Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom

Magna Carta:
The Foundation of Freedom
1215-2015 

by Dr. Marshall Foster  

 On June 15, 2015 the English speaking world will celebrate the 800th anniversary of the world’s foremost liberty document: Magna Carta. This ancient sheepskin may seem irrelevant to us in the 21st century as we face financial chaos and the usurpation of private property on a scale never before seen in America. Why should we care about what some archbishop wrote 800 years ago?

We should care because Magna Carta was the foundation and inspiration for America’s freedom documents. Most Americans have forgotten that Magna Carta was a spiritual charter declaring God and His law as Sovereign over the king and his law.

“The Magna Carta doesn’t start with barons, and doesn’t start with individual liberties. It doesn’t start with political considerations, and it doesn’t start with the issue of who holds what power. Magna Carta starts as a religious document, concerned with the “health of the soul” of the King, and with the “honour of God,” and with the “exaltation of the Holy Church.” In addition to that, the King acknowledges that the “advice” for signing the Carta comes from the bishops first, and then from the barons.”1

Like Americans today, the English of the 13th century had nearly forgotten their great heritage of Christian liberty. Their nation was filled with corruption and lawlessness.  A small group of landowners and business leaders at that time experienced much of the same anger and frustrations that we face each day.  They were overwhelmed by a lawless monarch, in their case, a king.

King John had killed the true heir to the throne and began tyrannizing the people.  He confiscated more and more of their wealth, imprisoned them without trial, and even violated their wives.  In 1214 he demanded such high taxes from everyone that the poor serfs were starving in the streets.
The nobles and landowners, wrote a letter to the king demanding that he abide by the law.  King John refused their request and multiplied his efforts to tyrannize nobles and peasants alike.  So the nobles made a wise choice and went to the most committed spiritual leader of the time, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  They asked him to write a document that would force the king to limit his power based on the law of the land (the biblically-based common law). Langton was well motivated to write this document since he had seen some of his own family torn from his house and exiled by this wicked monarch.

Langton’s writing became known as Magna Carta, the foremost document of liberty ever produced. Magna Carta, and its 63 articles, became the masterpiece of Christian liberty for the next 800 years.  Its first article insured that the church shall forever be free from state interference.  It stipulated that there could be no taxation without representation. It demanded a trial for every freeman by a jury of peers.

“The question here is: If the signing of the Magna Carta was a conflict between the King and the barons, as the history textbooks tell us, then why does it start with a solemn clause to defend the liberties of the church? Why were the barons so concerned with the inviolability of the rights of the church rather than with their own rights? Why did it start with acknowledging the fact that the advice was given by the bishops, and only then by the earls and barons of the Kingdom? Isn’t it strange that a document presumably initiated by the barons pays such high homage to the church? Also, if Magna Carta was based on the “traditional liberties” in the Saxon Law, why
doesn’t it mention those liberties, and why does it refer to God as the source of all liberties?

“The answer is: Magna Carta wasn’t drafted by the barons, and the English liberties did not come from a political struggle. The liberties of England came from the Church, based on the ideological foundation of the faith in Jesus Christ, and the application of His Law in the English society.  The signing of Magna Carta was the culmination of a centuries-long war between the pagan and the Christian concepts of law and power. At Runnymede [where Magna Carta was signed] the Church won the victory for Christianity, and by this victory England—and consequently America—was blessed with freedom more than any other nation in Europe.”

Magna Carta’s greatest legacy is the concept of a nation of laws rather than men.  In its final article it called for armed resistance by the people if their rulers would not obey the law.  This same obligation of the people to rise up and throw off tyrants is stated in our Declaration of Independence.  All of the articles of Magna Carta were rooted in a long history of biblical principles and the Ten Commandments.

Because of King John’s arrogance, the nobles were forced to raise an army which they called the
“Army of God.”  They marched on the king’s troops and they prevailed. They then forced the king to sign Magna Carta on the field at Runnymede on June 15, 1215.  It was said that after signing the charter, John escaped back into his castle at Windsor and threw himself on the ground, beat his fists and ate straw like a mad man.

The next year John recanted his agreement to obey Magna Carta.  The barons were forced into another war with the king.  But the king was caught in a rising tide while he was trying to escape with all his treasure, and he lost his wealth in the ocean.  He died of dysentery three days later.  From that time forward all the kings of England were periodically forced to deal with the brilliant biblical principles laid out in Magna Carta by Stephen Langton.  America’s foundations of liberty are built upon these principles and others, reasoned from the Bible.

The story of Magna Carta reveals the strategy of how to restore liberty to a nation in chaos.  The force of arms is not the central means of security and maintaining freedom. The people of England, by holding their leaders accountable to a higher power, God and his just principles, checked tyranny without massive bloodshed. We in the 21st century, still have the finest heritage of liberty in human history. We have our treasured freedom documents which call our nation peacefully back to a nation of laws.

But, like the people of England, we must inspire and educate our children and fellow citizens. John Adams, Americas 2nd president, reminded us that, “…it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles, upon which Freedom can securely stand….The only foundation of a free Constitution is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People….They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. – They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.”

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Why I teach my kids evolution

Why I teach my kids evolution

A homeschooling mother’s approach to ‘immunizing’ her children against humanism in science

by Cheri Fields

It was Summer, 2012. I’d just started writing about kids and creation science when a prominent media ‘science guy’ came out with a video claiming you can’t do science without evolution. I couldn’t wait to respond, and knew just whom to interview. My brother was now an engineer and had been homeschooled from the beginning. It would take a simple phone call to collect the proof I needed.

Before I dialed the number, though, my heart quailed: years ago, my brother had adopted the world’s priorities and standards instead of God’s. 

What if he had accepted evolutionary thinking along the way? I had to ask anyway. Sure enough, he is now a theistic evolutionist, seeing no difficulty between Jesus as his Savior and evolution as the way He created. But, he was careful to inform me this hadn’t happened in college. It had happened in his late teens already, when he read a fascinating article in a popular-level science magazine.

Good intentions, but…

My parents started homeschooling us in ’82 with the barest of resources. We used the only curriculum we knew of and were pretty happy with it. 

I remember being taught about Lamarckian acquired traits,¹ which no one believes in today, and the inaccuracy of the peppered moth story, but that seems to have been the bulk of what they covered about evolution. 

Later, we found a new program which taught us some amazing science and medicine, but it did not address creation/evolution at all.

This was done on purpose. The idea was to train us in the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so thoroughly that we would recognize a lie as soon as we heard it. It sounded reasonable. But, far too often, this approach has ended in disaster. Our ability to discern is a lot like our immune system's ability to recognise an invader

Many young people from Christian homes, only exposed to things they were expected to accept as truth, have later applied the same trust to the secular things they encountered.
The world is well-versed in packaging its ideas in attractive, reasonable, and compelling ways. Without tools to recognize and counter the lies, they were left dangerously exposed.
Now I’m on the other side, homeschooling my own children. I know I won’t be able to shield my kids forever from the tsunami of ungodly thinking and assumptions ‘out there’. So how am I to prepare them for this onslaught? Here’s the way I look at it. Hebrews 5:13–14 says:

For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

Our ability to discern is a lot like our immune system’s ability to recognize an invader.
So, I train my kids like we do our bodies: exposing them to what they will face, in a way designed to disarm the danger. This slowly and carefully helps them build the spiritual muscles they will need to discern between the good and the bad. A big part of this training is teaching kids more than the evolutionists want them to know.

We don’t expose our kids to feathered dinosaur characters at two and three years old, but we do watch other programs with more subtle messages beginning soon after. 

And we talk about it. A big part of this training is teaching kids more than the evolutionists want them to know. If kids learn the assumptions up front that scientists have to accept, they are far less likely to just take their word for it.

One of my sons is beginning to learn world history. We use colorful secular materials available anywhere. When the book claimed people lived 10,000+ years ago, I gave a brief explanation of carbon dating methods. The next time such a big number came up, I asked him how they ‘know’, and what the Bible says.

(By the way, when we read how people ‘may have discovered’ farming, metallurgy, music, etc., I love to take my kids to the early chapters of Genesis. We don’t have to guess like the secular world does, we can trust the historical account God preserved for us!)

I recently taught my kids earth science. The book had a double-page spread of the ‘Timeline of Life’ starting with the ‘first cells’. We stopped and pushed the story back further than most evolutionists want kids to go: Spontaneous Generation, today relabelled Abiogenesis.² Then we discussed how their series of developing organisms is based on how deeply each creature was buried. 

My oldest two are starting to study anatomy and biology. Now it’s time to introduce them to mutations, the only mechanism evolution has to develop new features.³ And natural selection.⁴

None of the evolutionary kids’ books I’ve seen explain why they believe what they teach. They just state the end conclusions as if they are undeniable facts. This is also true of most materials for adults. In fact, to find the basis for their claims, you often have to go to publications designed to be read by scientists—the initiated, who can be trusted to protect the fragile secrets of their assumptions.⁵

The last area we cover in our training concerns the worldview consequences of evolutionary thinking. Like every mindset, evolutionism and creationism have to answer the big questions of life:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. Where am I going?
4. What really matters in life?

The Bible is full of answers to these questions. Evolution has them, too, but they are normally only communicated subtly because the answers are so unappealing. Consider:

1. A random collection of matter
2. No reason (unless it is to perpetuate your DNA, which is for no other reason anyway)
3. Nowhere
4. Nothing

It’s hard to imagine a person wanting to choose the emptiness of naturalism until sin and pride have a huge hold on them. Most children from Christian homes haven’t sunk to such levels—yet.

Do I think this will guarantee my children stick close to God their whole lives? No, but I’m not afraid for them either. My part is to pray, live out my life devoted to Jesus, and invite them to join their father and me in His kingdom. 

Changing hearts isn’t any human being’s job—it’s God’s. My desire is to give the Holy Spirit the most tools to work with.

So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. (Matthew 18:14).

Hillary floats new excuse for role in Benghazi

Hillary floats new excuse for role in Benghazi

by Aaron Klein

Evidence belies claims about personal involvement, motive for attack

Published excerpts of the Benghazi chapter in Hillary Clinton’s forthcoming book, “Hard Choices,” contain misleading statements about the deadly attack and the then-secretary of state’s personal role in the decision-making process, WND has found.

Denying a personal role in the decision-making process regarding security of the compound, Clinton writes that she did not see the cables requesting additional security. She claims cables related to the security at the compound were only addressed to her as a “procedural quirk” and didn’t actually land on her desk.

Clinton writes: “That’s not how it works. It shouldn’t. And it didn’t.”

However, the Senate’s January 2014 report on the Benghazi attack reveals lawmakers found that the Benghazi facility required special waivers to be legally occupied, since it did not meet the minimum official security standards set by the State Department. Some of the waivers could only have been signed by Clinton herself.

Some of the necessary waivers, the Senate affirmed, could have been issued at lower levels within the State Department. However “other departures, such as the co-location requirement, could only be approved by the Secretary of State,” reads the Senate report.

The “co-location” requirement refers to the unusual housing setup in Benghazi in which intelligence and State Department personnel were kept in two separate locations.

Clinton would have a lot of explaining to do if she signed waivers allowing the facility to be legally occupied without reviewing the U.S. special mission’s security posture. Further, the Senate found it was Clinton’s top deputies, including officials known to be close to the Clintons, who were responsible for some major denials of security at the compound.

In one example, it was Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy who canceled the use in Tripoli of a DC-3 aircraft that could have aided in the evacuation of the Benghazi victims.

Kennedy also denied permission to build guard towers at the Benghazi mission and approved the withdrawal of a Security Support Teams, or SST, special U.S. forces specifically maintained for counterattacks on U.S. embassies or threats against diplomatic personnel.

For some lawmakers, it defies logic that Clinton was not informed, especially since she was known to have taken a particular interest in the Benghazi facility. She reportedly called for the compound to be converted into a permanent mission before a scheduled trip to Libya in December 2012 that eventually was canceled.

Blame

Meanwhile, according to Politico, in defending the White House’s claim that an anti-Islam YouTube video provoked the attack, Clinton writes that the video also sparked a protest at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo the same day.

However, the Cairo protests were announced days in advance as part of a movement to free the so-called blind sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in the U.S. for conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Rahman’s son, Abdallah Abdel Rahman, even went so far as to threaten to storm the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and detain the employees inside.

In fact, on the day of the Sept. 11, 2012, protests in Cairo, CNN’s Nic Robertson interviewed the son of Rahman, who described the protest as being about freeing his father. No Muhammad film was mentioned. A big banner calling for Rahman’s release can be seen as Robertson walked to the embassy protests. No such banners were seen in protest of the Muhammad film.

Clinton, however, writes that the New York Times later proved in an investigation the Muhammad video was “indeed a factor” in what happened in Benghazi.

“There were scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives,” she writes. “It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were. Both assertions defy not only the evidence but logic as well.”

Clinton was referring to a Dec. 28, 2013, New York Times piece by David D. Kirkpatrick titled “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi.”

Kirkpatrick claimed, for example, there was “no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.”

That claim is directly contradicted by Kirkpatrick’s own previous reporting from Benghazi. An Oct. 29, 2012, New York Times article co-authored by Kirkpatrick and titled “Libya Warnings Were Plentiful, but Unspecific” documents “Al-Qaeda-leaning” Islamic extremist training camps in the mountains near Benghazi.

Kirkpatrick’s claim is also contradicted by a Library of Congress report– released one month before the Benghazi attack – which detailed that al-Qaida established a major base of operations in Libya in the aftermath of the U.S.-NATO campaign that deposed Muammar Gadhafi and his secular regime.

The report documented that al-Qaida and affiliated organizations were establishing terrorist training camps and pushing Taliban-style Islamic law in Libya while the new, Western-backed Libyan government incorporated jihadists into its militias. Fox News reported the U.S. mission in Benghazi convened an “emergency meeting” in August 2012 to discuss al-Qaida training camps nearby.

Talking points

In the released excerpts, Clinton defended the actions of then-United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, who on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012, infamously appeared on five morning television programs to offer the official Obama administration response to the Benghazi attack. In nearly identical statements, Rice asserted that the attack was a spontaneous protest in response to a “hateful video.”

Writes Clinton: “Susan stated what the intelligence community believed, rightly or wrongly, at the time. That was the best she or anyone could do. Every step of the way, whenever something new was learned, it was quickly shared with Congress and the American people. There is a difference between getting something wrong, and committing wrong. A big difference that some have blurred to the point of casting those who made a mistake as intentionally deceitful.”

Clinton’s claim the intelligence community believed the attacks were a spontaneous protest in response to a “hateful video” is called into question by numerous revelations.

The U.S. immediately had surveillance video from the mission that showed there was no popular protest at all on Sept. 11, 2012.

Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 U.S. official in Libya at the time of the attack, testified that he knew immediately it was a terrorist attack, not a protest turned violent. According to Hicks, “everybody in the mission” believed it was an act of terror “from the get-go.”

The CIA’s station chief in Libya reportedly emailed his superiors on the day of the attack that it was “not an escalation of anti-American protest.”

The claim of a popular protest also defies logic. Spontaneous protesters do not show up with weapons, erect armed checkpoints surrounding the compound and demonstrate insider knowledge of the facility while deploying military-style tactics to storm the U.S. mission.

Nor do spontaneous protesters know the exact location of a secretive CIA annex, including the specific coordinates of the building that were likely utilized to launch precision mortar strikes. Spontaneous protesters are not thought to be capable of mounting a fierce, hours-long gun battle with U.S. forces stationed inside the annex.

Ironically, Clinton writes that in the Benghazi affair there has been a “regrettable amount of misinformation, speculation, and flat-out deceit by some in politics and the media.”

The Lunacy of White privilege seeps into schools

White privilege seeps into schools

By Walter E. Williams
What would you think if your 8-year-old came home and told you that “white privilege is something that white people have, meaning they have an advantage in a lot of things and they can get a job more easily”? You would have heard that at the recent 15th annual White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, attended by 2,500 public-school teachers, administrators and students from across the nation.

The average parent has no idea of the devious indoctrination going on in classrooms in many public schools. What follows are some of the lessons of the conference.

In one of the workshops, “Examining White Privilege and Building Foundations for Social Justice Thinking in the Elementary Classroom,” educators Rosemary Colt and Diana Reeves told how teachers can “insert social justice, anti-racist information” into their lessons that “even little kids” can understand.

Kim Radersma, a former highschool English teacher, hosted a session titled “Stories from the front lines of education: Confessions of a white, high school English teacher.” She said that teaching is a purely political act and that neutral people should “get the (expletive) out of education.” She also explained: “Being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic. I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor. I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way.”

But the propaganda and lunacy go even deeper. Jacqueline Battalora, professor of sociology and criminal justice at Saint Xavier University, informed conference participants that “white people did not exist before 1681.” That’s truly incredible. If Professor Battalora is correct, how are we to identify William Shakespeare (1564), Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Locke (1632), Leonardo da Vinci (1452) and especially dear Plato (428 B.C.)?

Stephanie Baran’s message to conference participants was that capitalism is the cause of racism in the world today. This adjunct professor at Kankakee Community College, who calls herself a vulgar Marxist, added that racism was invented in Colonial America by white capitalists as a tool to divide labor and keep the working class in their place.

Speaker Leonard Zeskind – according to the MacIver Institute, which covered the event – explained that “the longer you are in the tea party the more racist you become.” He added, “Parents put their kids in private schools because they’re racist.”

I can’t imagine people being stupid enough to believe all that was said at the White Privilege Conference.

There’s something else at work. I think it’s white guilt.

That’s why, for almost three decades, there has appeared on my website a certificate of amnesty and pardon that I’ve granted to Americans of European ancestry in the hope that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools.