Author: Papa Giorgio

Jesus vs Muhammad | Jordan Peterson

Published by Papa Giorgio

“All of the nine founders of religion, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are reported in their respective sacred scriptures as having passed through a preliminary period of uncertainty, or of searching for religious light. All the founders of the non-Christian religions evinced inconsistencies in their personal character; some of them altered their practical policies under change of circumstances. Jesus Christ alone is reported as having had a consistent God-consciousness, a consistent character himself, and a consistent program for his religion.”

Robert Hume, The World’s Living Religions (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 285-286.

SEE MY PDF: “MUHAMMAD vs. JESUS“

MUHAMMAD

MUHAMMAD – Ordered his followers, as well as personally participating in, both digging their graves and cutting the throats of between 600-to-900 men, women, and children. Jews. Some of the women and children were taken as property. He was a military tactician that lied and told others to use deception that ultimately led to the death of many people (taqiyya): The word “Taqiyya” literally means: “Concealing, precaution, guarding.”

  • In the West, what is said and done more or less corresponds to the intentions of the speaker and the doer. Liars and cheats abound, of course, but generally they can go only so far before being caught out in the contractual relationships of their society. Lying and cheating in the Arab world is not really a moral matter but a method of safeguarding honor and status, avoiding shame, and at all times exploiting possibilities, for those with the wits for it, deftly and expeditiously to convert shame into honor on their own account, and vice versa for their opponents. If honor so demands, lies and cheating may become absolute imperatives. In Shia practice, a man is allowed what is called “precautionary dissimulation,” a recognition that truth may be impossible in some contexts.
  • Pierre Bourdieu, the French social anthropologist, has pointed out that no dishonor attaches to such primary transactions as selling short weight, deceiving anyone about quality, quantity or kind of goods, cheating at gambling, and bearing false witness. The doer of these things is merely quicker off the mark than the next fellow; owing him nothing, he is not to be blamed for taking what he can.[1]

Islamic ethics include deceiving the Kafir. The doctrine of deception is found in the Sunna and the Koran. The Arabic name for sacred deception is called taqiyya.

We never see any depictions of Muhammad with children, we just know that he most likely acquired a child bride at age six and consummated that “marriage” when she was nine[2]  — he was a pedophile in other words. While the Qu’ran states that a follower of this book should have no more than 4 wives, we know of course that he had many more, about 5 more in fact. And “Just War Theory” cannot apply to Muhammad and Muslim’s since when he said:

“I have been ordered by Allah to fight against people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle and offer prayers perfectly and give the obligatory charity…then they will save their lives and property from me” (Sahih Muslim 1.24).

He ordered his followers to raid caravans, “This is the caravan of the Quraysh possessing wealth. It is likely that Allah may give it to you as booty.”[3] As he was dying, he said these now famous words, “I have been made victorious with terror.”[4]

Many more examples could be provided! Even when it comes to “salvation,” the most ardent/obedient Muslim still leaves his or her entrance into “heaven” is, in the end, an impersonal act of arbitrary divine power.… no story of love and sacrifice or assurance is provided.

[1] David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (Chicago, IL: Ivan R, Dee Publishers, 2009), 4, 38.

[2] Bukhari, vol. 5, book 63, no. 3896; cf. Bukhari, vol. 7, book 67, no. 5158.

[3] Ibn Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, translated by S. Moinul Haq and H. K. Ghazanfar, vol. 2 (Kitab Bhavan, n.d.), 9.

[4] Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, vol. 4, bk. 56, no. 2977 (Darussalam, 1997).

I was reading through some passages in the Quran not too long ago and came across Quran chapter 79, verse 42. I immediately noticed how similar this verse in the Quran is to Mark 13:31-32 … So, I started to do some more research on who Muhammad REALLY thought he was compared to Jesus. The findings are quite shocking!

JESUS

JESUS – When Peter struck off the ear of the soldier, healed it. Christ said if his followers were of any other kingdom, they would fight to get him off the cross. He also told Peter if he lived by the sword, he would die by it.; Christ invited and used children as examples of how Jewish adults should view their faith… something culturally radical – inviting children into an inner-circle of a group of status-oriented men such as the Pharisees was unheard of. Especially saying to them their faith must be similar; Jesus, and thusly us, can access true love because the Triune God has eternally loved (The Father loves the Son, etc. ~ unlike the Unitarian God of Islam).

Love between us then has roots in our Creator… [examples]:

  1. my wife and I for instance, as well as family,
  2. the love in community/Body of Christ,
  3. love for our enemies, …etc…

…has eternal foundations in God; This love from God towards us has caused a Sacrifice to ensure our salvation (John 3:16-17; 5:25; 6:47). Jesus said as well that he has “spoken openly to the world… always teaching in synagogues or at the temple, where all the Jews come together. ‘I said nothing in secret’” (John 18:20). The Bible also states that God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2; Hebrews 6:18) … and Jesus is God in orthodoxy (i.e., Jesus cannot lie). The love of Christ and the relationship he offers is bar-none the center piece of our faith… something the Muslim does not have. Which is why the Church evolved because they have a point of reference in Christ to come back to. In Matthew chapter 5 we find Jesus’ teaching and commending us to the following:

THE BEATITUDES | BELIEVERS ARE SALT AND LIGHT | CHRIST FULFILLS THE LAW | MURDER BEGINS IN THE HEART | ADULTERY BEGINS IN THE HEART | DIVORCE PRACTICES CENSURED | TELL THE TRUTH | GO THE SECOND MILE | LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

Muhammad would never be able to speak of these things that Christ did in the record of Matthew. Which is why whenever given the chance I say to a Muslim I pray they emulate Jesus’ life and follow Him rather than Muhammad. I wish Muhammad had read and followed Jesus’ teachings as well.

This is a segment of a Muslim caller into the Michael Medved Show and both Mosab Yousef and Michael Medved respond. Yousef compares Christians to Muhammad, the caller compares Muslims to Christians:

AQUINAS THOUGHTS ON MUHAMMAD

St. Thomas Aquinas is one of the most prolific thinkers in Western history; his words should not be taken lightly, regardless of your cultural/religious background. Subscribe now to stay updated with excellent content.

BREITBART has a neat story about Aquinas and his views on Islam… here is a portion of it:

…In one of his most significant works, the voluminous Summa contra gentiles, which Aquinas wrote between 1258 and 1264 AD, the scholar argued for the truth of Christianity against other belief systems, including Islam.

Aquinas contrasts the spread of Christianity with that of Islam, arguing that much of Christianity’s early success stemmed from widespread belief in the miracles of Jesus, whereas the spread of Islam was worked through the promise of sensual pleasures and the violence of the sword.

Mohammad, Aquinas wrote, “seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure.”

Such an offer, Aquinas contended, appealed to a certain type of person of limited virtue and wisdom.

“In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men,” he wrote. “As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity.”

Because of the weakness of Islam’s contentions, Aquinas argued, “no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning.” Instead, those who believed in him “were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms.”

Islam’s violent methods of propagation were especially unconvincing to Aquinas, since he found that the use of such force does not prove the truth of one’s claims, and are the means typically used by evil men.

“Mohammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms,” Aquinas wrote, “which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”

At the time Aquinas was writing, Islam was generally considered a Christian heresy, since it drew so heavily on Christian texts and beliefs. Aquinas wrote that Mohammed “perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law.”

According to the noted historian Hilaire Belloc, Islam “began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was—not a denial, but an adaptation and a misuse, of the Christian thing.”…

MUCH MORE

Here are some ways to deal with Muslim apologists questioning Jesus’ Divinity:

(Above) Nabeel Qureshi, a former Muslim, answers a question from a faithful Muslim about how Jesus could have both a Divine (God) nature and a human nature without confusion or contradiction. See more from Nabeel HERE  (He has passed away)

Nabeel is battling stomach cancer, so any prayers would be a gracious help.

Here is a more in-depth presentation dealing with how the question is typically raised.

Muslims around the world are being trained to ask Christians, “Where did Jesus say, ‘I am God, worship me,’ in those exact words?” However, if Muslims are suggesting that Jesus could only claim to be God by uttering a specific sentence, we may reply by asking, “Where did Jesus say, ‘I am only a prophet, don’t worship me,’ in those exact words?” The unreasonable demand for a particular statement, if applied consistently, would thus force Muslims to reject their own view!

Fortunately, we have a simple way to examine what Jesus said about himself. According to both the Bible and the Qur’an, there are certain claims that only God can truly make. For instance, God alone can correctly state that he created the universe. Of course, a mere human being can pronounce the words, “I created the universe,” but the statement would be false coming from anyone other than God.

Hence, if Jesus said things that can only truly be said by God, we must conclude that Jesus claimed to be God. Interestingly, Jews, Christians, and Muslims agree on many of the claims that cannot be properly made by (or about) mere human beings. In this video, we consider several examples of such claims.

For more on the deity of Christ, watch these videos by David Wood:

Among the major differences between Islam and Christianity is that of the character and nature of God as understood by the Bible and the Qur’an. For the Bible, Yahweh is a relational God, a God who appears to his people throughout the Old Testament, who took on flesh in the incarnation of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, and who will be present, the Bible claims, in heaven with us once again: “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” wrote the apostle Paul; “but then face to face.” [76] This is very different from Allah in the Qur’an, a God who is distant and remote, transcendent and lofty, who does not deign to step down into his creation, and is not present in Paradise. As Muslim theologian Isma’il al Faruqi writes:

Allah does not reveal Himself to anyone in any way. Allah reveals only his will… Allah does not reveal himself to anyone… that is the great difference between Christianity and Islam.[77]

Central, too, to the Christian understanding of God is that Yahweh is loving; indeed, the Bible goes as far as to boldly make the claim that God is love,[78] the one whose character and nature define what love actually is. You will commonly hear people opine that all religions teach that God is love, but this is simply not true – for instance, nowhere does the Qur’an claim that “Allah is love.”[79]

Finally, at the heart of Christianity stands the belief that, in Jesus, God has experienced suffering, paying the price of the cross in order to reconcile humanity to himself. Now atheists may choose to dismiss, laugh at, or even scoff at that claim, but it is a claim unique to Christianity.[80] It is certainly not an idea found in Islam, where the Qur’an goes as far as to deny that the historical event of Jesus’ crucifixion ever happened.

It has long fascinated me that when Christianity talks about the cross and the suffering of God, it is doing something quite startling, namely reversing the traffic pattern of every other religion, world view, and belief system. All other religions of which I am aware tend to work in one of three basic ways: they claim that if you know the right things, do the right things, or experience the right things, then you will achieve paradise, nirvana, wisdom, a higher state of consciousness, good teeth — whatever it is you are looking for. Islam adopts this model (“Keep the commandments”), as does, incidentally, the New Atheism, whose message is that if you think the right way — think good, secular, scientific thoughts — you’ll be one of the smart ones, one of the brights,[81] one of the elite, the elect.

[76] 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV).

[77] Isma’il al Faruqi, Christian Mission and Islamic Da’wah: Proceedings of the Chambésy Dialogue Consultation, Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1982, pp. 47-48.

[78] 1 John 4:16.

[79]  And many Muslim theologians argue that Muslims should not use the word “love” when talking about Allah; see e.g. Murad Wilfried Hofmann, “Differences between the Muslim and the Christian Concept of Divine Love” in 14th General Conference of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, Amman, Jordan, 2007. See also Gordon Nickel, “The Language of Love in Qur’an and Gospel” in Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala and Angel Urban, (eds), Sacred Text: Explorations in Lexicography, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 223-248.

[80] If you wish to understand this idea (which, whatever you make of it, is the central claim at the heart of Christianity), a great place to start is John Stott, The Cross of Christ, Leicester: IVP, 2006.

[81] A nauseatingly self-congratulatory term coined by some of the New Atheists to mark themselves off from the rest of the world, whom they clearly perceive as dimwits. See Daniel Dennett, “The Bright Stuff“, The New York Times, 12 July 2003.

Andy Banister, The Atheist Who Didn’t Exist: Or, The Dreadful Consequences of Bad Arguments (Oxford, England: Monarch Books, 2015), 62-63.

I am not a fan of the show… I think it is borderline blasphemous; but was listening to him (Neil Saavedra, AKA, “Jesus Christ”) on the way to get coffee for the wife and I while we were watching the niece. I enjoyed the call. I may start listening and uploading stuff like it in the future. BUT KNOW that a dude who responds like Jesus, is, …well… creepy and again ~ borderline blasphemous in my mind.

“Muhammad” Talks to “Jesus Christ”

I am not a fan of the show… I think it is borderline blasphemous; but was listening to him (Neil Saavedra, AKA, “Jesus Christ”) on the way to get coffee for the wife and I while we were watching the niece. I enjoyed the call. I may start listening and uploading stuff like it in the future. BUT KNOW that a dude who responds like Jesus, is, …well… creepy and again ~ borderline blasphemous in my mind.

The Last Line of Defense | Bari Weiss

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is via a hat-tip to Ayaan Hirsi Ali who says: “Very Powerful. Do as Bari urges us to do: Get Up and Fight.” The introduction by Mr. Theodore W. Ullyot, Co-Chairman, Board of Visitors, The Federalist Society — is here.

Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture | The Federalist Society, November 10, 2023 (Washington, D.C.)

The Last Line of Defense By Bari Weiss

Marine Corps Birthday | The Fat Electrician

Published by Papa Giorgio

The United States Military, which includes the Armed Forces and the National Guard, consists of various branches all birthed at different times throughout U.S. history. The Armed Forces consists of the following six military branches:

  • Army – June 14, 1775
  • Navy – October 13, 1775
  • Marine Corps – November 10, 1775
  • Coast Guard – August 4, 1790
  • Air Force – September 18, 1947
  • Space Force – December 20, 2019

The Genealogies of Jesus | A Supposed Contradiction, Explained

Published by Papa Giorgio

(This was originally posted in May of 2015, updated in Oct of 2022, and  Nov 2023)

This first video is the why the genealogies of Christ in Matthew and Luke are important. It is in Hebrew with English text underneath, so you may need a larger home computer screen for it. If the text moves too fast, there is a tool in the lower right of the YouTube video to slow it down. This helps. But this is a powerful video, a must watch. (Video Description) Is Jesus a descendant of the line of David? Or is His lineage full of contradictions as the Rabbis claim?? (This is my 2022 addition)

2022

This is my original post, I will note the addition I will add to it after.

2015

The “Genealogy” of Jesus

Norman Geisler explains the apparent contradiction between Matthew and Luke’s genealogies.

This is one of the more popular examples of a Biblical contradiction that is for the most part brought up by Muslims to show the Bible is a document riddled with problems. However, if one gives this document the same attestation as one gives to any other text of history, say, Livy’s History of Rome or Caesar’s Gallic Wars, then the alleged contradictions disappear. On this test John Warwick Montgomery writes that literary critics still follow Aristotle’s dictum that “the benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic himself.” With this in mind, lets see what some have to say about this “contradiction.”

Matthew 1:1-16 gives the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph, who was himself a descendant of King David. As Joseph’s adopted Son, Jesus became his legal heir, so far as his inheritance was concerned. Notice carefully the wording of verse 16: “And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ [messiah]” (NASB). This stands in contrast to the format followed in the preceding verses of the succession of Joseph’s ancestors: “Abraham begat [egennesen] Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob, etc.” Joseph is not said to have begotten Jesus: rather he is referred to as “the husband of Mary, of whom [Gk. feminine genitive] Jesus was born.”

Luke 3:23-38, on the other hand seems to record the genealogical line of Mary herself, carried all the way back beyond the time of Abraham to Adam and the commencement of the human race. This seems to be implied by the wording of verse 23: “Jesus… being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph.” This “as was supposed” indicates that Jesus was not really the biological son of Joseph, even though this was commonly assumed by the public. It further calls attention to the mother, Mary, who must of necessity have been the sole human parent through whom Jesus could have descended from a line of ancestors. Her genealogy is thereupon listed, starting with Heli, who was actually Joseph’s father-in-law, in contradistinction to Joseph’s own father, Jacob:

And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli – Luke 3:23 [Mary]

And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary – Matthew 1:16 [Joseph]

Mary’s line of descent came through Nathan, a son of Bathsheba (or “Bathshua,” according to 1 Chronicles 3:5), the wife of David. Therefore, Jesus was descended from David naturally through Nathan and legally through Solomon.

The coming Messiah of Israel had to be able to prove this lineage as it was prophesied in the Old Testament that He would in fact be a descendant of David. The Jews kept meticulous records at the temple mount of all the genealogical records of the Hebrew people. This information was “public knowledge,” or, verifiable by even the Pharisees. The Romans destroyed these records in A.D. 70. (This is very important – prophetically speaking – because the Orthodox Jews [as opposed to the Messianic Jews] are still awaiting their Messiah, however, he cannot be traced to David or Abraham! A prerequisite for Messiah clearly stated in the Old Testament.) Also of importance is the fact that Luke is very close to Mary, remember that Jesus gave him charge of her while shortly before he died.

Here is Norman Geisler and Thomas Howe in their book, When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties, explaining the dealio:

LUKE 3:23 —Why does Luke present a different ancestral tree for Jesus than the one in Matthew?

PROBLEM: Jesus has a different grandfather here in Luke 3:23 (Heli) than He does in Matthew 1:16 (Jacob). Which one is the right one?

SOLUTION: This should be expected, since they are two different lines of ancestors, one traced through His legal father, Joseph and the other through His actual mother, Mary. Matthew gives the official line, since he addresses Jesus’ genealogy to Jewish concerns for the Jewish Messiah’s credentials which required that Messiah come from the seed of Abraham and the line of David (cf. Matt. 1:1). Luke, with a broader Greek audi­ence in view, addresses himself to their interest in Jesus as the Perfect Man (which was the quest of Greek thought). Thus, he traces Jesus back to the first man, Adam (Luke 3:38).

That Matthew gives Jesus’ paternal genealogy and Luke his maternal genealogy is further supported by several facts. First of all, while both lines trace Christ to David, each is through a different son of David. Matthew traces Jesus through Joseph (his legal father) to David’s son, Solomon the king, by whom Christ rightfully inherited the throne of David (cf. 2 Sam. 7:12ff). Luke’s purpose, on the other hand, is to show Christ as an actual human. So he traces Christ to David’s son, Nathan, through his actual mother, Mary, through whom He can rightfully claim to be fully human, the redeemer of humanity.

Further, Luke does not say that he is giving Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph. Rather, he notes that Jesus was “as was supposed” (Luke 3:23) the son of Joseph, while He was actually the son of Mary. Also, that Luke would record Mary’s genealogy fits with his interest as a doctor in mothers and birth and with his emphasis on women in his Gospel which has been called “the Gospel for Women.”

Finally, the fact that the two genealogies have some names in common (such as Shealtiel and Zerubbabel, Matt. 1:12; cf. Luke 3:27) does not prove they are the same genealogy for two reasons. One, these are not uncommon names. Further, even the same genealogy (Luke’s) has a repeat of the names Joseph and Judah (3: 26, 30).

Matthew and Luke each record a different Genealogy for the family of Jesus, so is this a Bible contradiction that cannot be resolved? This video addresses this Supposed Bible Contradiction.

This a a partial excerpt from a great article over
at APOLOGETIC PRESS, enjoy. Click to enlarge:

…First, Matthew reported the lineage of Christ only back to Abraham; Luke traced it all the way back to Adam. Second, Matthew used the expression “begat;” Luke used the expression “son of,” which results in his list being a complete reversal of Matthew’s. Third, the two genealogical lines parallel each other from Abraham to David. Fourth, beginning with David, Matthew traced the paternal line of descent through Solomon; Luke traced the maternal line through Solomon’s brother, Nathan.

A fifth factor that must be recognized is that the two lines (paternal and maternal) link together in the intermarriage of Shealtiel and Zerubbabel. But the linkage separates again in the two sons of Zerubbabel—Rhesa and Abiud. Sixth, the two lines come together once again for a final time in the marriage of Joseph and Mary. Joseph was the end of the paternal line, while Mary was the last of the maternal line as the daughter of Heli.

The reason Joseph is said to be the “son” of Heli (Mary’s father) brings forth a seventh consideration: the Jewish use of “son.” Hebrews used the word in at least five distinct senses: (1) in the sense used today of a one-generation offspring; (2) in the sense of a descendant, whether a grandson or a more remote descendant many generations previous, e.g., Matthew 1:1; 21:9; 22:42 (“begat” had this same flexibility in application); (3) as a son-in-law (the Jews had no word to express this concept and so just used “son”—e.g., 1 Samuel 24:16; 26:17); (4) in accordance with the Levirate marriage law (Deuteronomy 25:5-10; cf. Matthew 22:24-26), a deceased man would have a son through a surrogate father who legally married the deceased man’s widow (e.g., Ruth 2:20; 3:9,12; 4:3-5); and (5) in the sense of a step-son who took on the legal status of his step-father—the relationship sustained by Jesus to Joseph (Matthew 13:55; Mark 6:3; Luke 3:23; 4:22; John 6:42).

Notice carefully that Joseph was a direct-line, blood descendant of David and, therefore, of David’s throne. Here is the precise purpose of Matthew’s genealogy: it demonstrated Jesus’ legal right to inherit the throne of David—a necessary prerequisite to authenticating His Messianic claim. However, an equally critical credential was His blood/physical descent from David—a point that could not be established through Joseph since “after His mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:18, emp. added). This feature of Christ’s Messiahship was established through His mother Mary, who was also a blood descendant of David (Luke 1:30-32). Both the blood of David and the throne of David were necessary variables to qualify and authenticate Jesus as the Messiah…

Here is Dr. Archer getting into the technical aspects of another part of the genealogy lineage:

Does not Matthew 1:9 err in listing Uzziah as the father of Jotham?

Matthew 1:9, which gives the gene­alogy of Jesus through His legal father, Joseph, states, “Ozias begat Joatham.” These are the Greek forms of Uzziah and Jotham. Some are con­fused by this mention of Uzziah, be­cause Jotham’s father is called Azariah in 2 Kings 15:1-7 and in 1 Chronicles 3:12. On the other hand, 2 Kings 15:32,34 calls him Uzziah rather than Azariah and refers to him as the father of Jotham. The same is true of 2 Chronicles 26:1-23; 27:2; Isaiah 1:1: 6:1; 7:1. The names are different. but they refer to the same king. `” zaryah (“Azariah”) means “Yahweh has helped,” whereas `uzzi-yahu (“Uzziah”) means “Yahweh is my strength.” The reason for the two names is not given in the biblical record, but the fact that he bore them both (perhaps Azariah was later replaced by Uzziah) is beyond dispute.

There are various reasons for the acquisition of second names in the case of Israel’s leaders. Gideon acquired the name Jerubbaal because of his destruc­tion of the altar of Baal at Ophrah (Judg. 6:32; 7:1; 8:29, etc.). Rehoboam’s son Abijam was also called Abijah (cf. 1 Kings 14:31; 15:1,7-8 for Abijam and 1 Chron. 3:10; 2 Chron. 12:16 for Abijah). Jehoahaz son of Josiah also bore the name of Shallum (2 Kings 23:21 and 1 Chron. 3:15; Jer. 22:11). Jehoiakim, Josiah’s oldest son, was originally named Eliakim; but Pharaoh Necho changed his name to Jehoiakim (i.e., “Yahweh will establish” rather than “God will establish”), ac­cording to 2 Kings 23:34. Likewise Jehoiachin son of Jehoiakim was also known as Jeconiah, and Zedekiah’s original name was Mattaniah.

Gleason Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982), 316-317.

The above comes from:

RECOMMENDED:

2023

WHAT IS NEW is the information I recently came across by THE BIBLE PROJECT (TBP). Their opening part of their Matthew video is informative in the genealogical aspect as to the deeper meaning.

But they got me on to another tangent as well. And it made me think, that to the Jewish mind at the time, it was like a flashing sign in the background of Matthews adept work. Here is a portion of the commentary by TBP:

Just think about the separated sections of the genealogy of Matthew. It is broken up into three parts that cover 14 generations each. But why 14?

Within the written language of Hebrew, the letters are also used as their numbers, and so each letter is assigned a numerical value. The name of David in Hebrew is “דוד,” and from here you just do the math. The numerical value of the first and third letter “ד” (called dalet) is 4. The middle letter “ו” (called waw) has a numerical value of 6. Put it into your mental calculator: 4+6+4=14, the numerical value of the name of “David.”

Matthew has created the genealogy so that it links Jesus to David both explicitly and in the very literary design of the list. In fact, Matthew wants to highlight this “14=David” idea so much that he’s intentionally left out multiple generations of the line of David (three, to be exact) to make the numbers work.

Wait, Matthew has taken people out of the genealogy?

Yes, but this is not a scandal. Leaving out generations to create symbolic numbers in genealogies is a common Hebrew literary practice, going all the way back to the genealogies in Genesis (the 10 generations of Genesis 5, or the 70 descendants of Genesis 46). Ancient genealogies were ways of making theological claims, and Matthew’s readers would have understood exactly what he was doing and why.

Matthew didn’t make numerical adjustments only. He also adjusted a few letters in some names for the same purpose. For example, he changed the names of Asa and Amon to Asaph (the poet featured in the book of Psalms) and Amos (the famous prophet). Matthew is winking at us here, knowing that his readers would spot these out of place names. The point, of course, is that Jesus doesn’t just fulfill Israel’s royal hopes, but also the hope of the Psalms (Asaph) and the Prophets (Amos). Jesus is from a line of kingly succession that also culminates the rich tradition of worship and prophecy of Israel. This way, readers are thinking about all of Israel and her history as they meet Jesus for the first time. The irony is that some modern translations haven’t gotten the pun, and so have changed the names back to their “original” referents. Ah, well.

Let me just break out here and note Ligonier’s comment of the number 14 being used. They simply state:

  • “fourteen” is likely intended as an aid for memorization.

This may be the only reason behind Matthew’s use of 14, but, I believe it is a bit more than just that. I tend to side a bit with Hank Hanegraaff’s comments being added as “and another reason”…

  • Matthew employs the practice of gematria and orders the genealogy according to the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew letters in King David’s name (4 + 6 + 4 = D + V + D). Matthew highlights the most significant names in the lineage of Jesus, artistically emphasizing Jesus as Messiah, who forever sits upon the throne of David. 

Some Christians may think this is “numerology” in some occultic sense, it is not that at all.

A word of warning however, the Kabbalistic tradition does take this to an occultic level. For instance, Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM) has this notation to their “Gematria” post:

  • Though it does seem that there are some very legitimate and interesting Gematria relationships found in the Bible, we can also see that Kabbalists could take the phenomena too far in their esoteric and mystical explanations of Scripture.

 I will “highlight” the portion below in one of the Biblical dictionaries noting this, as well as putting in the APPENDIX more info on Kabbalism.

gematria

Here is Biblical critic, Bart Ehrman talking about this section (yes, I paid the man to open up this section for this post. I donated to an atheist critic, lol). The second theory here is the one I think is in Matthews wheelhouse:

…..I pointed out in the previous post that Matthew presents a numerically significant genealogy of Jesus in order to show that something of major significance happen every fourteen generations:  from Abraham, the father of the Jews, to David, the greatest king of the Jews: fourteen generations; from King David to the Babylonian Captivity, the greatest disaster for the Jews: fourteen generations; and from the Babylonian Captivity to the Messiah Jesus, the ultimate savior of the Jews: fourteen generations.

It’s a terrific genealogy.  But to get to this 14-14-14 schema, Matthew had to manipulate the names in a couple of places, for example, by leaving out some of the generations and by counting the final set of names as fourteen, even though there are only thirteen.   And so, we might wonder whether the number fourteen, in particular, was for some reasons significant for Matthew.  Why not 15, or 12?

Over the years interpreters of Matthew have puzzled over the question and have suggested two, in particular, that strike me as interesting.

First, in ancient Israel, as in a number of other ancient societies where numbers had symbolic significance, the number seven was supremely important: it signified perfection or even divinity (as you’ll notice when you read the book of Revelation, for example, where seven’s turn up a lot).   The ancients divided the week into seven days, probably because they believed that there were seven planets.  For some ancient Jews there were seven stages in a person’s life and seven parts to the human soul; there were seven heavens, seven compartments of hell, and seven divisions of Paradise and seven attributes of God.  There were seven classes of angels.  And so on.   Consider the words of the famous first-century Jewish philosopher Philo: “I doubt whether anyone could adequately celebrate the properties of the number seven, for they are beyond words” (On the Creation of the World, 30).

If seven is a perfect number, a number associated with the divine, what then is fourteen?  Twice seven!  In cultures for which numbers matter, fourteen would have been a doubly perfect number.  Did Matthew set up Jesus’ genealogy to show the divine perfection of his descent?

A second theory ties the genealogy yet more closely into Matthew’s own portrayal of Jesus.  In ancient languages the numbers were typically represented by letters of the alphabet, so that in Hebrew, for example, Aleph was one, Beth was two, Gimel three, etc.  When you hit ten, then the next letter was twenty, then thirty, and so on; and when you hit 100 the next letter was 200, then 300 and so on.   Among other things, this meant that every word had a numerical value: you could just add up the letters.  (In ancient Judaism, this method of interpreting words according to their numerical value was called “gematria.”)

Matthew in particular wants to emphasize that Jesus is the Jewish messiah, the “son of David.”  And what does David’s name add up to?  In Hebrew there are no vowels, only consonants (which makes reading it very interesting indeed!  Luckily, in the middle ages, Jewish scribes added a series of dots to the consonantal letters to indicate the appropriate vowels, so that some of us who are not experts – like me – read Hebrew only with the vowels added.  But originally there weren’t any).  And so David is spelled D-V-D (Daleth-Vav-Daleth).   The D (Daleth) is worth 4 and the V (Vav) is worth 6.   So the numerical value of David’s name is … fourteen!  Has Matthew emphasized the number fourteen in Jesus’ genealogy in order to stress his Davidic roots as the messiah of the Jews?

Okay, time to bring that big word Bart used, gematria, into the Biblical definition arena… many do not know the extent of the use of this was in Matthews day. Games were even played using it.

And I wish to note, my wife, who is an accountant/finance person, loves playing what game? Sudoku. You don’t think Matthew was a numbers guy? First a shorter Biblical dictionary definition then a more in-depth one. In this Tyndale Bible Dictionary excerpt, I include their commentary partial explanation to the significance of the number fourteen.

GEMATRIA* One of the rabbinic hermeneutic rules for interpreting the OT. It consisted of explaining a word or group of words according to the numerical value of the letters or by substituting and rearranging certain letters according to a set system. By that rule of interpretation, for example, some rabbis have argued that Eliezer (Gn 15:2) was worth all the servants of Abraham put together, for Abraham had 318 servants and Eliezer’s name equaled 318 (Gn 14:14). The name Babylon is arrived at in Jeremiah 25:26 and 51:41 by substituting the last letter of the Hebrew word for the first letter of the same word.

The pseudepigraphal Epistle of Barnabas interprets the 318 servants of Abraham (Gn 14:14) as pointing to Jesus’ death on the cross, because 300 is the numerical value of the Greek letter “t,” which is cross-shaped, and 18 the value of the first two letters of the Greek word for Jesus. In the book of Revelation the number of the beast is 666 (Rv 13:18). If the number seven is considered to be the perfect number in the Bible, and if three sevens represent complete perfection, then the number 666 falls completely short of perfection.

[….]

5. In verse 6 David is called “the king.”

From these data, it is obvious that Matthew does not intend to present a strict genealogy; the arrangement is contrived, and extraneous material is included, probably for some other purpose than merely to present Jesus’ forebears. Matthew’s arrangement of the names into groups of 14, probably guided by an interest in portraying Jesus to Jews as the promised king of Israel and rightful heir to the Davidic throne, gives a definite historical movement to the genealogy by dividing it into three periods of time. These respectively highlight the origin, rise to power, and decay of the Davidic house, the last point represented by the lowly birth of the promised heir to a carpenter of Nazareth.

The 14 names in each group may be an effort to call attention to the thrice-royal character of Mary’s son by focusing on the numerical value 14 of the Hebrew letters in David’s name (d=4, v=6, d=4). This number also happens to be twice the sacred number seven, so that the whole list is composed of three sets of two sevens each. It may be, however, that the contrived groupings were merely intended to aid in memorization.

Walter A. Elwell and Philip Wesley Comfort, Tyndale Bible Dictionary, Tyndale Reference Library (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2001), 517, 519.

Here is The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary description which delves a little deeper on the subject of gematria for the studious researcher with limited resources:

gematria (gay-mah´tree-uh), the practice of assigning a numerical value to proper names or to related words and expressions. This was easily done in the ancient world because, in both Hebrew and Greek, letters of the alphabet were also used as numerals. It became commonplace for people to add up the numerical value of the letters that were used to spell any person’s name and to regard the sum of those numbers as “the number of (that) person’s name” (cf. Rev. 13:17–18). For example, if gematria were practiced with the modern-day English alphabet, an A would be equal to 1, a B would be equal to 2, and so forth. After the tenth letter, the eleventh (K) would be equal to 20, the twelfth (L) would be equal to 30, and so on until, with the twenty-first letter (U), multiples of 100 would be used. The proper name “Mark” would end up consisting of four letters with these numerical values: M = 40; A = 1; R = 90; K = 20. The sum of these numbers (40 + 1 + 90 + 20) would be 151, so in modern-day gematria, it could be said that the number of Mark’s name is 151. Today, this would seem like a code, but the whole process would have been less mysterious in the biblical world, when everyone already knew the numerical value of each individual letter. In any case, gematria became very popular in certain times and places. In the Greco-Roman world, during nt times, it often became the basis for jokes and riddles; for these to have functioned as they did at a popular level, most people would have to have known the numbers of their own names, as well as the numbers to be associated with other prominent people. Most Jews would have known that the letters in the name “David” (in Hebrew) added to 14 and most Christians would have known that the letters in the name “Jesus” (in Greek) added to 888. Likewise, the first readers of the book of Revelation probably knew that the letters in the name “Caesar Nero” (in Hebrew) added to either 666 or 616, depending on how it was spelled. Accordingly, Rev. 13:18 reveals the number of the beast to be 666 in some manuscripts and 616 in others.

The practice of gematria consists of assigning a numerical value to a word or phrase by adding together the values of the individual letters. This works in Hebrew and Greek, where the letters of the alphabet can also serve as numerals. In Greek, the marks signifying 6 and 90 were not used as letters in New Testament times.

In the Roman world, gematria became a basis for riddles, jokes, and games:

  • Graffiti on a wall in Pompeii reads, “I love her whose number is 545.”
  • As a political joke, Suetonius (Nero 39) indicates that the name “Nero” (Νέρων) and the phrase “killed his own mother” (ίδίαν μντέρα άπέκτεινε) have the same numerical value (1,005) when written in Greek. This was pertinent because the emperor was rumored to have murdered his mother.

In Christianity and Judaism, gematria could provide a basis for religious symbolism:

  • Rabbis noted that “Eliezer’ (אליעזר), the name of Abraham’s favored servant (Gen. 15:2), has a numerical value of 318, which is the total number of servants mentioned in Gen. 14:14. Thus, Eliezer was equal to all the rest of the servants combined.
  • The Hebrew letters in the name “David” (דוד) add up to 14, so that number could be accorded messianic significance: the messiah was to be the Son of David. This is probably why Matthew’s Gospel emphasizes that the genealogy of Jesus can be divided into three sets of 14 generations (Matt. 1:17).
  • The Greek letters in the name “Jesus” (′Ιησογυς) add up to 888, which some early Christians found significant: 8 surpasses 7 (the number for perfection) and heralds a “new creation” beyond what God did in the first 7 days (Gen. 1:1–2:3).

Many scholars think that gematria holds the clue to resolving the puzzle of 666, the number attributed to the beast in Rev. 13:18:

  • A popular spelling for the name of the emperor Nero adds up to 666 when written in Hebrew (קסרנרון = Caesar Neron). An alternate spelling (קסרנרו = Caesar Nero) adds up to 616, a variant reading for the number of the beast found in some manuscripts of Revelation.
  • A designation for the emperor Domitian that sometimes appeared on Greek coins also adds up to 666: Kai. Domet. Seb. Ge. (an abbreviation for Autokratōr Kaisar Dometianos Sebastos Germanikos = Emperor Caesar Domitian Augustus Germanicus).

Over time, most Jewish and Christian groups abandoned the practice of gematria, perhaps because certain groups used numerology in connection with magic and the occult. The practice still features prominently in kabbalah and other mystical traditions.

Mark Allan Powell, “Gematria,” in The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary (Revised and Updated), ed. Mark Allan Powell (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 316.

How can we start to dissect what Matthew was writing? By looking at the time he wrote it, to whom he was writing to, the culture and practices we know of from that time and people group, etc:

  • Who was the writer?
  • To whom were they writing?
  • Is the choice of words, wording, or word order significant in this particular passage?
  • What is the cultural, historical context?
  • What was the author’s original intended meaning?
  • How did the author’s contemporaries understand him?
  • Why did he say it that way?

(See my post on hermeneutics)

The above in the 2023 section goes a long way — I believe — to add more context to the issue of Matthews 14/14/14. So, all this to say that Matthew was throwing in that “flashing Neon Sign” that was saying three times:

David – David – David

APPENDIX

KABBALISM

This section is not important to the above… I am place carding this here as my first dealing with the topi/issue of Kabbalism. The WATCHMEN FELLOWSHIP has a good short definition of it:

  • Kabbalah: (Various spellings) Mystical Jewish teachings intermingled with teachings of gnosticism, Neoplatonism, magic and the occult. The word Kabbalah means secret oral tradition and was coined by an eleventh century Spanish philosopher, Ibn Gabirol. The philosophy developed in Babylon during the middle ages from earlier Hebrew speculation and numerology. An early Kabbalist, Moses de Leon, developed and systematized the philosophy in his thirteenth century work, The Book of Zolar (sometimes spelled Zohar meaning “Splendor”).

Here is the most accessible post on Kabbalism for the layman via GOT QUESTIONS:

Kabbalah, also spelled Kaballah, Qabalah, or Cabalah, developed between the 6th and 13th centuries among the Jews in Babylonia, Italy, Provence, and Spain. The word “Kabbalah” means “to receive” and refers to revelation from God received by Jews and passed to succeeding generations through oral tradition. The word was first used by mainstream Judaism but later came to refer to those who believed that only a select few were given the secret knowledge from God as to the “true” meaning of Scriptures. Kabbalah uses occult practices and is considered to be a cult.

Kabbalah closely resembles some of the beliefs held by the Greek Gnostics in that both groups believed that only a select few were given deeper understanding or knowledge. Also, Kabbalah teaches that “emanations” from God did the work of creation, denying that creation was a creative act directly from God (Genesis 1). With each descending emanation, the emanation became farther away from God. The final emanation took the personal form of angels.

[….]

Kabbalah, like all false doctrine and religions, denies the deity of Christ and the necessity of faith in Him as the only means of salvation (John 14:6). Jesus is God in the flesh, and He came to die for the sins of all who would believe in Him. If an individual trusts in Christ—that He is God (John 1:1-3) and paid for sin (Romans 8:3)—then that person is forgiven and becomes a child of God (John 1:12).

They have a lot in common with Gnostics I doodled this explanation of “emanations” during a very long conversation with actor Michael Berryman in discussion about [among other things] another modern day Gnostic religion, Freemasons:

Like Gnostics and Freemason and followers of the other New Age religions, Jesus is not Divine, God. Madonna is one of the more famous celebrities to “dabble” in it’s practices.

New York: `Material Girl` Madonna has been promoted to the highest level that can be achieved without being ordained, at the Kabbalah Church.

According to Ratethemusic.com, the singer, who is a staunch follower of the mystical Jewish religion, was promoted to an upper category of Kabbalah followers in a ceremony conducted by the Kabbalah Centre founder Rabbi Berg.

“Her teachers think she has reached the pinnacle of spiritual understanding. To Madonna this is the best achievement of her life,” a source said.

It was under Madge’s influence that celebrities like Demi Moore and Britney Spears became attracted towards Kabbalah.

(RELIGION NEWS BLOG)

  • There is a pretty good 1920 definition of this esoteric, “New” Age occultic tradition by Lewis Spence in his Encyclopedia of Occultism. He is not a Christian source FYI. (I PDF’ed It) It does get into the weeds a bit, and is dated.
  • The Christian Research Institute tackles it a bi in their article “What Is Kabbalah?“
  • Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM) has quite a few articles to dissect Kabbalism.

A decent covering of the topic:

The Messianic Movement is a broad term to refer to Jewish believers in Jesus. There are many Messianic movements today such as Jews for Jesus and others. However, within the Messianic Movement there are also some who teach heretical doctrines like the cults. Among some of these heretical doctrines is a denial of God’s compound unity (God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Dr. Tony Costa interviews Dr. Igal German in a series of questions related to the Messianic Movement. Dr. Igal German is a Jewish believer in Jesus.

Plastic Pastors | Environmental Myths In the Pulpit

Published by Papa Giorgio

The original video [2010] had some text I inserted in it that was unreadable. So I switched up the graphics in the texts spot. Plus I split the video into two to deal with THAT specific topic, individually below. They are:

Trash Islands, and, Water Bottles.

INTRODUCTION

While I criticize some stats in the two excerpts of a sermon here, take note that both the pastor and the church involved are one of the better pastors/churches in our valley (SCV) and the whole of the message is not affected by this portion. This sermon was preached on 7-11-2010. This was repotted here in 2016 from an old blog.

My main point is that when one goes to organizations that are driven by an almost eco-fascist drive or some emergent liberalism, you are going to get skewed stats. This sermon merely gives me the opportunity to critique eco-leftists ideology.

Again, I would not tell people not to go to this church. It is a wonderful church and I would encourage visiting and joining. (I chose not to name the church or pastor because many people may not understand the nuances I am pointing out and may over react.)

Pastors are people too — they are not all-knowing. Likewise, they can be influenced by the united cacophony of media, entertainment, and the like, just as many I know are. I just happened to be “in the know,” this pastor has other [more important] aspects of his office to be knowledgeable in — not to be versed in every jot and tittle of the culture war.

The original title, and thus URL for this post was:

  • Plastic Pastors Critiquing an Otherwise Great Sermon

I wasn’t going to post on this subject, and all-in-all, this topic is one Christians have the moral superiority in.

A poignant point from a discussion about Global Warming via a professor I admire:

…one that bedevils an atheist philosopher friend of mine: “if human beings are part of nature, then why is that we, rather than the chimpanzee, have a special responsibility to care for nature. And if we do have this responsibility, what is its limits and rightful powers? Is irrigation moral if it leads to human flourishing, or should we ask the beavers for their permission?” I am not being facetious. If there is nothing special about us–if we have not been given “dominion” over nature, as the Bible teaches–then it seems that the atheist environmentalist has a very tough time explaining why we should be in charge and what technological innovation that disturbs natural patterns is appropriate for that responsibility. Hence, Christian environmentalism is far more defensible than any secular variety, IMHO.

(Francis Beckwith quoting a friend)

BUT, stats and movements founded on these false statistics shouldn’t be used in the pulpit. When the secular left rejects true religion, they supplement their spiritual quest with that of fallible mans quest as the object of their religion. Which is why many call — rightly so — modern day environmentalism a religion.

A recipe for disaster.

So pastors should be wary of this stretching of man’s credibility found all-too-often in the environmental progressive left. Likewise, this leftism has infected the church. Here is an exceprt from a book written by “emergent leaders” that will shed some light on how this man-made religion infects the church. This is taken from an old post entitled, “Feminist Extremism, Eastern Concepts in Youth Specialties and Gaia in Emergence“:

Via:  A is for Abductive: The Language of the Emerging Church.

C is for Creation

What modern secularists called “nature” (a term that turned a sacred work of art into a profane source of “raw materials”) and what modern Christians always linked with “versus evolu­tion” (thus turning a sacred mystery into a profane and mis­guided argument).

What ancient Christians viewed, along with Holy Scripture, as one of God’s two primary sources of self-revelation.

What emerging Christians will cherish as God’s art gallery in which we live and of which we are a part and for which we were created as planetary trustees and caretakers.

Later of course we get to the “action” (the “praxy” if you will) behind the emergent meaning:

… For postmoderns, it’s “Mother Earth,” holy ground tragically portrayed in the words of James Merrill: “Father Time and Mother Earth, A marriage on the rocks.” No wonder the word environment is used less and less; it’s too cold a word for this theology of “holy ground.”

If our humaneness is most manifest in our relationships—with swallows and snails, with friends and enemies, with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the modern world needed mar­riage counseling big-time. The willingness to sacrifice living systems for commerce has meant that the lungs and other vital organs of Mother Earth are being cannibalized to the point where “natural” disasters are no longer “natural” but induced.

The mad weather patterns of the past decade are a byproduct of disappearing forests (at current rates of deforestation, Ecuador will be totally barren of trees in 20 years), disappearing healthy air, and disappearing ecosystems….

There are now over 130,000 religion and ecology projects in operation worldwide. Unfortunately, very few of them are emanating from evangelical churches.

So when people like Rob Bell, Ken Blanchard, Leonard Sweet, or Brian McLaren mention “Creation,” Al Gore and Rosemary Ellen Guiley are thrown into the meaning and action taken from that word/concept.

REMEMBER, this church the sermon came from IS NOT an Emergent type church. This sermon merely gives me the opportunity to critique eco-leftists and liberal theology a bit. So the following is a video critique of parts of the sermon followed by more information about the topics:

Floating Trash Islands

(Just so you are “in the know,” Patrick Moore is the co-founder of Green Peace. He has since left the crazy environmental movement and pushes for common sense — achievable, goals)

Plastic Pastors: Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Chapter 6 of Patrick Moore’s book is here, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is Full of Plastic and is Twice the Size of Texas.”

  • A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could mean bad news for environmental doomsayers. Forget all those warnings about the million tons of plastic debris floating in the ocean. Ignore the photos that you think show the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Andres Cozar of the University of Cadiz in Spain is the man who once extrapolated the 1 million-ton estimate. Since then, however, he has led research that collected samples at 141 ocean sites. Cozar’s new estimate: Between 7,000 and 35,000 tons of plastic are floating in the ocean. (The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Hoax | TOWNHALL)

There Is No Island of Trash in the Pacific: But the cause of clean oceans needed a good story. Our warming planet could use another one (SLATE)

… Moore’s Garbage Patch would grow in size and fame in the years that followed. The plastic-plankton soup he’d first discovered in 1997—which oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer dubbed the “Eastern Garbage Patch” or the “Pacific Garbage Patch”—gained notoriety in a 2006 series for the Los Angeles Times that won a Pulitzer Prize. Its area had doubled: Now the patch was “twice the size of Texas.” (Some reports went even bigger.) As coverage intensified—the patch’s media profile peaked between 2007 and 2009—the soup coalesced into a garbage landmass with a more official name: the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” In 2007, the San Francisco Chronicle called the patch “a massive, eternal, slowly swirling vortex of noxious garbage the size of a continent and the shape of death itself, just floating out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, mocking life, humanity, God.”

But the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has always been less substantial than it sounds, less an island in the ocean than a big idea that floats around inside our heads.

[….]

In a way, that’s the very problem the Great Pacific Garbage Patch helped to solve, when the concept was invented. Like its mirror image, the hole in the ozone layer, the patch squeezed and flattened all our worries, sequestering them in a far-off region of the globe.

That’s how and why the patch came into being, both as a fully fledged idea and a media phenomenon, at the turn of the millennium….

MORE ARTICLES:

  • Garbage: Another Environmental Claim Proven to Be Hyped (WUWT)
  • There is no Great Pacific Garbage Patch (PATRICK MOORE)
  • Are We Really “Choking the Ocean with Plastic”? Tracing The Creation of An Eco-Myth (WUWT)
  • The Garbage Philosophy Behind the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Myth (THE FEDERALIST)

Other wise known as “The Great Garbage Patch Charlie Brown!”

This is with a h/t to The Dennis Prager Show:

“Great Garbage Patch” in the Pacific Ocean not so great claim scientists

Claims that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas is “grossly exaggerated” said the research which reckons it is more like one per cent the size.

Further reports that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the patch has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s are equally misleading, the new research claimed.

In reality it often cannot even be seen from the deck of a passing boat, said the latest analysts from the Oregon State University professor of oceanography Angelicque White.

The scientist took part in a recent marine expedition to examine the mass of plastic that is floating in the ocean and found there was a problem.

But genuine scientific concerns are undermined by scare tactics from those proclaiming the trash patch is so big that there is more plastic than plankton in the Pacific….

Another news source says this:

Size of the Ocean Garbage Patch is “Grossly Exaggerated” (see also OREGON IUNIVERSITY)

The “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is often said to be twice the size of Texas—but that and other scary-sounding claims are “grossly exaggerated,” some scientists are now insisting. A new study shows the plastic waste patch is actually 200 times smaller than previously claimed when comparing its mass to the amount of water; if you need a Texas-sized visual, it’s actually closer to 1% of the state’s area, says researcher Angelicque White.

She is quick to add that the amount of plastic in the ocean is definitely “troubling,” but that scare tactics only “undermine the credibility of scientists.” White adds, “it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.” At this point, trying to get rid of the plastic is too expensive and potentially damaging to the ocean’s ecology, the Telegraph reports; White recommends focusing on prevention going forward. Click to read about its sister garbage patch in the Atlantic.

MORE SCARRY HEADLINES:

  • Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now nearly 4 times the size of California
  • The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic
  • The great Pacific garbage patch may be 16 times as massive as we thought
  • Great Pacific Garbage Patch weighs more than 43,000 cars and is much larger than we thought

Remember, the Left leaning SLATE MAGAZINE said it was a lie to cause action. But here is SNOPES noting the two wildly separated views:

The claim that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers “8.1 percent of the Pacific Ocean” is also a matter of debate. The number appeared to come from a 2008 quote from Marcus Eriksen, the research director at the Algalita Marine Research Foundation:

“Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”

A 2011 study from Oregon State University, however, asserted that the real size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was hundreds of times smaller than commonly claimed:

There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University scientist.

Further claims that the oceans are filled with more plastic than plankton, and that the patch has been growing tenfold each decade since the 1950s are equally misleading, pointed out Angelicque “Angel” White, an assistant professor of oceanography at Oregon State.

“There is no doubt that the amount of plastic in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists,” White said. “We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole. Given the observed concentration of plastic in the North Pacific, it is simply inaccurate to state that plastic outweighs plankton, or that we have observed an exponential increase in plastic.”

The studies have shown is that if you look at the actual area of the plastic itself, rather than the entire North Pacific subtropical gyre, the hypothetically “cohesive” plastic patch is actually less than 1 percent of the geographic size of Texas.

“The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial,” White said. “But using the highest concentrations ever reported by scientists produces a patch that is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size.”

An updated article on this can be found at THE FEDERALIST, and it comes my way with thanks to GAY PATRIOT — now defunct sadly.

Water Bottle Myths

Plastic Pastors: Water Bottles

Myths About Bottled Water Still Confuse Consumers (FOOD BEV)

MYTH 1: Less than one in four people correctly knew that there is no BPA in the plastic used to package bottled water.

FACT: PET is the only plastic used in the UK for bottled water. PET does not contain BPA. The confusion is often made as BPA is a chemical found in another type of plastic called polycarbonate which is most often found in reusable rigid water containers. US studies suggest BPA has a negative impact on human health, and these studies often use the generic term ‘plastic water bottle’ to refer to polycarbonate bottles in their findings.

MYTH 2: Four out of five consumers falsely believe drinking water from a bottle that has been left in the sun can cause cancer.

FACT: It is a myth that plastic water bottles left in cars will leach carcinogens into the water. The health scare began in 2002 when a Japanese television programme broadcast a theory that plastic water bottles were unsafe. These claims have since been discredited by Cancer Research UK say on their website: “There is no convincing scientific evidence to back up these claims or to suggest that any of these products could cause cancer.”

~ MORE ARTICLES ~

  • Can Water from Plastic Bottles Be Toxic? Does reusing, freezing, or warming plastic water bottles cause them to break down into dioxins or carcinogenic compounds? (SNOPES)
  • Researcher dispels Myth of Dioxins and Plastic Water Bottles (JOHN HOPKINS)
  • Does Freezing Plastic Water Bottles Cause Cancer? (VERY WELL HEALTH)
  • Fact Check: Plastic Water Bottles Left in Hot Cars Don’t Release Dioxins, Do Leach Other Chemicals (USA TODAY)
  • The Safety of Beverages in Plastic Bottles (FOOD SAFETY MAGAZINE)
  • Facts About BPA: Myths And Realities (FAB)
  • Plastic Water Bottles (CANCER FACT FINDER)

From an older post, Urban Legends — Water Bottles (Updated HERE), as well on some bottle myths:

I have worked at Whole Foods long enough to hear many of the “health myths” that typically float through the customer base there. One of these myths about health and product is found in the scare about plastic water bottles. It started in an email referencing a masters thesis by a student at the University of Idaho. The media, according to Snopes, ran with the story even though there was no peer reviews of the students work. They have this myth marked as false. Another worth-while article to read is by Carol Rees Parrish, R.D., M.S., entitled, “Bottled Water Myths: Separating Fact from Fiction.” In it it is pointed out that,

Based on the evidence available to date, it appears the true health risks (if any) related to drinking commercially manufactured bottled water or water in refillable plastic bottles may or may not come from the plastic itself. Further study is warranted to determine if poly carbonate plastics can cause harm to humans. Consumers should focus more on the quality of the drinking water, particularly from a microbe perspective as this point is indisputable, rather than chemicals leaching from the container.

Nutrition Issues In Gastroenterology, Series #50 (PDF)

One of the organizations implicated as supporting the health risks by bottled water , John Hopkins, released this statement in their Public Health News Center bulletin:

The Internet is flooded with messages warning against freezing water in plastic bottles or cooking with plastics in the microwave oven. These messages, frequently titled “Johns Hopkins Cancer News” or “Johns Hopkins Cancer Update,” are falsely attributed to Johns Hopkins and we do not endorse their content. Freezing water does not cause the release of chemicals from plastic bottles.

“Email Hoax Regarding Freezing Water Bottles and Microwave Cooking,” American Cancer Fund

In a short video, Dr. Joe Schwarcz, author of Brain Fuel: 199 Mind-Expanding Inquiries into the Science of Everyday Life, explains some of these myths in more detail:

Even author Elizabeth Royte mentioned in an interview that this is a myth of grand proportions. (She is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.) Again, the folks at Johns Hopkins sat down with Dr. Rolf Haden, assistant professor at Department of Environmental Health Sciences and the Center for Water and Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Haden dispelled the myth saying “This is an urban legend. There are no dioxins in plastics. In addition, freezing actually works against the release of chemicals.”

This myth perpetuates typically, but not always, from folks who like to shop at Whole Foods, believe in anthropogenic global warming, and want Bush brought up on war crimes. In other words, their science is as debased in critical thinking as their politics (I had to make this politically relevant… for this blog).

Updated info from BIG GOVERNMENT:

…Bisphenol-A (BPA) is a chemical used to harden plastic so it can be used in the countless ways it helps improve countless millions of lives. As it is a chemical, it was only a matter of time before the extremist environmentalists started talking of the “dangers” of it to human beings. Ironically, charges of this nature are always led by people who have no concern of human beings. They are the same type of people who effectively banned the mosquito killing agent DDT. That ban has led to millions of avoidable deaths around the world from malaria. While the banning of BPA wouldn’t lead to deaths, it’s banning wouldn’t save any lives either. But it would put a lot of people out of work.

But work, jobs, livelihoods of individuals has no place in the environmental extremist agenda. They’ve replaced what was known to kill malaria carrying mosquitos with nets to sleep under. So instead of eliminating the problem they’ve reduced the problem…during sleep hours. Malaria’s largest number of victims are infants and children who don’t have the wherewithal to swat mosquitos away when they land on them, and since no one can live their whole life in a net, their exposure risk is high.

The book from which the religion of modern environmentalism sprang is “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. In many ways it is the Bible of that movement. And even though it has been discredited, the “Silent Spring” model still serves as the modus operandi of the environmentalist cult. Ban first, ask questions later. That’s what they were trying to do with BPA.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia…

While environmentalists have always used their favorite tactic to “discredit” contrary information, their “go-to” arrow has been stolen from their quiver in the BPA fight.

To an environmentalist, the ability to attack the motives of those questioning their statements is their best weapon. Just look at Al Gore and the global warming/climate change debate. People dependent upon government grants to continue their studies find results that A) find results that are in line with those who publicize their “studies,” and B) will justify those grants and ensure the continued “need” for more. It’s almost as though crackheads got grants to study crack smoking and they miraculously get results that require more study. But since the end result of these studies is always the government getting more power to regulate people’s lives, it’s like the government is also a crack dealer and people trying to stop the cycle are the unwanted interventionists.

This circular dynamic was blown out of the water when a new study by the crack dealer, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), found that BPA is harmless (see appendix for the WSJ article). While other large studies found the same thing, those were quickly attacked as being funded by “Big BPA” or some such nonsense. They’ve even helped expose the media bias inherent in these sorts of matters. But now the government itself has completed a large study, and duplicated the results in two separate labs , you’d think the fight would be over. It’s not.

The hardest thing to fight is dogma.

The ban bandwagon still rolls on, without even so much as a passing mention in the “news” stories about the new government findings…

(read more)

APPENDIX

WALL STREET JOURNAL

Postscript to a Panic | New findings about bisphenol-A (BPA) will not redeem it. (Aug. 3, 2011)

Postscript to a Panic: New findings about bisphenol-A (BPA) will not redeem it.

Even by the usual standards of the environmental movement, the panic over bisphenol-A (BPA) was remarkable for its detachment from reality. A new study funded by that well-known shill for big business known as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has now debunked this scare about as comprehensively as is possible.

BPA has been in use for five decades all over the world and has been tested extensively and found to be safe. In 2008, however, green campaigners, abetted by trial lawyers in the U.S., began touting the potential for BPA to “disrupt” hormones in the human body. BPA was implicated in everything from cancer to obesity to impotence. One particularly overheated campaigner compared letting babies drink from BPA-containing baby bottles to feeding infants birth-control pills. Canada banned its use in baby bottles, and several U.S. states did the same. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein tried to get it banned in the U.S. as well, despite a clean bill of health from the FDA.

Not everyone succumbed to the panic—for a while. Studies performed in Europe before the scare had begun concluded that, if anything, BPA was safer than previously believed. But last year, despite at least two opinions by the European Food Safety Agency that BPA was safe in plastic bottles and in the liners of food containers, the European Union moved to ban it as well.

Too bad they didn’t wait for the science. The most recent study, led by Justin Teeguarden at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and published in the journal Toxicological Studies, involved feeding subjects a BPA-rich diet for 24 hours. Researchers then monitored their blood and urine for traces of the dread chemical. The result was BPA levels too low to detect—and this, remember, was from eating the stuff, a veritable worst-case scenario. Scare-mongers will no doubt point out that these results don’t preclude terrible long-term consequences from the use of BPA in packaging. But the evidence suggests that not enough of it is even present in the body to cause that kind of harm.

The results of the study, which was duplicated in two separate government labs, may not change the fate of BPA in the court of public opinion. Nor will it help the likes of Sigg Switzerland USA, the U.S. distributor of those now-ubiquitous metal drinking bottles. Sigg was initially a beneficiary of the scare as people moved to ditch their plastic drinking bottles. But once it transpired that the lining of Sigg’s aluminum bottles manufactured before August 2008 also contained trace amounts of BPA, its U.S. distributor was hit with lawsuits and a campaign of public vilification that recently sent it into bankruptcy.

Lost amid the hysteria were the benefits of BPA, including the fact that it helped to eliminate botulism in canned food. Where does a chemical go to get its reputation back?

People who live off $2 a day cannot afford the $.50 to have their meager shacks lit up… not to mention the strain on the shoddy electrical grid. This simple invention that started in Brazil and worked its way around the world via the internet is bringing light and saving money for the poorest people in the world.

Read more at THE DAILY NEWS

Woke Astronomers Pushing for Renaming “Heavenly Bodies”

Published by Papa Giorgio

I found this commentary by Jerry Coyne the best… even though he is dead wrong on evolution:

….They’ve been called the Magellanic Clouds by most astronomers since 1847, that is, for about 175 years. Before that they had other “indigenous” names, and that is one of the two reasons the author calls for renaming them:

Yet Magellan was no astronomer, and he was not the first to document these galaxies. Indigenous peoples across the Southern Hemisphere have names and legends for these systems that predate Magellan by thousands of years. For example, the Mapuche of modern-day Chile and Argentina call them Rvganko, or water ponds, which they think are in the process of drying out; the Kamilaroi of modern-day Australia regard the galaxies as places where people go after death; and the Arimi of modern-day Tanzania see the clouds as a man and a woman who help the Pleiades bring heavy rains during the rainy season. Magellan’s crew was also not the first Western team to write about the two galaxies; Arabic and Italian explorers are known to have described the galaxies at least a decade before Magellan embarked on his journey.

But this holds true for nearly all visible astronomical features, surely including the Sun, the Moon, and Halley’s comet. Each language of an indigenous people who observed these features would give them a different name.  Names get changed, and there’s no reason why the earliest names should get precedence. As for the superstitions associated with these clouds, well, that’s even less reason to revert to “divine” or numinous names.

No,  the real reason Mia de los Reyes wants these clouds renamed is because Magellan did bad things:

Furthermore, Magellan committed horrific acts. A first-hand account of Magellan’s expedition describes how, in what is now known as Argentina, Magellan enslaved the native Tehuelche people. He placed iron manacles on the “youngest and best proportioned” men, telling them that the manacles were gifts. In what became Guam and the Philippines, Magellan and his men burned villages and killed their inhabitants.

Despite his actions, Magellan has been—and continues to be—widely honored by the field of astronomy. Magellan’s name currently appears in over 17,000 peer-reviewed academic articles. His name is attached to astronomical objects such as a lunar crater and a Martian crater, both of which are named Magalhaens; the NASA Magellan spacecraft; the twin 6.5-m Magellan telescopes; and most recently, an under construction, next-generation extremely large telescope called the Giant Magellan Telescope. The Magellan telescopes are all located in Chile, a country with a history of violent Spanish conquest. Indeed, Magellan’s “discovery” of the Strait of Magellan allowed Spanish conquistadors to explore Chile’s coast and led to genocidal campaigns against the native Mapuche people.

I and many other astronomers believe that astronomical objects and facilities should not be named after Magellan, or after anyone else with a violent colonialist legacy. We would like the International Astronomical Union—the body in charge of naming astronomical objects—to rename the Magellanic Clouds. We hope other astronomical institutions, particularly the consortia that manage the 6.5-m Magellan telescopes and the upcoming Giant Magellan Telescope, will also revisit the use of Magellan’s name.

As usual, I decide that names should be changed if both of these questions can be answered “no”:

  1. Is the name be[eing] used to honor the good things the person did rather than the bad?
  2. Was the person’s existence a net good for the world as opposed to a net bad?

The answer to (a) is clearly “yes”: Magellan is being honored for organizing and leading the first voyage circumnavigate the planet (he died halfway through), and the clouds were noted by, among other people, Antonio Pigafetta, a scholar who went on Magellan’s sail around the world in 1519–1522.

(b) is harder, but it’s not cut and dried. Some of Magellan’s warfare was due to misinterpreting the local behavior, and, indeed, he was more concerned with converting the locals to Christianity than with killing them. Indeed, that’s how he died on his voyage: he was attacked in the Philippines by a local ruler who resented Magellan’s efforts to convert the locals.  Given that Magellan’s voyage “planned and led the 1519 Spanish expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route, during which he discovered the interoceanic passage thereafter bearing his name and achieved the first European navigation to Asia via the Pacific” (Wikipedia), he had good accomplishments as well as bad.

Given this, I don’t vote for a name change. But there are Wokesters who apparently think that unless someone is nearly perfect, we shouldn’t honor them. There goes most of our Presidents, including Washington, Madison, and Jefferson: all slaveholders. JFK was a serial adulterer, as was Martin Luther King, who’s also been accused of looking on and laughing as “a fellow Baptist minister ‘forcibly raped; a woman just a few minutes walk from The White House in Washington DC.” (The evidence for this is not dispositive!)….

Nashville Trans School Shooter Manifesto Leaked! (Steven Crowder)

Published by Papa Giorgio

With all the stuff happening in the world, there are still domestic items that are important that discussion of is forgotten about. Like the still ignoring of the Russian Collusion Hoax and the DOJ going after those who exposed it. The anti-Semitism in Congress, etc… there are still ball bouncing our eyes should be on. Here is one:Louder With Crowder [Steven Crowder] is the first to reoprt on the leaked “trans shooter manifesto.”

LANGAUGE WARNING!

SHORT CLIP

  • Today, we present to you the latest groundbreaking exposé from Mug Club Undercover! Join us for the very first look at excerpts from the Nashville Covenant School shooter’s manifesto. We’ve been granted exclusive access. We’re going line-by-line!

Here is the show, I start it past the long opener:

Nashville Trans School Shooter Manifesto Leaked!

I did play with a page… and the reason for it is that where school districts have the right for teachers to conceal carry, by district — conservative school districts allow it, lefty districts do not. Nationally, it is typically Democrats fighting the move for more armed safety in schools:

The SPLC Exemplifying It’s Anti-Semitic Leftist Ideals

Published by Papa Giorgio

THE WASHINGTON FREEBEACON has a frustrating story about  the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a cult in-and-of-itself. (More on this in a bit.) Here is part of the Beacon’s story:

A spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center signed a statement denouncing Israel as an “apartheid state” and “ethno-nationalist project,” and blaming the Jewish state for provoking Hamas’s terrorist attacks that killed 1,400 Israelis.

Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter and spokesperson for the SPLC, and Hannah Gais, a senior researcher and journalist for the SPLC, both signed on to the open letter, which was published by a group called Writers Against the War on Gaza last Thursday.

“Establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as ‘unprovoked,’” said the statement. “Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide.”

“We stand with [Gaza’s] anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation,” said the signatories.

The statement also claimed that “Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people” and that “Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians.”

The SPLC and Gais did not respond to requests for comment…..

I have posted some media in the past at various places on my site, but here is a good place to bring together two streams of them. One dealing with the charge of apartheid, and the other the extremist positions of the SPLC pointed out by some. Here is more of the BEACON’S story:

….The SPLC has yet to report on the surge in anti-Semitism in the United States in the wake of Hamas’s attacks, according to a review of its website. The Anti-Defamation League has documented a nearly 400-percent increase in anti-Jewish incidents nationally, while the New York Police Department said the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes reported in the city doubled.

The anti-Israel statement signed by Hayden and Gais could fall under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which includes “justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion” and “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

The statement also called for an international boycott of Israel and linked to a website for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, a Ramallah-based group whose members include the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine. The council is made up of Hamas and other designated terrorist groups, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The letter received hundreds of signatures as of Friday. It was organized by Writers Against the War on Gaza, a group of “writers, editors, and other culture workers” which describes itself as an “ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people.”

Jazmine Hughes, a reporter for the New York Times magazine, resigned on Friday after signing the same letter. The Times magazine editor said her signature was a “clear violation of the Times’s policy on public protest.”

Update 2:13 p.m.: Hayden responded to the Free Beacon after publication, claiming that the article was a “racist attempt” to target him. He said any “attempt to conflate my concerns about Palestinian rights with supporting Hamas is cowardly and vile,” and added that he has “made considerable sacrifices to undercut the activism of American antisemites.”

Of course it is racist. LOL!

Okay, let’s deal with the 1st claim I mentioned…

APARTHEID

In this excellent interview with South African up-and-coming scholar, law student, and African continent debate champion — Jamie Mithi. He grew up hearing about Israel being an apartheid state, and so, as a black South African he was interested in the subject. What he found out however was that Israel is the furthest thing from this awful designation. Enjoy Mr. Mithi and Dennis Prager talking about this important issue. Mr. Mithi’s Prager U video follows this interview:

Is Israel an “apartheid state,” as its enemies claim? Who better to answer that charge than a Black South African who lived through apartheid? Kenneth Meshoe, a member of the South African parliament, fits that bill. He examines the evidence against Israel and draws a compelling conclusion.

Dennis Prager in a NATIONAL REVIEW article notes the following regarding what constitutes an apartheid state and what Israel is:

….Israel has nothing in common with an apartheid state, but few people know enough about Israel — or about apartheid South Africa — to refute the libel. So let’s respond.

First, what is an apartheid state? And, does Israel fit that definition?

From 1948 to 1994, South Africa, the country that came up with this term, had an official policy that declared blacks second-class citizens in every aspect of that nation’s life. Among many other prohibitions on the country’s blacks, they could not vote; could not hold political office; were forced to reside in certain locations; could not marry whites; and couldn’t even use the same public restrooms as whites.

Not one of those restrictions applies to Arabs living in Israel.

One and a half million Arabs live in Israel, constituting about 20 percent of the country’s population. They have the same rights as all other Israeli citizens. They can vote, and they do. They can serve in the Israeli parliament, and they do. They can own property, businesses, and work in professions alongside other Israelis, and they do. They can be judges, and they are. Here’s one telling example: It was an Arab judge on Israel’s supreme court who sentenced the former president of Israel, a Jew, to jail on a rape charge.

Some other examples of Arabs in Israeli life: Reda Mansour was the youngest ambassador in Israel’s history, and is now Consul General at Israel’s Atlanta Consulate; Walid Badir is an international soccer star on Israel’s national team, and captain of one of Tel Aviv’s major teams; Rana Raslan is a former Miss Israel; Ishmael Khaldi was until recently the deputy consul of Israel in San Francisco; Khaled Abu Toameh is a major journalist with the Jerusalem Post; Ghaleb Majadele was until recently a minister in the Israeli Government. They are all Israeli Arabs. Not one is a Jew.

Arabs in Israel live freer lives than Arabs living anywhere in the Arab world. No Arab in any Arab country has the civil rights and personal liberty that Arabs in Israel have.

Now one might counter, “Yes, Palestinians who live inside Israel have all these rights, but what about the Palestinians who live in what are known as the occupied territories? Aren’t they treated differently?”

Yes, of course, they are — they are not citizens of Israel. They are governed by either the Palestinian Authority (Fatah) or by Hamas. The control Israel has over these people’s lives is largely manifested when they want to enter Israel. Then they are subjected to long lines and strict searches because Israel must weed out potential terrorists.

Otherwise, Israel has little control over the day-to-day life of Palestinians, and was prepared to have no control in 2000 when it agreed to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state to which it gave 97 percent of the land it had conquered in the 1967 War. The Palestinian response was to unleash an intifada of terror against Israeli civilians.

And what about the security wall that divides Israel and the West Bank? Is that an example of apartheid?

That this is even raised as an issue is remarkable. One might as well mention the security fence between the United States and Mexico an example of apartheid. There is no difference between the American wall at its southern border and the Israeli wall on its eastern border. Both barriers have been built to keep unwanted people from entering the country.

Israel built its security wall in order to keep terrorists from entering Israel and murdering its citizens. What appears to bother those who work to delegitimize Israel by calling it an apartheid state is that the barrier has worked. The wall separating Israel from the West Bank has probably been the most successful terrorism-prevention program ever enacted.

So, then, why is Israel called an apartheid state?

Because by comparing the freest, most equitable country in the Middle East to the former South Africa, those who seek Israel’s demise hope they can persuade uninformed people that Israel doesn’t deserve to exist just as apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve to exist……

OCCUPATION & DISCRIMINATION

Does Israel discriminate against Arabs? Is it today’s version of apartheid South Africa? Olga Meshoe, herself a South African whose family experienced apartheid, settles the question once and for all.

How many times have you heard that Israel “occupies” the West Bank? But have you ever asked yourself whether that’s true? Or even what it means? Eugene Kontorovich, professor of law at George Mason University, dives into these questions and uncovers some surprising answers.

What is life like for Arabs in Israel? Are they living under an apartheid state or treated like second-class citizens? Ami Horowitz interviews residents of an Arab village inside Israel about their work, lives, income, relations with Israelis, and whether life would be better in an Arab country.

ORIGINAL OCCUPIERS

Caller Asks Dennis Prager About Palestinian History (Israel) | A young caller – taking a history course – wants to respond to professor but asks Dennis Prager to explain the issue first.

CLICK MAP TO ENLARGE IF NEED BE

(Here is the PDF)

1. Before the modern state of Israel there was the British mandate, not a Palestinian state.
2. Before the British mandate there was the Ottoman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
3. Before the Ottoman Empire there was the Islamic Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, not a Palestinian state.
4. Before the Islamic Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt there was the Ayyubid Dynasty, not a Palestinian state. Godfrey of Bouillon conquered it in 1099.
5. Before the Ayyubid Dynasty there was the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, not a Palestinian state.
6. Before the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem there was the Fatimid Caliphate, not a Palestinian state.
7. Before the Fatimid Caliphate there was the Byzantine Empire, not a Palestinian state.
8. Before the Byzantine Empire there was the Roman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
9. Before the Roman Empire there was the Hasmoneans Dynasty, not a Palestinian state.
10. Before the Hasmonaean Dynasty there was the Seleucid Empire, not a Palestinian state.
11. Before the Seleucid Empire there was the Empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon, not a Palestinian state.
12. Before the Empire of Alexander, the 3rd of Macedon, there was the Persian empire, not a Palestinian state.
13. Before the Persian Empire there was the Babylonian empire, not a Palestinian state.
14. Before the Babylonian Empire there was the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea, not a Palestinian state.
15. Before the kingdoms of Israel and Judea there was the kingdom of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
16. Before the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea there was the theocracy of the 12 Tribes of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
17. Before the theocracy of the 12 Tribes of Israel there was the individual state of Canaan, not a Palestinian state.
18. Before the Kingdom of Israel, there was the Theocracy of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
19. Before the Theocracy of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, there was an agglomeration of independent Canaanite city-kingdoms, not a Palestinian state.

In fact, in this corner of the earth there was everything but a Palestinian state!

(Hat-Tip to RISHI!)

THE REAL WAR AGAINST ISRAEL

(Nikos Sotirakopoulos) When it comes to Israel’s mortal enemies, the usual suspects are Arab authoritarian regimes, Iran, and the antisemitic far right. And yet, some of the most dangerous wannabe-destroyers of Israel have come from the left. Whether it has been communist states, or terrorist groups, or “peaceful” organizations, the left’s war on Israel has been long and determined.

Now, let us switch gears a bit… I have posted on the SPLC for years — noting other’s tireless works on this politically Leftist organization.

SPLC = HATE GROUP

This is a combining of some older posts staring in 2012 to more recent:

The Southern Poverty Law Center bills itself as a watchdog of hate groups. But is this just a cover for its true aims? Journalist and author Karl Zinsmeister explains.

Take note as well that many Black groups and individuals stand against the SPLC, as GARY DEMAR points out:

A coalition of African-American pastors and pro-family Christian and Jewish leaders held a press conference outside the headquarters of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the SPLC’s smearing of pro-family groups that oppose homosexual activism as “hate groups.”

The SPLC has been co-opted by a Leftist, pro-homosexual, anti-Christian agenda. If you don’t agree with the SPLC leftist litmus test, then you are a de facto “hate group.” With its new definition of what constitutes a hate group, the SPLC has become a fund-raising machine. It’s no wonder that the organization is flush with cash. At the end of fiscal year 2010 SPLC’s endowment stood at $216.2 million. Ultimately, the tactic is to strike fear in middle-America so the checks keep rolling in. Most communities don’t see skinheads or even KKKers, so the SPLC needs a tangible enemy.

In other words, a money maker from its left leaning donors. CONSERVAPEDIA points out the obvious, that by labeling Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Ron Paul, and Judge Napolitano, as well as conservative Christian oragnizations that stand against same-sex marriage in with other hate groups, that this “proves that the SPLC is a left-wing political organization rather than one focused on racism and civil rights.” (I wish to point out that Conservapedia includes as normative some groups I would not have, like the John Birch Society, VDARE, and others.)

While I can understand and maybe support their position on the John Birch Society and Alex Jones… the main point still stands: This … further proves that the SPLC is a left-wing political organization rather than one focused on racism and civil rights.

POWERLINE has recently posted on this in two parts (Part 1 | Part 2). Here is a portion of their PART ONE:

I didn’t realize that I was following in the footsteps of former Vanderbilt political science professor Carol Swain, who called the SPLC’s number in a post she wrote about it for the Huffington Post in September 2009. Professor Swain concluded the post: “Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.”

This could not stand. In today’s Wall Street Journal Professor Swain tells the rest of the story (The full WSJ article is in the Appendix):

The SPLC’s retaliation was vicious and effective. On Oct. 17, 2009, my photo appeared on the front page of my local newspaper, the Tennessean, with the headline “ Carol Swain is an apologist for white supremacists.” That was a quote from Mark Potok, at the time the SPLC’s national spokesman. The context for Mr. Potok’s attack was a review I gave for a film titled “A Conversation About Race.” I endorsed it for classroom use because it offered a perspective on race rarely encountered on university campuses. Mr. Potok argued that the filmmaker was a bigot. I felt then and now that the perspective needed to be heard.

This negative article was featured on the front pages of several newspapers and it went viral, especially in black media outlets. The attacks did not subside until this newspaper’s website published a lengthy article titled “In Defense of Carol Swain.”

Being targeted by the SPLC has had a lasting impact on my life and career. Offers from other universities ended and speaking opportunities declined. Once you’ve been smeared in this way, mainstream news outlets are less likely to cite you as an expert of any kind.

Professor Swain knows she is in good company:

[T]oday I wear the SPLC’s mud as a badge of honor because I know I am in the company of many good men and women who have been similarly vilified for standing for righteousness and truth. Other SPLC targets have included Ben Carson (who eventually received an apology and retraction), Somali refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali, terrorism expert Steve Emerson, political scientist Guenter Lewy (who successfully sued the SPLC), attorney Robert Muise, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and Princeton professor Robert P. George. The SPLC has tagged Mr. George, a devout Catholic intellectual, as “anti-LGBT.”…..

(read it all)

And the video at the top of this update is from PART TWO. But the Wall Street Journal article is a “pay-to-play” article. I have found a decent excerpt at FOX NEWS. PART THREE is more of a biography and statement of amazement regarding Professor Swain:

….According to her Wikipedia entry, Swain grew up in a shack without running water. She and her eleven siblings shared two beds. She did not have shoes and thus missed school whenever it snowed. She did not attend high school, dropping out in ninth grade.

When her mother and abusive stepfather moved the family to Roanoke, Swain appealed to a judge to be transferred to a foster home. When her appeal was denied, she lived with her grandmother in a trailer park.

Intimately familiar with the south and with poverty, Swain also knows about the law, having earned a master’s degree from Yale Law School. This was the culmination of an education that begin with a GED, and was followed by an associate degree from Virginia Western Community College; a B.A. in criminal justice from Roanoke College; a master’s degree in political science from Virginia Tech; and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Swain went on to become a professor at leading universities and the author of several books. One was cited by Supreme Court Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor. Two dealt with the topic of white nationalism.

There is an obvious disconnect when an African-American from the south rises from extreme poverty to glittering scholarly success, only to be branded an “apologist for white supremacists” by the Southern Poverty Law Center….

So what is the hub-bub about with the SPLC? One blogger calls it as they see it:

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), has quite a racket going on. Now, they don’t practice poverty law as their name suggests, but they do spread hate, and lots of it too. In the name of the almighty dollar, the SPLC will slander and defame anyone it chooses. Especially those with the temerity to oppose their extreme, leftwing ideological views.

[….]

The SPLC is a racket. Contrary to it’s name, the Southern Poverty Law Center does not practice poverty law, but instead serves a 2-fold purpose: 1) lining the pockets of Morris Dees, the SPLC’s staff, its directors, and various cronies; and 2) serve as attack dogs for the government and radical left (did I repeat myself?).

(BEFORE IT’S NEWS)

The following half-hour / in-depth review of the SPLC is by the John Birch Society, which… for the record — I do not endorse nor recommend their [John birch Society’s] resources. However, this presentation is a decent excoriation of the “craziness” over at this liberal propaganda machine:

Tucker Carlson Bombshell: FBI Collaborating With SPLC and is STILL Doing It

JOHN STOSSEL hits the proverbial ball out of the park!

The Southern Poverty Law Center Scam (January 2018) | There are dangerous hate groups in America. So a group called the Southern Poverty Law Center promises to warn us about them. They release an annual list of hate groups in America. The media cover it, but John Stossel says they shouldn’t. It’s a scam.

Southern Poverty Law Center Has Become a Left-wing, Money-grabbing, Slander Machine | The Southern Poverty Law Center promises to warn us about dangerous hate groups and extremists. In reality, it smears grassroots activists like “Moms for Liberty” for daring to disagree about policy.

TO WIT…. CBN notes the idea that “Hate is good for the bottom line”

Southern Poverty Law Center: When ‘Hate’ Is Good for Business | Ltg. Jerry Boykin notes they are one of the most evil groups today.

  • Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin (Ret.), a genuine hero who was not only one of the original members of U.S. Army’s Delta Force, but wound up commanding it, led the Green Berets and the Army’s Special Warfare Center, was fired from Hampden-Sydney College, an all-male college in Virginia, earlier this week for remarks he made about the movement to allow transgendered people into any bathroom they choose. (DAILY WIRE)

Tony Perkins Points Blame At SPLC For Shooting | Family Research Council President Tony Perkins points finger at the Southern Poverty Law Center for shooting.

Via HOTAIR:

I have little to add to what you’ve read from Ace, John Sexton, R.S. McCain, Erick Erickson and others. We’re all thinking the same thing — see Twitchy for proof — and we’re all correct: Why yes, this is eerily similar to the left claiming after Gabby Giffords was shot that Palin’s “crosshairs” election map inspired Jared Loughner. With two differences. First, Loughner was not, in fact, inspired by Palin whereas this guy, per his own plea bargain, did consult the SPLC website in choosing people to kill. Second, you’ll see zero coverage of this inconvenient entry in the canon of political hate in wider media because it can’t be used as a blunt object with which to bludgeon the right. Sometimes facts that undermine the Greater Good need to be politely omitted. That’s what responsible journalism is all about.

Prosecutors say Corkins, who had been volunteering at a center for gay, lesbian and transgender people, was carrying ammunition and Chick-fil-A sandwiches in his bag. Chick-fil-A was making headlines at the time because of its president’s stated opposition to gay marriage.

Corkins intended to smear the sandwiches in the faces of his victims to make a statement about gay rights opponents, he acknowledged during a hearing Wednesday…

In his plea agreement, Corkins acknowledged he identified the [Family Research] Council as “an anti-gay organization” by visiting Southern Poverty’s website. The head of the Council, Tony Perkins, called on the group to stop labeling his organization and others hate groups because of their stance on gay issues. A spokeswoman for the Alabama-based Law Center did not immediately return a telephone message…

“He targeted us because we had been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which we think is very reckless,” [FRC employee Leo Johnson] says.

[….]

Funny thing, though: The SPLC itself was verrrrry quick to try to tie Jared Loughner to the “far right”, and kept at it long enough that they were posting speculative pieces about “political rhetoric” and its role in the Tucson shooting as late as 13 days after it occurred. Not only are they comfortable with a free-speech slippery slope when it’s right-wingers who are at risk, they’re willing and eager to add some grease. They richly deserve the bad PR they’re getting today, even if they’re blameless in the shooting. If you doubt that, visit Reason’s extensive archive on SPLC nonsense.

WSJ APPENDIX

What It’s Like to Be Smeared by the Southern Poverty Law Center

I paid a professional price when the group attacked me in 2009. Now I wear its mud as a badge of honor.

By Carol M. Swain (Sept. 11, 2017)

Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, was to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee about threats posed by domestic extremist groups. The hearing, scheduled for Tuesday, has been postponed because of Hurricane Irma. As a black conservative who has been smeared by the SPLC, I recommend against reinviting Mr. Cohen.

When Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr. started the SPLC in 1971, it was needed and it had noble goals. In recent years, however, it has become a tool of the radical left. Domestically, it uses its influence to paint with a broad brush that smears immigration restrictionists, orthodox Christian churches and pro-family organizations as “hate groups.”

What landed me in the SPLC’s crosshairs was a Sept. 10, 2009, Huffington Post blog entry titled “Mission Creep and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Misguided Focus.” I pointed out the SPLC’s silence about video footage released after the 2008 elections showing members of the New Black Panther Party, decked out in full paramilitary regalia, patrolling a polling precinct in Philadelphia where they were clearly intimidating white voters.

Although several news organizations covered the story, the SPLC ignored the incident. At the time, the law center was spending an inordinate amount of time attacking then-CNN host Lou Dobbs for his relentless focus on illegal immigration. It demanded that CNN fire the anchor. After CNN and Mr. Dobbs parted ways, the SPLC took credit for getting him off the air. I ended my post with a one-liner that raised the ire of the organization and had a devastating effect on my life. I wrote: “Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.”

The SPLC’s retaliation was vicious and effective. On Oct. 17, 2009, my photo appeared on the front page of my local newspaper, the Tennessean, with the quote: “Carol Swain is an apologist for white supremacists.” That was Mark Potok, at the time the SPLC’s national spokesman. The context for Mr. Potok’s attack was a review I gave for a film titled “A Conversation About Race.” I endorsed it for classroom use because it offered a perspective on race rarely encountered on university campuses. Mr. Potok argued that the filmmaker was a bigot. I felt then and now that the perspective needed to be heard.

This negative article was featured on the front pages of several newspapers and it went viral, especially in black media outlets. The attacks did not subside until this newspaper’s website published a lengthy article titled “In Defense of Carol Swain.”

Being targeted by the SPLC has had a lasting impact on my life and career. Offers from other universities ended and speaking opportunities declined. Once you’ve been smeared in this way, mainstream news outlets are less likely to cite you as an expert of any kind.

Yet today I wear the SPLC’s mud as a badge of honor because I know I am in the company of many good men and women who have been similarly vilified for standing for righteousness and truth. Other SPLC targets have included Ben Carson (who eventually received an apology and retraction), Somali refugee Ayaan Hirsi Ali, terrorism expert Steve Emerson, political scientist Guenter Lewy (who successfully sued the SPLC), attorney Robert Muise, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and Princeton professor Robert P. George. The SPLC has tagged Mr. George, a devout Catholic intellectual, as “anti-LGBT.”

Whatever label the SPLC assigns, such smears are harmful and designed to destroy the individual’s credibility and ability to have influence in the public square.

Some of those vilified by the SPLC have been subjected to even worse treatment. The Family Research Council and House Majority Whip Steve Scalise have been violently attacked by individuals inspired by the propaganda the SPLC regularly dishes out—which is often accepted without criticism and passed on by media, law-enforcement agencies and universities.

The SPLC should not be dignified with invitations to provide congressional testimony about domestic extremism as long as it continues to advance a transparently partisan agenda—one Mr. Potok has publicly acknowledged is designed to “destroy” groups it opposes.

 

The Leftist’s Climate Lies Coming Home To Roost

Published by Papa Giorgio

This is a great example of The Leftist Climate Lies Cultural Consequences. I would drop kick them if I was there. See WATTS UP WITH THAT’S stories on Just Stop Oil. END WOKENESS notes the following:

  • BREAKING: Climate cult strikes again Just Stop Oil lunatics took hammers and attacked Rokeby Venus, painted in 1651 ($90M) in the London National Gallery

Santa Cruz’s “Okay” Skate Symbol (A #MAGA Hoax)

Published by Papa Giorgio

ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2017

ROLL THE TAPE PLEASE:

Of course the left thinks this “okay” symbol is racist, like everything is now “racist” (milk, the term “athletic,” criticizing the IRS, saying that Barack Obama lied, wanting lower taxes, Star Wars, your baby, craft beer, being white, lunch bags, etc., etc. — TOWNHALL | TWITTER [Tucker Carlson] | WASHINGTON TIMES | NATIONAL REVIEW | ZERO HEDGE [Tucker Carlson]).

See, of course, my previous posts on the “okay” symbol, here and here. I assume that “racist things” and the list of things caused by “Global Warming” will compete with each other.

Of course, if you are not familiar with the original graphic from SANTA CRUZ, it made #3 in the TOP 50 GREATEST SKATE LOGOS.

I was happened upon DICTIONARY.COM’s definition of the “Okay” symbol — and can you guess what I found? And the reason for Savory Agent’s version of the Santa Cruz Symbol? Here is the WRONG DEFINITION description first:

Important context: While the OK hand emoji ? has many harmless meanings, it was co-opted as a white supremacist symbol in the late 2010s. One should now be mindful of context when using or coming across this emoji.

This is just factually wrong. The “okay” symbol as a white supremacist symbol was first a hoax by 4Chan dating to 2017, and, the media made such a stink about it [thinking  it was true] that after the media freakout, white supremacist groups adopted it.

Here is WIKIPEDIA’S noting of it:

In 2017, users on the message-board site 4chan aimed to convince the media and other people that the OK gesture was being used as a white power symbol as a joke. According to The Boston Globe, users on 4chan’s /pol/ (“Politically Incorrect”) board were instructed in February 2017 to “flood Twitter and other social media websites…claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy,” as part of a campaign dubbed “Operation O-KKK”.

The satirical association of the gesture with white supremacy derived from the assertion that the three upheld fingers resemble a ‘W’ and the circle made with the thumb and forefinger resemble the head of a ‘P’, together standing for “White Power.” While some members of the alt-right used the symbol after the launch of the 4chan campaign, it initially remained ambiguous whether or not it was being used to communicate genuine adherence to white supremacy, or with deliberately ironic motives.

In September 2019 the ADL revised their earlier position and added the OK gesture to its “Hate on Display” database. The listing notes that the usage of the OK hand gesture is sometimes benign, but that it is intended as a symbol of hate in some contexts, as some white supremacists have begun using the OK symbol “as a sincere expression of White Supremacy”. White supremacists have acknowledged using the symbol as a gesture of White Power. As a result of white supremacists’ co-opting the symbol….

Dennis Prager says it often, “everything the Left touches it ruins.” The Mainstream Media and Democrats [the Left] had their grubby hands/paws/mitts all over this story as factual — and because of the perceived power play seen in using this politically — they even ruined the “okay symbol.”

Here is the ADL’s dealing with it — take note the “circle game” was ruined as well by the Democrats and Media:

In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.

In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.

Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The overwhelming usage of the “okay” hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval. As a result, someone who uses the symbol cannot be assumed to be using the symbol in either a trolling or, especially, white supremacist context unless other contextual evidence exists to support the contention. Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the “okay” gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.

Other, similar-seeming hand gestures have also been mistakenly assumed to have white supremacist connotations as a result of the “okay” hoax. One of these is the so-called “Circle Game,” in which people attempt to trick each other into looking at an okay-like hand gesture made somewhere below the waist. Another is the hand sign of the Three Percenter movement, a wing of the anti-government extremist militia movement. Three Percenters, who are right-wing extremists but are not typically white supremacists, often make a hand gesture to symbolize their movement that uses the outstretched middle, ring, and pinky fingers to represent a Roman numeral “3.” This gesture, from certain angles, can often resemble an “okay” hand gesture and has been misinterpreted by some as a white supremacist symbol.

But hey…. our dictionaries. Lol.

You know who get’s it right? BLOG EMOJIPEDIA!

  • The myth of the OK gesture as a secret symbol of white supremacy begins in 2017 as a deliberate effort on 4chan to spread the sign as such. It was chosen in part due to its use by the controversial speaker Milo Yiannopoulos and some white nationalists in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. Its creators also claimed that the fingers of the OK gesture represent a W for white and the ring a P for power, as illustrated below. (read it all, it’s good)

I rarely say anything positive about VOX, but the link in the bullet point above surprised me. Bravo.

The “OK Sign” Hoax | Joe Rogan & Tim Pool

Why The Middle East Won’t Accept Palestinian Refugees

Published by Papa Giorgio

Despite having a border with Gaza, Egypt is current building an even bigger border wall and refuses to accept any Palestinian refugees. Here’s why.

Plus:

Was there ever a “Palestinian State”/People”

  1. Before the modern state of Israel there was the British mandate, not a Palestinian state.
  2. Before the British mandate there was the Ottoman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
  3. Before the Ottoman Empire there was the Islamic Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, not a Palestinian state.
  4. Before the Islamic Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt there was the Ayyubid Dynasty, not a Palestinian state. Godfrey of Bouillon conquered it in 1099.
  5. Before the Ayyubid Dynasty there was the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem, not a Palestinian state.
  6. Before the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem there was the Fatimid Caliphate, not a Palestinian state.
  7. Before the Fatimid Caliphate there was the Byzantine Empire, not a Palestinian state.
  8. Before the Byzantine Empire there was the Roman Empire, not a Palestinian state.
  9. Before the Roman Empire there was the Hasmoneans Dynasty, not a Palestinian state.
  10. Before the Hasmonaean Dynasty there was the Seleucid Empire, not a Palestinian state.
  11. Before the Seleucid Empire there was the Empire of Alexander the 3rd of Macedon, not a Palestinian state.
  12. Before the Empire of Alexander, the 3rd of Macedon, there was the Persian empire, not a Palestinian state.
  13. Before the Persian Empire there was the Babylonian empire, not a Palestinian state.
  14. Before the Babylonian Empire there was the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea, not a Palestinian state.
  15. Before the kingdoms of Israel and Judea there was the kingdom of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
  16. Before the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea there was the theocracy of the 12 Tribes of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
  17. Before the theocracy of the 12 Tribes of Israel there was the individual state of Canaan, not a Palestinian state.
  18. Before the Kingdom of Israel, there was the Theocracy of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, not a Palestinian state.
  19. Before the Theocracy of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, there was an agglomeration of independent Canaanite city-kingdoms, not a Palestinian state.

In fact, in this corner of the earth there was everything but a Palestinian state!

This short audio compliments the above

We often hear claims that Palestinians are “native” or indigenous to the land of Israel, but does history back this up? It’s worth taking a look.

 

Modern Man’s “Red Herring”

Published by Papa Giorgio

ORIGINALLY POSTED IN JANUARY OF 2014

Jump to Bradley Monton’s Isaac Newton and the methodological method.

... LAWS!

  • Newton is a leading contributor to the scientific worldview, and yet he does not bind himself by the assumption of uninterruptible natural law ~ Bradley Monton
  • 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 ~ CS Lewis
  • Meredith’s whole argument about ID, miracles, and the so-called “breaking” of natural laws is nothing but a red herring. Again, the real issue is about the nature of causation not about natural law ~ Michael Flannery

In the most recent issue of FIRST THINGS (February 2014), Stephen Meredith attempted to critique Intelligent Design theory, by, essentially creating straw-men arguments or by debating issues others have dealt with well.

Later in this “short” review of topics that caught my critical eye, we will see the similar vein John Derbyshire takes in the January/February (2014) issue of The American Spectator in comparing ID to Islam.

AT LEAST American Spectator had the foresight to have an alternative view side-by-side, so you get to see what an erudite, idea filled presentation looks like (Stephen Meyer’s)…

— a portion of which I will publish at the bottom from a magazine I recommend highly —

…alongside another filled with fallacious arguments, non-sequiturs, and a lack of intelligence in laying out a positive case (John Derbyshire).

First, however, my mind went immediately to David Hume and CS Lewis after reading the following from Stephen Meredith in the First Things article:

If God is omnipotent—that is, can do all that is possible without self-contradiction—what is the re­lationship between God and causality? Is there any causality outside an omnipotent God? Or is anything in nature that seems to act as an efficient cause only carrying out the causality of God, with no agency of its own? These questions get to the heart of a philosophical problem posed by Intelligent Design: It supposes that natural law, which is the basis for science, operates most of the time but is periodically suspended, as in the Cambrian “explosion” and the origin of life itself.
As well as reading John Derbyshire in the American Spectator article:
…IT IS THE religious aspect that causes most scientists to shy away from ID. Not that scientists all hate God. Many of them are devout.…

…The metaphysics of ID is occasionalist. It holds, to abbreviate the doctrine rather drasti­cally, that causation is an illusion; that every­thing happens because God makes it happen.

Why does ice float on water? Aristotle thought it was a matter of shape (see On the Heavens, IV.6). Science says it’s because ice is less dense than water. The occasionalist says it’s because God wills it so….

…But: Ice floats on water because God wills it so? Oh.

This straw-man built up by Mr. Derbyshire seems likewise heavily influenced by Hume, who said in his well known essay entitled, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the following:
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined  … It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.”

(David Hume: The Essential Philosophical Works, eBook, [2012], pages 662 and 663)

JOHN LENNOX breaks down Hume’s argument thus:
A. Argument from the uniformity of nature:

1. Miracles are violations of the laws of nature
2. These laws have been established by ‘firm and unalterable’ experience
3. Therefore, the argument against miracle is as good as any argument from experience can be

B.  Argument from the uniformity of experience:

1. Unusual, yet frequently observed, events are not miracles – like a healthy person suddenly dropping dead
2. A resurrection would be a miracle because it has never been observed anywhere at any time
3. There is uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise it would not be called miraculous

Dr. Lennox continues:

Are miracles ‘violations of the laws of nature’

Argument 1.    Hume says that accounts of miracles ‘are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations’ (op.cit. p.79).

Fallacy. In order to recognize some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception! You cannot recognize something which is abnormal, if you do not know what is normal. Example: 1) virgin conception of Jesus; 2) conception of John the Baptist.

Argument 2.    Now that we know the laws of nature, belief in miracles is impossible.

Fallacy. The danger of confusion between legal and scientific use of word law. Why it is inaccurate and misleading to say that miracles ‘violate’ the laws of nature. It is rather, that God feeds new events into the system from time to time. There is no alteration to or suspension of the laws themselves.   

‘If God annihilates or creates or 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 any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born’ (C.S Lewis, Miracles. p.63).

Continuing with CS Lewis and his relating to us this “red herring” of naturalism in rejecting the miraculous/metaphysical aspects of reality:
The first Red Herring is this. Any day you may hear a man (and not necessarily a disbeliever in God) say of some alleged miracle, “No. Of course I don’t believe that. We know it is contrary to the laws of Nature. People could believe it in olden times because they didn’t know the laws of Nature. We know now that it is a scientific impossibility.”

By the “laws of Nature” such a man means, I think, the ob­served course of Nature. If he means anything more than that he is not the plain man I take him for but a philosophic Natu­ralist and will be dealt with in the next chapter. The man I have in view believes that mere experience (and specially those artificially contrived experiences which we call Exper­iments) can tell us what regularly happens in Nature. And he finks that what we have discovered excludes the possibility of Miracle. This is a confusion of mind.

Granted that miracles can occur, it is, of course, for experi­ence to say whether one has done so on any given occasion. But mere experience, even if prolonged for a million years, cannot tell us whether the thing is possible. Experiment finds out what regularly happens in Nature: the norm or rule to which she works. Those who believe in miracles are not deny­ing that there is such a norm or rule: they are only saying that it can be suspended. A miracle is by definition an exception.

[….]

The idea that the progress of science has somehow altered this question is closely bound up with the idea that people “in olden times” believed in them “because they didn’t know the laws of Nature.” Thus you will hear people say, “The early Christians believed that Christ was the son of a virgin, but we know that this is a scientific impossibility.” Such people seem to have an idea that belief in miracles arose at a period when men were so ignorant of the cause of nature that they did not perceive a miracle to be contrary to it. A moment’s thought shows this to be nonsense: and the story of the Virgin Birth is a particularly striking example. When St. Joseph discovered that his fiancee was going to have a baby, he not unnaturally decided to repudiate her. Why? Because he knew just as well as any modern gynaecologist that in the ordinary course of na­ture women do not have babies unless they have lain with men. No doubt the modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St. Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point—that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St. Joseph obviously knew that. In any sense in which it is true to say now, “The thing is scientifically impossible,” he would have said the same: the thing always was, and was always known to be, impossible unless the regular processes of nature were, in this particular case, being over-ruled or supple­mented by something from beyond nature. When St. Joseph finally accepted the view that his fiancee’s pregnancy was due not to unchastity but to a miracle, he accepted the miracle as something contrary to the known order of nature. All records

[….]

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 harmonises it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one 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 other events. If God annihilates or creates or 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 any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Preg­nancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the new­comer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be di­gested. 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.

[….]

A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results fol­low according to Natural law. In the 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. And they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent. I agree with them. But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for the whole.

CS Lewis, Miracles (New York, NY: Touchstone Publishers, 1996), 62-63, 64-65, 80-81, 81-82.

This is mainly the point Michael Flannery makes near the end of this portion of his critique of the First Things article, entitled: “Writing in First Things, Stephen Meredith Offers Confusion in the Guise of Critique“:

…He [Stephen Meredith]  has

1) a faulty view of ID’s relationship to nature, miracles, and the supernatural;

2) no clear definition of what ID really is; and

3) an erroneous view of much of the history related to ID, evolution, and theology.

In company with John Derbyshire, Meredith, insists that ID proponents are “occasionalists,” holding to a particular theological understanding of causation. As occasionalists they do “not credit natural or physical law with enough causal power to enact evolution on its own.” Instead they “educe supernatural causes to do most of the heavy lifting in worldly events.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding. ID does not require the “breaking” of natural law or the notion that a natural law would have done X but instead Y happened. As William A. Dembski has pointed out, ID doesn’t need this “counterfactual substitution.” People act, for example, as intelligent agents not by “breaking” or “suspending” natural laws but by arranging or front-loading laws to suite particular ends (The Design Revolution, pp. 181-182). Meredith seems to argue that ID is incongruous with modern science because it invokes miracles and yields to supernatural causes. Here Meredith is making an old mistake, called out again by Dembski: “The contrast between natural law and supernatural causes is the wrong contrast. The proper contrast is between undirected natural causes on the one hand and intelligent causes on the other” (p. 189).

Furthermore, Meredith’s concern regarding miracles contravening natural laws seems to suggest a position of tension between the miraculous and science itself. However, this is not a scientific position. It is a philosophical one suggestive of methodological naturalism. “Scientists, as scientists,” Norman Geisler explains, “need not be so narrow as to believe that nothing can ever count as a miracle. All a scientist needs to hold is the premise that every event has a cause and that the observable universe operates in an orderly way” (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 467). Meredith’s whole argument about ID, miracles, and the so-called “breaking” of natural laws is nothing but a red herring. Again, the real issue is about the nature of causation not about natural law…

Even atheist philosophers refute the idea that to incorporate a theistic view into nature is NOT anti-science, and works within the scientific paradigm:

FOLLOWING SUPERNATURALISM MAKES THE SCIENTIST’S TASK TOO EASY

Here’s the first of Pennock’s arguments against methodological naturalism that I’ll consider:

allowing appeal to supernatural powers in science would make the scientist’s task too easy, because one would always be able to call upon the gods for quick theoretical assistance…. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for everything.

This argument strikes me as unfair. Consider a particular empirical phenomenon, like a chemical reaction, and imagine that scientists are trying to figure out why the reaction happened. Pennock would say that scientists who allow appeal to supernatural powers would have a ready-made answer: God did it. While it may be that that’s the only true explanation that can be given, a good scientist-including a good theistic scientist—would wonder whether there’s more to be said. Even if God were ultimately the cause of the reaction, one would still wonder if the proximate cause is a result of the chemicals that went into the reaction, and a good scientist—even a good theistic scientist—would investigate whether such a naturalistic account could be given.

To drive the point home, an analogy might be helpful. With the advent of quantum mechanics, scientists have become comfortable with indeterministic events. For example, when asked why a particular radioactive atom decayed at the exact time that it did, most physicists would say that there’s no reason it decayed at that particular time; it was just an indeterministic event!’ One could imagine an opponent of indeterminism giving an argument that’s analogous to Pennock’s:

allowing appeal to indeterministic processes in science would make the scientist’s task too easy, because one would always be able to call upon chance for quick theoretical assistance…. Indeed, all empirical investigation beyond the purely descriptive could cease, for scientists would have a ready-made answer for everything.

It is certainly possible that, for every event that happens, scientists could simply say “that’s the result of an indeterministic chancy process; there’s no further explanation for why the event happened that way.” But this would clearly be doing bad science: just because the option of appealing to indeterminism is there, it doesn’t follow that the option should always be used. The same holds for the option of appealing to supernatural powers.

As further evidence against Pennock, it’s worth pointing out that prominent scientists in the past have appealed to supernatural powers, without using them as a ready-made answer for everything. Newton is a good example of this—he is a devout theist, in addition to being a great scientist, and he thinks that God sometimes intervenes in the world. Pennock falsely implies that this is not the case:

God may have underwritten the active principles that govern the world described in [Newton’s] Principia and the Opticks, but He did not interrupt any of the equations or regularities therein. Johnson and other creationists who want to dismiss methodological naturalism would do well to consult Newton’s own rules of reasoning….

But in fact, Newton does not endorse methodological naturalism. In his Opticks, Newton claims that God sometimes intervenes in the world. Specifically, Newton thinks that, according to his laws of motion, the orbits of planets in our solar system are not stable over long periods of time, and his solution to this problem is to postulate that God occasionally adjusts the motions of the planets so as to ensure the continued stability of their orbits. Here’s a relevant passage from Newton. (It’s not completely obvious that Newton is saying that God will intervene but my interpretation is the standard one.)

God in the Beginning form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles … it became him who created them to set them in order. And if he did so, it’s unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature; though being once form’d, it may continue by those Laws for many Ages. For while Comets move in very excentrick Orbs in all manner of Positions, blind Fate could never make all the Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted, which may have risen from the mutual Actions of Comets and Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this System wants a Reformation…. [God is] able by his Will to move the Bodies within his boundless uniform Sensorium, and thereby to form and reform the Parts of the Universe….

A scientist who writes this way does not sound like a scientist who is following methodological naturalism.

It’s worth noting that some contemporaries of Newton took issue with his view of God occasionally intervening in the universe. For example, Leibniz writes:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to them, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time; otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion.”

Note, though, that Leibniz also thought that God intervened in the world:

I hold that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace.

Later investigation revealed that in fact planetary orbits are more stable than Newton thought, so Newton’s appeal to supernatural powers wasn’t needed. But the key point is that Newton is willing to appeal to supernatural powers, without using the appeal to supernatural powers as a ready-made answer for everything.

Pennock says that “Without the binding assumption of uninterruptible natural law there would be absolute chaos in the scientific worldview.” Newton’s own approach to physics provides a good counterexample to this—Newton is a leading contributor to the scientific worldview, and yet he does not bind himself by the assumption of uninterruptible natural law.

Bradley Monton, Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design, (Peterborough, Ontario [Canada]: Broadview Press, 2009), 62-64.

How one can go from the above rational positions by a Christian (CS Lewis), and an atheist (Bradley Monton), to comparing floating ice as an unnatural event held in situ by God’s continuous miraculous intervention. And then compare this straw-man to the Islamic understanding of extreme fideistic occasionalism?

The claim that there is a God raises metaphysical questions about the nature of reality and existence. In general, it can be said that there is not one concept of God but many, even among monotheistic traditions. The Abrahamic religions are theistic; God is both the creator of the world and the one who sustains it. Theism, with its equal stress on divine transcendence of the universe and immanence within it, constitutes a somewhat uneasy conceptual midpoint between deism and pantheism. Deist conceptions of the divine see God as the creator of a universe that continues to exist, without his intervention, under the physical impulses that he first imparted to it. In pantheism, God is identified with the universe as a whole. Theism itself has numerous subvarieties, such as occasionalism, which holds that the only real cause in the universe is God; thus, all other causes are simply signs of coincidence and conjunction between kinds of events occurring within the created order. For example, heat is not what causes the water in a teakettle to boil but is simply what uniformly occurs before the water boils. God himself is the cause of the boiling.

An important object of metaphysical reflection is God’s nature, or the properties of that nature. Is God simple or complex? If omniscience, omnipotence, and beauty are part of the divine perfection, what exactly are these properties? Is timeless eternity part of God’s perfection? Can an omnipotent being will that there be a four-sided triangle or change the past? Does an omniscient being know the future actions of free agents? (If so, how can they be free?) Does an omniscient being who is timelessly eternal know what time it is now?

(HISTORY OF RELIGION)

Nor do Christians suspend belief or do not question their own understanding or nature’s causes for events, like Islam has, historically:
We humans have an inner balance with which we weigh good and evil. This balance, in Muslims stopped working. The indicator is stuck on zero. Muhammad’s companions could no longer register right and wrong. Because it’s hard to envision how a human being could be this ruthless, they persuaded themselves that he must be from God. As for why this god is so demonic, they fooled themselves with the lies that he told them. He told them that it is not up to man to question God. This absurd explanation satisfied his benighted followers. They resorted to fideism and argued that reason is irrelevant to religious belief. The great Imam Ghazali (1058 – 1111) said: “Where the claims of reason come into conflict with revelation, reason must yield to revelation.” A similar thesis in defense of foolishness is presented by Paul in 1 Cor. 1:20-25 where he argues “the foolishness of God is wiser than (the wisdom of) men”. The statement “Credo quia absurdum” (I believe because it is absurd), often attributed to Tertullian, is based on this passage of Paul. In DCC 5 he said: “The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd.” Upon this belief in absurdity fideism is founded and it is the position that has been adopted by Muslims. This fideistic attitude allowed the early believers to abandon reason and accept whatever Muhammad did, even his blatant crimes, without questioning him.

(WHY CAN’T ISLAM BE REFORMED?)

And when something “unnatural” is introduced into nature, this does not interfere one iota with science or the natural order of events, causality, or the like. As CS Lewis said many years ago, this is a Red Herring. Not to mention, that in reality, neo-Darwinian thinking IS A METAPHYSICAL PREMISE at its core. So often times it is the kettle calling the pot… well, you know.

IN a great presentation from True U. (Focus on the Family store | Discovery Institute), Dr. Stephen Meyer shows how — by using the supposition from Hinduism that the earth sits atop a turtle used by Stephen Hawking’s — the materialist position differs little from this religious supposition. This video is to replace an old, defunct, MRCTV video uploaded early 2014, but here today (11/4/2023). I added a William Provine clip from his 1994 debate with Phillip Johnson at Stanford. The entire debate can be see HERE.

“We must ask first whether the theory of evolution by natural selection is scientific or pseudoscientific …. Taking the first part of the theory, that evolution has occurred, it says that the history of life is a single process of species-splitting and progression. This process must be unique and unrepeatable, like the history of England. This part of the theory is therefore a historical theory, about unique events, and unique events are, by definition, not part of science, for they are unrepeatable and so not subject to test.”

Colin Patterson [1978] (Dr. Patterson was Senior Principal Scientific Officer of the Paleontology Department of the British Museum of Natural History in London.)

People think evolution is “science proper.” It is not, it is both a historical science and a [philosophical] presupposition in its “neo-Darwinian” form. The presupposition that removes it from “science proper and moves it into “scientism” is explained by an atheist philosopher:
If science really is permanently committed to methodological naturalism – the philosophical position that restricts all explanations in science to naturalistic explanations – it follows that the aim of science is not generating true theories. Instead, the aim of science would be something like: generating the best theories that can be formulated subject to the restriction that the theories are naturalistic. More and more evidence could come in suggesting that a supernatural being exists, but scientific theories wouldn’t be allowed to acknowledge that possibility.

Bradley Monton, author of Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design ~ Apologetics315 h/t

In other words, the guy most credited in getting us to the moon used science to get us there, but was a young earth creationist. His view on “origins” (origin science) is separate from his working science. Two categories.

Likewise one of the most celebrated pediatric surgeons in the world, whom a movie was made after, “Gifted Hands,” is a young earth creationist. And the inventor of the MRI, a machine that diagnosed my M.S., is also a young earth creationist.

Evolutionary Darwinism is first and foremost an “historical science” that has many presuppositions that precede it, making it a metaphysical belief, a philosophy, as virulent anti-creationist philosopher of science, Michael Ruse explains:

Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. . . . Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.

Michael Ruse, “Saving Darwinism from the Darwinians,” National Post (May 13, 2000), p. B-3. (Via ICR)

….Nevertheless, there is a second, and arguably deeper, mystery associated with the Cambrian explosion: the mystery of how the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random mutation could have given rise to all these fundamentally new forms of animal life, and done so quickly enough to account for the pattern in the fossil record. That question became acute in the second half of the twentieth century as biologists learned more about what it takes to build an animal.

In 1953 when Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of the DNA molecule, they made a startling discovery, namely, its ability to store information in the form of a four-character digital code. Strings of precisely sequenced chemicals called nucleotide bases store and transmit the assembly instructions—the information—for building the crucial protein molecules that the cell needs to survive. Just as English letters may convey a particular message depending on their arrangement, so too do certain sequences of chemical bases along the spine of a DNA molecule convey precise information. As Richard Dawkins has acknowledged, “the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.” Or as Bill Gates has noted, “DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software ever created.”

The Cambrian period is marked by an explosion of new animals exemplifying new body plans. But building new animal body plans requires new organs, tissues, and cell types. And new cell types require many kinds of specialized or dedicated proteins (e.g., animals with gut cells require new digestive enzymes). But building each protein requires genetic information stored on the DNA molecule. Thus, building new animals with distinctive new body plans requires, at the very least, vast amounts of new genetic information. Whatever happened during the Cambrian not only represented an explosion of new biological form, but it also required an explosion of new biological information.

Is it plausible that the neo-Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations in DNA could produce the highly specificarrangements of bases in DNA necessary to generate the protein building blocks of new cell types and novel forms of life? 

According to neo-Darwinian theory, new genetic information arises first as random mutations occur in the DNA of existing organisms. When mutations arise that confer a survival advantage, the resulting genetic changes are passed on to the next generation. As such changes accumulate, the features of a population change over time. Nevertheless, natural selection can only “select” what random mutations first generate. Thus the neo-Darwinian mechanism faces a kind of needle-in-the-haystack problem—or what mathematicians call a “combinatorial” problem. The term “combinatorial” refers to the number of possible ways that a set of objects can be arranged or combined. Many simple bike locks, for example, have four dials with 10 digits on each dial. A bike thief encountering one of these locks faces a combinatorial problem because there are 10 × 10 × 10 × 10, or 10,000 possible combinations and only one that will open the lock. A random search is unlikely to yield the correct combination unless the thief has plenty of time.

Similarly, it is extremely difficult to assemble a new information-bearing gene or protein by the natural selection/random mutation process because of the sheer number of possible sequences. As the length of the required gene or protein grows, the number of possible base or amino-acid sequences of that length grows exponentially. 

Here’s an illustration that may help make the problem clear. Imagine that we encounter a committed bike thief who is willing to search the “sequence space” of possible bike combinations at a rate of about one new combination per two seconds. If our hypothetical bike thief had three hours and took no breaks he could generate more than half (about 5,400) of the 10,000 total combinations of a four-dial lock. In that case, the probability that he will stumble upon the right combination exceeds the probability that he will fail. More likely than not, he will open the lock by chance.

But now consider another case. If that thief with the same limited three hour time period available to him confronted a lock with ten dials and ten digits per dial (a lock with ten billion possible combinations) he would now have time only to explore a small fraction of the possible combinations—5,400 of ten billion—far fewer than half. In this case, it would be much more likely than not that he would fail to open the lock by chance.

These examples suggest that the ultimate probability of the success of a random search—and the plausibility of any hypothesis that affirms the success of such a search—depends upon both the size of the space that needs to be searched and the number of opportunities available to search it. 

In Darwin’s Doubt, I show that the number of possible DNA and amino acid sequences that need to be searched by the evolutionary process dwarfs the time available for such a search—even taking into account evolutionary deep time. Molecular biologists have long understood that the size of the “sequence space” of possible nucleotide bases and amino acids (the number of possible combinations) is extremely large. Moreover, recent experiments in molecular biology and protein science have established that functional genes and proteins are extremely rare within these huge combinatorial spaces of possible arrangements. There are vastly more ways of arranging nucleotide bases that result in non-functional sequences of DNA, and vastly more ways of arranging amino acids that result in non-functional amino-acid chains, than there are corresponding functionalgenes or proteins. One recent experimentally derived estimate places that ratio—the size of the haystack in relation to the needle—at 1077non-functional sequences for every functional gene or protein. (There are only something like 1065 atoms in our galaxy.)

All this suggests that the mutation and selection mechanism would only have enough time in the entire multi-billion year history of life on Earth to generate or “search” but a miniscule fraction (one ten trillion, trillion trillionth, to be exact) of the total number of possible nucleotide base or amino-acid sequences corresponding to a single functional gene or protein. The number of trials available to the evolutionary process turns out to be incredibly small in relation to the number of possible sequences that need to be searched. Thus, the neo-Darwinian mechanism, with its reliance on random mutation, is much more likely to fail than to succeed in generating even a single new gene or protein in the known history of life on earth. In other words, the neo-Darwinian mechanism is not an adequate mechanism to generate the information necessary to produce even a single new protein, let alone a whole new Cambrian animal….

[….]

Of course, many scientists dismiss intelligent design as “religion masquerading as science.” But the case for intelligent design is not based upon religious or scriptural authority. Instead it is based upon scientific evidence and the same method of scientific reasoning that Darwin himself used in the Origin of Species. 

In rejecting the theory as unscientific by definition, evolutionary biologists reveal a deep a priori commitment to methodological naturalism—the idea that scientists must limit themselves to materialistic explanations for all things. Yet, we know from experience that certain types of events and structures—in particular, information-rich structures—invariably arise from minds or personal agents. Indeed, no thinking person would insist that the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, for example, were produced by strictly materialistic forces such as wind and erosion. Yet, by insisting that all events in the history of life must be explained by reference to strictly materialistic processes evolutionary biologists preclude consideration of a designing intelligence in the history of life, regardless of what the evidence might indicate. 

This commitment to a wholly materialistic account of the origins of life also helps to explain the reluctance to criticize the Darwinian theory publicly. Many evolutionary biologists fear that if they do so they will aid and abet the case for intelligent design—a theory they disdain as inherently unscientific. Those of us who support the theory of intelligent design advocate a more open approach to scientific investigation. Not only do we think the public has a right to know about the problems with evolutionary theory, we also think that the rules of science should allow scientists to “follow the evidence wherever it leads”—even if it leads to conclusions that raise deep and unwelcome metaphysical questions.

(AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

Can you believe in God and science at the same time? Many claim that belief in religion is at odds with “the science” of today. But is that really true? In this five-part series, Stephen Meyer, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, attempts to answer this existential question.

Series “Broken Out”

  1. Are Religion and Science in Conflict? — Science and God | Does belief in God get in the way of science? The idea that science and religion are inevitably in conflict is a popular way of thinking today. But the history of science tells a different story.
  2. How Did the Universe Begin? — Science and God | Was the universe always here, or did it have a beginning? If so, how did it start? Mankind has debated these questions for centuries and has only recently begun to find some answers. And those answers may point to some even more intriguing conclusions.
  3. Aliens, the Multiverse, or God? — Science and God | Even staunch Darwinists have acknowledged that life in the universe displays an appearance of design, rather than being created out of random chance. If that’s true, where did that design come from? In other words, does a design require a designer?
  4. What Is Intelligent Design? — Science and God | Chances are if you’ve heard anything about intelligent design, you’ve heard that it’s faith-based, not science-based. Is that true? Or does modern science, in fact, point us in the direction of a designing intelligence?
  5. What’s Wrong with Atheism? — Science and God | Is there any meaning to life? Or is life nothing more than a cosmic accident? Scientific atheists claim the latter, but ironically, it’s science itself that suggests the former.