"The essence of paganism is idolatry: the self-aggrandizing worship of false gods in place of the God of love who is Creator of the universe and Lord of Life. How can we know that an idol, a false god, and not the true God, is being worshiped? I submit to you that there is a foolproof test: False gods always demand the blood of innocents. A pagan culture is always, in the end, a culture of death."
—Robert P. George

"Where the innocent and just are slain, there the god being worshiped is not the God of Israel, the Lord of Life, but rather Moloch in one or another of his protean disguises. Paganism is a permanent threat. The worship of false gods is a constant temptation."
—Robert P. George

"The idea that a human is not a person until another human says so is the old slaveholders view. You aren't a progressive if you're relying on the logic of Dred Scott v Sanford to justify elective abortion. In fact you're pathetically regressive."
—Mike Adams

"Feminists should condemn Bill Cosby for attacking his victims while they were unconscious and unable to fight back. But that would undermine their case for elective abortion."
—Mike Adams

"There is no reason to refrain from joking about abortion if the unborn is not human. If having an abortion is no different than picking a scab, clipping your fingernails, or otherwise maintaining your own body then nothing - and I mean nothing - that is said about it can be considered beyond the pale."
—Mike Adams

"When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would be right to kill him."
—Peter Singer

"The right of the unborn not to be killed and the right of a woman not to be pregnant may be at odds. But they are not equal rights. Staying alive is more precious and more basic than not being pregnant. We know what we are doing when we kill a child."
—John Piper

"I would put the life of a mother over the life of a fetus every single time — even if I still need to acknowledge my conviction that the fetus is indeed a life. A life worth sacrificing."
—Mary Elizabeth Williams (writer, Salon magazine)

“We know that the sinless priests of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who accepted as the nectar and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but incessant human sacrifice accompanied by horrible torments…[C]ertain human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular fury against witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that involved such a war against children.”
—GK Chesterton

"On the ultrasound screen, I could see the heart beating . . . the baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall."
—Brenda Pratt Shafer, RN, testifying in 1996 before the Senate Judiciary Committee

"....[re partial birth abortion].... the fetus’ arms and legs are delivered outside the uterus while the fetus is alive; witnesses to the procedure report seeing the body of the fetus moving outside the woman’s body. . . . At this point, the abortion procedure has the appearance of a live birth. As stated by one group of physicians “as the physician manually performs breech extraction of the body of a live fetus, excepting the head, she continues in the apparent role of an obstetrician delivering a child.” . . . With only the head of the fetus remaining in utero, the abortionist tears open the skull."
—Justice Anthony Kennedy (1996)

"No one is arguing that the government should forcibly abort babies. Rather, the argument is (apparently) that if a family wants to commit infanticide, there is not much difference between that and an abortion. For what it's worth, I find it a little repugnant, but I struggle to see anything really "wrong" with it. Babies prior to a certain age do not have certain moral properties that make them entities worth legal protection. Consider animals; an adult chicken is probably about as mentally aware and capable of feeling pain as an infant is, and yet I doubt you are a vegetarian.

As for the mentally disabled, we already essentially require someone (either an individual or the state) to act as their guardian and caretaker. On some level they do not have the same set of rights as the rest of us do."
—Taylor Portnoy Kessinger, PhD. (Evo-EcoBiology)

"I see abortion as the ultimate act of bullying. It's just bigger and stronger people tormenting and killing those who are weaker and smaller, usually for no other reason than that they're in the way of something we want, or they're just plain inconvenient. This is a tragedy, and it needs to stop."
—Clinton Wilcox

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956

“The logical sequel to the destruction of what are called ‘unwanted children’ will be the elimination of what will be called ‘unwanted lives.’”
— Malcolm Muggeridge

"A generation unwilling to oppose the murder of children because it may offend adults is hopelessly confused. Where on earth could they have learned that the comfort of adults is more valuable than the lives of children? Maybe all this talk of discomfort means we are getting close to the central issue."
—Mike S. Adams (Facebook comment, 4/25/14)

"By failing to preach on abortion we are encouraging not only cognitive, but moral, dissonance of the highest order. We are not merely giving sanction to the evil of our age, we are also misrepresenting the gospel. We think we're making it easier for seekers to find Christ, but we're actually making it easier for them to never feel any real need for Him. After all, if God isn't all that upset over the heartless, cold-blooded murder of 56 million defenseless babies, how concerned can He be over any of our sins?"
—Rolley Haggard

"An entire generation has now come of age taking for granted the liberty to kill one's children in the dim, soft refuge which was once considered the safest of all: the womb....whereas once it was thought that the helpless had the greatest claim on our protection, now it is held that they have the least. Most medical schools have rewritten the Hippocratic Oath to accommodate the view that a physician may be a killer as well as a healer."
— J. Budziszewski

"Moral/spiritual matters are preeminently the domain of the church. Political overtones notwithstanding, abortion is arguably the moral/spiritual issue of our day. If we don't speak to it, who will?

"Abortion is, in essence, a moral and spiritual issue. It is a violation of the commandment “thou shalt not murder.” It is political only secondarily and arbitrarily. Just because it has been made part of the national political discourse, that does not alter its fundamental character. No court on earth can vacate the laws of heaven."
—Rolley Haggard

"People may call them by different names, but idols of secularism, whatever people name them, turn out to be the same Baal and Molech, the same old bloodthirsty tyrants. As always it is the blood of the weakest, the most vulnerable, that they crave. Today the unborn, the partially born, and the handicapped newly born are daily sacrificed to the false gods of 'Chioce' and 'Autonomy' and 'Liberation', on stainless steel altars, by priests robed in surgical whites in store front temples, run by the likes of Planned Parenthood."
—Robert P. George

"A society that does not nurture respect for the human person”beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and physically impaired and the frail elderly”will sooner or later (probably sooner, rather than later) come to regard human beings as mere cogs in the larger social wheel whose dignity and well-being may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity. Some members of the community”those in certain development stages, for example”will come to be regarded as disposable, and others”those in certain conditions of dependency, for example, will come to be viewed as intolerably burdensome, as “useless eaters, as “better off dead,” as le bensunwertes Leben s"
— Robert P. George

"In Chapter 4 we saw that the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics - not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant - disabled or not - has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time."
—Peter Singer

“There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares."
—GK Chesterton ("Everlasting Man")

“I once read that part of the education for the would-be members of the infamous Nazi SS involved giving the aspiring men a puppy each, at the beginning of the training. Then at the time of their graduation, they were ordered, "Strangle the puppy." If they flinched, if they hesitated, if they declined, they flunked. The Nazis explicitly trained men to violate their conscience.”
—Jerry Newcombe

"Truth always carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation nevertheless. If our reflex action is always accommodation regardless of the centrality of the truth involved, there is something wrong."
—Francis Schaeffer

"By failing to preach on abortion we are encouraging not only cognitive, but moral, dissonance of the highest order. We are not merely giving sanction to the evil of our age, we are also misrepresenting the gospel. We think we're making it easier for seekers to find Christ, but we're actually making it easier for them to never feel any real need for Him. After all, if God isn't all that upset over the heartless, cold-blooded murder of 56 million defenseless babies, how concerned can He be over any of our sins?"
—Rolley Haggard

"The abortion license has not brought freedom and security to women. Rather, it has ushered in a new era of irresponsibility toward women and children, one that now begins before birth."
—Robert Casey

"Abortion and racism are evil twins, born of the same lie. Where racism now hides its face in public, abortion is accomplishing the goals of which racism only once dreamed. Together, abortionists are destroying humanity at large and the black community in particular."
—Alveda King

"The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact."
—Julie Burchill

"[A]bortion — including the killing of viable infants at the verge of birth — is now a sacrament of the Democratic Party, nobody admits to being “pro-abortion”; they are “pro-choice.” This is an obvious lie. The right to choose anything presupposes the right to live. The child, fetus, embryo, or whatever you want to call the entity growing within its mother’s womb has no “choice” about being killed. It will never have a choice about anything."
—Joseph Sobran

"I have no new teaching for America. I seek only to recall you to faithfulness to what you once taught the world. Your nation was founded on the proposition—very old as a moral precept, but startling and innovative as a political insight—that human life is a gift of immeasurable worth, and that it deserves, always and everywhere, to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect. I urge the Court to take the opportunity presented by the petitions in these cases to consider the fundamental question of when human life begins and to declare without equivocation the inalienable rights which it possesses."
—Mother Teresa

"Bereft of religion or a transcendent understanding of the rule of law, individuals co-opt the state, attempting to conform reality to their individual vision of how reality should be. In the case of abortionists, they must willfully disregard demonstrable and overwhelming scientific evidence as well as two millennia of Judeo-Christian revelation and natural law philosophy in order to dehumanize the unborn. They cannot allow any of this evidence to interfere with their belief that, far from being a gross violation of human and natural rights, abortion is in fact a positive good not just for women but for society at large. Rather than a person with human dignity made in the image and likeness of God, the unborn child becomes a clump of cells or, at best, a “potential person” who does not yet have any constitutional rights."
—Miles Smith.

"Some Christians want the baby born, but then don’t want to help the mama raise that baby" is used by a liberal Christian to justify abortion. Imagine me saying that "Some Christians want the slave freed, but then don’t want to help him find a job" as a justification for slavery. The premise of the argument is based on demonstrable factual inaccuracy compounded by deep moral confusion. Put simply, the question is not whether born pro-lifers are consistent, caring human beings. The question is whether the unborn are distinct, living human beings. The kind of thing I am does not fundamentally alter the nature of the unborn child. We cannot execute some humans for the alleged hypocrisy of others.."
—Mikes S. Adams (FB comment, 10/26/16)

Why I am Pro-life: A Short, Nonsectarian Argument (by Douglas Groothuis)

"If we call unborn babies ‘fetal refugees’ would leftists care about them?"
—Matt Walsh

"Abortion is the only event modern liberals think too violent and obscene to portray on TV. This is not because they are to squeamish or prudish. It is because if people know what abortion looks like, it would destroy their pretense that it is a civilized answer to the problem of what to do with unwanted babies.”
—Peter Hitchens

"[The] secularist faith ....sees Christianity as a competitor to be vanquished, rather than as an alternative set of beliefs to be tolerated in an open society.....within this new church of secularism, pro-life women are heretics: despised transgressors of a religious community’s teaching and norms."
—Mary Eberstadt

"There are those within the church who are critical of Christian apologetics who point out its limitations. They will argue that presenting an apologetic for Christianity will not result in the person becoming a Christian. It is argued that people become followers of Jesus only by the calling of the Holy Spirit. Therefore apologetic arguments are not required. I will agree with this on one condition: I want those same people to agree that no one will become a Christian as a result of preaching, evangelism, missionary activity, prayer, Bible reading or any other human activity. If they will agree with this, then I will agree with them. I do believe that people become Christians by a work of the Holy Spirit. And I also believe that God uses preaching and evangelism and all the other things, including apologetics, in the process of calling that person."
—Stephen J. Bedard

"Before I can call upon Christ as my Savior, I have to understand that I need a savior. I have to understand that I am a sinner. I have to have some understanding of what sin is.I have to understand that God exists. I have to understand that I am estranged from that God, and that I am exposed to that God’s judgment. I don’t reach out for a savior unless I am first convinced that I need a savior. All of that is pre-evangelism. It is involved in the data or the information that a person has to process with his mind before he can either respond to it in faith or reject it in unbelief."
—R.C. Sproul(From, Defending Your Faith)

"Why does God use us in the conversion of the lost? When I was a little boy my Daddy asked me to come outside and help him fix the car. I handed him the tools out of his toolbox and we had a great time of father-son bonding. If I had tried to fix that car myself, it would never have run again. He could have fixed it just fine--indeed, probably a lot more efficiently--without me and my "help." But he asked me to join him because he was my father and he loved me. And that is why you and I get to participate in the Lord's work. The most sophisticated Apologist on the planet is a little boy helping his Daddy. It's as simple, as humbling, and as wonderful as that."
—Donald Williams

"I feel that very grave dangers hang over us. This results from the apostasy of the great part of Europe from the Christian faith. Hence a worse state than the one we were in before we received the Faith. For no one returns from Christianity to the same state he was in before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature."
—CS Lewis

"The honest way to commend God’s revealed truth to an unbelieving generation is not to disguise it as a word of man, and to act as if we could never be sure of it, but had to keep censoring and amending it at the behest of the latest scholarship, and dared not believe it further than historical agnosticism gives us leave; but to preach it in a way which shows the world that we believe it wholeheartedly, and to cry to God to accompany our witness with His Spirit, so that we too may preach ‘in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.’

The apologetic strategy that would attract converts by the flattery of accommodating the gospel to the ‘wisdom’ of sinful man was condemned by Paul nineteen centuries ago, and that past hundred years have provided a fresh demonstration of its bankruptcy.

The world may call its compromises ‘progressive’ and ‘enlightened’ (those are its names for all forms of thought that pander to its conceit); those who produce them will doubtless, by a natural piece of wishful thinking, call them ‘bold’ and ‘courageous,’ and perhaps ‘realistic’ and ‘wholesome,’ but the Bible condemns them as sterile aberrations. And the Church cannot hope to recover its power till it resolves to turn its back on them."
—JI Packer

The dismal reality is that the church's native language of sin and grace, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, is in danger of being displaced by the vocabulary of psychology, law and public relations."
—Richard John Neuhaus ("Scandal Time (Continued", First Things, 2002)

"The problem with America today is not America, it's the church. We have become very shallow as Christians. Very shallow. We have become masters at engineering feelings without much thought."
—Ravi Zacharias (youtube video)

“That which begins with shamefacedness, equivocation, hesitation, and compromise will ripen into apostasy.”
—C.H. Spurgeon

“The desire to please may be commendable enough under certain circumstances, but when pleasing men means displeasing God it is an unqualified evil and should have no place in the Christian’s heart. To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.”
—A.W. Tozer

"The worst thing that can happen to the Church is what is happening to the Church now in the West, namely that the Church is deliberately conforming to the world. This is a betrayal of her primary task, which is to conform the world to Christ. The leader has become a follower. The Lion of Judah has become tame.

Nowhere has this deadly process been more apparent than in the very thought processes and categories that modern Christians use. They are the categories of the world. What categories? The modern world politicizes everything and imposes the political categories of Right and Left on everything. They are the two knee-jerk categories that save us from the awful necessity of thinking through issues on their own merit.

Understanding the love of God frees us definitively from the domination of these two secular political categories."
— Peter Kreeft

""If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.”
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Sound Doctrine

"Most churches today have been taken over by the Baby Boomer mentality, exhibiting the values of mass-market commercialism, the rejection of the past and hedonistic individualism."
—Gene Veith

"Eastern religions will be to Christianity a new, dangerous Gnosticism."
—Os Guiness

"Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs; in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned or homeless — each one of these persons is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of his love. How we treat these persons — whether we revere them and welcome them, or throw them away in distaste — shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation."
—Archbishop Charles Chaput

Any time a Christian tries publicly to take seriously a biblical commandment, he will be hit with the question why he doesn't obey some obscure Levitical prohibition, like not eating a calf with its mother's milk (which is taken to prohibit cheeseburgers). The answer is simple. Large swaths of the Old-Testament law (called in retrospect the "ceremonial law") were rendered obsolete by the new phase of salvation history ushered in by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The moral law in general was still upheld. If you want to know which is which, look to what the New Testament upholds and what it overturns. If you are too ignorant to know this or too lazy to overcome your ignorance, you should not be commenting about biblical law."
—Donald Williams (Facebook comment, June 28, 2015)

"America is adrift—morally, politically, and spirituality. The anchor broke off and sank to the bottom of the ocean. The rudder rusted out and fell down to the bottom as well. Its garish sails—festooned with mindless slogans—take it wherever the wild gusts of wind want. Few stand against the wind. But some must—not for the sake of being different or authentic, but because of the uncompromising insistence of the truth."
—Douglas Grouthuis

"Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the “grand reduction” of religious thought and practice to a set of sentimental and affirming principles, absent the presence of a transcendent, personal, and transformative God. It is a religious faith of mediocrity, of insularity, and of loneliness. It requires no greatness of soul. And it engenders no virtue, no charity, and no heroism."
—James D. Conley

“There is no adulterous woman who has ever been so soiled as the liberal theology, which has had all the gifts of God and has turned away to a worship of something that is more destructive than Molech was to the babies whose parents were led astray from the living God to worship this idol. This is not a thing to take lightly."
—Francis Schaeffer

"Much of the church is either asleep or in bed with the world."
—Douglas Groothuis

"A time will come when instead of shepherds feeding the sheep, the church will have clowns entertaining the goats."
—C.H. Spurgeon

"The pagan world was a virgin waiting for her groom. The modern West is an adulterous divorce’, cynical, angry and “so through” with Jesus. It is hard to know how the secular West will come round. Will she die in her sins, or will the miracle of broken, humbled heart emerge?"
—Msgr. Charles Pope

"The past several decades, we have seen a dramatic decline in doctrinal and biblical preaching. We have gone from theology to therapy in the pulpits. In the past decade, we went from therapy to motivational speaking instead of preaching."
—Joseph Mattera

""Most equate prophets with radicals and innovators and change-agents, but rather the prophet is a traditionalist calling God's people to be faithful to the covenant.

"The prophets are not agents of change; they are preachers that demand God's people change by returning to the covenant tradition."
— John Bevere

—James Montgomery Boice

"As God can send a nation or people no greater blessing than to give them faithful, sincere and upright ministers, so the greatest curse that God can possibly send upon a people in this world is to give them over to blind, unregenerate, carnal, lukewarm and unskilled guides."
—George Whitefield

"The church that marries the culture of her day will find herself a widow tomorrow."
—Karl Barth

"It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have – until recently – been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it."
—T.S Eliot (1948)

"Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of man,, trust in religious externalities, quasi religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul."
—A.W. Tozer

“Religion today is not transforming people; rather it is being transformed by the people. It is not raising the moral level of society; it is descending to society’s own level, and congratulating itself that it has scored a victory because society is smilingly accepting its surrender.”
—A.W. Tozer

“First, there is Chance, in which all is random, a wan modern world —like fragile, weasel-sucked egg — devoid of all meaning and where nothing is more than the dead sum of its dead parts, where an utterly random series of accidental events somehow ended up in creating the infinitely variegated cosmos in which we find ourselves, somehow musing on our place in it, only to conclude that our existence and all we have created and thought over the millennia has no more actual meaning than does a rock on a dead planet a billion billion billion miles from the wild flowers around the Parthenon. The Dance, on the other hand, is a divinely orchestrated poetic and genuinely infinitely meaningful movement through history — that progression and ascension toward God, and toward the ultimate meaning of all things, large and small. The book asks us, then: Which is true? Which of these two views is grace-filled and glorious? And which of them deprives us forever of those categories we call grace-filled and glorious?”
—Eric Metaxas

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.”
—Stephen Hawking

"If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions . . . . Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They are all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else."
–Douglas Wilson

“You came from nothing and you’re going to nothing, but in between you have great significance.”
—Dr. Ray Pritchard

"Some say Christianity is just a crutch. But let's turn the question on its edge for a moment. Is atheism an emotional crutch, wishful thinking? The ax cuts both ways. Perhaps atheists are rejecting God because they've had a bad relationship with their father. Instead of inventing God, have atheists invented non-God? Have they invented atheism to escape some of the frightening implications of God's existence? Think about it."
—Greg Koukl

"Darwin kicked him [God] out of biology, but physics remained more uncertain. Hawking is now administering the coup de grace."
—Richard Dawkins

"...spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
—Stephen Hawking

“When men stop believing in God, it is not that they believe in nothing; they will believe in anything"
—GK Chesterton

"The universe cares nothing for us. Humans are nothing even in the evolutionary process on earth. There is no ultimate meaning for humans."
—William B. Provine, Prof. of Biological Sciences, Cornell University

"Let's not kid ourselves, we're all concentrations of molecules containing DNA, hard-wired into a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which as software has a certain genetic code. And your idea that you have a soul or even a self, much less free will, is just an illusion."
—Tom Wolfe

“Atheists are prepared to burrow very deep down the materialist rabbit hole in order to avoid any possible confrontation with the spiritual.”
—Rabbi Moshe Averick

"The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice."
—Richard Dawkins

"And who is this great I AM, this Disturber of man’s apathy, this Stumbling Block to intellectuals and Confounder of worldly wisdom? Why has He chosen to come forth to trouble the world which He created, and to trouble the chief of His works, Man, with this immovable and immortal question? He will not go quietly into the dark; He refuses to stand aside and let the world go on its merry way without Him. He is not only content to affirm that He exists; He demands that we acknowledge His existence as well."
—Will Hubbard

"...man without God is hopelessly lost. He is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there....His best scientific, philosophical, ands educational achievements have not even identified, let alone explained or resolved, the real issues of life."
—Marvin Rosenthal

‎"Humanism or atheism is a wonderful philosophy of life as long as you are big, strong, and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But watch out if you are in a lifeboat and there are others who are younger, bigger, or smarter."
—William Murrayz

"...And finally, I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought, giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I am capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me. And I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me."
—Adam Savage (2012 "Reason Rally", Washington DC)

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
—GK Chesterton

"[The] cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be."
—Carl Sagan

"If we're going to be scientistic, then we have to attain our view of reality from what physics tells us about it. Actually, we'll have to do more than that: we'll have to embrace physics as the whole truth about reality."
—Alex Rosenberg, Department Chair and R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University

"So we bow our heads for two minutes of contemplation about the miracle of life and, in his closing sermon, Jones speaks about how the death of his mother influenced his own spiritual journey and determination to get the most out of every second, aware that life is all too brief and nothing comes after it."
—Pastor of the Church of Atheism, London

"Science itself is steadily nailing the lid on atheism’s coffin."
—Lee Strobel

"[theistic] religion is itself the problem. [Theistic] religious belief is man-made and murderous -- irrational, superstitious, and hazardous to our health. The solution is to flush this poison out of our system -- to follow the courageous examples of heroic unbelievers from Diagoras to Freud to the patron saints of the New Atheism: American writer Sam Harris, American philosopher Daniel Dennett, British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, British journalist Christopher Hitchens, and French philosopher Michel Onfray. And where will this cleansing lead? To a postreligous utopia. Without the foolishness of faith, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."
—Stephen Prothero (Boston University, Prof. of Religion, 2010 describing what Atheism believes about theism)

"What I like about today's new atheists is that while they may have the wrong answer, they are focusing attention on the right question. Is God real or imaginary?"
—Phillip Johnson

"Atheism is a disease of the mind caused by eating underdone philosophy."
—Austin O'Malley

"Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion."
—William Stekel

"The main reason an atheist doesn't find God is the same reason a criminal doesn't find the police--he's running away"
—Cliffe Knechtle

"The conclusion that God exists doesn't require faith. Atheism requires faith. It takes faith to believe in everything coming from nothing. It takes only reason to believe in everything coming from God."
—Peter Kreeft

"I’ve never been angry at unicorns.

"It’s unlikely you’ve ever been angry at unicorns either. We can become incensed by objects and creatures both animate and inanimate. We can even, in a limited sense, be bothered by the fanciful characters in books and dreams. But creatures like unicorns that don’t exist—that we truly believe not to exist—tend not to raise our ire. We certainly don’t blame the one-horned creatures for our problems.

"The one social group that takes exception to this rule is atheists. They claim to believe that God does not exist and yet, according to empirical studies, tend to be the people most angry at him."
—Joe Carter, "First Things" (on-line magazine)

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."
—C.S. Lewis

"For atheism, in the final analysis, there is no Final Analysis."
—Douglas Groothuis

"I intend no offense, but it takes one to know one. And when I read much of Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of fellow unbelievers."
—Eugene D. Genovese (atheist)

“To sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge”
— Ravi Zacharias

“There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.”
—Marquis de Sade

“… belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.”
—William Provine, Cornell University, biology

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
—Werner Heisenberg

“Many people today seem convinced that the point of life is that there is no point. We face what Nietzsche call “Das Nichte”—or, the nothing. Our public philosophy tells us that we are the result of blind force plus chance and/or necessity. Yet our movies are filled with romantic longings, visions of other worlds, the hunger for transcendence, and love stories between vampires or other worlds where there is a greater unity of life and being. In other words, we face a massive contradiction between what one set of experts tells us is real and what many artists compel us to hope for and reflect on.”
—Stuart McAllister

“Atheists must sit in God’s lap in order to try to slap Him in the face.”— Frank Turek

I don’t know what’s the matter with physicists these days. It used to be that they were an intellectually sophisticated bunch, with the likes of Einstein and Bohr doing not only brilliant scientific research, but also interested, respectful of, and conversant in other branches of knowledge, particularly philosophy. These days it is much more likely to encounter physicists like Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking, who merrily go about dismissing philosophy for the wrong reasons, and quite obviously out of a combination of profound ignorance and hubris (the two often go together, as I’m sure Plato would happily point out). The latest such bore is Lawrence Krauss, of Arizona State University."
—Massimo Pigliucci (atheist, philosopher)

"Is God the true creator of everything that exists, or is God a product of the human imagination, real only in the minds of those who believe? If God really does exist, then to lead a rational life a person has to take account of God and his purposes. A person or a society that ignores the Creator is ignoring the most important part of reality, and to ignore reality is to be irrational."
—Phillip E. Johnson

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
—Werner Heisenberg, Nobel winner in physics and a principal originator of quantum mechanics.

"We are in a disturbing period of scientism, in which leading scientists—Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss and Jerry Coyne come to mind—have derogated non-scientific ways of engaging with reality, including the arts and humanities as well as religion. By espousing scientism, these scientists just reveal their own arrogance and small-mindedness. "
—John Horgan (author, science journalist)

“I am an atheist. My attitude is not based on science, but rather on faith. . . The absence of a Creator, the non-existence of God is my childhood faith, my adult belief, unshakable and holy.”
—George Klein (‘The Atheist in the Holy City.’)

“All the proofs of God’s existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists. In short, to show that the proofs do not work is not enough by itself. It may still be the case that God exists."
—Kai Nielsen (‘Reason and Practice.’)

""As it rises in popularity..., I'm reminded that atheism is nihilism with fancy clothes.
It's despair with a pocket square.
It's nothingness with a better brand strategy."
—Owen Strachan

"In a world with no clear origin, no purposeful end, and no intrinsic meaning, human dignity is founded on nothing more than a self-creating will to power that is, in the last analysis, self-destructive."
—Roberta Green Ahmanson

—Francis A. Schaeffer

"Atheism, I began to realize, rested on a less-than-satisfactory evidential basis. The arguments that had once seemed bold, decisive, and conclusive increasingly turned out to be circular, tentative, and uncertain."
— Alister McGrath

“The fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing… We should…acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel awe at the marvelous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts without reason the reign of non-being.”
—Quentin Smith

"If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
—William Shakespeare (via the lips of Macbeth)

“The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said “existence precedes essence.” In other words, we have no stable or fixed identity that precedes us. The burden of identity, selfhood, and meaning rests solely on our shoulders. But, again, if we came from nothing and are returning inextricably to nothing, life is a temporary accident, and death is the only authentic currency at our disposal. Why is death authentic? Because it is life that is artificial and nothingness that is essential. It is not that this worldview tries to be especially morbid—in many cases it makes a valiant attempt to be life-affirming—it’s simply that it has literally nothing else to offer, or, rather, it has precisely nothing to offer.”
—Cameron McAllister

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
—H.P. Lovecraft

“The first effect of not believing in God, is that you lose your common sense.”
—GK Chesterton

"Natural selection, the blind, unconscious automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose at all."
—Richard Dawkins

"The materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion...The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the Universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle...Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as materialistic denials."
—GK Chesterton

"You have to be educated into not seeing design around you in the natural world...You have to be either bullied or,...socialized out of it."
—Mark Hartwig

"...the God who made us can't be escaped. He can be denied, He can be ignored, He can be unknown; He can certainly be fled, but He can never be escaped. Not to be aware of this truth is not thereby to be spared it."
—V. Shephard

".... the surprising thing is not that the materialist should meet with such profound resistance.  More incredible by far is that a living mind undermining its own sovereign nature in such a dogmatic manner, while declaring it completely reliable in every respect, should expect to be taken seriously at all."
—Iain Carstairs

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated…We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination…No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man...”
—Charles Darwin

"Although it is developed in the crude English fashion, 'Darwin’s Origin of Species' is the book which, in the field of natural history, provides the basis for our views."
—Karl Marx to Frederick Engels in 1860

"In the last ten years we have come to realize humans are more like worms than we ever imagined."
—Biologist Bruce Alberts, past president of the National Academy of Sciences

"[evolutionary naturalists]...have not a well-supported scientific theory but a form of magic that masquerades as scientific theory...This form of magic is the view that something can be gotten from nothing...The transformation of nothing into something may involve minor expenditures of effort. For instance, the magician may need to utter 'abracadabra' or 'hocus pocus', likewise the Darwinian just-so stories that attempt to account for complex, information-rich biological structures are incantations that give the illusion of solving a problem but in fact merely cloak ignorance....We have become so accustomed to this something for nothing way of thinking that we no longer appreciate just how deeply magical it is."
—Prof. William Dembski (mathematician/ philosopher, Baylor University)

"The flourishing of these ideas, of neo-Darwinism in general, would not be possible except in the absence of vigorous and critical study of the humanities. Its “proofs” are proof of nothing except the failure of education, in the schools and also in the churches. If I were inclined to use the metaphors of contagion they so often employ, I would say our immunity to nonsense has been killed out, the flora of historical and cultural knowledge that education should sustain in us, and this has opened opportunity for notions that could not otherwise take hold."
—Marilynne Robinson, philosopher, author

“Atheists are prepared to burrow very deep down the materialist rabbit hole in order to avoid any possible confrontation with the spiritual.”
—Rabbi Moshe Averick

"Darwinism, the apotheosis of materialistic theory, is bound to be thoroughly reductionistic. Virtually by definition, therefore, a religion making souls central is bound to clash with a theory like Darwinism."
—Michael Ruse (Philosophy of ScienceBiology, Florida State University)

"What I like about today's new atheists is that while they may have the wrong answer, they are focusing attention on the right question. Is God real or imaginary?"
—Phillip Johnson

"[T]he stars, the wind in waste places mean
more to me than even the human beings I love best."
—Bertrand Russell

"Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain have the power to see into the heart of matter and mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life. It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin."
—David Berlinski, "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions,(Basic Books, 2009, 16-17)

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions."
—Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"

"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique."
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

"Is God the true creator of everything that exists, or is God a product of the human imagination, real only in the minds of those who believe? If God really does exist, then to lead a rational life a person has to take account of God and his purposes. A person or a society that ignores the Creator is ignoring the most important part of reality, and to ignore reality is to be irrational."
—Phillip E. Johnson

"We are in a disturbing period of scientism, in which leading scientists—Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss and Jerry Coyne come to mind—have derogated non-scientific ways of engaging with reality, including the arts and humanities as well as religion. By espousing scientism, these scientists just reveal their own arrogance and small-mindedness. "
—John Horgan (author, science journalist)

"Once we admit that Darwin was right when he argued that human ethics evolved from the social instincts that we inherited from our non-human ancestors, we can put aside the hypothesis of a divine origin for ethics."
—Peter Singer

"We may regard the material and cosmic world as the supreme being, the cause of all causes, the creator of heaven and earth."
—V. Lenin

“It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.”
― Paul Copan, Passionate Conviction: Modern Discourses on Christian Apologetics

"Evolution teaches that savagery is normal, and we are brothers to the beast."
—anonymous

“The fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing… We should…acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel awe at the marvelous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts without reason the reign of non-being.”
—Quentin Smith

"He who does not believe God will punish sin will not believe that he will pardon it through atoning blood."
—Charles H. Spurgeon

"[W]e in the modern West are living under barbarism, though we do not recognize it. Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes—they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged the animal pelts and spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones."
—Rod Dreher

"That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don't spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes."
–Denis Waitley

"Truth, beauty, and goodness have their being together. By truth we are put in touch with reality, which we find is good for us and beautiful to behold. In our knowing, loving and delighting, the gift of reality appears to us as something infinitely and inexhaustively valuable and fascinating."
–Thomas Dubay

“I think we are losing beauty. And there is a danger that with it, we are losing the meaning of life.”
—Sir Roger Scruton, 2009

"So things like music and other types of art, beautiful sunsets, or views of some majestic mountains, can all trigger within us a longing and hunger and desire for eternal beauty and everlasting joy. We get the snippets in this life of what God and eternity are all about. These are pointers and indicators of something more, something greater, something eternal."
—Bill Muehlenberg

"Now if a man believes in the existence of beautiful things, but not of Beauty itself, and cannot follow a guide who would lead him to a knowledge of it, is he not living in a dream?"
—Plato's Republic, 476c.

"Art is a mode of prediction not found in charts and statistics, and it insinuates possibilities of human relations not to be found in rule and precept, admonition and administration."
—John Dewey, Art as Experience, 363.

"It was not a fortuitous meeting of chordal atoms that made the world.  If order and beauty are reflected in the constitution of the universe, then there is a God."
—Ludwig von Beethoven

".... there is no moment in which, no perspective from which, science as science can regard human life and say that there is a beautiful, terrible mystery in it all, a great pathos. Art, music, and religion tell us that."
—Marilynne Robinson, author

“There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind—what they are in their thought world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity ….The results of their thought world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel, and it is true of a dictator’s sword.”
—Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?

“The books or the music in which we thought we located beauty will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.”
—C.S. Lewis

"Humanism or atheism is a wonderful philosophy of life as long as you are big, strong, and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But watch out if you are in a lifeboat and there are others who are younger, bigger, or smarter."
—William Murrayz

"If the artist sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting what he sees before him."
—Casper David Friedrich

"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one."
—Stella Adler

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."
—Michelangelo

"Art is man's nature; nature is God's art."
—Philip James Bailey

“The closer we are to God, to divine attributes — such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty — the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.”
—Peter Kreeft

"...John Calvin reminded the world that God has given his creatures two books: the book of nature and the Word of God. For the Christian, they are not equal in authority or revelatory power, and yet it is a serious neglect to focus on one at the exclusion of the other."
—Stuart McAllister

“Atheists must sit in God’s lap in order to try to slap Him in the face.”— Frank Turek

"“Pragmatism, legalism, and greed cannot comprehend the power of ephemeral beauty. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness; the opposite of beauty is legalism. Legalism is hard determinism that slowly strangles the soul. Legalism injures by giving pragmatic answers to our suffering."
—Makoto Fujimura

"This quaint word, sublime, should be dug up, brushed off, and put in good light. Pretty does not capture it; neither does beautiful. Something is not sublime because it can be put to use by busy workers or players. A waterfall or a painting or a saxophone solo may be sublime if it arrests us by attracting our astonished attention. The sublime is nothing in us. It does something to us because of what it is in itself."
— Douglas Groothuis

"The Christian imagination indeed presents a God who not only created and noticed beauty, whose own glory offers present encounters in the world, but the God who is not unfamiliar with the world’s brokenness, transforming a disordered creation by stepping closer into it in Jesus Christ. This is a God who takes all the glimpses and introduces the whole—not as an escape from reality but a deepening of it, one that can hold life as well as death."
—Jill Carattini

"Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering reason. It is a grasp on reality that does not need constant high points in order to be maintained, nor is it made vulnerable by the low points of life’s struggle. It sees in the ordinary the extraordinary, and it finds in the extraordinary the reaffirmations for what it already knows. Wonder clasps the soul (the spiritual) and is felt in the body (the material). Wonder interprets life through the eyes of eternity while enjoying the moment, but never lets the momentary vision exhaust the eternal. Wonder makes life’s enchantment real and knows when and where enchantment must lie. Wonder knows how to read the shadows because it knows the nature of light. Wonder knows that while you cannot look at the light you cannot look at anything else without it. It is not exhausted by childhood but finds its key there. It is a journey like a walk through the woods, over the usual obstacles and around the common distractions while the voice of direction leads, saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21 KJV). It is not at all surprising that of the seventy usages of the word wonder in the Old Testament, nearly half of them are by David, the sweet singer of Israel. Wonder and music go hand in hand. Wonder cannot help but sing. Even nature recognizes that."
—Ravi Zacharias

"We sense that we are made for more than just this life and so we yearn, we long, we write our bucket lists. We encounter beauty and it makes our heart sing and our soul ache and we feel something that words cannot fully express, and through it we catch a glimpse of reality."
—Andy Bannister

For all people who were ignorant of God
were foolish by nature;
and they were unable from the good things that are
seen to know the one who
exists,
nor did they recognize the artisan while
paying heed to his works;
but they supposed that either fire or wind or
swift air,
or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water,
or the
luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.
If through delight
in the beauty of these things people assumed them to
be gods,
let them
know how much better than these is their Lord,
for the author of beauty
created them.
And if people* were amazed at their power and working,
let
them perceive from them
how much more powerful is the one who formed them.
For from the greatness and beauty of created things
comes a corresponding
perception of their Creator.
Yet these people are little to be blamed,
for perhaps they go astray
while seeking God and desiring to find him.

For while they live among his works, they keep searching,
and they trust in
what they see, because the things that are seen are
beautiful.
Yet again, not even they are to be excused;
for if they had the power to know
so muchthat they could investigate the world,
how did they fail to find
sooner the Lord of these things?
—Apocrypha, Wisdom 13: 1-9

“Created beauty eclipses God’s beauty in the desire factory of man’s heart. It is a case of mistaken identity. Every created beauty was created by God to lead our affections to Him. That’s why He made the pleasures of earthly beauty so fleeting — so that on the other side of the pleasure we might experience either wonder and worship and ultimate satisfaction in God or the pursuit of the pleasure that beauty provides for its own sake. If we choose the latter, we will only be disappointed again.”
—Steve DeWitt

“The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.”
—Peter Kreeft

"Art creates the thirst to know God more and to love him better. It cannot give all of the answers, for who can explain God? But the encounter is nevertheless genuine. It is God-shaped, beyond words, soul-expanding, and once you experience it you are addicted. Whatever it is that we are longing for remains an enigma, inexpressible, nameless, and yet it is nuptial bliss itself."
—Michael Rennier

"Art is a reflection of God’s creativity, an evidence that we are made in the image of God."
—Francis Schaeffer

"“Created beauty eclipses God’s beauty in the desire factory of man’s heart. It is a case of mistaken identity. Every created beauty was created by God to lead our affections to Him. That’s why He made the pleasures of earthly beauty so fleeting — so that on the other side of the pleasure we might experience either wonder and worship and ultimate satisfaction in God or the pursuit of the pleasure that beauty provides for its own sake. If we choose the latter, we will only be disappointed again.”
—Steve DeWitt

—Steve DeWitt

"Begin with the beautiful, which leads you to the good, which leads you to the truth. Once you are captivated by the winsomeness of the beautiful, you are drawn to the good. You wonder, ‘How do I participate in the life that made this beauty possible?’ Once we live that life of goodness, we realize the truth of it. "
—Bishop Robert Barron

"When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart. "
—George MacDonald

"We do not want merely to see beauty . . . We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. "
—C.S. Lewis

"Aesthetics drives contemporary popular culture. Entertainment has become the ultimate value, not only in Hollywood but in education and even religion. People define themselves according to the music they listen to and the aesthetically packaged products they buy....

"We live in an age that claims "there are no absolutes." The classic absolutes, according to the old thinkers, are truth, goodness, and beauty. For people today, truth is relative; goodness is relative; and beauty is relative. They are all connected, and they have all been dragging each other down. The lack of belief fuels moral relativism, and beauty is distorted to serve what is false and what is bad."
—Gene Edward Veith

Elizabeth Barrett Browning observed:

"Earth is crammed with heaven
And every bush aflame with God
But only those who see take off their shoes."


"Earth is crammed with heaven
And every bush aflame with God
But only those who see take off their shoes."

"Today, it is critical to develop our inner "eyes of your heart" to use imagination toward integrating; and seeing beauty nurtures this 'eye'."
—Makoto Fujimura

"Truth is that which reflects the mind of God, Goodness His character, and Beauty His glory, as they are imprinted on the fabric of His world by Him or enacted by His creatures through His common or special grace. Practically, then, the True is that which deserves to be believed; the Good is that which deserves to be done; and the Beautiful is that which deserves to be contemplated—just because they are from, and reflect, His Son ."
—Donald Williams

"God, a timeless reality, enters our time-bound history as an artist would enter his own painting.”
—CS Lewis, The First Christmas

"Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time."
—Albert Camus

"Think with me about beauty and about this matchless One who is the Lord of all beauty, our Savior! God has surely deposited something within our human beings that is capable of understanding and appreciating beauty—the love of harmonious forms, appreciation of colors and beautiful sounds. Brother, these are only the external counterparts of a deeper and more enduring beauty—that which we call moral beauty. It has been the uniqueness and the perfection of Christ's moral beauty that have charmed even those who claimed to be His enemies throughout the centuries of history."
—A.W. Tozer

“Think with me about beauty and about this matchless One who is the Lord of all beauty, our Savior! God has surely deposited something within our human beings that is capable of understanding and appreciating beauty—the love of harmonious forms, appreciation of colors and beautiful sounds. Brother, these are only the external counterparts of a deeper and more enduring beauty—that which we call moral beauty. It has been the uniqueness and the perfection of Christ's moral beauty that have charmed even those who claimed to be His enemies throughout the centuries of history. We do not have any record of Hitler saying anything against the moral perfection of Jesus. One of the great philosophers, Nietzsche, objected to Paul's theology of justification by faith, but he was strangely moved within himself by the perfection of moral beauty found in the life and character of Jesus, the Christ. We should thank God for the promise of heaven being the place of supreme beauty-and the One who is all—beautiful is there!”
—A.W. Tozer

“The idea that God communicates with human beings in personal words pervades all of Scripture, and it is central to every doctrine of Scripture. If God has, in fact, not spoken to us personally, then we lose any basis for believing in salvation by grace, in judgment, in Christ’s atonement—indeed, for believing in the biblical God at all. Indeed, if God has not spoken to us personally, then everything important in Christianity is human speculation and fantasy."
—John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God

“If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, then error will be. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end."
—Daniel Webster

“Does any one ask me, What is the best safeguard against false doctrine? – I answer in one word, ‘The Bible: the Bible regularly read, regularly prayed over, regularly studied.’ We must go back to the old prescription of our Master: ‘Search the Scriptures.’ (John 5:39) If we want a weapon to wield against the devices of Satan, there is nothing like ‘the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God."
—J.C. Ryle

"You can't reduce this book to what you can handle; you can't domesticate this book to what you are comfortable with. You can't make it your toy poodle, trained to respond to your command."
—Eugene Peterson

"Your mind is a piano with 88 keys, representing receptivity to God; they are activated by Scripture. Most Christians, through neglect, only have a toy piano working. God wants to send them a concerto, but all they can hear is "Chopsticks."
—Dr. Donald Williams

"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
—Antonio Gramisci, Italian communist (1915)

"America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power."
—Nancy Pearcey

"Years ago, speaking in a tone of subdued irony for my benefit, Donn Rosen, a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, wryly summarized what is involved: 'Darwin said that speciation occurred too slowly for us to see it. Gould and Eldredge said it occurred too quickly for us to see it. Either way we don’t see it.' "
— Tom Bethell , American Spectator, September 2013

"Think with me about beauty and about this matchless One who is the Lord of all beauty, our Savior! God has surely deposited something within our human beings that is capable of understanding and appreciating beauty—the love of harmonious forms, appreciation of colors and beautiful sounds. Brother, these are only the external counterparts of a deeper and more enduring beauty—that which we call moral beauty. It has been the uniqueness and the perfection of Christ's moral beauty that have charmed even those who claimed to be His enemies throughout the centuries of history. We do not have any record of Hitler saying anything against the moral perfection of Jesus. One of the great philosophers, Nietzsche, objected to Paul's theology of justification by faith, but he was strangely moved within himself by the perfection of moral beauty found in the life and character of Jesus, the Christ. We should thank God for the promise of heaven being the place of supreme beauty-and the One who is all—beautiful is there!
—A.W. Tozer

“We as a scientific community created an origin myth that has no more intellectual value than 1 Genesis…Although we’re very quick to criticize those that operate on faith, that’s exactly what we did.”
—Dr. T. Mark Harrison (Distinguished Professor of Geochemistry, UCLA)

Suppose we think of a man made of water in an infinitely extended and bottomless ocean of water.
Desiring to get out of water, he makes a ladder of water.
He sets this ladder upon the water and against the water and then attempts to climb out of the water.
So hopeless and senseless a picture must be drawn of the natural man’s methodology based as it is upon the assumption that time or chance is ultimate. On his assumption his own rationality is a product of chance. On his assumption even the laws of logic which he employs are products of chance. The rationality and purpose that he may be searching for are still bound to be products of chance.
—Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (P&R, 1972), p. 102.

"[We have]...pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him 'meek and mild', and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies."
—Dorothy Sayers

"He was the meekest and lowliest of all the sons of men. Yet he spoke of coming on the clouds of heaven with the glory of God.  He was so austere that evil spirits and demons cried out in terror at his coming, yet he was so genial and winsome and approachable,that the children loved to play with him and the little ones nestled in his arms.  His presence at the innocent joy of a village wedding, was like the presence of sunshine.  No one was half so kind or compassionate to sinners, yet no one ever spoke such red-hot scorching words about sin.A bruised reed he would not break. His whole life was love. Yet on one occasion he demanded of the Pharisees, how they were expected to escape the damnation of hell.  He was a dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions, yet for sheer stark realism, he has all of us self-styled realists soundly beaten.He was the servant of all, washing the disciples’ feet, yet masterfully he strode into the temple, and the hucksters and moneychangers fell over one another to get away in their mad rush from the fire they saw blazing in his eyes.  He saved others, yet at the last, he himself did not save.  There is nothing in history like the union of contrasts which confronts us in the gospels; the mystery of Jesus is the mystery of divine personality."
—Ravi Zacharias

"All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever were built, all the parliaments that ever sat and all the kings that ever reigned, put together, have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life."
—George Buttrick

"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."
—Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."
—C. S. Lewis

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
—C.S. Lewis

“At Oxford - to my surprise - I discovered Christianity. It was the intellectually most exhilarating and spiritually stimulating thing I could ever hope to describe - better than chemistry, a wonderful subject that I had thought to be the love of my life and my future career. I went on to gain a doctorate for research in molecular biophysics from Oxford, and found that immensely exciting and satisfying. But I knew I had found something better - like the pearl of great price that Jesus talks about in the Gospel, which is so beautiful and precious that it overshadows everything. It was intellectually satisfying, imaginatively engaging, and aesthetically exciting.”
—Alister McGrath

"The Christian worldview is not proven in one or two strokes but is rather verified by appealing to a wide and compelling variety of converging arguments. Christianity is shown to be the best explanation for the origin and nature of the universe as well as the human condition and the facts of history."
—Douglas Groothuis

"The marks of truth, as Christianly conceived, are that it is supernaturally grounded not developed within nature; that it is objective and not subjective; that it is a revelation and not a construction; that it is discovered by inquiry and not elected by a majority vote; that it is authoritative and not a matter of personal choice."
—Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind.

“We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything, so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is eastern, it is granted critical immunity; if western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus, a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same if the ceremony is from eastern fold. Such is the mood at the end of the twentieth century. A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling. But that is precisely what I believe postmodernism best represents - a mood.”
—Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message

“Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
—G. K. Chesterton

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions."
—Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"

"If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
—Antonio Gramisci, Italian communist (1915)

“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, subtler. His body will become more harmonized , his movements more rhythmic , his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And above these heights new peaks will rise.”
—Leon Trotsky

Communism is ugly, dangerous and whenever and wherever it has been tried it has made people poorer, more miserable and often more dead. That’s why one of our most pressing missions in 2019 is to defend Western Civilisation from what I call the Care Bear Commies – all those youthful, telegenic, smiley, hard-left activists you see across the media reassuring your kids that actually communism is likeable and fun and the only reason it gets such a bad rap is that it hasn’t been tried properly yet.
—James Delingpole

"The reason we are against racism is because a person's race is sacred. A person's ethnicity is sacred. You cannot violate it. My race is sacred; your race is sacred; I dare not violate it. The reason we react against the issue of homosexuality the way we do is because sexuality is sacred. You cannot violate it. How do you treat one as sacred and desacrelize the other? Sex is a sacred gift of God. I can no longer justify an aberration of it in somebody else's life than I can justify my own proclivities to go beyond my marital boundaries.

Every man here who is an able-bodied man will tell you temptation stalks you every day. Does it have anything to do with your love for your spouse? Probably not, because you can love your spouse with 100% desire to love the person, but the human body reacts to the sight entertained by the imagination and gives you all kinds of false hints that stolen waters are going to be sweeter. They are not. They leave you emptier. So a disposition or a proclivity does not justify expressing that disposition and that proclivity. That goes across the board for all sexuality.

When God created mankind and womankind, it was His plan, not our plan. It is extraordinary what He said. He said, 'It is not good for man to live alone.' Well, man wasn't living alone; God was with him. Why did He say that? He created the mystique and the majesty and the charm and the complimentary nature of womankind in a way that made it possible for her to meet his emotional needs that God, Himself, put only within her outside himself from himself in her in that complimentariness. It is a design by God."
—Ravi Zacharias

“Unity and peace are very delightful; but they are bought too dear if they are bought at the expense of truth.”
—JC Ryle

"Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns"
—D.A. Carson

"A new Decalogue has been adopted by the neo-Christians of our day, the first word of which reads ‘Thou shalt not di...sagree;’ and a new set of Beatitudes too, which begins ‘Blessed are they that tolerate everything, for they shall not be made accountable for anything."
—AW Tozer

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“The desire to please may be commendable enough under certain circumstances, but when pleasing men means displeasing God it is an unqualified evil and should have no place in the Christian’s heart. To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.”
—A.W. Tozer

"...[T]he truth of Christianity outlasts the untruths of man’s applause..... Churches should know better than to believe the myth that accommodation will swell their ranks. The opposite happens. "
—Andrew Walker

"Cowardice is a greater danger to our civilization than error. When people cannot muster the courage to speak the truth, error will triumph."
—Robert P. George (Internet comment)

“We live in a day in which renunciation is no longer being taught. We are not supposed to renounce anything to become Christians. We are not told to. We just believe something and accept something passively, in a state of moral inertia, and then we go right back to what we were doing before. There are people in this country making a career of compromising the cross of Christ with the world, until we cannot tell which is which. We are one big compromise.”
—AW Tozer

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."
—G.K. Chesterton

"The devil is compromise."
—Henrik Ibsen

"For those who follow Jesus Christ, our message to the world must be clear. God transforms the heart and mind and we become his children and his ambassadors. Let us so live that we will never be accused of hate or indifference. But let us also know that compromising the truth is a serious blunder and ends up celebrating that which is not in the will of our Father. This is a painful tension for a believer. To be seen as rejecting a belief or a behavior is not the same as rejecting the person. But God helps us to carry that burden. By contrast, when Truth is lived out in love and grace, it will always make the faith attractive and even the one who opposes us will recognize the fearful symmetry of a conviction for the sacred that will swim against the tide and a commitment to the person that will find a bridge of hope. We must so live the gospel that men and women will call upon God’s name and make this body his home until we reach our Eternal City bought with the precious sacrifice of Jesus Christ. His body was broken for us so that ours might be mended for Him."
—Ravi Zacharias

“For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft."
—G.K.Chesterton

“Let us, in heaven’s name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much worse for the pious – others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ. “It is the dogma that is the drama – not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to lovingkindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death – but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”
—Dorothy Sayers

"Men who have been used of God in any generation from Calvary down to this hour have not invented and preached new truths. They have simply had the anointed vision to discover truths that had been obscured by the overemphasis of certain other truths.

"The church has lost her testimony. She has no longer anything to say to the world. Her once robust shout of assurance has faded away to an apologetic whisper. She who one time went out to declare now goes out to inquire. Her dogmatic declaration has become a respectful suggestion, a word of religious advice, given with the understanding that it is after all only an opinion and not meant to sound bigoted."
—A.W. Tozer

"A new Decalogue has been adopted by the neo-Christians of our day, the first word of which reads ‘Thou shalt not di...sagree;’ and a new set of Beatitudes too, which begins ‘Blessed are they that tolerate everything, for they shall not be made accountable for anything."
—AW Tozer

"If everything that is called Christianity in these days is Christianity, then there is no such thing as Christianity. A name applied indiscriminately to everything, designates nothing."
— B.B. Warfield

"The honest way to commend God’s revealed truth to an unbelieving generation is not to disguise it as a word of man, and to act as if we could never be sure of it, but had to keep censoring and amending it at the behest of the latest scholarship, and dared not believe it further than historical agnosticism gives us leave; but to preach it in a way which shows the world that we believe it wholeheartedly, and to cry to God to accompany our witness with His Spirit, so that we too may preach ‘in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.’

The apologetic strategy that would attract converts by the flattery of accommodating the gospel to the ‘wisdom’ of sinful man was condemned by Paul nineteen centuries ago, and that past hundred years have provided a fresh demonstration of its bankruptcy.

The world may call its compromises ‘progressive’ and ‘enlightened’ (those are its names for all forms of thought that pander to its conceit); those who produce them will doubtless, by a natural piece of wishful thinking, call them ‘bold’ and ‘courageous,’ and perhaps ‘realistic’ and ‘wholesome,’ but the Bible condemns them as sterile aberrations. And the Church cannot hope to recover its power till it resolves to turn its back on them."
—JI Packer

"Choosing cultural monasticism rather than hard-thinking advocacy, Christians abandoned the public square to the secularists. When the disciples of Jesus Christ retreated, the disciples of Dewey, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Skinner, and a host of others replaced them."
—Greg Koukl

The dismal reality is that the church's native language of sin and grace, right and wrong, truth and falsehood, is in danger of being displaced by the vocabulary of psychology, law and public relations."
—Richard John Neuhaus ("Scandal Time (Continued", First Things, 2002)

"We must be stripped of our fig leaves in order to be clothed with Christ's righteousness so we can stand in the judgment of a holy God. The question is whether the aim of ministry today is to tear off our fig leaves so we can be clothed with Christ or to help us add a few more."
—Michael Horton, "Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church"

"[Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none. Such a God is an idol of your own."
—J.C. Ryle

"I intend no offense, but it takes one to know one. And when I read much of Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of fellow unbelievers."
—Eugene D. Genovese (atheist)

"The problem with America today is not America, it's the church. We have become very shallow as Christians. Very shallow. We have become masters at engineering feelings without much thought."
—Ravi Zacharias (youtube video)

“The desire to please may be commendable enough under certain circumstances, but when pleasing men means displeasing God it is an unqualified evil and should have no place in the Christian’s heart. To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.”
—A.W. Tozer

"The worst thing that can happen to the Church is what is happening to the Church now in the West, namely that the Church is deliberately conforming to the world. This is a betrayal of her primary task, which is to conform the world to Christ. The leader has become a follower. The Lion of Judah has become tame.

Nowhere has this deadly process been more apparent than in the very thought processes and categories that modern Christians use. They are the categories of the world. What categories? The modern world politicizes everything and imposes the political categories of Right and Left on everything. They are the two knee-jerk categories that save us from the awful necessity of thinking through issues on their own merit.

Understanding the love of God frees us definitively from the domination of these two secular political categories."
— Peter Kreeft

"I believe that the greatest threat to Christianity is the anti-intellectualism that permeates the church. For about a century now, Christians have largely retreated from the intellectual arena and entrenched themselves in a version of Christianity that emphasizes feelings, experience, and pragmatism, and have ignored the life of the mind. We have adopted a view of faith that sees it as opposed to reason. The result has been the marginalization of the church from the larger culture and our inability to be salt and light, and the increasing secularization of our society."
—Dr. Steve B. Cowan (interview)

"I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most violent offense to all kinds of people, it would seem absurd to expect that the doctrine of his person can be so presented as to offend nobody. We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference; and he said in so many words that what he brought with him was fire and sword. That being so, nobody need be too much surprised or disconcerted at finding that a determined preaching of Christian dogma may sometimes result in a few angry letters of protest or a difference of opinion on the parish council."
—Dorothy Sayers ("Creed or Chaos?") ˜

""If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.”
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Sound Doctrine

"...[T]he truth of Christianity outlasts the untruths of man’s applause..... Churches should know better than to believe the myth that accommodation will swell their ranks. The opposite happens. "
—Andrew Walker

"Here in the West, there are lots of liberal Christians. Some of them have assumed a kind of reverse mission: instead of being the church's missionaries to the world, they have become the world's missionaries to the church."
—Dinesh D'Souza in "What's So Great About Christianity"

"Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the “grand reduction” of religious thought and practice to a set of sentimental and affirming principles, absent the presence of a transcendent, personal, and transformative God. It is a religious faith of mediocrity, of insularity, and of loneliness. It requires no greatness of soul. And it engenders no virtue, no charity, and no heroism."
—James D. Conley

"Much of the church is either asleep or in bed with the world."
—Douglas Groothuis

—James Montgomery Boice

"The church that marries the culture of her day will find herself a widow tomorrow."
—Karl Barth

"...it is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ."
—Dorothy Sayers

“There is no escape… If we are to continue to make moral judgments (and whatever we say we shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of Nature. It can be valid only if it is an offshoot of some absolute moral wisdom, a moral wisdom which exists absolutely “on its own” and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature.
—C.S. Lewis

"It is in the nature of things that if you don’t keep moving forward, you risk falling backward. If you don’t keep stamping down those moral scruples, one after the other, your conscience may come back to life and rise unbidden from its grave. That is why new mountaintops of cynicism must be conquered."
—James Barham

"...[I]f you work hard enough to undermine the social structures supporting individuals—family, work, faith, community—you will persuade a certain proportion of people to dispense with their consciences. That is what has been happening to American society the past 50 years now."
—James Barham

"Today issues of character that once raised alarm don't even raise an eyebrow."
—Bob Gass

"We have to nurture the consciences of each new generation...But this doesn't happen merely by chance. Conscience is cultivated primarily within the family. In a sense the family is like the Garden of Eden: we didn't create it, God did; but He gave us the Garden to till. If you fail to tend your Garden, it will go to seed and grow wild and dangerous. The family is the same. When families break down, marriages fall apart, the logic and natural order disappear, and the children end up with severely malformed consciences."
—Chuck Colson

“I once read that part of the education for the would-be members of the infamous Nazi SS involved giving the aspiring men a puppy each, at the beginning of the training. Then at the time of their graduation, they were ordered, "Strangle the puppy." If they flinched, if they hesitated, if they declined, they flunked. The Nazis explicitly trained men to violate their conscience.”
—Jerry Newcombe

"It was Jiminy Cricket who said, 'Always let your conscience be your guide.' This is good advice if our conscience is informed and ruled by the Word of God. However, if our conscience is ignorant of Scripture or has been seared or hardened by repeated sin, then Jiminy Cricket theology is disastrous."
—R.C. Sproul, Sr.

“A conscience apart from objective moral authority is an orphan with no way home.”
—Douglas Groothuis

"Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency ask the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular?

"But, conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when we must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right."
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I will" is no word for man. There is a far diviner one, "I ought." Bow passion to reason, reason to conscience, and conscience to God, and then be as resolute and determined as you choose."
—Alexander MacLaren

"This is a moment of decision, and every evangelical believer, congregation, denomination, and institution will have to answer. There will be no place to hide. The forces driving this revolution in morality will not allow evasion or equivocation. Every pastor, every church, and every Christian organization will soon be forced to declare an allegiance to the Scriptures and to the Bible’s teachings on marriage and sexual morality, or to affirm loyalty to the sexual revolution. That revolution did not start with same-sex marriage, and it will not end there. But marriage is the most urgent issue of the day, and the moment of decision has arrived.

In this season of testing, Christians committed to the gospel of Christ are called upon to muster the greatest display of compassion and conviction of our lives. But true compassion will never lead to an abandonment of biblical authority or a redefinition of the gospel of Jesus Christ."
—Albert Mohler.

"The desire to please may be commendable enough under certain circumstances, but when pleasing men means displeasing God it is an unqualified evil and should have no place in the Christian’s heart. To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men."
—A.W. Tozer

"You and I cannot be useful if we want to be sweet as honey in the mouths of men. God will never bless us if we wish to please men, that they may think well of us. Are you willing to tell them what will break your own heart in the telling and break theirs in the hearing? If not, you are not fit to serve the Lord. You must be willing to go and speak for God, though you will be rejected."
—Charles Spurgeon

"That is the only way to understand rightly this picture of the false prophets. The false prophet is a man who has no `strait gate’ or `narrow way’ in his gospel. He has nothing which is offensive to the natural man; he pleases all. He is in ‘sheep’s clothing’, so attractive, so pleasant, so nice to look at. He has such a nice and comfortable and comforting message. He pleases everybody and everybody speaks well of him. He is never persecuted for his preaching, he is never criticized severely."
—Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“The man whose little sermon is ‘repent’ sets himself against his age, and will for the time being be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There is but one end for such a man — ‘off with his head!’ You had better not try to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven.”
—Joseph Parker

“Satan is so much more in earnest than we are — he buys up the opportunity while we are wondering how much it will cost.”
—Amy Carmichael

"The problem comes when we never get around to talking about the hard part of the good news...What's wrong with us required much more than a hug [consolation], it required a cross...We'd rather feel as if we're victims of a cruel world than admit we are contributers to the world's cruelty, lost sinners who perversely love our lostness, clinging to our treasured sins like a drowning man to an anvil."
—Frederica Mathewes-Green

"In a profound sense we may say that the crucifixion, however else we may interpret it, accuses human nature, accuses all of us in the very things that we think are our righteousness."
—Sir Herbert Butterfield

"The cross … is the watershed event for the whole of the cosmos, affecting everything after it."
—J. Louis Martyn

"We believe that the history of the world is but the history of His influence and that the center of the whole universe is the cross of Calvary."
—Alexander Maclaren

"He took the tree of death, so we can have the tree of life"
—Tim Keller

"If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands."
—Dietrich Bonhoffer

“Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”
—John Stott

"There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people. People are unique in the inner life of the mind—what they are in their thought world determines how they act. This is true of their value systems and it is true of their creativity ….The results of their thought world flow through their fingers or from their tongues into the external world. This is true of Michelangelo’s chisel, and it is true of a dictator’s sword."
—Francis Schaefer

“The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this submerged sense of wonder, that a man might suddenly understand he’s alive, and be happy.”
—G.K. Chesterton

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine – dull dogma as people call it. The fact is quite the opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man – and the dogma is the drama."
—Dorothy Sayers

“A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.”
― Andrew Coyne

“So it is that assisted suicide has gone, in the space of a year, from a crime, to something to be tolerated in exceptional circumstances, to a public service. Perhaps you see this as progress. But I cannot help feeling that a society that can contemplate putting children to death has somehow lost its way.”
- Andrew Coyne

"When 1960s hippie radicals got clever, they stopped burning and rioting and turned to politics. They infiltrated the universities, the courts, and the labor unions. Now almost all the “Big” institutions—Big Labor, Big Education, Big Law, Big Hollywood, and Big Science—are firmly in their grasp. Big Business is falling in line now, too, as seen in corporate support for “transgender rights” at Target, and repudiation of North Carolina for having the audacity to state the obvious, that people should use the restroom matching their sex stated on their birth certificates.

"As western civilization commits suicide without help of IS beheaders, one thing will stand: reality. You can’t fight God’s moral order forever. Sooner or later, reality fights back. We just hope it won’t be too late". (from article..."Big Science Succumbs to Political Correctness", author not given)

"If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Societies, like individuals, reap what they sow. Where virtue is disdained and vice is glorified corruption and demagoguery are the harvest."
—Robert P. George

“For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft."
—G.K.Chesterton

"Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others."
–J. P. Moreland

“It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.”

“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design."
—Anthony Flew, Professor of Philosophy, former atheist, author, and debater

"The Darwinian theory is the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century,.....like the Genesis-based cosmology which it replaced."
—Michael Denton

"The whole point of Darwinian explanation is to explain how things that appear to be intended could actually have originated without really being intended."
—Barry Arrington (Uncommon Descent, "Stephen Barr's Own Private Idaho")

"Darwinism is essentially a moral and metaphysical crusade that fuels our contemporary moral debates."
—Wm. Dembski

"......this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric... No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation."
—Lynn Margulis, biologist, Presidential Medal of Science winner ["Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of the Species," 2003, p29

"The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. It's effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science."
—Sir Francis Galton, eugenics founder/pioneer

"Scientific journals now document many scientific problems and criticisms of evolutionary theory and students need to know about these as well. … Many of the scientific criticisms of which I speak are well known by scientists in various disciplines, including the disciplines of chemistry and biochemistry, in which I have done my work."
—Philip S. Skell, emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Penn Staue University

"...Darwinists have been protecting a shrinking turf using ridicule, rhetoric, and religion for over a century, and they have been largely successful."
—Denyse O'Leary

"The faith of many young people has been wrecked on the shoals of Darwinism. Whoever has the power to define the story of creation in a culture is the de facto priesthood and largely determines what the dominant worldview will be."
—Dr. Ray Bohlin

"[Darwinism]...stripped the human personality of its sacramental dignity. It made no distinction between the physical life and the social life, and conceived of the human condition in terms of an unceasing struggle, whose natural outcome was the survival of the fittest."
—Zeev Sternhell

"...the Darwinian world view must look upon the present sentimental conception of the value of the life of a human individual as an overestimate completely hindering the progress of humanity. The human state also, like every animal community of individuals, must reach an even higher level of perfection, if the possibility exists in it, through the destruction of the less well-endowed individual, for the more excellently endowed to win space for the expansion of its progeny. . . The state only has an interest in preserving the more excellent life at the expense of the less excellent."
—Robby Kossman (Nazi scientist/zoologist under Hitler)

“My high school science teacher once told me that much of Genesis is false. But since my high school teacher did not prove he was God by rising from the dead, I’m going to believe Jesus instead.”
—Andy Stanley

“In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!”
—Ron Carlson

"Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint.....the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today."

‘… Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity."
—Dr. Michael Ruse, PhD. Philosophy of Science at F.S.U, and proponent of Darwinian Evolutionism

"If the average length of finch beaks in a population increases five per cent following drought years, and droughts occur every ten years, how long will it take the beaks to grow from an average of one inch in length to ten feet, or for finches to become eagles?"
—Phillip Johnson

"Years ago, speaking in a tone of subdued irony for my benefit, Donn Rosen, a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, wryly summarized what is involved: 'Darwin said that speciation occurred too slowly for us to see it. Gould and Eldredge said it occurred too quickly for us to see it. Either way we don’t see it.' "
— Tom Bethell , American Spectator, September 2013

"Why do Darwinists keep indulging in this gross contradiction? Because, as human beings, they not only cannot live in a world without meaning and purpose, they cannot even articulate a world without meaning and purpose, they cannot make such a world intelligible to themselves. So they keep appealing to teleology, even in the act of promoting a theory that radically denies all teleology. They are intellectual parasites who would strip all meaning from the universe, while continuing to preserve for themselves the comforts and pleasures of meaning.

The game is up. Henceforth we shall tell the Darwinists that they have no right to eat their meaning and have it. What can they say in reply? That a process utterly lacking in purpose has produced beings, such as themselves, who require a belief in purpose? Their position is as absurd as that of the postmodernists, who declare that there is no such thing as truth in the sense of words that correspond with reality, even as they expect us to agree with their theories! But how can we agree with any theory, if there can be no true correspondence between words and reality?

No matter how the Darwinists, liberals, and postmodernists twist it, they have no right to indulge in such nonsense. We must require of them that they be intellectually consistent and accept the nihilistic void produced by their own belief systems. Then we will see how long those belief systems last."
—Lawrence Austen

"Darwinism was an interesting idea in the 19th century, when handwaving explanations gave a plausible, if not properly scientific, framework into which we could fit biological facts. However, what we have learned since the days of Darwin throws doubt on natural selection's ability to create complex biological systems - and we still have little more than handwaving as an argument in its favour."
—Professor Colin Reeves, Dept of Mathematical Sciences Coventry University

"Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, create, modify, shape, operate, drive, favor, maintain, push, or adjust. Natural selection does nothing ... . Having natural selection select is nifty because it excuses the necessity of talking about the actual causation of natural selection. Such talk was excusable for Charles Darwin, but inexcusable for evolutionists now. Creationists have discovered our empty "natural selection" language, and the "actions" of natural selection make huge, vulnerable targets."
— William Provine

"Evolution teaches that savagery is normal, and we are brothers to the beast."
—anonymous

"Evolutionary thought is popular because it is a world view which facilitates man's attempt to rid himself of all knowledge of a transcendent creator and promises to secure man's autonomy."
—GL Bahnsen

“Despite the widespread view that Darwinian Evolution has been able to explain the emergence of biological complexity that is not the case…Darwinian theory does not deal with the question how [life] was able to come into being. The troublesome question still in search of an answer is: How did a system capable of evolving come about in the first place?…Nature just doesn’t operate like that! Nature doesn’t spontaneously make highly organized…purposeful entities…And here precisely lies the [origin of] life problem…it is not just common sense that tells us that highly organized entities don’t just spontaneously come about. Certain basic laws of physics [coupled with mathematical probability] preach the same sermon – systems tend toward chaos and disorder, not toward order and function… Biology [i.e. a naturalistic origin of life] and physics seem contradictory, quite incompatible”
—Dr. Addy Pross, professor of chemistry, Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

"...Christ has made Death into life's golden chariot, sent to fetch his Cinderella bride out of the cinder fireplace of a world, through a far midnight ride, to his very own castle and bedchamber, where Glory will beget glory upon us forever."
—Peter Kreeft

"Death...is a great attention-grabber; it is a solid, sound, secure and indisputable fact; and it slaps us in the face with our own wretchedness, our utter helplessness before the loss of everything. It is our obvious problem, and Christ claims to be the answer."
—Peter Kreeft

"Our greatest threat as a nation is not foreign invaders at the door; it's termites in the floor."
—Os Guiness

"Our greatest threat as a nation is not foreign invaders at the door; it's termites in the floor."
—Os Guiness

—James Montgomery Boice

"Societies, like individuals, reap what they sow. Where virtue is disdained and vice is glorified corruption and demagoguery are the harvest."
—Robert P. George

“For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft."
—G.K.Chesterton

“If a society is to preserve its stability and a degree of continuity, it must know how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, attitudes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.”
—Eric Hoffer

" If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."
—Joseph Goebels (Hitler's Propaganda Minister)

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
—Laurence J. Peter

“If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.”
—Russell Kirk

“She came forward. She sat here. She told her truth.”
—Corey Booker, D-N.J. (Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearing, 2018)

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"
—George Orwell (1984)

“If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, then error will be. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end."
—Daniel Webster

Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once, and He volunteered.
—RC Sproul

"The devil is compromise."
—Henrik Ibsen

“Does any one ask me, What is the best safeguard against false doctrine? – I answer in one word, ‘The Bible: the Bible regularly read, regularly prayed over, regularly studied.’ We must go back to the old prescription of our Master: ‘Search the Scriptures.’ (John 5:39) If we want a weapon to wield against the devices of Satan, there is nothing like ‘the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God."
—J.C. Ryle

"Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine – dull dogma as people call it. The fact is quite the opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man – and the dogma is the drama."
—Dorothy Sayers

"Doubting isn’t a duty to be observed; it’s a concern to be addressed. Promoting thoughtfulness and critical thinking skills is one thing. Celebrating a life of doubt is another.">
—Paul Copan

"Morality . . . is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends."
—Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson

"The concept of a Creator God interferes with our sexual mores. Thus we have rationalized God out of existence. To us, he has become nothing more than the faint and disappearing smile of the cosmic Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland."
—Sir Julian Huxley

"A subjective system of morality is nothing more than a rickety shack with no foundation; it will collapse in the first good wind."
—Moshe  Averick

"Morality then is not something handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is something forged in the struggle for existence and reproduction, something fashioned by natural selection…Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothaches and marking student papers…now that you know morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what’s to stop you from behaving like an ancient Roman? Well, nothing in an objective sense."
—Michael Ruse

 “The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence.”
—Sigmund Freud

"This banishment of guilt by any means necessary—ideological or chemical—is the truest measure of the meanness of modern man."
—James Barham

"....science provides the basis for moral decisions, which are sensible only if they are based on reason, which is itself based on empirical evidence.....Ultimately,I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs."
—Dr. Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist

"As Western society rejects old moral structures and values, it finds that its moral GPS has no fixed and stationary points of reference."
—Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk

"We live in societies where virtue and goodness are frequently a veneer for religious intolerance, personal gratification and moral decay.... Secularism would like us to be closed in a little box of Sunday worship."
—Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk

"Ethical pragmatism is one way of determining what is good or bad. … That which works best determines its moral value. Careful evaluation should discern the possible consequences in order to see if an action is … right or wrong. The moral answer is to be judged in terms of whether the actions yield satisfactory results"
—Richard H. Popkin

"David Hume asked in the eighteenth century whether ought could be derived from is, and he concluded that it could not: There is a gap between what is and what ought to be. The world of fact and the world of value are disjoint. They have nothing to say to one another. The ensuing chilliness between what is and what ought to be has in the twentieth century grown glacial. The more science reveals what is, the less it reveals what ought to be."
—David Berlinski

“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth . . . Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, [ethics] is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves . . . Nevertheless, . . . such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory . . .”
—Michael Ruse

"To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
—Theodore Roosevelt

"Morality is a collective illusion of humankind put in place by our genes in order to make us good cooperators."
—Michael Ruse

"The most important information a culture has is its creation story because from that a culture derives its morality and law."
—Terry Scambray

"How would you know that the Holocaust is ultimately wrong [or evil] unless you knew what was ultimately right? If you don’t have an absolute standard for right, you can’t say that [the Holocaust] is absolutely wrong. That’s just your opinion, and somebody else’s opinion could be, the Holocaust was the best thing in the history of mankind."
—Norman Geisler

"[M]orality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs. . . . The only 'immoral' person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways"
&mdash Margaret Sanger

"Sexual liberation has become a moral crusade, in which Christian morality is the enemy, and opposition to it is a heroic moral stance."
—Nancy Pearcey

"Like crabgrass growing through the cracks and crannies of concrete slabs, the awareness of the moral law breaks through the crust of our denials."
— J. Budziszewski ("What We Cannot Know")

"The moral law has become the very emblem of immorality. We call affirming it 'being judgmental' and 'being intolerant', which is our way of saying that it has been judged and will not be tolerated."
— J. Budziszewski, ("What We Can't Not Know")

"If morality is created, not discovered, then surely different groups and individuals will create different moralities...there will be no common standard by which to adjudicate the conflicts among these invented moralities."
— J. Budziszewski ("What We Can't Not Know")

The idea of ... moral obligation isclear enough, provided that reference to some lawmaker higher ... than those of the statehood is understood. In other words, our moral obligations can ... be understood as those that are imposed by God ... But what if this higher-than-human lawgiver is no longer taken into account? Does the concept of a moral obligation ... still make sense?" ...

"The concept of moral obligation is unintelligible apart from the idea of God. The words remain, but their meaning is gone."
—Richard Tayler (philosopher)

"A society that does not nurture respect for the human person”beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and physically impaired and the frail elderly”will sooner or later (probably sooner, rather than later) come to regard human beings as mere cogs in the larger social wheel whose dignity and well-being may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity. Some members of the community”those in certain development stages, for example”will come to be regarded as disposable, and others”those in certain conditions of dependency, for example, will come to be viewed as intolerably burdensome, as “useless eaters, as “better off dead,” as le bensunwertes Leben s"
— Robert P. George

"These reactionaries [ie., cultural elites] claim to love tolerance, but, misunderstanding it, they strangle it in their embrace. Their creed is that intolerance is born at the same moment as public moral commitments; that morality must therefore be a “private” affair; that in order to say that tolerance is a good, we must forbear to say aloud that anything else is good or evil. Their god is Neutrality. In certain intellectual regions he travels under other names such as Autonomy and Rights."
—J. Budziszewski

"If atheism is true, then nothing is inherently good or bad—things just are. Rather, what we have are a set of labels (“Good”, “Bad” and “Neutral”) and a list of human actions. Who gets to decide which sticker gets stuck on what action? There are really only two choices: either every individual gets to decide for themselves what is “good”, or we have to defer to something like the state. But in either case, all we have are personal preferences: yours, mine, or the majority’s."
—Andy Bannister (from, The Magical Moral Mystery)

"Nietzsche perceives that the ingrained moral habits of a culture can outlast the original religious impulse that produced them. The English intelligentsia, he says, have stopped thinking like Christians, but still feel and act like Christians, by a kind of moral inertia. This characterization remained true long after Nietzsche’s death. The agnosticism of many Britons and North Americans from the 1880s through to about 1945 usually went with a morality that was more or less Christian. Secular humanism in that era was secular in theory but often unwittingly Christian in spirit."
—Cameron Wybrow

"Our greatest threat as a nation is not foreign invaders at the door; it's termites in the floor."
—Os Guiness

Any time a Christian tries publicly to take seriously a biblical commandment, he will be hit with the question why he doesn't obey some obscure Levitical prohibition, like not eating a calf with its mother's milk (which is taken to prohibit cheeseburgers). The answer is simple. Large swaths of the Old-Testament law (called in retrospect the "ceremonial law") were rendered obsolete by the new phase of salvation history ushered in by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The moral law in general was still upheld. If you want to know which is which, look to what the New Testament upholds and what it overturns. If you are too ignorant to know this or too lazy to overcome your ignorance, you should not be commenting about biblical law."
—Donald Williams (Facebook comment, June 28, 2015)

"America is adrift—morally, politically, and spirituality. The anchor broke off and sank to the bottom of the ocean. The rudder rusted out and fell down to the bottom as well. Its garish sails—festooned with mindless slogans—take it wherever the wild gusts of wind want. Few stand against the wind. But some must—not for the sake of being different or authentic, but because of the uncompromising insistence of the truth."
—Douglas Grouthuis

“There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of 'pretending'; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares."
—GK Chesterton ("Everlasting Man")

If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.”
—Francis Schaeffer

"Moral relativism and the rejection of absolute truth now shape the modern post-Christian mind. Indeed, relativism is virtually taken for granted, at least as an excuse for overthrowing theistic truth claims and any restrictive morality."
—Albert Mohler

"Indifference, the plague of modern Western culture in general and evangelicalism particular, is at best the result of intellectual laziness, at worst a sign of moral abdication."
—Carl Trueman

"The pagan world was a virgin waiting for her groom. The modern West is an adulterous divorce’, cynical, angry and “so through” with Jesus. It is hard to know how the secular West will come round. Will she die in her sins, or will the miracle of broken, humbled heart emerge?"
—Msgr. Charles Pope

"All forms of humanist sentimental ethics have one common characteristic: subjectivism. Humanists decide for them selves what is right and what is wrong without any external entity to instruct them....sentiment rules."
—Herbert Schlossberg

"When a society mistakes license for liberty, and establishes the Cult of the Imperial Self as its religion, the poor and vulnerable suffer."
—Robert P. George

"The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. It's effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science"
—Sir Francis Galton, eugenics founder/pioneer

“A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.”
― Andrew Coyne

“So it is that assisted suicide has gone, in the space of a year, from a crime, to something to be tolerated in exceptional circumstances, to a public service. Perhaps you see this as progress. But I cannot help feeling that a society that can contemplate putting children to death has somehow lost its way.”
- Andrew Coyne

" In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."
— Flannery O'Conner

"It is the widespread and ongoing devaluation of human life in the Western world -- under various sentimental disguises: "quality of life," "pointless suffering," "termination of life without meaning," etc. I trace it to a certain mindset in the biological and social sciences which is extraordinarily influential among educated folk -- so much that it has achieved the status of a quasi-religious orthodoxy...."
— Walker Percy

“Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.”
—Os Guiness

"If God wiped out all sources of evil in the world we would no longer be here, the evil is inside us."
—Tim Keller

"If God is, why is there evil? But if God is not, why is there good?"
—St. Augustine

"Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves."
— Joni Eareckson Tada, The God I Love

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

"It is strange that some theologians and preachers see something incompatible or irreconcilable in the Bible’s portrayal of God’s anger and God’s love. Anger and love can co-exist simultaneously in a human heart; why not in God’s?… If God were not angry at the evil that destroys human life, could he be said to love us? If God did not love us so much, why would he get angry against all that threatens to destroy us, including our own sinful rebellion and folly?"
—Chris Wright

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

“Say that an evil is inscrutable if it is such that we can’t think of any reason God (if there is such a person) could have for permitting it. Clearly, the crucial problem for this probabilistic argument from evil is just that nothing much follows from the fact that some evils are inscrutable; if theism is true we would expect that there would be inscrutable evil. Indeed, a little reflection shows there is no reason to think we could so much as grasp God’s plans here, even if he proposed to divulge them to us. But then the fact that there is inscrutable evil does not make it improbable that God exists.”
—Alvin Plantinga

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

"Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good."
—Archbishop Charles Chaput

"Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion."
—G. K. Chesterton

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”
—C S Lewis, Mere Christianity

"I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter."
—Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."
—G.K. Chesterton

"The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good.... If God can take the greatest of evils and turn them for the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well."
—Carl Trueman

“Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.”
—Os Guinness

"The reason the evolution controversy generates such high emotion is not that people care about, say, changes in the size of finch beaks but that they sense a potential challenge to their moral choices."
—Nancy Pearcey

"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has."
—Malcomb Muggeridge

"[evolutionary naturalists]...have not a well-supported scientific theory but a form of magic that masquerades as scientific theory...This form of magic is the view that something can be gotten from nothing...The transformation of nothing into something may involve minor expenditures of effort. For instance, the magician may need to utter 'abracadabra' or 'hocus pocus', likewise the Darwinian just-so stories that attempt to account for complex, information-rich biological structures are incantations that give the illusion of solving a problem but in fact merely cloak ignorance....We have become so accustomed to this something for nothing way of thinking that we no longer appreciate just how deeply magical it is."
—Prof. William Dembski (mathematician/ philosopher, Baylor University)

"If all the missing link stories that turn out later to be false or misleading or misinterpreted were laid end to end, they would wind up biting their own prehensile fossil tails."
—Bruce Chapman

"......this Darwinian claim to explain all of evolution is a popular half-truth whose lack of explicative power is compensated for only by the religious ferocity of its rhetoric... No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation."
—Lynn Margulis, biologist, Presidential Medal of Science winner ["Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of the Species," 2003, p29

"The only indisputable fact is: leading evolutionists have no evidence that natural selection created today’s biochemical complexity. Therefore, skepticism is the best response. Evolutionary dogmatism—the insistence that evolution is true—is a serious issue. Science is not threatened by evolutionary skepticism; science is threatened by the quasi-science of the evolutionist."
—Don McElroy

"Being an evolutionist means there is no bad news. If new species appear abruptly in the fossil record, that just means evolution operates in spurts. If species then persist for eons with little modification, that just means evolution takes long breaks. If clever mechanisms are discovered in biology, that just means evolution is smarter than we imagined. If strikingly similar designs are found in distant species, that just means evolution repeats itself. If significant differences are found in allied species, that just means evolution sometimes introduces new designs rapidly. If no likely mechanism can be found for the large-scale change evolution requires, that just means evolution is mysterious. If adaptation responds to environmental signals, that just means evolution has more foresight than was thought. If major predictions of evolution are found to be false, that just means evolution is more complex than we thought."
—Cornelius Hunter

“In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!”
—Ron Carlson

"Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint.....the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today."

‘… Evolution therefore came into being as a kind of secular ideology, an explicit substitute for Christianity."
—Dr. Michael Ruse, PhD. Philosophy of Science at F.S.U, and proponent of Darwinian Evolutionism

"Today, the world's most distinguished Darwinian, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, likewise thinks that evolution progresses up to humans and speaks of his world picture as a "myth" that must replace conventional religions."
—Michael Ruse, PhD.( Darwinian, philosopher of science at F.S.U.)

"Today, the world's most distinguished Darwinian, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, likewise thinks that evolution progresses up to humans and speaks of his world picture as a "myth" that must replace conventional religions."
—Michael Ruse, PhD. Darwinian, philosopher of science

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear . . . There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either."
—William B. Provine

"If the average length of finch beaks in a population increases five per cent following drought years, and droughts occur every ten years, how long will it take the beaks to grow from an average of one inch in length to ten feet, or for finches to become eagles?"
—Phillip Johnson

"Since we are creatures of natural selection, we cannot totally trust our senses. Evolution only passes on traits that help a species survive, and not concerned with preserving traits that tell a species what is actually true about life."
—Richard Dawkins

"Years ago, speaking in a tone of subdued irony for my benefit, Donn Rosen, a curator of ichthyology at the American Museum of Natural History, wryly summarized what is involved: 'Darwin said that speciation occurred too slowly for us to see it. Gould and Eldredge said it occurred too quickly for us to see it. Either way we don’t see it.' "
— Tom Bethell , American Spectator, September 2013

"Darwinism was an interesting idea in the 19th century, when handwaving explanations gave a plausible, if not properly scientific, framework into which we could fit biological facts. However, what we have learned since the days of Darwin throws doubt on natural selection's ability to create complex biological systems - and we still have little more than handwaving as an argument in its favour."
—Professor Colin Reeves, Dept of Mathematical Sciences Coventry University

"All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did."
—Harold Urey, Christian Science Monitor (January 4, 1962)

"Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, create, modify, shape, operate, drive, favor, maintain, push, or adjust. Natural selection does nothing ... . Having natural selection select is nifty because it excuses the necessity of talking about the actual causation of natural selection. Such talk was excusable for Charles Darwin, but inexcusable for evolutionists now. Creationists have discovered our empty "natural selection" language, and the "actions" of natural selection make huge, vulnerable targets."
— William Provine

“… belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.”
—William Provine, Cornell University, biology

"“Nursed by warm sunbeams in primeval caves,
Organic life began beneath the waves.
Hence without parents, by spontaneous birth,
Rise the first steps of animated earth.”
—Public TV "Evolution" series, 2002

"Evolution teaches that savagery is normal, and we are brothers to the beast."
—anonymous

"Evolutionary thought is popular because it is a world view which facilitates man's attempt to rid himself of all knowledge of a transcendent creator and promises to secure man's autonomy."
—GL Bahnsen

“Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, subtler. His body will become more harmonized , his movements more rhythmic , his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. And above these heights new peaks will rise.”
—Leon Trotsky

“Despite the widespread view that Darwinian Evolution has been able to explain the emergence of biological complexity that is not the case…Darwinian theory does not deal with the question how [life] was able to come into being. The troublesome question still in search of an answer is: How did a system capable of evolving come about in the first place?…Nature just doesn’t operate like that! Nature doesn’t spontaneously make highly organized…purposeful entities…And here precisely lies the [origin of] life problem…it is not just common sense that tells us that highly organized entities don’t just spontaneously come about. Certain basic laws of physics [coupled with mathematical probability] preach the same sermon – systems tend toward chaos and disorder, not toward order and function… Biology [i.e. a naturalistic origin of life] and physics seem contradictory, quite incompatible”
—Dr. Addy Pross, professor of chemistry, Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

"And who is this great I AM, this Disturber of man’s apathy, this Stumbling Block to intellectuals and Confounder of worldly wisdom? Why has He chosen to come forth to trouble the world which He created, and to trouble the chief of His works, Man, with this immovable and immortal question? He will not go quietly into the dark; He refuses to stand aside and let the world go on its merry way without Him. He is not only content to affirm that He exists; He demands that we acknowledge His existence as well."
—Will Hubbard

"...man without God is hopelessly lost. He is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there....His best scientific, philosophical, ands educational achievements have not even identified, let alone explained or resolved, the real issues of life."
—Marvin Rosenthal

"Faith turns a promise into a prophecy."
—Philip Brooks

"When dealing with a supernatural Being and taking things from Him that are humanly impossible, it is actually easier for us to take a lot than it is to take a little. And it is easier to stand in a place of bold trust than in a place where we cautiously and timidly cling to the shore."
—AB Simpson

"It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by reason."
—Blaise Pascal

"I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition."
—Mortimer J. Adler

“In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.”
—Blaisie Pascal

"I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition."
—Mortimer J. Adler

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
—Pope John Paul II

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye".
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Faith is not the basis of our salvation; it is only the instrument. The foundation, the basis, of our salvation is the Lord Jesus Christ and His work on our behalf. Faith, then, is nothing but the channel by means of which the work of the Lord Jesus Christ becomes efficacious in the children of God."
—Martyn Lloyd-Jones

"The conclusion that God exists doesn't require faith. Atheism requires faith. It takes faith to believe in everything coming from nothing. It takes only reason to believe in everything coming from God."
—Peter Kreeft

"God does not expect us to submit our faith to Him without reason, but the very limits of our reason make faith a necessity"
—Augustine

“Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.”
—Peter Kreeft

“We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.”
—Peter Kreeft

“Many people today seem convinced that the point of life is that there is no point. We face what Nietzsche call “Das Nichte”—or, the nothing. Our public philosophy tells us that we are the result of blind force plus chance and/or necessity. Yet our movies are filled with romantic longings, visions of other worlds, the hunger for transcendence, and love stories between vampires or other worlds where there is a greater unity of life and being. In other words, we face a massive contradiction between what one set of experts tells us is real and what many artists compel us to hope for and reflect on.”
—Nancy Pearcey (from, Saving Leonardo)

"Faith is not an instinct. It certainly is not a feeling – feelings don’t help much when you’re in the lions’ den or hanging on a wooden Cross. Faith is not inferred from the happy way things work. It is an act of will, a choice, based on the unbreakable Word of a God who cannot lie, and who showed us what love and obedience and sacrifice mean, in the person of Jesus Christ."
—Elizabeth Eliot

"In the darkness of faith, Nicodemus seemed to discover the God who is there, the light who draws us further up and further in, until standing before the divine, we ourselves are reborn."
—Jill Carattini

“Faith is an organ of knowledge, and love an organ of experience.”
—A.W. Tozer

"This is our time, folks. We do not have the luxury of neutrality, since in the eternal economy, there is only yes or no. It’s God or nothing. It is truth or lies. It is freedom or bondage. Life or death. There is no middle ground. No ambiguous morality that permits “yours” and “mine” and “theirs,” all equally good.

This is our moment in history, for better, and for all the worse. There’s no point in denying all the worse, or pretending it doesn’t wear us down. I know it wears me down.

Worn down or not, the facts remain unchanged. Jesus Christ is Lord. He is the light that is the life of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:4-5)

We must fortify the walls of our hearts and take courage. We need to choose to believe the eternal facts instead of feelings. It’s not a Pollyanna optimism I speak of, but a deep, solid faith that doesn’t surrender to gloom and futility. Do I know Him whom I have believed or not? Is He the King of Kings or not? There is only yes or no.

It is dark outside, and the enemy of our souls seems to be gaining more ground every day, logging terrific victories in our morally bankrupt culture. Now is our time to bring the light and live as children of light, with courage and steadfast faith.

Jesus Christ is Lord, now and forever. He lives and reigns forever. He is victorious, and all power and honor and glory belong to Him."
—Jennifer Hartline.

"When you refuse to teach on the radical depravity of men, it is an impossibility that you bring glory to God, His Christ, and His cross, because the cross of Jesus Christ and the glory thereof is most magnified when it's placed in front of the backdrop of our depravity!"
— Paul Washer, sermon, "Ten Indictments Against the Modern Church."

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
—Laurence J. Peter

“Does any one ask me, What is the best safeguard against false doctrine? – I answer in one word, ‘The Bible: the Bible regularly read, regularly prayed over, regularly studied.’ We must go back to the old prescription of our Master: ‘Search the Scriptures.’ (John 5:39) If we want a weapon to wield against the devices of Satan, there is nothing like ‘the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God."
—J.C. Ryle

“Let us, in heaven’s name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much worse for the pious – others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ. “It is the dogma that is the drama – not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to lovingkindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death – but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”
—Dorothy Sayers

"I feel that very grave dangers hang over us. This results from the apostasy of the great part of Europe from the Christian faith. Hence a worse state than the one we were in before we received the Faith. For no one returns from Christianity to the same state he was in before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature."
—CS Lewis

"Theological liberalism is the fake news version of Christianity. It uses God words but strips them of their biblical content. Thus they deny all the key doctrines of the faith or radically reinterpret them. They reject the miraculous and the supernatural, they reject the uniqueness of Christ, his virgin birth, his deity and his resurrection, they reject the reality of sin, the wrath of God and judgment to come, etc. Instead they push a schmaltzy and mushy “let’s love everyone and learn to just get along” version of Christianity."
-Bill Muehlenburg

"Eastern religions will be to Christianity a new, dangerous Gnosticism."
—Os Guiness

Any time a Christian tries publicly to take seriously a biblical commandment, he will be hit with the question why he doesn't obey some obscure Levitical prohibition, like not eating a calf with its mother's milk (which is taken to prohibit cheeseburgers). The answer is simple. Large swaths of the Old-Testament law (called in retrospect the "ceremonial law") were rendered obsolete by the new phase of salvation history ushered in by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The moral law in general was still upheld. If you want to know which is which, look to what the New Testament upholds and what it overturns. If you are too ignorant to know this or too lazy to overcome your ignorance, you should not be commenting about biblical law."
—Donald Williams (Facebook comment, June 28, 2015)

"Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the “grand reduction” of religious thought and practice to a set of sentimental and affirming principles, absent the presence of a transcendent, personal, and transformative God. It is a religious faith of mediocrity, of insularity, and of loneliness. It requires no greatness of soul. And it engenders no virtue, no charity, and no heroism."
—James D. Conley

"A time will come when instead of shepherds feeding the sheep, the church will have clowns entertaining the goats."
—C.H. Spurgeon

"The past several decades, we have seen a dramatic decline in doctrinal and biblical preaching. We have gone from theology to therapy in the pulpits. In the past decade, we went from therapy to motivational speaking instead of preaching."
—Joseph Mattera

"Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to exist side by side on earth, and will make no distinction between good and bad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own creation as real as Jupiter or Moloch; as true an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple; as true an idol as was ever moulded out of brass or clay. The hands of your own notions and emotions have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and aside the God of the Bible there is no God at all."
—J C Ryle

“It is a poor sermon that gives no offense; that neither makes the hearer displeased with himself nor with the preacher.”
—George Whitefield

"As God can send a nation or people no greater blessing than to give them faithful, sincere and upright ministers, so the greatest curse that God can possibly send upon a people in this world is to give them over to blind, unregenerate, carnal, lukewarm and unskilled guides."
—George Whitefield

“We live in a day in which renunciation is no longer being taught. We are not supposed to renounce anything to become Christians. We are not told to. We just believe something and accept something passively, in a state of moral inertia, and then we go right back to what we were doing before. There are people in this country making a career of compromising the cross of Christ with the world, until we cannot tell which is which. We are one big compromise.”
—AW Tozer

" If I see aright, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is, rather, a new bright ornament on the bosom of a self-assured and carnal Christianity… The old cross slew men, the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter.”
—A.W. Tozer

"The nature of Christ's salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day evangelist. He announces a Savior from hell rather than a Savior from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of Fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness."
—A.W. Pink

“The effort of liberal and borderline modernists to woo men to God by presenting the soft side of religion (is) an unqualified evil because it ignores the very reason for our alienation from God in the first place. Until a man had gotten into trouble with his heart he is not likely to get out of trouble with God.”
—A. W. Tozer

"[re Gnosticism]...it doesn’t matter what you believe as much as that you choose to believe it. You, after all, are not only the center of reality, you can create it."
—Carl E. Olson

“That is the only way to understand rightly this picture of the false prophets. The false prophet is a man who has no `strait gate' or `narrow way' in his gospel. He has nothing which is offensive to the natural man; he pleases all.”
—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

"Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna."
—Peter Kreeft

“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.'”
—St. Anthony the Great of Thebes

"...it is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology. It is a lie to say that dogma does not matter; it matters enormously. It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it. The brutal fact is that in this Christian country not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the Church teaches about God or man or society or the person of Jesus Christ."
—Dorothy Sayers

"Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of man,, trust in religious externalities, quasi religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit: these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul."
—A.W. Tozer

“In fact, when we listen to the church today, at least in the West, we are often left with impression that Christianity actually has very little to do with truth. Christianity is only about feeling better about ourselves, about leaping over our difficulties, about being more satisfied, about have better relationships, about getting on with our mothers-in-law, about understanding teenage rebellion, about coping with our unreasonable bosses, about finding greater sexual satisfaction, about getting rich, about receiving our own private miracles, and much else besides. It is about everything except truth. And yet this truth, personally embodied in Christ, gives us a place to stand in order to deal with the complexities of life, such as broken relations, teenage rebellion, and job insecurities. ”
—David F. Wells

"The desire to please may be commendable enough under certain circumstances, but when pleasing men means displeasing God it is an unqualified evil and should have no place in the Christian’s heart. To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men."
—A.W. Tozer

"That is the only way to understand rightly this picture of the false prophets. The false prophet is a man who has no `strait gate’ or `narrow way’ in his gospel. He has nothing which is offensive to the natural man; he pleases all. He is in ‘sheep’s clothing’, so attractive, so pleasant, so nice to look at. He has such a nice and comfortable and comforting message. He pleases everybody and everybody speaks well of him. He is never persecuted for his preaching, he is never criticized severely."
—Martyn Lloyd-Jones

"We earnestly pray God to prevent any damage to this valuable, beneficial, and necessary union. The Christian family is a sacred institution. If it totters, if the norms which the divine Redeemer laid down for it are rejected or ignored, then the very foundations of the state tremble; civil society stands betrayed and in peril. Everyone suffers."
—Pope John XXIII

"Theological liberalism is the fake news version of Christianity. It uses God words but strips them of their biblical content. Thus they deny all the key doctrines of the faith or radically reinterpret them. They reject the miraculous and the supernatural, they reject the uniqueness of Christ, his virgin birth, his deity and his resurrection, they reject the reality of sin, the wrath of God and judgment to come, etc. Instead they push a schmaltzy and mushy “let’s love everyone and learn to just get along” version of Christianity."
-Bill Muehlenburg

" In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."
— Flannery O'Conner

"It is the widespread and ongoing devaluation of human life in the Western world -- under various sentimental disguises: "quality of life," "pointless suffering," "termination of life without meaning," etc. I trace it to a certain mindset in the biological and social sciences which is extraordinarily influential among educated folk -- so much that it has achieved the status of a quasi-religious orthodoxy...."
— Walker Percy

" If I see aright, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is, rather, a new bright ornament on the bosom of a self-assured and carnal Christianity… The old cross slew men, the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter.”
—A.W. Tozer

“The effort of liberal and borderline modernists to woo men to God by presenting the soft side of religion (is) an unqualified evil because it ignores the very reason for our alienation from God in the first place. Until a man had gotten into trouble with his heart he is not likely to get out of trouble with God.”
—A. W. Tozer

… somewhere in the world of philosophy, we made a huge blunder across the centuries, when we lost contact with the reality of our emotions and made human beings purely cerebral. Then in the 1960’s, the existentialist philosophers became so popular focusing on emotion, focusing on passion, focusing on experience, and swung the pendulum to the other side to where rationality was not as important as much as acting for the passion of the moment. Somewhere in the middle is the balance.… Emotions are supposed to be indicators of reality, not fabricators, or framers of reality.”
—Ravi Zacharias

“In fact, when we listen to the church today, at least in the West, we are often left with impression that Christianity actually has very little to do with truth. Christianity is only about feeling better about ourselves, about leaping over our difficulties, about being more satisfied, about have better relationships, about getting on with our mothers-in-law, about understanding teenage rebellion, about coping with our unreasonable bosses, about finding greater sexual satisfaction, about getting rich, about receiving our own private miracles, and much else besides. It is about everything except truth. And yet this truth, personally embodied in Christ, gives us a place to stand in order to deal with the complexities of life, such as broken relations, teenage rebellion, and job insecurities. ”
—David F. Wells

“Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.”
—David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

“Religion today is not transforming people; rather it is being transformed by the people. It is not raising the moral level of society; it is descending to society’s own level, and congratulating itself that it has scored a victory because society is smilingly accepting its surrender.”
—A.W. Tozer

"[O]ne belongs to the whole, one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer…that alone is the great liberation. . .We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world."
—Friedrich Nietzche

"[Nietzsche]....was a very important thinker because he shows to modern western civilization its own dark heart and future...[Nietzsche]...let the cat out of the bag."
—Peter Kreeft

"[re Gnosticism]...it doesn’t matter what you believe as much as that you choose to believe it. You, after all, are not only the center of reality, you can create it."
—Carl E. Olson

“It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter willful blindness, and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction.”
-Jordan Peterson

Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace…Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian 'conception' of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins.... In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any ...real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God…Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. 'All for sin could not atone.' Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin.... Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
—D. Bonhoeffer

"You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography."
-PJ O'Rourke

"Guilt is a warning in the soul, analogous to pain as a warning in the body."
—Peter Kreeft

"For those who follow Jesus Christ, our message to the world must be clear. God transforms the heart and mind and we become his children and his ambassadors. Let us so live that we will never be accused of hate or indifference. But let us also know that compromising the truth is a serious blunder and ends up celebrating that which is not in the will of our Father. This is a painful tension for a believer. To be seen as rejecting a belief or a behavior is not the same as rejecting the person. But God helps us to carry that burden. By contrast, when Truth is lived out in love and grace, it will always make the faith attractive and even the one who opposes us will recognize the fearful symmetry of a conviction for the sacred that will swim against the tide and a commitment to the person that will find a bridge of hope. We must so live the gospel that men and women will call upon God’s name and make this body his home until we reach our Eternal City bought with the precious sacrifice of Jesus Christ. His body was broken for us so that ours might be mended for Him."
—Ravi Zacharias

"We are a desperate collectivity of hedonists indulging in fast food, faster sex and any other fastest pleasure we can catch, high-minded or low....as if somehow more and more and faster and further and longer-living are answers to where and why."—John Senior

"When a society mistakes license for liberty, and establishes the Cult of the Imperial Self as its religion, the poor and vulnerable suffer."
—Robert P. George

"We tend to think sexual hedonism places too *high* a value on the purely physical dimension, but in reality it places a very *low* value on the body, draining it of moral and personal significance.

In the hookup culture, partners are referred to as “friends with benefits.” But that is a euphemism because they are not really even friends. The unwritten etiquette is that you never meet just to talk or spend time together. A New York Times article explains, “You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don’t have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt.”

Except when they do. The same article quotes a teenager named Melissa who was depressed because her hookup partner had just “broken up” with her. No matter what the current secular philosophy tells them, people cannot disassociate their emotions from what they do with their bodies.

In the biblical worldview, sexuality is integrated into the total personality. The most complete and intimate *physical* union is meant to express the most complete and intimate *personal* union. In marriage, husband and wife are intended to relate to one another along all dimensions in a whole-life covenant bond....

The biblical view fits who we really are."
—Nancy Pearcey

"No sane person wants hell to exist. No sane person wants evil to exist. But hell is just evil eternalized. If there is evil and if there is eternity, there can be hell. If it is intellectually dishonest to disbelieve in evil just because it is shocking and uncomfortable, it is the same with hell. Reality has hard corners, surprises, and terrible dangers in it. We desperately need a true road map, not nice feelings, if we are to get home. It is true, as people often say, that "hell just feels unreal, impossible." Yes. So does Auschwitz. So does Calvary."
—Peter Kreeft

"Hell is when you come to the end and discover that you have a god after all, and it is you."
—Linwood Kemp

"QUESTION: If God only creates what is good, what can we say of Hell?

MY ANSWER: Is it good that God's justice be given ultimate expression? Is it good that the finally unrepentant not be able to shake their fists in God's face and get away with their rebellion with no consequences forever? Is it good that evil be finally quarantined so that it cannot mess up the rest of the universe forever? [Heads nod "Yes" after each question.] Hell *in itself* then is not an evil thing (though it is regrettable that people will insist on being there); it is in fact a positive good."
—Donald Williams

“The bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”
—Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

"EVERY sin in the history of the world will either be punished in Hell or punished in Christ."
—Steve Lawson

"Honesty is a choice of the will—the choice to seek the truth no matter where or what. This is the most momentous choice you can make. It is the choice of light over darkness, ultimately heaven over hell. Honesty is infinitely more momentous than we often think. It is also much harder than we think. Our culture trivializes honesty into merely 'sharing our feelings', telling others about the state of our nerve ends. That's not the opposite of dishonesty, that's just the opposite of shame or shyness.

"Shallow honesty seeks 'sharing', deep honesty seeks Truth.

"Shallow honesty stands in the presence of others—-deep honesty stands in the presence of God."
—Peter Kreeft

“It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter willful blindness, and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction.”
-Jordan Peterson

“Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.”
-Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

"The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style."
-Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

"Humanism or atheism is a wonderful philosophy of life as long as you are big, strong, and between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. But watch out if you are in a lifeboat and there are others who are younger, bigger, or smarter."
—William Murrayz

"Scientism has been shown to be an illusion time and time again. But it is another illusion to imagine that scientism will go away. Looking to science for deliverance from the tragicomedy of history is part of what it means to be modern. The tracts that come and go in airport bookstores, promising solutions to problems that have baffled the greatest minds, are symptoms of a confusion that is incurable. We may expect many more books that offer to extricate us from conflict by sprinkling the magic dust of science on our disorders."
—John N. Gray (philosopher)

"Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty."
—Jacques Monod

"Secular Humanism has a notion of Hope for History that it stole from Christianity, but without the Christian basis for that Hope in the sovereignty and grace of God."
—Donald Williams

—Francis A. Schaeffer

—Maggie Gallagher (paraphrasing/ summarizing Kevin Hammond)

"Evolutionary thought is popular because it is a world view which facilitates man's attempt to rid himself of all knowledge of a transcendent creator and promises to secure man's autonomy."
—GL Bahnsen

So, Humanism is the absolute certain result, if we choose this other final reality (instead of Christianity) and say that is what it is. You must realize that when we speak of man being the measure of all things under the Humanist label, the first thing is that man has only knowledge from himself. That he, being finite, limited, very faulty in his observation of many things, yet nevertheless, has no possible source of knowledge except what man, beginning from himself, can find out from his own observation. Specifically, in this view, there is no place for any knowledge from God.
—Francis Schaeffer

“The new paganism is the virtual divinization of man, the religion of man as the new God. One of its popular slogans, repeated often by Christians, is "the infinite value of the human person." Its aim is building a heaven on earth, a secular salvation. Another word for the new paganism is humanism, the religion that will not lift up its head to the heavens but stuffs the heavens into its head.”
—Peter Kreeft

"All forms of humanist sentimental ethics have one common characteristic: subjectivism. Humanists decide for them selves what is right and what is wrong without any external entity to instruct them....sentiment rules."
—Herbert Schlossberg

"How did rationalism replace biblical Christianity as the dominant public philosophy in England so easily? Two factors coming together in diabolically bad timing created a perfect storm. The revulsion against Bible-quoting that followed the religious wars of the 17th century coincided with an increased confidence in human reason due to the successes of the early modern scientific movement of the same century. The rise of modern science was a good thing in itself, neither anti-Christian nor even pro-secular at first, but based on a faith in the intelligibility of nature that flowed from belief in a rational Creator. But it was transformed by the cultural context, the visceral desire for something other than revelation as a basis for public policy, into an overconfidence in reason divorced from revelation that gave us the Endarkenment of the 18th century. That overconfidence led to the disillusionment of Post-Modernism, and to the world in which we still live."
—Donald Williams

"Perhaps we have crossed some kind of cultural Rubicon, and broad agreement on terms is no longer possible. Certainly the political has become personal for many millions of Americans, and political views—replacing faith in a secular society—become the only eschatological force in our private and public lives...

The whole enterprise of secular liberalism is based on the premise of self-creation: the modern self, unshackled from the “oppressive” bonds of religion, family, and even biology, can now make itself anew as it pleases. All that is solid does indeed melt into air in secular liberalism, and that melting begins with a reluctance to define terms with finality. Now, more than ever, we must shore up the terms of our world and be unafraid to affix ourselves to unwavering definitions."
—RM Stangler.

"But if we are talking about lifestyle, and if lifestyle refers to something more than a personal consumption item, at some point we are going to have to enact laws. Culture is impossible without them. But cultures differ because they serve different gods, and different gods require different things. This means the laws are different. Every society is a theocracy. The only question is, “Who’s Theo?”
—Douglas Wilson

“You are not mature if you have a high esteem of yourself. He who boasts in himself is but a babe in Christ, if indeed he be in Christ at all. Young Christians may think much of themselves. Growing Christians think themselves nothing. Mature Christians know that they are less than nothing. The more holy we are, the more we mourn our infirmities, and the humbler is our estimate of ourselves.”
—Charles Spurgeon

"It is strange that some theologians and preachers see something incompatible or irreconcilable in the Bible’s portrayal of God’s anger and God’s love. Anger and love can co-exist simultaneously in a human heart; why not in God’s?… If God were not angry at the evil that destroys human life, could he be said to love us? If God did not love us so much, why would he get angry against all that threatens to destroy us, including our own sinful rebellion and folly?"
—Chris Wright

“As we grow in the knowledge of God's holiness, even though we are growing in the practice of holiness, it seems the gap between our knowledge and our practice always gets wider. This is the Holy Spirit's way of drawing us to more and more holiness.”
—Jerry Bridges

"You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography."
-PJ O'Rourke

"O sad-faced mourners, who each day are wending
Through churchyard paths of cypress and of yew,
Leave for today the low graves you are tending,
And lift your eyes to God's eternal blue."
—-May Riley Smith

"Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things."
—William James

"Thankfully, the good news of the gospel is not an exhortation from above to 'hang on at all costs', or 'grin and bear it' in the midst of hardship. No, the good news is that God is hanging on to you, and in the end, when all is said and done, the power of God will triumph over every pain and loss."
—Tullian Tchividjian ("Glorious Ruin")

“The closer we are to God, to divine attributes — such as absolute truth, goodness, and beauty — the more we wonder. When we separate ourselves from truth, goodness, and beauty, we lose wonder and become cynical. The Enlightenment was basically the narrowing of our vision to a purely scientific, empirical, rationalistic worldview, screwing down the manhole covers on us so we became squinting underground creatures.”
—Peter Kreeft

"Wonder is that possession of the mind that enchants the emotions while never surrendering reason. It is a grasp on reality that does not need constant high points in order to be maintained, nor is it made vulnerable by the low points of life’s struggle. It sees in the ordinary the extraordinary, and it finds in the extraordinary the reaffirmations for what it already knows. Wonder clasps the soul (the spiritual) and is felt in the body (the material). Wonder interprets life through the eyes of eternity while enjoying the moment, but never lets the momentary vision exhaust the eternal. Wonder makes life’s enchantment real and knows when and where enchantment must lie. Wonder knows how to read the shadows because it knows the nature of light. Wonder knows that while you cannot look at the light you cannot look at anything else without it. It is not exhausted by childhood but finds its key there. It is a journey like a walk through the woods, over the usual obstacles and around the common distractions while the voice of direction leads, saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it” (Isaiah 30:21 KJV). It is not at all surprising that of the seventy usages of the word wonder in the Old Testament, nearly half of them are by David, the sweet singer of Israel. Wonder and music go hand in hand. Wonder cannot help but sing. Even nature recognizes that."
—Ravi Zacharias

"The essence of paganism is idolatry: the self-aggrandizing worship of false gods in place of the God of love who is Creator of the universe and Lord of Life. How can we know that an idol, a false god, and not the true God, is being worshiped? I submit to you that there is a foolproof test: False gods always demand the blood of innocents. A pagan culture is always, in the end, a culture of death."
—Robert P. George

"Where the innocent and just are slain, there the god being worshiped is not the God of Israel, the Lord of Life, but rather Moloch in one or another of his protean disguises. Paganism is a permanent threat. The worship of false gods is a constant temptation."
—Robert P. George

"We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess... And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. ...what is the consequence, then, when Christianity, as a living historical force, recedes? Christianity is the midwife of nihilism, not because it is itself nihilistic, but because it is too powerful in its embrace of the world and all of the world’s mystery and beauty; and so to reject Christianity now is, of necessity, to reject everything except the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity. ...as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing—the nothing. No third way lies open for us now, because—as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not—all things have been made subject to Him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath His feet, until the very end of the world, and—simply said—there is no other god."
—David Bentley Hart

“Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who as a heaven for every body, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to be side by side in time, but will make no distinction between good and bad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own, as truly an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple. The hands of your own fancy and sentimentality have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and beside the God of the Bible there is no God at all.”
—J.C. Ryle

"[The]postmodern person.... someone who is virtually unfamiliar with biblical faith, whether in contemporaneous or historical form, who therefore also lacks a sense of sin. It is next to impossible to persuade him that he is in thrall to the idolatrous imagination or suffers from the misplaced devotion that idolatry connotes."
—Vigen Guroian

"[T]he main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good."
—Tim Keller

"The Greek word behind covetousness (pleonexia) is defined as “the state of desiring to have more than one’s due,” which is to say that a covetous person is not content with what they’ve been alloted by God—including God himself—and so they are constantly looking elsewhere for their satisfaction. Does that sound at all familiar?"
—Tim Challies

"Biblical training does not guarantee that our hearts are inclined toward worshiping the true king. Religious language and learning can cloak the kingdom of self."
—John Piper

"Hell is when you come to the end and discover that you have a god after all, and it is you."
—Linwood Kemp

"The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance."
—Malcolm Muggeridge

"[Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none. Such a God is an idol of your own."
—J.C. Ryle

"There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It’s not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion."
—C. S. Lewis

"Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none; a God who can allow good and bad to exist side by side on earth, and will make no distinction between good and bad in eternity. Such a God is an idol of your own creation as real as Jupiter or Moloch; as true an idol as any snake or crocodile in an Egyptian temple; as true an idol as was ever moulded out of brass or clay. The hands of your own notions and emotions have made him. He is not the God of the Bible, and aside the God of the Bible there is no God at all."
—J C Ryle

—CS Lewis

“Progress” seems to be our name for Juggernaut, the Hindu god that trampled his worshipers to death like a runaway elephant. Between Juggernaut and Moloch, the old gods are making a remarkable comeback in our secular society.”
—Peter Kreeft

"When a society mistakes license for liberty, and establishes the Cult of the Imperial Self as its religion, the poor and vulnerable suffer."
—Robert P. George

"[W]e must worship, we will worship. Even as nature abhors a vacuum, so does the human soul. The human soul will find an object of worship, either on the shelf, on the altar, in the mirror, or in heaven. We are born idolaters.”
—Al Mohler

“Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”
—John Calvin

"Entertainment is the devil's substitute for joy."
—Leonard Ravenhill

"Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy"
—C.S. Lewis

"We are not to reflect on the wickedness of men but to look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults, an image which, by its beauty and dignity, should allure us to love and embrace them."
—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

"What does inerrancy mean? It means I trust the Biblical authors more than I trust the critics; it means I trust them more than I trust church leaders; it means most importantly that I trust them more than I trust *me*. (Without this last provision, the first two are subject to abuse.) It means I have discovered over fifty plus years of studying the Scriptures that such trust is always justified. Always. That is the bottom line."
—Donald Williams

“If you want to have order in the commonwealth, you first have to have order in the individual soul.”
—Russell Kirk

"Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them."
— George Orwell

"[W]hile there are stupid people everywhere, there is a particular minute and microcephalous idiocy which is only found in an intelligentsia.

I have sometimes fancied that, as chilly people like a warm room, silly people sometimes like a diffused atmosphere of intellectualism and long words."
— GK Chesterton

"The fact that even in our disordered lives we have innumerable intimations of an order from which we have fallen is evidence of a mind and a being above the natural order we perceive,"
—Marshall McLuhan

"As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."
—Max Planck

"Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word ‘miraculous’ without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word."
—George Ellis (British astrophysicist)

"We are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in."
—John O’Keefe (astronomer at NASA) Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 200.

"Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan."
—Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics) Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p. 83.

“As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit  it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”
—Professor Freeman J, Princeton

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”
—Max Planck, physicist,( founder of quantum physics )

“It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.”

“It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.”
—Anthony Flew

"As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency—or, rather, Agency—must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?"
—George Greenstein (American astronomer)

“When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”
—Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University)

"When I went to the moon I was a pragmatic test pilot. But when I saw the planet Earth floating in the vastness of space the presence of divinity became almost palpable and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident."
—Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14 Astronaut)

"A life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world."
—John Wheeler (American physicist)

,".... biologists must deny their scientific intuition that molecular machines appear to be the engineered products of intelligent design, and instead must remind themselves that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution."
—Casey Luskin

“To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”
—Francis Collins (geneticist)

"Everyone who is seriously interested in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe,a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble."
—Albert Einsten

"ID is very different from creation science...Whatever the merits, however, [it] is clearly a scientific disagreement, not a disagreement between science and something else."
—Dr. Thomas Nagel, philosophy, NYU

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."
—Max Planck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, founder of Quantum Physics

"If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music."
—Thomas Carlyle

"So compelling is that illusion [of design] that it has fooled our greatest minds for centuries, until Charles Darwin burst onto the scene."
—Richard Dawkins

"The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects."
—Albert Einstein

"The really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.....“even if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life—almost contrived—you might say a ‘put-up job’."
—Dr. Paul Davies

"Scientific journals now document many scientific problems and criticisms of evolutionary theory and students need to know about these as well. … Many of the scientific criticisms of which I speak are well known by scientists in various disciplines, including the disciplines of chemistry and biochemistry, in which I have done my work."
—Philip S. Skell, emeritus Evan Pugh Professor at Penn Staue University

"How is it that, with so many other apparent options, we are in a Universe that possesses just that peculiar nexus of properties that breeds life? It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [consciousness and cosmic origins] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always, as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—that the stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical Universe that breeds life, and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself."
—George Wald, (Harvard prof. emeritus)1984

"What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, warm breath, not a ‘spark of life’. It is information, words, instructions…Think of a billion discrete digital characters…If you want to understand life think about technology."
—Richard Dawkins (Dawkins 1996, 112)

"Human DNA contains more organized information than the Encyclopedia Britannica. If the full text of the encyclopedia were to arrive in computer code from outer space, most people would regard this as proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But when seen in nature, it is explained as the workings of random forces."
—George Sim Johnson (Sims Johnson 1999)

"When Watson and Crick discovered the structure and information bearing properties of DNA, they did indeed solve one mystery, namely, the secret of how the cell stores and transmits hereditary information. But they uncovered another mystery that remains with us to this day. This is the DNA enigma – the mystery of the origin of the information needed to build the first living organism."
—Stephen Meyer (Meyer 2009, 24)

"From the intrinsic evidence of His creation, the great architect of the universe begins to appear as a pure mathematician."
—Sir James H. Jeans, physicist/astronomer

"Being an evolutionist means there is no bad news. If new species appear abruptly in the fossil record, that just means evolution operates in spurts. If species then persist for eons with little modification, that just means evolution takes long breaks. If clever mechanisms are discovered in biology, that just means evolution is smarter than we imagined. If strikingly similar designs are found in distant species, that just means evolution repeats itself. If significant differences are found in allied species, that just means evolution sometimes introduces new designs rapidly. If no likely mechanism can be found for the large-scale change evolution requires, that just means evolution is mysterious. If adaptation responds to environmental signals, that just means evolution has more foresight than was thought. If major predictions of evolution are found to be false, that just means evolution is more complex than we thought."
—Cornelius Hunter

"We have caught the first glimpses of our instruction book, previously known only to God."
—Dr. Francis Collins (re Genome study)

"...the onset of Darwinian evolution in a chemical system was likely not the critical step in the emergence of life. … Instead, the emergence of life was likely marked by a transition in information processing capabilities."
—Sara Imari and Paul Davies

"For even creation reveals Him who formed it, and the very work made suggests Him who made it, and the world manifests Him who ordered it."
—Iranaeus

"Why do Darwinists keep indulging in this gross contradiction? Because, as human beings, they not only cannot live in a world without meaning and purpose, they cannot even articulate a world without meaning and purpose, they cannot make such a world intelligible to themselves. So they keep appealing to teleology, even in the act of promoting a theory that radically denies all teleology. They are intellectual parasites who would strip all meaning from the universe, while continuing to preserve for themselves the comforts and pleasures of meaning.

The game is up. Henceforth we shall tell the Darwinists that they have no right to eat their meaning and have it. What can they say in reply? That a process utterly lacking in purpose has produced beings, such as themselves, who require a belief in purpose? Their position is as absurd as that of the postmodernists, who declare that there is no such thing as truth in the sense of words that correspond with reality, even as they expect us to agree with their theories! But how can we agree with any theory, if there can be no true correspondence between words and reality?

No matter how the Darwinists, liberals, and postmodernists twist it, they have no right to indulge in such nonsense. We must require of them that they be intellectually consistent and accept the nihilistic void produced by their own belief systems. Then we will see how long those belief systems last."
—Lawrence Austen

"Current scientific evidence points not to undirected random chemical interactions as the explanation for life, but to the intervention of a mind. Intelligent design makes no claim whatever about the nature of the designer — that is beyond the reach of science. But science does have rules about how to detect the past actions of an intelligent agent. “Is this pointed rock an arrowhead, or just a stone? Was the fire arson or accident? The same logical constructs form the foundation of intelligent design theory."
— Dr. William S. Harris

"As a scientist I am sensitive to the danger of falling into a "God of the gaps" mentality and running the risk of intellectual laziness. For that reason I hasten to say, I do not find the main evidence for God and His activity in the current gaps in the scientific picture. I see evidence of God and His activity in the science we do know—indeed, I see it in the very fact that we can do science at all."
—John Lennox

“Every common organism is more intricately articulated, more astoundingly put together than the most sublime literary composition…Despite all evasions, the ultimate agency of intelligence stares one in the face.”
—Frederick Ferre (Basic Modern Philosophy of Religion)

"Science is the glimpse of God's purpose in nature . The very existence of the amazing world of the atom and radiation points to a purposeful creation , to the idea that there is a God and an intelligent purpose back of everything . An orderly universe testifies to the greatest statement ever uttered "In the beginning God ..."
—Arthur H Compton , winner of the Nobel prize in Physics

“The stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.
—R.C. Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, “The Mental Universe”; Nature 436:29,2005)

"Intelligent design, as one sees it from a scientific point of view, seems to be quite real. This is a very special universe: it's remarkable that it came out just this way. If the laws of physics weren't just the way they are, we couldn't be here at all. The sun couldn't be there, the laws of gravity and nuclear laws and magnetic theory, quantum mechanics, and so on have to be just the way they are for us to be here."
—Dr. Charles Townes, Nobel Prize winner in physics, MIT, UC Berkeley , UC Berkeley News (June 17, 2005).)

"..... mathematics is not only intrinsic to the Universe but fundamental to the human brain. Add to that the idea that we humans were created in the image of God, our Creator. This tells us the following. The mathematical description of the Universe, though immensely complex and still largely unknown (Ecclesiastes 3:11), is not an invention of man, but a creation of God. And when we try to discover the mathematical description of the Universe, which our mind was created to be able to understand, we are “thinking God’s [mathematical] thoughts after Him.”
—John Gideon Hartnett

""[A]s science continues to reveal how life works, we find again and again that the magic that seems to distinguish between things that are alive and things that are not [is] actually created by complex interacting molecular machines. These microscopic machines are as precise and intricate as a mechanical watch, but instead of being run on gears and springs, are powered by the fundamental rules of physics and chemistry....

Now what's most unsettling to me about this is that we didn't build these machines. As someone originally trained as an engineer, I've got to be honest with you, I kind of hate this. As the most clever species on the planet, we kind of like to think of ourselves as the builders of the most sophisticated technology in the entire universe. We invented written language and the printing press. We cured polio and sent a man to the moon....

And yet when I look through a microscope at a humble bacterium ... I still wonder how it really works. Because the mechanical watch that is life is not like any watch we've ever built. It is biological gears and springs, but they fill rooms and buildings and cities of a vast microscope landscape that's bustling with activity.

On the one hand it's extremely well organized, but on the other hand the sheer scale of all of this unfamiliar well-organized stuff that happens in there makes me feel that I've stumbled onto an alternate landscape of technology that's built by an engineer a million times smarter than me. The more that I search for principles beyond the ones we've already learned, the more I am overwhelmed with the feeling that this stuff was built by aliens.

OK, not literally. I don't literally mean that I think little green men and women came down to the earth and seeded life here a billion years ago. What we understand of course is that life evolved on the planet over billions of years. But the results of evolution confuse even our smartest engineers when we try to understand how we could build what biology has evolved."
—Stephen Larson

There is no "Made by Yahweh" engraved on the side of the bacterial rotary motor -- the flagellum. In order to find out what or who its designer is, one must go outside the narrow discipline of biology. Cross-disciplinary dialogue must begin with the fields of philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and theology. Design itself, however, is a direct scientific inference; it does not depend on a single religious premise for its conclusions.
—(Thomas Woodward, Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelligent Design, p. 15 (Baker Books, 2006).)

"We have only to see a few letters of the alphabet spelling our name in the sand to recognize at once the work of an intelligent agent. How much more likely, then is the existence of an intelligent Creator behind human DNA, the colossal biological database that contains no fewer than 3.5 billion "letters the longest "word" yet discovered?"
—John Lennox

"The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
—G.K. Chesterton

"In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."
—Edmund Burke

"Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them."
— George Orwell

"Academic ivory towers are increasingly tolerant of psychopathy masquerading as philosophy...."
—Joe Carter (re Peter Singer)

“Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.”
—Peter Kreeft

“Be very sure of this,-people never reject the Bible because they cannot understand it. They understand it only too well; they understand that it condemns their own behavior; they understand that it witnesses against their own sins, and summons them to judgment.”
—J.C. Ryle

"If the social justice movement went by its actual name, young Christians would not have been lured into it. Because the social justice movement is actually Cultural Marxism. There's no such thing as 'social justice,' people. In fact, in the Bible, justice never has an adjective. There's justice and there's injustice, but there's not different kinds of justice."

The term "social justice" is an argument for the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges in a society. Sometimes that argument turns loud and violent, though many have good intentions when they speak of "social justice," a desire for the common good. But who gets to decide what the common good is, and who carries it out?

God is the one who defines what is just and what is unjust. "His work is perfect for all His ways are justice" (Deuteronomy 32:4). Our works are not good. Why is there in injustice in the world? Because it's full of unjust people (Romans 3:12). So what has a just God told us to do? He said preach the gospel to all nations, baptize, and teach them (Matthew 28:19-20).

That is the mission of His church. Those who have been changed by His Spirit will do good works -- the works God defines as good (Ephesians 2:10, Titus 2:14, Hebrews 10:24) -- but works are not the gospel. You cannot change the world. Only God changes hearts, which He does through the gospel.

"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:23-24). That is the message of justice we should announce, so that all who hear it might be forgiven their sins and will not fall under the righteous judgment of God. He is both "just and the Justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26) when we understand the text."
—Voddie Bauchamp

"For some reason, whenever I read a book by an evolutionary psychologist I get the feeling that I've read something like this before in an astrology text. Granted, there are no references to planets or stellar objects that are supposed to explain such things as why the typical human sleep cycle lasts about 90 minutes, but the explanation in terms of how our "ancient ancestors" adapted to their environment seem like the same kind of confirmation bias and just-so stories that astrologers devise, or the kind of stories mythmakers devise to explain the origin of a rock formation called The Old Hag"
—Dr. William Meller.

"America is a knowledge-based society, where information counts as much as material resources. Therefore those with the power to define what qualifies as knowledge - to determine what are the accepted facts - wield the greatest social and political power."
—Nancy Pearcey

“As a nation we risk coming undone because our language is coming undone and our language is coming undone because one by one we are being undone”
—David W. Orr

"When language is devalued, misused, or corrupted, so too are those who speak it and those who hear it."
—David W. Orr

“This is what God gives us the Law for, to show us ourselves and our true colors”.
—D.L. Moody

“There is no way of coming to that knowledge of sin which is necessary to repentance, but by comparing our hearts and lives by the Law”.
—Matthew Henry

“The man who does not know the nature of the Law cannot know the nature of sin. And he who does not know the nature of sin cannot know the nature of the Savior”.
—John Bunyon

“Through the Law, God opens man’s eyes so that he sees his helplessness and by faith takes refuge to His mercy and is healed. The Law was given in order that we might seek grace, grace was given in order that we might fulfill the Law.”
—Augustine

“I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law. The Law is the needle, and you cannot draw the silken thread of the gospel through a man’s heart unless you first send the needle of the Law to make way for it. If men do not understand the Law, they will not feel they are sinners. And if they are not consciously sinners, they will never value the sin offering. There is no healing a man till the Law has wounded him, no making him alive till the Law has slain him”.
—Spurgeon

“The law of Moses is not a religion of salvation, it is the categorical imperative of God by which men are accused and exposed as sinners”.
—Leon Morris

“The law of God is like a mirror. Now the purpose is to reveal to you that your face is dirty, but the purpose of a mirror is not to wash your face. When you look in a mirror and find that your face is dirty, you do not then reach to take the mirror off the wall and attempt to rub it on your face as a cleansing agent. The purpose of the mirror is to drive you to the water. Any other use of the mirror is plain folly. It is by the straight edge of the law of God, whether expressed by Moses or reaffirmed by our Lord Himself, that man may know how crooked he really is, and may turn from the folly of self effort to the reality of the life of faith in Christ”.
—Donald Grey Barnhouse

The law was never given to save man, but it was given as a school master to bring him to the Savior. The whole object and purpose of the law is to show that man can never save himself. Once he has understood the law and its spiritual meaning and content he knows that he cannot keep it. He is undone. . . . It shows us our utter helplessness and hopelessness, and thereby it becomes our school master to lead us to Christ, the only one who by the grace of God can save us, and deliver us, and reconcile us to God, and make us safe for all eternity.”
—Martin Lloyd-Jones

“The Rich Young Ruler is a good example of the use of the law to reveal sin and show a man his need of a Savior.”
—Warren Weirsbe

“Without God, there is no moral law.”
—Ravi Zacharias

"The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden."
—GK Chesterton

“When the idea of moral law is held in disrespect, the notion of sin softens and then dissolves.”
—Douglas Groothuis

"Every word of God, whether promise, or doctrine, or specific command, has in it some element bearing on conduct. God reveals nothing only in order that we may know, but that, knowing, we may do and be what is pleasing in His sight. All His words are law. But Paul sets forth another view of its purpose here; namely, to drive home to men’s consciences the conviction of sin”.

“That is not the only purpose, for God reveals duty primarily in order that men may do it, and His law is meant to be obeyed. But, failing obedience, this second purpose comes into action, and His law is a swift witness against sin. The more clearly we know our duty, the more poignant will be our consciousness of failure”.

“The light which shines which shows the path of right, shines to show our deviations from it. And that conviction of sin, which it was the very purpose of all the previous revelation to produce, is a merciful gift; for, as the Apostle implies, it is the prerequisite to the faith which saves.”
—Alexander MacLaren

"The Old Covenant is the Law which came by Moses, and, believe it or not, it plays a vital role in bringing a man or woman to Christ. If we would use it more, we would probably not have so many false professions of salvation.”
—Kay Arthur

“Only a fool would think any method of conviction better than the one God has chosen and appointed.”
—Matthew Henry

“The law of Moses is not a religion of salvation, it is the categorical imperative of God by which men are accused and exposed as sinners.”
—Leon Morris

“Therefore I cannot spare the Law one moment, no more than I can spare Christ, seeing I now want it as much to keep me to Christ, as I ever wanted it to bring me to Him. Otherwise this evil heart of unbelief would immediately depart from the living God. Indeed each is continually sending me to the other the Law to Christ, and Christ to the Law.”
—John Wesley

“I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law. The Law is the needle, and you cannot draw the silken thread of the gospel through a man’s heart unless you first send the needle of the Law to make way for it. If men do not understand the Law, they will not feel they are sinners. And if they are not consciously sinners, they will never value the sin offering. There is no healing a man till the Law has wounded him, no making him alive till the Law has slain him.”
—Charles Spurgeon

“We are certainly under the same obligation as they were; for there cannot be a doubt that the claim of absolute perfection which God made for His Law is perpetually in force.”
—John Calvin

“What good is it to have godly principles yet not know them? Why should God reveal His mind to us if we don’t care enough to know what it is? Yet the only way we can know whether we are sinning is by knowing His moral law: By the law is the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:20).”
—Johnathan Edwards

“Evangelism must take the sinner and measure him against the perfect law of God so he can see his deficiency. A gospel that deals only with human need, only with human feelings, only with human problems, lacks the true balance. That is why churches are full of people whose lives are essentially unchanged after their supposed conversion.”
—John McArthur

“When speaking of those who didn’t use the Law as a school-master, Wesley said, “All this proceeds from the deepest ignorance of the nature of the properties and use of the Law. And, proves that those who act thus either know not Christ, are strangers to living faith, or are at least but babes in Christ, and as such are unskilled in the word of righteousness.”
—John Wesley

“Explain the Ten Commandments and obey the divine injunction: show my people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins. Open up the spirituality of the law as our Lord did, and show how it is broken by evil thoughts, intents, and imaginations. By this means many sinners will be pricked in their hearts.”
—Charles Spurgeon

"There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft."
—C.S. Lewis

"When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would be right to kill him."
—Kathryn Jean-Lopez

"Every religion---including Christless Christianity--which is no Christianity at all---assumes some form of redemption by self-effort.....The law unmasks our pretensions, showing us that we deserve God's judgment for the pride clinging to our best works and intentions---never mind the obvious sins. The law commands, but does not give us any power to fulfill its conditions."
—Michael Horton, "Christless Christianity"

"[God's law]...comes to kill us--not to improve us, but to end our life in Adam, exposing us for what we really are...Until our preaching of the law has exposed our hearts and God's holiness at that profound level, our hearers will never flee to Christ alone for safety even if they come to us for advice."
—Michael Horton

“Regardless of the official theology held on paper, moralistic preaching (the bane of conservatives and liberals alike) assumes that we are not really helpless sinners who need to be rescued but decent folks who need good examples, exhortations, and instructions.”
—Michael S. Horton

"The commandments of Christ are not difficult because they are so complex or mystical. They're difficult because they are so clear and we do not want to keep them."
—Fr Stephen Freeman

"Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules."
—C. S. Lewis

“The law is for the self-righteous, to humble their pride: the gospel is for the lost, to remove their despair.”
—Charles H. Spurgeon

“It sounds really spiritual to say God is interested in a relationship, not in rules. But it's not biblical. From top to bottom, the Bible is full of commands. They aren't meant to stifle a relationship with God, but to protect it, seal it, and define it. Never forget: first God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, then He gave them the law. God's people were not redeemed by observing the law. But they were redeemed so that they might obey the law.”
—Kevin DeYoung, The Hole in Our Holiness: Filling the Gap between Gospel Passion and the Pursuit of Godliness

"Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles."
—Peter Kreeft

"The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal."
-PJ O'Rourke

"You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography."
-PJ O'Rourke

"You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography."
-PJ O'Rourke

"Theological liberalism is the fake news version of Christianity. It uses God words but strips them of their biblical content. Thus they deny all the key doctrines of the faith or radically reinterpret them. They reject the miraculous and the supernatural, they reject the uniqueness of Christ, his virgin birth, his deity and his resurrection, they reject the reality of sin, the wrath of God and judgment to come, etc. Instead they push a schmaltzy and mushy “let’s love everyone and learn to just get along” version of Christianity."
-Bill Muehlenburg

"Every religion---including Christless Christianity--which is no Christianity at all---assumes some form of redemption by self-effort.....The law unmasks our pretensions, showing us that we deserve God's judgment for the pride clinging to our best works and intentions---never mind the obvious sins. The law commands, but does not give us any power to fulfill its conditions."
—Michael Horton, "Christless Christianity"

"[Beware of manufacturing a God of your own: a God who is all mercy, but not just; a God who is all love, but not holy; a God who has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none. Such a God is an idol of your own."
—J.C. Ryle

"Sexual liberation has become a moral crusade, in which Christian morality is the enemy, and opposition to it is a heroic moral stance."
—Nancy Pearcey

"It makes very little difference how much or how little of the creeds of the Church the Modernist preacher affirms, or how much or how little of the Biblical teaching from which the creeds are derived. He might affirm every jot and tittle of the Westminster Confession, for example, and yet be separated by a great gulf from the Reformed Faith. It is not that part is denied and the rest affirmed; but all is denied, because all is affirmed merely as useful or symbolic and not as true."
—John Gresham Machen, "What is Faith", 1925

"Liberal Tolerance is perhaps the primary challenge to the Christian worldview current in North American popular culture. Proponents of this viewpoint argue that it is intolerant and inconsistent with the principles of a free and open society for Christians (and others) to claim that their moral and religious perspective is correct and ought to be embraced by all citizens. Liberal tolerance is not what it appears to be, however. It is a partisan philosophical perspective with its own set of dogmas. It assumes, for instance, a relativistic view of moral and religious knowledge. This assumption has shaped the way many people think about issues such as homosexuality, abortion rights, and religious truth claims, leading them to believe that a liberally tolerant posture concerning these issues is the correct one and that it ought to be reflected in our laws and customs. But this posture is dogmatic, intolerant, and coercive, for it asserts that there is only one correct view on these issues, and if one does not comply with it, one will face public ridicule, demagogic tactics, and perhaps legal reprisals. Liberal Tolerance is neither liberal nor tolerant."
—Frank Beckwith

"I believe that the greatest threat to Christianity is the anti-intellectualism that permeates the church. For about a century now, Christians have largely retreated from the intellectual arena and entrenched themselves in a version of Christianity that emphasizes feelings, experience, and pragmatism, and have ignored the life of the mind. We have adopted a view of faith that sees it as opposed to reason. The result has been the marginalization of the church from the larger culture and our inability to be salt and light, and the increasing secularization of our society."
—Dr. Steve B. Cowan (interview)

""Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace…Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian 'conception' of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins.... In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any ...real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God…Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything they say, and so everything can remain as it was before. 'All for sin could not atone.' Well, then, let the Christian live like the rest of the world, let him model himself on the world’s standards in every sphere of life, and not presumptuously aspire to live a different life under grace from his old life under sin.... Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
—D. Bonhoeffer

"Here in the West, there are lots of liberal Christians. Some of them have assumed a kind of reverse mission: instead of being the church's missionaries to the world, they have become the world's missionaries to the church."
—Dinesh D'Souza in "What's So Great About Christianity"

"Most churches today have been taken over by the Baby Boomer mentality, exhibiting the values of mass-market commercialism, the rejection of the past and hedonistic individualism."
—Gene Veith

"A society that does not nurture respect for the human person”beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and physically impaired and the frail elderly”will sooner or later (probably sooner, rather than later) come to regard human beings as mere cogs in the larger social wheel whose dignity and well-being may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity. Some members of the community”those in certain development stages, for example”will come to be regarded as disposable, and others”those in certain conditions of dependency, for example, will come to be viewed as intolerably burdensome, as “useless eaters, as “better off dead,” as le bensunwertes Leben s"
— Robert P. George

"[P]rogressives and traditionalists (and others!) are much like the scattered people who witnessed the collapse of the Babel tower; we don’t speak the same language. Even if we use the same words, we don’t mean the same things. From our beliefs about human nature and sexuality, to our understanding of the authority of Scripture, to what we think it means to act with integrity, we have major ― and sometimes irreconcilable ― differences."
—Karen Booth

"Consider just one more linguistic symptom of our decay. Whenever you hear a liberal theologian calling for a more "adult" Christianity, please remember what the word "adult" means in our culture. (What is an "adult" bookstore, or an "adult" movie?) Ask yourself then what is the relationship between such a theologian and a certain old out-of-date teacher who said, "Unless you become as little children, you can not enter the Kingdom of God."
—Peter Kreeft

“The fact is that secularists are “for” reason and science only to the extent that they don’t lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and toleration only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order. Again, the animus against religion is not merely a feature of the secularist mindset; it is the only feature.”
—Edward Feser

“The fact is that secularists are “for” reason and science only to the extent that they don’t lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and toleration only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order. Again, the animus against religion is not merely a feature of the secularist mindset; it is the only feature.”
—Edward Feser

"[L]iberals have been able to make the Constitution into an indecipherable mystic scroll that morphs to accommodate the fashionable ideologies of the day. As such, it is dead. It might as well not exist."
—Matt Walsh

"John Crowe Ransom argued in God Without Thunder (1930) that most Americans had already traded away the traditional view of God and replaced it with varying degrees of enthusiasm about science, progress, and the like. Here was the most definitive proof of his thesis. Religion, morality, even reality were now questions of self-fulfillment—making truth subjective and traditional truth claims irrelevant and meaningless."
—Joel Miller

"America is adrift—morally, politically, and spirituality. The anchor broke off and sank to the bottom of the ocean. The rudder rusted out and fell down to the bottom as well. Its garish sails—festooned with mindless slogans—take it wherever the wild gusts of wind want. Few stand against the wind. But some must—not for the sake of being different or authentic, but because of the uncompromising insistence of the truth."
—Douglas Grouthuis

“There is no adulterous woman who has ever been so soiled as the liberal theology, which has had all the gifts of God and has turned away to a worship of something that is more destructive than Molech was to the babies whose parents were led astray from the living God to worship this idol. This is not a thing to take lightly."
—Francis Schaeffer

"Liberalism has officially severed itself from any semblance of reality, and indeed declared war upon it. If our culture cooperates; if we relent and concede that science is relative and human beings are gods who can choose their own biological makeup; if the left jumps over the shark and into the dark waters of full fledged insanity, and many in our society take the plunge right along with it, then there will be no stopping liberalism. It will have won the culture irreversibly. If we willingly forfeit the definition of “man” and “woman,” right after forfeiting the definition of marriage, and long after forfeiting the definition of human life, then we will have no basis left to oppose anything else liberalism tries to do. We will have given it everything, ceded its every demand, compromised on every single imaginable point, and that will be the end of it. All we’ll be able to do, then, is sit and wait for our civilization to eat itself and collapse into dust.

“….progress is the mother of problems…it is no longer a means to an end but has become an end in itself. Progress is a law unto itself, and to question progress is not only to question the good that progress is presumed to be but to question the god that progress has become. According to this dogmatic progressivism, any attack on progress is not only wrong but futile. Progress is unstoppable; it is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. It has all the attributes of the divine. It is inexorable, indestructible, and of course benign. It is not only an all-powerful god, but a good god.”
—Joseph Pearce

“The typical modern man…has no positive picture at all of what he is aiming at, but only a vague (and erroneous) sensation of progress.”
—GK Chesterton

“As for our own society if it proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.”
—GKC

"The difference between love and "luv" is the difference between the prophetic model of religion and the therapeutic model. In the prophetic model, God commands us to begood. In the therapeutic model, people use religion to make themselves feel good."
—Peter Kreeft

"Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea spoke of “classical Marxism” whereby land and property were seized, but that now we’ve moved to “cultural Marxism” and “gender ideology,” a new type of revolution: “Now the revolution goes deeper; it pretends to redefine family, sex identity and human nature. This ideology calls itself progressive. But it is nothing else than the ancient serpent’s offer, for man to take control, to replace God, to arrange salvation here, in this world. It’s an error of religious nature, it’s Gnosticism.”
—Fr. Daniel Pattee

"That is the problem with multicultural churches in general. They are not dedicated to using truth to influence culture. They are looking to the culture to define truth. It’s not the approach that was used by Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, it’s the polar opposite. But being a member of a “multicultural” church does have its advantages. It helps the follower’s self esteem and helps him retain popularity in “the community.” In other words, it helps him claim to follow Jesus without risking cultural crucifixion."
—Mike S. Adams

“Progressivism: The brave new world you work for today becomes the accursed backwards world you will try to subvert tomorrow.”
—Anthony Esolen

"[W]hile there are stupid people everywhere, there is a particular minute and microcephalous idiocy which is only found in an intelligentsia.

I have sometimes fancied that, as chilly people like a warm room, silly people sometimes like a diffused atmosphere of intellectualism and long words."
— GK Chesterton

“We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.”
—Nicholas Kristoff

"The Western world generally has lost the concept of man as a creature made to the image and likeness of God, and reduced him... to a component part of the universe... This distortion of the true nature of man was due principally to the philosophy of historical liberalism, which saw man as endowed with no higher destiny than the economic. There is no word more "dangerous" than liberalism, because to oppose it is a new "unforgivable sin."
—Fulton J. Sheen

"Liberal Tolerance is perhaps the primary challenge to the Christian worldview current in North American popular culture. Proponents of this viewpoint argue that it is intolerant and inconsistent with the principles of a free and open society for Christians (and others) to claim that their moral and religious perspective is correct and ought to be embraced by all citizens. Liberal tolerance is not what it appears to be, however. It is a partisan philosophical perspective with its own set of dogmas. It assumes, for instance, a relativistic view of moral and religious knowledge. This assumption has shaped the way many people think about issues such as homosexuality, abortion rights, and religious truth claims, leading them to believe that a liberally tolerant posture concerning these issues is the correct one and that it ought to be reflected in our laws and customs. But this posture is dogmatic, intolerant, and coercive, for it asserts that there is only one correct view on these issues, and if one does not comply with it, one will face public ridicule, demagogic tactics, and perhaps legal reprisals. Liberal Tolerance is neither liberal nor tolerant."
—Frank Beckwith

“Religion today is not transforming people; rather it is being transformed by the people. It is not raising the moral level of society; it is descending to society’s own level, and congratulating itself that it has scored a victory because society is smilingly accepting its surrender.”
—A.W. Tozer

"What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any cultural in the world except Western culture-and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture."
—Thomas Sowell

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
—Winston Churchill

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
—Margaret Thatcher

“The goal of socialism is communism.”
—Vladimir Lenin

"Yes, if evangelical Christianity is to stay alive she must have men again, the right kind of men. She must repudiate the weaklings who dare not speak out, and she must seek in prayer and much humility the coming again of men of the stuff prophets and martyrs are made of.”
—A.W. Tozer

“It is urgently needful that the Christian people of our charge should come to understand that they are not a company of invalids, to be wheeled about, or fed by hand, cosseted, nursed, and comforted, the minister being the head-physician and nurse – but a garrison in an enemy’s country, every soul of which should have some post of duty, at which he should be prepared to make any sacrifice rather than quit it.”
—F. B. Meyer

"The Church of Christ is continually represented under the figure of an army; yet its Captain is the Prince of Peace; its object is the establishment of peace, and its soldiers are men of a peaceful disposition. The spirit of war is at the extremely opposite point to the spirit of the gospel. Yet nevertheless, the church on earth has, and until the second advent must be, the church militant, the church armed, the church warring, the church conquering. And how is this? It is in the very order of things that so it must be. Truth could not be truth in this world if it were not a warring thing, and we should at once suspect that it were not true if error were friends with it. The spotless purity of truth must always be at war with the blackness of heresy and lies.”
—C.H. Spurgeon

“When a nation calls its prime men to battle, homes are broken, weeping sweethearts say their good-byes, businesses are closed, college careers are wrecked, factories are refitted for wartime production, and rationing and discomforts are accepted—all for war. Can we do less for the greatest fight that this world has ever known outside of the cross—this end-time siege on sanity, morality and spirituality?”
—Leonard Ravenhill

“The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a scanty round of formal religious services once every week. But of the great spiritual warfare—its watchings and strugglings, its agonies and anxieties, its battles and contests—of all this they appear to know nothing at all.”
—J C Ryle

"Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith."
—William Lane Craig

“Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.”
—David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

It is clear: most Christian authorities and bodies view marriage (also called Holy Matrimony) as a relationship instituted and ordained by God for the lifelong relationship between one man as husband and one woman as wife. They consider it the most intimate of human relationships, a gift from God, and a sacred institution.......... Protestants consider it to be sacred, holy, and even central to the community of faith. Catholics and Orthodox Christians consider it a Sacrament. Biblically, it is to be “held in honor among all….” [Heb. 13:4]

Jesus Christ underscored the importance and sacredness of lifelong marriage in his own teachings. He stated that God had created mankind as male and female, [Genesis 1:27] and that in marriage “‘the two will become one flesh’. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”[Matt. 19:5b-6]"-
— Maxie Dunam

“Wives, understand and support your husbands...Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives.” Eph 5:22, 25 TM

HOW TO BUILD A GREAT MARRIAGE
If you want a great marriage, you’ve got to work at it every day. The Bible gives us God’s blueprint for one: “Be courteously reverent to one another. Wives, understand and support your husbands in ways that show your support for Christ. The husband provides leadership to his wife in the way Christ does to his church, not by domineering but by cherishing. So just as the church submits to Christ as he exercises such leadership, wives should likewise submit to their husbands. Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for the church—a love marked by giving, not getting. Christ’s love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything He does and says is designed to bring the best out in her...And that is how husbands ought to love their wives. They’re really doing themselves a favor—since they’re already ‘one’ in marriage. No one abuses his own body, does he? No, he feeds and pampers it. That’s how Christ treats us, the church, since we are part of His body. And this is why a man leaves father and mother and cherishes his wife. No longer two, they become ‘one flesh.’ This is a huge mystery, and I don’t pretend to understand it all. What is clearest to me is the way Christ treats the church. And this provides a good picture of how each husband is to treat his wife, loving himself in loving her, and how each wife is to honor her husband” (vv. 21-33 TM). That’s how to build a great marriage!"
—(commentary by Bob Gass, "The Word for You Today", Aug. 26, 2014)

"Dr. Anca-Maria Cernea spoke of “classical Marxism” whereby land and property were seized, but that now we’ve moved to “cultural Marxism” and “gender ideology,” a new type of revolution: “Now the revolution goes deeper; it pretends to redefine family, sex identity and human nature. This ideology calls itself progressive. But it is nothing else than the ancient serpent’s offer, for man to take control, to replace God, to arrange salvation here, in this world. It’s an error of religious nature, it’s Gnosticism.”
—Fr. Daniel Pattee

"It is no coincidence that Post-Modern scholars often tend to be Marxists. Both systems have no place for any objective truth to which their results must be submitted; both subordinate truth to their social agendas, which become self-justifying. Evil supports evil and attracts it. And the damage takes generations to heal."
—Donald Williams

"If the social justice movement went by its actual name, young Christians would not have been lured into it. Because the social justice movement is actually Cultural Marxism. There's no such thing as 'social justice,' people. In fact, in the Bible, justice never has an adjective. There's justice and there's injustice, but there's not different kinds of justice."

The term "social justice" is an argument for the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges in a society. Sometimes that argument turns loud and violent, though many have good intentions when they speak of "social justice," a desire for the common good. But who gets to decide what the common good is, and who carries it out?

God is the one who defines what is just and what is unjust. "His work is perfect for all His ways are justice" (Deuteronomy 32:4). Our works are not good. Why is there in injustice in the world? Because it's full of unjust people (Romans 3:12). So what has a just God told us to do? He said preach the gospel to all nations, baptize, and teach them (Matthew 28:19-20).

That is the mission of His church. Those who have been changed by His Spirit will do good works -- the works God defines as good (Ephesians 2:10, Titus 2:14, Hebrews 10:24) -- but works are not the gospel. You cannot change the world. Only God changes hearts, which He does through the gospel.

"All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:23-24). That is the message of justice we should announce, so that all who hear it might be forgiven their sins and will not fall under the righteous judgment of God. He is both "just and the Justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26) when we understand the text."
—Voddie Bauchamp

“First, there is Chance, in which all is random, a wan modern world —like fragile, weasel-sucked egg — devoid of all meaning and where nothing is more than the dead sum of its dead parts, where an utterly random series of accidental events somehow ended up in creating the infinitely variegated cosmos in which we find ourselves, somehow musing on our place in it, only to conclude that our existence and all we have created and thought over the millennia has no more actual meaning than does a rock on a dead planet a billion billion billion miles from the wild flowers around the Parthenon. The Dance, on the other hand, is a divinely orchestrated poetic and genuinely infinitely meaningful movement through history — that progression and ascension toward God, and toward the ultimate meaning of all things, large and small. The book asks us, then: Which is true? Which of these two views is grace-filled and glorious? And which of them deprives us forever of those categories we call grace-filled and glorious?”
—Eric Metaxas

"At this point the only conclusion I can reach is that defenders of Darwinism have sacrificed reason and rational inquiry at the altar of the god of materialism."
—anonymous

The materialist and reductionist vision of the world favored by consistent Darwinists—what I have been calling “value” or “normative” nihilism—is gaining ground with the public at an alarming rate. If it isn’t effectively challenged, our very humanity may be at risk.
—James Barham

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
—Richard Lewontin, biologist/geneticist

"As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out."
—GK Chesterton

"If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology . . . "
—Dr. Thomas Nagel, philosophy, NYU

"All creeds which refuse to see an intelligent purpose behind unthinking powers of material nature are intrinsically self-refutuing. In the order of causation they base reason upon unreason. In the order of logic they involve conclusions which discredit their own premises. "
—Sir Arthur Balfour

"The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is 'unassailable fact,' the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: 'With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside."
—New York Times article

"'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."
—Francis Crick (biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist)

“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
—Richard Dawkins

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear . . . There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either."
—William B. Provine

"The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance."
—Malcolm Muggeridge

"Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain have the power to see into the heart of matter and mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life. It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin."
—David Berlinski, "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions,(Basic Books, 2009, 16-17)

Suppose we think of a man made of water in an infinitely extended and bottomless ocean of water.
Desiring to get out of water, he makes a ladder of water.
He sets this ladder upon the water and against the water and then attempts to climb out of the water.
So hopeless and senseless a picture must be drawn of the natural man’s methodology based as it is upon the assumption that time or chance is ultimate. On his assumption his own rationality is a product of chance. On his assumption even the laws of logic which he employs are products of chance. The rationality and purpose that he may be searching for are still bound to be products of chance.
—Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (P&R, 1972), p. 102.

"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique."
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

"Is God the true creator of everything that exists, or is God a product of the human imagination, real only in the minds of those who believe? If God really does exist, then to lead a rational life a person has to take account of God and his purposes. A person or a society that ignores the Creator is ignoring the most important part of reality, and to ignore reality is to be irrational."
—Phillip E. Johnson

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
—Werner Heisenberg, Nobel winner in physics and a principal originator of quantum mechanics.

The debate about creation and evolution is not deadlocked . . . Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment tomaterialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence. Separate the philosophy from the science, and the proud tower collapses."
—[Phillip Johnson, The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism, First Things, 77 (Nov. 1997), pp. 22 - 25.]

"While materialists must claim that materialism is true, the worldview of materialism cannot carve out the metaphysical space for the very concept of truth. Therefore, materialism is false, since it fails to correspond to reality—no small weakness there."
—Douglas Groothuis

“It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.”
― Paul Copan, Passionate Conviction: Modern Discourses on Christian Apologetics

"We are a desperate collectivity of hedonists indulging in fast food, faster sex and any other fastest pleasure we can catch, high-minded or low....as if somehow more and more and faster and further and longer-living are answers to where and why."—John Senior

“Our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.”
—Jerry Coyne

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either."
—William Provine

"We tend to think sexual hedonism places too *high* a value on the purely physical dimension, but in reality it places a very *low* value on the body, draining it of moral and personal significance.

In the hookup culture, partners are referred to as “friends with benefits.” But that is a euphemism because they are not really even friends. The unwritten etiquette is that you never meet just to talk or spend time together. A New York Times article explains, “You just keep it purely sexual, and that way people don’t have mixed expectations, and no one gets hurt.”

Except when they do. The same article quotes a teenager named Melissa who was depressed because her hookup partner had just “broken up” with her. No matter what the current secular philosophy tells them, people cannot disassociate their emotions from what they do with their bodies.

In the biblical worldview, sexuality is integrated into the total personality. The most complete and intimate *physical* union is meant to express the most complete and intimate *personal* union. In marriage, husband and wife are intended to relate to one another along all dimensions in a whole-life covenant bond....

The biblical view fits who we really are."
—Nancy Pearcey

“It cannot be said too emphatically that the operators of the Great Stereopticon have an interest in keeping people from breaking through to deeper significances. Not only is the philosopher a notoriously poor consumer; he is also an unsettling influence on societies careless of justice. That there are abysses of meaning beneath his daily routine, the common man occasionally suspects; to have him realize them in some apocalyptic revelation might well threaten the foundations of materialist civilization.”
—Richard Weaver (written in 1949)

“First, there is Chance, in which all is random, a wan modern world —like fragile, weasel-sucked egg — devoid of all meaning and where nothing is more than the dead sum of its dead parts, where an utterly random series of accidental events somehow ended up in creating the infinitely variegated cosmos in which we find ourselves, somehow musing on our place in it, only to conclude that our existence and all we have created and thought over the millennia has no more actual meaning than does a rock on a dead planet a billion billion billion miles from the wild flowers around the Parthenon. The Dance, on the other hand, is a divinely orchestrated poetic and genuinely infinitely meaningful movement through history — that progression and ascension toward God, and toward the ultimate meaning of all things, large and small. The book asks us, then: Which is true? Which of these two views is grace-filled and glorious? And which of them deprives us forever of those categories we call grace-filled and glorious?”
—Eric Metaxas

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.”
—Stephen Hawking

“I think we are losing beauty. And there is a danger that with it, we are losing the meaning of life.”
—Sir Roger Scruton, 2009

“Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe--his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction.”
—T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, then error will be. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end."
—Daniel Webster

Modern culture is a mighty force. It is either subservient to the gospel or else it is the deadliest enemy of the gospel. For making it subservient, religious emotion is not enough, intellectual labor is also necessary. And that labor is being neglected. The Church has turned to easier tasks. And now she is reaping the fruits of her indolence. Now she must battle for
her life.
—J. Gresham Machen

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another -- slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
—Neil Postman, Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

"Modern men and women who lack a sense of place and continuity with the past are driven by ephemeral appetites and the passion for immediate self-gratification."
—Vigon Guroian

"My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture."
— Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame professor

"That is the problem with multicultural churches in general. They are not dedicated to using truth to influence culture. They are looking to the culture to define truth. It’s not the approach that was used by Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, it’s the polar opposite. But being a member of a “multicultural” church does have its advantages. It helps the follower’s self esteem and helps him retain popularity in “the community.” In other words, it helps him claim to follow Jesus without risking cultural crucifixion."
—Mike S. Adams

"Entertainment is the devil's substitute for joy."
—Leonard Ravenhill

“If a society is to preserve its stability and a degree of continuity, it must know how to keep its adolescents from imposing their tastes, attitudes, values, and fantasies on everyday life.”
—Eric Hoffer

"Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.”
—Rene Girard

"There is perhaps no greater need today in the West than for people to be able to distinguish right from wrong. Most folks have altogether lost their moral compasses and are simply roaming aimlessly in an ethical no-man’s land. Moral absolutes have been jettisoned and relativism reigns. This is always a recipe for disaster. And we have seen it occurring throughout human history. There has always been a connection between the abandonment of morality and the abandonment of God. When we declare the nonexistence or the inconsequentiality of God, we lose the basis for moral absolutes."
—Bill Muehlenberg

“There is no escape… If we are to continue to make moral judgments (and whatever we say we shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of Nature. It can be valid only if it is an offshoot of some absolute moral wisdom, a moral wisdom which exists absolutely “on its own” and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature.
—C.S. Lewis

"We have to nurture the consciences of each new generation...But this doesn't happen merely by chance. Conscience is cultivated primarily within the family. In a sense the family is like the Garden of Eden: we didn't create it, God did; but He gave us the Garden to till. If you fail to tend your Garden, it will go to seed and grow wild and dangerous. The family is the same. When families break down, marriages fall apart, the logic and natural order disappear, and the children end up with severely malformed consciences."
—Chuck Colson

"If atheism is true, then nothing is inherently good or bad—things just are. Rather, what we have are a set of labels (“Good”, “Bad” and “Neutral”) and a list of human actions. Who gets to decide which sticker gets stuck on what action? There are really only two choices: either every individual gets to decide for themselves what is “good”, or we have to defer to something like the state. But in either case, all we have are personal preferences: yours, mine, or the majority’s."
—Andy Bannister (from, The Magical Moral Mystery)

"Once we admit that Darwin was right when he argued that human ethics evolved from the social instincts that we inherited from our non-human ancestors, we can put aside the hypothesis of a divine origin for ethics."
—Peter Singer

"Indifference, the plague of modern Western culture in general and evangelicalism particular, is at best the result of intellectual laziness, at worst a sign of moral abdication."
—Carl Trueman

“A conscience apart from objective moral authority is an orphan with no way home.”
—Douglas Groothuis

"That is the problem with multicultural churches in general. They are not dedicated to using truth to influence culture. They are looking to the culture to define truth. It’s not the approach that was used by Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, it’s the polar opposite. But being a member of a “multicultural” church does have its advantages. It helps the follower’s self esteem and helps him retain popularity in “the community.” In other words, it helps him claim to follow Jesus without risking cultural crucifixion."
—Mike S. Adams

"What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any cultural in the world except Western culture-and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture."
—Thomas Sowell

"Evidence? The whole concept went out with the idea of a universe. The multiverse dispenses with evidence."
— Denyse O'Leary

"To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality".
—Richard Swinburne

“[Multiverse]-theory, theorists now realize, comes in an almost infinite number of versions, which ‘predict’ an almost infinite number of possible universes… of course, a theory that predicts everything really doesn’t predict anything.”
—John Horgan, Scientific American, 2010

"In asking for an account of pre-Big Bang cosmology, physicists are attempting to flee from a story that they have heard but do not like. They make little attempt to disguise their aversion either."
—David Berlinski

'It may be, in the end, that our biggest obstacle in understanding the cosmos is that we didn't make it.'
—David Berlinski

"[I]n the new naturalist multiverse there are bound to be a few universes that don’t make sense even if naturalism is true, right? Ours just happens to be one of them."
—Denyse O'Leary

Teleology, Providence, and Mystery.

A belief in teleology and providence can drive you mad if you do not develop a wise sense of mystery. The will to explain can backfire into irrational attributions of causes for opaque events. In order to explain the inexplicable, you might find causes that are not there for the sake of grounding meaning in knowing. This is trying to read the mind of God himself.

We must bracket our unknowing within a circle of knowing. I know God is providential and good. I do not think the central truths of Christianity, such as the Trinity and Incarnation are beyond the realm of logic. But I do not know so many things: why my father died in an airplane crash in Alaska on November 21, 1968 at age forty. I do not know why my once-brilliant wife has the cruelest form of dementia. I do not even try to know these things, since to do so would be futile and agonizing.

The one who knows the limits of knowledge knows when to admit ignorance, knows when explaining is unedifying and positively exasperating, knows when to remain silent.

Again, see The Book of Ecclesiastes on all of this. Please.
—Douglas Groothuis

"[Naturalism's]....attempted murder not of persons but of personhood, not of humans but of humanness itself. Naturalism will not succeed in its quest to kill. That does not mean it is not trying."
—Tom Gilson

"If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology . . . " 
—Dr. Thomas Nagel, philosophy, NYU

"Scientists committed to philosophical naturalism do not claim to have found the precise answer to every problem, but they characteristically insist that they have the important problems sufficiently well in hand that they can narrow the field of possibilities to a set of naturalistic alternatives. Absent that insistence, they would have to concede that their commitment to naturalism is based upon faith rather than proof. Such a concession could be exploited by promoters of rival sources of knowledge, such as philosophy and religion, who would be quick to point out that faith in naturalism is no more "scientific" (i.e. empirically based) than any other kind of faith. "
—Phillip Johnson

"The problem with scientific naturalism as a worldview is that it takes a sound methodological premise of natural science and transforms it into a dogmatic statement about the nature of the universe. Science is committed by definition to empiricism, by which I mean that scientists seek to find truth by observation, experiment, and calculation rather than by studying sacred books or achieving mystical states of mind. It may well be, however, that there are certain questions -- important questions, ones to which we desperately want to know the answers -- that cannot be answered by the methods available to our science. These may include not only broad philosophical issues such as whether the universe has a purpose, but also questions we have become accustomed to think of as empirical, such as how life first began or how complex biological systems were put together."
—Phillip Johnson

".... [N]aturalism cannot even be rationally affirmed. For if naturalism was true, the probability that our cognitive faculties would be reliable is pretty low. For those faculties have been shaped by a process of natural selection which does not select for truth but merely for survival. There are many ways in which an organism could survive without its beliefs' being true. Hence, if naturalism were true, we could not have any confidence that our beliefs are true, including the belief in naturalism itself!
... [N]aturalism seems to have a built-in defeater that renders it incapable of being rationally affirmed."
—William Lane Craig

"[T]he origins of new organic forms may be obscure or even inexplicable, but we ought not on that account to doubt that they had a natural cause, and came by a natural process; for so to doubt is also to doubt the validity of reason."
—Joseph le Conte

"So we bow our heads for two minutes of contemplation about the miracle of life and, in his closing sermon, Jones speaks about how the death of his mother influenced his own spiritual journey and determination to get the most out of every second, aware that life is all too brief and nothing comes after it."
—Pastor of the Church of Atheism, London

"If you start with impersonal forces operating by chance -- naturalistic evolution -- then over time you will end up with naturalism in moral, social, and political philosophy. This is the big picture we need to teach our children to see."
—Nancy Pearcey (Pearcey Report)

"Naturalism....is a philosophical doctrine that says that our universe is a closed system of natural causes and effects. On this assumption every natural phenomenon, like the origin of life...is securely known to be explicable on the basis of natural causes accessible to scientific investigation---some combination of chemical laws and chance."
—Philip Johnson

"If naturalism is true, morality is nothing more than a matter of opinion. All of us, as humans, have simply come to embrace those cultural or personal mores that best promote the survival of the species. There is no transcendent, objective moral truth. Instead, cultures merely embrace the values and moral principles that “work” for them and have resulted in the flourishing of their particular people group. If this is the case, one group of evolved humans has no business trying to tell another evolved group what is truly right or wrong from a moral perspective. After all, each group has successfully arrived at their particular level of development by embracing their own accepted moral standards. Arguments over which moral truths provide for greater human flourishing are simply subjective disagreements; there is no transcendent, objective standard that can adjudicate such disagreements from a naturalistic perspective."
—J Warner Wallace

"[S}cientific naturalism stakes its fortunes on the bare, cold facts of particles and quarks; to know them is to know ultimate reality—never mind the minor detail that, logically, there is a gaping missing link between knowing how something works and the conclusion that it was not made."
—J.M. Njoroge

"[W]e are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the ‘choosing."
—Dr. Jerry Coyne

"Decisions’ . . . aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense."
—Dr. Jerry Coyne

"Today, the world's most distinguished Darwinian, Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University, likewise thinks that evolution progresses up to humans and speaks of his world picture as a "myth" that must replace conventional religions."
—Michael Ruse, PhD.( Darwinian, philosopher of science at F.S.U.)

“There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.”
—Marquis de Sade

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
—Werner Heisenberg, Nobel winner in physics and a principal originator of quantum mechanics.

“It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.”
― Paul Copan, Passionate Conviction: Modern Discourses on Christian Apologetics

“The fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing… We should…acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel awe at the marvelous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts without reason the reign of non-being.”
—Quentin Smith

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either."
—William Provine

"Post-modernism is a direct and inevitable outcome of metaphysical naturalism. After all if our brain are shaped for fitness not for truth, we ought to aim at what works for us, not for truth."
—Denyse O'Leary

"Nature points us to God but does not help us with the nature of God.... Nature is a clue...not a manifesto: a puzzle not a solution....If nature proved God clearly, we would not have to search for Him with all our heart."
—Peter Kreeft

"Nature is a parable, that in its structure, orderliness, beauty and design points beyond itself to its Creator..."
—David Wells

"God's power, goodness and skill are displayed in the beauty, balance, intricacy and intelligibility of the universe..."
—John Stott

"The creation is a visible disclosure of the invisible God, an intelligible disclosure of the otherwise unknown God. Just as artists reveal themselves in what they draw, paint and sculpt, so the Divine Artist has revealed himself in his creation."
—John Stott

"It is not just that God spoke; but God is speaking! He is continuously articulate. He fills the world with his speaking voice."
—A. W. Tozer

"Nature is a first volume, in itself incomplete, and demanding a second volume, which is Christ."
—Charles Gore

"The fact that even in our disordered lives we have innumerable intimations of an order from which we have fallen is evidence of a mind and a being above the natural order we perceive,"
—Marshall McLuhan

“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.”
—Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy)

“As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.”
—Professor Freeman J. of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

"There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause, [but still believes that] there is no first cause... "This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control..."
—Robert Jastrow, astronomer, physicist

"It was not a fortuitous meeting of chordal atoms that made the world.  If order and beauty are reflected in the constitution of the universe, then there is a God."
—Ludwig von Beethoven

"... [T]here was at some stage in the history of the earth, after the cooling process, a definite act of creation. Something came from the outside. Power was exercised from without. In a word, life was given to the earth."
—Alfred Russell Wallace (Darwin's proto-type)

"As a scientist I am sensitive to the danger of falling into a "God of the gaps" mentality and running the risk of intellectual laziness. For that reason I hasten to say, I do not find the main evidence for God and His activity in the current gaps in the scientific picture. I see evidence of God and His activity in the science we do know—indeed, I see it in the very fact that we can do science at all."
—John Lennox

‘God cannot contradict His speech in Nature by His speech in Scripture. If the Author of Nature and Scripture are the same God, then the two books of God must eventually recite the same story.’
—Bernard Ramm

"The final goal of the blessed life, moreover, rests in the knowledge of God [cf.John 17:3]. Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him."
—John Calvin (Institutes, I.5.1).

"...John Calvin reminded the world that God has given his creatures two books: the book of nature and the Word of God. For the Christian, they are not equal in authority or revelatory power, and yet it is a serious neglect to focus on one at the exclusion of the other."
—Stuart McAllister

"God, a timeless reality, enters our time-bound history as an artist would enter his own painting.”
—CS Lewis, The First Christmas

"The biblical record of creation is more than just a statement of fact. It is a purposeful account of why the universe was created by a sovereign, holy, and benevolent God as the theater of His own glory."
—Dr. Albert Mohler

"If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions . . . . Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They are all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else."
–Douglas Wilson

"We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess... And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. ...what is the consequence, then, when Christianity, as a living historical force, recedes? Christianity is the midwife of nihilism, not because it is itself nihilistic, but because it is too powerful in its embrace of the world and all of the world’s mystery and beauty; and so to reject Christianity now is, of necessity, to reject everything except the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity. ...as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing—the nothing. No third way lies open for us now, because—as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not—all things have been made subject to Him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath His feet, until the very end of the world, and—simply said—there is no other god."
—David Bentley Hart

“You came from nothing and you’re going to nothing, but in between you have great significance.”
—Dr. Ray Pritchard

"Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an afterlife. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged."
—Czeslaw Milosz, "Discreet Charm of Nihilism", 1998

“Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe--his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction.”
—T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

"The more we learn about the cosmos, the more meaningless it appears."
—Dr. Steven Weinberg, physicist

"Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal."
—Jean Paul Sartre, philosopher

"The very scale of the universe...speaks to us of the inconsequentiality of human events in te cosmic context."
—Carl Sagan

"Man is the result of a purposeless...process..."
—G. Gaylord Simpson, paleontologist

"I'm simply an accident, why take it all so seriously?"
—Emile Ciornan, philosopher

"There is no hope whatsoever in there being any....meaning in life."
—William Provine, biologist/geneticist (Cornell University)

"I don't think we're here for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say, gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there is a purpose; but I'm anticipating having a goo lunch."
—Dr. James Watson, biologist/ geneticist

"...we may yearn for a higher answer—but none exists."
—Steven J. Gould, paleontologist/ biologist

"The moment a a man questions the meaning and value of life he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence."
—Sigmund Freud

"....why care? Why do I bother? That's a very good question. It...doesn't have a conclusive answer."
—Christopher Hitchens

"Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and author, spent his entire lifetime writing books explaining why there is no meaning to writing books, giving lectures about how there is no real point to giving lectures, and teaching students that there is no real purpose to teaching students. The atheistic passion to achieve is an object lesson in the theater of the absurd."
—Rabbi Moshe Averick

"There is darkness without and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness, anywhere; only triviality for a moment, and then nothing"
—Bertrand Russell

"Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus, because of the 'death of God', they would confuse heaven with happiness, and happiness with health."
—Os Guinness

"No inherent moral or ethical laws exist, nor are there absolute guiding principles for human society. The universe cares nothing for us and we have no ultimate meaning in life."
—William Provine

"Life as a whole had no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, in a chance combination of molecules; it then evolved through random mutations and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen for any purpose."
—Dr. Peter Singer (Princeton University, ethicist)

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear . . . There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either."
—William B. Provine

"In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."
—Edmund Burke

"[T]he most deadly enemy of morality is not atheism, agnosticism, materialism, greed nor any other of the accepted causes. The true enemy of morality is nihilism, belief in, quite literally, nothing."
—Lord Hailsham (British politician)

"Americans decry the nihilism of radical Islam, but advanced modern American freedom has itself become nihilistic. It is a soft though decadent nihilism that devours tradition, destroys social cohesion, cheapens cultural standards, hollows moral convictions and in the years to come will produce its own dark harvest of social consequences."
—Os Guinness ("A Free People's Suicide")

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty."
—Jacques Monod

"It should strike us as more than coincidental that the rise in rampage killings began when the vapors of nihilism wafted out of coffee houses and college lecture halls to cover the cultural landscape, from sea to shining sea. Although its milder forms—relativism and subjectivism—are more prevalent, they share nihilism's tenet that neither God nor Man is the measure of all things, but the individual. By now, at least two generations of young people have grown up learning that the answers to life's mysteries are not writ large in the heavens or inscribed on ancient scrolls; the answers are within each of them, waiting to be discovered in the sacred "search for self."
—Regis Nicoll

"Western culture has made a fortune in the marketing of the concept of the rebel. It has also paid a huge cost. The deep sense of meaninglessness that characterizes what historian Paul Johnson calls “modern times,” which is taught as the science of life in our education system and often embraced in our arts, is having an untold effect in the lives of many."
— Stuart McAllister

Logic is like a policeman that God has put in the brain of human beings, to blow the whistle; to recognize the lie. The whistle blows, and things don’t compute. Just like your computer goes whacky when you ask it to be irrational. So, God has built into the human mind a function of rationality that is a test of coherency. A test of rationality. And at the very heart of the Christian affirmation, is that. Though the content that we get in the Bible goes far beyond what we can learn, through rational speculation. It’s based on Divine revelation. That Divine revelation does not come to us packaged in absurdity. The Word of God is not… irrational. It is addressed to creatures who have been given minds that operate according to these principles.”
—R.C. Sproul

“Many people today seem convinced that the point of life is that there is no point. We face what Nietzsche call “Das Nichte”—or, the nothing. Our public philosophy tells us that we are the result of blind force plus chance and/or necessity. Yet our movies are filled with romantic longings, visions of other worlds, the hunger for transcendence, and love stories between vampires or other worlds where there is a greater unity of life and being. In other words, we face a massive contradiction between what one set of experts tells us is real and what many artists compel us to hope for and reflect on.”
—Stuart McAllister

"As intelligent agents we are compelled to believe certain things, most importantly that our will is free, that we are selves that persist through time, that there are moral truths that can be universalized, beliefs which as individuals committed to science we yet know to be false."
—Karsten Harries, Yale University philosophy professor

Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
—Wm. Shakespeare, Macbeth

"While the world as we know it is indeed disordered and damaged, and to find answers in the world itself is absurd, God does not abandon us to absurdity. Into this world, into its pain and confusion, God, too, became flesh and dwelt among us. And it ended for Jesus as tragically as anything we observe under the sun. He went to the cross with the full force of every ugly, honest reality of Ecclesiastes on his shoulders. And he stood with us in that darkness, giving us an equally severe image of a God worth seeking in the midst of it."
—Stuart McAllister

"John Crowe Ransom argued in God Without Thunder (1930) that most Americans had already traded away the traditional view of God and replaced it with varying degrees of enthusiasm about science, progress, and the like. Here was the most definitive proof of his thesis. Religion, morality, even reality were now questions of self-fulfillment—making truth subjective and traditional truth claims irrelevant and meaningless."
—Joel Miller

""As it rises in popularity..., I'm reminded that atheism is nihilism with fancy clothes.
It's despair with a pocket square.
It's nothingness with a better brand strategy."
—Owen Strachan

"In a world with no clear origin, no purposeful end, and no intrinsic meaning, human dignity is founded on nothing more than a self-creating will to power that is, in the last analysis, self-destructive."
—Roberta Green Ahmanson

"Joseph Campbell endeared himself to the 1960s generation by telling them, “Follow your bliss,” and they followed it right into the waiting arms of the Nihilists."
—David Goldman

“A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.”
― Andrew Coyne

"If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"[Nietzsche]....was a very important thinker because he shows to modern western civilization its own dark heart and future...[Nietzsche]...let the cat out of the bag."
—Peter Kreeft

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
—William Shakespeare (via the lips of Macbeth)

“The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said “existence precedes essence.” In other words, we have no stable or fixed identity that precedes us. The burden of identity, selfhood, and meaning rests solely on our shoulders. But, again, if we came from nothing and are returning inextricably to nothing, life is a temporary accident, and death is the only authentic currency at our disposal. Why is death authentic? Because it is life that is artificial and nothingness that is essential. It is not that this worldview tries to be especially morbid—in many cases it makes a valiant attempt to be life-affirming—it’s simply that it has literally nothing else to offer, or, rather, it has precisely nothing to offer.”
—Cameron McAllister

QUESTION: "How do you get through to Post-Modern Nihilists?"

MY ANSWER: "You cannot argue someone out of his position when part of that position is the rejection of the authority of reason. But the Post-Modernist has to live in reality, which refuses to cooperate with his world view. So enlist reality on your side and just keep confronting him with it. He doesn't mind contradicting himself, but contradicting reality proves often quite inconvenient and uncomfortable. Don't let him escape that fact. And then, do what you must do at the end of every apologetic encounter: Leave him at the feet of Jesus."
—Donald Williams

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
—H.P. Lovecraft

"Neo-paganism would like to turn the Ten Commandments and all of Judeo-Christian morality into some alleged intolerable violence, and indeed its primary objective is their complete abolition. Faithful observance of the moral law is perceived as complicity with the forces of persecution that are essentially religious... Neo-paganism locates happiness in the unlimited satisfaction of desires, which means the suppression of all prohibitions. This idea acquires a semblance of credibility in the limited domain of consumer goods, whose prodigious multiplication, thanks to technological progress, weakens certain mimetic rivalries. The weakening of mimetic rivalries confers an appearance of plausibility, but only that, on the stance that turns the moral law into an instrument of repression and persecution.”
—Rene Girard

"[meditative techniques]....the best of Eastern divinizing techniques made for the inception of a nirvanic world where we could become the new avatars."
—Ravi Zacharias

"...the older quest for spiritual authenticity and Godliness has often been abandoned and been replaced by newer quests for psychological wholeness."—David Wells

"We pretend to be unable to understand the Bible because we know that the minute we understand, we are obliged to obey."
—Søren Kierkegaard

"I will" is no word for man. There is a far diviner one, "I ought." Bow passion to reason, reason to conscience, and conscience to God, and then be as resolute and determined as you choose."
—Alexander MacLaren

Why do bad things happen to good people? That only happened once, and He volunteered.
—RC Sproul

"Dictators do not come into the human race from without, from Mars. They erupt from within, like hemorrhoids, from an infected body, from the one fact no secularist ever dares to face: original sin."
—Peter Kreeft

""One of the really surprising things about the present bewilderment of humanity is that the Christian Church now finds herself called upon to proclaim the old and hated doctrine of sin as a gospel of cheer and encouragement. The final tendency of the modern philosophies, hailed in their day as a release from the burden of sinfulness, has been to bind man hard and fast in the chains of an iron determinism. The influence of heredity and environment, of glandular makeup and the control exercised by the unconscious, of economic necessity and the mechanics of biological development, have all been invoked to assure man that he is not responsible for his misfortune and therefore not to be held guilty. Evil has been represented as something imposed on us from without, not made by us from within. The dreadful conclusion follows inevitably that as he is not responsible for evil; he cannot alter it. Even though evolution and progress may offer some alleviation in the future there is no hope for you and me now. I well remember how an aunt of mine, brought up in an old-fashioned liberalism, protested angrily against having continuously to call herself a miserable sinner when reciting the Litany. Today, if we could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners, that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of God, we can do something to put it right, we should receive that message as the most helpful and heartening thing that can be imagined.
—(Dorothy Sayers, "Creed or Chaos")

"A great deal of the theological impotence of our generation can be traced to what our ancestors would have called a severely deficient sense of the horrible sinfulness of sin."
—Donald Williams

—Mark Kelly

"The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.”
—Adrian Rogers

"When it comes to the origin of life on the earth, there are only two possibilities: creation and spontaneous generation. There is no third way. Spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago. But that leads us to only one other conclusion; that of supernatural creation. We cannot accept that on philosophical grounds, therefore we choose to believe the impossible: that life arose spontaneously by chance."
—George Wald (research scientist/Nobel Prize winner)

"The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.”
—Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist)

“If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.”
—Christian de Duve. “A Guided Tour of the Living Cell” (Nobel laureate and organic chemist)

"The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice."
—Richard Dawkins

"It is absurd for the evolutionist to complain it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."
—G.K. Chesterton

"The faith of many young people has been wrecked on the shoals of Darwinism. Whoever has the power to define the story of creation in a culture is the de facto priesthood and largely determines what the dominant worldview will be."
—Dr. Ray Bohlin

"The most important information a culture has is its creation story because from that a culture derives its morality and law."
—Terry Scambray

“My high school science teacher once told me that much of Genesis is false. But since my high school teacher did not prove he was God by rising from the dead, I’m going to believe Jesus instead.”
—Andy Stanley

If you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one… Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.”
—Christian de Duve. “A Guided Tour of the Living Cell” (Nobel laureate and organic chemist)

"In the beginning were the particles And the particles became complex Living stuff; And the stuff imagined God; But then discovered Evolution."
—-Phillip Johnson

"Imagine 10 to the 50th blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."
—Sir Fred Hoyle, physicist, mathematician, astronomer

"...a scenario describing the genesis of life on earth by chance and natural causes which can be accepted on the basis of fact and not faith has not yet been written The entire effort in the primeval soup paradigm is self-deception."
—H.P. Yockey , physicist and information theorist

"...[we are still quite unable to grasp the extreme complexity of the simplest organisms."
—Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize, Chemistry)

"The notion that not only biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."
—Fred Hoyle, astronomer, mathematics, physicist

"There are only two possibilities as to how life arose. One is spontaneous generation arising to evolution; the other is a supernatural creative act of Gd. There is no third possibility…a supernatural creative act of GD. I will not accept that philosophically because I do not want to believe in GD, therefore I choose to believe that which I know is scientifically impossible; spontaneous generation arising to Evolution."
—Dr. George Wald (Nobel Laureate)

"For some time now, scientists have known that our life-friendly cosmos depends on the delicate balancing of a host of universal constants: Newton's gravitational constant, the mass and charge of the electron, and the strengths of the weak and strong nuclear forces, just to name a few. If the value for any one of these constants was slightly different, questions about the universe couldn't be asked, intelligence, and biological life itself, would have never come about. And that makes scientists edgy, because conditions that depend on coincidence and fine-turning suggest something of a set-up job. "
—Chuck Colson

"This is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology. The origin of life is a science writer’s dream. It abounds with exotic scientists and exotic theories, which are never entirely abandoned or accepted, but merely go in and out of fashion."
—(John Horgan, The End of Science, 1997, p. 138)

"The more we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes."
—Thomas Nagel - "Mind & Cosmos"

"Most of origin-of-life research is as relevant to the real problem of life's origin as rubber-band powered propeller model planes are to the military's most sophisticated stealth aircraft."
—Jonathan Wells

"The claim that natural laws are sufficient to account for the origin of life is far-fetched. Natural laws work against the origin of life. Natural laws describe material processes that consume the raw materials of life, turning them into tars, melanoids, and other nonbiological substances that thereafter are completely useless to life"
—Jonathan Wells

"... [T]here was at some stage in the history of the earth, after the cooling process, a definite act of creation. Something came from the outside. Power was exercised from without. In a word, life was given to the earth."
—Alfred Russell Wallace (Darwin's proto-type)

"Some of us want to believe in extraterrestrials because an article of our secular faith holds that there is nothing exceptional about human life. This is dogma, lacking any justification, but it has already been codified as the Mediocrity Principle. The Earth, life, mankind, and civilization are humdrum, routine developments; nothing out of the ordinary about them. And if that is so, we should expect to find such life all over the Galaxy."
—Tom Bethell

"All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere. We believe as an article of faith that life evolved from dead matter on this planet. It is just that its complexity is so great, it is hard for us to imagine that it did."
—Harold Urey, Christian Science Monitor (January 4, 1962)

""What makes the origin of life and of the genetic code a disturbing riddle is this: The genetic code is without any biological function unless it is translated; that is, unless it leads to the synthesis of the proteins whose structure is laid down by the code. But...the machinery by w...hich the cell... translates the code consists of at least fifty macromolecular components which are themselves coded in the DNA. Thus the code can not be translated except by using certain products of its translation.

This constitutes a baffling circle; a really vicious circle, it seems, for any attempt to form a model or theory of the genesis of the genetic code. Thus we may be faced with the possibility that the origin of life (like the origin of physics) becomes an impenetrable barrier to science, and a resudue to all attempts to reduce biology to chemistry and physics."
—Popper, K.R. 1974. Scientific Reduction and the Essential Incompleteness of All Science. In Ayala, F. and Dobzhansky, T., eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Biology, University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 270

"The origin of life is one of the hardest problems in all of science, but it is also one of the most important. Origin-of-life research has evolved into a lively, inter-disciplinary field, but other scientists often view it with skepticism and even derision. This attitude is understandable and, in a sense, perhaps justified, given the "dirty" rarely mentioned secret: Despite many interesting results to its credit, when judged by the straightforward criterion of reaching (or even approaching) the ultimate goal, the origin of life field is a failure - we still do not have even a plausible coherent model, let alone a validated scenario, for the emergence of life on Earth. Certainly, this is due not to a lack of experimental and theoretical effort, but to the extraordinary intrinsic difficulty and complexity of the problem. A succession of exceedingly unlikely steps is essential for the origin of life, from the synthesis and accumulation of nucleotides to the origin of translation; through the multiplication of probabilities, these make the final outcome seem almost like a miracle."
—Eugene V. Koonin, molecular biologist, The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2011), 391.

“Despite the widespread view that Darwinian Evolution has been able to explain the emergence of biological complexity that is not the case…Darwinian theory does not deal with the question how [life] was able to come into being. The troublesome question still in search of an answer is: How did a system capable of evolving come about in the first place?…Nature just doesn’t operate like that! Nature doesn’t spontaneously make highly organized…purposeful entities…And here precisely lies the [origin of] life problem…it is not just common sense that tells us that highly organized entities don’t just spontaneously come about. Certain basic laws of physics [coupled with mathematical probability] preach the same sermon – systems tend toward chaos and disorder, not toward order and function… Biology [i.e. a naturalistic origin of life] and physics seem contradictory, quite incompatible”
—Dr. Addy Pross, professor of chemistry, Ben-Gurion University, Israel.

"I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing."
—Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy) Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest

"Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan."
—Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics)

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
—Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“The unfolding of absolutely nothing into something is a problem of the profoundest difficulty and currently far beyond the reach of science.”
—Peter Atkins (atheist/chemist)

“Absolutely nothing lacks laws just as it lacks everything else… There are no laws in a universe that does not yet exist, for laws come into existence as the behaviour they summarize emerges with the emerging universe... Nothing has no properties, and thus does not undergo quantum fluctuations.”
—Peter Atkins (atheist, chemist)

"I do not reply, as some do, when asked `What was God doing before He created the world?' , saying 'He was creating Hell for those who ask such questions........Time was also created, so there was no 'before'."
—St. Augustine

"According to the Big Bang Theory, the whole matter of the universe began to exist at a particular time in the remote past. A proponent of such a theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the matter of the universe came from nothing and by nothing."
— Anthony Kenny, philosopher

"The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy ... For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
—Robert Jastrow (physicist, astronomer, cosmologist)

"It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning."
—Alexander Vilenkin

“The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.”
—Michael Denton, atheist Microbiologist

"In asking for an account of pre-Big Bang cosmology, physicists are attempting to flee from a story that they have heard but do not like. They make little attempt to disguise their aversion either."
—David Berlinski

'It may be, in the end, that our biggest obstacle in understanding the cosmos is that we didn't make it.'
—David Berlinski

"Christians should not be hostile, they should not hate, they should not judge, and they should not condemn. But they also must not shy away from real Truth and real Christianity. Just because so many have “itching ears” and “will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” does not mean Christians should be willing to scratch that itch."
—Erick Erickson

"We must be stripped of our fig leaves in order to be clothed with Christ's righteousness so we can stand in the judgment of a holy God. The question is whether the aim of ministry today is to tear off our fig leaves so we can be clothed with Christ or to help us add a few more."
—Michael Horton, "Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church"

"It is the same with all modern attempts at syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the creed without leaving something out."
—GK Chesterton

"I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most violent offense to all kinds of people, it would seem absurd to expect that the doctrine of his person can be so presented as to offend nobody. We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference; and he said in so many words that what he brought with him was fire and sword. That being so, nobody need be too much surprised or disconcerted at finding that a determined preaching of Christian dogma may sometimes result in a few angry letters of protest or a difference of opinion on the parish council."
—Dorothy Sayers ("Creed or Chaos?") ˜

""If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.”
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Sound Doctrine

"[P]rogressives and traditionalists (and others!) are much like the scattered people who witnessed the collapse of the Babel tower; we don’t speak the same language. Even if we use the same words, we don’t mean the same things. From our beliefs about human nature and sexuality, to our understanding of the authority of Scripture, to what we think it means to act with integrity, we have major ― and sometimes irreconcilable ― differences."
—Karen Booth

""Most equate prophets with radicals and innovators and change-agents, but rather the prophet is a traditionalist calling God's people to be faithful to the covenant.

"The prophets are not agents of change; they are preachers that demand God's people change by returning to the covenant tradition."
— John Bevere

“The new paganism is the virtual divinization of man, the religion of man as the new God. One of its popular slogans, repeated often by Christians, is "the infinite value of the human person." Its aim is building a heaven on earth, a secular salvation. Another word for the new paganism is humanism, the religion that will not lift up its head to the heavens but stuffs the heavens into its head.”
—Peter Kreeft

“In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left.”
—Peter Kreeft

"The essence of paganism is idolatry: the self-aggrandizing worship of false gods in place of the God of love who is Creator of the universe and Lord of Life. How can we know that an idol, a false god, and not the true God, is being worshiped? I submit to you that there is a foolproof test: False gods always demand the blood of innocents. A pagan culture is always, in the end, a culture of death."
—Robert P. George

"Where the innocent and just are slain, there the god being worshiped is not the God of Israel, the Lord of Life, but rather Moloch in one or another of his protean disguises. Paganism is a permanent threat. The worship of false gods is a constant temptation."
—Robert P. George

"I feel that very grave dangers hang over us. This results from the apostasy of the great part of Europe from the Christian faith. Hence a worse state than the one we were in before we received the Faith. For no one returns from Christianity to the same state he was in before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature."
—CS Lewis

"The Antichrist boasts of bringing to human beings the peace and tolerance that Christianity promised but has failed to deliver. Actually, what the radicalization of contemporary victimology produces is a return to all sorts of pagan practices: abortion, euthanasia, sexual undifferentiation, Roman circus games galore but without real victims, etc."
—Rene Girad

"The pagan world was a virgin waiting for her groom. The modern West is an adulterous divorce’, cynical, angry and “so through” with Jesus. It is hard to know how the secular West will come round. Will she die in her sins, or will the miracle of broken, humbled heart emerge?"
—Msgr. Charles Pope

"My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and the reassertors of the pagan ideal is, then, this. I accuse them of ignoring definite human discoveries in the moral world, discoveries as definite, though not as material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For mankind has discovered that reason does not lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal of pride and enjoyment. For mankind has discovered that pride does not lead to enjoyment. I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past. I accuse Mr. Lowes Dickinson and his school of reaction in the only real sense. If he likes, let him ignore these great historic mysteries—the mystery of charity, the mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If he likes, let him ignore the plough or the printing-press. But if we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end—where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity."
—GK Chesterton

“Here are wonders upon wonders: the Strong One is weak; the Infinite One lies in a manger; the Prince of Life dies; the Crucified One lives; the Humiliated One is glorified.
Meekness and majesty, indeed!
Behold, then, your newborn King! Come and worship Him!”
—Sinclair B. Ferguson, In Christ Alone: Living the Gospel Centered Life

"It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by reason."

Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.

"It is just plain stupid for a Christian not to expect spiritual warfare while he lives in enemy territory."
—Francis Schaeffer

The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people have finished with stake-burning circuses and torture racks. No martyr's blood is shed in the secular west so long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babes pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfastly in their intellectual retardation; the church's extinction won't come by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. But let the church step off the reservation, let her penetrate once more the culture of the day and the...face of secularism will change from a benign smile to a savage snarl."
—(R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, Arthur Lindsley, (“Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith”)

"Persecution is the heirloom of the church, and the ensign of the elect.”
—Charles Spurgeon

“Once upon a time, there was a safe, private place to take your controversial stand for Jesus. No more. If you are going to stand, you will be shot at—either figuratively or literally.”
—John Piper, Jesus: The Only Way to God: Must You Hear the Gospel to Be Saved?

“God rules over the sufferings of the church and causes them to spread spiritual power and the joy of faith in a lost world. It is not his only way. But it does seem to be a frequent way. God spurs the church into missionary service by the suffering she endures. Therefore we must not judge too quickly the apparent setbacks and tactical "defeats" of the church. If you see things with the eyes of God, the Master strategist (who cannot lose because he is omnipotent), what you see in every setback is the positioning for a greater advance and a greater display of his wisdom and power and love.”
—John Piper

“We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything, so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is eastern, it is granted critical immunity; if western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus, a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same if the ceremony is from eastern fold. Such is the mood at the end of the twentieth century. A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling. But that is precisely what I believe postmodernism best represents - a mood.”
—Ravi Zacharias, Jesus Among Other Gods: The Absolute Claims of the Christian Message

"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
—Antonio Gramisci, Italian communist (1915)

"This is a moment of decision, and every evangelical believer, congregation, denomination, and institution will have to answer. There will be no place to hide. The forces driving this revolution in morality will not allow evasion or equivocation. Every pastor, every church, and every Christian organization will soon be forced to declare an allegiance to the Scriptures and to the Bible’s teachings on marriage and sexual morality, or to affirm loyalty to the sexual revolution. That revolution did not start with same-sex marriage, and it will not end there. But marriage is the most urgent issue of the day, and the moment of decision has arrived.

In this season of testing, Christians committed to the gospel of Christ are called upon to muster the greatest display of compassion and conviction of our lives. But true compassion will never lead to an abandonment of biblical authority or a redefinition of the gospel of Jesus Christ."
—Albert Mohler.

"[W]e in the modern West are living under barbarism, though we do not recognize it. Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes—they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged the animal pelts and spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones."
—Rod Dreher

"This is our time, folks. We do not have the luxury of neutrality, since in the eternal economy, there is only yes or no. It’s God or nothing. It is truth or lies. It is freedom or bondage. Life or death. There is no middle ground. No ambiguous morality that permits “yours” and “mine” and “theirs,” all equally good.

This is our moment in history, for better, and for all the worse. There’s no point in denying all the worse, or pretending it doesn’t wear us down. I know it wears me down.

Worn down or not, the facts remain unchanged. Jesus Christ is Lord. He is the light that is the life of men, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:4-5)

We must fortify the walls of our hearts and take courage. We need to choose to believe the eternal facts instead of feelings. It’s not a Pollyanna optimism I speak of, but a deep, solid faith that doesn’t surrender to gloom and futility. Do I know Him whom I have believed or not? Is He the King of Kings or not? There is only yes or no.

It is dark outside, and the enemy of our souls seems to be gaining more ground every day, logging terrific victories in our morally bankrupt culture. Now is our time to bring the light and live as children of light, with courage and steadfast faith.

Jesus Christ is Lord, now and forever. He lives and reigns forever. He is victorious, and all power and honor and glory belong to Him."
—Jennifer Hartline.

"No one is arguing that the government should forcibly abort babies. Rather, the argument is (apparently) that if a family wants to commit infanticide, there is not much difference between that and an abortion. For what it's worth, I find it a little repugnant, but I struggle to see anything really "wrong" with it. Babies prior to a certain age do not have certain moral properties that make them entities worth legal protection. Consider animals; an adult chicken is probably about as mentally aware and capable of feeling pain as an infant is, and yet I doubt you are a vegetarian.

As for the mentally disabled, we already essentially require someone (either an individual or the state) to act as their guardian and caretaker. On some level they do not have the same set of rights as the rest of us do."
—Taylor Portnoy Kessinger, PhD. (Evo-EcoBiology)

"In Chapter 4 we saw that the fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings. We saw in our discussion of abortion that the potential of a fetus to become a rational, self-conscious being cannot count against killing it at a stage when it lacks these characteristics - not, that is, unless we are also prepared to count the value of rational self-conscious life as a reason against contraception and celibacy. No infant - disabled or not - has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time."
—Peter Singer

"Once we admit that Darwin was right when he argued that human ethics evolved from the social instincts that we inherited from our non-human ancestors, we can put aside the hypothesis of a divine origin for ethics."
—Peter Singer

"Many roads lead up the single mountain of religion to God at the top. It is provincial, narrow-minded, and blind to deny the validity of other roads than yours."

The unproved assumption of this very common mountain analogy is that the roads go up, not down; that man makes the roads, not God; that religion is man's search for God, not God's search for man. C. S. Lewis says this sounds like "the mouse's search for the cat".

Christianity is not a system of man's search for God but a story of God's search for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense wafting up from special spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but like a Father's hand thrust downward to rescue the fallen. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails. There is no human way up the mountain, only a divine way down. "No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known."

If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any one road is the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least in all being human, finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made the roads, it would be as stupid to absolutize one of them as to absolutize one art form, one political system, or one way of skinning a cat. But if God made the road, we must find out whether he made many or one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as God's God-made one.

But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true, not all religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more arrogant than all others, for it centers on one who claimed, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father but by me."
—Peter Kreeft

"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
—Voltaire

“The upsurge of political correctness is not just greasy-kid stuff, and it’s not just a bunch of weird, unfortunate events that somehow keep happening over and over. It’s the expression of a political culture with consistent norms, and philosophical premises that happen to be incompatible with liberalism.”
—Jonathan Chait (liberal commentator/journalist)

“The truth has become an insult.”
—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred."
—Jacques Barzun

"When 1960s hippie radicals got clever, they stopped burning and rioting and turned to politics. They infiltrated the universities, the courts, and the labor unions. Now almost all the “Big” institutions—Big Labor, Big Education, Big Law, Big Hollywood, and Big Science—are firmly in their grasp. Big Business is falling in line now, too, as seen in corporate support for “transgender rights” at Target, and repudiation of North Carolina for having the audacity to state the obvious, that people should use the restroom matching their sex stated on their birth certificates.

"As western civilization commits suicide without help of IS beheaders, one thing will stand: reality. You can’t fight God’s moral order forever. Sooner or later, reality fights back. We just hope it won’t be too late". (from article..."Big Science Succumbs to Political Correctness", author not given)

"Relativism is culture's dictator and political correctness is our first language."
—Maxie Dunnam

"The [contemporary secular] university, instead of transmitting culture, exists to deconstruct it, to remove its “aura,” and to leave the student, after four years of intellectual dissipation, with the view that anything goes and nothing matters."
—Roger Scruton

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
—Laurence J. Peter

“She came forward. She sat here. She told her truth.”
—Corey Booker, D-N.J. (Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearing, 2018)

"[P]ostmodernism...has not only revealed the shaky intellectual foundations of the story of modernity, but has also sought to do away with all universal narratives that seek to make sense of reality. The postmodern world is one in which each of us is free to make up our own story, using whatever narrative helps us get by."
—Daniel Lattier

"[The]postmodern person.... someone who is virtually unfamiliar with biblical faith, whether in contemporaneous or historical form, who therefore also lacks a sense of sin. It is next to impossible to persuade him that he is in thrall to the idolatrous imagination or suffers from the misplaced devotion that idolatry connotes."
—Vigen Guroian

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
— Humpty-Dumpty (Lewis Carrol)

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
—Robert Knight

"What happens to language when words lose all significance, when they have no history or objectivity, when they are deconstructed or denied a reality? This is what has happened in recent years in the departments of literature and philosophy in leading universities. Is it any wonder that there is a crisis in the teaching of moral education, if words, which are the tools to convey truths, have no objective meaning?"
—Russell Kirk, 1989

"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy."
—CS Lewis

"Americans decry the nihilism of radical Islam, but advanced modern American freedom has itself become nihilistic. It is a soft though decadent nihilism that devours tradition, destroys social cohesion, cheapens cultural standards, hollows moral convictions and in the years to come will produce its own dark harvest of social consequences."
—Os Guinness ("A Free People's Suicide")

"But the new rebel is a sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutio...nist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything."
—G.K. Chesterton

"We seem to be experiencing a kind of cultural vaporization, where many ideas, practices, and values slowly but surely erode and then disappear. In such a time as this, what does it mean to be a sincere pursuer of the good?"
—Stuart McAllister

"Why do Darwinists keep indulging in this gross contradiction? Because, as human beings, they not only cannot live in a world without meaning and purpose, they cannot even articulate a world without meaning and purpose, they cannot make such a world intelligible to themselves. So they keep appealing to teleology, even in the act of promoting a theory that radically denies all teleology. They are intellectual parasites who would strip all meaning from the universe, while continuing to preserve for themselves the comforts and pleasures of meaning.

The game is up. Henceforth we shall tell the Darwinists that they have no right to eat their meaning and have it. What can they say in reply? That a process utterly lacking in purpose has produced beings, such as themselves, who require a belief in purpose? Their position is as absurd as that of the postmodernists, who declare that there is no such thing as truth in the sense of words that correspond with reality, even as they expect us to agree with their theories! But how can we agree with any theory, if there can be no true correspondence between words and reality?

No matter how the Darwinists, liberals, and postmodernists twist it, they have no right to indulge in such nonsense. We must require of them that they be intellectually consistent and accept the nihilistic void produced by their own belief systems. Then we will see how long those belief systems last."
—Lawrence Austen

"The postmodern thinker believes that he is intrinsically neutral, free from any ethical, moral, or religious system of thought, yet this is not so. The problem is worse than mere inconsistency, for the new tolerance regularly smuggles into the culture massive structures of thought and imposes them on others who disagree, while insisting that the others are the intolerant people-."
—D.A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance.

"For atheism, in the final analysis, there is no Final Analysis."
—Douglas Groothuis

"In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant."
—David Wells

Logic is like a policeman that God has put in the brain of human beings, to blow the whistle; to recognize the lie. The whistle blows, and things don’t compute. Just like your computer goes whacky when you ask it to be irrational. So, God has built into the human mind a function of rationality that is a test of coherency. A test of rationality. And at the very heart of the Christian affirmation, is that. Though the content that we get in the Bible goes far beyond what we can learn, through rational speculation. It’s based on Divine revelation. That Divine revelation does not come to us packaged in absurdity. The Word of God is not… irrational. It is addressed to creatures who have been given minds that operate according to these principles.”
—R.C. Sproul

There is an immense difference between a worldview that is not able to answer every question to complete satisfaction and one whose answers are consistently contradictory. There is an even greater difference between answers that contain paradoxes and those that are systemically irreconcilable.

Once again, the Christian faith stands out as unique in this test, both as a system of thought and in the answers it gives. Christianity does not promise that you will have every question fully answered to your satisfaction before you die, but the answers it gives are consistently consistent. There may be paradoxes within Christian teaching and belief, but they are not irreconcilable. "
—Ravi Zacharias

"Post-modernism has unwittingly awakened society to the realization that thruth, morality and meaning are connected. If the first goes, there is nothing on which to base the other two. On every side society feels the colossal breakdown, and a stirring is taking place deep within the national conscience that when truth has been lost, the results are devastating."
—Ravi Zacharias

"A certain kind of thinking is losing ground: thinking that stresses precise ideas, exact wording, and rigorous knowledge."
— Pierre Babin

"The modern habit of saying"This is my opinion, but I may be wrong" is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me" - the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon."
—G. K. Chesterton

"We are subjected to the reproduction of truth through power, and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth."
—Michel Foucault

“Pluralism professes to tolerate and, other things being equal, to protect all these views, but it throws a dark canopy of uncommitted-ness over them and thus reduces them to private interests that must not be allowed to rock, let alone steer, the community boat.”
—JI Packer

"Christianity cannot be successfully accommodated to Post-Modernism. Why not? "There are no valid Metanarratives" is not just a belief serious Post-Modernists happen to hold. It is a form of discourse they are committed to. If there are no universally and objectively true Metanarratives (grand explanations of the universe and its meaning), then the Christian Metanarrative is not true either. This logic is inescapable. You cannot proclaim that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life by entering into a conversation which has as its price of admission accepting the premise that no such thing can exist.

"What then can we do? Christians must challenge the premises of that discourse at every point and yield no quarter to them. Otherwise, the gospel they are proclaiming will not be The Gospel at all, but just one more subjective "perspective" among many, with no reason why anyone should "privilege" it. To accept the demotion of Christ from universal Lord to one of your personal "perspectives," to admit at the outset that His Gospel is not true (but we should believe it anyway), is blasphemous and traitorous to the Kingdom. May God have mercy on our souls if we do any such thing!"
—Donald Williams

"Our greatest threat as a nation is not foreign invaders at the door; it's termites in the floor."
—Os Guiness

"While the world as we know it is indeed disordered and damaged, and to find answers in the world itself is absurd, God does not abandon us to absurdity. Into this world, into its pain and confusion, God, too, became flesh and dwelt among us. And it ended for Jesus as tragically as anything we observe under the sun. He went to the cross with the full force of every ugly, honest reality of Ecclesiastes on his shoulders. And he stood with us in that darkness, giving us an equally severe image of a God worth seeking in the midst of it."
—Stuart McAllister

"We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the questions, partly because of the short-term view of things that’s encouraged by the media and partly because there seems to be no centre to which people can turn in order to see what the heart of the discussion is. I think this is a failure of philosophy in our days – and also of the culture that our English-speaking world has generated – around the idea of an abstract question."
—Roger Scruton

"Liberalism has officially severed itself from any semblance of reality, and indeed declared war upon it. If our culture cooperates; if we relent and concede that science is relative and human beings are gods who can choose their own biological makeup; if the left jumps over the shark and into the dark waters of full fledged insanity, and many in our society take the plunge right along with it, then there will be no stopping liberalism. It will have won the culture irreversibly. If we willingly forfeit the definition of “man” and “woman,” right after forfeiting the definition of marriage, and long after forfeiting the definition of human life, then we will have no basis left to oppose anything else liberalism tries to do. We will have given it everything, ceded its every demand, compromised on every single imaginable point, and that will be the end of it. All we’ll be able to do, then, is sit and wait for our civilization to eat itself and collapse into dust.

Where modernism was a manifesto of human self-confidence and self-congratulation, postmodernism is a confession of modesty, if not despair. There is no truth, only truths. There are no principles, only preferences. There is no grand reason, only reasons. There is no privileged civilization, only a multiple of cultures, beliefs, periods, and styles. There is no grand narrative of human progress, only countless stories of where people and their cultures are now. There is no simple reality or any grand objectivity of universal, detached knowledge, only a ceaseless representation of everything in terms of everything else. In sum, postmodernism...is an extreme form of relativism."
—Os Guiness

"Multinational consumerism reduces all life to a bland and rootless present, and as humanity finds itself free-floating and rootless, it desperately strives to create (rather than rediscover) for itself a history and a network of tradition which will give it value and identity. The death of tradition has not proved to be a liberating experience; it has merely created a hole into which any old fairy-story can now be fitted."
- Carl R. Trueman

"Joseph Campbell endeared himself to the 1960s generation by telling them, “Follow your bliss,” and they followed it right into the waiting arms of the Nihilists."
—David Goldman

“If hypocrisy in its essence is a violation of truth, which it is, postmodernism has no concept of truth with which to remedy the problem. And if hypocrisy violates justice, which it does, postmodernism has no concept of objective justice either. If, as postmoderns say. ‘truth’ is merely the compliment we pay to claims and ideas that we agree with, then ‘lies’ are only the insult we level at claims and ideas that differ from our own. Seen that way, there are only relativities to counter relativities, supposed lies to counter supposed lies, and of course power to counter power.”
—Os Guiness (“Fool’s Talk”)

"When 1960s hippie radicals got clever, they stopped burning and rioting and turned to politics. They infiltrated the universities, the courts, and the labor unions. Now almost all the “Big” institutions—Big Labor, Big Education, Big Law, Big Hollywood, and Big Science—are firmly in their grasp. Big Business is falling in line now, too, as seen in corporate support for “transgender rights” at Target, and repudiation of North Carolina for having the audacity to state the obvious, that people should use the restroom matching their sex stated on their birth certificates.

"As western civilization commits suicide without help of IS beheaders, one thing will stand: reality. You can’t fight God’s moral order forever. Sooner or later, reality fights back. We just hope it won’t be too late". (from article..."Big Science Succumbs to Political Correctness", author not given)

"Societies, like individuals, reap what they sow. Where virtue is disdained and vice is glorified corruption and demagoguery are the harvest."
—Robert P. George

"[W]hile there are stupid people everywhere, there is a particular minute and microcephalous idiocy which is only found in an intelligentsia.

I have sometimes fancied that, as chilly people like a warm room, silly people sometimes like a diffused atmosphere of intellectualism and long words."
— GK Chesterton

"If objects are indeterminate, because there is no privileged interpretation of what they are, then conformity of word and object—the definition of truth—can only come about through conformity of the object to the word. In other words, truth means that things become what we say they are. That’s why today there is my truth, your truth, the pope’s truth, his predecessors’ truth, and the truth of TV news. Who of us can judge among them?"
—James Kalb

"How did rationalism replace biblical Christianity as the dominant public philosophy in England so easily? Two factors coming together in diabolically bad timing created a perfect storm. The revulsion against Bible-quoting that followed the religious wars of the 17th century coincided with an increased confidence in human reason due to the successes of the early modern scientific movement of the same century. The rise of modern science was a good thing in itself, neither anti-Christian nor even pro-secular at first, but based on a faith in the intelligibility of nature that flowed from belief in a rational Creator. But it was transformed by the cultural context, the visceral desire for something other than revelation as a basis for public policy, into an overconfidence in reason divorced from revelation that gave us the Endarkenment of the 18th century. That overconfidence led to the disillusionment of Post-Modernism, and to the world in which we still live."
—Donald Williams

"It is no coincidence that Post-Modern scholars often tend to be Marxists. Both systems have no place for any objective truth to which their results must be submitted; both subordinate truth to their social agendas, which become self-justifying. Evil supports evil and attracts it. And the damage takes generations to heal."
—Donald Williams

"Without a thorough and deeply rooted understanding of the biblical view of truth as revealed, objective, absolute, universal, eternally engaging, antithetical and exclusive, unified and systematic, and as an end in itself, the Christian response to postmodernism will be muted by the surrounding culture or will make illicit compromises with the truth-impoverished spirit of the age. The good news is that truth is still truth, that it provides a backbone for witness and ministry in postmodern times, and that God's truth will never fail."
—Douglas Groothuis

QUESTION: "How do you get through to Post-Modern Nihilists?"

MY ANSWER: "You cannot argue someone out of his position when part of that position is the rejection of the authority of reason. But the Post-Modernist has to live in reality, which refuses to cooperate with his world view. So enlist reality on your side and just keep confronting him with it. He doesn't mind contradicting himself, but contradicting reality proves often quite inconvenient and uncomfortable. Don't let him escape that fact. And then, do what you must do at the end of every apologetic encounter: Leave him at the feet of Jesus."
—Donald Williams

"The most critical question in the history of thought is whether all the convictional frameworks through which different peoples arrive at the meaning and worth of human life are by nature mythical, or whether perhaps at least one of these perspectives stem from divine revelation and has objective cognitive reality."
—Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority

“As a nation we risk coming undone because our language is coming undone and our language is coming undone because one by one we are being undone”
—David W. Orr

"When language is devalued, misused, or corrupted, so too are those who speak it and those who hear it."
—David W. Orr

“But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative -- useless synonyms for good or for bad.”
—C.S. Lewis

"The [contemporary secular] university, instead of transmitting culture, exists to deconstruct it, to remove its “aura,” and to leave the student, after four years of intellectual dissipation, with the view that anything goes and nothing matters."
—Roger Scruton

“In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.”
—David F. Wells

“Without a thorough and deeply rooted understanding of the biblical view of truth as revealed, objective, absolute, universal, eternally engaging, antithetical and exclusive, unified and systematic, and as end in itself, the Christian response to postmodernism will be muted by the surrounding culture or will make illicit compromises with the truth-impoverished spirit of the age.”
—Douglas R. Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism

"Post-modernism is a direct and inevitable outcome of metaphysical naturalism. After all if our brain are shaped for fitness not for truth, we ought to aim at what works for us, not for truth."
—Denyse O'Leary

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?"
—George Orwell (1984)

"The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal."
-PJ O'Rourke

"Egotism is the source of the passions. From egoism spring gluttony, avarice, conceit, and from conceit springs pride...At the beginning of all passion there is egotism, just as at the end there is pride."
—Maximus the Confessor (7th Century)

Communism is ugly, dangerous and whenever and wherever it has been tried it has made people poorer, more miserable and often more dead. That’s why one of our most pressing missions in 2019 is to defend Western Civilisation from what I call the Care Bear Commies – all those youthful, telegenic, smiley, hard-left activists you see across the media reassuring your kids that actually communism is likeable and fun and the only reason it gets such a bad rap is that it hasn’t been tried properly yet.
—James Delingpole

“Neither secular progress nor secular progressives have brought the West where they once promised. Nor can they.”
—Os Guinness

“The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary.”
— John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

"My objection to Mr. Lowes Dickinson and the reassertors of the pagan ideal is, then, this. I accuse them of ignoring definite human discoveries in the moral world, discoveries as definite, though not as material, as the discovery of the circulation of the blood. We cannot go back to an ideal of reason and sanity. For mankind has discovered that reason does not lead to sanity. We cannot go back to an ideal of pride and enjoyment. For mankind has discovered that pride does not lead to enjoyment. I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past. I accuse Mr. Lowes Dickinson and his school of reaction in the only real sense. If he likes, let him ignore these great historic mysteries—the mystery of charity, the mystery of chivalry, the mystery of faith. If he likes, let him ignore the plough or the printing-press. But if we do revive and pursue the pagan ideal of a simple and rational self-completion we shall end—where Paganism ended. I do not mean that we shall end in destruction. I mean that we shall end in Christianity."
—GK Chesterton

"The job of a watchman is not easy. It is a thankless and lonely task. Many will not like the sound of the sentinel, and will even fight against it. As John Taylor puts it, the calling to be a watchman is “an awful responsibility”. Like Ezekiel, a modern-day watchman will be “a lonely figure who is committed to the task of standing apart from his fellow-men in order that he can keep a constant vigil and warn his people of dangers that lie ahead.”
-Bill Muehlenburg

“Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.”
-Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud

"How did rationalism replace biblical Christianity as the dominant public philosophy in England so easily? Two factors coming together in diabolically bad timing created a perfect storm. The revulsion against Bible-quoting that followed the religious wars of the 17th century coincided with an increased confidence in human reason due to the successes of the early modern scientific movement of the same century. The rise of modern science was a good thing in itself, neither anti-Christian nor even pro-secular at first, but based on a faith in the intelligibility of nature that flowed from belief in a rational Creator. But it was transformed by the cultural context, the visceral desire for something other than revelation as a basis for public policy, into an overconfidence in reason divorced from revelation that gave us the Endarkenment of the 18th century. That overconfidence led to the disillusionment of Post-Modernism, and to the world in which we still live."
—Donald Williams

"Reason itself needs a place on which to stand; while it can be used without acknowledging its foundation, its use can never be justified without affirming its proper place. That place is creation. Until we recognize that all of our reasoning, all of our knowledge, all of our experiences of the world have their ontological and epistemological foundation in God himself, our reasoning and experiences are vain and futile. Whatever truth we do gain from them, we gain only because we continue to "live, move and have our being" in God. But if we refuse to acknowledge that truth, we'll forever be trapped in our own culpable futility. Like a hamster wheel floating in the air, we might still think we're making real progress, but, when it comes to rationality, it's all a viciously circular illusion."
—K. Scott Oliphint

A lesson both sides need to learn: Societies, like individuals, reap what they sow. Where virtue is disdained, and vice excused and even glorified, corruption and demagoguery are the harvest. You can count on it."
-Robert P George

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”
—Pope John Paul II

Mankind suffers from two excesses: to exclude reason, and to live by nothing but reason.
—Blaise Pascal

"An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy."
—CS Lewis

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It's like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."
—C.S. Lewis

"God does not expect us to submit our faith to Him without reason, but the very limits of our reason make faith a necessity"
—Augustine

Logic is like a policeman that God has put in the brain of human beings, to blow the whistle; to recognize the lie. The whistle blows, and things don’t compute. Just like your computer goes whacky when you ask it to be irrational. So, God has built into the human mind a function of rationality that is a test of coherency. A test of rationality. And at the very heart of the Christian affirmation, is that. Though the content that we get in the Bible goes far beyond what we can learn, through rational speculation. It’s based on Divine revelation. That Divine revelation does not come to us packaged in absurdity. The Word of God is not… irrational. It is addressed to creatures who have been given minds that operate according to these principles.”
—R.C. Sproul

"The problem with a madman is not that he is not logical; the problem is that he is only logical."
—GK Chesterton

"If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have no mysterious and supernatural element. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous."
—Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 273

"Reason alone cannot give you a whole steak, but it sure helps with identifying bologna."
—Peter Kreeft

"Reason itself needs a place on which to stand; while it can be used without acknowledging its foundation, its use can never be justified without affirming its proper place. That place is creation. Until we recognize that all of our reasoning, all of our knowledge, all of our experiences of the world have their ontological and epistemological foundation in God himself, our reasoning and experiences are vain and futile. Whatever truth we do gain from them, we gain only because we continue to "live, move and have our being" in God. But if we refuse to acknowledge that truth, we'll forever be trapped in our own culpable futility. Like a hamster wheel floating in the air, we might still think we're making real progress, but, when it comes to rationality, it's all a viciously circular illusion."
—K. Scott Oliphint

"The concept of a Creator God interferes with our sexual mores. Thus we have rationalized God out of existence. To us, he has become nothing more than the faint and disappearing smile of the cosmic Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland."
—Sir Julian Huxley

"Western culture has made a fortune in the marketing of the concept of the rebel. It has also paid a huge cost. The deep sense of meaninglessness that characterizes what historian Paul Johnson calls “modern times,” which is taught as the science of life in our education system and often embraced in our arts, is having an untold effect in the lives of many."
— Stuart McAllister

"We pretend to be unable to understand the Bible because we know that the minute we understand, we are obliged to obey."
—Søren Kierkegaard

“To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense? If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.”
—Timothy Keller

"But, to the Darwinist, the mind itself is an illusion. Great rhetoric is no different from the bellowing of angry elks."
—Denyse O'Leary

"...many scientists believe that the real causal factors are all those interacting neurons that do many things including creating a sense of self, and a sense of free will—-both of which are illusions."
—Dr. Susam Blackmore (psychologist/'memecist')

"In summary, then, I believe that free will is clearly an illusion. However, this is not to say that consciousness does not have a function. I believe it does, and from this I assume that it must give rise to an evolutionary selective advantage. Consciousness confers the illusion of responsibility. No wonder the belief in free will is so prevalent in society—the very survival of those “selfish free-will genes” is predicated on their capacity to con one into believing in free will!"
—Dr. Susan Blackmore (psychologist/'memecist')

"The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis."
—Dr. Lawrence Krauss

It is no longer fashionable, or even respectable, to talk of fate or destiny taking a hand. Love is a random matter, no more than that, in a universe governed by chance, which has swept aside all other deities and taken on a power that is all but supreme. But what a dull deity Chance is in comparison to those it has vanished. Dressed up as cool rationality — how rational it is, after all, to assert that there is no reason for anything — it appeals only to the impoverished of spirit.
—Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio

“I think we follow the basic law of nature, which is that we’re a bunch of chemical reactions running around in a bag.”
—Dean Hamer

"Always century by century, item after item is transferred from the object's side of the account to the subject's. And now, in some extreme forms of behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we can only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we 'go from that' is a dark question."
—CS Lewis

“The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar.”
—Prof. Anthony Cashmore, (biology, U. of Pennsylvania)

"All creeds which refuse to see an intelligent purpose behind unthinking powers of material nature are intrinsically self-refutuing. In the order of causation they base reason upon unreason. In the order of logic they involve conclusions which discredit their own premises. "
—Sir Arthur Balfour

"Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control."
—Sam Harris

"Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe that we don’t have it."
—Jerry Coyne

"If mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true ... and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms."
—J.B.S. Haldane

"You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise"; "we know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behavior, is true."
—Sam Harris

"Thinking about things can't happen at all. The brain can't have thoughts about Paris, or about France, or about capitals, or about anything else for that mater. When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong."
—Alex Rosenberg, Department Chair and R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University

"Since there are no thoughts about things, notions of purpose, plan, or design in the mind are illusory....Since the brain can't have thoughts about stuff, it cannot make, have, or act on plans, projects, or purposes that it gives itself."
—Department Chair and R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University

"Thinking with the learned, especially the neuroscientist, we recognize that information the brain acquires, stores and employs, doesn’t come in sentences or anything like them. But speaking with the vulgar, we can accept that brains convey this information in sounds and inscriptions that confer the illusion that there are propositions that give the content of the sentences speech and writing convey. And that goes for all the sentences in this paper."
—Alex Rosenberg

"We are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the “choosing.” And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics."
—Dr. Jerry Coyne

"'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."
—Francis Crick (biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist)

"[S]cientism" is but another example of the adage: If you are devoted to using a hammer, then everything looks like a nail"
—Terry Scambray

"If naturalism is true, morality is nothing more than a matter of opinion. All of us, as humans, have simply come to embrace those cultural or personal mores that best promote the survival of the species. There is no transcendent, objective moral truth. Instead, cultures merely embrace the values and moral principles that “work” for them and have resulted in the flourishing of their particular people group. If this is the case, one group of evolved humans has no business trying to tell another evolved group what is truly right or wrong from a moral perspective. After all, each group has successfully arrived at their particular level of development by embracing their own accepted moral standards. Arguments over which moral truths provide for greater human flourishing are simply subjective disagreements; there is no transcendent, objective standard that can adjudicate such disagreements from a naturalistic perspective."
—J Warner Wallace

"[W]e are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the ‘choosing."
—Dr. Jerry Coyne

"Decisions’ . . . aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense."
—Dr. Jerry Coyne

“DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
—Richard Dawkins

"Why should a limited and finite organ such as the human brain have the power to see into the heart of matter and mathematics? These are subjects that have nothing to do with the Darwinian business of scrabbling up the greasy pole of life. It is as if the liver, in addition to producing bile, were to demonstrate an unexpected ability to play the violin."
—David Berlinski, "The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions,(Basic Books, 2009, 16-17)

""One of the really surprising things about the present bewilderment of humanity is that the Christian Church now finds herself called upon to proclaim the old and hated doctrine of sin as a gospel of cheer and encouragement. The final tendency of the modern philosophies, hailed in their day as a release from the burden of sinfulness, has been to bind man hard and fast in the chains of an iron determinism. The influence of heredity and environment, of glandular makeup and the control exercised by the unconscious, of economic necessity and the mechanics of biological development, have all been invoked to assure man that he is not responsible for his misfortune and therefore not to be held guilty. Evil has been represented as something imposed on us from without, not made by us from within. The dreadful conclusion follows inevitably that as he is not responsible for evil; he cannot alter it. Even though evolution and progress may offer some alleviation in the future there is no hope for you and me now. I well remember how an aunt of mine, brought up in an old-fashioned liberalism, protested angrily against having continuously to call herself a miserable sinner when reciting the Litany. Today, if we could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners, that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of God, we can do something to put it right, we should receive that message as the most helpful and heartening thing that can be imagined.
—(Dorothy Sayers, "Creed or Chaos")

"As intelligent agents we are compelled to believe certain things, most importantly that our will is free, that we are selves that persist through time, that there are moral truths that can be universalized, beliefs which as individuals committed to science we yet know to be false."
—Karsten Harries, Yale University philosophy professor

"In a world with no clear origin, no purposeful end, and no intrinsic meaning, human dignity is founded on nothing more than a self-creating will to power that is, in the last analysis, self-destructive."
—Roberta Green Ahmanson

"The very concept of tolerance entails that you disagree with that which you tolerate. Otherwise, you wouldn’t tolerate it; you would agree with it! Thus, one can only tolerate a view if one regards that view as false. You can’t tolerate a view which you believe to be true. Thus, the very concept of toleration presupposes that one believes the tolerated view to be false. So objective truth is not incompatible with tolerance; on the contrary the objectivity of truth is presupposed by tolerance. The correct basis of tolerance is not pluralism, but the inherent worth of every human being created in the image of God and therefore endowed with certain God-given rights, including freedom of thought and expression. That’s why Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” The basis of tolerance is not relativism, but love."
–William Lane Craig, Are There Objective Truths about God?

"Vulgar relativism is an invisible gas, odorless, deadly, that is now polluting every free society on earth. It is a gas that attacks the central nervous system of moral striving. The most perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither political nor economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism…. During the next hundred years, the question for those who love liberty is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance the work of the Father of Lies. “There is no such thing as truth,” they teach even the little ones. “Truth is bondage. Believe what seems right to you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow your feelings. Do as you please. Get in touch with your self. Do what feels comfortable.” Those who speak in this way prepare the jails of the twenty-first century. They do the work of tyrants."
–Michael Novak

"Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others."
–J.P. Moreland

"There is no neutral ground when it comes to the tolerance question. Everybody has a point of view she thinks is right, and everybody passes judgment at some point or another. The Christian gets pigeonholed as the judgmental one, but everyone else is judging, too, even people who consider themselves relativists."
—Greg Koukl

"There is perhaps no greater need today in the West than for people to be able to distinguish right from wrong. Most folks have altogether lost their moral compasses and are simply roaming aimlessly in an ethical no-man’s land. Moral absolutes have been jettisoned and relativism reigns. This is always a recipe for disaster. And we have seen it occurring throughout human history. There has always been a connection between the abandonment of morality and the abandonment of God. When we declare the nonexistence or the inconsequentiality of God, we lose the basis for moral absolutes."
—Bill Muehlenberg

"Without the ultimate warrant of Divine Revelation, all claims to authority are vulnerable to the 'Grand Sez Who'."
—Arthur Leff

"In the new age of post-modern pluralism, divinity without sovereignty brings humans without dignity into an age without responsibility through the exploitation of a god or goddess of your choice without tragedy."
—Thomas Hopko

"Vulgar relativism is an invisible gas, odorless, deadly, that is now polluting every free society on earth. It is a gas that attacks the central nervous system of moral striving. The most perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither political nor economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism..."
—Michael Novak , "Awakening from Nihilism: The Templeton Prize Address"

"The formula is simple: when relativism holds sway long enough, everyone begins to do right in his own eyes without any regard to for submission to truth. In this atmosphere, a society begins to brea down."
—John Piper (Think, p. 114)

"Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition...If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the the bearers of an objective, immortal truth...then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity...From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable."
—Benito Mussolini (Diuturna pp. 374-375)

"There is no longer any cultural corrective because we have abandoned the concept of objective truth. Nothing is right or wrong, because that suggests a standard by which right and wrong might be defined. Personal choice is the new ‘standard,’ which is no standard at all. One might as well develop individual weights and measures."
—Cal Thomas

"Like an old apple, relativism may look good on the surface, but it is rotten at the core."
—Norm Geisler

"There is a modern myth that holds that true tolerance consists of neutrality. It is one of the most entrenched assumptions of a society committed to relativism."
—Greg Koukl

"How would you know that the Holocaust is ultimately wrong [or evil] unless you knew what was ultimately right? If you don’t have an absolute standard for right, you can’t say that [the Holocaust] is absolutely wrong. That’s just your opinion, and somebody else’s opinion could be, the Holocaust was the best thing in the history of mankind."
—Norman Geisler

"[M]orality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs. . . . The only 'immoral' person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways"
&mdash Margaret Sanger

"We seem to be experiencing a kind of cultural vaporization, where many ideas, practices, and values slowly but surely erode and then disappear. In such a time as this, what does it mean to be a sincere pursuer of the good?"
—Stuart McAllister

"It makes very little difference how much or how little of the creeds of the Church the Modernist preacher affirms, or how much or how little of the Biblical teaching from which the creeds are derived. He might affirm every jot and tittle of the Westminster Confession, for example, and yet be separated by a great gulf from the Reformed Faith. It is not that part is denied and the rest affirmed; but all is denied, because all is affirmed merely as useful or symbolic and not as true."
—John Gresham Machen, "What is Faith", 1925

"I believe that the greatest threat to Christianity is the anti-intellectualism that permeates the church. For about a century now, Christians have largely retreated from the intellectual arena and entrenched themselves in a version of Christianity that emphasizes feelings, experience, and pragmatism, and have ignored the life of the mind. We have adopted a view of faith that sees it as opposed to reason. The result has been the marginalization of the church from the larger culture and our inability to be salt and light, and the increasing secularization of our society."
—Dr. Steve B. Cowan (interview)

“Relativism poses as humble by saying: “We are not smart enough to know what the truth is—or if there is any universal truth.” It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It’s like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master—or if I even have a master. The result is that I don’t have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride.”
—John Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind and the Love of God

"The modern habit of saying"This is my opinion, but I may be wrong" is entirely irrational. If I say that it may be wrong, I say that is not my opinion. The modern habit of saying "Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me" - the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon."
—G. K. Chesterton

“Grey is the devil’s favorite color.”
—Peter Kreeft

"The concept of truth is very much avoided in modern secular society. Instead, we are meant to choose our own truth, and live as we see fit. We’re told that what’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me, and everything is actually up for interpretation. Right from wrong is never clear-cut, and morality is basically a subjective society-created idea. According to the modern academia, truth is an elusive and abstract concept, and we waste our time trying to pin anything down as true."
—Lori-Ann Hyde

"Aesthetics drives contemporary popular culture. Entertainment has become the ultimate value, not only in Hollywood but in education and even religion. People define themselves according to the music they listen to and the aesthetically packaged products they buy....

"We live in an age that claims "there are no absolutes." The classic absolutes, according to the old thinkers, are truth, goodness, and beauty. For people today, truth is relative; goodness is relative; and beauty is relative. They are all connected, and they have all been dragging each other down. The lack of belief fuels moral relativism, and beauty is distorted to serve what is false and what is bad."
—Gene Edward Veith

"Moral relativism and the rejection of absolute truth now shape the modern post-Christian mind. Indeed, relativism is virtually taken for granted, at least as an excuse for overthrowing theistic truth claims and any restrictive morality."
—Albert Mohler

Where modernism was a manifesto of human self-confidence and self-congratulation, postmodernism is a confession of modesty, if not despair. There is no truth, only truths. There are no principles, only preferences. There is no grand reason, only reasons. There is no privileged civilization, only a multiple of cultures, beliefs, periods, and styles. There is no grand narrative of human progress, only countless stories of where people and their cultures are now. There is no simple reality or any grand objectivity of universal, detached knowledge, only a ceaseless representation of everything in terms of everything else. In sum, postmodernism...is an extreme form of relativism."
—Os Guiness

"A spirit of relativism today leads us into the desert of self-determination, where we are encouraged to build our own castles on shifting sands."
—Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg

"To judge anything absolutely was naive and unthinkable, the sort of thing done only by the great unwashed. Following Nietzsche, all self-respecting philosophers had abandoned absolute judgements for relativism. And long before the day of political correctness, psychologists had thrown over absolutes in favor of non-judgmental tolerance and acceptance."
—Os Guinness

“If hypocrisy in its essence is a violation of truth, which it is, postmodernism has no concept of truth with which to remedy the problem. And if hypocrisy violates justice, which it does, postmodernism has no concept of objective justice either. If, as postmoderns say. ‘truth’ is merely the compliment we pay to claims and ideas that we agree with, then ‘lies’ are only the insult we level at claims and ideas that differ from our own. Seen that way, there are only relativities to counter relativities, supposed lies to counter supposed lies, and of course power to counter power.”
—Os Guiness (“Fool’s Talk”)

"...the concept of tolerance reveals a presupposition of moral objectivism, for we do not tolerate goods. We only tolerate evils in order to prevent worse evils. The patient will tolerate the nausea brought on by chemotherapy in order to prevent death by cancer. And a society will tolerate bad things like smoking in order to preserve good things like privacy and freedom"
—Peter Kreeft.

“In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left.”
—Peter Kreeft

"Perhaps we have crossed some kind of cultural Rubicon, and broad agreement on terms is no longer possible. Certainly the political has become personal for many millions of Americans, and political views—replacing faith in a secular society—become the only eschatological force in our private and public lives...

The whole enterprise of secular liberalism is based on the premise of self-creation: the modern self, unshackled from the “oppressive” bonds of religion, family, and even biology, can now make itself anew as it pleases. All that is solid does indeed melt into air in secular liberalism, and that melting begins with a reluctance to define terms with finality. Now, more than ever, we must shore up the terms of our world and be unafraid to affix ourselves to unwavering definitions."
—RM Stangler.

"Relativism is culture's dictator and political correctness is our first language."
—Maxie Dunnam

"Moral stupidity comes in two different forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles."
—Peter Kreeft

“The only consistent response for a relativist is, "Pushing morality is wrong for me, but that's just my personal opinion, and has nothing to do with you. Please ignore me.”
—Greg Koukl

"The most perilous threat to the free society today is, therefore, neither political nor economic. It is the poisonous, corrupting culture of relativism…. During the next hundred years, the question for those who love liberty is whether we can survive the most insidious and duplicitous attacks from within, from those who undermine the virtues of our people, doing in advance the work of the Father of Lies. “There is no such thing as truth,” they teach even the little ones. “Truth is bondage. Believe what seems right to you. There are as many truths as there are individuals. Follow your feelings. Do as you please. Get in touch with your self. Do what feels comfortable.” Those who speak in this way prepare the jails of the twenty-first century. They do the work of tyrants."
—Michael Novak.

"It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”'
—Abraham Lincoln

"Righteousness is not something we do. Righteousness is something God does in us and through us by his grace. The saint is not a self-made person. Moral resolutions are important, but they are only a first step. Having once resolved to follow Christ, we are powerless until we seek God in repentance and humility for the strength to follow through on our resolve. Righteousness is a result of granting God rule in our lives and denying our sin-driven desire for independence.
—Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, 1985.

“That is the only way to understand rightly this picture of the false prophets. The false prophet is a man who has no `strait gate' or `narrow way' in his gospel. He has nothing which is offensive to the natural man; he pleases all.”
—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“The man whose little sermon is ‘repent’ sets himself against his age, and will for the time being be battered mercilessly by the age whose moral tone he challenges. There is but one end for such a man — ‘off with his head!’ You had better not try to preach repentance until you have pledged your head to heaven.”
—Joseph Parker

"The message of Easter is that God's new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you're now invited to belong to it."
—N.T. Wright

"The resurrection of the dead is the chief truth of the Christian faith....He who takes away the resurrection mantles our future with Egyptian darkness. To take away the resurrection is to leave man with no preeminence above the beast....Other doctrines are important; this is one of the essentials."
—Robert L. Moyer

"The benefits [of the resurrection] are innumerable. To list a few:
Our illnesses don't seem nearly so final;
Our fears fade and lose their grip;
Our grief over those who have gone on is diminished;
Our desires to press on in spite of the obstacles is rejuvenated...
... Our identity as Christians is strengthened as we stand in the lengthening shadows of saints down through the centuries, who have always answered back in antiphonal voice: 'He is risen, indeed!"
—Charles Swindoll

"The devil, darkness, and death may swagger and boast, the pangs of life will sting for a while longer, but don't worry; the forces of evil are breathing their last. Not to worry...He's risen!"
—Charles R. Swindoll

"Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal."
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
—G. K. Chesterton

“The idea that God communicates with human beings in personal words pervades all of Scripture, and it is central to every doctrine of Scripture. If God has, in fact, not spoken to us personally, then we lose any basis for believing in salvation by grace, in judgment, in Christ’s atonement—indeed, for believing in the biblical God at all. Indeed, if God has not spoken to us personally, then everything important in Christianity is human speculation and fantasy."
—John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God

‘God cannot contradict His speech in Nature by His speech in Scripture. If the Author of Nature and Scripture are the same God, then the two books of God must eventually recite the same story.’
—Bernard Ramm

"The final goal of the blessed life, moreover, rests in the knowledge of God [cf.John 17:3]. Lest anyone, then, be excluded from access to happiness, he not only sowed in men’s minds that seed of religion of which we have spoken, but revealed himself and daily discloses himself in the whole workmanship of the universe. As a consequence, men cannot open their eyes without being compelled to see him."
—John Calvin (Institutes, I.5.1).

Created beauty eclipses God’s beauty in the desire factory of man’s heart. It is a case of mistaken identity. Every created beauty was created by God to lead our affections to Him. That’s why He made the pleasures of earthly beauty so fleeting — so that on the other side of the pleasure we might experience either wonder and worship and ultimate satisfaction in God or the pursuit of the pleasure that beauty provides for its own sake. If we choose the latter, we will only be disappointed again.

"Without special revelation, general revelation would be for sinful men incomplete and ineffective. … Without general revelation, special revelation would lack that basis in the fundamental knowledge of God as the mighty and wise, righteous and good, maker and ruler of all things." -- B. B. Warfield"Without special revelation, general revelation would be for sinful men incomplete and ineffective. … Without general revelation, special revelation would lack that basis in the fundamental knowledge of God as the mighty and wise, righteous and good, maker and ruler of all things."
—B. B. Warfield

"God, a timeless reality, enters our time-bound history as an artist would enter his own painting.”
—CS Lewis, The First Christmas

"The most critical question in the history of thought is whether all the convictional frameworks through which different peoples arrive at the meaning and worth of human life are by nature mythical, or whether perhaps at least one of these perspectives stem from divine revelation and has objective cognitive reality."
—Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority

"There are those within the church who are critical of Christian apologetics who point out its limitations. They will argue that presenting an apologetic for Christianity will not result in the person becoming a Christian. It is argued that people become followers of Jesus only by the calling of the Holy Spirit. Therefore apologetic arguments are not required. I will agree with this on one condition: I want those same people to agree that no one will become a Christian as a result of preaching, evangelism, missionary activity, prayer, Bible reading or any other human activity. If they will agree with this, then I will agree with them. I do believe that people become Christians by a work of the Holy Spirit. And I also believe that God uses preaching and evangelism and all the other things, including apologetics, in the process of calling that person."
—Stephen J. Bedard

"A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world and might even be more difficult to save."
—C.S. Lewis

“I was for weeks, a poor, brokenhearted mourner, traveling through the darkness and misery of doubts and fears. I finally found that change of heart which comes by ‘casting all one’s care’ upon God, and by having faith in Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer, Friend, and Savior of those who diligently seek Him. After this, I saw the world in a new light. I seemed to live in a new world, surrounded by new objects, and to be animated by new hopes and desires. I loved all mankind – slaveholders not excepted; though I abhorred slavery more than ever. My great concern was, now, to have the world converted. The desire for knowledge increased, and especially did I want a thorough acquaintance with the contents of the Bible…”
—Fredrick Douglass

“Although the forgiveness of sin takes an instant, the cure of the sin-soaked soul is gradual and not complete until heaven.”
—J. Budziszewski said in The Revenge of Conscience

"Righteousness is not something we do. Righteousness is something God does in us and through us by his grace. The saint is not a self-made person. Moral resolutions are important, but they are only a first step. Having once resolved to follow Christ, we are powerless until we seek God in repentance and humility for the strength to follow through on our resolve. Righteousness is a result of granting God rule in our lives and denying our sin-driven desire for independence.
—Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, 1985.

"Your mind is a piano with 88 keys, representing receptivity to God; they are activated by Scripture. Most Christians, through neglect, only have a toy piano working. God wants to send them a concerto, but all they can hear is "Chopsticks."
—Dr. Donald Williams

"From Elijah taunting the priests of Baal to Jesus roasting the Pharisees, and from Jesus roasting the Pharisees to Luther backhanding the papacy, we see the potency of righteous ridicule. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the “humorist” is a trifler in these deadly serious affairs of ours. He might be the only one taking the threat as seriously as it deserves, and it may be that he is the only one offering an effective counterpunch."
—Douglas Wilson

"Those who cannot respond to examples of cultural madness with laughter are in the process of going mad themselves"
—Douglas Wilson

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.”
—Stephen Hawking

"Roughly, scientism is the view that the hard sciences —like chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy—provide the only genuine knowledge of reality. At the very least, this scientific knowledge is vastly superior to what we can know from any other discipline."
—J.P. Moreland, Scientism and Secularism

"The science establishment today is firmly in the hands of people who embrace multiverse theory to avoid the idea that fine-tuning of the universe is real – even though they know it means the end of science".
—Denyse O'Leary

“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.”
—Dan Brown

"From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. Of course,we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence."
—Dr. Alan T. Lightman, M.I.T.

"Today, faith is more often channeled through science. Not only the pseudo-science of crop circle enthusiasts and UFO cultists, but genuine advances in science and technology are being used to promote hopes and dreams that are quintessentially religious. "
—John Gray,( The U.K.Guardian)

"There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science, it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the universe, and every effect must have its cause, [but still believes that] there is no first cause... "This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control..."
—Robert Jastrow, astronomer, physicist

[S]cience alone has the power to silence heretics. Today it is the only institution that can claim authority. Like the Church in the past, it has the power to destroy, or marginalise, independent thinkers....In fact, science does not yield any fixed picture of things, but by censoring thinkers who stray too far from current orthodoxies it preserves the comforting illusion of a single established worldview. From the standpoint of anyone who values freedom of thought, this may be unfortunate, but it is undoubtedly the chief source of science's appeal. For us, science is a refuge from uncertainty, promising — and in some measure delivering — the miracle of freedom from thought; while churches have become sanctuaries for doubt. (p. 19)"
—John Gray, Straw Dogs, 2007, p.19

"During the last decades of the 20th century, the modern world view of truth  based on objective empiricism in science has slid into a sea of churning subjectivity."
—Prof. Jeremy Walter

'It is one thing to celebrate science for its achievements and remarkable ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena in the natural world.  But to claim there is nothing knowable outside the scope of science would be similar to a successful fisherman saying that whatever he can’t catch in his nets does not exist.  Once you accept that science is the only source of human knowledge, you have adopted a philosophical position (scientism) that cannot be verified, or falsified, by science itself.  It is, in a word, unscientific.’
—Thomas Burnett

"Consider, for instance, the notion that science is based on observation. If this is a necessary prerequisite to a scientific theory, what are we to make of the claim that our universe may be only one of a series of universes? Has anyone ever observed one of these extra universes? How can such an observation be possible, even in theory? There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the multiverse. And what do we call "the evidence of things not seen"?
—Terry Mirll

"There are today notable and high-profile scientists who use op-ed pieces, popular books and programs and other public pulpits to proclaim the gospels of materialism, atheism, and scientism… too often the claims are philosophically naïve and clothed in arrogant sarcasm and dismissive disdain. That’s no way to carry out a discussion.”
—Lawrence M. Principe, Professor of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, and Professor of Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University.

"At present, science has no satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of life on the earth. Perhaps the appearance of life on the earth is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited; either life was created on the earth by the will of a being outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of the planet. The first theory places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. It is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith. The act of faith consists in assuming that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief."
—Robert Jastrow (physicist/astronomer/cosmologist)

"In recent years, there has been a disturbing trend toward scientific dogmatism in some areas of science. Pronouncements by notable scientists and scientific organizations about "only one scientifically acceptable explanation" for events which are clearly outside the domain of science -- like all origins are -- can only destroy the curiosity of those who must carry on the future work of science. Humility, a seemingly natural product of studying nature, appears to have largely disappeared -- at least its visibility is clouded from the public's viewpoint."
—Werher von Broun

"A 'leap of faith' means believing something – not because it is reasonable or backed up by compelling evidence – but because you would like it to be true, because it satisfies your emotional, spiritual, or philosophical agenda. Non-believers, be they scientists or philosophers, wield this principle as a blunt instrument when they attack religion and believers. Sometimes these attacks may be justified and sometimes not. What they fail to do, however, is to apply this same standard to themselves.... Secularists have perpetuated a myth of the “Almighty Scientist” who has transcended all human failings and temptations, who is computer-like in his mathematical thinking and objective analysis of not only scientific issues, but even in the philosophical implications of scientific “truths.” In other words, for many non-believers Science has become the religion that eclipses all other systems of belief; the Scientist has become the new holy man whose words and declarations must be accepted without question"
—Rabbi Moshe Averick

"I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science. But I am more and more convinced that that the spirit of free inquiry is being repressed within the scientific community by fear-based conformity. Institutional science is being crippled by dogmas and taboos."
—Rupert Sheldrake, biologist

"...committed materialists have made science into a kind of religion. They believe that there is no reality but material or physical reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Nature is mechanical. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads...
"These materialist beliefs are often taken for granted by scientists, not because they have thought about them critically, but because they haven't. To deviate from them is heresy, and heresy harms careers."
—Rupert Sheldrake, biologist

"The problem with scientific naturalism as a worldview is that it takes a sound methodological premise of natural science and transforms it into a dogmatic statement about the nature of the universe. Science is committed by definition to empiricism, by which I mean that scientists seek to find truth by observation, experiment, and calculation rather than by studying sacred books or achieving mystical states of mind. It may well be, however, that there are certain questions -- important questions, ones to which we desperately want to know the answers -- that cannot be answered by the methods available to our science. These may include not only broad philosophical issues such as whether the universe has a purpose, but also questions we have become accustomed to think of as empirical, such as how life first began or how complex biological systems were put together."
—Phillip Johnson

"[The] cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be."
—Carl Sagan

"Advocates of scientism today claim the sole mantle of rationality, frequently equating science with reason itself. Yet it seems the very antithesis of reason to insist that science can do what it cannot, or even that it has done what it demonstrably has not. As a scientist, I would never deny that scientific discoveries can have important implications for metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, and that everyone interested in these topics needs to be scientifically literate. But the claim that science and science alone can answer longstanding questions in these fields gives rise to countless problems."
—Austin Hughes ( biologist, U. of South Carolina)

"Confident assertions by scientists that in the privacy of their chambers they have demonstrated that God does not exist have nothing to do with science, and even less to do with God's existence."
—David Berlinski

"[scientists]....are at the summit of knowledge, beacons of rationality, and intellectually honest....there is no reason to suppose that science cannot deal with every aspect of existence."
—Peter Atkins , Oxford University (Chemistry)

"The scientific account of cosmogenesis cannot stop when it has accounted for the universe springing from a seed the size of a Sun, nor when it has arrived at a seed the size of a pea. Nor can it stop at any smaller seed. A seed the size of a proton implies that that seed had to be manufactured, placed there by some cosmic pre-existing gardener. Science will be forced to admit defeat if it has to stop at a seed of any size. That is the severity of the criterion that science sets for itself. If we are to be honest, then we have to accept that science will be able to claim complete success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergency of everything from absolutely nothing. Not almost nothing, not a subatomic dust-like speck, but absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not ever empty space."
—Peter W. Atkins

"[T]he origins of new organic forms may be obscure or even inexplicable, but we ought not on that account to doubt that they had a natural cause, and came by a natural process; for so to doubt is also to doubt the validity of reason."
—Joseph le Conte

"Historically, the claim of [scientific] consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled."
—Michael Crichton

"The only indisputable fact is: leading evolutionists have no evidence that natural selection created today’s biochemical complexity. Therefore, skepticism is the best response. Evolutionary dogmatism—the insistence that evolution is true—is a serious issue. Science is not threatened by evolutionary skepticism; science is threatened by the quasi-science of the evolutionist."
—Don McElroy

"If we're going to be scientistic, then we have to attain our view of reality from what physics tells us about it. Actually, we'll have to do more than that: we'll have to embrace physics as the whole truth about reality."
—Alex Rosenberg, Department Chair and R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University

"Thinking about things can't happen at all. The brain can't have thoughts about Paris, or about France, or about capitals, or about anything else for that mater. When consciousness convinces you that you, or your mind, or your brain has thoughts about things, it is wrong."
—Alex Rosenberg, Department Chair and R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University

"... in recent times technological advances and scientific expansion have increasingly succeeded in shutting the windows and closing the blinds. The physical replaces the spiritual, the temporal replaces the eternal, and “what is seen” replaces what is unseen (Hebrews 11:3)."
—Tullian Tchividjian

"The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is 'unassailable fact,' the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: 'With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside."
—New York Times article

"'You,' your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons."
—Francis Crick (biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist)

"[S]cientism" is but another example of the adage: If you are devoted to using a hammer, then everything looks like a nail"
—Terry Scambray

"[S}cientific naturalism stakes its fortunes on the bare, cold facts of particles and quarks; to know them is to know ultimate reality—never mind the minor detail that, logically, there is a gaping missing link between knowing how something works and the conclusion that it was not made."
—J.M. Njoroge

"Scientism has been shown to be an illusion time and time again. But it is another illusion to imagine that scientism will go away. Looking to science for deliverance from the tragicomedy of history is part of what it means to be modern. The tracts that come and go in airport bookstores, promising solutions to problems that have baffled the greatest minds, are symptoms of a confusion that is incurable. We may expect many more books that offer to extricate us from conflict by sprinkling the magic dust of science on our disorders."
—John N. Gray (philosopher)

"All the [techno-scientific] achievements have led to a growing arrogance, a widening separation from the true nature of our being; in other words, an alienation from God."
—Malcolm Muggeridge

"Some take the position that if science doesn't give us reason to believe in something, then no good reason exists. That's simply the false assumption of scientism. "
— Greg Koukl

"To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality".
—Richard Swinburne

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
—Werner Heisenberg

"In asking for an account of pre-Big Bang cosmology, physicists are attempting to flee from a story that they have heard but do not like. They make little attempt to disguise their aversion either."
—David Berlinski

'It may be, in the end, that our biggest obstacle in understanding the cosmos is that we didn't make it.'
—David Berlinski

“Atheists must sit in God’s lap in order to try to slap Him in the face.”— Frank Turek

I don’t know what’s the matter with physicists these days. It used to be that they were an intellectually sophisticated bunch, with the likes of Einstein and Bohr doing not only brilliant scientific research, but also interested, respectful of, and conversant in other branches of knowledge, particularly philosophy. These days it is much more likely to encounter physicists like Steven Weinberg or Stephen Hawking, who merrily go about dismissing philosophy for the wrong reasons, and quite obviously out of a combination of profound ignorance and hubris (the two often go together, as I’m sure Plato would happily point out). The latest such bore is Lawrence Krauss, of Arizona State University."
—Massimo Pigliucci (atheist, philosopher)

"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique."
— C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

"As intelligent agents we are compelled to believe certain things, most importantly that our will is free, that we are selves that persist through time, that there are moral truths that can be universalized, beliefs which as individuals committed to science we yet know to be false."
—Karsten Harries, Yale University philosophy professor

The debate about creation and evolution is not deadlocked . . . Biblical literalism is not the issue. The issue is whether materialism and rationality are the same thing. Darwinism is based on an a priori commitment tomaterialism, not on a philosophically neutral assessment of the evidence. Separate the philosophy from the science, and the proud tower collapses."
—[Phillip Johnson, The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism, First Things, 77 (Nov. 1997), pp. 22 - 25.]

"We are in a disturbing period of scientism, in which leading scientists—Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss and Jerry Coyne come to mind—have derogated non-scientific ways of engaging with reality, including the arts and humanities as well as religion. By espousing scientism, these scientists just reveal their own arrogance and small-mindedness. "
—John Horgan (author, science journalist)

"We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the questions, partly because of the short-term view of things that’s encouraged by the media and partly because there seems to be no centre to which people can turn in order to see what the heart of the discussion is. I think this is a failure of philosophy in our days – and also of the culture that our English-speaking world has generated – around the idea of an abstract question."
—Roger Scruton

“The fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing… We should…acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel awe at the marvelous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts without reason the reign of non-being.”
—Quentin Smith

“We as a scientific community created an origin myth that has no more intellectual value than 1 Genesis…Although we’re very quick to criticize those that operate on faith, that’s exactly what we did.”
—Dr. T. Mark Harrison (Distinguished Professor of Geochemistry, UCLA)

“Our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.”
—Jerry Coyne

"The Christian faith is science-friendly, and we can find supports in science—such as the universe’s beginning a finite time ago and the breathtaking fine-tuning conditions for intelligent life. But insisting that only science can give us knowledge is both arbitrary and self-contradictory. Why just science and no other source of knowledge? The mere pronouncement sola scientia—“science alone”—doesn’t make science the sole or final arbiter for all knowledge. Again, what about other sources of knowledge? Besides, how can one scientifically prove that all knowledge must be scientifically provable? Scientism—not science—is a self-contradictory philosophical assumption, not the conclusion of scientific research."
—Paul Copan

"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either."
—William Provine

"[I]n the new naturalist multiverse there are bound to be a few universes that don’t make sense even if naturalism is true, right? Ours just happens to be one of them."
—Denyse O'Leary

"I still prefer to believe that sex is a substitute for religion and that the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God."
—from"The World, the Flesh and Father Smith" by Bruce Marshall

“Neither secular progress nor secular progressives have brought the West where they once promised. Nor can they.”
—Os Guinness

The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist, as educated people have finished with stake-burning circuses and torture racks. No martyr's blood is shed in the secular west so long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babes pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfastly in their intellectual retardation; the church's extinction won't come by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. But let the church step off the reservation, let her penetrate once more the culture of the day and the...face of secularism will change from a benign smile to a savage snarl."
—(R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, Arthur Lindsley, (“Classical Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Christian Faith”)

"Christians know that we are constrained by reality. Though we don’t always put it this way, we don’t believe we hold the truth. We believe the truth holds us. It would be so simple to ride with the flow of the age, to relax and let go of the truth about abortion, gay marriage, sexual freedom and so on. We can’t. If we bow before the truth, we must be led by it, even if doing that costs us. I have spent years studying viewpoints contrary to Christianity. I continue to find that God’s word is solid and nourishing, and ultimately makes more sense than the alternatives. The truth holds me. As Martin Luther said (or was reported to say, at least), “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.” (“Here I stand, I can do no other.”)
—Tom Gilson (from, We Don’t Hold the Truth, The Truth Holds Us)

"The rejection of biblical authority invariably leads to the secularization of society. Secular, in terms of contemporary sociological and intellectual conversation, refers to the absence of any binding theistic authority or belief. It is both an ideology and a result. Secularization is not an ideology; it is a theory and a sociological process whereby societies become less theistic as they become more modern. As societies move into conditions of deeper and more progressive modernity, they move out of situations in which there is a binding force of religious belief, and theistic belief in particular. These societies move into conditions in which there is less and less theistic belief and authority until there is hardly even a memory that such a binding authority had ever existed. Western culture has secularized beyond the authority of the God of the Bible and almost beyond the memory of any such authority."
—Albert Mohler, foreword to "A History of Western Philosophy and Theology" by John Frame

".... the secular liberal professionals...are the ones who control the educational system, the legal system, and the media.... And they are the ones who teach hedonism and moral relativism to our youth and to the nation at large—ideas which have led directly to the bread-and-circuses mentality of our age."
—James Barham

"As Western society rejects old moral structures and values, it finds that its moral GPS has no fixed and stationary points of reference."
—Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk

"We live in societies where virtue and goodness are frequently a veneer for religious intolerance, personal gratification and moral decay.... Secularism would like us to be closed in a little box of Sunday worship."
—Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk

"Indecency is not wild and lawless. The danger of indecency is exactly that it is tame, dull, direct, inevitable; a mere law in the members. It is automatic evil. Pride makes man a devil; but lust makes him a machine."
—Malcolm Muggeridge

"Dictators do not come into the human race from without, from Mars. They erupt from within, like hemorrhoids, from an infected body, from the one fact no secularist ever dares to face: original sin."
—Peter Kreeft

"This is the conviction that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything; that science's description of the world is correct in its fundamentals; and that when "complete," what science tells us will not be surprisingly different from what it tells us today.... Science provides all the significant truths about reality..... Being scientistitic just means treating science as our exclusive guide to reality, to nature—both our own nature and everything else's."
—Alex Rosenberg, Department Chair and R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy, Duke University

"We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another -- slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reaso...n to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In _1984_, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
—Neil Postman, Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

"What will be the next secular worldview? In the next millenium, after post-modern relativism has finished dismantling the tents of western civilization, what will be built on the rubble?"
—Chris Stamper

"Eternal questions and yearnings are thrusting their way up between the cracks in the sterile world of secular disenchantment."
—Os Guinness

"Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that secular people, losing touch with transcendence, would eventually lose a reference point from which to look down and judge themselves. In the end they would lose even the capacity to despise themselves. Thus, because of the 'death of God', they would confuse heaven with happiness, and happiness with health."
—Os Guinness

"Christianity does not claim to convey merely religious truth, but truth about all reality. This vision of reality is radically different from a secularist vision that wants Christianity to scuttle into the corner of the hearth by the coal shovel, conveniently out of the way of anything but private religious concerns"
—D.A. Carson

"Choosing cultural monasticism rather than hard-thinking advocacy, Christians abandoned the public square to the secularists. When the disciples of Jesus Christ retreated, the disciples of Dewey, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Skinner, and a host of others replaced them."
—Greg Koukl

"[S]ecularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King -- indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history -- were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."
—Barak Obama

"We seem to be experiencing a kind of cultural vaporization, where many ideas, practices, and values slowly but surely erode and then disappear. In such a time as this, what does it mean to be a sincere pursuer of the good?"
—Stuart McAllister

"Some of us want to believe in extraterrestrials because an article of our secular faith holds that there is nothing exceptional about human life. This is dogma, lacking any justification, but it has already been codified as the Mediocrity Principle. The Earth, life, mankind, and civilization are humdrum, routine developments; nothing out of the ordinary about them. And if that is so, we should expect to find such life all over the Galaxy."
—Tom Bethell

"...secular people are just as eager to promote the moral causes they care most about—women’s rights, environmentalism, abortion rights, homosexual rights … As a result, the same people who aspire to be liberated from what they call oppressive moral codes are actually paving the way for new forms of oppression … All that remains is power and coercion—each group seeking to impose its own preferences on the others … A loss of objectivity in moral thought does not lead to liberation. It leads to oppression. Secular ideologies preach liberty, but they practice tyranny."
—Nancy Pearcey, ("Saving Leonardo", p. 41)

"The problem with secularization is as it sweeps over a culture and takes root, you begin to lose definitions in the process. How do we define right from wrong, moral from immoral? … When secularization has done its work, it will lead to a generation that has lost its sense of shame. You show me a human being without a sense of shame, and I will show you a human being who will stop at nothing. Sec...ularization literally comes from the Latin word “saeculum” which means “worldly.” There is no transcendent moral order."
—Ravi Zacharias

"The worst thing that can happen to the Church is what is happening to the Church now in the West, namely that the Church is deliberately conforming to the world. This is a betrayal of her primary task, which is to conform the world to Christ. The leader has become a follower. The Lion of Judah has become tame.

Nowhere has this deadly process been more apparent than in the very thought processes and categories that modern Christians use. They are the categories of the world. What categories? The modern world politicizes everything and imposes the political categories of Right and Left on everything. They are the two knee-jerk categories that save us from the awful necessity of thinking through issues on their own merit.

Understanding the love of God frees us definitively from the domination of these two secular political categories."
— Peter Kreeft

""The handwriting is on the wall and a sterile secularism will not be able to withstand the religious assault of beliefs that take away our freedom. Only Christianity is strong enough to preserve our freedom and our dignity. Only the gospel of Jesus Christ gives us the enormous privilege of sacred freedom without imposing faith on anyone. History is replete with examples that politics never has had and never will have the answers to ensuring the perpetuity of a nation and the freedom and dignity of our souls."
—Ravi Zacharias

"We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the questions, partly because of the short-term view of things that’s encouraged by the media and partly because there seems to be no centre to which people can turn in order to see what the heart of the discussion is. I think this is a failure of philosophy in our days – and also of the culture that our English-speaking world has generated – around the idea of an abstract question."
—Roger Scruton

"Secular Humanism has a notion of Hope for History that it stole from Christianity, but without the Christian basis for that Hope in the sovereignty and grace of God."
—Donald Williams

"Secularization in America has been attended by a moral revolution without precedent and without endgame. The cultural engines of progress driving toward personal autonomy and fulfillment will not stop until the human being is completely self-defining. This progress requires the explicit rejection of Christian morality for the project for human liberation."
—Al Mohler

Secular fundamentalism: the aggressive belief by certain people (of many faiths or none at all) that they are entitled to be especially aggrieved by the religious displays of others. Oddly this particular form of bigotry often masquerades as a form of tolerance.
—Maggie Gallagher (paraphrasing/ summarizing Kevin Hammond)

"My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture."
— Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame professor

“Progress” seems to be our name for Juggernaut, the Hindu god that trampled his worshipers to death like a runaway elephant. Between Juggernaut and Moloch, the old gods are making a remarkable comeback in our secular society.”
—Peter Kreeft

"Perhaps we have crossed some kind of cultural Rubicon, and broad agreement on terms is no longer possible. Certainly the political has become personal for many millions of Americans, and political views—replacing faith in a secular society—become the only eschatological force in our private and public lives...

The whole enterprise of secular liberalism is based on the premise of self-creation: the modern self, unshackled from the “oppressive” bonds of religion, family, and even biology, can now make itself anew as it pleases. All that is solid does indeed melt into air in secular liberalism, and that melting begins with a reluctance to define terms with finality. Now, more than ever, we must shore up the terms of our world and be unafraid to affix ourselves to unwavering definitions."
—RM Stangler.

"It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have – until recently – been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it."
—T.S Eliot (1948)

"The secular world of today, dominated by the powers of the human body and soul, but having little or no regard for the spirit, to regulate, challenge, and integrate the other two aspects of our nature, has come to exhibit the same weaknesses of all other human attempts to dominate the world it did not create and which belongs to God. Like thieves in the night, the dominant secular culture has stolen the priceless painting and left behind the frame that secured it and defined its limits, and like thieves, secular thought will never fully comprehend or appreciate what has been stolen."
—Fr. James Fisher

"But if we are talking about lifestyle, and if lifestyle refers to something more than a personal consumption item, at some point we are going to have to enact laws. Culture is impossible without them. But cultures differ because they serve different gods, and different gods require different things. This means the laws are different. Every society is a theocracy. The only question is, “Who’s Theo?”
—Douglas Wilson

"But the truth is secular liberalism isn’t what you get when you subtract all religions. What you get when you subtract religion is another religion, secular liberalism, an entirely secular worldview dominated by materialism and hedonism and exceedingly intolerant of all other religions, especially Christianity. You get, to be exact, the secular culture championed with religious zeal by the Left imposed with all the power the federal government can muster. The naked public square is secular atheism’s monument."
—Ben Wiker

"[The] secularist faith ....sees Christianity as a competitor to be vanquished, rather than as an alternative set of beliefs to be tolerated in an open society.....within this new church of secularism, pro-life women are heretics: despised transgressors of a religious community’s teaching and norms."
—Mary Eberstadt

"--"If we do believe that sexual desires and choices are fluid and complicated, then surely we must assume that a world in which heterosexuality is not the default norm—not promoted—would perhaps open up the door to a wider variety of sexual expressions and choices....

The framing of "gayness" as an issue of nature versus nurture or destiny versus choice misses the point about sexuality and about civil rights. It's not our genes that matter here but rather our ethics."
—Suzanna Danuta Walters, The Atlantic, June 2014 ("The Power in Choosing to Be Gay")

"For decades, the Sexual Revolution was supposed to be about freedom. Today, it is about coercion. Once, it sought to free our sexual choices from restrictive laws and unwanted consequences. Now, it seeks to free our sexual choices from other people's disapproval."
—Sherif Girgis

"The reason we are against racism is because a person's race is sacred. A person's ethnicity is sacred. You cannot violate it. My race is sacred; your race is sacred; I dare not violate it. The reason we react against the issue of homosexuality the way we do is because sexuality is sacred. You cannot violate it. How do you treat one as sacred and desacrelize the other? Sex is a sacred gift of God. I can no longer justify an aberration of it in somebody else's life than I can justify my own proclivities to go beyond my marital boundaries.

Every man here who is an able-bodied man will tell you temptation stalks you every day. Does it have anything to do with your love for your spouse? Probably not, because you can love your spouse with 100% desire to love the person, but the human body reacts to the sight entertained by the imagination and gives you all kinds of false hints that stolen waters are going to be sweeter. They are not. They leave you emptier. So a disposition or a proclivity does not justify expressing that disposition and that proclivity. That goes across the board for all sexuality.

When God created mankind and womankind, it was His plan, not our plan. It is extraordinary what He said. He said, 'It is not good for man to live alone.' Well, man wasn't living alone; God was with him. Why did He say that? He created the mystique and the majesty and the charm and the complimentary nature of womankind in a way that made it possible for her to meet his emotional needs that God, Himself, put only within her outside himself from himself in her in that complimentariness. It is a design by God."
—Ravi Zacharias

"You can't shame or humiliate modern celebrities. What used to be called shame and humiliation is now called publicity. And forget traditional character assassination; if you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography."
-PJ O'Rourke

If we do not see ourselves...as desperate cases, we are simply not part of the audience Christ came to save.
—Peter Kreeft

"Be killing sin or it will be killing you."
—John Owen

"It isn't that they can't see the solution, it is that they can't see the problem."
—GK Chesterton

“The result of becoming tolerant towards sin is that we become intolerant towards God and His Word.”
—Rousas John Rushdoony

"A great deal of the theological impotence of our generation can be traced to what our ancestors would have called a severely deficient sense of the horrible sinfulness of sin."
—Donald Williams

—Mark Kelly

"Knowing God without knowing our own wretchedness makes for pride. Knowing our own wretchedness without knowing God makes for despair. Knowing Jesus Christ strikes the balance because he shows us both God and our own wretchedness."
—Blaise Pascal, Pensees

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”
—C S Lewis, Mere Christianity

“You are not mature if you have a high esteem of yourself. He who boasts in himself is but a babe in Christ, if indeed he be in Christ at all. Young Christians may think much of themselves. Growing Christians think themselves nothing. Mature Christians know that they are less than nothing. The more holy we are, the more we mourn our infirmities, and the humbler is our estimate of ourselves.”
—Charles Spurgeon

“Although the forgiveness of sin takes an instant, the cure of the sin-soaked soul is gradual and not complete until heaven.”
—J. Budziszewski said in The Revenge of Conscience

"He who does not believe God will punish sin will not believe that he will pardon it through atoning blood."
—Charles H. Spurgeon

"Outside the gospel of Christ, we are tempted to say we have no sin. We are tempted to see ourselves not as sinners, but as victims; not as fallen, but as frustrated. Not as wrong, but as misunderstood! Unappreciated! Underestimated! We deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
—Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

"The nature of Christ's salvation is woefully misrepresented by the present-day evangelist. He announces a Savior from hell rather than a Savior from sin. And that is why so many are fatally deceived, for there are multitudes who wish to escape the Lake of Fire who have no desire to be delivered from their carnality and worldliness."
—A.W. Pink

“Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”
—John Stott

"Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules."
—C. S. Lewis

"The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.”
—Adrian Rogers

"EVERY sin in the history of the world will either be punished in Hell or punished in Christ."
—Steve Lawson

If we do not see ourselves...as desperate cases, we are simply not part of the audience Christ came to save.
—Peter Kreeft

"Satan and his forces ultimately lack creativity, not replacing but perverting the one true story of the universe revealed in the Bible. The very fact that many religions and myths involve sacrifices to appease the wrath of the gods points to a universal sense of sin and guilt—-and a universal need for the perfect Lamb of God who offered himself as a sacrifice for us."
—Kathleen Nielsen

"Shame… is that sense of unease with yourself at the heart of your being."
—David Atkinson

"Contemporary Western culture tries to account for this restlessness without recourse to the biblical doctrine of sin. Psychologists help us understand the part our early childhoods have played in creating unnecessary shame or a sense of being unloved. Entertainment distracts us from our discomfort. And doing good helps bolster our identity as a good person. But the Bible locates the root issue as our separation from God."
—Tim Keller

"The problem with the world is it blames problems on things besides sin and identifies salvation on things besides God"
—Tim Keller

"There is mercy for a sinner, but there is no mercy for the man who will not own himself a sinner."
—C. H. Spurgeon

"We must be stripped of our fig leaves in order to be clothed with Christ's righteousness so we can stand in the judgment of a holy God. The question is whether the aim of ministry today is to tear off our fig leaves so we can be clothed with Christ or to help us add a few more."
—Michael Horton, "Christless Christianity: The Alternative Gospel of the American Church"

"The problem with secularization is as it sweeps over a culture and takes root, you begin to lose definitions in the process. How do we define right from wrong, moral from immoral? … When secularization has done its work, it will lead to a generation that has lost its sense of shame. You show me a human being without a sense of shame, and I will show you a human being who will stop at nothing. Sec...ularization literally comes from the Latin word “saeculum” which means “worldly.” There is no transcendent moral order."
—Ravi Zacharias

"It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”'
—Abraham Lincoln

"Outside the gospel of Christ, we are tempted to say we have no sin. We are tempted to see ourselves not as sinners, but as victims; not as fallen, but as frustrated. Not as wrong, but as misunderstood! Unappreciated! Underestimated! We deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
—Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

“Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us.”
—John Stott

"Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—-in itself very bad news—-before it can win the hearing for the cure."
—CS Lewis

"The kind of behavior that once brought disgrace now brings book, movie, and television contracts."
—Unknown

"A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."
—C.S. Lewis

"One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul."
—GK Chesterton

"Indecency is not wild and lawless. The danger of indecency is exactly that it is tame, dull, direct, inevitable; a mere law in the members. It is automatic evil. Pride makes man a devil; but lust makes him a machine."
—Malcolm Muggeridge

"Biblical training does not guarantee that our hearts are inclined toward worshiping the true king. Religious language and learning can cloak the kingdom of self."
—John Piper

"Most Eastern religions insist that the problem with humanity is not sin but ignorance; hence, their solution to the human predicament is enlightenment, not forgiveness."
—J.M. Njoroge

"Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms."
—CS Lewis

"What's really wrong with the world? We are what's wrong. It's the self-centeredness of the human heart. It's sin."
—Tim Keller

“Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”
—CS Lewis

"In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes."
—John Ruskin

"There is no fault that makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others….Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind”
—C.S. Lewis

“Pride is a sin, which of all sins, makes a person most like Satan. Pride is Satan’s disease. Pride is so base a disease, that God had rather see His dearest children buffeted by Satan, than that in pride they should be like to Satan (2 Cor. 12:7). When Paul, under the abundance of revelations, was in danger of being puffed up, the Lord rather than He would have him proud like Satan, suffers him to be buffeted by Satan… It was pride which turned angels into devils. They would be above others in heaven—and therefore God cast them down to hell… Other sins strike at the word of God, the people of God, and the creatures of God, but pride strikes directly at the very being of God… God bears a special hatred against pride. His heart hates it, His mouth curses it, and His hand plagueth it.”
—Thomas Brooks

—Mark Kelly

"Egotism is the source of the passions. From egoism spring gluttony, avarice, conceit, and from conceit springs pride...At the beginning of all passion there is egotism, just as at the end there is pride."
—Maximus the Confessor (7th Century)

"Outside the gospel of Christ, we are tempted to say we have no sin. We are tempted to see ourselves not as sinners, but as victims; not as fallen, but as frustrated. Not as wrong, but as misunderstood! Unappreciated! Underestimated! We deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
—Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.

“It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who carefully documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again. Perhaps we could take from his writing the humility that would allow us to understand that our mere good intentions are not sufficient to make us good men and women. Perhaps we could come to understand that such intentions are instead all too often the consequence of our unpardonable historical ignorance, our utter willful blindness, and our voracious hidden appetite for vengeance, terror and destruction.”
-Jordan Peterson

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”
—Winston Churchill

“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
—Margaret Thatcher

“The goal of socialism is communism.”
—Vladimir Lenin

“Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. Solitude begins with a time and place for God, and him alone. If we really believe not only that God exists but also that he is actively present in our lives – healing, teaching, and guiding – we need to set aside a time and space to give him our undivided attention.”
—Henri Nouwen

"We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess... And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. ...what is the consequence, then, when Christianity, as a living historical force, recedes? Christianity is the midwife of nihilism, not because it is itself nihilistic, but because it is too powerful in its embrace of the world and all of the world’s mystery and beauty; and so to reject Christianity now is, of necessity, to reject everything except the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity. ...as a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing—the nothing. No third way lies open for us now, because—as all of us now know, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not—all things have been made subject to Him, all the thrones and dominions of the high places have been put beneath His feet, until the very end of the world, and—simply said—there is no other god."
—David Bentley Hart

"Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves."
— Joni Eareckson Tada, The God I Love

"God maintains a delicate balance between keeping his existence sufficiently evident so people will know he's there and yet hiding his presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free."
—JP Moreland

"Let the cynic become cynical of his cynicism and the skeptic skeptical of his skepticism and join the battle."
—R.C. Sproul

“We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.”
—Peter Kreeft

"If you are under the impression that a person cannot be both a Christian and a skeptic, you need to rethink your position. The truth is that most Christians are skeptics, albeit of a different kind than people typically associate with that word. Christians are skeptical of human nature. The reason? Scripture affirms what our experience tells us. Namely, everyone is a sinner and is capable of disappointing us. And in some cases deceiving us."
—Dan Delzell

“To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense? If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.”
—Timothy Keller

"God maintains a delicate balance between keeping his existence sufficiently evident so people will know he's there and yet hiding his presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore him can do it. This way, their choice of destiny is really free."
—JP Moreland

"It is just plain stupid for a Christian not to expect spiritual warfare while he lives in enemy territory."
—Francis Schaeffer

"The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a scanty round of formal religious services once or twice every week. But the great spiritual warfare, it's watchings and strugglings, it's agonies and anxieties, it's battles and contests, of all this they appear to know nothing at all."
—R.C. Sproul

"Yes, if evangelical Christianity is to stay alive she must have men again, the right kind of men. She must repudiate the weaklings who dare not speak out, and she must seek in prayer and much humility the coming again of men of the stuff prophets and martyrs are made of.”
—A.W. Tozer

“It is urgently needful that the Christian people of our charge should come to understand that they are not a company of invalids, to be wheeled about, or fed by hand, cosseted, nursed, and comforted, the minister being the head-physician and nurse – but a garrison in an enemy’s country, every soul of which should have some post of duty, at which he should be prepared to make any sacrifice rather than quit it.”
—F. B. Meyer

"The Church of Christ is continually represented under the figure of an army; yet its Captain is the Prince of Peace; its object is the establishment of peace, and its soldiers are men of a peaceful disposition. The spirit of war is at the extremely opposite point to the spirit of the gospel. Yet nevertheless, the church on earth has, and until the second advent must be, the church militant, the church armed, the church warring, the church conquering. And how is this? It is in the very order of things that so it must be. Truth could not be truth in this world if it were not a warring thing, and we should at once suspect that it were not true if error were friends with it. The spotless purity of truth must always be at war with the blackness of heresy and lies.”
—C.H. Spurgeon

“When a nation calls its prime men to battle, homes are broken, weeping sweethearts say their good-byes, businesses are closed, college careers are wrecked, factories are refitted for wartime production, and rationing and discomforts are accepted—all for war. Can we do less for the greatest fight that this world has ever known outside of the cross—this end-time siege on sanity, morality and spirituality?”
—Leonard Ravenhill

“Though you and I have stepped from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear son, we are still surrounded by a culture controlled by God’s great enemy, satan. We must live in it from the moment we accept Christ as our saviour until judgement falls. We, too, are encompassed by one who was once our king, but is now our enemy. It is just plain stupid for a Christian not to expect spiritual warfare while he lives in enemy territory.”
—Francis Schaeffer

“The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a scanty round of formal religious services once every week. But of the great spiritual warfare—its watchings and strugglings, its agonies and anxieties, its battles and contests—of all this they appear to know nothing at all.”
—J C Ryle

No one is devoid of the invitation to glory. Hide as we may, we are hailed by the angel. Ah, but we hear the hailing only in the 'hailing frequency': that spiritual ear that is buried at the very bottom of our being, buried under the louder shouts and bellows of a hundred hungry animals, the this-worldly desires."
—Peter Kreeft

"The saddest symptom about many so-called Christians is the utter absence of anything like conflict and fight in their Christianity. They eat, they drink, they dress, they work, they amuse themselves, they get money, they spend money, they go through a scanty round of formal religious services once or twice every week. But the great spiritual warfare, it's watchings and strugglings, it's agonies and anxieties, it's battles and contests, of all this they appear to know nothing at all."
—R.C. Sproul

“The truth is, Jung has brought back one member of the old duality, unreason, with a new name; it is no synthesis at all, but only the latest maneuver in the war against rationality that has been conducted with rising hysteria by literary intellectuals and humanists against the laws of a culture they have reason to distrust and disobey. The Jungian theory proposes to every disaffected humanist his "personal myth," as a sanctuary against the modern world. Against the vulgar democracy of intelligence, Jungian theory proposes an aristocracy of feeling. From this proposal derives Jung's persistent influence on modern critical and aesthetic style.”
—Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (1966)

… somewhere in the world of philosophy, we made a huge blunder across the centuries, when we lost contact with the reality of our emotions and made human beings purely cerebral. Then in the 1960’s, the existentialist philosophers became so popular focusing on emotion, focusing on passion, focusing on experience, and swung the pendulum to the other side to where rationality was not as important as much as acting for the passion of the moment. Somewhere in the middle is the balance.… Emotions are supposed to be indicators of reality, not fabricators, or framers of reality.”
—Ravi Zacharias

"Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober, not to make us sorry but wise."
—Henry Ward Beecher

"These 'depths' in which we sometimes find ourselves...come upon us not by misfortune but by God's providential hand in order that we might learn to know ourselves as we are before him and to seek his grace and forgiveness."
—David Wells

"The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God,
you will not despise."
—David Wells

"Truly....affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it."
—John Donne

"Suffering leads to wisdom in the long run but not in the short- run, and short-range folly is a price worth paying for long-range wisdom."
—Peter Kreeft

"Many pleasing things the Lord may withold, but no 'good thing'. He is the best judge of what is good for us."
—Charles Spurgeon

"A God who did not abolish suffering--worse, A God who abolished sin precisely by suffering--is a scandal to the modern mind."
—Peter Kreeft

"Stoop to conquer. He who yields wins. It is so in the Christian life. We are to be anvils, and overcome the hammers, not by striking again, but by patiently bearing the blows."
—Charles Spurgeon

"If you don't believe there is a benevolent Mind guiding all of human existence, suffering is just a pointless and meaningless accident."
—Peter Kreeft

"Suffering is the one and only path to glory."
—John Stott

"No matter how deep our darkness, He is deeper still."
—Corrie Ten Boon

"...God in his wisdom deliberately allows bad times, troubles, trials and temptations precisely to hammer out saints on the anvil of suffering in the furnace of wickedness."
—Peter Kreeft

"Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence."
—Leon Bloy

"Time spent in the fog of pain could be God's greatest gift. It could be the hour that we finally see our Maker. If it is true that in suffering God is most like man, maybe in our suffering we can see God like never before."
—Max Lucado

"The Lordship of Christ over all creation is being manifest in stages, first in the Age of Groaning, then in theAge of Glory."
—John Piper

"We are happy sojourners, though, because we have been commanded by our bloody champion to rejoice in our exile miseries."
—John Piper

"It is good, too, that we sometimes suffer opposition and that men think ill of us and misjudge us, even when we mean and do well. Such things are an aid to humility, ans preserve us from pride and vainglory. For we more readily turn to God as our inward witness, when men despise us and think no good of us."
—Thomas a Kempis

"Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces. Sanctified afflictions are spiritual promotions."
—Matthew Henry

"But they who bleed remember far better."
—Victor Hugo

"Man's extremity is God's Possibility."
—John Flavel

"When God intends to fill a soul, He first makes it empty. When He intends to enrich a soul, He first makes it poor. When He intends to exalt a soul, He first makes it sensible to its own miseries, wants and nothingness."
—John Flavel

"The way to heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome and contrary to the natural bias of the flesh."
—Jonathan Edwards

"God does not lead His children around hardship, but leads them straight through hardship. But He leads! And amidst the hardship, He is nearer to them than ever before."
—Otto Dibelius

"Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truth."
—Gamaliel Bailey

"God brings men into deep waters, not to drown them, but to cleanse them."
—Aughey

"When it gets dark ewnough, you can see the stars."
—Charles A. Beard

"We often learn more from God under the rod that strikes us, than under the staff that comforts us."
—Stephen Charnock

"Trials should not surprise us, or cause us to doubt God's faithfulness. Rather, we should actually be glad for them. God sends trials to strengthen our trust in Him so that our faith will not fail. Our trials keep us trusting; they burn away our self-confidence and drive us to our Savior."
—Edmund Clowney

"We may often have to see Jesus wreck a life before He saves it."
—Oswald Chambers

"What is to give light must endure the burning."
—Viktor Frankl

"Bearing the burden of crushing weight actually gives Christians wings."
—L.B. Cowman

"Hell works the hardest on God's saints. The most worthy saints will be tested with the most pressure and the highest heat, but heaven will not desert them."
—William Watkinson

"Trouble never comes to someone unless it brings a nugget of gold in its hand."
—L.B. Cowman

"Suffering is a great fertilizer for the roots of character."
—Austin Phelps

"Death...is a great attention-grabber; it is a solid, sound, secure and indisputable fact; and it slaps us in the face with our own wretchedness, our utter helplessness before the loss of everything. It is our obvious problem, and Christ claims to be the answer."
—Peter Kreeft

“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

"Where [God] is, tragedy is only provisional, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the absolutely final things."
—William James

"Thankfully, the good news of the gospel is not an exhortation from above to 'hang on at all costs', or 'grin and bear it' in the midst of hardship. No, the good news is that God is hanging on to you, and in the end, when all is said and done, the power of God will triumph over every pain and loss."
—Tullian Tchividjian ("Glorious Ruin")

"God uses sorrowful tragedy to set the stage for surprising triumph—whether in this life or the life to come."
—David Platt

"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."
—C.S. Lewis

“Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering.... The love of God did not protect His own Son.... He will not necessarily protect us - not from anything it takes to make us like His Son. A lot of hammering and chiseling and purifying by fire will have to go into the process.”
— Elisabeth Elliot

"Today the United States is a vast Home Depot of “do-it-yourself religion.”
—Paul Elie

"[T]he New Testament is on a collision course with those who say it doesn't matter which road you're on."
—RC Sproul

"The theological pluralism and confusion of our day argues weakness of the flesh rather than vitality of the heart...Until agreement reaches to method, the battle for the Bible in the pluralistic maelstrom of the Christian world today will have to be maintained. May God strengthen his servants to continue the good fight."
—J.I. Packer

"If everything that is called Christianity in these days is Christianity, then there is no such thing as Christianity. A name applied indiscriminately to everything, designates nothing."
— B.B. Warfield

"It is the same with all modern attempts at syncretism. They are never able to make something larger than the creed without leaving something out."
—GK Chesterton

“In fact, many today think religions should respect each other and, in their dialogue, become a common force for peace. According to this way of thinking, it is usually taken for granted that different religions are variants of one and the same reality,” the retired pope wrote. “The question of truth, that which originally motivated Christians more than any other, is here put inside parentheses. It is assumed that the authentic truth about God is in the last analysis unreacha...ble and that at best one can represent the ineffable with a variety of symbols. This renunciation of truth seems realistic and useful for peace among religions in the world.

“It is nevertheless lethal to faith. In fact, faith loses its binding character and its seriousness, everything is reduced to interchangeable symbols, capable of referring only distantly to the inaccessible mystery of the divine..."
—Pope Benedict XVI

“Pluralism professes to tolerate and, other things being equal, to protect all these views, but it throws a dark canopy of uncommitted-ness over them and thus reduces them to private interests that must not be allowed to rock, let alone steer, the community boat.”
—JI Packer

"Here in the West, there are lots of liberal Christians. Some of them have assumed a kind of reverse mission: instead of being the church's missionaries to the world, they have become the world's missionaries to the church."
—Dinesh D'Souza in "What's So Great About Christianity"

"Most churches today have been taken over by the Baby Boomer mentality, exhibiting the values of mass-market commercialism, the rejection of the past and hedonistic individualism."
—Gene Veith

"Eastern religions will be to Christianity a new, dangerous Gnosticism."
—Os Guiness

"Sincerity is a laudable quality, but by itself it is not an adequate test for the veracity of religious truth claims."
—D.A Carson

"Many roads lead up the single mountain of religion to God at the top. It is provincial, narrow-minded, and blind to deny the validity of other roads than yours."

The unproved assumption of this very common mountain analogy is that the roads go up, not down; that man makes the roads, not God; that religion is man's search for God, not God's search for man. C. S. Lewis says this sounds like "the mouse's search for the cat".

Christianity is not a system of man's search for God but a story of God's search for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense wafting up from special spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but like a Father's hand thrust downward to rescue the fallen. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails. There is no human way up the mountain, only a divine way down. "No man has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known."

If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any one road is the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least in all being human, finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made the roads, it would be as stupid to absolutize one of them as to absolutize one art form, one political system, or one way of skinning a cat. But if God made the road, we must find out whether he made many or one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as God's God-made one.

But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true, not all religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more arrogant than all others, for it centers on one who claimed, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man can come to the Father but by me."
—Peter Kreeft

"No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so obviously at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious rivals such as Hinduism and Islam, Judaism and Christianity are, by some miracle of the imagination, essentially the same, and this view resounds in the echo chamber of popular culture."
—Steven Prothero

"You and I are not on the wrong side of history.The worst thing that has happened to us has already happened to us. We were crucified [with Christ] outside of Jerusalem. But the best thing has happened to us too. That’s not a Supreme Court victory. That is walking out of a hole in the ground in Jerusalem and being seated at the right hand of God in heaven. … If we truly believe that, we can patiently bear with those who disagree with us, because we have intel on them. We know they are made in the image of God … and we know that they are once like we were, that deep down, they are cowering inside themselves, hiding from the voice that says ‘Adam, where are you?’"
—Russell Moore

"The Gospel that you preserve is not meant to end with you. It’s meant to go forward. If we recognize that and know that, we work for the common good, we work for human flourishing, and all good things. But we hold them with a certain looseness, because we know that the United States of America is temporary, but the Gospel goes on."
—Russell Moore

“I was for weeks, a poor, brokenhearted mourner, traveling through the darkness and misery of doubts and fears. I finally found that change of heart which comes by ‘casting all one’s care’ upon God, and by having faith in Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer, Friend, and Savior of those who diligently seek Him. After this, I saw the world in a new light. I seemed to live in a new world, surrounded by new objects, and to be animated by new hopes and desires. I loved all mankind – slaveholders not excepted; though I abhorred slavery more than ever. My great concern was, now, to have the world converted. The desire for knowledge increased, and especially did I want a thorough acquaintance with the contents of the Bible…”
—Fredrick Douglass

“The idea that God communicates with human beings in personal words pervades all of Scripture, and it is central to every doctrine of Scripture. If God has, in fact, not spoken to us personally, then we lose any basis for believing in salvation by grace, in judgment, in Christ’s atonement—indeed, for believing in the biblical God at all. Indeed, if God has not spoken to us personally, then everything important in Christianity is human speculation and fantasy."
—John Frame, The Doctrine of the Word of God

"The very concept of tolerance entails that you disagree with that which you tolerate. Otherwise, you wouldn’t tolerate it; you would agree with it! Thus, one can only tolerate a view if one regards that view as false. You can’t tolerate a view which you believe to be true. Thus, the very concept of toleration presupposes that one believes the tolerated view to be false. So objective truth is not incompatible with tolerance; on the contrary the objectivity of truth is presupposed by tolerance. The correct basis of tolerance is not pluralism, but the inherent worth of every human being created in the image of God and therefore endowed with certain God-given rights, including freedom of thought and expression. That’s why Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” The basis of tolerance is not relativism, but love."
–William Lane Craig, Are There Objective Truths about God?

"Tolerance has come to mean that no one is right and no one is wrong and, indeed, the very act of stating that someone else’s views are immoral or incorrect is now taken to be intolerant (of course, from this same point of view, it is all right to be intolerant of those who hold to objectively true moral or religious positions). Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others."
–J.P. Moreland

"There is no neutral ground when it comes to the tolerance question. Everybody has a point of view she thinks is right, and everybody passes judgment at some point or another. The Christian gets pigeonholed as the judgmental one, but everyone else is judging, too, even people who consider themselves relativists."
–Greg Koukl

"Toleration is the enduring of something disagreeable. Thus it is not indifference toward things that do not matter and it is not broad-minded celebration of differences. It involves a decision to forgo using powers of coercion, so it is not merely resignation at the inevitability of the disagreeable, although begrudging toleration can be granted when one believes that coercion, while possible, would come at too high a price"
–Edward Langerak

"...[O]ne of the great ironies of contemporary censorship on campus is that it constitutes a “great generational swindle”: the same baby boomers who fought so hard for free speech on campus under the banner of “Question Authority” turned around and impose speech codes when it was their turn to be in charge of the academy."
—Greg Lukianoff

"Sincere love means Christian love is always truthful. Christian love is never just tolerance."
—Tim Keller

"Universal tolerance is impossible and self-refuting, because it cannot tolerate intolerance. Since anything that is "true" and "factual" requires intolerance of all that is false, universal tolerance can only tolerate falsehood, not truth."
–Michele Marshall

"There is a modern myth that holds that true tolerance consists of neutrality. It is one of the most entrenched assumptions of a society committed to relativism."
—Greg Koukl

"A new Decalogue has been adopted by the neo-Christians of our day, the first word of which reads ‘Thou shalt not di...sagree;’ and a new set of Beatitudes too, which begins ‘Blessed are they that tolerate everything, for they shall not be made accountable for anything."

"Once the existence of knowable truth in religion and ethics is denied, authority (the right to be believed and obeyed) gives way to power (the ability to force compliance), reason gives way to rhetoric, the speech writer is replaced by the makeup man, and spirited but civil debate in the culture wars is replaced by politically correct special-interest groups who have nothing left but political coercion to enforce their views on others."
–J. P. Moreland

"That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don't spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes."
–Denis Waitley

"Truth, beauty, and goodness have their being together. By truth we are put in touch with reality, which we find is good for us and beautiful to behold. In our knowing, loving and delighting, the gift of reality appears to us as something infinitely and inexhaustively valuable and fascinating."
–Thomas Dubay

"If there is no God, then all that exists is time and chance acting on matter. If this is true then the difference between your thoughts and mine correspond to the difference between shaking up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. You simply fizz atheistically and I fizz theistically. This means that you do not hold to atheism because it is true , but rather because of a series of chemical reactions . . . . Morality, tragedy, and sorrow are equally evanescent. They are all empty sensations created by the chemical reactions of the brain, in turn created by too much pizza the night before. If there is no God, then all abstractions are chemical epiphenomena, like swamp gas over fetid water. This means that we have no reason for assigning truth and falsity to the chemical fizz we call reasoning or right and wrong to the irrational reaction we call morality. If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else."
–Douglas Wilson

"A truth that is heard but not accepted and followed becomes dull and meaningless. The more we neglect it, the more immune to it we become."
–John MacArthur

"The very concept of tolerance entails that you disagree with that which you tolerate. Otherwise, you wouldn’t tolerate it; you would agree with it! Thus, one can only tolerate a view if one regards that view as false. You can’t tolerate a view which you believe to be true. Thus, the very concept of toleration presupposes that one believes the tolerated view to be false. So objective truth is not incompatible with tolerance; on the contrary the objectivity of truth is presupposed by tolerance. The correct basis of tolerance is not pluralism, but the inherent worth of every human being created in the image of God and therefore endowed with certain God-given rights, including freedom of thought and expression. That’s why Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” The basis of tolerance is not relativism, but love."
–William Lane Craig, Are There Objective Truths about God?

“She came forward. She sat here. She told her truth.”
—Corey Booker, D-N.J. (Senate Supreme Court confirmation hearing, 2018)

“Unity and peace are very delightful; but they are bought too dear if they are bought at the expense of truth.”
—JC Ryle

"Christians know that we are constrained by reality. Though we don’t always put it this way, we don’t believe we hold the truth. We believe the truth holds us. It would be so simple to ride with the flow of the age, to relax and let go of the truth about abortion, gay marriage, sexual freedom and so on. We can’t. If we bow before the truth, we must be led by it, even if doing that costs us. I have spent years studying viewpoints contrary to Christianity. I continue to find that God’s word is solid and nourishing, and ultimately makes more sense than the alternatives. The truth holds me. As Martin Luther said (or was reported to say, at least), “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders.” (“Here I stand, I can do no other.”)
—Tom Gilson (from, We Don’t Hold the Truth, The Truth Holds Us)

"Today's generation often fails to distinguish between the concepts of truth and belief. In order for a statement to contain truth it must exclude falsity. Otherwise it is meaningless to call it truth. If you correct my statement you assume error exists. As soon as you affirm the existence of error you affirm the existence of truth."

—Mike S. Adams