NavigoArmatus.com

Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said Monday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if there’s a terrorist attack over the upcoming 4th of July weekend.

“This one really resonates with me for two reasons,” Morell said. “One is there’s been about 50 people in the last 12 months who have been arrested in the United States for being radicalized by ISIS, wanting to go fight there or wanting to conduct an attack here, so there’s a lot of people out there who are seeing themselves as aligned with ISIS, number one.”

“Number two, you have this ISIS call to arms during Ramadan,” Morell said. “We are right in the middle of Ramadan, call to arms, conduct attacks against our enemies, so I’m worried about this one.”

...the Wall Street Journal has an important article that appeared over the weekend entitled,

“Bye, Bye, American History.”

The author is Daniel Henninger, it’s the Wonderland column of the Wall Street Journal. When he is saying goodbye to American history, he’s talking about the fact that history, especially as it is taught in colleges and universities and now even in high schools and elementary schools, history has become a very controversial subject and from a Christian worldview perspective we need to understand why. If you tell the story of the history you are defining terms and that’s exactly why history has always been so controversial, especially in the modern age, especially at the intersection of the secularized worldview and the traditional understanding of history.

The new issue is the AP curriculum. That’s advanced placement and that’s very important because the AP curriculum sets the standards that will be followed by many high schools in particular, and the AP standards also signal what’s expected in terms of historical knowledge, or in this case historical interpretation, by the mainstream of America’s academic historians operating at universities. As Henninger writes,

“Last week, 56 professors and historians published a petition on the website of the National Association of Scholars, urging opposition to the College Board’s framework.”

So as you look more closely at the situation, you have a group such as the National Association of Scholars that group includes a good many conservative historians amongst its numbers and then you have the very liberal American Historical Association. Now predictably, the two groups are in a face-off over these new AP standards and the new standards by any measure represent what’s called a revisionist understanding of American history. And that revisionist understanding we should note is driven by a very leftist ideological bias that also comes through in the materials for the new AP standards.

But from the Christian worldview perspective the important issue is to understand that history matters, if we understand what happened and we have the right understanding of how to tell the story we’ll know the truth. This is not to say that history is just a collection of facts. History always requires interpretation. But we need to note that interpretation will happen according to some ideological grid, according to some worldview. And the worldview that dignifies history the most is the Christian worldview because Christianity we should note is an historical faith, not just the fact that it’s a very old faith, it’s an historical faith in that its truth claims are deeply rooted in time and space and history. The same is true of biblical Judaism, but Christianity in particular makes very clear claims about events that took place in history. Events that are documented and revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures, events that are understood to have taken place and time and space and history, events that are for our knowledge and that knowledge for our salvation and for our maturity as Christians. And furthermore, we have to understand that if you deny that historical basis, you are undercutting the very central truth claims of Christianity.

The Christian worldview doesn’t insist that history is easy or simple to understand. Instead, it tells us that we are dependent upon divine Revelation to know not only the who, the what and the when, but also the why. The Bible’s unfolding story which we call the gospel and the metanarrative of Scripture, that story is central to Christianity itself. Take away or diminish in any way the historical claims and you have redefined Christianity, you have redefined the gospel. And if you redefine the gospel according to the New Testament itself, you lose it. It is interesting that secular historians understand that history is important. Of course what’s more important for us is to understand that for Christians, history is less important than it is for secular historians, it is far more important.

Those of us who are now in the United States of America should understand that our Constitution, our written Constitution, harkens back 800 years to the signing of the Magna Carta. But unlike the Magna Carta, our Constitution has now lasted so long as to be the longest serving written Constitution in human history. It’s a remarkable document, but the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, as humbling as that historical moment is, reminds us that as Benjamin Franklin famously said, "we have a constitutional Republic if we can keep it." 

It is up to us to keep it. And when we look at religious liberty and when we look at every other liberty, respected and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, those liberties are secure only so far and only for so long as the American people make certain that they are secured. And when it comes to the U.S. Constitution, we need to be reminded that the framers of the Constitution do not believe they were inventing new rights, they were merely respecting rights that had been given to every American citizen by God.

(CNSNews.com) - Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to authorize $60 million in taxpayer money to go to the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) for research on gun violence prevention...

“The epidemic of gun violence in America is not preordained, it is preventable,” Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) says in a press release.

Diseased lungs and adrenal glands found in dead dolphins on northern Gulf of Mexico beaches are evidence of petroleum contamination, and show the 2010-2012 die-off was linked to the Deepwater Horizon [operated by BP] oil spill, researchers reported.

“We found dolphins dying after the oil spill had distinct lung and adrenal gland lesions…These dolphins had some of the most severe lung lesions I’ve seen,” said Dr. Kathleen Colegrove of the University of Illinois, the lead veterinary pathologist on the study sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.