Christian astronaut pilots first moon mission in 53 years
Victor Glover, NASA Artemis II astronaut, made some remarkable statements in a pre-Easter interview from the Orion space capsule.
He cites "the beauty of creation" and says “When I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us…” and then says we were "created."
Glover then says that Earth is an "amazing place" and Earth "was created to give us a place to live in the universe".
He goes on to say "You are special. In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing this thing we call the universe, you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together."
Link to the video below.
This is what forgetting Christianity does to a civilization:
“The modern world imagines that it has outgrown religion. It has done nothing of the kind. It has merely forgotten it. And because it has forgotten it, it no longer understands itself.
Men do not realize that the whole framework of their moral judgments, their political habits, and even their intellectual methods were formed within a Christian society and cannot exist long outside it. When that framework breaks, they will not find themselves enlightened, but bewildered; not free, but enslaved; not rational, but confused.”
— Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith
Many people do not realize that virtually every society has had slaves — from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Native Americans. The great philosopher Aristotle said some people are born to rule, while others are born to be slaves.
Pagan authors did occasionally condemn the mistreatment of slaves. But they had no rationale for why slavery itself was evil.
History's first condemnation of the institutionof slavery -- that slavery itself was flat-out, always and everywhere, morally evil, was inspired by the concept of the image of God.
In the 4th century, a church father named Gregory of Nyssa wrote:
“If he [a person] is in the likeness of God, who is his buyer, tell me? Who is his seller? Has the written contract and the counting out of obols [silver coins] deceived you into thinking yourself the master of the image of God? What folly!”
All through the Middle Ages, Christians made efforts to limit or outlaw slavery.
As early as the 7th century, King Clovis II of the Franks was famous for his campaign to stop the slave trade. He was inspired his wife, Saint Bathilde, herself a former slave.
In the 9th century, St. Anskar brought Christianity to the Danes and the Swedes, and tried to end the Viking slave trade. The Viking ships sailed up rivers to penetrate deeply into the European continent to buy and sell slaves.
In 1102, Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, presided over a national council at Westminster. He secured a resolution that specifically prohibited the "nefarious trade" of selling human beings “like brute animals.”
In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas considered slavery “repugnant to human nature.” He said it was a result of the fall: “This form of subjection began after sin.”
But by then, the subject was not even a matter of controversy. It was the settled consensus among Christians that human bondage was wrong.
What this means is that later, when the practice of slavery was revived among Americans, they were going against centuries of settled conviction that slavery was wrong and should be illegal.
And even then, who rose up to oppose the slave traders? Who led the movement to abolish slavery? Mostly Christians.
Even secular historians note that the abolitionist movement was inspired by the Second Great Awakening with its teaching that all humans are created equal in the eyes of God.
Frederick Douglass declared, “The slave is a man, ‘the image of God,’ but ‘a little lower than the angels’; possessing a soul, eternal and indestructible.”
Sociologist Rodney Stark points out that it was not Enlightenment philosophers who led the movement against slavery. It was mostly evangelical Christians, motivated by their conviction that all people are made in God’s image.
Stark writes: "A virtual Who’s Who of Enlightenment figures fully acceptedslavery....
Thus, It was not philosophers or secular intellectuals who assembled the moral indictment of slavery, but the very people they held in such contempt: men and women having intense Christian faith, who opposed slavery because it was a sin."
In the mistaken idea of "tolerance" we have allowed radical Muslims and others to bring dark spirits into our country. We've pretended that that didn't matter, but we are now seeing that it does matter. This is a spiritual war. We have to proclaim the God of the Bible openly.
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