🏛️ Apologetics Fact

Helium escape rates: The radioactive decay of uranium and thorium produces helium gas. Helium is a noble gas (it doesn't react with other elements) and is also the second lightest known element. Because of these properties, any helium trapped in rocks should escape after no more than 100,000 years. However, rocks alleged to be millions of years old often are found with trapped helium. The entrapped helium casts serious doubt on the claims that these rocks are millions of years old.

🗣️ Quote

"Throughout the history of the west, communities of transcendence have pinioned the nation from above, while the marital and domestic bonds of family loyalty have pinioned it from below." — R. R. Reno (Preface to Idols for Destruction)

🏅 Person: John MacArthur (1939-2025)

Pastor at Grace Community Church for 56 years, MacArthur was the most influential Christian theologian and pastor of the generation. He believed strongly in literal Biblical interpretation, including societally unpopular issues such as marriage, gender roles, qualifications for pastors, young earth creationism, and more. During his time as pastor, Grace Community grew to be viewed by many as the model for a Christian church. Hundreds of churches were planted either directly or indirectly from Grace Community or from graduates of The Master's Seminary, which MacArthur helped found in 1986. Aside from his role at Grace and Master's, MacArthur also wrote or contributed to over 150 books, many of which can be found in church libraries across the world.

📕 Book: The Law

The latest read for Locus Lectorum, here are the members' thoughts on this brief volume written in 1850 by Frederic Bastiat:
• Lane: 9/10 -- An incredibly prescient take-down of socialism and government overreach, while also proving something good can come from France after all.
• Isaac: 9/10 -- History has proven time and again that socialist policies never pan out. The Law accurately and succinctly predicts this decades before the first socialist experiment began.
• Caleb: 9/10 -- A wonderfully brief while surprisingly comprehensive analysis of the logical relationship between citizen and state.
• Josiah: 8/10 -- Bastiat predicts the problems created by socialism and statism while simultaneously providing one of the most clear frameworks ever put in writing for a functional libertarian system of law and governance.
• Mark: 8/10 -- This book does a fantastic job laying out the fundamentals of human rights and how the law is often overstepping its boundaries, to plunder the individual, instead of fulfilling its purpose of protecting society.
• Zack: 8/10 -- Although Bastiat's foundational views on the law and human nature are flawed, he nonetheless makes a logical and extremely compelling argument on the purpose of law and government, with the best portions of the book being thorough dismantlings of socialism.
• Calvin: 7.5/10 -- The Law is a readable overview of foundational ideas like legal plunder, the role of government, and individual liberty. Bastiat offers a timeless warning about socialism and state overreach long before history revealed their full consequences.
• Sam: 7/10 -- A succinct treatise on foundational elements of the law to Western society, Bastiat combines punchy takedowns of his contemporaries with prescient criticisms of socialism and the art of legal taking aka plunder.