“Let’s Go Boatin’” still rings in my ear; and I can still vividly remember the first time I heard Tom Vail’s call when we launched our trip from Lee’s Ferry in the Marble Canyon on June 23rd (pictured above, the Vermilion Cliffs are in front of us). Though it has been over a week since I have returned from our 8-day/7-night white water rafting trip on Colorado River, Tom’s typical call to get on the boats is permanently etched in my mind. In a rough analogous way to Pavlov’s dog, Tom’s call moved us to “salivate” for boarding our boats to begin another informative aspect of our white water rafting trip down 187 miles of the Colorado River, starting at Lee’s Ferry in Marble Canyon and concluding at Whitmore Wash in the Grand Canyon. While I could write many posts about this valuable trip, I plan to highlight some key items from our trip in this post and a few subsequent posts.

Canyon Ministries in cooperation with Answers in Genesis, through the gracious gifts of donors, gave scholarship to 23 College and Seminary professors. Since the aim of this trip was to influence professors, it was described as the “2008 Grand Canyon Christian Scholars’ Trip.” More specifically, the purpose of the trip was to influence College and Seminary professors, who seemingly had more post-graduate degrees than Carter has liver pills, that the geological evidence in the Grand Canyon is best explained as a result of the universal flood in Noah’s lifetime. Besides the 23 professors, 5 additional scholars came on the trip to provide biblical and geological discussions. The following is a picture of our august body after the trip.

The following picture is of the team of five instructors who gave us a biblical and geological education on this trip. Pictured from left to right are David Coppedge (NASA’s team lead system administrator for the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena), Bill Barrick (Old Testament Professor at The Master’s Seminary), Andrew Snelling (Geologist par excellence, Director of Research with AIG-US), Tom Vail (director of Canyon Ministries; my impression from some river rafters is that Tom is something of a legend among river rafter), and Terry Mortenson (lecturer & researcher with AIG). All of these men are experts in their fields.

The expertise that these five men brought to the trip was invaluable. Since “let’s go boatin’” is permanently etched in my mind, I thought it appropriate to use this as a title for this series of posts. Here is a picture of Tom leading the way down the Colorado River.

Though I cannot forget Tom giving candid directions laced with humor, articulating geological insight about the canyon on a raft, climbing the canyon like a seasoned mountain goat, testifying how God in his sovereign grace saved him, and instructing how Noah’s flood provides the best explanation for the rock formations in the Grand Canyon, what I remember most vividly is “Let’s Go Boatin’” (for some other blogs describing aspects of our trip, click here for Bill Barrick’s blog, here and here for Del Tackett’s). With my next few posts, I will share with your a few of the thrills of white water rafting, geological data and theological observations.

Since I returned home late last Sunday night from my 8-Day Grand Canyon River Trip, I am just getting caught up on some reading since I had access neither to the internet nor to a cell phone. In scanning over some blogs that I normally read, I found a “fair and balanced” article on the upcoming presidential elections.

Many people are just waking up to the fact that this is an election year. John Mark Reynolds has posted an article that looks at the strengths and weaknesses of both presidential candidates. In the end, Reynolds notes that there are three areas where the next president will have an impact: the energy issue, judicial appointments and the war in Iraq. Though Reynolds clearly notes that McCain is not the conservative ideal, he indicates that he is voting for McCain because of the war and the courts. Because of the gravity of this election year, you will profit by reading “If You Are Just Starting To Think About This Election.”

“Politically speaking, Susan Speakman is a different kind of evangelical,” writes John M. Broder of the The New York Times. “Mrs. Speakman, 59, a pastor and educator at Bethany Presbyterian Church in Bridgeville, Pa., an activist evangelical church southwest of Pittsburgh, backs Senator Barack Obama in the presidential race. Along with her 23-year-old son, Stephen, she supports Mr. Obama because of his stands on the Iraq war and matters of social justice. The two of them plan to spread the word in their community and beyond.” This female church leader “is one of thousands of evangelical Christians and so-called faith voters whom the Obama campaign is recruiting in a major effort to connect with a part of the electorate that accounts for an estimated quarter of the voting population and helped elect George W. Bush president twice.” To find out more about Obama’s strategy and appeal to evangelical leaders, continue reading Obama Courting Evangelicals Once Loyal to Bush - NYTimes.com.

However, before evangelical Christians are seduced by Obama, they need to consider that his moral positions are antithetical to a Christian ethic. For example, they need to consider that Obama has the most liberal voting record in the Senate, is committed to appointing activist judges and approves the formal sanction of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Further, they should ask why Hamas is hoping for an Obama victory.

Though some so-called Evangelicals are concerned about “social justice,” what has happened to moral justice? For example, what has happened to moral justice for those created in the divine image but cannot articulate they want justice. I am referring to those unborn children who will be murdered through the medical practice of partial-birth abortion (for some basic biblical information on abortion, see my concise paper “A Biblical Understanding of Abortion“). Obama’s clearly articulated support for partial-birth abortion should wave a huge red flag for anyone with a biblical ethic. Every Christian with any moral fiber needs to listen to Obama’s unambiguous support for partial-birth abortion in his 2007 address to Planned Parenthood. To listen to his speech, go to Barack Obama at Planned Parenthood 2007. This address speaks volumes. May God help God-fearing people to use biblical discernment in the upcoming election.

Before leaving on my 8-day Grand Canyon river trip, I checked the American Solutions’ website; and, as of 5:25 AM, 1,086,047 people have signed the “Drill Now. Drill Here. Pay Less” petition. Since my last post at 9:48 PM last evening, this means that 4,956 people in a little less than six hours have signed this petition. Hopefully, the swelling number of people signing the petition will put some pressure on Congress. And, if not, we need to vote some of these Congressmen out of office. To sign the petition, click here.

If you do not see the issues clearly, you need to listen to Newt Gingrich discuss three ways to solve America’s energy solutions (this is less than 4 minutes): “Y3 Ways to Lower Gas Prices.”

The Chinese have forged a deal with the Cuban government to start drilling for oil near Key West, Florida. As our Congress continues to hopelessly debate the issue about offshore drilling for oil, the Chinese are taking advantage of a golden opportunity. As Bill Mayer, in the American Free Press, reports,

While Washington dithers over exploiting oil and gas reserves off the coast of Florida, China has seized the opportunity to gobble up these deposits, which run throughout Latin America, the Caribbean and along the U.S. Gulf coast.

The Chinese have forged a deal with Cuban leader Fidel Castro to explore and tap into massive oil reserves almost within sight of Key West, Florida. At the same time, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who controls the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, is making deals to sell his country???s oil to China, oil that is currently coming to the United States.

To continue reading Mayer’s “China Starts Oil Drilling off Flordia,” click here.

I noticed the American Solutions’ “Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less” petition now has 1,081,091 signatures. To read about the latest news with this petition, go here. And, if you have not signed this petition yet, you need to do it now by clicking this link.

John McCain has recently taken a step toward the right position on lifting the ban on offshore oil drilling though in my opinion he has not gone far enough. However, Barack Obama has remained consistent with his position as the most liberal Democrat in the Senate by remaining opposed to offshore drilling. Today’s editorial page of the National Review Online supports lifting the ban on drilling for offshore oil.

John McCain is finally starting to exploit Barack Obama???s weakness on the energy issue. With gasoline topping $4 per gallon, McCain reversed his stance on offshore drilling and called for Congress to lift a 27-year-old moratorium on coastal energy exploration. With this shift, McCain has put himself on the same side as two-thirds of the American people, according to a recent poll. Obama, meanwhile, has said that he “would have preferred a gradual adjustment” toward $4 per gallon gasoline, but otherwise he seems amenable to it ??? as we would be, if that $4 price reflected market conditions instead of government restriction of the energy supply.

Lifting the ban on offshore drilling won???t increase supply right away, but would signal to oil speculators that the U.S. is serious about increasing domestic production, long smothered under regulatory and tax practices that discourage exploration and the expansion of our refining capacity. That could immediately put downward pressure on the price of oil and alone would do more to reduce the price at the pump than anything Barack Obama has proposed. But McCain should go even further.

To continue reading this article, go to “Lift the Ban.”

Something needs to be done to correct the foolishness of our Congress’ opposition to offshore drilling???the vast majority of this opposition comes from Democrats. Let me again suggest that, if you have not signed Americans Solutions’ “Drill Here! Drill Now! Pay Less!” petition, now is the time to do this. As of this morning, 956,681 people have signed it, and this number is growing while I write this post. To sign this, click here. In addition, United States Rep. Lynn Westmoreland is circulating a pledge in Congress to increase United States oil production to lower our gas prices. So that you can identify these Congressman to make informed votes this fall, go to Rep. Westmoreland’s webpage House members who signed pledge to increase U.S. oil. Friends, now is the time to act and not tomorrow.

This morning I read a few more articles about Congressional gridlock on the issue of utilizing American oil resources. According to Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, the federal Minerals Management Service estimates that “86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas are locked up and untouchable just off our shores.” Locked up by whom? It is neither the UN nor big oil companies. It is our Congress. As Steigerwald, goes on to note “Rep. John Peterson, a Republican from upstate Pennsylvania whose crusade to fix America’s broken energy policy has brought him the interplanetary enmity of environmentalists, has made it his mission to slay that foolish rider.” The only thing that Peterson wants “to do is get Congress to allow America to do what every other sensible modern country on Earth from Norway to New Zealand has been doing for decades — open our deep-sea energy reserves to safe, environmentally sensitive development.” To continue reading this article, go to Drill now, drill here, pay less - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.” After you finish reading this article, check out this video from the Wall Street Journal. Finally and more importantly, after you have read the cited article in this post and have viewed the short video, I highly recommend that you sign this petition and join the 787,593 people who have already signed this petition. Friends, we may have some fools in Congress but we not need share in their foolishness.

Gas prices are killing me. Every time I get gas I feel like I am being violated. My infuriation grows as gas prices increase. What exacerbates my frustration is the gridlock in congress. To begin correcting the problem about excessively growing gas prices, I signed the petition at American Solutions. The objective of this petition is to to bring an awareness to congress of the advantages in drilling for oil within the continental US and the surrounding regions. The petition says: “We, therefore, the undersigned citizens of the United States, petition the U.S. Congress to act immediately to lower gasoline prices (and diesel and other fuel prices)* by authorizing the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries.” To sign the petition, go American Solutions - Petitions.

Though I have some level of concern about my stewardship of the environment as an outworking of the dominion mandate in Genesis 1, I am convinced that the hurricane force of the current global warming frenzy is unbiblical. Some of our politicians and the news media have elevated global warming to a virtual apocalyptic nightmare that may have some drastic influences on our standard of living. Since all of life is in the hands of an absolutely sovereign God, the heavens and earth will not be destroyed until he choses (2 Pet 3:12). However, until that time, let me suggest that we attempt to think biblically. For example, Genesis 8:22 contains a divine promise: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”

Since I am somewhat cynical about global warming (for more on my cynicism about anthropogenic global warming, click here and here), I have been sardonically following this frenzy for some time and have noticed that the news media does not generally promote sources that work against the doomsday approach of the global warming activists like Al Gore. Here is an article that provides some caution that will hopefully take some of the force out of the hurricane of global warming.

On May 18, an article by S. Fred Singer was posted on the web about the misplaced and potentially costly results from the current Global Warming scare. Singer’s purpose “is to show that this concern is misplaced, that human activities are not influencing the global climate in a perceptible way, and that, in any case, very little can be done about global climate change. It is unstoppable; we should not even try to influence it. Climate will continue to change, as it always has in the past, both warming and cooling on different time scales and for different reasons, completely unrelated to any human action.” He further argues that modest warming has beneficial effects. Singer insightfully points out that “many climate scientists, including those working on the report of the UN-sponsored IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] have pointed out that the greenhouse computer models all show a global temperature increase. But the two dozen or so major GH models in the world all give different warming rates, depending on the assumptions that are fed into the model.”

It is disappointing that few have observed the obvious disparity between the computer-generated patterns and those that are observed “and drawn the obvious conclusion that current climate models cannot simulate properly the processes of the real atmosphere and that the anthropogenic effect on climate predicted by models are still too small to be noticeable.” To get the full impact of this article, continue reading Dr. Singer’s “The Global Warming Debate” (HT: John Hinderaker).

I had completely forgotten the above picture until it somehow surfaced at my son Bob’s wedding in 1999. This picture brings back many fond memories. In the spring semester of 1981 while I was doing my ThD work at Grace Theological Seminary, I dropped out of school for a semester because my wife needed surgery. We were as poor as church mice and had only one inefficient car. As a consequence, I would walk about a mile to work in the early hours of the morning. Because of the cold northern Indiana winters, I grew the beard to protect my face from the cold. Though life was tough, this was a great time for our family for life did not have an excessive number of embellishments. In its simplest form, life was about the family getting dad through school. What had great importance for my wife and I was raising our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. As I have watched family values in the US quickly erode over the last fifteen to twenty years, a Barack Obama presidency may cause this erosion to be complete.

I use the above picture because it reminds me about the importance of my family. Since I live in Michigan, a blue state, I know Christians who are “purgatory”-bent on voting Democrat (btw, I do not believe in purgatory, it is my substitute rhetorical device), even though the party values of the Democrats are biblically bankrupt. To be sure, I am repulsed by the scandals of a few Republicans; however, believers must vote for the basic platform of a political party that best preserves the Judaeo-Christian ethic our forefathers intended for the US. This is one election that I pray that my Democrat Christian friends reconsider how they vote. Some may say, I see how liberal Obama is so I will not vote. This would be disastrous because to not vote is to vote for Obama (another undesirable alternative would be to vote for a third party candidate, since it is likewise a vote for Obama). Furthermore, how could a genuine Christian even entertain the thought of voting for Barack Obama for president? Not only does he have one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, but his commitment to appoint activist judges may ruin the core values of the United States. Though he has more problems than two I have mentioned, what currently grieves me is a report that I read last night by Michael Farris where he maintains that Obama approves of the formal sanction of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In his own words, “Obama supports the ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that would have disastrous consequences for the American family. This treaty would be, according to our Constitution, part of the Supreme law of the land. And in the U.S. international treaties override state law.” You need to read the full article by Farris: “Obama Knows Best: Elitism Threatens Parental Rights.”