John Stonestreet – Page 4

A Double Standard on Terrorism: Guest Column

Jun 9, 2025John StonestreetTerrorismTerrorism

In November 2022, Anderson Lee Aldrich killed five people and injured 25 others in a shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, CO. Aldrich identified as nonbinary, used they/them pronouns, had multiple violent encounters with law enforcement, threatened to kill Christians, and dabbled in the gay lifestyle. However, in a matter of hours, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and multiple other news outlets and commentators implicated Focus on the Family, either directly or indirectly, for “creating a culture” that led to this violence. A few weeks later, the campus of the ministry was vandalized with the words, “Their Blood Is On Your Hands.”

The false accusation was based on the notion of “stochastic violence,” that saying the wrong thing about a group or a behavior creates an environment that can lead to violence. Similarly, political conservatives were accused of “stochastic violence” when a homeless, mentally ill man attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer.

So far, no one has been accused of stochastic violence after Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian-born man living in Colorado Springs illegally, threw Molotov cocktails into a group of peaceful pro-Israel demonstrators while yelling, “Free Palestine!” At least 12 people were burned in the attack, including a holocaust survivor. After the attack, the father of five, who had planned on dying that day, calmly and directly revealed that he was a committed antisemitic Muslim who had been planning the attack for over a year.

The same voices that were certain that a Christian ministry which has never advocated violence in its history was responsible for the attack on Club Q seemed lost about any related motives or responsibility in this case. This, even though since October 2023, when Hamas militants killed nearly 1,200 Jews in Israel in a horrific attack, protestors on American streets and college campuses have been calling for violence on Jews everywhere. Even in Colorado Springs, in fact, some Colorado College students set up a protest village, refused to go to class, and chanted slogans that meant more than protestors realized.

And now, the chant “Globalize the Intifada” has become a reality. In just the last few weeks, two Israeli embassy workers were murdered on the street in Washington D.C., the Molotov cocktail attack was carried out in Boulder, and—in a story mainstream media outlets largely ignored—a Muslim man in Michigan plotted to massacre kids at a Jewish daycare. Thankfully, his plan was uncovered before he was able to inflict harm.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it in a post on X, “Antisemitism is not just rising, its metastasizing.” Everyone should be concerned. And yet, we are being told that what should concern us most is potential negative backlash against Muslims and Arab immigrants, not targeted violence against Jews, which is clearly on the rise.

This is a clear example of the “Critical Theory mood” that clouds the thought of secular and religious progressives. One consequence of this view is that the “good guys” and the “bad guys” of any situation are pre-determined. If violence happens against the “bad guys,” they somehow deserve it. If the “good guys” commit violence, they are justified because of how oppressed and mistreated they are.

The Critical Theory mood was already in place at Thomas McLaren School, where some of the children of the Boulder terrorist attended. When Soliman’s daughter, recently named one of the “Best and Brightest” seniors in Colorado Springs, started an Arab club at the school, school officials allowed the club to make regular announcements to the student body and meet inside where they highlighted Arab culture and occasionally discussed the Koran as part of the Muslim faith. But when a group of students opened a Decision Point chapter at the school, a Christian club for students to talk about their faith and the Bible, school officials did not allow them to meet in the building. They were forced to meet outside, even in bad weather.

When the Critical Theory mood leads to the disenfranchising of students, it’s wrong and unfair. However, the stakes are way higher when these bad ideas cloud our collective ability to recognize or speak truthfully about the dramatic increase of antisemitic violence. The reaction to the Boulder attack has been, in large part, propaganda. As Thaddeus Williams pointed out, “Propaganda offers a highly edited history that paints the most damning picture it can of a given people group … and gives us a way to blame all of life’s troubles on that damnable group and its members.”

Christians are called to be discerning and to defend truth anytime it is contested, but especially when lives are at stake. That time is now.

Trust the Science on Life: Guest Column

May 19, 2025John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

The slogan “trust the science” has been used for years to push any number of causes, many of them controversial, from Covid policies to transgender medical practices. Used in substitution for making an argument, “trust the science” signals one’s intellectual credibility without having to prove it, preempting debate and shutting down any opposition. After all, how can one argue with Science?

At this point, it should be obvious to us all that those who most loudly repeat the mantra are also most likely to put ideology before science, not the other way around. Consider the policy and corporate profiteering enabled by claiming scientific consensus about human-caused global warming. Now, an increasing number of scientists question that global warming is even happening, much less is human caused. This, despite the extensive way that federal and state policy was reoriented around cutting carbon emissions.

Though scientists do not agree about climate change, it turns out they do (mostly) agree about when life begins. A 2021 survey found 96% of 5,577 biologists surveyed from 1058 academic institutions agree that human life begins at conception. This is the kind of consensus that activists on many other issues would love to have, but don’t. Shouldn’t our laws and public policies reflect this “science,” also? Wouldn’t scientists who agree that life begins at conception be calling for us to “trust the science” and oppose abortion?

No. In this area, when “the biology” collides with the cultural priorities of sexual freedom, there are two common responses. First is deflection, citing something about “women’s rights to their own bodies,” an idea about which the science we are supposed to trust has nothing to say. Second is an assertion that the preborn, while a human life, is not yet a person with moral status or rights.

Of course, in this context, the concept of personhood is utilized with no clear definition. And “the science,” which tells us when life begins, is also of no help here. What scientifically study-able aspect of a human being makes a person “a person”?

Different worldviews offer different answers to this, ranging from birth to self-awareness. And yet, in the end, it tends to be Christians who are accused of imposing their religious, non-scientific views through law by others who are imposing their own religious, non-scientific distinctions between a human being and a person.

The implications of this debate go well beyond abortion. Historically, whenever some humans are defined as non-persons, other humans are defined as non-persons. This is the story of how those with dementia, or Down Syndrome, or any number of other mental or physical conditions have been treated throughout much of history, including in much of the world today. Once the powerful assume the right to define which humans qualify as persons, whether by legal means or more broadly across a culture, the list always tends to be reduced further. This is the slope down which Canada is sliding, where assisted suicide has devolved from a rare option for the terminally ill to standard practice justified for almost any reason.

The essential question to anyone proclaiming, “trust the science,” is What is science? Is it a means, enabled by God’s common grace, for human beings to better understand and redeem a fallen world? Or is it a tool of control?

Science tells us that human life begins at conception. Both natural law and biblical ethics teach that every human life is valuable. The best way forward, then, is to see every human being as having rights that should be protected, from the beginning of life to natural death. This is an area in which we should definitely “follow the science.”

We’ve Seen the Dire Wolf Movie and it Doesn’t End Well: Guest Column

May 13, 2025John StonestreetEthicsBioethics, Ethics, Medical Ethics

Recently, TIME magazine announced that the biotechnology company Colossal has resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct thousands of years ago. “This is Remus,” read the caption over a photo of a robust-looking white wolf. “He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years.” According to Colossal, this is a first step to resurrecting other long-extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth.

As it turns out, the headline is an exaggeration. Remus, his brother Romulus, and their sister Khaleesi contain no DNA from the dire wolf. Rather, they are modern gray wolves with genes tweaked by the company to mirror the DNA of the dire wolf. And they were more than likely engineered to look like the fictional giant wolves from HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

The most common comment on the TIME story was some variation of the sentiment, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well.” Most people likely had in mind Jurassic Park, in which a company uses genetic technology to bring back dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well. In fact, the seventh installment of the franchise will release this summer, each containing the same message as the 1993 original: Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

Dozens of movies reflect the dangers of genetic tinkering, human reengineering, and other forms of scientific hubris. From The Island of Dr. Moreau to Gattaca to Planet of the Apes to The Island, not to mention about half of all zombie movies ever made, we’ve been thoroughly warned about the illusion of human control over nature.

Maybe this is just the story of directors sprucing up a plot, or perhaps a surprising amount of wisdom in the arts has been overlooked or ignored by scientists and tech pioneers. A popular meme from Twitter quotes an imaginary science fiction author saying, “In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale,” immediately followed by a tech company exec announcing: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” Even more, there is a strange disconnect between pop culture’s ability to anticipate the negative consequences of our scientific advances and our overall willingness to volunteer as guinea pigs.

This is as true for Artificial Intelligence as for medical technology. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to A.I. to Terminator to I, Robot, to Avengers: Age of Ultron, we’ve been warned about AI. Wall-E warned how we’d lose our humanity if we relied on technology to solve all our problems. Ready Player One warned against getting lost in virtual reality. Children of Men depicted what would happen if society stopped having enough babies. Minority Report questioned the justice of a surveillance state.

What all these movies have in common is that their warning has been ignored in the real world. People will jokingly say, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well,” but we continue to adopt every new technology that promises comfort, convenience, and control without a serious discussion about purpose or boundaries.

Even when the warnings aren’t exactly accurate or even realistic, these films often raise questions worth asking. And yet, our curiosity wanes once the credits roll. As in the Terminator movies, artificial intelligence continues to gobble up vast areas of life and human creativity without much protest. And despite all the Jurassic Park references, Colossal’s wolves will likely be the first of many bioengineering projects that prioritize profit and publicity over the welfare of animals or humans.

You won’t hear me say this often, but it’s time to pay closer attention to Hollywood. Despite the garbage that comes from the entertainment industry, there’s a willingness to question “progress” that is lacking at MIT, medical labs, and Silicon Valley.

C.S. Lewis wrote that reason is the organ of understanding, and imagination is the organ of meaning. We need both, which is why we should listen when someone asks, even in film, “What could go wrong?” Asking whether we should do something is a skill that should not be extinct.