Insight on the News

Judge: “Stop Teaching Bible”

● A Massachusetts judge ruled that a man may lose visiting rights with his children. As Congregationalist church members, the man and his wife had divorced and she was granted child custody. He later became one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. “The 35-year-old fireman doesn’t beat his daughters (aged 7 and 4) or take them to X-rated movies or encourage them to neglect their studies,” writes syndicated columnist William Rasberry. “What he does is read the Bible to them.” The mother complained: “He was (also) confusing them by telling them there was no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Tooth Fairy, and I had told them there was.”

“Confusion alone could hardly have been the [judge’s reason],” observes columnist Rasberry. “Else, what would his honor do about all the children of intact marriages whose parents hold differing religious beliefs? . . . Could it be that the judge himself is a Congregationalist? Or a believer in the Tooth Fairy, et al?”​—“The Philadelphia Inquirer,” February 13, 1979, p. 13-A.

Blind to the Evidence

● Since Darwin’s day, has modern geology been able to find proof of his theory of evolution by natural selection? “Instead of finding the gradual unfolding of life,” writes David M. Raup, curator of geology at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History in the museum’s “Bulletin,” “what geologists of Darwin’s time, and geologists of the present day actually find is a highly uneven or jerky record; that is, species appear in the sequence very suddenly, show little or no change during their existence in the record, then abruptly go out of the record.”

Curator Raup notes that Darwin’s answer to this was to the effect “that if the record were complete and if we had better knowledge of it, we would see the finely graduated chain that he predicted. And this was his main argument for downgrading the evidence from the fossil record.”

“Well,” says Raup, “we are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have a quarter of a million fossil species but the situation hasn’t changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky and, ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwin’s time . . . as a result of more detailed information. . . . So Darwin’s problem has not been alleviated in the last 120 years.” How much more evidence is needed to make an unbiased person admit that the “finely graduated chain” of evolution does not exist?​—January 1979, pp. 23-25.

Armstrong Opulence

● When dissident members recently charged Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God with mishandling church funds, the California Superior Court put church finances temporarily in receivership. Complaints centered on huge sums spent entertaining prominent world politicians and the lavish life-styles and huge salaries of top church officials.

Armstrong’s second-in-command, Stanley R. Rader, defends money spent on jet leasing, very expensive hotels, restaurants and gifts for foreign dignitaries, saying: “We had a commission to spread the gospel.” And Rader’s lawyer Allan Browne admits that in “proclaiming the word of Jesus,” church officials spend “enormous sums of money.” Why? “Meeting with prime ministers and other world leaders, you bring him something and maybe it’s from Gucci’s.” “Important people stay at Stan Rader’s home. You don’t take them out to McDonalds. You take them to Perino’s.”

To set the record straight, it is of interest to note the actual Gospel commission that Jesus gave his disciples. Quite in contrast to the opulence reflected in the foregoing, Jesus indicated that they would need only very limited funds: “Do not procure gold or silver or copper for your girdle purses.” Were they to entertain worldly politicians with lavish meals and gifts? Indeed Jesus did say that they would “be haled before governors and kings for my sake,” but this was not to entertain these rulers. Rather, it was to answer charges brought against them as “objects of hatred by all people” for their preaching. The record of Jesus himself and the early Christians proves this to be the case.​—Matt. 10:9, 10, 18, 22.