Mortimer J. Adler rightly points out that while many Christians are quick in responding to the conclusions in an argument often times the Christian is unaware that the point of departure is not in the conclusion, but in the starting premise, the foundational assumptions.
Norman L. Geisler & Peter Bocchino, Unshakable Foundations: Contemporary Answers to Crucial Questions About the Christian Faith (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2001), 20-21.
(One may wish as well to peruse the posts withGreg Bahnsen’s audio included.) Below are two short audio examples of Ravi Zacharias “questioning the questioner,” the first is a recounting of conversation, whereas the second is a challenge proferred by a student and is Ravi at his best!
This second audio is of a student asking Ravi Zacharias about God condemning people [atheists] to hell and the moral implications of this. This Q&A occurred after a presentation Ravi gave at Harvard University(the entire presentation is worth the purchase), and is now one of his most well-known responses in the apologetic sub-culture.
Enjoy this short response by Mr. Zacharias, it is him at his best.
I am including some remarks from an earlier version of the above audio from my YouTube. Someone makes the following statement:
Polish parlor trick showman. Why do people still fall for his nonsense. BTW. There is no evidence for gods, none. Ravi is merely lying and creating logical fallacy.
To which another commentator responds:
Actually he is very articulately (yet indirectly) pointing to the presence of “argumentum ad ignorantium” in the debate over atheism/theism. Faith is a logical fallacy on the terms of atheism, as atheism is a logical fallacy on the terms of the physical universe being unable to explain its origin. All leading atheists and Religious believers/scholars accept these boundaries. His answer begins with his explanation of the self-destructive nature of the question as given from its source (being an atheist)… it self-destructs because the question giver already doesn’t subscribe to the moral law as bound to the moral law giver who is the subject of the question. The question giver rejects the evidence that the believer accepts. And the believer can only point to evidence that the atheist rejects.
Larry Elder tackles in a short clip Obama’s hypocritical elitism in his last State of the Union Speech (2016). In this clip “The Sage” shows that even left-leaning media types document this hypocritical history.
The leftist ideology of “multiculturalism” is dividing Europe. Europe as well has become more secular over the decades… so you have generations of people removed from a “conserving” Western cultural advances via a Grecian/Judeo-Christian history and worldview. So with the rapes and violence (see a recent post of mine where there is video of women being forcefully drug into a subway — yes — to be raped [2nd video]) caused by an ideology that rejects the advances of Western society and a religious tradition that even Richard Dawkins says Christianity is a “bulwark against something worse.”
And so, this something worse includes Islam, of course, but, it also is a harbinger to other ingredients in a civilization headed towards a world war. And it is the children living in the vapors of freedom created by the Judeo-Christian “bulwark.” These secular believers want freedom… but do not know how to retain or advance it — outside of how Mussolini says to:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology AND TO ATTEMPT TO ENFORCE IT WITH ALL THE ENERGY OF WHICH HE IS CAPABLE.”
Mussolini, Diuturna (1924) pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
This energy is seen in movements ~ reactions to [rightly so] ~ these animals living by and wanting to impose on civilization an ideology from 600 A.D.
So we will see more headlines like these:
Anti-Immigrant ‘Soldiers of Odin’ Raise Concern in Finland: HELSINKI, Finland (Reuters) – Wearing black jackets adorned with a symbol of a Viking and the Finnish flag, the “Soldiers of Odin” have surfaced as self-proclaimed patriots patrolling the streets to protect native Finns from immigrants, worrying the government and police. (BREITBART)
…Finnish Government Condemns ‘Extremist’ Anti-Migrant Street Patrols: Volunteer street patrols linked to neo-Nazi groups have emerged in several Finnish towns in recent months claiming to protect locals from what they call “Islamic intruders”, a trend the Finnish government condemned on Thursday. (BREITBART)
Cologne Sexual Assault Victim Called a Racist and Harassed After Identifying Her Attackers: A woman, who came forward and told her story of being sexually assaulted in Cologne, Germany, on New Years Eve, was victimized a second time after an Internet video gave out her identity and suggested her account of the attack was anti-Muslim propaganda. (BREITBART)
Germany: Migrant Crime Wave, Police Capitulate: …According to the President of the German Police Union, “In Berlin or in the north of Duisburg there are neighborhoods where colleagues hardly dare to stop a car — because they know that they’ll be surrounded by 40 or 50 men.” These attacks amount to a “deliberate challenge to the authority of the state — attacks in which the perpetrators are expressing their contempt for our society.” (GATESTONE)
Germany runs out of pepper spray as residents brace for immigrant crime wave (HOTAIR)
German police spray anti-migrant protesters, Merkel toughens tone: Migrants who commit crimes should lose their right to asylum, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today, toughening her tone as police in Cologne confronted right-wing protesters venting their anger at mass assaults on women on New Year’s Eve. Police in the western city fired water canon to disperse protesters from the anti-Islamic PEGIDA movement, which has seized on the alleged involvement of migrants in the New Year attacks and stepped up its calls for a halt to the influx. (TIMES OF MALTA)
The secular man’s growing response to this growing threat will be — in the end — vicious, animalistic, based on a neo-Darwinian approach to ethics in survival…
The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law [natural selection] did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all…. If Nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.
~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, translator/annotator, James Murphy (New York: Hurst and Blackett, 1942), 161-162.
and the rest of the world will be brought along for the ride. Tennyson said it best:
…Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed…
…So runs my dream, but what am I? An infant crying in the night An infant crying for the light And with no language but a cry…
…Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams? So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life;
That I, considering everywhere Her secret meaning in her deeds, And finding that of fifty seeds She often brings but one to bear,
I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares Upon the great world’s altar-stairs That slope thro’ darkness up to God,
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope…
…If e’er when faith had fallen asleep, I hear a voice ‘believe no more’ And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt The freezing reason’s colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’
No, like a child in doubt and fear: But that blind clamour made me wise; Then was I as a child that cries, But, crying knows his father near…
Brace yourselves… with Russia, Islamo-Fascism, Anarcho-Left Fascists, Obama [may be] running for General Secretary of the U.N. later in his career, and the current Pope… we may — I stress may — be living in a very violent age for the eschatology watchers. Keep in mind that I am not saying this is right or wrong… I am merely supplying how I see the cookies falling. R.J. Rummel’s work on what he terms “Democide” is that as a government gets larger [socialist, communist, fascist], there is a correlation in history to more of that governments people dying at its hands. This is what I see growing as well in the world… these large secular governments trying to implement a border-less Utopian ideal that will backfire in soo many ways. It will pit citizens against their government and governments against the reality of the world.
Conservative Teddy Turner, Jr. says he spent time in the Soviet Union after graduation and Hillary, Obama and Bernie Sanders are saying the same thing as the Hammer and Sickle members of the USSR.
My dad made me go to military school. Which was a brilliant move. I went to the Soviet Union for a couple years. And when you go there, I’ve heard everything that Bernie’s been saying, or Hillary or Obama, have been saying for years. And it was guys with hammers and sickles. We don’t need to be there. And we cannot move more toward socialism. It doesn’t work. There are failed socialist countries all over the world. (Gateway)
(From left to right) Pol-Pot; Hillary Clinton, Mao, Teletubbies
Dennis Prager tackles a couple issues and takes some calls on the matter of how far the left is/has moved to the left as compared to how far the right has moved.
While not necessary to listen to in conjunction with the story below… if you have never heard Larry Elder’s “Nuts or Sluts,” give it a whirl… the “Sage from South Central” builds an excellent case (note as well the earlier post of mine):
This indicates the caliber of human being Hillary supporters want to return to the White House (h-t: Moonbattery):
[Bill] Clinton’s friendship with a convicted child sex predator, Jeffrey Epstein, again is coming under increased scrutiny, thanks in part to a recent civil lawsuit for defamation filed in Florida against [liberal lawyer Alan] Dershowitz by representatives for two of Epstein’s alleged victims. Dershowitz served as Epstein’s lawyer during Epstein’s criminal trial.
Not only has Bill Clinton’s name come up in the court proceedings, but Dershowitz, one of the key figures in the case, says that he cannot conclusively deny that Clinton was present at lavish sex orgies thrown on a Caribbean island by Epstein. What’s more, one of the victims said that Bill Clinton in fact was present at an Epstein island orgy.
Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. …
Flight logs also connect Clinton as they show he made multiple trips on Epstein’s private plane, including a September 2002 jaunt to Africa with actor buddies Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker. So does Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts, who claimed that she was used as a sex slave by Epstein and his friends, said that she met Bill Clinton on one of his trips with Epstein when she was only seventeen, but that she did not have sex with him. …
Bill Clinton also is connected to Epstein’s escapades through Ghislaine Maxwell, a socialite friend of Epstein’s, who is being accused by plaintiffs in the case of recruiting children for Epstein’s disturbing parties. Clinton and Maxwell, who both live in New York, have dined together on at least one occasion.
“As recounted in detail in this Complaint, Jane Doe 102 was 15 years old when Ghislaine Maxwell discovered her and lured her to Epstein’s house,” according to a 2011 Undisputed Statement of Facts in the case. “Maxwell and Epstein forced her to have sex with both of them and within weeks Maxwell and Epstein were flying her all over the world. According to the Complaint, Jane Doe 102 was forced to live as one of Epstein’s underage sex slaves for years and was forced to have sex with not only Maxwell and Epstein but also other politicians, businessmen, royalty, academicians, etc. She was even made to watch Epstein have sex with three 12-year-old French girls that were sent to him for his birthday by a French citizen that is a friend of Epstein’s.”
Clinton’s association with Maxwell was reported by New York Magazine in 2003, years before the Epstein scandal.
Mexican authorities have released a video to the Mexican TV station Televisa that shows the fierce gun battle that eventually led to the capture of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera.
The video shows the moment Mexican Marines storm the house where El Chapo had been staying and the fierce resistance that the drug lord’s gunmen put up.
The operation was dubbed by the Mexican government as “Black Swan”.
[….]
Interestingly the video shows at least one man in tactical gear who appears to be the commanding officer and is not in uniform but wears a red sweat shirt instead. The man out of uniform has sparked various debates on social media as to the man’s role. Those speculating ask if the man is a Mexican federal agent, a U.S. federal agent, or an international contractor.
El Chapo’s cartel is connected to some VERY gruesome murders in Mexico.
(This is with a hat-tip to a friend, Tanner.) I loved this Front Page Magazine article (also in National Review) by David Horowitz, it reads in-part (I invite you to also read the CS LEWIS quotes after the excerpt):
The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky once described Stalinism as “the perfect theory for glueing up the brain.” What he meant to dramatize was the fact that a regime as monstrous as Stalin’s, which murdered 40 million people and enslaved many times more, was nonetheless able to persuade progressives and “social justice” advocates all over the world to act as its supporters and defenders. These enlightened enablers of Stalin’s crimes included leading intellectuals of the day, even Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and the arts like Frederic Joliot-Curie and Andre Gide. Brilliant as they were, they were blind to the realities of the Stalinist regime and therefore of the virtues of the societies they lived in.
What glued up their brains was the belief that a brave new world of social justice – a world governed by progressive principles – existed in embryo in Soviet Russia, and had to be defended by any means necessary. As a result of this illusion, they put their talents and prestige at the service of the totalitarian enemies of democracy, acting, in Trotsky’s words, as “frontier guards” for the Stalinist empire. They continued their efforts even after the Soviets conquered Eastern Europe, acquired nuclear weapons and initiated a “cold war” with the West. To the progressives seduced by Stalinism, democratic America represented a greater evil than the barbaric police states of the Soviet bloc. Even half a century later a progressive culture still refers to the formative phase of the Cold War as years of a “Red Scare” – as though the fifth column of American progressives whose loyalties were to the Soviet enemy, whose members included Soviet spies, was not a matter of serious concern, and as though a nuclear-armed, rapacious Soviet empire did not pose a credible threat.
How were these delusions of otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people possible? How were otherwise informed individuals able to deny the obvious and support the most brutal and oppressive dictatorship in history? How did they come to view a relatively humane, decent, democratic society like the United States as evil, while regarding the barbarous communist regime as its victim? The answer lies in the identification of Marxism with the promise of social justice and the institution of progressive values, which will take place in a magical socialist future. Defense of the progressive idea trumped recognition of the reactionary fact.
Once the Stalin regime was identified with the imaginary progressive future, everything followed – its status as a persecuted victim, and its adversary’s role as a reactionary force standing in the way of the noble aspiration. Every fault of the Stalin regime, every crime it committed if not denied by progressives was attributed to the nefarious actions of its enemies, most glaringly the United States. Once a promise of redemption is juxtaposed to an imperfect real world actor, all of these responses become virtually inevitable. Hence the glueing of the brain.
[….]
Our country is at a perilous crossroads, one that is made immeasurably more dangerous by a treacherous national party, which blames its own country for the crimes of its enemies, and by a political opposition too feckless and timid to hold its fellow citizens accountable for their treasonous acts.
“If we are to be mothered, mother must know best…. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in.’ It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science…. Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny.’ All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of others…. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be.”
[….]
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severley, because we have deserved it, because ‘ought to have known better,’ is to be treated as a human persons in God’s image.”
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002), 292 (Full text).
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
C.S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night (New York, NY: Mariner Books, 1984), 131.
