 President Trump likes to pretend that he's the first person to ever think of denying due process to illegal aliens, but that's far from the case. America's history is sadly replete with attempts to deny immigrants the equal protection of the law. Fortunately, this is one area in which our Supreme Court has a remarkably good track record. The Court has touched on the question of the rights due to illegal aliens on many occasions, and I've put together a small sample of their findings to help with refuting the claims made by Trump and his supporters.
0 Comments
 In one of his “false friend” videos, Mark Ward attempts to prove that modern versions do a better job than the KJV of translating I Corinthians 15:19. The KJV translates this verse as: If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. The NKJV translates it as: If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable. Ward claims that pitiable is a better word choice here because miserable has supposedly changed over the years to mean something different today than it meant when the KJV was translated in 1611. Unfortunately for Ward, his attempts to prove this claim failed miserably (pun intended). Every single piece of evidence he presented actually argues against him.  President Trump’s denial of due process for non-citizens is not without precedent. The same thing was attempted by President Van Buren in the mid-nineteenth century. In that case, a group of about forty slaves were being transported from Cuba when they rebelled against the ship’s company and attempted to sail back to Africa. The former slaves strayed into American waters where they were captured and taken ashore. Van Buren attempted to circumvent the courts and send the escaped slaves back to Spanish Cuba without trial. His plans were foiled, and John Quincy Adams defended the rights of the former slaves before the Supreme Court. The arguments made by Adams have direct bearing on President Trump’s current immigration policies, and I’ve compiled the following excerpts from a speech that was more than eight hours in length.
 Over the years, I’ve had many people share a video with me that claims to use gumballs to illustrate the problem with allowing large numbers of immigrants into America. I watched the video several years ago and wrote out some thoughts to share with a friend. I’ve shared basically that same response many times since then, and I’ve finally gotten smart enough to copy and paste it into a blog article. Here is my response to the video Immigration, World Poverty and Gumballs featuring Roy Beck and produced by NumbersUSA:  My entire life, I've heard arguments over the words "modest apparel" in I Timothy 2:9, so I decided to do my own study of them. I started with the Liddell and Scott lexicon entry for katastole (apparel) and followed it through with the entries for katastello, kata, and stello. I compared the various concepts with as much of the context of the examples as I could find, and then cross checked everything with several other lexicons.
 In March of 2019, Personhood Alabama made headlines worldwide when a judge granted their request to allow a father to represent an aborted child in a wrongful death suit against the clinic that had killed her. The suit was eventually dropped at the request of the father who faced an incredible amount of backlash from the community, but it remains the only case in American history to win the right for an aborted child to sue her killers.  I originally thought this article would have a different title. When I decided to do an article on the word prevent, I fully expected my title to be something like “Prevent Is an Actual False Friend in the KJV.” I chose that as my working title because everyone that I have ever read or listened to regarding the word prevent in I Thessalonians 4:15 has claimed that it doesn’t have the same meaning that we ascribe to that word today. However, the more I studied this word and the underlying Greek word, the more convinced I became that prevent is the best word to use both here in I Thessalonians and in every other passage where it occurs in the KJV.  My wife recently led her class through a word study on worship, and I asked her to share her notes here for the benefit of my readers.
Many times, we look to our culture to answer questions about how we should interact with God. But every culture on the planet has sinful influences, so when we want to know more about God, we should look only to the Bible. A comment in my Sunday School class about the different ways people worship God led to this word study using the Masoretic and TR translated with KJV. Original Documents Verify That Birthright Citizenship Was the Standard in 18th Century America2/24/2025  One of the major factors that led to the War of 1812 was the practice of impressment. Under English law, a ship of the British navy could board any vessel and force just about any able-bodied British subjects on that vessel into naval service. This practice often led to the impressment of American citizens into the British navy if Americans traveling abroad could not prove their citizenship. Because of this, America passed the 1796 Act for the Relief and Protection of American Seamen, which was designed to protect American sailors from being impressed into the navies of foreign nations. Part of that protection consisted of giving American sailors certificates of citizenship to show foreign governments that they were in fact citizens of the United States. Here is the text of the 1796 act requiring these certificates to be made available:  Mark Ward’s handling of the word let is a deliberate attempt to manipulate his audience into accepting a falsehood. This is a textbook case of deceptive framing—where key details are selectively presented, linguistic meaning is distorted, and critical context is omitted to shape a misleading narrative. Ward doesn’t address this supposed “false friend” very often. Apart from a passing reference in an article, I’ve only been able to find a single thirty-second segment devoted to this word in one of Ward’s videos, but the amount of deception that Ward managed to cram into that tiny segment of video is literally mind-blowing.
|
Bill Fortenberry is a Christian philosopher and historian in Birmingham, AL. Bill's work has been cited in several legal journals, and he has appeared as a guest on shows including The Dr. Gina Show, The Michael Hart Show, and Real Science Radio.
Contact Us if you would like to schedule Bill to speak to your church, group, or club. "Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning." (Proverbs 9:9)
Search
Topics
All
Archives
December 2025
|
RSS Feed