Margaret Sanger and the Racist History of Planned Parenthood (Black Genocide)

Margaret Sanger and the Racist History of Planned Parenthood (Black Genocide)

“We do not want word to get out that we want

to exterminate the Negro population.”

~ Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood ~

Before we start this topic, I must say that this treatise is not taking into account the emotional strain that many women encounter before and after an abortion. This is a political, philosophical, and historical dealing with the founding of Planned Parenthood, specifically, Margaret Sanger. I would be remiss and foolish however not to think once this hits “cyber-space” that a confused or hurting young woman might happen to come across this blog. To her I wish to leave behind some links where she can get information or counseling whether in question to “should I get an abortion,” or to look for help for the emotional pain of losing a child to choice. So here are some links to organizations that will help either before or after this “choice” is made:

After Abortion – This is the web’s most complete source of information on the aftereffects of abortion and post-abortion healing. We have over 500 hundred links to thousands of printed pages of original research, testimonies, articles, and resources. Most of these are drawn from articles and books published by the Elliot Institute, one of the nation’s leading authorities on post-abortion issues.

Crisis Pregnancy Center – The mission of the CPC is to minister to women. Our ministry focuses on the woman and her needs, offering her acceptance, compassion, accurate information and assistance in bringing her baby to term. We are here to help our clients make an informed decision so that they will, hopefully, choose an alternative to abortion.

The CPC does not refer a client for abortion. (The client is informed of this on the Request for Services form that she signs when she first comes into the center.) We never try to intimidate or control clients. We do not show bloody videos or use scare tactics. Our staff is trained to offer documented information/education and to provide the services offered by the CPC.

There is a myth to the effect that pro-life people care only about the baby and not the woman. If the community views our message as focusing only on the baby, clients will not feel safe about coming to the CPC and talking, especially if they are considering an abortion or have already experienced one. Our goal is to break down that myth by educating the community to know that our client is the woman. We realize that in order to help a child, we must help the child’s mother. She is the only one who can nourish and care for her pre-born child. When we place our focus on helping the woman, she becomes able to reject the ideology that frames the abortion issue in terms of mother versus child. When we place our focus on loving the woman, God can touch her with hope and empower her to choose life.

The final decision about abortion belongs to the client; however, we want our client to know that our door is always open to her. The client needs to know that she can return to the Center in the future even if she should choose to abort. We are here to help her should she experience regret and need help with Post Abortion Stress.

For the guysNational Fatherhood Initiative – To improve the well-being of children by increasing the proportion of children growing up with an involved, responsible, and committed father.

Through a few conversations and blogs that argued the peripheral of this subject (even the human trafficking aspect of it), I want to finally expand a bit on what I always reference. That is, the original goals of Planned Parenthood Founder, Margaret Sanger, and the provable continuation of this goal by the statistics of actual abortions and sterilizations. Her saying that “[w]e don’t want the word out that we want to exterminate the Negro population” is often times not enough to convince the liberal Democrats that they are truly not for the minority person outside of their political agenda. What was Planned Parenthoods goals? Did they have aims and agendas they wished to complete? Is Planned Parenthood following in those footsteps today? If so, would we be able to tell by looking at their outcomes based on their stated goals?

Above Picture Not Real ~ FYI
Many of the current and past presidents of the organization have mentioned that they are following in the footsteps of their founder, following the aims and goals of Margaret Sanger, their liberal heroin and founder. To make this point (and others), I will rely on two well written books, the first is Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change, by Jonah Goldberg. I think – however – before I mention the next book, I should allow the reader a chance to have that seemingly self-refuting term (“liberal fascism”) explained and defined. Jonah Goldberg documents that the term was the invention of H.G. Wells:

The introduction of a novel term like “liberal fascism” obviously requires an explanation. Many critics will undoubtedly regard it as a crass oxymoron. Actually, however, I am not the first to use the term. That honor falls to H. G. Wells, one of the greatest influences on the progressive mind in the twentieth century (and, it turns out, the in­spiration for Huxley’s Brave New World). Nor did Wells coin the phrase as an indictment, but as a badge of honor. Progressives must become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis,” he told the Young Liberals at Oxford in a speech in July 1932. Wells was a leading voice in what I have called the fascist mo­ment, when many Western elites were eager to replace Church and Crown with slide rules and industrial armies.

(Liberal Fascism, p. 21; more on this can be found in a post entitled, “Mussolini Defines Fascism: Does the Left = Communism? And The Right = Fascism?“)

It will be noted more in-depth later, but I must now point out that Margaret Sanger was the mistress to H.G. Wells. There was no conflict of ideals betwixt these two “enlightened Nazis.” The other book is just an expose of Planned Parenthood (unlike Jonah Goldberg’s book which deals with a panoply of topics), it is entitled Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood, by George Grant. This book is the best I have found yet on this topic. Each chapter ends with a Biblical critique as well, so if you are non-religious person this book is set up so you can skip entirely any theology if wished. If one cannot consider any “religion” on a topic however, one must ask if they are “theophobic” (a term I like to think I coined in my post entitled, “Defending the Faith Over a Syrah“). These two books (Jonah’s chapter entitled, “Liberal Racism: The Eugenbic Ghost in the Fascist Machine,” and George Grants book) will give any amateur historian or studier of movements enough fodder to turn the tables on those who profess equality at all costs.

A third book that is worth a mention is by Edwin Black, entitled, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. A thick history of how the eugenic movement that spurned the Third Reich in their “master race” found its scientific basis in the American Left. The theological roots for it are not the topic here, but they are rooted in the occultism found in Madam Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine.

The racialist ideas that were developing independently in India and Europe fused in esoterica. In The Secret Doctrine [1888], Helena Petrovna Blavatsky saw the “Aryans” as the fifth of her seven “Root Race.” This is where the term used by the Nazi’s came from.

(For more on the roots of Nazism, read my post entitled: “Hitler’s Homosexuality, Pedastry, and Occultism.”)

The question remains however, do recent Planned Parenthood (PP from here on out) leaders want what Sanger wanted? Some history and input on this is in order:

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of mod­ern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pan­theon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton—Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year in 1989—said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

(Liberal Fascism, pp. 270-271)

George Grant opines in on this as well:

Planned Parenthood is a paradigmatical illustration of this prin­ciple. Margaret Sanger’s character and vision are perfectly mirrored in the organization that she wrought. She intended it that way. And the leaders that have come after her have not attempted to have it another way. Dr. Alan Guttmacher, the man who immediately succeeded her as president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, once said, “We are merely walking down the path that Mrs. Sanger carved out for us.” Faye Wattleton, president of the organization during the decade of the eighties, has claimed that she is “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps” of Margaret Sanger. And the president of the New York affiliate is Alexander Sanger, her grandson.

(Grand Illusions, 81-82)

Now that we know these PP leaders are “walking in Margaret’s footsteps,” let us see where these imprints lead us in history. Edwin Black makes it known that Maragret Sanger was no “saint.”

…Sanger was an ardent, self-confessed eugenicist, and she would turn her… birth control organizations into a tool for eugenics, which advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives, mass incarceration of the unfit and draconian immigration restrictions. Like other staunch eugenicists, Sanger vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically supe­rior strains could multiply without competition from “the unfit.” She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as “human waste” not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human “weeds” should be “exterminated.” Moreover, for both political and genuine ideological reasons, Sanger associated closely with some of America’s most fanatical eugenic racists. Both through her publication, Birth Control Review, and her public oratory, Sanger helped legitimize and widen the appeal of eugenic pseudoscience.

(War Against the Weak, p. 127)

To follow through with this idea that charitable organizations were detrimental to her cause, George Grant (Grand Illusions, p. 40) quotes from Sanger’s book, The Pivot of Civilization:

In one passage, she followed the Malthusian party-line advocating the abandonment of all forms of charity and compassion. She wrote:

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound crit­icism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order are the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity is the symptom of a malignant social disease. Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding, and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philan­thropy, but rather at its success. These dangers are inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste.”

Again, she wrote:

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benev­olence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delin­quents, and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modernf business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dys­genic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering.”

You may be asking how someone could think in terms like the above? Well, the simple answer is, radicalism. Political, and moral:

In the first issue of The Woman Rebel, Margaret Sanger admitted that “Birth control appeals to the advanced radical because it is calculated to undermine the authority of the Christian churches. I look forward to seeing humanity free someday of the tyranny of Chris­tianity no less than Capitalism.”

(Grand Illusions, p. 83)

This is similar to Hitler saying the following:

“I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality… we will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence – imperious, relentless and cruel.”

(Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God? [1994] p. 23).

George Grant runs down a quick list of whom Margaret “hung” with:

Her bed became a veritable meeting place for the Fabian (socialist) upper crust: H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Arbthnot Lane, and Norman Haire. And of course, it was then that she began her unusual and temptuouse affaire with Havelock Ellis…. virtually all of her Socialist friends, lovers, and comrades were committed Eugenicists as well—from the followers of Lenin in Revolutionary Socialism, like H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Julius Hammer,” to the followers of Hitler in National Socialism, like Ernest Rudin, Leon Whitney, and Harry Laughlin.” But it wasn’t simply sentiment or politics that drew Margaret into the Eugenic fold. She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact “human weeds” and a “menace to civilization.”

(Grand Illusions, pp. 76 & 115)

Isn’t Sanger a hero of the Left though? How could she truly believe the above… isn’t there some kind of mistake? I wish there was. Here we start to go deeper into her relationships (personal and business) and views on race relations. Dinesh D’Souza points out in his wonderful book, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, that Sanger coined the term, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit,” used by the Third Reich.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, coined the slogan “More children from the fit, less from the unfit.” In language that many of her contemporary admirers would probably like to forget, she described blacks and Eastern European immigrants as “a menace to civi­lization” and “human weeds.” Concerned that American blacks might protest Planned Parenthood’s special “Negro Project” aimed at promot­ing sterilization, Sanger wrote to an associate, “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

(The End of Racism, p. 118)

The Negro Project?! Maybe this is why you will find groups of Black Americans banding together on sites like BlackGenocide.org/L.E.A.R.N.

 

Not only did she “widen the appeal” of eugenic thinking, she was in the mix of the whole movement, and even gave page space to Nazi monsters in her news letter. For instance, in the following excerpts, we see some very disturbing relationships. In her autobiography, for instance, she said that “[o]ur living-room, be­came a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s [Industrial Workers of the World, a socialist organization] could meet.” Jonah Goldberg continues:

A member of the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations…. A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman—another eugeni­cist—Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex the­orist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an af­fair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.”….

Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children—whom she ad­mitted to neglecting—died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she al­ways acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

(Liberal Fascism, p. 271)

 

I must let Jonah continue (pp. 272-273) with his referencing the history and aims of the organization, it is jaw dropping:

She sought to ban fit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children … and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are deter­mined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citi­zens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscrim­inate torrent of progeny.”)

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugen­ics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.” As editor of the Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racism we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, the Birth Control Review ran ar­ticles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For exam­ple, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, the Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rudin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.”When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social con­trol by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934,. she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit … no permit shall be valid for more than one child. But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family.

Sanger believed—prophetically enough—that if women con­ceived of sex as first and foremost a pleasurable experience rather than a procreative act, they would embrace birth control as a neces­sary tool for their own personal gratification. She brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact “speaking truth to power,” as it were.” This was the identical trick the Nazis pulled off. They took a radical Nietzschean doctrine of individual will and made it into a trendy dogma of middle-class conformity. This trick remains the core of much faddish “individualism” among rebellious con­formists on the American cultural left today. Nonetheless, Sanger’s analysis was surely correct, and led directly to the widespread femi­nist association of sex with political rebellion. Sanger in effect “bought off” women (and grateful men) by offering tolerance for promiscuity in return for compliance with her eugenic schemes.

In 1939 Sanger created the previously mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The proj­ect’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disas­trously, with the result that the increase among Negroes … is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s in­tent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

The question is this, how can a graduate student make it through a 4-year university and not know about this history. They can denounce, after this four-year indoctrination, how the settlers mistreated the Native-American’s, but will lift up a racist Nazi as a hero? The logic with this thinking baffles the mind. Even the history of the Democrats and their continual choice to be on the wrong side of history is seemingly forgot.

This radical movement and its continual harming of history, minorities, and women does not fly on blogs like this. Feminism has turned for the worse because of it (at least modern, New Left feminism). The following excerpted from a post/paper I did entitled, “Gnostic Feminism: Empowered to Fail:”

What’s Going On?

While Concerned Women for America have about 600,000 members, the National Organization of Women (NOW) has dwindled to less than 56,000 members. One of the reasons, I believe, for the resultant loss of a nationally known organization such as NOW, is to be found in the current movements direction. As an example, in the January 1988 National NOW Times, the newsletter for the organization, said: “The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.” This may sound extreme, but in fact, this type of radical thinking has more to do with politics than with civil rights and equality. This political movement looks forward to the overthrow of the family unit as well as capitalism. Well-known feminist author and co-founder/editor of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem, said the following about feminisms “end game” (if you will): “Overthrowing capitalism is too small for us. We must overthrow the whole… patriarch!”[61]

How, though, can a civil rights movement be interested in capitalism? According to Tammy Bruce, who was the former president of the Los Angeles chapter of NOW as well as being a former member of NOW’s national board of directors puts it: “What Gloria Steinem, Molly Yard, Patricia Ireland and all the rest have presented to you over the last 15 years (at least) has not been feminist theory.”[62]

Ms. Bruce goes on to show that Betty Friedan and Patricia Ireland, ex-president of NOW, (and others) are members of the Communist Party. In fact, Gloria Steinem is honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, which boasts of being the largest socialist organization in the United States and is the principle U. S. affiliate of the Socialist International. Now the political goals become clearer as we understand the intent of these “posers,” as Tammy Bruce calls them.[63] One of the signs of an over oppressive movement is well illustrated in The Animal Farm, by George Orwell. Napoleon, one of the main characters, concerns himself with the education of the young, and forcefully takes two litters of puppies away as soon as they’re weaned, saying he’ll educate them. In effect, the “State,” or those who are in charge raise them.

Now compare this to a statement made by feminist Mary Jo Bane (assistant professor of education at Wellesley College and associate director of the school’s Center for Research on Woman) and the lesson taught in Animal Farm, “In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.” Alternatively, In The Saturday Review of Education,[64] Gloria Steinem declared: “By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.” NEA president/feminist Catherine Barrett wrote in the same issue:

“Dramatic changes in the way we will raise our children in the year 2000 are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling…We will need to recognize that the so-called basic skills, which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one-quarter of the present school day…When this happens- and it’s near- the teacher can rise to his true calling. More than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values…We will be agents of change.”

Comparisons

A true feminist is a woman who fulfills her potential, like Brenda Feigen, co-founder of Ms. Magazine, who exemplifies what the movement had been, with all its promise and enthusiasm. She became the kind of woman the modern feminist couldn’t keep up with! A lawyer, wife and mother, civil-rights activist, politician, Hollywood movie producer, and author… she is a feminist in the true sense of the word. This feminist sounds surprisingly like the one in Proverbs 31:10-31. These sayings are likely a woman writing what the woman’s role is (Lemuel’s mother). The New King James Version opens up verse 10 with, “Who can find a virtuous wife?” A better rendering of this verse is “the truly capable woman.” It portrays her exercising responsibility for the provision of food and clothing for the household, and also being involved in managing financial and business affairs outside the house itself. She also cares for the needy, and fulfils a wise teaching ministry. This element of the portrait suggests that, as an authoritative teacher at the end of Proverbs (like Lemuel’s mother in v. 1), she parallels Ms. Wisdom in the opening chapters (i.e., corresponding expressions in 3:13-18; 9:1-6). Woman’s teaching role in the book alongside man’s (e.g., 1:8; 6:20) fulfils part of the vision in Genesis 1-2 of man and woman together representing the image of God and called to exercise authority in the world on God’s behalf.

This is in stark contrast to A Feminist Dictionary,[65] whose definitions are self-explanatory:

Male: “… represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants… the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female.”

Man: “… an obsolete life form… an ordinary creature who needs to be watched … a contradictory baby-man.”

Testosterone Poisoning: “Until now it has been thought that the level of testosterone in men is normal simply because they have it. But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’”

Feminist author Ti-Grace Atkinson shows her true autonomy when stating, “the institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist.”[66] Marilyn French, feminist author calls all men rapists: “All men are rapists and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, and their codes.”[67] Gloria Steinen, feminist extraordinaire, wrote the following about Andrea Dwarkin, a contemporary, “Every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.” Wow, such high accolades from one of the most well-known activists in the feminist movement, so what does this Andrea Dworkin have to say about us men? “Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”

Creating Victims

One must keep in mind that when studying comparative theologies through the lenses (e.g., worldview) of modern feminism, that time honored hermeneutics[68] will be subjugated by gender influenced politics. This revisionist goal will not only affect the Bible, and hence Christianity, but also other holy books and religious beliefs. Other presuppositions that drive the modern feminist movement include philosophical naturalism (atheism), and what I call metaphysical naturalism (neo-paganism). Metaphysical naturalism is merely the spiritual movement based partly on the reawakening of “goddess consciousness,” and its real goal is matriarchy, not equality!

The Christian tradition is rich with examples of feminism.[69] The feminism that truly empowers women, not the feminism that makes victicrats[70] out of well meaning woman that wish to make a difference. Christina Hoff Sommers, a liberal feminist and formerly professor of philosophy at Clark University, comments on the current condition of modern feminism:

“The orthodox feminists are so carried away with victimology, with a rhetoric of male-bashing that it’s full of female chauvinists, if you will. Also, women are quite eager to censor, to silence. And what concerns me most as a philosopher is it’s become very anti-intellectual, and I think it poses a serious risk to young women in the universities. Women’s studies classes are increasingly a kind of initiation into the most radical wing, the most intolerant wing, of the feminist movement.”[71]

Many true feminists, like Christina, do away with the many myths that are meant to “scare” woman into becoming radicals.[72] Books by feminist Christina Hoff Sommers[73] are good books to refute such myths. Alternatively, the Independent Women’s Forum can be accessed via the Internet.[74][75] This “backlash” by women against modern feminism is well summed up in a review of the book Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life: How Today’s Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch With the Real Concerns of Women, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese:

According to historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (who describes herself as a feminist), is that most women perceive “official” feminism as indifferent to their deepest concerns. In particular, they are put off by the movement’s negative attitude toward marriage and motherhood, its intolerance for dissent from its most controversial positions, its attacks on men, and its inattention to the practical problems of balancing work and family on a day-to-day basis. Hence the title, echoing a refrain running through the author’s conversations with a diverse sample of women: “Feminism is not the story of my life.”[76]

(Notes [FOR UPDATED TEXT AND FOOTNOTES SEE: SCRIBD])

[61] William D. Gairdner, The War Against the Family: A Parent Speaks Out on the Political, Economic, and Social Policies That Threaten Us All (Toronto, Canada: BPS Books, 2007), 295.

[62] Tammy Bruce, The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds, Random House Inc, New York: NY [2001], p. 123.

[63] Ibid., p. 142.

[64] February 1973.

[65] Edited by Cheris Kramarae & Paula A. Treichler. Feminist Dictionary, University of Illinois Press, Champaign: IL [1986].

[66] Daniel Dervin, Enactments: American Modes and Psychohistorical Models (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 244; another telling quote comes directly from Atkinson’s own biography, Amazon Odyssey:

The price of clinging to the enemy [a man] is your life. To enter into a relationship with a man who has divested himself as completely and publicly from the male role as much as possible would still be a risk. But to relate to a man who has done any less is suicide…. I, personally, have taken the position that I will not appear with any man publicly, where it could possibly be interpreted that we were friends.

Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York, NY: Links Books, 1976), 90, 91.

[67] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/q108276.html

[68] “Traditionally the sub-discipline of theology concerned with the proper interpretation of scriptural texts” C. Stephen Evans, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove: IL [2002].

[69] Helen Kooiman Hosier, 100 Christian Woman Who Changed the 20th Century, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids: MI [2000]; and Rebecca Price Janney, Great Woman in American History, Horizon Books, Camp Hill: PA [1996].

[70] “A victicrat is one who blames all ills, problems, concerns, and unhappiness on others,” Larry Elder, Ten Things You Can’t Say in America, St. Martins, New York: NY [2000], p. 22-33.

[71] Unpublished paper from Clark University.

[72] These include some of the following: 1) Myth of the Extent of Anorexia Nervosa; 2) Myth of Amount of Domestic Violence; 3) Myth of Increased Domestic Battery on Super Bowl Sunday; 4) Myth Concerning Percent of Women Raped; 5) Myth Concerning Female Self-esteem; 6) Myth of Discrimination Against Females in School; 7) Myth of Huge Gender Wage Gap, Etc.

[73] Who Stole Feminism: How Woman Have Betrayed Woman, Simon & Schuster, New York: NY [1995]; The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.

[74] http://www.iwf.org/news/010417.shtml

[75] http://www.iwf.org/

[76] http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9603/reviews/feminism.html

George Grant documents this radicalism, where, like Goldberg, he points out some of these connections Sanger had with racists and eugenists. PP’s founding aims and its founder’s radicalism is all too commonly ignored or swept under the carpet of history’s tide. Let us pick up from Grand Illusions (pp. 41-42), some of which was already pointed out by Goldberg:

Not surprisingly, Planned Parenthood officials have always tried to deflect any criticism of their founder’s B-movie worldview of weird science and ideological compulsion. Though they have managed all manner of intellectual gymnastics and historical revisionism in a feeble attempt to deny it, hide it, and belie it, Sanger was undeniably mesmerized by the fashionable elitism of Malthusian Eugenics.”

She was thoroughly convinced that the “inferior races” were in fact a “menace to civilization.” She really believed that “social regener­ation” would only be possible as the “sinister forces of the hordes of irresponsibility and imbecility” were repulsed. She had come to regard organized charity to ethnic minorities and the poor as a “symptom of a malignant social disease” because it encouraged the prolificacy of those “defectives, delinquents, and dependents” she so obviously abhorred. She yearned for the end of the Christian “reign of benevolence” that the Eugenic Socialists promised, when the “choking human undergrowth” of “morons and imbeciles” would be “segregated” and ultimately “sterilized.” Her greatest aspiration was “to create a race of thoroughbreds” by encouraging “more children from the fit, and less from the unfit.” And the only way to achieve that dystopic goal, she realized, was through the harsh and coercive tyranny of Malthusian Eugenics.”

In other words, she was a true believer not simply someone who assimilated the Flash Gordon jargon of the times—as Planned Parent­hood officials would have us believe. She was a committed elitist bent on undermining the familial bonds of the poor and disenfranchised.”

Thus, as she began to build the work of the American Birth Con­trol League, and ultimately, of Planned Parenthood, Margaret relied heavily on the men, women, ideas, and resources of the Eugenics movement. Virtually all of the organization’s board members were Eugenicists. Financing for the early projects—from the opening of the first birth control clinics to the publishing of the revolutionary lit­erature—came from Eugenicists. The speakers at the conferences, the authors of the propaganda and the providers of the services were almost without exception avid Eugenicists.

The Birth Control Review — Sanger’s magazine and the immediate predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Review regularly and openly published the racist articles of Malthusian Eugenicists. In 1920 — for instance, it published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s fright­ening book of Fascist diatribe, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy.” In 1923, the Review editorialized in favor of restrict­ing immigration on a racial basis.” In 1932, it outlined Sanger’s own “Plan for Peace,” which called for coercive sterilization, mandatory seg­regation, and at rehabilitative concentration camps for all “dysgenic stocks.” In 1933, the Review published a shocking article entitled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.” It was written by Sanger’s close friend and advisor, Ernst Rudin, who was then serving as Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and had earlier taken a prominent role in the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. Later that same year, it published an article by Leon Whitney entitled, “Selective Sterilization,” which adamantly praised and defended the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust “race purification” programs.”

The bottom line is that Sanger self-consciously organized the Birth Control League—and its progeny, Planned Parenthood—in part, to promote and enforce the scientifically elitist notions of racial purification and perfection. Thus, like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, Sanger’s enterprise was from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist. And this racist orientation was all too evident in its various programs and initiatives: govern­ment control over family decisions, nonmedicinal health-care exper­imentations, the rabid abortion crusade, and the coercive sterilization initiatives.

Okay, the proof of the racist goals and ideals of PP from its inception has been shown. Can this early start be shown to still be in operation? Here I want to defer to the site, BlackGenocide.org (see video below), and Abort73.com (attached article below). I think their work shows ample proof of this racist underpinning.

The following is an excerpt from an article entitled “Abortion and Race: For decades, abortion has disproportionately targeted minority babies.”

Alveda C. King, daughter of slain civil-rights leader A.D. King and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., quotes her uncle often when outlining her opposition of abortion. She writes:

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] once said, “The Negro cannot win as long as he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his children for comfort and safety.” How can the “Dream” survive if we murder the children? Every aborted baby is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. The mother decides his or her fate.

Lest you feel these claims are an exaggeration, consider the numbers. According to the most recent census data, black women make up 12.3% of the female population in America, but account for 35% of all U.S. abortions – that according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The Guttmacher Institute (AGI) puts the percentage of black abortions at 37% of the U.S. total.

Similarly, AGI tells us that Hispanic women account for 22% of all U.S. abortions, though they make up just 12.5% of the female population. Compare those numbers to non-Hispanic, white women, who make up 62.6% of America’s female population(1), but account for only 34% of all U.S. abortions.

Abortion is eliminating minority children in the United States at a staggering rate.

Every day in America, an average of 3,315 human beings lose their lives to abortion. Based on the percentages above, 729 of those babies are Hispanic, 1,127 are white, and 1,227 are black. Not only are black children being killed at a far greater percentage than white children, they’re being killed in greater numbers, period. Is that not shocking?! Though the white population in the U.S. outnumbers the black population five to one, abortion kills more black children than white children, every day. John Piper, a white pastor with a heart for racial justice, remarks on the disparity of abortion this way:

The de facto effect (I don’t call it the main cause, but net effect) of putting abortion clinics in the urban centers is that the abortion of Hispanic and Black babies is more than double their percentage of the population. Every day 1,300 black babies are killed in America. Seven hundred Hispanic babies die every day from abortion. Call this what you will—when the slaughter has an ethnic face and the percentages are double that of the white community and the killers are almost all white, something is going on here that ought to make the lovers of racial equality and racial harmony wake up.

Each year, almost a half a million black babies are lost to abortion. The Life Education and Resource Network (LEARN), the largest African-American pro-life group in the country has produced a chart which shows that from 1973-2001, abortion has claimed more than two and a half times as many African-American lives as the next five leading causes combined. In 2005, a total of 292,808 blacks died in the U.S. That same year, almost twice as many blacks (roughly 447,700) were killed by abortion. In 2004, the black population in the U.S. stood at 36 million. Between 1973 and 2004, roughly 15 million blacks were aborted, which means that, as of 2004, nearly 30% of the black population has been lost to abortion! And that doesn’t even factor in all the children that would have been born to those aborted a generation ago. Population estimates show that blacks will soon lose their status as the nation’s largest minority group. To put it bluntly, abortion has thinned the black community in ways the Ku Klux Klan could have only dreamed of.

I would be remiss if I didn’t include the sterilization stats as well… which, with the culmination of what we have see already is a nail in the PP coffin. This comes from pages 117-188 of Grand Illusions. Just a side-note, in just the part below, in the book there are 11-footnotes that one would have to get the book to follow up on themselves to be more methodical.

Racism and Sterilization

 

In order to realize Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic ideal of eliminating the “masses of degenerate” and “good-for-nothing” races, Planned Parenthood has not only emphasized contraception and abortion, it has also carried the banner of sterilization. And, of course, that ster­ilization vendetta has been primarily leveled against minorities.

The sterilization rate among African Americans is 45 percent higher than among Whites. Among Hispanics the rate is 30 percent higher. As many as 42 percent of all American women and 35 per­cent of all Puerto Rican women have been sterilized.

As was the case with Carrie and Doris Buck, many of these steril­izations have been performed coercively. “Women in the United States are often pressured to accept sterilization in order to keep get­ting welfare payments,” says feminist writer Linda Gordon. And non-White welfare recipients are apparently pressured at a signifi­cantly higher level than Whites, resulting in a disproportionate number of sterilizations.

The Association for Voluntary Sterilization has estimated that Between one and two million Americans a year are surgically sterilized. But there may be another 250,000 coercive sterilizations disguised in hospital records as hysterectomies.

A hysterectomy—the removal of the female reproductive system—should only be performed when organs and tissues become severely damaged, diseased, or malignant. Never should it be performed to achieve sexual sterilization, says Dr. Charles McLaughlin, president of the American College of Surgeons. That would be “like killing a mouse with a cannon.” It is also much more lethal than simple tubal ligation sterilization operations. Currently, some twelve thousand women a year die having hysterectomies.

Nevertheless, since Planned Parenthood’s Eugenic hysteria was unleashed, the annual number of hysterectomies has skyrocketed, so that the operation now ranks with abortion, appendectomy, and tonsillectomy as one of the most frequently performed surgical procedures in the land.

Predictably, the chief victims of these medically needless hysterectomies are poor and minority women. Over a decade ago, the New York Times reported that:

A hysterectomy which renders a patient sterile costs up to eight hundred dollars, while a tubal ligation, which does the same thing, pays only two hundred fifty dollars to the surgeon, increasing the motivation to do the more expensive operation. Medicare, Medicaid, and other health plans—for the poor and the affluent both—will reimburse a surgeon up to 90 percent for the costs of any sterilization procedure, and sometimes will allow nothing for abortion. As a consequence, hyster-sterilizations—so common among some groups of indigent Blacks that they are referred to as Mississippi Appendectomies—are increasingly popular among surgeons, despite the risks.

Lydia Jones, a Title X and Medicaid-eligible welfare mother of four, went to the Planned Parenthood clinic near her home and discovered that “free” government programs can be a good news/bad news proposition. “They told me that if I wanted to take advantage of their medical services, I would have to undergo sterilization,” she said. “The counselor just kept lecturing me about how I needed to do this, and that I should have done it a long time ago. She told me that my children were a burden to society. Well, let me tell you, I love my children. And they’re a burden to no one. My two oldest are in college, working their way through. The other two are straight-A students and bound for scholarships. I may be poor, and I may be Black, but I’m not gonna be bullied by these people into despising the heritage God has given me.”

Lydia walked out—a rare exception.

Some have tried to compare Luther’s anti-Semitism to the problem presented here. I have been told that since Luther had racist views doesn’t that mean that the Lutheran church is a racists organization (using my logic). Here I will get somewhat technical, however, quickly, there are two worldviews at work here. A secular worldview (Sanger’s and PP) versus a Christian-theistic worldview. I will point out some of the failings of the secular view that excludes the Judeo-Christian worldview. The person seems to be saying, “anti-Semitism is most definitely an immoral viewpoint.” If they aren’t saying this then their position is vacuous. They are attempting to show that by using one moral position, the other is shown to be false, or at least contradictory, if the proposed logic doesn’t follow equally in both cases… because we all know that Lutherans are not anti-Semites! (Although the people this usually comes from think all Republicans are generally racists, which I just showed above in this post and links that the evidence weighs heavily on the other-side.) I will post an excerpt from a longer debate I had with a secular history teacher at a winery:

The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [Christians] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana), and the church is liable for the unjustified murder of about (taking the high number here) 300,000-women over about a 300 year period. A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no evolutionary/naturalistic natural law is being violated in other words (as non-theists reduce everything to natural law — materialism). However, and this is key, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law.

Hang in here with me… here comes the philosophical part of my argument/critique.

So the founder and subsequent directors are doing what? Living out their worldview, the Lutheran’s are not living and being corrected by a Lutheran worldview. They are living and being corrected when they get off course by a Judeo-Christian. There is nothing inherent to Sanger’s worldview or those that adhere to its founding philosophy that can say anti-Semitism is wrong, morally, it is just currently taboo by our culture’s temporary mores — by the edict of the majority. It likens the abortion and Semitism question to the level of one saying they like vanilla ice-cream over chocolate. If our cultures temporary mores were, by an edict from the majority, to wade into the ice-cream debate. That would be just as moral as the life and racism question… according to the secular worldview followed to its logical end. Here is a question asked by a Harvard student of Ravi Zacharias during the Q&A, he asked it in order to trip up Ravi… which isn’t so easy:

Here we go, further down the worldview “hole.” Here I would point the reader to my critiques of two atheists, one article is entitled, “Responding to Christopher Hitchens and a Friend: Explaining the Failings of a Worldview,” and, “Hugh Hewitt Interviews Evangelical Turned Atheist, William Lobdell, for 2-Hours.” From these two topics one can see that Darwinian views make this Mein Kampf quote just as moral as that of Sanger’s quotes, or the fact that someone may prefer chocolate over vanilla:

“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”

(Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy [New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942], pp. 161-162. — Source: “I Cannot Even Study In Privacy: Old Cantankerous Atheist @ Starbucks.”)

In other words, do Objective Morals truly exist without God?

Let us start this [extended] jolly good time with a most interesting thought from Stephen Hawkings (who holds the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton’s chair) at a lecture given to a university crowd in England entitled “Determinism – Is Man a Slave or the Master of His Fate.” He discussed whether we are the random products of chance, and hence, not free, or whether God had designed these laws within which we are free. In other words, do we have the ability to make choices, or do we simply follow a chemical reaction induced by millions of mutational collisions of free atoms?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s maxim rings just as true today as it did in his day, “If there is no God, all things are permissible.” Without an absolute ethical norm, morality is reduced to mere preference and the world is a jungle where might makes right. This same strain of thought caused Mussolini to comment, “Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”

Notice that Mussolini agrees that might makes right. There was another bad boy on the block in those days, his name was Hitler, who agreed when he said, “I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality… we will train young people before whom the world will tremble. I want young people capable of violence – imperious, relentless and cruel.” Again, the rejection of moral absolutes creates what? Young people who will scare the bejesus out of the world. (Take note of the rise in youth violence in our school system.)

But what is this “absolute” that Mussolini referred to as “the immortal truth?” What is the “stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality” that Hitler removed in order to created a nation of hate mongers? Heidegger, In Being and Time, discussed the problems facing men living in a post-Enlightenment secular society – a world without God in other words. Heidegger called this situation “the dark night of the world,” a world which the light of God had been eclipsed and in which men were left to grope around as best they could, searching in the darkness for any scraps of meaning that might be found. This man of course, Heidegger, backed the National Socialists (Nazis) for most of the 1930’s.

The third article in the Humanist Manifesto begins:

“We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems from human need and interest.”

For the secular person, man himself is the only standard by which his own behavior is to be assessed, “man is the measure of all things.” Man is to be the sole arbiter in all matters of justice and law, right and wrong. In the words of the Encyclopedia Americana, “Since there is no God, man is the creator of his own values.” The British author John Hick bluntly asserts, “There is no God; therefore no absolute values and no absolute laws.” Joseph Lewis in, The Bible Unmasked, say, “There is in reality no absolute standard by which we can judge… In the final analysis our guide in moral affairs should be what gives to the individual the greatest possible happiness.”

Anthony Freeman comes to the same conclusion: “Not only the absolute existing-out-there God has gone. So have the absolute existing-out-there values such as peace, joy, goodness, beauty, love, etc….” Friedrich Nietzsche agreed: “…the advantage of our times, nothing is true, everything is permitted.” The American scholar David Wells says of our nation, “This is the first time that civilization has existed that, to a significant extent, does not believe in objective right and wrong. We are traveling blind, stripped of our own moral compass.” Paul Kurtz believes that, “The moral principles that govern our behavior are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion,” how can anything be commended as being right, or condemned as being wrong?

Bertrand Russell vehemently opposed war, yet denounced restrictions on sexual freedom. In a letter to the Observer in 1957, Bertrand admitted that he could not live as though ethical values were a matter of personal taste, that he therefore found his own views “incredible” (because he espoused moral relativism) and that “I do not know the solution.” C. S. Lewis talked about this “privatized morality” and showed some of its weaknesses, two of which he identified with his usual clarity:

In the first place, how do ethical standards come into being? In Lewis’s words, “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new color in the spectrum.”

Secondly, in the absence of absolutes, how can we talk of moral progress? As Lewis puts it, “if things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process towards which that process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of ‘becoming better’ if better means simply ‘what we are becoming’ – it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as ‘ the place you have reached.’”

Allan Bloom, in his book, The Closing of the American Mind, said that, “There is one thing a professor can be certain of. Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” How did the college student get this way? Let us allow the Father of modern educational philosophy answer that, John Dewey: “There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable [i.e. unchangeable] truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent moral absolutes.”

In light of all this, I find it funny when an atheist says that he is so because there is evil in this world (innocent children die, and the such). Again, C. S. Lewis makes my point for me when he was an atheist:

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?… Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist – in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless – namely my idea of justice – was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”

Lewis hit the nail on the head. In the absence of transcendent values, we are left floundering about as best we can… or, as Heidegger put it, “searching in the darkness for any scraps of meaning that might be found.” Ravi Zacharius rightly concludes, if atheism is true, “Thinking atoms discussing morality is absurd.” All this leads to what Jean-Paul Sartre called a “baseless base of values.” In other words, the person who takes this route finds himself in a world with particulars but no universals, relatives but no absolutes, valuations but no values.

So from Cristina Odone (Melrose Place) saying in the June 97’ Daily Telegraph that, “What’s right is what you feel,” to Ernest Hemingway’s creed: “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after,” all this does as a philosophy of evolutionary naturalism is create people who will try to enforce their “will and way” above others.

This is why the “Hitlers” and “Stalins” will always exist! When the moral imperatives of God are thrown to the wayside, it creates a power vacuum. This is why the atheist has no real way to say what is good or bad for any individual besides himself – objectively. This, I believe, drove Bertrand Russell to a solemn grave, and Nietzsche insane. In fact, it was Nietzsche who said that the consequences of the death of God would penetrate every avenue of life, and that this, in-and-of-itself, would be unbearable. Nietzsche went on to say, because God had died in the nineteenth century, there would be two direct results in the twentieth century. First, he prognosticated that the twentieth century would become the bloodiest century in history; and second, that a universal madness would break out.

He has been right on both counts. More people have been killed because of ideological differences, and destroyed on the battlefields of geo-political maneuvering in the name of naturalism and might in this century than the previous nineteen centuries before it. Did you catch that; non-God movements have killed more people in one century than religion did in the first nineteen. Unfortunately we see this madness seeping into other areas of our society as well:

Newspapers in 1996-1997 reported two particularly shocking cases of infanticide. In one, a pair of eighteen-year-old college sweethearts delivered their baby in a hotel room, killed him, and left the body in a dumpster. In the other, an eighteen-year-old briefly left her high school prom to deliver her baby in a bathroom stall, left the infant dead in a garbage can and returned to the dance floor. Both events led to convictions for homicide.

Although these crimes were attributed to either a moral failure (personal or social) or to some form of mental pathology, Steven Pinker had a different explanation. Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychology and a leading popularizer of evolutionary psychology, says it is a genetic imperative. Writing in the New York Times, Pinker argued that what he termed neonaticide is not attributable to mental illness because “it has been practiced and acceptable in most cultures throughout history.” Rather, he went on to say, a capacity for neonaticide is hard-wired into the maternal genes by our evolutionary history.

AHHhh! Naturalistic morals (relativism) have struck again! And the only individual to strike at the core of these horrors that materialists have inflicted on the twentieth century is the theist (the Jew and Christian). This is why the non-theist will always have the “Hitlers,” “Stalins,” and “Maos” in their worldview as acceptable to their moral theorizing. They cannot assert objectively – beyond themselves – that those persons are wrong, it would only be their personal preference speaking. Sorta’ like chocolate or vanilla ice cream, or, brownies with or without nuts, Hitler… or Mother Teresa. They (the relativist) are neutered in the political and moral spectrum, or, if they do choose to take a value-laden stance, they are doing so in direct violation of their own doctrines and dogmas, thus, self-refuting their own claims.

(to see a response and answer to this post, see: “Objective Morals Without God???“)

One last item to point out before I call it quits, and then I will let the reader’s enjoy this small book of a post, this is from a debate that I and a graduate student had that went to California State University, San Francisco. If the secular view is the correct one, then the following must be a correct summation of the moral authority of such a view:

Society As the “Whole”

(Excerpted from the book, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly In Mid-Air)

If Society, the will of all or the will of the majority [society says], is the final measure of morality, then all its judgments are moral by definition. Such a concept is an oxymoron – a contradiction in terms. An attorney once called a radio talk show with a challenge. “When are you going to accept the fact that abortion is the law of the land?” she asked. “You may not like it, but it’s the law.” Her point was simple. The Supreme Court has spoken, so there is nothing left to discuss. Since there is no higher law, there are no further grounds for rebuttal. This lawyer’s tacit acceptance of conventionalism suffers because it confuses what is right with what is legal.

When reflecting on any law, it seems sensible to ask, “it’s legal, but is it moral? It’s law , but is the law good; is it just?” There appears to be a difference between what a person has the liberty to do under the law and what a person should do. Conventionalism renders this distinction meaningless. There is no “majority of one” to take the higher moral ground. As Pojman puts it, “Truth is with the crowd and error with the individual” (much like Rousseau). This is tyranny of the majority.

When any human court is the highest authority, then morality is reduced to mere power – either power of the government or power of the majority. If the courts and laws define what is moral, then neither laws nor governments can ever be immoral, even in principle.

Another absurd consequence follows from the society says line of thought. This view makes it impossible to reform the morals of a society. There are actually two problems here; the first is called the reformer’s dilemma. Moral reformers typically judge society from the inside. They challenge their culture’s standard of behavior and then campaign for change. But when morality is defined by the present society’s standard, then challenging the standard would be an act of immorality. Social reformers would be made moral outcasts precisely because they oppose the status quo.

Corrie ten Boom and other “righteous gentiles” risked their own lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. William Wilberforce sought the abolition of slavery in the late eighteenth century in the United Kingdom. Martin Luther King Jr. fought for civil rights in the United States in the 50’s and 60’s. in Germany during World War II, Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer challenged Christians to oppose Hitler.

We count these people as moral heroes precisely because they had the courage to fight for freedom. According to Society Says thought, however, they are the worst kind of moral criminals because they challenged the moral consensus of their own society. This view faces another difficulty with moral improvement of society. If society’s laws and cultural values are the ultimate standards of behavior, then the notion of moral improvement on a legal or cultural level is nonsense. A social code can never be improved; it can only be changed.

Think of what it means to improve something. Improvement means an increase in excellence by raising to a better quality or condition. How do we know if we have increased the quality of something? Only by noting that some change has brought it closer to an external standard of improvement. A bowler improves when she raises her average closer to 300, the perfect game. A baseball pitcher increases his skill by decreasing the number of batters he allows on base. If he strikes out every batter, he’s attained perfection. In either case, an outside standard is used as the measure of improvement.

To improve a society’s moral code means that the society changes its laws and values to more closely approximate an external moral ideal. If no such standard exists, if cultural values are the highest possible law, then there is no way for those standards to be better than what they are at any given moment. They can only be different. A society can abolish apartheid in favor of equality. It can adopt policies of habeas corpus protecting citizens against unjustified imprisonment; it can guarantee freedom of speech and the press. But according to this view, no one could ever claim that these are moral improvements but only that society changed its tastes. There is no moral ideal to emulate. Moral change is possible, but not moral improvement. Improvement means getting better, and there’s nothing better – in this view – than any society’s current assessment of morality. And moral reformers actually turn out to be unethical.

Mark Driscoll Speaks Directly to a Cornerstone of Word Faith Theology

By PapaGiorgio / Aug 09 2010 / in Aberrant Christian Teaching, Apologetics / No Comments »
Mark Driscoll Speaks Directly to a Cornerstone of Word Faith Theology

 

The Word On the Word of Faith h/t:

This clip came from the sermon Suffering To Learn, part of Mars Hill Church’s Trial series through 1&2 Peter. For more content from this sermon, please visit http://www.marshillchurch.org/media/trial/suffering-to-learn


Deism Defined-Miracles Impossible?

Deism Defined-Miracles Impossible?

From a Debate on Deism (Imported Over from RPT-Blogspot). This debate had to have taken place in early 2000′s. But, as it defines and argues a position often misunderstood, it makes it to PG’s Best. Enjoy:

Ahhh, Countess, what an honor it is that we meet again. Your name evokes wild pictures of moonlit nights from the pages of the Scarlet Pimpernel. I will indulge a further response from you, as your last post seemed contradictory. My question was simple, it was:

  • Are miracles – from the deist standpoint – possible?

You responded in kind that:

“No, miracles would, logically, not be possible. In a straight-line explanation, God created the universe, and the laws of the universe are the boundaries of the possible. In theory, God could, as the creator of the universe, violate those laws; however, there is no evidence that he has ever done this.”

I need to clarify; I didn’t ask “if miracles were actual” (i.e., miracles have actually occurred). I simply asked if they are possible. Let me give some more ways of looking at it, since you brought up the fact of actuality, then I will return to your statement that I chose to display above.

  • The denial that miracles are possible, and the denial that they are actual;
  • The belief that miracles are possible, but the denial that they are actual;
  • Agnosticism about whether miracles are possible, but the denial that they are actual;
  • The belief that miracles are possible, but agnosticism about whether they are actual;
  • Agnosticism about whether miracles are possible, and agnosticism about whether they are actual.

I believe – reading your opening statement above – that you would fall under category B. I say this because you even admitted that God could, theoretically, “violate” these laws. This seems an anathema to deists, who view these laws of nature as not descriptive, but prescriptive. Let me quote C. S. Lewis on this matter for the sake of clarity in defining what these laws of nature do, and don’t do:

But if God comes to work miracles, He comes “like a thief in the night.” Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating. It introduces a new factor into the situation, namely supernatural force, which the scientist had not reckoned on. He calculates what will happen, or what must have happened on a past occasion, in the belief that the situation, at that point of space and time, is or was A. but if supernatural force has been added, then the situation really is or was AB. And no one knows better than the scientist that AB cannot yield the same result as A. The necessary truth of the laws, far from making it impossible that miracles should occur, makes it certain that if the Supernatural is operating they must occur. For if the natural situation by itself, and the natural situation plus something else, yielded only the same result, it would be then that we should be faced with a lawless and unsystematic universe. The better you know that two and two make four, the better you know that two and three don’t. (C.S. Lewis, Miracles, pp. 92-93)

This is what I have come across in deism, is a belief that if God would “violate” (I am highlighting that word for a reason) His laws of nature that He set up, we would live in a “lawless and unsystematic universe” (to quote Lewis). However, let us continue with his remarks:

This perhaps helps to make a little clearer what the laws of Nature really are. We are in the habit of talking as if they caused events to happen; but they have never caused any event at all. The laws of motion do not set billiard balls moving: they analyze the motion after something else (say, a man with a cue, or a lurch of the liner, or, perhaps, supernatural power) has provided it. They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event – if only it can be induced to happen – must conform, just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions with money must conform – if only you can get hold of any money. Thus in one sense the laws of Nature cover the whole field of space and time; in another, what they leave out is precisely the whole real universe – the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history. That must come from somewhere else. To think the laws can produce it is like thinking that you can create real money by simply doing sums. For every law, in the last resort, says “if you have A, then you will get B.” But first catch you’re a: the laws won’t do it for you.

It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t. If I knock out my pipe I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonizes it in a twinkling with all other events. It is more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they apply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all events. If God annihilates or creates of deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break [violate] any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all normal laws, and nine months later a child is born…. Miraculous wine will intoxicate…. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. It does not violate the law’s provisio, “If A, then B”: it says, “But this time instead of A, A2,” and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies, “Then B2” and naturalizes the immigrant, as she well knows how. She is an accomplished hostess.

A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its result follows according to Natural law. In a forward direction (i.e., during the time which follows its occurrence) it is interlocked with all Nature just like any other event. Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. And this is just what some people find intolerable. The reason they find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of reality. (C. S. Lewis was quoted from his book Miracles, chpt. 8, “Miracles and the Laws of Nature”, pp. 94-96)

This is the case with deism. They presuppose that God created “Nature to be the whole of reality.” a miracle doesn’t “violate” any law, simply, that law will predict what should happen once a miracle event happened.

I got a wee bit ahead of myself here, but I wanted to make sure that you understood that a proper understanding of the laws of Nature in no way restrict miracles, and that any further use of violate by me (and you) should encapsulate this definition. And all I was asking at this point was if miracles were possible. As one writer wrote of Deism:

“A being who could [as deists believe] bring the universe into existence from nothing could certainly perform lesser miracles if He chose to do so. A God who created water could part it or make it possible for a person to walk on it. The immediate multiplication of loaves of bread and fish would be no problem to a God who created matter and life in the first place. A virgin birth or even a physical resurrection from the dead would be minor miracles in comparison to the miracle of creating the universe from nothing [as deists believe]. It seems self-defeating to admit a great miracle like creation and then to deny the possibility of lesser miracles.”(Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, by Norman L. Geisler, p. 189.)

I will conclude with a mock conversation from the book Answers for Atheists, Agnostics, and Other Thoughtful Skeptics: Dialogues About Christian Faith and Life. This conclusion is only meant to elucidate in laymen’s terms (laymanize) what C. S. Lewis has already said. Enjoy:

The very next day Dave was at Jim’s door again. Now he was more eager than ever to talk.

  • “You know that book you loaned me last night?” he said. “Well, I could hardly put it down today. It’s tough going, but it’s really interesting. I never knew there was so much historical evidence for the Bible.”
  • “Glad you’re enjoying it,” Jim said. “But last night you wound up by saying you couldn’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection because you think it’s unscientific to believe in miracles, right?”
  • “Right. They’re contrary to the laws of nature.”
  • “So?”
  • “Well, the law of nature can’t be broken.”
  • “And miracles, if they happen [are possible], would break them?”
  • “That’s what I’ve always understood.”
  • “Let me suggest another way to think of the laws of nature, Dave. The laws of nature don’t tell us everything that can possibly happen. They just tell us what can happen naturally – that is, by nature working on its own. They don’t tell us anything at all about what happens if something outside of nature acts on nature.”
  • “But there isn’t anything outside of nature.”
  • “Really? I thought we’d been through that already. You remember – entropy, creation of the universe, God, all that?” (pp. 73-74)

See Countess, you — by default — believe something to be outside the universe, and that this God actually did the greatest miracle of all time… that is, “creating the universe with laws and motion with mankind as its goal.” If that isn’t a miracle, then what is?

Ravi Zacharias Interviewed by Fox’s Lauren Greene about His Book~Has Christianity Failed You?

By PapaGiorgio / Aug 05 2010 / in Apologetics Sub, General News, Worldviews / No Comments »
Ravi Zacharias Interviewed by Fox's Lauren Greene about His Book~Has Christianity Failed You?

Here is an interview with Ravi Zacharias by Lauren Green from FOX News. Here we see a battle between what the Emergents view is why people leave the church, and what I see (have seen and have it confirmed in yet one more way) as the main reason – people are not having their intellectual argument.


Conversation Series: Defending the Faith Over a Syrah

Conversation Series: Defending the Faith Over a Syrah

(Imported “Best of Papa Giorgio,” which here is “PG’s Best.”) For what was my first wine tasting experience, it was a great time. Wine, my wife, and some friends and family. And just like in Star Trek where there was always a guy in a red shirt. Well, there was a friend of a friend whom I didn’t know too well. And this person like to talk… about things she thought she knew a lot about: Politics, Religion, and US History. She was a theophobe, anything religious she seems to have an aversion to. She was also a history teacher for high school and the way she talked about history, was a Howard Zinn fan. So here is the original post I posted in November of 2006. Keep in mind since I posted this in 2006, many of the links in the footnotes may not be good after these many years. (The wine was flowing and I was on the top of my game… for those who are wondering. And for a larger image of the one shown, here ya go.)

Late September turned into an opportunity for my wife and me to visit some wineries in the Santa Ynez Valley. We met up with some friends and family members, as well as some of their friends/co-workers. These family member’s/friend’s co-workers I speak of all work at a public school. So the direction of the conversation didn’t necessarily surprise me, but it sure did dishearten me. What disheartened me was that this teacher wasn’t just arguing a model or philosophy of history that didn’t exist until Marx and Engels interpreted history with their worldview[1] (that all of history is a class struggle), it was that they were putting forth arguments that my oldest son could probably tear down. I say tear down because most of the arguments put forth were what is called straw-man arguments, or just plain wrong. Below I will put into a Context what will follow:

a) First Contact

b) Conversation Starter

c) “Theophobia” — A Psychosis?

d) Rhetoric vs. Argument

e) Non-Religious Movements vs. Religious

f) What is Fascism?

g) Ethics Without God!

h) Hitler: Christian or Philosophical Naturalist?

i) Hitler’s Occultism

j) Buddhism — Self-Refuting

k) Buddhism & Evil

l) Eastern Charity

m) Scientists Praying

n) Genesis Proved Right

a) Conversation started at the first winery about a topic that caused me to mention a letter I wrote to my son’s sixth-grade classmate’s parents. It was on Native American and Settler relations. As the conversation skimmed along I portrayed the teacher as explaining history in a similar fashion to Howard Zinn. This teacher mentioned that Howard Zinn’s view of history was good; I, then, pointed out that this view did not exist until Marx and Engels — sort of hoping this would spark said person to understand that this outlook on history, viewed through a lens of political opinion (e.g., Communism, Socialism), was not true history, rather, skewed history. This first contact at least allowed me to know with whom I was dealing.

b) The day went on; it was the usual fun, talking, learning, and laughing. At the last winery we were about halfway into our flight of wines when I hear this teacher and my wife discussing organized religion. As I am a student of comparative religion[2], philosophy[3], politics[4], and some history, I naturally gravitated over to where the real conversation was. You see, I say real because too many people believe it to be a bad thing to discuss weightier issues that include religion or politics. I think just the opposite. These items should be discussed vigorously and judicially, with a firm but kind heart. I say firm because I have found that in my many debates on-line and in person for the past decade the other party is ignorant that what they are saying is either a straw man[5] or the premise can be turned on them, and sometimes it takes persistence (being firm) to point this their dilemma out.

Now that the groundwork has been laid somewhat, lets delve into some of the conversation.

c) When I came into the conversation this person, whom I will call Felicia in honor of their fallacious arguments, was saying they are against organized religion. Which is usually code for “they cannot stand Christianity?” So to set the record straight, I said that she must also be against Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucism, Sikhism, and the like. Realizing the premise she laid out, she quickly admitted to the fact that she is indeed against such religious people organizing into small communities of like minded people. The presumption was that she was arguing for un-organized religion? Whatever that is!? I would hate to see what religion looks like if guided by anarchy. So I wanted to point out the biased view she held by presenting this person with a label that she probably hadn’t heard until now. I made the statement that she was Theophobic. She asked for clarification, I said much like a person can be homophobic, so to can a person be Theo(God)phobic. Obviously in our day and age of political correctness one does not wish top be labeled with a phobia, especially a teacher, this implies intolerance when the buzz-word of our day is tolerance. This clearly caught her off guard.

After thinking over what I had charged her with and the previous conversation she finally admitted to it wholly at first but after put a vague stipulation on it. This stipulation didn’t help her recover from her admitted theophobia and dogmatic biasness on stark display. You see, she has probably portrayed religious people as bias and phobic, arguing for things dogmatically, however, I wanted to point out in conversation by explicitly and implicitly pointing out in this case it was on display by her, and not I (a religious person). Even if I didn’t point this out as much as I could have, I am hopeful that in private reflection this person will reflect on how she came across.

d) At this point the usual litany of “straw man” arguments proceeded to spill forth as they normally do when ones precious bumper-sticker beliefs are challenged and shown to be vacuous. The next thing out of Felicia’s mouth was that organized religion has killed more people and started more wars than any other reason in history. This is where I cringed — a teacher that is charged with children who makes such false claims is a red-flag to me. These types of people repeat such lines not because they have studied history or religion in-depth, but because a politically motivated historian like Howard Zinn or Noam Chomskey said such a thing, or they simply picked up the saying from another friend (who themselves had heard it from another) and it fit so well in their theophobia framework to make the rejection of religion an easy thing in their mind’s eye. This is more of a commentary on said person’s psychosis than making any sort of valid argument. This being said let us deal with this charge:

e) The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [Christians] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana), and the church is liable for the unjustified murder of about (taking the high number here) 300,000-women over about a 300 year period. A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no evolutionary/naturalistic natural law is being violated in other words (as non-theists reduce everything to natural law — materialism). However, and this is key, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law.[6]

So the historical reality that this teacher of history seemed to ignore is that non-religious movements have killed more people in the Twentieth-Century than religion has in the previous nineteen (or for that matter, all of mankind’s history). I also pointed out to Felicia during our conversation that the non-religious view of origins has no moral law to point to any of the above acts as morally wrong or un-ethical. They are merely currently taboo. For someone to say the Nazis were morally wrong they have to borrow from the theistic worldview that posits a universal moral code. If there is no Divine moral law, then as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s maxim makes the point, “If there is no God, all things are permissible.” Without an absolute ethical norm, morality is reduced to mere preference and the world is a jungle where might makes right.

f) This same strain of thought caused Mussolini to comment:

“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition . . . . If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth . . . then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity . . . . From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”[7]

(Side note: the above definition by Mussolini (who was a philosophy major) of fascism, fits more closely with non-religious liberal democrats today than with religious conservative Republicans.)

g) The only problem is that without God, man is the one who dies, quite literally. As Dr. Ravi Zacharias observes: “Conveniently forgotten by those antagonistic to spiritual issues are the far more devastating consequences that have entailed when antitheism is wedded to political theory and social engineering. There is nothing in history to match the dire ends to which humanity can be led by following a political and social philosophy that consciously and absolutely excludes God.[8] And,

One of the great blind spots of a philosophy that attempts to disavow God is its unwillingness to look into the face of the monster it has begotten and own up to being its creator. It is here that living without God meets its first insurmountable obstacle, the inability to escape the infinite reach of a moral law. Across scores of campuses in our world I have seen outraged students or faculty members waiting with predatorial glee to pounce upon religion, eager to make the oft-repeated but ill-understood charge: What about the thousands who have been killed in the name of religion?

This emotion-laden question is not nearly as troublesome to answer if the questioner first explains all the killing that has resulted from those who have lived without God, such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, et al . . . why is there not an equal enthusiasm to distribute blame for violence engendered by some of the irreligious? But the rub goes even deeper than that. The attackers of religion have forgotten that these large-scale slaughters at the hands of anti-theists were the logical outworking of their God-denying philosophy. Contrastingly, the violence spawned by those who killed in the name of Christ would never have been sanctioned by the Christ of the Scriptures. Those who kill in the name of God were clearly self-serving politicizers of religion, an amalgam Christ ever resisted in His life and teaching. Their means and their message were in contradiction to the gospel. Atheism, on the other hand, provides the logical basis for an autonomist, domineering will, expelling morality . . . . . The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevski repeatedly wrote of the hell that is let loose when man comes adrift from his Creator’s moorings and himself becomes God — he understood the consequences. Now, as proof positive, we witness our culture as a whole in a mindless drift toward lawlessness — we live with the inexorable result of autonomies in collision. [Zacharias cites Hitler, "I freed Germany from the stupid and degrading fallacies of conscience and morality . . . . I want young people capable of violence -- imperious, relentless and cruel."][9]

h) After pointing out that non-God movements are much more murderous than God movements, Felicia mentioned that my lumping Hitler in my analogy was wrong, she said he was a Christian and that I was wrong.[10] I had never heard this before . . . just kidding, I have heard this brought up quite often and will deal with it in brief here (as I promised Felicia I would).[11] First off, all someone would have to do is read Mein Kampf to understand that Hitler himself stood in stark contrast to Christianity. In fact, Hitler admitted himself that he was a philosophical naturalist; I will quote from a larger essay I did on the subject some years back:

 

For instance, Adolf Hitler appealed to the people of his country to have a backbone to advance the logical outworking of their worldview. Now mind you, not all naturalists are racists or killers of the less fortunate . . . however, this is a logical outworking of philosophical [or, metaphysical] naturalism.

“The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all . . . . If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.”[12]

Hitler referred to this dispensation of nature as “quite logical. In fact, it was so logical to the Nazis that they built concentration camps to carry out their convictions about the human race as being “nothing but the product of heredity and environment” or as the Nazis liked to say, “of blood and soil.[13]

The teachings of . . . Hitler and others like them, however, are completely consistent with the teachings of Darwinian evolution. Indeed, social Darwinism has provided the scientific substructure for some of the most significant atrocities in human history. For evolution to succeed, it is as crucial that the unfit die as the fittest survive. Marvin Lubenow graphically portrays the ghastly consequences of such beliefs in his book Bones of Contention[14]:

“If the unfit survived indefinitely, they would continue to ‘infect’ the fit with their less fit genes. The result is that the more fit genes would be diluted and compromised by the less fit genes, and evolution could not take place. The concept of evolution demands death. Death is thus as natural to evolution as it is foreign to biblical creation. The Bible teaches that death is a ‘foreigner,’ a condition superimposed upon humans and nature after creation. Death is an enemy, Christ has conquered it, and he will eventually destroy it. Their respective attitudes toward death reveal how many light years separate the concept of evolution from Biblical creation.”[15]

Adolph Hitler’s philosophy that Jews were subhuman and that Aryans were supermen (mirroring the beliefs Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood) led to the extermination of about six million Jews. In the words of Sir Arthur Keith, a militant anti-Christian physical anthropologist: “The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consistently sought to make the practices of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.[16]

Karl Marx, the father of communism, saw in Darwinism the scientific and sociological support for an economic experiment that eclipsed even the carnage of Hitler’s Germany. His hatred of Christ and Christianity led to the mass murder of multiplied millions worldwide. Karl Marx so revered Darwin that his desire was to dedicate a portion of Das Kapital to him.

While not having the time to mention some of what is above as well as below, I promised Felicia that I would show her some evidence that Hitler was not a Christian. Many of the Nazi emblems, such as the swastika, the double lightning bolt “SS” symbol, and even the inverted triangle symbol used to identify classes of prisoners in the concentration camps, originated among homosexual occultists in Germany (some, such as the swastika, are actually quite ancient symbols which were merely revived by these homosexual groups). In 1907, Jorg Lanz Von Liebenfels (Lanz), a former Cistercian monk whom the church excommunicated because of his homosexual activities,[17] flew the swastika flag above his castle in Austria.[18] After his expulsion from the church, Lanz founded the Ordo Novi Templi (“Order of the New Temple“), which merged occultism with violent anti-Semitism. A 1958 study of Lanz called, “Der Mann der Hitler die Ideen gab” — or, “The Man Who Gave Hitler His Ideas” — by Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Daim, called Lanz the true “father” of National Socialism.

List, a close associate of Lanz, formed the Guido Von List Society in Vienna in 1904. The Guido Von List Society was accused of practicing a form of Hindu Tantrism, which featured sexual perversions in its rituals (the swastika is originally from India). A man named Aleister Crowley, who, according to Hitler biographer J. Sydney Jones, enjoyed “playing with black magic and little boys,” popularized this form of sexual perversion in occult circles.[19] List was “accused of being the Aleister Crowley of Vienna“.[20] Like Lanz, List was an occultist; he wrote several books on the magic principles of rune letters (from which he chose the “SS” symbol). In 1908, List “was unmasked as the leader of a blood brotherhood which went in for sexual perversion and substituted the swastika for the cross“.[21] The Nazis borrowed heavily from Lis’s occult theories and research. List also formed an elitist occult priesthood called the Armanen Order, to which Hitler himself may have belonged.[22]

What you have here is the first known example of a Swastika in Germany. It is a political poster from 1919 published by the Thule Society. The Thule Society was an occultic group with ties to Hitler and others that I have mentioned herein. Their belief structure is similar to the New Age movement of today.

  • What you have here is the first known example of a Swastika in Germany. It is a political poster from 1919 published by the Thule Society. The Thule Society was an occultic group with ties to Hitler and others that I have mentioned herein. Their belief structure is similar to the New Age movement of today.

The Nazi dream of an Aryan super-race was adopted from an occult group called the Thule Society, founded in 1917 by followers of Lanz and List. The occult doctrine of the Thule Society held that the survivors of an ancient and highly developed lost civilization could endow Thule initiates with esoteric powers and wisdom. The initiates would use these powers to create a new race of Aryan supermen who would eliminate all “inferior” races.

Hitler dedicated his book, Mein Kampf, to Dietrich Eckart, one of the Thule Society’s inner circle and a former leading figure in the German Worker’s Party (when they met at the gay bar mentioned earlier).[23]. . . And among them I want also to count that man, one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of his, our people, in his writings and his thoughts . . . [24] Hitler was definitely not a Christian.

i) Felicia then mentioned that Christianity is refuted by science and that most of our smartest, brightest scientists are accepting Buddhism. So I broke this statement up into two parts, that is: are scientists converting to the pantheistic worldview?[25] And, does Buddhism comport with reality/science? I will deal with the latter first. Although not the time nor place to explain the Law of non-contradiction, for those who don’t know, I will briefly explain. The law of non-contradiction is simply this: “‘A cannot be both non-A and A at the same time.” In the words of professor J. P. Moreland (Ph.D., University of Southern California):

“When a statement fails to satisfy itself (i.e., to conform to its own criteria of validity or acceptability), it is self-refuting . . . . Consider some examples. ‘I cannot say a word in English’ is self-refuting when uttered in English. ‘I do not exist’ is self-refuting, for one must exist to utter it. The claim ‘there are no truths’ is self-refuting. If it is false, then it is false. But is it is true, then it is false as well, for in that case there would be no truths, including the statement itself.”[26]

I brought up Aristotle and his discovering and codifying many of the Laws of Logic, the most important being the Law of non-contradiction, one of the most important laws of logical thought.[27] Another major problem that faces the pantheist is that there is no reality except the all-encompassing God. Everything else is illusion, or maya. But again, this is a nonsensical statement that is logically self-refuting. If everything is illusion, then those making that statement are themselves illusions. There’s a real problem here. As Norman Geisler (Ph.D., Loyola University of Chicago) pointed out, “One must exist in order to affirm that he does not exist.[28] When we claim that there is no reality except the all-encompassing God, we are proving just the opposite. The fact that we exist to make the claim demonstrates that there is a reality distinct from God, which makes this key doctrine of pantheism a self-defeating proposition. It is an untruth — by definition.

k) I then mentioned that Buddhism cannot answer the problem of evil and I provided her with an easily understood example that I often use, it is the example real evil.

Let’s say I am home with my 10-year-old son. My work calls me into work on an emergency so I call my uncle Bo to come over and watch him so I can go in. While I am at work my Uncle Bo rapes and sodomizes my son. Well, eastern philosophies that use the karmic understanding of reincarnation posit that something my son did in a previous lifetime demanded that this happen to him in this lifetime.

Felicia didn’t like this much. She defended reincarnation as if I was being bigoted and intolerant (like she was really being towards Christianity). So I gave some more examples dealing with how holy men in India walk by the needy. In India and Tibet and other areas that hold to reincarnation as the predominate philosophy; in other words, one is in his or her predicament, for the most part, because of a previous life. For the Dalai Lama and other “Holy Men to help these poor unfortunates is to tamper with their karma. These before mentioned men will literally walk right past the poor, invalid, maimed, un-educated, starving, mentally ill people and completely ignore their pleas for help and assistance. All because of their caste or karmic past! It takes a person who a priori accepts (presupposes) the theistic worldview, specifically the Judeo-Christian worldview, like Mother Theresa who went to India and adopted the city of Calcutta, doing what these holy men didn’t. And may I be so bold as to posit that if a Buddhist or Hindu actually helps the needy, they do so out of compassion which is consistent with theism, not pantheism.

l) Another example I gave which wasn’t allowed to go to its fruition, because those who have tough challenges refuse to hear the tough answers: While speaking in Thailand, Ron Carlson was invited to visit some refugee camps along the Cambodian border. Over 300,000 refugees were caught in a no-man’s-land along the border. This resulted from the Cambodian massacre under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the mid-70′s (which is known as the “killing fields“) and then subsequently by the invasion of the Vietnamese at the end of the 70′s. One of the most fascinating things about these refugee camps was the realization of who was caring for the refugees. Here, in this Buddhist country of Thailand, with Buddhist refugees coming from Cambodia and Laos, there were no Buddhists taking care of their Buddhist brothers. There were also no Atheists, Hindus, or Muslims taking care of those people. The only people there, taking care of these 300,000[+] people, were Christians from Christian mission organizations and Christian relief organizations. One of the men Ron was with had lived in Thailand for over twenty-years and was heading up a major portion of the relief effort for one of these organizations. Ron asked him: “Why, in a Buddhist country, with Buddhist refugees, are there no Buddhists here taking care of their Buddhist brothers? Ron will never forget his answer:

Ron, have you ever seen what Buddhism does to a nation or a people? Buddha taught that each man is an island unto himself. Buddha said, ‘if someone is suffering, that is his karma.’ You are not to interfere with another person’s karma because he is purging himself through suffering and reincarnation! Buddha said, ‘You are to be an island unto yourself.‘” — “Ron, the only people that have a reason to be here today taking care of these 300,000 refugees are Christians. It is only Christianity that people have a basis for human value that people are important enough to educate and to care for. For Christians, these people are of ultimate value, created in the image of God, so valuable that Jesus Christ died for each and every one of them. You find that value in no other religion, in no other philosophy, but in Jesus Christ.[29]

Do you get it now? It takes a “Mother Teresa to go into these embattled countries and bathe, feed, educate, care for these people — who otherwise are ignored due to harmful religious beliefs.

m) The August 22, 2005 New York Times had a fantastic article based on a Nature Journal report about religious belief among scientists: 40% of American scientists believe in God, specifically a God to whom they can pray and expect to receive an answer.[30] Pantheism (Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the like) do not have a God to pray to. I also mentioned science has in fact backed the Hebrew/Christian account of creation, I used the following example (not quite word-for-word mind you):

n) For almost 2,300 years, the universe was thought to be static. However, the Bible clearly states that it had a beginning[31] (see The Case for a Creator, “The Evidence of Cosmology: Beginning with a Bang,” which is where I am quoting the below from). Even now some physicists and cosmologists are still pushing the static view, multiple universe view, and the like. However, all these break down under the math used for them (an infinity cannot be put into a math equation and have it be tenable, this was Albert Einstein’s Fudge Factor). What has modern science shown that since the Greeks has been assumed?

When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. In order to make the universe static, he had to fudge his equations by putting in a facto that would hold the universe steady.

In the 1920′s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaitre were able to develop models based on Einstein’s theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course, this meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn’t exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this the Big Bang — and the name stuck!

Starting in the 1920′s, scientists began to find empirical evidence that supported these purely mathematical models. For instance, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears redder than it should be, and this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Hubble’s astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaitre.

Then in the 1940′s, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the universe’s background radiation — and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There’s no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and a very dense state of the universe, which was predicted by the Big Bang model.

The third main piece of the evidence for the Big Bang is the origin of light elements. Heavy elements, like carbon and iron, are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded through supernova into space. But the very, very light elements, like deuterium and helium, cannot have been synthesized in the interior of the stars, because you would need an even more powerful furnace to create them. These elements must have been forged in the furnace of the Big Bang itself at temperatures that were billions of degrees. There’s no other explanation.

So predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by the scientific data. Moreover, they have been corroborated by the failure of every attempt to falsify them by alternative models. Unquestionably, the Big Bang model has impressive scientific credentials . . . . Up to this time, it was taken for granted that the universe as a whole was a static, eternally existing object . . . . At the time an agnostic, American astronomer Robert Jastrow was forced to concede that although details may differ, the essential element in the astronomical and Biblical accounts of Genesis is the same; the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply, at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy” . . . . Einstein admitted the idea of the expanding universe “irritates me[32] (presumably, said one prominent scientist, “because of its theological implications[33])

So the Bible has stood on one interpretation of the universe when the world was against it. And the Bible ended up being spot on. Not only that, but the Big Bang demonstrates that a Cause must have happened, and that this cause is outside the time-space dimension and would be an absolute Cause (this fits with the theistic model for God, not pantheistic).

That’s it. I hope you all enjoyed the journey down Straw-Man Lane,” where the premisi are fallacious and the conclusions are wrong.

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footnotes

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[1] People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By “presuppositions” we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. “As a man thinketh, so he is,” is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room” — that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions (Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, Crossway Books, Wheaton [1976], pp. 19-20.).

[2] world religions, as well as cults and the occult;

[3] worldviews, philosophy of science, philosophy of history, philosophy of religious, philosophy of political, philosophy of law, etc;

[4] currant affairs — hot button issues, socio-economic/religio-political topics, left-right dichotomies, and the like;

[5] A straw man argument is a logical fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “set up a straw man” or “set up a straw-man argument” is to create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent. A straw-man argument can be a successful rhetorical technique (that is, it may succeed in persuading people) but it is in fact misleading, because the opponent’s actual argument has not been refuted.

[6] “The real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?” http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5527

[7] Mussolini, Diuturna pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.

[8] Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God?, (Dallas: Word, 1994), p. XVII.

[9] Ibid., pp. 22-23

[10] Two articles I recommend: http://www.trueorigin.org/hitler01.asp – “Was Hitler a Christian?”, and, http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v13/i2/nazi.asp – “Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust.” The authors bio follows for those who think that believers are un-educated:

Education

M.P.H., Northwest Ohio Consortium for Public Health (Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio; University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio; Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio), 2001; M.S. in biomedical science, Medical College of Ohio, Toledo, Ohio, 1999; Ph.D. in human biology, Columbia Pacific University, San Rafael, California, 1992; M.A. in social psychology, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1986; Ph.D. in measurement and evaluation, minor in psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1976; M.Ed. in counseling and psychology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1971; B.S., Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1970. Major area of study was sociology, biology, and psychology; A.A. in Biology and Behavioral Science, Oakland Community College, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1967.

Honors/awards/certifications

Fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation, 1983; Who’s Who in America; MENSA; Ohio certification to teach both elementary and high school levels; Professional memberships.

Dr Bergman is or was active in the following organizations

National Association for Gifted Children; American Educational Research Association; National Council on Measurement in Education; American Sociological Association; American Psychological Association; Ohio Psychological Association; Association for the Scientific Study of Religion; American Association of Suicidology; Institute of Religion and Health; American Society of Corrections.

The Professional Organizations that Dr Bergman is now a member of and/or involved in, include

Ohio Science Teachers Association; American Biology Teachers Association; The American Scientific Affiliation; The American Association for the Advancement of Science; The American Association for the History of Science; American Chemical Society; American Institute of Biological Sciences; Ohio Academy of Science; American Institute of Chemists; New York Academy of Sciences; The New York Museum of Natural History; Other professional memberships; Society for the Scientific Study of Male Psychology and Physiology, President & Founder.

Radio, video tapes, and television shows

Dr Bergman has appeared on approximately 200 radio shows and 14 television shows for various Public Television and other stations. His research has been featured several times on the Paul Harvey Show, and once by David Brinkley.

[11] Another myth is that the Pope helped or supported Hitler. A good book by Rabbi David G. Dalin and is entitled The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pope Pius Rescued Jews from the Nazis.

[12] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy (New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942), pp. 161-162.

[13]The SS Blood and Soul,” one of four videos in a video series entitled, The Occult History of the Third Reich (St. Lauret, Quebec: Madacy Entertainment Group, 1998); Now in DVD – ISBN: 0974319465). See also

[14] see chapter 15, “The Elephant in the Living Room.

[15] Marvin L. Lubenow, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 47.

[16] Sir Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947), p. 230.

[17] Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult, Dorset Press; New York [1989], p. 19

[18] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology, New York University Press; New York [1985] p. 109

[19] J. Sydney Jones Hitler in Vienna 1907-1913, Stein & Day; New York [1983], p. 123

[20] ibid., p. 123

[21] Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult, Dorset Press; New York [1989], p. 23

[22] Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God Adolf Hitler, Signet Books; New York [1977], p. 91

[23] Wulf Schwarzwaller, The Unknown Hitler: His Private Life and Fortune, National Press Book; Washington D. C. [1989], p. 67

[24] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim: Houghton Mifflin; New York [1971], p.687

[25] http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660PDF List of over 600 Scientists, and Professors who Disagree with Darwinism, pantheists (Buddhists, Hindus, and the like) support Darwinism, broadly.

[26] J. P. Moreland, Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1987), p. 92. I recommend Francis Beckwith (Ph.D., Fordham University) & Gregory Koukl’s (M. A. Trinity Law School) book, Relativism: Feet Planted Firmly In Mid-Air. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998).

[27] “. . . is considered the foundation of logical reasoning,” Manuel Velasquez, Philosophy: A Text with Readings (Wadsworth; 2001), p. 51. “A theory in which this law fails . . . is an inconsistent theory”, edited by Ted Honderich, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, (Oxford Univ; 1995), p. 625.

[28] Norman Geisler, Christian Apologetics. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1976), p. 187.

[29] Ron Carlson & Ed Decker, Fast Facts on False Teachings. (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House, 1994), pp. 28-29.

[30] Also see: Newsweek (7/20/98), Society/Science, “Can Science & Faith Be Reconciled?”

[31] “The Evidence of Cosmology: Beginning with a Bang,” in The Case for a Creator, by Lee Strobel

[32] Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers, p. 21. Said Jastrow of Einstein: “We know he had well-defined feelings about God, but not as the Creator or the Prime Mover. For Einstein, the existence of God was proven by the laws of nature; that is, the fact that there was order in the Universe and man could discover it.” This is the basis for Natural Law, which is the foundation for the ethics found in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Not to mention why science boomed in the West and why the East lagged behind, because the universe isn’t real in eastern thinking. Why study and dissect an illusion? A Hindu scientist must first reject his religions presuppositions and then borrow the presuppositions of the Judeo-Christian worldview, which is that a) the universe exists, and b) men can discover truths about it.

[33] Ibid., p. 104

Christopher Hitchens Seeing the Despair In “Best Laid Plans” By Men?

By PapaGiorgio / Aug 04 2010 / in Apologetics, Apologetics Sub, Cartoons, Secularism/Atheism / No Comments »
Christopher Hitchens Seeing the Despair In "Best Laid Plans" By Men?

Fixed Point (video at the end) discusses what we Christians were all thinking who have known and enjoyed Hitchens via debates with great Christian thinkers as well as his weekly insights on the Hugh Hewitt show. In a previous post I asked and said this in regards to the news of his cancer:

…will he remain an atheist to death. Many in his place have, but typically die through disease inflicted through too many partners, or drug overdoses. Sartre and Flew are examples of others who have changed their minds, even if at a late hour. I will be praying for Hitchens, that he escape the worst sickness of all… his rebellion against his Creator.

A great question, considering his diagnosis of a deadly form of cancer. Here is a more recent story from Politico:

…Hitchens was describing the events leading up to his hospitalization, in which he learned of his diagnosis.

“In whatever kind of a ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist. … I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me,” he writes. “Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”

…(read more)…

Inspiration for insertion of this Robot Chicken can be blamed entirely on The Anchoress:

He is being brought to the importance of a decision by the one-to-one ratio that besets us all. He is also being brought to the realization of the compassion indwelt in the Judeo-Christian worldview… something he has waged war on – God.


 

Transcendent Beauty Only Skin Deep? Or In Even the Deepest Secrets of Our DNA?

Transcendent Beauty Only Skin Deep? Or In Even the Deepest Secrets of Our DNA?

In this presentation Ravi Zacharias takes his time explaining a talk he was present at where Dr. Francis S. Collins…

who is an American physician-geneticist, noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and described by the Endocrine Society as “one of the most accomplished scientists of our time.” He currently serves as Director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

…compares a cross section of DNA to a stained-glass Rose window from Yorkminster Cathedral. The design is apparent and Collins mentions it a huge boost to his faith.

Ravi writes:

“The picture (of the DNA) did more that take away one’s breath; it was awesome in the profoundest sense of the term – not just beautiful but overwhelming. And it almost mirrored the pattern of the Rose window… The intricacy of the DNA’s design, which pointed to the Transcendant One, astonished those who are themselves the design and who have been created semitranscendant by design. We see ourselves only partially, but through our Creator’s eyes, we see our transcendance. In looking at our own DNA, the subject and the object come together.”


RNA/DNA or Information

RNA/DNA or Information

What naturalism is is described in the last paragraph. It is also described in a more relational way here, “Love.”

Professor Werner Gitt – Director and professor at the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology – tells us that:

“The highest information density known to us is that of DNA molecules…. The storage capacity of DNA, the information carriers of living things, is 4.5 x 10(to the 13th power) times more effective than a megachip!… The sum total of knowledge currently stored in the libraries of the world is estimated at 10(to the 18th power) bits. If this information could be stored in DNA molecules, 1% of the volume of a pinhead would be sufficient for this purpose. If, on the other hand, this information were to be stored with aid of megachips, we would need a pile higher than the distance between the earth and the moon.”

The DNA molecule, of which even the simplest – some would say the most “primitive” – forms of life are composed, is thus 45 million million times more efficient at holding and conveying information than a megachip. This is because the DNA molecule is an incredibly complex three-dimensional information storage system, where the megachip is only two-dimensional. But the DNA molecules ability to store and convey such inconceivably large amounts of information so efficiently does not tell us where the itself comes from. What is the source of that?

Information Theory, of which Professor Gitt is one of the world’s leading exponents, is an important branch of scientific investigation which has shown conclusively and consistently that information cannot and does not arise from any state of non-information, just as life cannot proceed from non-life. Moreover, information has now come to be recognized as the Third Fundamental Quantity of the universe, which hitherto was thought to consist of merely two fundamental quantities, those of matter and energy. The DNA molecule is, of course, matter. Its activities are funded by energy. But the information that it carries is something else entirely. In other words, it is not sufficient to have only matter and energy for DNA to work. What is also required, at least to begin with, is a massive input of information for which matter and energy can give no account, and which neither of them can supply. Again, Professor Gitt:

“According to Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics and information theory, information cannot be of a physical nature, even though it is transmitted by physical means: ‘Information in information, neither matter nor energy. No materialism that fails to take account of this can survive the present day.’”

 

Because of the increasing disillusionment with the role of chance, a shift took place in the late 60’s and the 70’s to the view that life was somehow the inevitable outcome of nature’s laws at work over vast spans of time. Terms such as “directed chance” and “biochemical predestination” have entered the scientific literature to mean that life was somehow the result of the inherent properties of matter.

But more discomforting still to the materialist, is not just the recent discovery of information to be the Third Fundamental Quantity, but rather the startling realization of its source:

“If a basic code is found in any system, it can be concluded that the system originated from a mental concept, and did not arise by chance…. Meanings always represent mental concepts. They are distinct from matter and energy. They originate from an intelligent source. It is by means of language that information may be stored and transmitted on physical carriers. The information itself is invariant…. The reason for this invariance lies in its non-material nature.”

It would seem then that while some materialists have been busy looking in all the wrong places, certain physicists have stumbled upon the Mind of God.

The problem with most of modern science is that the philosophy of reductionism is the ruling paradigm. According to George Williams, a scientist of some stature in the evolutionary community, the crucial object of selection in evolution is inherently non-material:

“Evolutionary biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter…. These two domains can never be brought together in any kind of the sense usually implied by the term ‘reductionism.’ … The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium, its not the message…. Just the fact that fifteen years ago I started using a computer may have had something to do with my ideas here. The constant process of transferring information from one physical medium to another and then being able to recover the same information in the original medium brings home the separability of information and matter. In biology, when you’re talking about things like genes and genotypes and gene pools, you’re talking about information, not physical objective reality.”

Perhaps evolutionary biologists have avoided noticing that information and matter are fundamentally different things because that insight is fatal to the whole reductionist project in biology. If the message is truly not reducible to the medium, then trying to explain the creation of the information by a materialistic theory is simply a category mistake. One might as well try to explain the origin of a literary work [say, Hamlet] by invoking the chemical laws that govern the combining of ink and paper, and then proposing speculative hypotheses about how those laws (with boost from chance but without intelligence) might have generated meaningful sentences.

Rob Bell’s Presentation of the Gospel-Critiqued

By PapaGiorgio / Jul 27 2010 / in Aberrant Christian Teaching, Apologetics / No Comments »
Rob Bell's Presentation of the Gospel-Critiqued

The original recording of this I did disappeared into the wasteland of the Internet. So I re-downloaded it into a new file. Rob Bell has his presentation of the “Gospel” put to the test of the Word of God as well as Christian historical points examined. This topic is long, but important (2hrs). Pirate Christian radio can be found here as well as a couple other sites by Chris Rosebrough:

Rob Bells “Gospel” Presentation Critiqued from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.

This show was done well after my paper was first published on Scribd and emailed to Chris. The similarities can be attributed to coincidence or me focusing Chris in on the issues at hand. My paper can be found here:

In both my paper and the audio portion of Lee Strobel added in the Pirate Christian Radio broadcast, Rob Bell’s history is shown to be way off and in line more with Gnostic scholars like Pagels and the Jesus Seminar. My paper also included Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, probably the premier historian on pre-Christ history.

William Lane Craig Gives the Best Evidences for the Theistic/Christian Faith

By PapaGiorgio / Jul 27 2010 / in Apologetics Sub, Philosophy/Ethics, Worldviews / No Comments »
William Lane Craig Gives the Best Evidences for the Theistic/Christian Faith

William Lane Craig gives one of his best presentations on evidences for theism. It is directly aimed at the heart of atheistic arguments and destroys many of the straw-men placed by said atheists.

There is a short follow up by atheist professor Daniel Dennett that lasts about 10-minutes or so, who has no defense of his atheism in light of what just happened. He basically mentions that his non-knowledge will some day be filled in (atheism-of-the-gaps). Professor McGrath (theist) finishes up with about a 5-minute outro.

Theistic Evidences at Philsophers Convention from Papa Giorgio on Vimeo.

Defining Terms Between Two Sides of an Issue (Creation/Intelligent Design and Evolution/Darwinism)

Defining Terms Between Two Sides of an Issue (Creation/Intelligent Design and Evolution/Darwinism)

A mock conversation from the jr. high level book What’s Darwin Got to Do With It? A Friendly Conversation About Evolution:

  • Creationist: Before we get started, we’ve got to clear up some terms. Words can be used a lot of different ways.
  • Evolutionist: That’s what we have dictionaries for.
  • Creationist: This is a little trickier than that. like, how would you define the word “adult?”
  • Evolutionist: Mature. Responsible. Grown up. Why?
  • Creationist: So, when you (as a mature, responsible grown-up) want something to read, do you shop at an adult bookstore?… I don’t think so. We have the same problem here. Evolution” and “creationism” are both wagon words. “
  • Evolutionist: Wagon words?
  • Creationist: Yeah, you know, loaded with other stuff that comes along when you pull the handle [of a wagon].
  • Evolutionist: How do you mean?
  • Creationist: Well, take “evolution.” Some people talk as though all it means is “change over time.” If that were all it meant, I’d buy it.
  • Evolutionist: You mean I win already?
  • Creationist: No, of course not. All I’m saying is that nobody in their right mind questions that some animals have changed some through the course of their existence on earth. What I find, though, is that when I grab the [wagon] handle, all sorts of other things come along with it. Things like a belief that an unguided, purposeless process can cause the accumulation of minor changes and cascade them into major complex innovations.
  • Evolutionist: What about “creationism?”
  • Creationist: Well, I prefer to be called a design theorist. My major point is that some things in the natural world are so complex that it seems more likely that they were designed rather than arose by chance. Unfortunately, when I pull this handle… you find that you’re also stuck with defending a geologically young earth… and the idea that everything we see on earth was created in six calendar days.
  • Evolutionist: So you’re saying that the terms are too broad?
  • Creationist: Yeah. I’ve seen people use “evolution” to refer to something as simple as minor changes in bird beaks. I’ve also seen people use the term to mean the spontaneous appearance of life… its unguided creation of major innovations (like the birds themselves)… and its purposeless progression into incredible complexity (like the human brain).
  • Evolutionist: And I’ve seen people use the term “creationism” for everything from a strict literal reading of Genesis… all the way to the idea that God started the ball rolling and then let nature take its course. Yeah, I guess you’re right – the terms are too broad.
  • Creationist: May I suggest that we use these terms so that we don’t end up pulling more than we want?

 

Some working language then:

Creation or Creation-science

The belief that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old, and that all biological life forms were created in six calendar days and have remained relatively stable throughout their existence.

Intelligent Design or Design Theory

The belief that the earth and biological life owe their existence to a purposeful, intelligent creation.

Darwinism

The belief that undirected mechanistic processes (primarily random mutation and natural selection) can account for all the diverse and complex living organisms that exist. Insists that there is no long range plan or purpose in the history of life (i.e., that changes happen without intent).

Micro-evolution

Refers to minor variations that occur in populations over time. Examples include variation in moth population and finch beaks, and the emergence of different breeds of dogs.

Macro-evolution

Refers to the emergence of major innovations or the unguided development of new structures (like wings), new organs (like lungs), and body plans (like the origin of insects and birds). Includes changes above the species level, especially new phyla or classes. [species and classes are a hot – debatable – topic.]

Common Descent

The theory that all currently living organisms are descended from a common [or a few common] ancestor[s].

About us

About UsAbout Papa Giorgio @ RPT:

Biased: I have my own interests and personal beliefs in mind when talking to others, spiritually or politically (Prov 21:2; Matt 15:19), because... I am Fallen: I am a sinner and tend towards ~ naturally ~ what is not best for me or others. In other words, I will probably let you down (Rom 3:10; Rom 3:23; Lam 5:16); Sentenced: since I tend towards rebellion and selfishness, I am judged accordingly and righteously (Rom 5:12; Rom 6:23a; Job 36:6); Forgiven: I am justified before God NOT through works but by faith (Eph 2:8-10; Gal 2:16; Rom 6:23b; PS 86:5); Relational: mercy is not getting what you deserve. And grace is getting what you absolutely do not deserve (Heb 4:16; Eph 1:5; Jer 15:19a). (FYI ~ all graphics below are click-able)

Apologetic Resources

Great Online Courses in Apologetics

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For the latest headline news about creation, I.D., and evolutionary topics:

Evo-news

Another apologetics site I love and frequent is the following:

apologobig

Search for apologetics articles, books, videos, and other research resources across 135 Christian apologetics websites and blogs. (Click Eyeglass)

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For a great take on the truth of the Gospel, visit PCM:

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Live from Buffalo, Every Day Reggie. I Like Biscuits. Turtles are Green.

Video & Audio Uploads

Dissent

Scientists Who Dissent from Neo-Darwinsim:

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Medical Doctors Who Dissent from Neo-Darwinism:

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Creation Scientists Biographies of Interest (Historical Creationist)

Polonium218


A Short Animation Explaining Intelligent Design


Some Questions About Evolution that Should Be Exhumed

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Conservative Activism

Support Our Troops By Supporting the USO

USO
 

Join AMAC and Tear Up Your AARP Card

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Sign the Manhattan Declaration for Marriage Between One Man and One Woman

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Military Ministry

MM
 

Christians United for Israel (for Zions Sake)

CUFI-3
 

A Good Site To Branch Out from To Fight Abortion

Abort-73 Main

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Jihad Watch

Conquest
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Civility

Disgusting


DNC-Map

Creation Encyclopedias

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stacks
Revolution Against Evolution
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R.A.E. Essays
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Creation-Evolution Encyclopedia
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