Don’t bid farewell to the death tax. President Bush had begun to phase out the estate tax, lowering it from 55 to 44 percent, and it was set to disappear entirely in 2010. But according to The Wall Street Journal, President Obama’s budget maintains the tax in 2010 “at its 2009 parameters.”

The WSJ editorial comments,

Liberals counter that the estate tax is “fair” because it is only paid by the richest 2% of American families. This ignores that much of the long-term saving and small business investment in America is motivated by the ability to pass on wealth to the next generation.

The budget is under debate in Congress this week, so footnotes like this one, preserving the death tax, may not make it through the legislative process. But with the government facing a hefty deficit, it would be no surprise if the death tax stays alive.

In Germany, school attendance is mandatory. And I do mean mandatory. When Uwe and Hannelore Romeike insisted on homeschooling their kids, authorities threatened to break down their door:

When the Romeikes wouldn’t comply with repeated orders to send the children to school, police came to their home one October morning in 2006 and took the children, crying and upset, to school.
 
“We tried not to open the door, but they (police) kept ringing the doorbell for 15 or 20 minutes,” Romeike said. “They called us by phone and spoke on the answering machine and said they would knock open the door if we didn’t open it. So I opened it.”

Now the Romeikes, who say they have been persecuted for their evangelical beliefs — in particular, their desire to educate their children according to their own worldview and not the state’s — have moved to the U.S. and are seeking political asylum, the AP reports. Mr. Romeike is afraid that if he returns to Germany, police will arrest him and authorities will take his kids.

“Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior,” opined economist Allan Meltzer. Market competition, just as in sports, produces winners and losers. Innovation eliminates the need for certain skills, making us more productive, but it also causes temporary structural unemployment. It is painful to lose your business or your job, but while it is the duty of a Christian to help a neighbor in distress, we need not fear free market enterprise for its social Darwinism.

It is good for everyone when the only survivors in the long run are companies that are fit to serve our diverse needs and wants. The system contains an intrinsic mechanism for self-improvement and waste-reduction. It is that freedom to fail and relocate productive resources to better uses that has turned America into the most prosperous nation in the world. Capitalism’s “creative destruction” has given our middle class, and even many so-called poor among us, living standards that have no analogue in human history.

No politico-economic system will ever eliminate poverty, absolute or relative. Capitalism has its rainy days but it is constantly changing and adapting, very much like an intricate ecosystem evolves with the shifts in climate. These changes can be painful for some individuals—that is where we need private charity. The problems of deep recessions and high-cyclical unemployment only plague us when benevolent busybodies take over the economy, spreading soft pillows around in case someone fails and hurts themselves. We forget a fundamental law in parenting and economics—the more you bail out failure, the more failure you produce.

These days it looks like justice may be served against Bernie Madoff for running a private Ponzi scheme. The courts have done their job of protecting us against one case of fraudulent behavior. At the same time we witness a sharp increase in mob pressure on our elected servants to save us from our greed through tighter regulation of our economic lives. But in an environment where secular government plays the roles of both God and Church we need to ask ourselves: Who watches the watchmen? Who will protect us against the abuses of our bureaucratic regulators who are running the current multi-trillion financial pyramid?

This weekend, I met a gentleman who is very good at tossing out conversation-starters: What’s your all-time favorite movie? Who’s your favorite author? That sort of thing. Here’s a question he asked me that I will pass along to you:

If you could have dinner tonight with anyone, living or dead (for this purpose, dead people would be alive again) who would it be and why?

The interview question was put to Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias: “What do you say to a pastor who says, ‘Apologetics is just philosophy and we do not need that. All we need is the Bible’?”

Zacharias replied, “When pastors believe and teach ‘all we need is the Bible,’ they equip their young people with the very line that gets them mocked in the universities and makes them unable and even terrified to relate to their friends. . . . That line will not get them anywhere. Even the Bible that Christ gave us is sustained by the miracle of the Resurrection.”

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

Let me agree with Mr. Zacharias wholeheartedly, as far as I am able to. It wouldn’t work at all if every time you’re standing around the water cooler, all you did was quote the ESV or KJV in answer to your colleagues’ queries. Even people who would say “all you need is the Bible” know they necessarily use words outside the Bible when they speak. There is a continuum from “only Bible” through “paraphrase” to “only philosophy.”

But if “all we need is the Bible” has its dangers, apologetics has more—and for precisely the reason stated in the interviewer’s question: If you don’t watch it, apologetics tends to philosophy. And if you don’t watch philosophy, it gets unhinged from Biblical truth.

Zacharias may be right that the “all we need is the Bible” attitude is problematic. But honestly, it is not the problem I most often observe. It seems to me there are a lot more “apologists” than people who can give me good Bible thoughts to chew on. Seminarians are full of people who will argue you into a corner and leave you cold. What I need is the Word of God. What saves is the Word of God.

Peter said to always be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), but what makes us so sure that “defense” is a philosophical one? The example Mr. Zacharias cites to prove that even Christ used apologetics works against his case: Jesus’ adducing of the Resurrection is pure Bible! Peter, Stephen, and Paul all play it very close to the Scripture text when doing apologetics (Acts 2, 7, 23). And I’ll bet even Paul’s famous defense in Athens (Acts 17) was mostly Bible. The purer apologetics is, the more it looks like the Bible.

If I have to choose, give me an “all we need is the Bible” guy any day.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.

A new Barna Group survey highlights the ways in which liberals and conservatives differ on matters of faith. According to the survey’s results, liberals are:

• more likely than conservatives to develop their own set of religious beliefs rather than adopt those proposed by a church or other entity;
• very open to accepting different moral views than those they presently possess;
• less likely than conservatives to firmly contend that they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs with others.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are more likely than liberals to:

• view their faith as an increasingly important moral guide in their life;
• believe the church they currently attend is very important in helping them find direction and fulfillment in life;
• have participated in a short-term missions trip, either within the U.S. or in another country.

According to lead researcher George Barna, the survey’s findings demonstrate that “Liberals appear to place a greater emphasis upon self-reliance and what they personally accomplish than upon faith alone or intense participation in a community of faith.”

What do you all make of the findings? Are the survey results an accurate picture of your ideological group?

Massachusetts officials who are overseeing the state’s distribution of federal stimulus funds are questioning how the White House came up with a pledge to save or create 79,000 jobs in the state. And Massachusetts isn’t the only state raising questions:

Massachusetts Undersecretary of Administration and Finance Jay Gonzalez also attended the Washington meeting and said other states complained that issuing job estimates undercut the administration’s vow of transparency because it was unclear where the estimates came from.

Gonzalez said he was asked at one point how he might come up with a jobs estimate and pointed federal officials to a state task force report, but cautioned them the estimate was very rough and came with “qualifications all over it.”

According to a document on the federal stimulus website, government officials determined the figures by averaging three job growth estimates.  But state officials are concerned that the estimated numbers may have set an unrealistic guide by which the success or failure of each state’s program will be measured.

Holy cow, it’s the last day of March already…

Today’s quote is from an American evangelist: “The greatest waste in all of our earth, which cannot be recycled or reclaimed, is our waste of the time that God has given us each day.”

The Church of England has lost Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali – who says he is leaving the church to work with Christian minorities in England and around the world.

Melanie Phillips comments in the Daily Mail that Nazir-Ali was a refreshing contrast to the mushy religious tolerance now pervading the Church of England.

Across the world, in countries such as Nigeria and Sudan, millions of Christians are being persecuted at the hands of militant Islam, with forced conversions, the burning of churches and widespread violence.

Yet in the face of this global onslaught, the Church of England makes scarcely a peep of protest.

Worse still, when Dr Nazir-Ali warned last year that Islamic extremists had created ‘no-go areas’ across Britain where non-Muslims faced intimidation, he was disowned by his fellow churchmen who all but declared that he was a liar – even though he was telling the truth.

Nazir-Ali has been put under police protection for his comments. Phillips says his departure is another sign of the Church of England’s self-destruction.

Take for example the proposal by a regular churchgoer that the churches should ring their bells on St George’s Day, to proclaim that the Christian element of English identity is in robust health.

Only five out of the church’s 44 bishops back the plan while the rest have scuttled for cover. The Bishop of Chester frets about the danger of such ‘public displays’ of confidence, while the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds murmurs faintly: ‘I am not sure assertiveness is a Christian value.’

Such cultural cringe would be comical were it not so tragic. For this is precisely how the church has all but destroyed itself. Instead of asserting its core beliefs against aggressive secularism, it has tried to accommodate its own destroyer.

…Open the doors, the church is the people.

Some Fargo, North Dakotans put a new twist on the child’s finger game, meeting for church yesterday in a local hotel after rising floodwaters closed their own houses of worship.

Triumph Lutheran Brethren Church held its Sunday services at a Ramada hotel to accommodate those from other churches with canceled services. They pared down the service — no high-tech PowerPoint presentations, no food, no Sunday school. “Just prayer, some old hymns everybody knows, and being together,” said church member Tami Crist.

“We can sit back and know that we’ve done what we can do. Now God’s going to do what he can do,” she said.

The pastor at the Assemblies of God church said now was the time to turn to spirituality for hope and not obsess about material possessions. After a week in which the church used its buses to shuttle people to feverish sandbagging efforts, Ona told the congregation that “we have done everything we can do, humanly speaking.”

Here’s an AP story about how many Fargo residents divided their time on Sunday between saving their city with sweat, and praying for divine intervention.