Google Assistant division, told Project Veritas that he was going public with his warning in an attempt to encourage increased transparency in Big Tech amid what he described as an increasingly politically biased atmosphere. Claiming there’s no bias in Google’s algorithms is ‘ridiculous,’ he said. ... ‘I’ve been coding since I was ten [years old.] I have a PhD, I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are,’ said Coppola (partial transcript via Project Veritas). ‘They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do.’ ‘I think we’re just at a really important point in human history,’ he said in explanation for why he is coming forward. ‘I think for a while we had tech that was politically neutral. Now we have tech that really, first of all, is taking sides in a political contest, which I think, you know, anytime you have big corporate power merging with political parties can be dangerous. And I think more generally we have to just decide now that we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people. It’s a time to decide, you know, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?’ Asked about Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifying in front of Congress last December that there’s no bias in his company's searches, Coppola said that while he respects Pichai a great deal, the claim is ‘ridiculous.’ ... ‘I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is.’ The problem of political bias in Big Tech has gotten worse in recent years, he argued. After about a decade of relative neutrality, people began to trust companies like Google to provide them unbiased means of finding information. ‘We haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda,’ he said. The turning point in Big Tech from relatively neutral to increasingly partisan, he suggested, was Donald Trump’s presidential run. ‘I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist...’ he said. ‘And that got picked up everywhere. I mean, every tech company, everybody in New York, everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that.’
CHRISTIAN DOCTOR IN ENGLAND LOSES HIS JOB OVER TRANSGENDER LANGUAGE (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Christian Doctor,” The Telegraph, July 10, 2019: “A Christian doctor lost his job in a government department after he refused to refer to ‘a six-foot-tall bearded man’ as ‘madam’, a tribunal heard. Dr David Mackereth, 56, claims he was sacked as a disability benefits assessor by the Department of Work and Pensions over his religious beliefs. The father-of-four alleges he was asked in a conversation with a line manager: ‘If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as she and Mrs, would you do that?’ Dr Mackereth, an evangelist who now works as an emergency doctor in Shropshire, claims his contract was then terminated over his refusal to use transgendered pronouns. He argues that he was dismissed ‘not because of any realistic concerns over the rights and sensitivities of transgender individuals, but because of my refusal to make an abstract ideological pledge’. The doctor is now suing the government at an employment tribunal for discrimination on the grounds of his religious belief. A hearing in Birmingham was told how Dr Mackereth believes transgenderism is a ‘delusional belief’ and an ideology ‘which I disbelieve and detest’. In a statement admitted into evidence, he told the court: ‘If you believe in gender fluidity, gender is no more than one’s own fantasy about oneself.’ ... In a statement put before the court, Dr Mackereth said: ‘I appreciate that in the present political climate, some people, including some of those who believe they are transgender, may find my beliefs to be offensive. However, in a free society, this is not a good enough reason to censor my beliefs and coerce me to act contrary to my conscience. Moreover, as a doctor, my responsibility is always to act in good conscience in the best interest of the patients--not to adopt various fancies, prejudices, or delusions, to avoid offence at all cost.’ Dr Mackereth added that his inherent belief is that transgenderism is a ‘rebellion against God, which is both pointless and sinful’. He said: ‘I am, of course, aware that there are men or women who believe they have been trapped in a wrong body, and I do not question the sincerity of their convictions. A small number of such people have always existed. Up until recently, such a belief was considered by medics to be delusional and a symptom of a medical disorder. It is only recently that transgenderism has been recognised as normal and such delusional beliefs accepted at face value. What is responsible for that change is political pressure, not scientific evidence.’”
FRANCE LET A WIFE SENTENCE HER DISABLED HUSBAND TO DEATH (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “France Let a Wife,” The Stream, July 11, 2019: “[Vincent Lambert died today, at age 42.] He became a quadriplegic in a ‘vegetative state’ in 2008. France’s highest court ruled that his food and water should be removed. ... make no mistake, the French government is guilty here. It could and should have intervened to protect this citizen. But the bad actor here seems to be the person with legal power over Vincent’s fate: his wife. ... Mr. Lambert was not in excruciating pain. He seemed to live comfortably on simple food and water support. He responded to stimuli. ... Vincent’s mother reported: ‘He sleeps at night, wakes up during the day, and looks at me when I talk,’ she said, according to Reuters. ‘He only needs to be fed through a special device and his doctor wants to deprive him of this so that he can die, while legal experts have shown that this is not necessary.’ She also emphasized that he has reacted to their voices, stating, ‘In May, when learning about his planned death, he cried.’ ... We have no room to throw stones. Too few of us recall the horrors of Terri Schiavo’s death in 2005. As I wrote at the time: Here’s a woman who was not in a coma, was not brain dead, and didn’t require elaborate machines to stay alive—just a nutrition drip in the stomach, of the sort any one of us might need after, say, a tonsillectomy. ... And yet American courts decided that her adulterous husband had the right to impose her death by starvation and thirst. ... As St. Louis neurologist William Burke told author Wesley Smith, as he was researching his book on euthanasia Forced Exit ... ‘Imagine going one day without a glass of water! Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death.’ We should prepare ourselves. Throughout the West, collapsed birth rates and huge cohorts of retirees will exert enormous pressure on health systems. Countries with few babies, and few workers paying in, will have a very strong motive to accept active euthanasia. As in a poison pill, or a needle in the arm. It’s quicker, cheaper, and in one sense more ‘merciful’ than the ‘passive’ method of letting people like Mr. Lambert die of thirst. That’s in our future. ... And I think judges and policymakers in places like France are purposely authorizing the slow, agonizing deaths by thirst of patients such as Mr. Lambert. Why? Precisely because they’re so horrible. The public, sentimental and easy to manipulate via almost unanimous media, will respond not by demanding that sick people like Mr. Lambert be saved. But instead, that we kill them more quickly and painlessly. Like the animals that Darwinism tells us we really are.”
DID PETER GET IT WRONG? (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from Creation Moments, June 13, 2019: “In both of his epistles, the apostle Peter writes about the Flood. In his first epistle, he wrote: “God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight persons, were saved by water.” Peter goes on to compare the Flood to baptism. The account of the Flood in Genesis shows that Noah and his family were saved from the wrath of God on a sinful world by the Ark and, therefore, waterproofed through that judgment. The ordinance of baptism is, therefore, predicated on the historicity of the Flood and the necessity of it being a worldwide Flood. In 2 Peter 3, the apostle refers to scoffers who believe that all processes have continued from the beginning at the same rate as they proceed today. This is the evolutionary principle that the present is the key to the past. Peter refutes this argument by pointing out that the whole world was created by God and that the whole world was deluged by Him. He writes that the scoffers have deliberately ignored these two world events. The application is clear. Modern evolutionists and deep time geologists are like Peter’s scoffers, interpreting the world as a gradual development of slow processes over long aeons of time. Peter is clear that the biblical account of the Flood really happened, and, if he were wrong, the whole of his teaching would fall apart.”
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mt. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Ro. 13:11-14).
GOOGLE ENGINEER: “OUR TECH IS NOT POLITICALLY NEUTRAL” (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Google Engineer,” DailyWire, July 24, 2019: “The engineer, Greg Coppola, a senior software engineer in the Google Assistant division, told Project Veritas that he was going public with his warning in an attempt to encourage increased transparency in Big Tech amid what he described as an increasingly politically biased atmosphere. Claiming there’s no bias in Google’s algorithms is ‘ridiculous,’ he said. ... ‘I’ve been coding since I was ten [years old.] I have a PhD, I have five years’ experience at Google and I just know how algorithms are,’ said Coppola (partial transcript via Project Veritas). ‘They don’t write themselves. We write them to do what we want them to do.’ ‘I think we’re just at a really important point in human history,’ he said in explanation for why he is coming forward. ‘I think for a while we had tech that was politically neutral. Now we have tech that really, first of all, is taking sides in a political contest, which I think, you know, anytime you have big corporate power merging with political parties can be dangerous. And I think more generally we have to just decide now that we kind of are seeing tech use its power to manipulate people. It’s a time to decide, you know, do we run the technology, does the technology run us?’ Asked about Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifying in front of Congress last December that there’s no bias in his company's searches, Coppola said that while he respects Pichai a great deal, the claim is ‘ridiculous.’ ... ‘I think everyone who supports anything other than the Democrats, anyone who’s pro-Trump or in any way deviates from what CNN and the New York Times are pushing, notices how bad it is.’ The problem of political bias in Big Tech has gotten worse in recent years, he argued. After about a decade of relative neutrality, people began to trust companies like Google to provide them unbiased means of finding information. ‘We haven’t had time to absorb the fact that tech might have an agenda,’ he said. The turning point in Big Tech from relatively neutral to increasingly partisan, he suggested, was Donald Trump’s presidential run. ‘I think as the election started to ramp up, the angle that the Democrats and the media took was that anyone who liked Donald Trump was a racist...’ he said. ‘And that got picked up everywhere. I mean, every tech company, everybody in New York, everybody in the field of computer science basically believed that.’
CHRISTIAN DOCTOR IN ENGLAND LOSES HIS JOB OVER TRANSGENDER LANGUAGE (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Christian Doctor,” The Telegraph, July 10, 2019: “A Christian doctor lost his job in a government department after he refused to refer to ‘a six-foot-tall bearded man’ as ‘madam’, a tribunal heard. Dr David Mackereth, 56, claims he was sacked as a disability benefits assessor by the Department of Work and Pensions over his religious beliefs. The father-of-four alleges he was asked in a conversation with a line manager: ‘If you have a man six foot tall with a beard who says he wants to be addressed as she and Mrs, would you do that?’ Dr Mackereth, an evangelist who now works as an emergency doctor in Shropshire, claims his contract was then terminated over his refusal to use transgendered pronouns. He argues that he was dismissed ‘not because of any realistic concerns over the rights and sensitivities of transgender individuals, but because of my refusal to make an abstract ideological pledge’. The doctor is now suing the government at an employment tribunal for discrimination on the grounds of his religious belief. A hearing in Birmingham was told how Dr Mackereth believes transgenderism is a ‘delusional belief’ and an ideology ‘which I disbelieve and detest’. In a statement admitted into evidence, he told the court: ‘If you believe in gender fluidity, gender is no more than one’s own fantasy about oneself.’ ... In a statement put before the court, Dr Mackereth said: ‘I appreciate that in the present political climate, some people, including some of those who believe they are transgender, may find my beliefs to be offensive. However, in a free society, this is not a good enough reason to censor my beliefs and coerce me to act contrary to my conscience. Moreover, as a doctor, my responsibility is always to act in good conscience in the best interest of the patients--not to adopt various fancies, prejudices, or delusions, to avoid offence at all cost.’ Dr Mackereth added that his inherent belief is that transgenderism is a ‘rebellion against God, which is both pointless and sinful’. He said: ‘I am, of course, aware that there are men or women who believe they have been trapped in a wrong body, and I do not question the sincerity of their convictions. A small number of such people have always existed. Up until recently, such a belief was considered by medics to be delusional and a symptom of a medical disorder. It is only recently that transgenderism has been recognised as normal and such delusional beliefs accepted at face value. What is responsible for that change is political pressure, not scientific evidence.’”
FRANCE LET A WIFE SENTENCE HER DISABLED HUSBAND TO DEATH (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “France Let a Wife,” The Stream, July 11, 2019: “[Vincent Lambert died today, at age 42.] He became a quadriplegic in a ‘vegetative state’ in 2008. France’s highest court ruled that his food and water should be removed. ... make no mistake, the French government is guilty here. It could and should have intervened to protect this citizen. But the bad actor here seems to be the person with legal power over Vincent’s fate: his wife. ... Mr. Lambert was not in excruciating pain. He seemed to live comfortably on simple food and water support. He responded to stimuli. ... Vincent’s mother reported: ‘He sleeps at night, wakes up during the day, and looks at me when I talk,’ she said, according to Reuters. ‘He only needs to be fed through a special device and his doctor wants to deprive him of this so that he can die, while legal experts have shown that this is not necessary.’ She also emphasized that he has reacted to their voices, stating, ‘In May, when learning about his planned death, he cried.’ ... We have no room to throw stones. Too few of us recall the horrors of Terri Schiavo’s death in 2005. As I wrote at the time: Here’s a woman who was not in a coma, was not brain dead, and didn’t require elaborate machines to stay alive—just a nutrition drip in the stomach, of the sort any one of us might need after, say, a tonsillectomy. ... And yet American courts decided that her adulterous husband had the right to impose her death by starvation and thirst. ... As St. Louis neurologist William Burke told author Wesley Smith, as he was researching his book on euthanasia Forced Exit ... ‘Imagine going one day without a glass of water! Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death.’ We should prepare ourselves. Throughout the West, collapsed birth rates and huge cohorts of retirees will exert enormous pressure on health systems. Countries with few babies, and few workers paying in, will have a very strong motive to accept active euthanasia. As in a poison pill, or a needle in the arm. It’s quicker, cheaper, and in one sense more ‘merciful’ than the ‘passive’ method of letting people like Mr. Lambert die of thirst. That’s in our future. ... And I think judges and policymakers in places like France are purposely authorizing the slow, agonizing deaths by thirst of patients such as Mr. Lambert. Why? Precisely because they’re so horrible. The public, sentimental and easy to manipulate via almost unanimous media, will respond not by demanding that sick people like Mr. Lambert be saved. But instead, that we kill them more quickly and painlessly. Like the animals that Darwinism tells us we really are.”
DID PETER GET IT WRONG? (Friday Church News Notes, August 2, 2019, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from Creation Moments, June 13, 2019: “In both of his epistles, the apostle Peter writes about the Flood. In his first epistle, he wrote: “God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight persons, were saved by water.” Peter goes on to compare the Flood to baptism. The account of the Flood in Genesis shows that Noah and his family were saved from the wrath of God on a sinful world by the Ark and, therefore, waterproofed through that judgment. The ordinance of baptism is, therefore, predicated on the historicity of the Flood and the necessity of it being a worldwide Flood. In 2 Peter 3, the apostle refers to scoffers who believe that all processes have continued from the beginning at the same rate as they proceed today. This is the evolutionary principle that the present is the key to the past. Peter refutes this argument by pointing out that the whole world was created by God and that the whole world was deluged by Him. He writes that the scoffers have deliberately ignored these two world events. The application is clear. Modern evolutionists and deep time geologists are like Peter’s scoffers, interpreting the world as a gradual development of slow processes over long aeons of time. Peter is clear that the biblical account of the Flood really happened, and, if he were wrong, the whole of his teaching would fall apart.”
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mt. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Ro. 13:11-14).
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Distributed by Way of Life Literature., publisher of Bible Study Materials and reports for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Established in 1974, Way of Life Literature is a fundamental Baptist preaching and publishing ministry based in Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. Brother Cloud lives in South Asia where he has been a church planting missionary since 1979. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY (REPORTS AND FRIDAY NEWS) IS NOT DEVOTIONAL. IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
The Way of Life Literature preaching and publishing ministry is based at Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. A mail stop is maintained in Port Huron, Michigan.
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