Should pets be treated better than unborn children? Americans have the right to kill their unborn children. Should the Supreme Court also grant them the right to kill their pets?

Michael Vick lost his NFL career and faces prison and fines for funding cruelty to animals. He was publicly scorned and harshly criticized. Had he funded the killing of unborn children, he would have been considered a hero by a great many Americans. Why the double standard?

Since pets are private property and are dependent on their owners for food, care, and protection, should their owners be given the right to choose? How is pet owners' right to choose different from a woman's right to choose?

You can have an exciting world travel experience by visiting any Ten Thousand Villages store. Ten Thousand Villages is a nonprofit organization and a chain of shops that carry handcrafted items by artisans from around the world.

It was started by Edna Ruth Byler after she visited a sewing class in Puerto Rico and discovered a group of women with exceptional talent hand sewing beautiful textiles. She was inspired to begin to find artisans in developing countries and help them market their work in North America.

Today Ten Thousand Villages has more than 100 stores and conducts more than 200 community festivals each year. They also have a great web site at: tenthousandvillages.com where you can purchase their products.

MLK Day commemorates a movement that brought down 350 years of government sponsored, public injustice in America. From their first introduction into America in 1619 at Jamestown, until the passing of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960’s, African-Americans were openly persecuted, terrorized, and abused by our democracy.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was the inspirational leader of hundreds of thousands of brave Americans who boldly said “enough is enough” and courageously stood for “liberty and justice for all.” Some (even little children) paid the ultimate price for their stand for freedom. The Civil Rights movement knocked down the government supported walls of injustice and terrorism. For this we should all be thankful.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said: “Let nobody fool you, all the loud noises we hear today are nothing but the death groans of the dying system. The old order is passing away, the new order is coming into being. But whenever there is anything new there are new responsibilities. As we think of this coming new world, we must think of the challenges we confront and the new responsibilities that stand before us.”

The old order fell in the 1960’s, but the new order is not yet with us. Studies show that there is still as much racial segregation today, in housing and schools, as there was in the Jim Crow days. A large percentage of African-Americans are sill overwhelmed by poverty, violence, limited opportunity, low self-esteem, drugs, depression, and despair. Innocent children, who have no say in the matter, are growing up in desperate circumstances right here in America.

But what can we do? We can all make an effort to make friends with people of a different color. We can give more than money (money has not solved the problem). We can give our time, our friendship, our listening ear, our compassion.

Why should we settle for segregated schools, churches, neighborhoods, and clubs? We all have a lot to learn from and to teach those of a different color than ourselves. Nowadays, we will not be terrorized or lynched for crossing racial lines. So why do we stay put in our racial comfort zones and talk about “them” and wonder why “they” do what they do? Perhaps, as Dr. King said, we should all accept our personal responsibilities to build a new order.

If human beings are nothing but products of nature, as many people insist nowadays, why aren’t the things humans produce natural? If a beaver dam is natural, why isn’t Hoover Dam natural?

Why should man-made mean any more than beaver-made or fox-made, if both man and beavers and foxes are mere products of evolution? Why don’t we consider buildings, trucks, sidewalks, colleges, stadiums, garbage, governments, and polution to be natural things?

The answer is obvious. As human beings, we are not part of nature. We are outside it. We act independently of it. We bend nature to conform to our will. How could something that we can dominate and manipulate have created us?

The things we produce are not natural things because we are not natural. We are supernaturally created in the image of the living God.

Is it possible to have a book without an author? You can have a book with several authors who collaborated or with various authors who wrote different sections of the book. You can have a book with an unknown author.

But can you have a book with no author or authors at all? Why not?

British intellectual, C.S. Lewis, wrote: “If there were an idiot who thought plays existed on their own, without an author, our belief in Shakespeare would not be much affected by his saying that he had studied all the plays and never found Shakespeare in them.” If you can’t have plays and/or books without authors, how can we have things far more complex and profound without an author?

How can life and love, peace and joy, compassion and sacrifice, courage and principle, logic and intelligence, beauty and order, conscience and consciousness, mathematics and science — how can all these things exist without an author?