3 Key Things Skeptics Will Say to Shame Your Kids for Being Christians

NATASHA CRAIN

Faithful Christian Parenting in a Secular World

AUGUST 1, 2016

I haven’t blogged in the last couple of weeks because my family and I were on vacation. We went on a wonderful trip to the island of Grand Cayman! I successfully managed to avoid email while I was there, but that made for quite a backlog by the time I returned. As I started going through the emails to my blog address, I was struck by the nature of comment after comment left by atheists on various old blog posts while I was gone: one emotional attack after another and not a single discussion of evidence for/against the truth of Christianity.

I actually get such emails all the time and am very used to it. But seeing them all piled together made me realize how often the objective of skeptics is to shame Christians rather than to engage in fair-minded discussions about evidence—something highly ironic given how much skeptics talk in theory about how important evidence is.

Shaming can have an especially negative impact on kids, who are very susceptible to believing emotion-laden statements. But this, too, is something we can (and should) prepare them for. While shaming comes in all kinds of forms, I can roll 90 percent of skeptics’ comments into some version of three general claims.

Here is what your kids are most likely to hear…and what you can do about it.

1. “You’ve been indoctrinated.”

The Implied Shame Claim: You’re just parroting what your parents have drilled into your head throughout your childhood. You’ve been brainwashed and can’t even think for yourself. If you’re brave enough to look at [evidence/science/common sense] instead, you’ll see how crazy Christianity is.

I probably receive at least one blog comment each week about how I’m indoctrinating my kids simply by raising them in a Christian home. Skeptics love to say this. The problem is, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what indoctrination even means. As I explained in this post, indoctrination is “teaching someone to fully accept the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group and to not consider other ideas, opinions and beliefs.” In other words, indoctrination is a problem with how you teach someone something. It’s not inherently related to any particular belief system, though religion is one type of belief system where indoctrination is possible. Atheists can indoctrinate their kids as well.

So, unless a skeptic has been inside the homes of every Christian in America, seen how we are teaching our kids Christianity, and then had appropriate reason to conclude that we don’t collectively expose our kids to other ideas, it’s utterly meaningless to say that “Christians indoctrinate their kids.”

What Parents Can Do:

Make sure you’re not actually indoctrinating your kids. Make sure you are teaching them what other people believe. That doesn’t mean you should teach them that what everyone else believes is true (that’s not logically possible)—it simply means you’re appropriately comparing and contrasting other ideas, opinions, and beliefs.
Make it explicitly clear to your kids that you don’t want them to believe in Jesus just because you do. (Read why this is so important in my post, Six Scary But Important Words Every Christian Parent Should Say to Their Kids About Faith.) When you’ve actually demonstrated that it’s important for them to own their spiritual decisions, they’ll have no reason to later question whether they’ve been “indoctrinated” when someone suggests it.
Teach your kids the evidence for the truth of Christianity (you’re going to see a recurring theme on this bullet point). In that very process, you’ll be comparing and contrasting truth claims from various worldviews and your kids will know first-hand that you didn’t “indoctrinate” them.

2. “If you allow yourself to think critically, you’ll see there’s no reason to believe in God.”

The Implied Shame Claim: Don’t you want to be a critical thinker? Someone who is rational, reasonable, and uses their brain? If you have faith, you’re throwing all that out the door. You’re choosing to believe something in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

“Critical thinking” is a buzz phrase today. Technically speaking, critical thinking is the “objective analysis and evaluation of an issue to form a judgment.” The funny thing is, skeptics always assume that such thinking necessarily leads to their own conclusions. The logic goes like this:
Critical thinking means forming beliefs based on evidence.
There’s no evidence for God.
If you believe in God, you’re not thinking critically.

The problem with this logic is the second statement—the foregone conclusion that there’s no evidence for God. A more honest assessment would be that Christians and atheists disagree over what constitutes legitimate evidence for God. As much as many skeptics would like to make critical thinking their own domain based on this implied argument, the reality is that neither Christians nor atheists are willing to believe in something without evidence; Christians believe there is evidence for God. That’s why conversations about who’s thinking more critically than whom are absolutely pointless. There are Christians who think well and Christians who think poorly; atheists who think well and atheists who think poorly. This says nothing about the evidence itself.

What Parents Can Do:

Be intentional in talking to your kids about definitions. So many times, Christians and skeptics talk right past each other with conflicting meanings of the same words. In this case, discuss the words critical thinking and faith(skeptics incorrectly assert that faith means believing something in spite of evidence—see chapter 8 of my bookfor help with this conversation).
Discuss the implied argument of the three points listed above and explain that this is the logic behind skeptics’ claims that Christians don’t think critically. When you expose your kids to the thinking behind the shame claim, they won’t be fazed by it later.
Teach your kids the evidence for the truth of Christianity (yup, here it is again!). It’s one thing to show them the faulty logic (see the point above)—it’s another thing to teach them how to combat a faulty premise themselves.

3. “Christians are less intelligent than atheists. Studies show it.”

The Implied Shame Claim: You’re stupid if you’re a Christian and that’s not just my opinion—it’s been proven.

You may be surprised to hear that a number of studies have found a negative relationship between intelligence and religiousness—in other words, they suggest that the more intelligent a person is, the less likely they are to be religious. Many passionate atheists are well aware of these studies and use them as ammunition for their arguments that religion is for the poor, ignorant, or unintelligent.

My professional background is in market research (I have an MBA in marketing and statistics) so I decided to personally review the studies that are constantly referenced by skeptics. I explained my findings in detail in my post,Are Christians Less Intelligent Than Atheists? Here’s What Those Studies REALLY Say, and further in Chapter 16 of my book.

Here’s the bottom line of what you should know: Over the last 80+ years, many studies have been done on the relationship between intelligence and religiousness. In 2013, researchers pulled together all the ones that quantified that relationship. Of the 63 studies they identified, roughly half showed no relationship at all. The other half showed at least some kind of negative relationship (the more intelligent you are, the less likely you are to be religious). That said, statistically speaking, it’s not very helpful to simply know there is “some kind” of relationship. You have to know how strong the relationship is to know if it matters. So researchers combined the results of all these individual studies to evaluate that question overall…and found the strength of relationship to be very weak. What do I mean by very weak? A -.17 or -.20 correlation is considered to be a trivial or negligible relationship by most statisticians. In other words, hardly worth mentioning. There is no reasonable basis for suggesting Christians are less intelligent than atheists according to this data.

What Parents Can Do:

Give your kids an appropriate framework for considering this kind of claim before you even discuss specific studies: Even if we could reliability measure which group is collectively smarter (we can’t), the answer wouldn’t tell us anything about the truth of Christianity. Intelligence doesn’t equate to always having the right answer. The important question we must constantly point our kids back to is, Which worldview is an accurate picture of reality? (Not which worldview theoretically has the smartest adherents.)
If your kids are teens, take the time to read my summary of these studies and findings and then discuss (links to my blog post and book above).
Teach your kids the evidence for the truth of Christianity (I told you this would keep coming up!). How else will they know how to set aside distracting claims like this one about intelligence and answer the key question,Which worldview is an accurate picture of reality?

So, you must have caught the recurring solution that combats all of these attempts at shaming: Teach your kids theevidence for the truth of Christianity.

Consider for a moment why that in particular is the antidote for almost any shaming attempt. Shame by definition is “a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, unworthiness or disgrace.” In other words, the root of shame is feeling inadequate.

In order for our kids to feel (more than) adequate when they encounter shaming attempts, they need to have the deep conviction that what they believe is really true. Only then will they be able to fully see these shame claims for what they are—shallow and baseless emotional attacks—and be able to say confidently with the apostle Paul, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16).

If you need help talking to your kids about the evidence for the truth of Christianity and how to address secular claims with your kids, please check out my book, Keeping Your Kids on God’s Side: 40 Conversations to Help Them Build a Lasting Faith. 

Read More

Mighty to Save!

Read More

Where the Spirit of the Lord Is!

Read More

The execution of a former Turkish leader that still haunts Erdogan

By Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, July 30, 2016

ISTANBUL–In the shadow of medieval ramparts along the north of the old city lie the graves of three hanged men. The tomb at the center belongs to Adnan Menderes, a former Turkish prime minister who was ousted by a military junta in 1960 and executed a year later, along with his foreign and finance ministers. They now rest next to him.

Turkey’s modern history is punctuated by great drama and upheaval. The country has endured waves of political turmoil and unrest, a decades-long Kurdish separatist insurgency, the growing threat of Islamist terrorism and multiple coup attempts, including the failed insurrection July 15 that led to hundreds of deaths and prompted an unprecedented government purge of state institutions.

But in the minds of some Turks, the military’s removal and unjust sentencing of Menderes–the republic’s first leader elected in free elections–represent a kind of original sin, a tragedy that prefigured the turbulent course of events to come.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in power for nearly a decade and a half, has in recent years invoked the memory of Menderes as part of his own political legacy.

A young Erdogan reportedly watched his father, a humble mariner from the Black Sea region, weep when Menderes was sentenced to death. He has said that the “sadness” of the moment turned him toward politics.

A tiny, flat isle off Istanbul’s coast–once the site of exile for unruly Byzantine princes–where the junta imprisoned, tortured and tried Menderes and senior figures in his government, has been renamed Democracy and Freedom Island under Erdogan’s watch. A hotel and tourist complex is under construction.

“We are realizing Menderes’s dream,” Erdogan said while on the campaign trail in 2014. “They may have executed him, but he is not forgotten. He is in our hearts.”

In the wake of the defeated coup attempt, Menderes’s fate has particular resonance. The public’s muted acquiescence to the 1960 coup and the sham trial that followed is a “dark blot” on the Turkish conscience, said Halil Berktay, professor of history at Sabanci University in Istanbul.

Contrast that with what seemed to happen this month as mutinous soldiers blockaded bridges in Istanbul and launched attacks on government buildings in Ankara. Countless Turks took to the streets in support of the elected government; opposition politicians, despite their differences, all backed Erdogan and the ruling party. In Istanbul’s central Taksim Square, nightly rallies still extol the government and the will of the people.

The coup attempt was the bloodiest in the long history of military interventions in Turkish politics, with soldiers opening fire on civilian protesters and bombing the parliament. Its defeat stoked nationalist sentiment and proved emotional for Erdogan’s conservative base, a constituency not dissimilar from those who once supported Menderes.

Like Erdogan, Menderes was a center-right nationalist with tremendous popular support. In a climate of almost draconian state secularism, he pushed for liberalizing economic reforms and tried to create more space for Muslim practices. Under Menderes, mosques in Turkey were allowed to issue the call to prayer in its original Arabic for the first time.

The Turkish republic was founded and led by Westernized elites in the country’s cosmopolitan coastal cities who had little to do with the more devout Sunni Muslim communities in the Anatolian hinterland. Menderes, although a rich, well-educated landowner himself, came to power with the votes of this largely neglected, poorer, religious base.

His election victory in 1950 “was the first breakthrough, the first attempt to conquer the center of Turkish politics from the periphery,” Berktay said.

Erdogan sees himself walking in Menderes’s path and invokes this history to show that his own Islamist-tinged rhetoric “has roots and is part of an older political tradition,” said Etyen Mahcupyan, a journalist and former adviser to Erdogan’s government.

Erdogan also repeatedly claims to be vying against the same forces that led to Menderes’s demise–the machinations of the once staunchly secular military and the schemes of the “deep state,” the distinctly Turkish notion of antidemocratic cabals installed in the state bureaucracy.

Turkish authorities say the coup attempt was carried out by a conspiracy tied to the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States but presides over a complex global network of schools, businesses and charities.

In his early years in power, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and Gulenist-linked officials in the state bureaucracy teamed up to sideline rival elements, including the secularist top brass. But in recent years, the two camps have been in open war with each other.

Erdogan has likened Gulenist efforts to implicate him and his allies in controversial corruption cases to the “kangaroo courts” that were set up for Menderes.

“His narrative is Menderes was toppled by nefarious conspiratorial powers against the nation, by these putschists who want to defy the majority of the people,” said Akyol, the columnist. “The Gulenists are just the new element in the same old tradition of Turkish coup plotters.”

Since the coup was quashed, tens of thousands of military officers, judges, police officers, teachers and other civil servants allegedly linked to the Gulen movement have been arrested, detained or otherwise purged from state institutions.

Arrest warrants have been issued for dozens of journalists with alleged links to the Gulenists. More than 100 media outlets are being shuttered because of alleged Gulenist ties.

The scale of the crackdown has alarmed rights groups and international observers.

In a phone call to Turkey’s foreign minister on Wednesday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed “deep concerns” about the nature of the purge and urged Ankara to “adhere to its human rights obligations.”

Here, too, there are echoes of the past.

“The parallel is actually more appropriate than Erdogan might like to admit,” said Nicholas Danforth, Turkey scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an expert on U.S.-Turkey ties during the Cold War.

In the last years of his rule, Menderes became increasingly autocratic, brutalizing and intimidating toward the opposition while arresting critical journalists and closing newspapers.

His government “created the environment for a military takeover virtually with their own hands,” said Berktay, of Sabanci University, insisting that that in no way justified the coup.

Similar currents that surrounded Menderes’s downfall–the volatile polarization of Turkish politics, the restlessness of a military that sees itself as the true guardian of the state, the tension between Muslim conservatives and secularists–have again come to the surface.

“Though the real blame lies with the leaders of the 1960 coup, Menderes also squandered a unique opportunity to help consolidate Turkish democracy,” Danforth said. “In his effort to avoid Menderes’s fate, Erdogan may well do the same.”

Read More

What Babies Know About Physics and Foreign Languages

By Alison Gopnik, NY Times, July 30, 2016

In the last 30 years, the United States has completed its transformation to an information economy. Knowledge is as important in the 21st century as capital was in the 19th, or land in the 18th. In the same 30 years, scientists have discovered that even very young children learn more than we once thought possible. Put those together and our preoccupation with making children learn is no surprise.

The trouble is that most people think learning is the sort of thing we do in school, and that parents should act like teachers–they should direct special lessons at children to produce particular kinds of knowledge or skill, with the help of how-to books and “parenting” apps. Studies prove that high-quality preschool helps children thrive. But policy makers and educators are still under pressure to justify their investments in early childhood education. They’ve reacted by replacing pretend corners and playground time with “school readiness” tests.

But in fact, schools are a very recent invention. Young children were learning thousands of years before we had ever even thought of schools. New studies show that even the youngest children’s brains are designed to learn from this simple observation and play in a remarkably sensitive way.

Young children today continue to learn best by watching the everyday things that grown-ups do, from cleaning the house to fixing a car. My grandson Augie, like most 4-year-olds, loves to watch me cook, and tries manfully to copy what I do. But how does he decide whether to just push the egg whites around the bowl, or to try to reproduce exactly the peculiar wristy beating action I learned from my own mother? How does he know that he should transfer the egg yolks to the flour bowl without accidentally dropping them in the whites, as Grandmom often does? How did he decide that green peas would be a good addition to a strawberry soufflé? (He was right, by the way.)

Experimental studies show that even the youngest children are naturally driven to imitate. Back in 1988, Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington did a study in which 14-month-olds saw an experimenter do something weird–she tapped her forehead on top of a box to make it light up. A week later, the babies came back to the lab and saw the box. Most of them immediately tried to tap their own foreheads on the box to make the light go on.

In 2002 Gyorgy Gergely, Harold Bekkering and Ildiko Kiraly did a different version of this study. Sometimes the experimenters’ arms were wrapped in a blanket when she tapped her forehead on the box. The babies seemed to figure out that when the experimenter’s arms were wrapped up, she couldn’t use her hands, and that must have been why she had used her head instead. So when it was the babies’ turn they took the easy route and tapped the box with their hands.

In 2013 David Buttelmann and his colleagues did yet another version. First, the babies heard the experimenter speak the same language they did or a different one. Then the experimenter tapped her head on the box. When she had spoken the same language, the babies were more likely to tap the box with their foreheads; when she spoke a different language they were more likely to use their hands.

In other words, babies don’t copy mindlessly–they take note of who you are and why you act.

Children will also use what they see to figure out intelligent new actions, like putting peas in a soufflé. For example, in our lab, Daphna Buchsbaum, some colleagues and I showed 4-year-olds a toy with lots of different handles and tabs. A grown-up said, “Hmm I wonder how this toy works” and performed nine complicated series of actions, like pulling one of the handles, shaking a tab and turning the toy over. Sometimes the toy played music and sometimes it didn’t.

The actions followed a pattern: Some of them were necessary to make the machine go and some were superfluous. For example, the children might see that the toy lit up only when the experimenter shook the tab and turned over the toy, no matter what else she did.

Then she asked the child to make the music play. The children analyzed the pattern of events, figured out which actions actually made the toy go, and immediately produced just those actions. They would just pull the tab and turn over the toy. They used their observations to create an intelligent new solution to the problem.

We take it for granted that young children “get into everything.” But new studies of “active learning” show that when children play with toys they are acting a lot like scientists doing experiments. Preschoolers prefer to play with the toys that will teach them the most, and they play with those toys in just the way that will give them the most information about how the world works.

In one recent experiment, for example, Aimee E. Stahl and Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins showed 11-month-old babies a sort of magic trick. Either a ball appeared to pass through a solid wall, or a toy car appeared to roll off the end of a shelf and remain suspended in thin air. The babies apparently knew enough about everyday physics to be surprised by these strange events and paid a lot of attention to them.

Then the researchers gave the babies toys to play with. The babies who had seen the ball vanish through the wall banged it; those who’d seen the car hovering in thin air kept dropping it. It was as if they were testing to see if the ball really was solid, or if the toy car really did defy gravity.

It’s not just that young children don’t need to be taught in order to learn. In fact, studies show that explicit instruction, the sort of teaching that goes with school and “parenting,” can be limiting. When children think they are being taught, they are much more likely to simply reproduce what the adult does, instead of creating something new.

My lab tried a different version of the experiment with the complicated toy. This time, though, the experimenter acted like a teacher. She said, “I’m going to show you how my toy works,” instead of “I wonder how this toy works.” The children imitated exactly what she did, and didn’t come up with their own solutions.

The children seem to work out, quite rationally, that if a teacher shows them one particular way to do something, that must be the right technique, and there’s no point in trying something new. But as a result, the kind of teaching that comes with schools and “parenting” pushes children toward imitation and away from innovation.

There is a deep irony here. Parents and policy makers care about teaching because they recognize that learning is increasingly important in an information age. But the new information economy, as opposed to the older industrial one, demands more innovation and less imitation, more creativity and less conformity.

In fact, children’s natural learning techniques are better suited to that sort of challenge than the teaching methods of the past two centuries.

New research tells us scientifically what most preschool teachers have always known intuitively. If we want to encourage learning, innovation and creativity we should love our young children, take care of them, talk to them, let them play and let them watch what we do as we go about our everyday lives.

We don’t have to make children learn, we just have to let them learn.

Read More

'Download a Good Heart’, Pope Tells Young as Polish Visit Ends

Reuters, July 31, 2016

KRAKOW, Poland–Pope Francis wrapped up his Polish visit on Sunday with a huge outdoor Mass where he told young people to look beyond the instant gratification afforded by technology, and instead to try to change the world.

Hundreds of thousands of young people, many of whom camped out for the night, waved national flags and cheered as Francis arrived to say the Mass in a large field on the outskirts of Krakow at the end of his five-day trip to Poland where he presided at the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day festivities.

Francis, 79, who has said he is a “disaster” with technology, sprinkled his sermon at the last major event of the trip with social media and technology terms.

He urged the young people to “‘download’ the best ‘link’ of all, that of a heart which sees and transmits goodness without growing weary.”

He said their response to the challenges of life cannot be “texting a few words,” that prayer should be given pride of place over their internet “chats”, and that God’s memory was not a “hard disk” filled with files on everyone, but more of a compassionate heart that wants to help them “erase” evil.

Francis encouraged them to continue “to be dreamers (who) believe in a new humanity, one that rejects hatred between peoples, one that refuses to see borders as barriers”.

Read More

The Wonder of the Universe

Read More

Jesus, the Book of Daniel and the Temple Institute

Chapter 13 from Where is America in Bible Prophecy by Dennis Edwards

The book of Daniel not only contains many specific prophecies about the latter days, but also one that even Jesus Himself mentions to His disciples when talking about the end of the world:

When you therefore shall see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso reads, let him understand) then let them which be in Judah flee into the mountains: … For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.[1]

The fact that Jesus quotes from Daniel should motivate us to do a bit of study on the subject. Some eschatologists believe “the holy place” that Jesus was talking about could be a rebuilt Jewish temple on the Temple Mount. Presently in Jerusalem there exists an organization called the Temple Institute which is preparing for the eventual rebuilding of a Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, where today stands the Muslim’s Mosque of Omar. Read the following introduction to their site: 

SHALOM AND WELCOME to the official website of the TEMPLE INSTITUTE in Jerusalem, Israel. The Temple Institute is dedicated to every aspect of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem, and the central role it fulfilled, and will once again fulfill, in the spiritual well being of both Israel and all the nations of the world. The Institute's work touches upon the history of the Holy Temple's past, an understanding of the present day, and the Divine promise of Israel's future. The Institute's activities include education, research, and development. The Temple Institute's ultimate goal is to see Israel rebuild the Holy Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, in accord with the Biblical commandments.[2]

Following the Six-Day War of 1967, Christianity Today published an article saying, 

Israeli government representatives have ordered 60,000 tons of the finest Bedford stone from Bedford, Indiana to be used in the erection of the Jerusalem Temple….The cornerstones for the Third Temple are already in Israel. Materials for this Temple have been secretly in preparations for seven years.[3]

The Temple Institute argues that the above report is false. They say that the abundance of stones available in Israel makes the report highly unlikely. However, they do not deny the possibility of the stones having been already cut and prepared. If true, the stones necessary for the rebuilding of the Temple could be present in Israel at this very moment and could be assembled in a short period of time. All the various Temple ornaments have been carefully created in conformity with the instructions given by Moses for the original items.[4]

The news article Preparing for the Third Temple by Daniel Ben Simon reinforces the ideas of the Temple Institute.

The author of the article goes on a visit to the Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem to see what preparations are being made for the building of the new Temple. For many Israelis the building of the Third Temple has become an all-consuming passion and work. They believe that the time may be just right for its establishment and want to do all they can to hasten the day when it will stand where the First and Second Temples once stood. 

One of the elite soldiers of the Temple who has dedicated his life to the Third Temple’s construction is Yehuda Glick. Since moving from New York to Israel, Glick has been preparing for the great day when the building will be constructed. The Temple will be the Jewish people’s most holy place on earth. Until then, he spends his time as a Temple Mount activist and serves as a 

tourist guide to foreign visitors.

To Glick, there is no greater sensation in life than walking on the ground of the Temple Mount where Abraham offered sacrifice to God. Glick believes that the state of Israel is a Divine move, and the culminating manifestation of that Divine move will be the construction of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount.[5]

In similar fashion, the Jewish community of Shiloh, where the original Tabernacle stood before the building of the First Temple, is carefully sewing the veil of the Temple. The veil will be needed to enclose the “Holy of Holies.” The “Holy of Holies” is the area of the Temple where only the High Priest is able to enter, and only on one specific day of the year. Here’s a section of an article from May 2014 found in the magazine Israel Today called Jewish Women Recreating Temple Veil.

If the Jewish Temple is ever to be rebuilt in Jerusalem, the massive curtain—66 feet high by 33 feet wide and 2 inches thick—that once hung in the Second Temple and was consumed by fire in A.D. 70, will need to be recreated. That task is already underway in the Jewish community of Shiloh, located in biblical Samaria about 40 minutes north of Jerusalem, reports Israel Today. For more than two years women from the community have been working to assemble the materials and learn the techniques needed to weave the veil that will hang between, and separate, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies.[6]

The Orthodox Jews who are preparing for the Temple’s reconstruction obviously take prophecy seriously. Many Christian Bible scholars agree that the reconstruction of the Third Temple is one of the main end-time events which ushers in the last three and half year period of world history known as the Great Tribulation. Are you aware of the prophecies concerning the rebuilding of the Temple and the beginning of animal sacrifices by the Jews on the Temple Mount? Are you aware of the Holy Covenant which seems to bring about the peace agreement in the Middle East? Do you know what the breaking of the covenant signifies, or in other words, who will break the covenant and what will happen afterwards? If you took Bible prophecy seriously, you would not be answerless and empty-headed when asked these questions.

Notes:

[1] Matthew 24:15,16 & 21
[2] https://www.templeinstitute.org/ (accessed 03/2016)
[3] http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/temple.htm (accessed 03/2016)
[4] http://www.templemount.org/tempprep.html (accessed 03/2016)
[5] Daniel Ben Simon, "Preparing For The Third Temple," Al-Monitor Israel Pulse, June 7, 2013 (accessed 03/2016)
[6] Israel Today, "Jewish Woman Recreating Temple Veil," May 28, 2014.

Read More

The Nezer HaKodesh Institute for Kohanic Studies: The World's First Institute for Training Kohanim

Read More

Israel and U.S. are close to a deal on the biggest military aid package ever

By Carol Morello and Ruth Eglash, Washington Post, July 29, 2016

A senior Israeli official will arrive in Washington next week for a final round of negotiations involving the largest military aid package the United States has ever given any country and that will last more than a decade after President Obama leaves office.

Brig. Gen. Yaakov Nagel, the acting head of Israel’s National Security Council, has been dispatched with instructions to meet with White House officials in hopes of signing an agreement “as soon as possible,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said this week.

That represents a striking about-face for Netanyahu, who angered the Obama administration when he mused during a February meeting with his cabinet that Israel might decide to wait and “reach an agreement with the next administration.”

Nagel’s visit signals that Netanyahu may have concluded that he won’t necessarily get a better deal than the one he can forge with Obama, with whom he has had a visibly testy personal relationship. Both countries are now eager to strike a deal before Obama’s term ends.

The Obama administration has said it is prepared to sign a 10-year “memorandum of understanding” that significantly raises the $3.1 billion a year the United States currently grants Israel under an existing agreement that expires in 2018. In addition, Congress has provided additional money for missile defense.

Over months of secret negotiations that picked up steam late last year, Netanyahu was holding out for as much at $5 billion a year, according to accounts in the Israeli news media. Israelis argued that they need to spend much more on defense in the wake of last year’s Iran nuclear deal, which is freeing up frozen Iranian assets that Israel fears may be used in part to fund Iranian aggression in the region.

One major obstacle to finalizing an agreement, however, is a dispute over where the funds can be spent.

According to U.S. and Israeli analysts familiar with the negotiations, the Obama administration is insisting on phasing out a special arrangement that has allowed Israel to spend 26 percent of U.S. aid on its own defense research, development and procurement. No other country receiving U.S. funds is permitted to do so, but it was carved out in the 1980s to allow Israel to build up its nascent defense infrastructure. With Israel’s defense industry now thriving, the administration wants to pare that back and require that more U.S. aid go to American companies providing goods and services.

The possibility that Israeli defense companies could lose hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts is already causing controversy.

Israelis are also said to be displeased with a U.S. position that whatever amount of money they agree on will be final and that Israel will not go to Congress requesting more money, according to reports in the Israeli news media.

As the talks have dragged on, Netanyahu started getting pressured to finalize an agreement soon so that the Israeli military could proceed with its long-term planning. Israel’s finance and defense ministers both complained publicly that the delay was creating uncertainty that made planning difficult, and they urged that the deal be completed and signed quickly.

Some analysts said there was also growing recognition that concluding the agreement with Obama carried strong symbolism.

“Though he has been a strong supporter of Israeli security throughout his term, there’s clearly a difficult relationship between Netanyahu and Obama,” said Ilan Goldenberg, director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “For them to agree on this would send a signal to the world that although their personal relationship is not great, here Obama is making a down payment on 10 years of deep U.S.-Israeli security cooperation. That’s a powerful message.”

David Makovsky, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that Israelis are conscious that support for Israel is slipping in some liberal quarters and that a 10-year deal with a liberal president would make it “bulletproof.”

Makovsky also cited the “unpredictability factor” of Donald Trump as a potential successor to Obama.

“He professes his support of Israel,” Makovsky said of Trump. “But he’s also someone saying America’s broke. A bit of bird-in-the-hand would lock that in.”

The arrival of Nagel suggests that an agreement is entering the homestretch. Netanyahu has said he hopes talks will be concluded “within a few weeks.” Ultimately, both Obama and Netanyahu would gain political benefits from a deal, analysts say.

“It’s an exclamation point on the case the Obama administration has been making for years, that he strengthened more than ever the U.S. commitment to Israeli security,” said David Halperin, director of the New York-based Israel Policy Forum. “And it helps Netanyahu rebut criticism in recent years that he has sometimes quietly, sometimes very bluntly, sided with Republican points of views.

“It helps a bit to restore balance,” Halperin said, “to return to the notion of bipartisanship when it comes to Israel’s security.”

Read More