The course it chooses will impact the rest of the nation and a lot of the world.

“In case you haven’t noticed, California is fast becoming a third world economy,” wrote Jennifer Rubin, in Commentary Magazine. That’s the shocking reality of California’s sinking condition.

The Golden State’s fiscal sins have tarnished the glint. Companies long resident there are slipping out the back door while businesses once considering setting up shop in California are refusing to come through the front door. “It is a wonder that there are any entrepreneurs or venture capitalists” left in California, said economist Arthur Laffer.

Greed and usury are the sins that clamp individuals and their societies in a tight squeeze. Greed manifests itself in the passion to overspend. It’s an offense committed both on the personal and political level.

California’s tax policies and financial practices have amounted to usury. The Bible identifies usury as an exorbitant or unfair charge for lending money.
In a broader sense, usury is any unjust amount imposed on another person. California’s excessive progressive tax rate, the second highest in the country, has proven impractical. It has produced a feast-and-famine economic cycle, driven income-producing businesses from the state, and brought reductions in state welfare on which poor are dependent.

Some might say that in the light of such behavior, California is experiencing its “karma,” the relentless and inevitable spin of cause and effect.
I prefer instead a word used in the Greek New Testament–”kairos”–to describe the special season the big state has entered. Kairos refers to the special opportunities as well as crises that ride along the track of “chronos,” the passage of time. The Bible, for example, speaks of “times and seasons.” The “times” bring the “seasons.” What’s done hour-by-hour and day-by-day ultimately mounts up to results, consequences, crises and opportunities.

The California Moment is either karma or kairos, depending on actions taken by her leadership. California doesn’t have to yield to the inevitability of karma, brought on by bad fiscal policy and behavior. Rather, she can seize the moment by embracing the kairos of new opportunity.

There are positive signs the state’s leaders — beginning with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — will seize the opportunity rather than allow California to sink economically. “California is so broken that we must look at every bold proposal out there, no matter how daring or radical–including the idea of a flat tax,” Schwarzenegger said last June.

The Governor established the Commission on the 21st Century Economy to probe the causes of the state’s dire economic situation and propose solutions. The Commission’s title is apt, and reflects what ought to happen nationally. America’s current taxing system is as archaic as the Model-T and is about as adequate for the complexities of modern economics as Ford’s old car is for a whizzing interstate highway.

Our contemporary taxation method was contrived in 1913 through the 16th Amendment to our Constitution. Withholding from worker’s pay was introduced in 1943 (there had also been a withholding policy during the Civil War). Clearly, it’s time for a national effort, similar to California’s, to bring tax policy into the 21st century.

We could argue that any time a state or nation taxes people on the fruit of their labor that usury occurs, and that taxes should be levied on what we spend, not on what we earn. But at least serious consideration of a flat tax is movement in the right direction.

If the Golden State chooses to seize the opportunity to redefine its tax structure through a flat tax policy rather than sink deeper in a fiscal abyss, then the California Moment can become an example, leading to a kairos-season for the whole nation.

The clock is ticking!

Lisa Falkenberg, in a May 20 Chronicle column, was near apoplectic as she wrote about “far-right board members” who are a threat to “critical thinking skills, public education, Darwin’s limitless contributions to science, and the opinions of educators, scientists and other people who have spent their lives accumulating invaluable expertise that can only make our schools better…”

In light of the looming dominance of the “rightwing” over the State Board, Ms. Falkenberg warns, “be afraid… Be very afraid.” The “rest of us” value those attributes the rightist cadres are out to destroy, declares Ms. Falkenberg with staggering elitist snobbery.

Actually, her indignation was unnecessary. A week later, the State Senate removed as chairman of the State Board of Education Don McLeroy, the Bryan dentist who believes in creationism and dares suggests students ought to learn about flaws in Darwin’s theory.

While some claimed leadership style was the issue, State Senator Steve Ogden saw it otherwise. “”I think Texas is watching here because I think, whether intentional or not, that will be a perception… that we are applying a religious test for serving in this state,” Ogden was quoted as saying in a Chronicle report by Gary Scharrer on May 28.

Without question, political correctness is a fundamental issue for many educators in contemporary society. Ironically, Ms. Falkenberg fretted that Dr. McLeroy and his ilk would stifle “critical thinking” in public schools. Actually it’s the elitists determined to enforce political correctness who are keeping out “critical thinking.”

Darwinian evolution is a major doctrine in the humanist religion at whose altars so many of America’s supplicants of political correctness bow. The keepers of the high PC religion apparently don’t want students to know that scientists like Henry Schaefer (nominated five times for the Nobel Prize), Fred Sigworth, Robert Kaita, Dean Kenyon, Carl Koval, William Dembski, Siegfried Scherer, David DeWitt, Theodore Liss, William Pelletier, Muzaffar Iqbal, Walter Bradley, Theodore Saito, Marvin Fritzler, Keith Delaplane, Clarence Fouche, Hugh Nutley, Fazal Rana, and 82 others signed a statement reading, “I am skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

And what of Michael Behe’s penetrating critique of Darwinism in his book, Darwin’s Black Box? What about eminent scientists like Hugh Ross who embrace dreaded creationism? What about Anthony Flew, the British scholar who abandoned atheism two years ago because he said the scientific evidence does not support it?

The Texas School Board matter is a piece of a much larger battle going on in America between two belief systems. One is founded on the original Ten Commandments, while the other offers a revisionist version: No absolutes, no God, no capitalism, no parents, no sacredness of life, no right or wrong, no defense, no borders, no laws, and socialism as the order of the day.

If you oppose this agenda, you’re a bad person (which is odd in a belief system that mostly rejects the idea of “sin”). A pro-life American is anti-women’s rights. Anyone opposed to gay marriage is homophobic and terminally bigoted. Support an aggressive strategy to fight terrorism and you’re a war-monger.

Those who hold such opinions are “intolerant,” while those who support abortion, homosexuality, pluralism and multi-culturalism are “tolerant.” In fact, contemporary pseudo-tolerance has actually become a mask for intolerance.

The Bible teaches genuine tolerance. “Forbearance” is a classical biblical word that can also be translated “tolerance.” In the New Testament’s original Greek, “tolerance” meant “to hold up,” as in putting up with one another. The Bible commands us to “forebear” others, and be patient with people differing from us. The aim is growth, maturity and the ability to come together to discover truth.

In Galatians 6:2, the Apostle Paul writes that we are to bear one another’s burdens. That signifies putting up with others who may even be disagreeable to us.

Jesus Himself modeled this. He dealt daily with people from all sorts of lifestyles. Prostitutes. Wretched politicians. Pompous religious-types. Deformed lepers. Blind beggars. Roman soldiers. He may not have approved of all the behaviors He encountered, but lovingly dealt with the individuals in humility, gentleness, respect and compassion.

Ethnic cleansing, abortion clinic violence, gay-bashing, bigotry, mean-spiritedness all sicken His heart. Whenever we treat another human being as inferior it reveals the pride residing in our hearts that needs to be displaced and replaced with His humility.

Tolerance is a virtue. We live in a pluralistic society. For example, it’s the tolerance our early culture learned in its biblically formed Judeo-Christian consensus that causes us today, in a spirit of tolerance, to give freedom for building mosques in American cities while countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran forbid churches.

To be a follower of Christ is to be a tolerant person, loving all people.

Sadly, “tolerance” has been redefined and turned into a trap. The implication from the pseudo-tolerant PC elitists is that you can’t have conviction and tolerance at the same time. Since in that worldview there is no transcendent God, there are no moral absolutes, no ultimate truth that is the standard for all other claims. Everything’s up for grabs. As Professor Alan Bloom put it years ago in his book, The Closing of the American Mind, the true enemy in the eyes of the pseudo-tolerant is the “true believer.”

No one would want to fly into Houston if Bush Intercontinental Airport changed its name to “Wild West International” and dropped all objective standards for approach and traffic control. Relativism is as illogical and absurd morally and philosophically as it is scientifically.

Biblically based tolerance teaches that we are to deal with all people with respect. But we are not to be tolerant in how we treat all ideas. Genuine tolerance means we must practice civility in relationships in society. However, reason and intellectual integrity require we treat some concepts as better than others. To argue that an idea is false, immoral or just plain outrageous is not intolerant, but in the spirit of “critical thinking” Ms. Falkenberg is afraid will be taken away by us “true believers.”

And that raises some chilling possibilities. The pseudo-tolerant have worked hard to silence the voices of those who challenge their belief. They have succeeded in marginalizing people who disagree with them–especially Evangelical Christians–by shoving our worldview from the public square whenever possible, as the School Board debacle shows, and making us appear as buffoons whenever possible.

What’s next?

Arrest and incarceration? That’s already happened in Sweden, where a pastor was arrested for preaching the Bible’s view of homosexuality. Many of us regard the push for “Hate Crimes” laws in America as a veiled attempt by the pseudo-tolerant to rein in free speech.

Elimination? If the “true believer” is the great enemy, if we’re such a threat to “critical thinking” and the cherished dogma of the pseudo-tolerant PC elitists, maybe we should, to borrow Ms. Falkenberg’s words, “be afraid… be very afraid.”

There is no contradiction.

Significant progress has been made through stem cell research in battling dozens of diseases. Interestingly almost all the breakthroughs came from adult stem cell research, which does not necessitate sacrifice of a human embryo.

In fact, as bioethics professor Ben Mitchell notes, “more than 70 treatments or cures are available using adult stem cells that do not require the destruction of any human embryos.”

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) come from existing body cells, like those comprising the skin. According to The Boston Globe, James Thomson, an iPSC researcher, said because of the breakthroughs human embryo stem cell research “will be abandoned by more and more labs.”

Medical News Today reported Thomson as saying the iPSCs “do all the things embryonic stem cells do,” and are “probably more clinically relevant than embryonic stem cells.”

“By comparison with the classical embryonic stem cell process, which requires us to use thousands of eggs, this is much more efficient, technically much easier, and it solves some of those more emotional issues,” said Australian expert Richard Boyd, in a Sydney Herald story.

Further, on March 31, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported on Dr. Andras Nagy, a Toronto scientist, who has pioneered a way to turn adult human skin cells into those similar to embryonic stem cells.

Nagy’s discovery, said CBC, is “a process that could eventually cure devastating maladies such as spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease or diabetes, to name a few.”

Even before iPSCs and Nagy’s discovery, Melissa Block and Joe Palca of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” reported on German research into mouse cells. Those coming from the testes of male mice can function like embryonic stem cells. “If the same holds true in humans, it could perhaps provide a controversy-free source of versatile cells for treating disease,” said Block and Palca.

So why the big push for embryonic stem cell research?

A recent chron.com article by State Rep. Ellen Cohen was headlined, ‘Let’s shine a light on stem cell debate.’ Her distress was over addition of language in the state budget prohibiting state funding of embryonic stem cell research.

I agree we need to “shine the light,” but perhaps not in the way Representative Cohen might think. When we do, we will find the answer is as old as human nature: Follow the money.

Fertility clinics pay women $5,000 and even up to $10,000 for their eggs. stem cell researchers, according to an MSNBC report, are forced to compensate women in the same range. To be fair, there are those in stem cell experimentation who see the crassness of merchandising a human egg, and are pushing for payment limited to a woman’s expenses–like having to miss work.

The ideal, of course, is to find women who will donate their eggs from a pure desire to advance research. But Dr. Robert Lanza, for one, has given up. Lanza, vice president of research and scientific development at Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., Alameda, California, tried for a year to get women to donate eggs without being paid. Only one woman was willing to donate her eggs without compensation.

Other research institutions, including one at Harvard, have had similar difficulty finding women willing to give eggs without payment.

Not only can eggs-for-stem-cell-research be personally lucrative, but states can benefit as well. State Senator Kirk Watson was concerned the language banning state money from embryonic stem cell research could hurt the state.

“We hold ourselves out to be a state that’s open to wanting to attract the greatest researchers in the world, but we send a very negative message with something of this nature,” Watson said, in a Chronicle story.

Hitler’s infamous experimenter, Mengele, couldn’t have said it better. Some will protest the comparison. However, Watson’s concern demonstrates the same utilitarian view of human life that led to the catastrophe of the Holocaust, Hitler’s grand attempt to improve the human genetic line by eliminating “weaker” races.

Watson seems to be saying that what really matters is what’s “best” for the state. Tyrants across history would nod agreement. It’s certainly not Watson’s aim to establish a tyranny, but it’s important not to argue ethical issues on sheer pragmatics.

In fact, Germany today has the most restrictive laws in Europe regarding embryonic stem cell research. That nation carries the memory of Mengele’s eugenics experiments, and, to its credit, doesn’t want to go down that road again.

There are those who believe there is no inherent value in a human life, and thus a human embryo can be destroyed with the banality of dicing an onion.
According to Princeton Professor Peter Singer, there might actually be conditions under which a baby pig is of greater value than a living human infant. If the piglet is “viable,” and the human not, then the animal is of greater practical value, goes Singer’s argument.

Viability in a human can be determined 28 days after birth, Singer and co-author Helga Kuhse wrote, in “Should the Baby Live?” At that point, a baby could be granted the same rights as an adult, they suggested.

Up to that point, the “neonate”–the tricky terminology that avoids the word, “baby”–could be terminated. The stark, truthful term is “infanticide.”

James Watson, who, with Francis Crick, discovered the DNA code, was a bit more generous. After winning the Nobel Prize, Watson was quoted as saying, “No one should be thought of as alive until about three days after birth.” Crick agreed. “No newborn should be declared human until it has passed certain tests regarding its genetic endowment, and if it fails these tests it forfeits the right to life,” he said.

We seem always at the edge of another holocaust. It’s urgent we understand that human life in a mother’s womb and human life in a Petri dish is the same, and of equal value.

Even some who place high value on human life say it doesn’t begin until birth. The Bible differs. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,” God says to Jeremiah, “and before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5) “You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb,” writes the Psalmist. (Psalm 139:13)

This worldview produced the greatest understanding of the dignity of human life in history. It’s the foundation for Western civilization’s liberties and opportunities. The Bible’s revelation of the worth of human life motivated the framers of our founding documents to assert the right to life as God-given, and foundational.

Why should we abandon this belief?

Some might protest that the Bible, for them, is not authoritative. Then what is the authority for determining when human life begins? If there is no absolute we are back in the old swamp of subjectivism, where one person’s opinion is as good as another.

Meanwhile, babies in the womb await the thumbs-up or thumbs-down, signaling whether they will live or die.

Establishment elites set cultural consensus. When they move away from the concept that places absolute value on human life, it’s only a matter of time until government-funded “embryo farms” become commonplace.

The politicians who drive for embryonic stem cell research cause government to push the whole enterprise in that direction. If the alternatives, like iPSC, are more efficient and effective, and if clinics, as James Thomson thinks, will increasingly abandon embryonic stem cell research, what sense does it make for politicians to pressure for government funding for that research?

So, let’s “shine the light” on the real forces that drive some politicians and other politically correct opinion-shapers to seek government funding for embryonic stem cell research, and let’s put the money in the alternatives that have already proven effective without sacrificing human life.

Actually, the Titanic went down in 1912 and the Bismarck was sunk by the British in 1941. What the two ships had in common was they both wallowed in seas of delusion.

Not even God could sink the Titanic, her designer supposedly said. The Nazis boasted there had never been such a mighty vessel as the Bismarck.

Clearly, faith in either of the ships was a sham.

As is confidence in current strategies to rescue us from sinking economies. After all, it was delusional financial practices that brought on the global recession, and now governments are offering more delusion to rescue us.

We are jumping one sinking ship for another.

The contemporary crisis was ignited when investors, lenders and borrowers dazzled one another with empty promises. The lenders lived happily under the delusion they could relax credit requirements and tease consumers into loans whose floating rates would surge in a mere two years.

Subprime borrowers lapped up the loans, sometimes concealing their own financial problems, and not reading the small print about the floating interest rates. Investors joined the feeding frenzy, buying up mortgages and their fictional derivatives, and taking the bait of inflated forecasts projected by companies wanting to keep their stock prices bobbing high on the waves.

The financial earthquake, way down deep where most economic sages couldn’t see, swirled upward and outward as a financial tsunami. Banks, insurance companies and scores of other institutions got caught in the turbulence.

The ship began to sink.

Now the government is putting us all on a vessel whose hull is as leaky as the Titanic’s after the iceberg gashed it. The Obama administration’s $3.6 trillion budget and $800 billion stimulus plan propose to spend money that doesn’t — and may never — exist to pay for financial promises and schemes proven empty as air.
The administration’s budget rests on the assumption the economy will grow faster than projections by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Presidents have sometimes preferred to stick their own finger in the air to try to conjure the direction and speed of future winds and waves, resulting in politically driven fiscal policies rather than factually sound forecasts.

Speaking of things to come — the administration’s budget will slap our kids and grandkids with a $15 trillion national debt — at least.

Meanwhile, the corporate brass on the upper decks who steered their ships into this mess are doing swimmingly thanks to the stimulus package. It’s the crew down in steerage that’s suffering. They don’t know “trickle down” any more than they can describe the taste of caviar.

It’s all delusion, about which Scripture provides a lot of insight. The Bible’s ancient wisdom is as fresh and relevant as if written just this morning.

Take, for example, Solomon’s wry observation that “the rich rules over the poor, and the borrower becomes the lender’s slave” (Proverbs 22:7). America may find out the hard way how true this is as nations like Communist China that own hefty chunks of our country’s debt begin tightening the chains.

St. Paul writes about “lusts and desires that spring from delusion” (Ephesians 4:22). Truth blows away delusionary smoke. Right now we need a powerful gale of it to rescue the sinking ships.

There might be much rejoicing among the opponents of free markets over a possible demise of capitalism. After all, they believe capitalism led to the enriching of the few at great cost to the masses, to paraphrase the Marxist mantra.

The hoorahs would turn to howls of anguish if capitalism’s opponents truly understood it.

The Catholic author and scholar Michael Novak, in a 2004 speech in Sri Lanka, discussed what he called the “virtues” of capitalism. “In practical terms,” he said, “neither the traditional economy of centuries past nor the failed socialist experiments of the 20th century came close to matching the productivity, wealth, and rising standards of living generated by the free and inventive economy.”

Novak told the Sri Lankan audience that “no other system so rapidly raises up the living standards of the poor, so thoroughly improves the conditions of life, or generates greater social wealth and distributes it more broadly. In the long competition of the last 100 years, neither socialist nor third-world experiments have performed as well in improving the lot of common people, paid higher wages, and more broadly multiplied liberties and opportunities.”

Democracy, he noted, cannot exist without capitalism’s free market philosophy. And both show the importance of a culture’s faith. Economist Arnold Kling noted, in TCS Daily, that “economists are gradually shifting the way we think about the determinants of economic well-being… we appear to be moving toward a focus on beliefs.”

Max Weber, in the early 20th century, saw that correlation, and wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Many have tried to refute Weber’s conclusions that Protestant Christianity inspired a highly productive work ethic, but correlation seems to have come from surprising sources.

For example, a 2003 Harvard study of 60 countries reported in The Christian Science Monitor, found there is a positive link between business success and religious belief, leading to economic prosperity. In 2004, according to the Monitor, another Harvard study found a direct link between faith and the work ethic, as Weber had contended decades earlier.

If capitalism is fading, it is not something to rejoice over. It could symbolize something far worse: the erosion of the belief system that produced the freest, most prosperous civilization in history–that of the Bible.

And the death of democracy.