Comment on La Sierra University Responds to anti-Creation Bond Issue by David Read.
@Holly Pham: Boilerplate may or may not be enforceable, depending upon a variety of factors (chief among which is how often the attorney producing the boilerplate updates his forms based upon the most recent case law and statutory changes).
The thing is that the prohibited use covenant at issue in this case is not optional, or heedlessly included just because it was in some attorney’s form book or in the attorney’s previous bond deal documentation. This language had to be included because of the CA Supreme Court’s recent (2007) ruling (which Sean has very helpfully linked to at the top of this thread). Prior to 2007, “pervasively sectarian” schools could not issue tax-exempt bonds; it was unconstitutional. But the 2007 case made it constitutionally permissible to issue the bonds, and also specified on what conditions a school could issue those bonds.
So there’s nothing “boilerplate” about the prohibited use covenant in La Sierra’s bonds. It is required to be there by a case that came down the year before they issued the bonds.
In all likelihood, no one will ever try to enforce the prohibited use covenant language, even if La Sierra were to stop being Darwinist and become a branch office of Answers in Genesis or the Geo-Science Research Institute. But that’s not the point. No Adventist school should ever, EVER, agree to a contractual provision that limits its right to include worship or sectarian religious content in its classes, or that limits its right to teach religious topics in non-neutral way. It doesn’t matter if it is not likely to be enforced, it should never be done. Period. And I’m just stunned that anyone would think otherwise.
David Read Also Commented
La Sierra University Responds to anti-Creation Bond Issue
@Holly Pham: Holly, I have heard that Larry Blackmer has recently been experiencing some health difficulties, and that might explain why he has not able to communicate with you. I’ve also heard that his heart is the right place and he really wants to see La Sierra come closer to the Adventist educational philosophy.
La Sierra University Responds to anti-Creation Bond Issue
@Holly Pham: Holly, the Board of Trustees doesn’t get into the details of financial transactions like this. Ricardo Graham and the Board were relying upon Wisbey, Geriguis, and Kent Hansen to tell them the important parameters of the bond financing. I think it will soon emerge that these folks badly disserved Graham and the Board of Trustees, and didn’t reveal the prohibited use covenant language and the fact that it would limit the use of the Price Science Complex to only teaching secular science.
Recent Comments by David Read
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: I do not agree that science must be naturalistic, but if that is your bottom line, it will not trouble me much where it concerns most day-to-day science–the study of current, repeating phenomena. But a rigid naturalism applied to origins morphs into philosophical atheism. Hence, mainstream origins science is not science but atheistic apologetics. This is what should not be done at an Adventist school, but sadly what has been the rule at La Sierra.
Dr. Paul Cameron and the God of the Gaps
@Pauluc: The Adventist doctrine of creation is that God created the world in six days and rested on the Seventh day and hallowed it. (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11) Do you believe that doctrine? It won’t do to say that you accept some vague “Christian doctrine of creation.” The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a very specific mission to call people back to the worship of the creator God, on the day that He hallowed at the creation.
You say you believe that the “core doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ,” but what was Jesus Christ incarnated to do? Wasn’t his mission to redeem fallen humanity, to be the second Adam who succeeded where the first Adam failed? And doesn’t your view of origins make nonsense of a perfect creation, a literal Adam who fell, and the need for redemption because of Adam’s sin? You seem to want to gloss over all the very profound differences you have not only with Seventh-day Adventist dcotrine, but with the most basic reasons that Seventh-day Adventism exists.
The syncretistic hodgepodge religion you’ve created for yourself, combining elements of a biblical world view (the incarnation) and elements of a pagan worldview (a self-created creation) is not Adventism. It is anti-Seventh-day Adventism.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Holly Pham: Holly, I will try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: Since no creationist could land a job as chairman of a biology department at a public university, it seems entirely appropriate that no Darwinist should be given the chairmanship of a biology department of a Seventh-day Adventist college.
The SDA educational system doesn’t exist to expensively duplicate the public university system. It exists to provide a uniquely biblical and Seventh-day Adventist education to interested young people. If mainstream origins science is correct in its assumptions and conclusions about our origins, the entire enterprise of Seventh-day Adventism is an utterly foolish waste of time. So at Adventist institutions, our professors should assume that Darwinistic science is false, and that creationistic science is true (just the reverse of how it is done at public universities), and proceed accordingly.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@gene fortner: What I like about your list of topics, Gene, is that it points out that many disciplines are implicated in the necessary change of worldview. It isn’t just biology and geology, although those are the main ones. History, archeology, anthropology and other disciplines should also be approached from a biblical worldview. The biblical worldview should pervade the entire curriculum.
