The Blinne Blog

Tolerant Truth

As evangelicals how are we to deal with diversity? The two options we normally take are either capitulate to the society or completely rebuff those whom would disagree with us. But, there is a third option: engage the dialog. We need to drop the cynicism where we assume that the desire for diversity is hypocritical. In other words we take up the offer to dialog and see if the offer is genuine. An example of how this works is found in the Winter Issue of EFCA Today Magazine. Here Rev. Rich Mauer of Grace Church (EFC) in Viroque WI dealt with the issue of a "diversity day" at a local school. A firestorm erupted and the event was eventually canceled. His response follows. Note specifically his last sentence. This is key.

It almost sounds like the first line of a joke—“a Buddhist, an atheist and an inter-faith minister walked into my office”— except that it really happened. For the past five months I have been hosting a “Dynamic Diversity Dialogue” in our church office. It all began last April, when our local school board cancelled “Diversity Day”—a high-school program that was to include a homosexual speaker. Let me draw the battle lines for you. Ours is a rural county in Wisconsin that historically has been very conservative. In contrast, the most rapidly growing segment of our population are liberal thinkers and activists, attracted in part by the presence of the largest organic food distributor in North America.

When Diversity Day was cancelled, letters to the editor flooded our local newspaper, and debates ensued. The controversy even went national when it was lampooned by Jay Leno on the “Tonight Show” and supported by several white supremacist organizations. This was bigger than our annual pig-wrestling contest.

One woman responded to my editorial letter and thanked me for my firm but compassionate words. She invited me to discuss the issue of homosexuality and diversity further with herself and a few others. We have met eight times, and apart from two visits from members of our church, I have been the lone evangelical voice. People are intrigued that an evangelical minister would even want to talk with them.

Don’t misunderstand—I speak the truth with boldness. We have spoken at great length about sin, heaven and hell. On two occasions I have clearly said that my goal is to convert them all. I have presented a defense of the authority and reliability of Scripture that would easily satisfy an ordination council. I have spoken of many of the hard sayings of Jesus to those who want to reduce our Lord and Savior to an inner-consciousness or an all-around nice guy.

They don’t let me off easily, though. They direct difficult questions to me, such as, “What would you say to my gay nephew who is struggling with his faith and his homosexual urges?” and, “How does it make you feel when you know we are all going to hell?”

One highlight occurred recently when a newcomer attempted to summarize what she thought to be my thinking: “All homosexuals are going to burn in hell.” Three different group members stepped in to more accurately present my viewpoint in the face of this caricature of hatred and intolerance.

Why would those who hold a polar-opposite viewpoint seek to diligently defend me? The answer is that I have approached this divisive subject, and each individual, with kindness and respect, instead of battling them with verbal firebrands.

I don’t take the credit for this, for I know that God is sanctifying my contentious spirit through this dialogue. Furthermore, each person I have met has been remarkably kind—more so, sadly, than many Christians I have known.

So far, none of the members have fallen down in repentance, and I don’t know that this format can be packaged into a neat, evangelistic program for the local church. But I do know that many will listen to truth when it is spoken in genuine love from a heart that is committed to listen as well.

The newspaper article concerning the original situation can be found here.

Rev. Maurer's letter to the editor can be found here.

Open and Shut

Christianity Today Magazine reported the case of John Sanders:

While John Sanders and the Board of Trustees at Huntington College in Indiana disagree on whether God exhaustively knows the future, they agree that his days as a theology professor at the evangelical school are running out. The issue, according to both Sanders and G. Blair Dowden, the college's president, is not Sanders' belief in open theology, but his notoriety in advocating the doctrine. Both acknowledged that others on the faculty hold the same open theology views.

"You can be an open theist," Sanders told CT. "You just can't be a well-known one. That makes this a very interesting case."

After an executive session of the board was held in October, Dowden told members of the faculty that there "was very little support for John's continued employment at Huntington." Neither Sanders nor Dowden expect him back for the 2005-2006 academic year, which begins next fall. Dowden told ct that while the controversy is "directly related" to open theism, there is no requirement for professors on the issue.

"Not at all," Dowden said. "We have some other faculty who are open theists, but they're not teaching theology or Bible. It's not a litmus test." Sanders, who has taught at the school of about 1,000 students for seven years, has been a focus of controversy over open theism for the past four years, he said. In November 2003, Sanders narrowly avoided being expelled from the Evangelical Theological Society over his beliefs. Some society members believe open theology violates the society's commitment to scriptural inerrancy.

Open Theism is a radical form of free will theology where God's foreknowledge is deliberately self-limited in order to preserve human freedom. This will prove to be a test case where academic freedom and doctrinal fidelity collide. Other institutions have brighter white lines where the boundaries are. Some hope that by being fuzzy with the boundaries that controversies might be minimized. As this story shows, the opposite is true. Policies degenerate into a similar arbitrary morass to that which the military created with "Don't ask, don't tell".

Cancer Doesn't Take a Holiday

This week's Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) illustrates how our minds create an association that doesn't exist. In this case, Grandma hung on until Christmas before she died. We remember when people die of cancer on December 26 but not December 24. Young and Hade looked at 1.3 million people who died in Ohio from 1989-2000, 300,000 of whom died of cancer. They found no significant number of cancer deaths the week after compared against a week before birthdays, Thanksgiving, or Christmas.

Link: JAMA -- Abstract: Holidays, Birthdays, and Postponement of Cancer Death, December 22/29, 2004, Young and Hade 292 (24): 3012.

Vaccination could protect against heart disease

Long-term effects of treatments has been in the news lately. Extended usage of Vioxx, Celebrex, and Aleve may cause heart disease. Now there is a more positive heart disease implication. Childhood immunizations may protect us from heart disease. The following story from New Scientist gives us some of the details. Whether the mice studies carry over to humans is still unknown, but the results are promising.

A course of injections in childhood might help protect people from heart disease later in life. And for those whose arteries are already clogged up, a dose of antibodies could provide immediate benefits. That is the enticing vision raised by animal studies.

"It is an extremely attractive idea," says heart expert Andrew Newby at Bristol Royal Infirmary in the UK, who chaired a session of the European Vascular Genomics Network meeting in Cambridge, UK, last week where the vaccine research was presented. "In principle it would be a relatively short-term treatment, but give lifetime protection," he says.

Another Cox-2 Inhibitor (Celebrex) In Trouble

Reuters is reporting that Pfizer is stopping a Celebrex trial due to heart problems with the drug.

Pfizer Inc. on Friday said a government-sponsored cancer-prevention trial of its blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex was halted after patients taking it had more than twice as many heart attacks as patients taking a placebo.

Pfizer Inc. on Friday said patients taking its blockbuster arthritis drug Celebrex in a long-term cancer-prevention trial had more than twice the number of fatal or non-fatal heart attacks as those taking a placebo.

Shares of Pfizer, a component of the Dow Jones industrial average, dipped 17 percent in early trade after the unfavorable details emerged on the large, long-term trial, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute.

Pfizer said the trial involved patients taking 400-milligram and 800-milligram daily doses of Celebrex to prevent adenomas, tumors that grow from glandular tissue. The anti-inflammatory drug was being tested on the theory that inflammation is a cause of cancer.

Celebrex is in a class of drugs known as a Cox-2 inhibitor. Recently, Vioxx has been yanked from the market because of similar heart problems. The whole class of drugs is now suspect. At this point it appears that Celebrex is less dangerous than Vioxx but more dangerous than other NSAIDs. A recent University of Pennsylvania study reported the following:

Penn Epidemiological Study Shows Difference In Cardiovascular Effects Between Vioxx And Celebrex

Philadelphia, PA -- In the first epidemiological study designed and executed specifically to determine the heart-attack risk associated with COX-2 inhibitors rofecoxib (Vioxx) and celecoxib (Celebrex), researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found a greater risk of heart attack associated with Vioxx than Celebrex, although neither of the two drugs showed a statistically significant elevated risk of heart attack relative to people who did not use the drugs. In addition, the researchers found discrete clinical differences between the two COX-2 inhibitors -- which suggest that the effect of the drugs on the cardiovascular system should be viewed separately rather than as a single class of drugs. This study appears online December 7, 2004 and will be published in the February 1, 2005 print issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study, which also compared the heart-attack risk between COX-2 inhibitors and older nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), found a lower risk with NSAIDs rather than COX-2 inhibitors. The NSAIDs studied included aspirin, ibuprofen (Advil and Motrin), and naxproxen (Aleve).

"Our results suggest that there is a marked difference between rofecoxib and celecoxib relative to heart-attack risk," said Stephen E. Kimmel, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at Penn and lead author of the study. Use of rofecoxib was associated with 2.72-higher odds of heart attack than was the use of celecoxib. That difference, Kimmel suggests, may be due to a number of factors, including differences in selectivity for the COX-2 isoenzyme, blood pressure, endothelial function, and oxidative stress. Rofecoxib was also associated with a higher odds of heart attack compared with older NSAIDs.

It would seem that this is all new, but it is not. The following was reported in the British Medical Journal in 2001.

Treatment with certain COX 2 inhibitors, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs that relieve the pain associated with arthritis, may increase the risk of heart attack, according to a retrospective analysis of two separate marketing studies.

The research comes within weeks of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence approving these types of drug for use in the NHS in England and Wales. The institute acknowledged in a recent technology appraisal guidance bulletin (No 27, July 2001; www.nice.org.uk) that there is such a risk and that COX 2 inhibitors should not be prescribed routinely to patients with cardiovascular disease.

Researchers from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio analysed the cardiovascular event rates in two randomised multicentre trials. They also looked at myocardial infarction rates in the placebo group (23407 patients) in a meta-analysis of four large aspirin studies.

They found that the annual myocardial infarction rate in the aspirin placebo group was 0.52% This compared with 0.74% (P=0.04) for the COX 2 inhibitor rofecoxib (Vioxx) in the Vioxx gastrointestinal outcomes research (VIGOR) study and 0.80% for the inhibitor celecoxib (Celebrex) in the celecoxib long term arthritis safety study (CLASS) (JAMA 2001;286: 954-9).

Bottom line: if you are using any Cox-2 inhibitor, see your doctor.

The Science of Middle-Earth

An interesting new book is out. It is called: The Science of Middle-Earth : Explaining The Science Behind The Greatest Fantasy Epic Ever Told!.  The author of the book, Henry Gee, bemoans the lack of science education. Here he addresses that issue in a provocative way by providing a series of science essays organized around Middle Earh. The following is from the review of the book by Scientific American:

How did Frodo's mithril coat ward off the fatal blow of an orc? How was Legolas able to count the number of riders crossing the plains of Rohan from five leagues away? Could Balrogs fly? Gee, a senior editor at Nature (who says he read The Lord of the Rings about once a year between the ages of 10 and 25), elucidates and expands on the scientific aspects of J.R.R. Tolkien's world in this fascinating book. Many commentators have noted Tolkien's use of philology and cultural history to create believable languages for his elves and orcs. Now Gee shows how scientific precepts can make the wonders of Middle-earth even richer. In a closing essay, he argues that "Tolkien's own worldview was closer to the true spirit of science than that held by many who propose to promote the public understanding of science."

Chilly Quaoar May Have Had Warmer Past

The Journal Nature is reporting that the planetoid Quaoar may have had a warmer past.  The folowing paper found that Quaoar had crystalline ice implying a warmer past than expected. David Jewitt, one of the paper's authors put it this way:

"At that temperature [50K, the surface temperature of Quaoar], the ice on Quaoar should be amorphous, but it is not," says David Jewitt, an astronomer from the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Why Quoaoar has crystalline water ice is still somewhat of a mystery. Either the radioactive decay of elements such as Uranium or Thorium are heating the planetoid, or the same decay may have triggered 'cryogenic volcanism'. This latter volcanism could bring wamer crystalline water ice to the surface.