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I was influenced by Francis Schaeffer’s books and films and Adrian Rogers’ sermons when I grew up. I want to make the point that no one influenced the pro-life movement more than Francis Schaeffer!!! Schaeffer energized the movement and that is why it is appropriate that on May 15, 1994, ten years the anniversary of Francis Schaeffer’s passing I would mail a letter to Carl Sagan that get him to ultimately respond to Schaeffer’s views on abortion which I included 3 letters that followed.
Francis Schaeffer and Adrian Rogers
On August 30, 1995, in my letter to Carl Sagan I included my published letter to the editor in that very day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and it appeared under the title THE HUMANIST WORLD VIEW. This got Sagan’s notice and in his letter of December 5, 1995, Sagan disagreed with me concerning the close relationship between atheistic evolutionists and the abortion movement. Actually I wrote: Adrian Rogers, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, has rightly said, “Secular Humanism and so-called abortion rights are inseparably linked together.”
In another letter I noted that Nelson Price in THE EMMANUEL FACTOR (1987) tells the story about Brown Trucking Company in Georgia who used to give polygraph tests to their job applicants. However, in part of the test the operator asked, “Do you believe in God?” In every instance when a professing atheist answered “No,” the test showed the person to be lying. My pastor Adrian Rogers used to tell this same story to illustrate Romans 1:19 and it was his conclusion that “there is no such thing anywhere on earth as a true atheist. If a man says he doesn’t believe in God, then he is lying. God has put his moral consciousness into every man’s heart, and a man has to try to kick his conscience to death to say he doesn’t believe in God.” Sagan’s December 5, 1995 letter to me included the sentence “You argue that God exists because otherwise we could not understand the world in our consciousness,” and this may have been his short to this story above possibly.
On August 30, 1995 I mailed a letter to Carl Sagan that probably further prompted this discussion on abortion and it enclosed a lengthy story from Adrian Rogers about an abortion case in Pine Bluff, Arkansas that almost became an infanticide case.
(Adrian Rogers pictured above)
In responding to all four of my letters from 1994 and 1995, Carl Sagan also enclosed the article “The Question of Abortion: A Search for Answers”by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.
I disagree with his assertion that there is a widespread ”Problem of Radicals Killing Abortion Doctors.” I know that Sagan included a radical evangelical killer in his book CONTACT, but in reality those are hard to find and I have provided a more detailed response in a past post. Let me briefly respond today with a picture:
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Sagan rightly noted, “New knowledge of embryology, the physicians said, had shown the fetus to be human even before quickening.” This brings me to Bernard Nathanson’s powerful testimony on why he gave up his abortion activities and spent the rest of his life in the pro-life promoting his film THE SILENT SCREAM because of the technology of ultrasound and how, for the first time ever, we could actually see inside the womb.
Sagan is right that “A newborn baby is surely the same being it was just before birth.” But what about those who claim it would be better to abort then have the unwanted child be a victim of child abuse. The answer is to respect life at all stages of life.
On January 10, 1996, I wrote my response letter to Carl Sagan and I included an additional insert from Francis Schaeffer that showed The humanist base leads to meaningless and The Bible is God’s revealed truth and it tells us about our origin.
Kansas – Dust in the Wind (Official Video)
Sagan in Rahway High School‘s 1951 yearbook
The first portion of my 5-15-94 letter to Carl Sagan and next week I will have the second part.
On May 15, 1994 on the 10th anniversary of the passing of Francis Schaeffer I mailed the following letter to Carl Sagan and to 250 other scientists!!! Sagan actually answered 4 of my letters on December 5, 1995.
Could you take 3 minutes and attempt to refute the nihilistic message of the song (DUST IN THE WIND) which appears at the beginning of the enclosed audio tape followed by Adrian Rogers sermon FOUR BRIDGES THE EVOLUTIONIST CAN NOT CROSS.
Back in 1980 I watched the series COSMOS and on May 5, 1994 I again sat down to watch it again. In this letter today I will tell you of 3 GENTLEMEN who contemplated the world around them. The first one is an evolutionist by the name of Carl Sagan. Mr. Sagan is what I would call a humanist full of optimism.
The second man also sought to contemplate the world around him and this man was King Solomon of Israel. In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon limits himself to the question of human life lived “under the sun” between birth and death and what answers this would give (that is exactly what Mr. Sagan has done in COSMOS).It is this belief that life is only between birth and death that eventually causes Solomon to embrace nihilism. In the first few words of Ecclesiastes he observes the continual cycles of the earth and makes some very interesting conclusions”…to search for understanding about everything in the universe.”
The third man I want to mention is Francis Schaeffer who I believe was the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century. However, when he was a young agnostic many years ago he also had an experience similar to King Solomon’s when he contemplated the world and universe around him.contemplated the world and the universe around him.CARLSAGAN:”Our contemplations of the Cosmos stir us. There is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.”KING SOLOMON: Ecclesiastes 1:2-11;3:18-19 (Living Bible): 2 In my opinion, nothing is worthwhile; everything is futile. 3-7 For what does a man get for all his hard work?Generations come and go, but it makes no difference.[b] The sun rises and sets and hurries around to rise again. The wind blows south and north, here and there, twisting back and forth, getting nowhere.* The rivers run into the sea, but the sea is never full, and the water returns again to the rivers and flows again to the sea . .everything is unutterably weary and tiresome. No matter how much we see, we are never satisfied; no matter how much we hear, we are not content. History merely repeats itself…For men and animals both breathe the same air, and both die. So mankind has no real advantage over the beasts; what an absurdity!—-What Solomon said ties into this following statement by evolutionist Douglas Futuyma – “Whether people are explicitly religious or not they tend to imagine that humans are in some sense the center of the universe. And what evolution does is to remove humans from the center of the universe. We are just one product of a very long historical process that has given rise to an enormous amount of organisms, and we are just one of them. So in one sense there is nothing special about us.”
———-FRANCIS SCHAEFFER: There is no doubt in my mind that Solomon had the same experience in his life that I had as a younger man (at the age of 18 in 1930). I remember standing by the sea and the moon arose and it was copper and beauty. Then the moon did not look like a flat dish but a globe or a sphere since it was close to the horizon. One could feel the global shape of the earth too. Then it occurred to me that I could contemplate the interplay of the spheres and I was exalted because I thought I can look upon them with all their power, might, and size, but they could contempt nothing. Then came upon me a horror of great darkness because it suddenly occurred to me that although I could contemplate them and they could contemplate nothing yet they would continue to turn in ongoing cycles when I saw no more forever and I was crushed.
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Solomon died 3000 years ago and Francis Schaeffer passed away on May 15, 1984 exactly 10 years ago.I firmly believe Solomon was correct when he said in Ecclesiastes 7:2 “It is better to spend your time at funerals than at festivals. For you are going to die, and it is a good thing to think about it while there is time.”Suppose that you to learn that you only had just one year to live—the number of your days would be 365. What would you do with the precious few days that remained to you? With death stalking you, you would have little interest in trivial subjects and would instead be concerned with essentials. I know that is what I did when I was bed ridden in a hospital in Memphis at age 15. I was told that I may not live. My thoughts turned to spiritual things. Thank you for your time.Sincerely,Everette Hatcher III, 13900 Cottontail lane, ALEXANDER, AR 72002, TIME MAGAZINE May 28, 1984:DIED, Francis Schaeffer, 72. Christian theologian and a leading scholar of evangelical Protestantism; of cancer; in Rochester, Minn. Schaeffer, a Philadelphia-born Presbyterian, and his wife in 1955 founded L’Abri (French for ‘the shelter’), a chalet in the Swiss Alps known among students and intellectuals for a reasoned rather than emotional approach to religious counseling. His 23 philosophical books include the bestseller How Should We Then Live? (1976).” (January 30, 1912-May 15, 1985)
Adrian Rogers is pictured below and Francis Schaeffer above.
Watching the film HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? in 1979 impacted my life greatly
Francis Schaeffer in the film WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?
Francis and Edith Schaeffer
Sagan discusses FAITH when there is no evodence
Carl Sagan on Religion
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The Bible and Archaeology – Is the Bible from God? (Kyle Butt)
Biblical Archaeology is Silencing the critics! Significantly, even liberal theologians, secular academics, and critics generally cannot deny that archaeology has confirmed thebiblical record at many points. Rationalistic detractors of the Bible can attack it all day long, but they cannot dispute archaeological facts.
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Carl Sagan
Richard Dawkins on Carl Sagan, Einstein and Religion | A How To Academy …
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Francis Schaeffer the Founder of the L’Abri community
The Cosmos Is All That Is
Francis Schaeffer wrote in 1981 in CHRISTIAN MANIFESTO chapter 3 The Destruction of Faith and Freedom:
Then there was a shift into materialistic science based on a philosophic change to the materialistic concept of final reality. This shift was based on no addition to the facts known. It was a choice, in faith, to see things that way. No clearer expression of this could be given than Carl Sagan’s arrogant statement on public television–made without any scientific proof for the statement–to 140 million viewers: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever was or ever will be.” He opened the series, COSMOS, with this essentially creedal declaration and went on to build every subsequent conclusion upon it.
How Should We Then Live | Season 1 | Episode 6 | The Scientific Age
FEATURED ARTIST IS EL GRECO
DOMENIKOS THEOTOKOPOULOS · EL GRECO(1541-1614)
One of the most original and fascinating artists of his era, with a very personal technique that was admired, three centuries later, by the impressionist painters. A true innovator in the broadest sense of the word.
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