As you read below… note that CHRISTIANS make up about 60% of the foster care system.
Much like blue states legalizing same-sex marriage, like in Massachusetts, the Democrat policies and politicians ran the most successful and oldest adoption services out of business. One non-Christian adoption specialist notes the impact back then:
“Everyone’s still reeling from the decision,” Marylou Sudders, executive director of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (MSPCC), said yesterday. “Ultimately, the only losers are the kids,” said Maureen Flatley, a Boston adoption consultant and lobbyist. (more at RPT& WT)
Around the same time (2012-2013), it was noted in Philadelphia that “the City of Philadelphia put out an urgent call for 300 new foster families.”
Continuing,
Despite the desperate need for homes for the 6,000 children in Philadelphia’s foster care system, the City then abruptly barred Catholic Social Services, one of the most successful foster agencies in the city, from placing any children. The City’s actions mean that foster homes are sitting empty and loving foster parents are unable to serve at-risk children, simply because the City disagrees with Catholic Social Services’ longstanding beliefs about marriage. (RPT’S SSM POST – point #3)
In the naming of the bill e peer — yet again — into the mind of the Orwellian parlance of the Democrats:
“Safe and Appropriate Foster Care Placement Requirements” (Christian Post)
So, here is a nationwide bill hurting those the Democrats purport to care about:
“This is not just about foster care,” explains American Family Association Senior Fellow Jameson Taylor. They’re “beginning to define Christian parents teaching a biblical worldview and defining that as a form of abuse. If you deny the LGBT lifestyle for your children, that is where this is headed.” (CBN)
Listen, I am not saying crazy Islamic fundamentalists would not have eventually made a move – even under Trump. But Republican administration foreign policy views are typically more realistic regarding the Middle East and Africa, and the spread of Islamo-Fascism. Under Biden one of the first things he did was remove the Houthis from the terrorist listing. And ignored [for the most part] Iran’s involvement in the hundred[+] attacks on bases in the Middle East and it took a record number of drone and missile strikes to garner a reaction [defensive] to these Iran backed terrorists.
The Biden administration has a skewed view of foreign policy that has created MORE unrest in a volatile area for evil opportunists “to pounce.” As well as a VERY porous border that is another opportunist wedge to get terrorists across the border who are creating cells in the country that will surely “pounce” when ordered.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., examines increased tensions in the Middle East after the U.S. struck Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
Remember, this was an “attack” [not preemptive, but retaliatory] with supported from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands. For the record.
And the night of the attack on Houthi terrorists [Iranian proxies] led to this exchange that is a rarity on news channels that are not FOX:
One can only imagine the sort of giddy high Willis and Wade were riding as they flexed their provincial power over a man they commonly despised. They must have imagined themselves as a superman and woman, flying above the rules and considerations that bind lower beings, entitled to the best life has to offer in payment for the historic, heroic service they were performing. — PJ-MEDIA
Massive Reversal In Trump Case Fani Willis Gave Trump Everything
Key Take Away:Fanni Willis is in bigger trouble than any of Trump’s co-defendants.
BTW, I found this New York Times article funny… I will note where quotes should be placed: “Lawyer Tapped [“Tapped”]to Prosecute Trump in Georgia Is Now Under Scrutiny Himself” — Lol
Just found Doug in Exile. Like his stuff. (He is on “X-aisle“as well [TWITTER]) The above video compliments this PJ-MEDIA article regarding the same issue. Before PJ however… the NEW YORK POST discusses the failing marriage of Nathan Wade and this newer “romance” with his sugar mamma probably playing a role:
FODDER
A top prosecutor leading the election interference case against Donald Trump in Georgia has allegedly left his estranged wife “without any means of financial support” while splurging on “lavish trips” for himself and his boss, Fani Willis.
Nathan Wade, who has been married for 26 years and shares two adult children with his wife Joycelyn, filed for divorce in Cobb County, outside Atlanta, in November 2021, according to court records.
The ex claimed in a motion for expenses filed last month and obtained by The Post, that Wade has left her with next to nothing, despite him having earned more than $650,000 in legal fees from the Trump case alone since 2022.
That court filing alleges that Joycelyn is in “dire need of financial support” because she is unemployed after having been a “stay-at-home mom for 26 years” and has “no access to marital funds.”
In the documents obtained by The Post, Joycelyn claims that Wade had habitually deposited $700 bi-weekly into a joint account for household expenses but was now tapping into that for his own use and sending it into overdraft……
In another NEW YORK POST article they note the following:
Embattled District Attorney Fani Willis has been subpoenaed to testify in the divorce case of the special prosecutor handling the Trump election interference case, who she stands accused of having an “improper relationship” with.
Furthermore, it has emerged the attorney, Nathan Wade, wasn’t even approved by the relevant board before being hired by the Willis who presides over Fulton County in Georgia.
Willis hired Atlanta-based private attorney Nathan Wade as a special prosecutor in the case against Trump and 18 of his associates over their alleged actions following the 2020 election.
Despite Wade having no experience prosecuting a complex Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. case like the one against Trump, he was handed a contract which has so far earned his company more than $650,000 in legal fees from the DA’s office.
The contract started on November 1, 2021, and Wade filed for divorce from his wife of 26-years [RPT comment: that is a sad], Joycelyn Wade, the following day, a case which has yet to be settled…..
So, there are some serious allegations and relationships here that will sink this case. What comes before the fall? Pride.
All of tat is worthy of having this case torpedoed…. BUT…. after PJ-MEDIA covers that as point #1, they get to their point #2:
…While the sexy bits alone are enough to disqualify both Willis and Wade from pursuing the case, the pair are alleged to have made plenty of other missteps in their power-mad pig-pile on the former president. For one thing, there was apparently improper coordination between the DA’s office and Joe Biden’s White House.
The motion was filed on behalf of Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official who oversaw Election Day operations in 2020, by his attorney, Ashleigh Merchant. Merchant “is a well-respected Georgia attorney,” writes Peach State native Erick Erickson on his substack. “She’s not out of her league, in over her head, or outside her competence in representing opposition researcher and Georgia defendant Michael Roman, one of those named in the Fulton County, Georgia RICO case against Trump.” In other words, this is not another “Release the Kraken” disappointment:
Among the salacious allegations and one for which Merchant clearly has the receipts, the special counsel hired by Willis met with the White House in Washington about the Trump RICO case. It provides some evidence that Willis did, in fact, coordinate with the Biden team to take out Trump.
PJ goes on to a third point as well. The entire article is well worth the read. But coordination with the Biden admin is the important point that bolsters yesterdays post: “WINING ELECTIONS THE SOVIET WAY“
The special prosecutor that District Attorney Fani Willis is accused of having an “improper” relationship with billed the Fulton County DA’s office $4,000 for two eight-hour meetings with White House officials while overseeing the election interference case against former President Donald Trump, according to court documents. [….] The services rendered by Wade in conjunction with the case seemingly included attending an event with White House counsel in Georgia and a meeting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, the invoices show. (NEW YORK POST)
(Click pic for full KanekoaTheGreat Tweet-X)
For an excellent walk-through of the main issue at hand, see the below video byRobert Gouveia Esq.
Fani Willis got subpoenaed to testify in her “Special” Prosecutor’s divorce proceedings, specifically, regarding Nathan Wade’s “improper” relationship with the D.A. And why did these two meet with the White House three times before indicting Trump? (17-minutes)
Of course the Democrats think they are “saving Democracy”. In fact, Joe Biden says “Democracy is on the ballot!” As he tries to remove the #1 opposition to him from the ballot. Also, Democrats are trying more removals as well based on theories that the authors had zero intent for the use of:
….It’s only the latest effort targeting congressional candidates as Democrats seek to bar opponents as “insurrectionists” for questioning the election of President Biden.
We have become a nation of Madame Defarges — eagerly knitting names of those to be subject to arbitrary justice.
Former congressional candidate Gene Stilp, who’s previously made headlines by burning MAGA flags with swastikas outside courthouses, filed the challenge.
Using the 14th Amendment to disqualify candidates like Perry is consistent with Stilp’s signature flag-burning stunts.
But what’s chilling is how many support such efforts, including Democratic officeholders from Maine’s Secretary of State to dozens of members of Congress.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory for challenging the election before Jan. 6, 2021.
Similar legislation from Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats, including New York Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman and Ritchie Torres and “Squad” members Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
When Maine’s secretary of state disqualified Trump, three in the state’s congressional delegation — Sens. Angus King (I) and Susan Collins (R) and Rep. Jared Golden (D) — condemned the decision. But others supported the antidemocratic action.
The grounds were virtually identical to those of Stilp. He accuses Perry of supporting challenges to Biden’s election and opposing its certification.
Of course, he ignores Democratic members who sought to block certification of Republican presidents under the very same law with no factual or legal basis.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised the effort then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) organized to challenge the certification of President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election.
Jan. 6 committee head Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) voted to challenge it in the House.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sought to block certification of the 2016 election result — particularly ironic since he’s a leading voice calling for Trump to be disqualified.
He insisted last week on CNN that the effort to prevent citizens from voting for Trump is the very embodiment of democracy: “If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.”
That is akin to treating every criminal charge as a consensual act of incarceration because the accused chose his path in life.
This is also being played out in state races.
The filing against Perry came the same day Pennsylvania Democratic state Sen. Art Haywood made public a complaint to the Senate Ethics Committee against his Republican colleague Doug Mastriano accusing him of playing a role in the plot to overturn the election.
Notably, in his effort to “hold insurrectionists accountable,” Haywood admitted he relied on the same evidence from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington that was used in the Colorado case.
“Insurrectionist” is the newest label to excuse any abuse.
During the McCarthy period, individuals were accused of being Communists or “fellow travelers.”
Now you have Stilp accusing Perry of being “supportive of insurrectionists.”
Democrats and pundits have claimed civil libertarians and journalists who have testified against the government’s growing censorship efforts are enablers of insurrectionists and even “Putin lovers.”
Figures like Stilp are wrong on the law but right about one thing: There are few real limits once you embrace this theory.
[….]
With the support of elected officials across the country, they can then join Stilp in moving from burning flags to torching the Constitution in a fit of exhilarating rage.
In fact, Democrats as a whole are impartial to this ridding themselves of competition. You see it in business with “crony corporatism,” you see it in the electorate (as this post notes), and the like. In yesterdays post I noted a “slightly dated” article in the ATLANTIC(see more in my first post on this 14th Amendment “witch hunt”), where David Frum said this:
Consider the scenario in which Section 3 is invoked against Trump in 2024. Although he has won the Republican nomination, Democratic secretaries of state in key states refuse to place his name on their ballots, as a person who engaged in insurrection against the United States. With Trump’s name deleted from some swing-state ballots, President Joe Biden is easily reelected.
But only kind of reelected. How in the world are Republicans likely to react to such an outcome? Will any of them regard such a victory as legitimate? The rage and chaos that would follow are beyond imagining.
And then what? If Section 3 can be reactivated in this way, then reactivated it will be. Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as “aid and comfort” to enemies of the United States. Didn’t progressive Representative Ilhan Omar once seemingly equate al-Qaeda with the U.S. military? Do we think that her political enemies will accept that she was making only a stupid rhetorical point? Earlier this year, Tennessee Republicans tossed out of the legislature two Black Democrats for allegedly violating House rules. Might Tennessee Republicans next deem unruly Democrats “rebels” forbidden ever to run for office again?
What are red states doing in case of a successful removal of Trump from their ballots disenfranchising voters choice?
Where do the regular Democrat voter position themselves in all this? RED STATE has an article answering that:
Ever since Donald Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015, Democrats have been shrieking about how he is a “danger to democracy” and how MAGA threatens the very foundations of our republic. Listen to President Joe Biden Friday angrily rail on about how Trump wants to destroy America as we know it.
But in the real world, it appears that most Democrats don’t truly believe in democracy, or at least how it’s actually supposed to work. A new CBS News/YouGov poll shows that an astonishing 81 percent of Dems think that Trump’s name should be removed from ballots this presidential election, presumably because they think he’s guilty of violating the 14th Amendment by inciting an insurrection on J6.
[…]
[…]
The former president has neither been charged with nor convicted of insurrection, so how could they possibly think that his name should be removed? Quite simply, they want to win, and win at any cost, and they don’t care about what damage it does to our system.
The Supreme Court will decide in short order on cases in Maine and Colorado about the efforts to remove Trump’s name from the GOP primary ballot.
[….]
However, one question I don’t see is, “Why do you consider our democracy to be threatened?” Since it’s a CBS poll, you can assume that they thought everyone who felt it was threatened thought Donald J. Trump was the reason behind their concern. But the reality is, a large number of that 70 percent is likely voters like me, who consider the tyrannical current president, his corrupt, weaponized Department of Justice, and people like the 81 percent who think a presidential candidate should be taken off ballots simply because they don’t like him represent the true threats to our republic.
I warned you via David Frum back on August 29, 2023, when I quoted the Atlantic piece:
…Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as “aid and comfort” to enemies of the United States. Didn’t progressive Representative Ilhan Omar once seemingly equate al-Qaeda with the U.S. military? Do we think that her political enemies will accept that she was making only a stupid rhetorical point?…(RPT)
ALAN DERSHOWITZ MAKES THE PROPHECY 2-WEEKS AGO:
RPT’S “thinking”: You play stupid games; you get stupid prizes!
Harry Reid changed the Senate rules? GOP took advantage of it and due to Trump we have one of the better Courts in a long while. (RPT)
Dems placed two people on a committee illegally [J6]? GOP should do the same. (RPT)
Trying to Trump from the ballot? Get Biden off the ballot! [Story Below]
DNC charges guy for memes as election interference? Charge the DNC! (AP NEWS)
The GOP should counter Dems craziness with Dem craziness!
Republicans are calling for President Joe Biden to be removed from the 2024 primary ballot as former President Donald Trump is facing challenges to remove him from ballots in multiple states.
As challenges are brought to disqualify Trump from 2024 GOP primary ballots in more than 30 states for allegedly instigating an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, Republicans are suggesting that Biden should be removed from the ballot in response, but because of the increased volume of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. through the southern border.
The challenges against Trump have been made under the insurrection clauses of the 14th Amendment, a Civil War-era amendment that hasn’t previously been used to disqualify a presidential candidate, Axios reported. The insurrection clauses do not specify whether a criminal conviction is necessary as a prerequisite. There have been candidates — albeit on the fringes — who have appeared on presidential ballots despite criminal convictions. Lyndon LaRouche ran his 1992 campaign from behind prison bars after a fraud conviction, and more famously, Eugene V. Debs ran his 1920 campaign from prison after being convicted of sedition. He garnered nearly a million votes.
[….]
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft (R), who is running for governor, posted on X on Friday following the Supreme Court taking up the Colorado appeal, saying the same standard should be applied to Biden as Trump.
“What has happened in Colorado & Maine is disgraceful & undermines our republic,” Ashcroft wrote. “While I expect the Supreme Court to overturn this, if not, Secretaries of State will step in & ensure the new legal standard for @realDonaldTrump applies equally to @JoeBiden!”
Missouri state Sen. Bill Eigel (R), who is also running for governor, announced on Friday that he plans to introduce legislation that would disqualify Biden from the Missouri ballot.
“By the Democrats’ own standard, Joe Biden should be immediately disqualified and removed from the ballot for the ‘aid and comfort’ he has given our enemies,” Eigel said in a press release, citing the treason clause in Article III of the U.S. Constitution.
“Our country is being invaded, because Joe Biden has swung our southern border wide open. President Biden has allowed more than 8 million people to stroll across our border illegally, causing more harm to this country than any other president in American history,” the state senator continued.
[….]
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is running in the GOP presidential primary race against Trump, said on Friday that he’s looking at blocking Biden from the ballot.
“This is just going to be a tit for tat and it’s just not gonna end well,” DeSantis said. “You could make a case — and I’m actually looking at this in Florida now — could we make a credible case” to block Biden from the ballot “because of the invasion of 8 million. And again, I don’t think that’s the right way to do it.”
[….]
Last month, following Colorado removing Trump from the ballot, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) also suggested that Biden be removed from the ballot.
“Seeing what happened in Colorado tonight … makes me think — except we believe in democracy in Texas — maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he’s been president, disrupting our state far more than anything anyone else has done in recent history,” Patrick said.
It has become one of the enduring messages of the House Democrats’ final report on the Jan. 6 riot: Donald Trump had a plan and an intention to go directly to the U.S. Capitol to join those disrupting the certification of the 2020 election results.
“The Committee’s principal concern was that the President actually intended to participate personally in the January 6th efforts at the Capitol, leading the attempt to overturn the election either from inside the House Chamber, from a stage outside the Capitol, or otherwise,” the committee wrote in its final report in December, 2022.
“The Committee regarded those facts as important because they are relevant to President Trump’s intent on January 6th. There is no question from all the evidence assembled that President Trump did have that intent,” it added.
Lawmakers, pundits and journalists have all echoed that line in the months before and after the report’s release.
“I imagine that he thought that he would enter like Mussolini being carried on the shoulders of his supporters and enter the Capitol,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said, comparing Trump to Italy’s fascist leader during World War II.
In his speech at Valley Forge on Friday reviving his argument that Trump and MAGA supporters pose a threat to democracy, President Joe Biden pointedly avoided making the claim. In fact, he took the opposite tact and suggested a cowardly Trump declined to join his supporters storming the Capitol.
“He promised he would right them — right them. Everything they did, he would be side by side with them. Then, as usual, he left the dirty work to others. He retreated to the White House,” Biden said.
Such conflicting portrayals may be confusing to voters. That confusion is also rooted in an undisputed fact: Trump never actually went to the Capitol after his speech on the Ellipse.
The House Democrats’ claims are based on two pieces of testimony. Some Trump aides recalled to the committee the 45th president mentioning in a meeting on Jan, 4, 2021, that he might want to go to the Capitol.
And then former aide Cassidy HutchinsonMadison Cornbread claimed in a disputed account based on hearsay that on the way back from his speech Trump lunged at the driver of the presidential limo to commandeer it and take it to the Capitol. The Secret Service and Trump deny that happened, and no evidence has emerged to validate Hutchinson’s claim. That did not stop the account from making its way into mainstream media.
The Democratic Party’s narrative is further undercut by internal Secret Service documents reviewed by Just the News, which show there was no plan heading into the Jan. 6 event to take Trump to the Capitol.
He didn’t go, and there was never a plan to go.
But the media which will get you deplatformed for “misinformation” continues lying, claiming he was going to cross the Mall like it was the Rubicon and crown himself as emperor.
The FEDERALIST posts this excellent “Nuking of NBC”
In an NBC interview Sunday, Rep. Elise Stefanik deftly demonstrated how to handle Democrats’ false claims about a Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection” to justify criminalizing the speech of the half of the country that opposes their policies.
Mariano Grinbank, a Messianic-Jew and persona behind True Freethinker and earlier, Atheism is Dead [now an essentially dead site], succinctly draws a line in the “worldview sand” when he lays down what many atheist cannot pick up. I will let you watch this 1-1/2 minute portion to see what I mean:
A friend texted me the Jeff Daniel’s Newsroom video… and this was essentially my response. (Here it has links and videos as well as larger quotes, the real response was just in text form)
In my years of experience of talking about religion and politics (since 1999 on the WWW, Space Battles Forum), I have noticed the main impediment to people progressing in thinking on a matter. Not speaking of you, but a wider point I am making (Yoda). People will watch that clip and be convinced (This is referring to the Jeff Daniels “Newsroom” clip that occasionally makes it’s rounds).
There were a lot of things just spewed out as fact that many just accept as fact. But to dissect this clip even more work needs to be done than I did – linking articles, media, etc. (As I did: Newsroom’s Anti-America Scene Bitch Slapped!)
People would rather “just accept/believe” than do the hard work to challenge, properly their own beliefs by rightly contrasting two views. Well.
People want the easy way out.
Take for instance an oft used “evidence” against God. People will merely say, “well, what about this evil [insert any one you wish], doesn’t this disprove your God? This person to challenge their own position will have to respond to their own “bumper sticker position” by asking themselves what are the competing worldviews? What do they offer as explanations to said evils? Does theism offer a reasonable response?
These questions take more time than one sentence responses like the one sentence challenge.
But as before, people like the easy route versus thinking well.
Here is a truncated example, how the three big worldviews would respond to rape:
THEISM: evil, wrong at all times and places in the universe — absolutely.
ATHEISM: taboo, it was used in our species in the past for the survival of the fittest and is thus a vestige of evolutionary progress… and so may once again become a tool for survival — it is in every corner of nature.
TWO BOOKS I read years ago that would undergird the evolutionary/atheistic [naturalism] foundation for explaining rape: Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence | Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion.
PANTHEISM: illusion, all morals and ethical actions and positions are an illusion (Hinduism – maya; Buddhism – sunyata). To reach some state of Nirvana one must retract from this world in their thinking on moral matters, such as love and hate, good and bad. Not only that, but often the person being raped has built up bad karma and thus is the main driver for his or her state of affairs (thus, in one sense it is “right” that rape happens).
Even the staunch, to the end of his life atheist, Christopher Hitchens, noted the despair in man’s [his] best laid plans being thwarted by death:
“Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read — if not indeed write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?” (RPT – 2010)
…..Graham Lawton, Executive Editor of New Scientist magazine, penned a brief article titled, “What is the Meaning of Life?” He began with his blunt, one line answer: “The harsh answer is ‘it has none.’” He went on to say: “Your life may feel like a big deal to you, but it’s actually a random blip of matter and energy in an uncaring and impersonal universe.” Stephen J. Gould, one of the most recognized evolutionary paleontologists of the 20th century, wrote about atheism’s meaninglessness with his customary flair: “We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’—but none exists.”
Philosopher and self-professed atheist, Thomas Nagel, teaches and writes extensively on atheism’s implication of meaninglessness. In his brief book What Does it All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy, he stated: “If you think about the whole thing, there seems to be no point to it at all. Looking at it from the outside, it wouldn’t matter if you had never existed. And after you have gone out of existence, it won’t matter that you did exist.” Eminent atheistic author, debater, and spokesperson Richard Dawkins boldly said: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Edward O. Wilson quipped that “no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history.”
The late William Provine, atheistic professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the distinguished Cornell University, stated: “Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.”
The existential philosopher Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, struggled greatly with atheism’s lack of meaning and purpose. So great was his contemplation of it, he declared, “I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.” Camus then championed the idea of the “absurd” man. He used a very specific meaning for the word “absurd.” In his writing, the concept of the absurd is the recognition and acceptance that life has no meaning, rhyme, or reason. He says of the absurd man: “He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” His whole book begins with the premise that atheism denies any meaning to the world, and proceeds to flesh out how a person can keep from committing suicide once he arrives at universal meaninglessness. Thus, he begins the book, saying: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” And later in the book he concludes, about his entire book, discussion, and life: “Let me repeat. None of all this has any real meaning.”…..
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s maxim rings just as true today as it did in his day,
“If God does not exist, all things are permissible”
…a statement which Sartre called the starting point of existentialism (SEE:“Existentialism and Humanism,” trans. Philip Mairet, pp. 32-33. Quoted in “Does God Believe in Atheists? [newer Kindle ed.]” (Evangelical Press; 2000), p. 123.).
BE THINKING expands on the above Dostoyevsky quote with modern atheist support:
…Traditionally, atheists have acknowledged that God is a necessary condition of objective moral values (i.e. the sort of moral truths that are discovered rather than invented by humans and which are “valid and binding whether anybody believes in them or not”). For example:
Jean-Paul Sartre: “when we speak of ‘abandonment’ – a favourite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense. Towards 1880, when the French professors endeavoured to formulate a secular morality, they said … nothing will be changed if God does not exist; we shall rediscover the same norms of honesty, progress and humanity, and we shall have disposed of God as an out-of-date hypothesis which will die away quietly of itself. The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself.”
Paul Kurtz: “The central question about moral and ethical principles concerns their ontological foundation. If they are neither derived from God nor anchored in some transcendent ground, they are purely ephemeral.”
Julian Baggini: “If there is no single moral authority [i.e. no God] we have to in some sense ‘create’ values for ourselves … [and] that means that moral claims are not true or false… you may disagree with me but you cannot say I have made a factual error.”
Richard Dawkins:“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose [i.e. no God], no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Dawkins concedes: “It is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones.”….
This age is an age of religious cacophony, as was the Roman Empire of Christ’s time. From agnosticism to Hegelianism, from devil-worship to scientific rationalism, from theosophical cults to philosophies of process, virtually any worldview conceivable is offered to modern man in the pluralistic/relativistic marketplace of ideas. Our age is indeed in ideological and societal agony, grasping at anything and everything that can conceivably offer the ecstasy of a cosmic relationship or of a comprehensive Weltanschauung [worldview].
— Atheist Morality Noted Below —
….Darwin thought that, had the circumstances for reproductive fitness been different, then the deliverances of conscience might have been radically different. “If … men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering” (Darwin, Descent, 82). As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring.
But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness producing given the circumstances of survival. Given the background belief of naturalism, there appears to be no plausible Darwinian reason for thinking that the fitness-producing predispositions that set the parameters for moral reflection have anything whatsoever to do with the truth of the resulting moral beliefs. One might be able to make a case for thinking that having true beliefs about, say, the predatory behaviors of tigers would, when combined with the understandable desire not to be eaten, be fitness producing. But the account would be far from straightforward in the case of moral beliefs.” And so the Darwinian explanation undercuts whatever reason the naturalist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs is true. The result is moral skepticism.
If our pretheoretical moral convictions are largely the product of natural selection, as Darwin’s theory implies, then the moral theories we find plausible are an indirect result of that same evolutionary process. How, after all, do we come to settle upon a proposed moral theory and its principles as being true? What methodology is available to us?
Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists & Other Objections (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2009), 70.
This is why I have this “legal statement” — for lack of a better descriptor when people hit me up online or through emmail to discuss issues:
“By-the-by, for those reading this I will explain what is missing in this type of discussion due to the media used. Genuflecting, care, concern, one being upset (does not entail being “mad”), etc… are all not viewable because we are missing each other’s tone, facial expressions, and the like. I afford[a] the other person I am dialoguing with the best of intentions and read his/her comments as if we were out having a talk over a beer at a bar or meeting a friend at Starbucks. Or even striking up a conversation in a line at a grocery store. In other words, in public. (I say this because there seems to be a phenomenon of etiquette thrown out when talking through email or social media sites. There seems to be more vulgarity and gratuitous responses than if you were to strike up conversation in line at a check stand in a grocery market.) You will see that often I USE CAPS — which in www lingo for YELLING. I am not using it this way, I use it to merely emphasize a point (even at times noting this): *not said in yelling tone, but merely to emphasize*. So, in all my discussions I afford[a] the best of thought to the other person as I expect he or she would to me… even if dealing with tough subjects like the ones being discussed herein. I have had more practice at this than most, and with half-hour pizza, one hour photo and email vs. ‘snail mail,’ know that important discussions take time to meditate on, inculcate, and to process. I will not expect agreement, rather, clarity. So be prepared for a good thought-provoking discussion if you choose one with me.”
[a]DICTIONARY: 2. provide or supply (an opportunity or facility): “the rooftop terrace affords beautiful views”
ORIGIN: late Old English geforthian, from ge- (prefix implying completeness) + forthian ‘to further’, from forth. The original sense was ‘promote, perform, accomplish’, later ‘manage, be in a position to do’.
So here-is-as-good-a-place-as-any to post an old commentary on an atheist guest Hugh Hewitt had on his radio show, as, I am importing my posts slowly. Enjoy, and keep in mind I am merely bringing together many resources:
Let me here disagree a small bit with Hugh Hewitt. In the interview with evangelical turned atheist, William Lobdell, author of, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace, Hugh mentioned that this is not an apologetics issue. Which is partially true, apologetics does not regenerate, only the Holy Spirit can do that. However, after listening to this interview, I believe a strong apologetic can break through the weak responses I heard by Lobdell to sometimes strong, sometimes weak as well, challenges to Lobdell’s atheism via callers to the Hugh Hewitt show.
The 2-hour interview can be found either in the free podcast section of the ITunes store under the Hugh Hewitt show, or one can listen here:
CANNOT FIND THESE AUDIOS — WHEN I DO, I WILL LINK EM
I will work my way through a few of the rejections found in the interview in a fashion that deals with Lobdell’s reasoning behind rejecting his faith. Some of these rejections are implied implicitly by him, other are explicit rebuttals by Lobdell to callers to the show.
In hour one, near the beginning, Lobdell starts out with the sex abuse cases that have hit the Catholic church.
He seems to be saying that these abuse cases made him begin to deconstruct his faith. I will deal with this issue in a few ways:
FIRST, I will make the case that atheists, Buddhists (atheists), and others commit these crimes, which should make the skeptic ask if he or she is rejecting an ideology for this reason seems to be just as strong for atheism as it is for Christianity. In other words, if the rejection of Christianity is because of the evil it produces, then what about the evil seemingly produced by atheism. A deeper explanation of this will come shortly.
SECONDLY,to judge an act “evil,” one would have to have a metaphysics, excuse me, a coherent – non-self-refuting – logical worldview in order to judge some act on a scale that says an act is morally wrong while expecting another person to know (inherently) this scale by which to judge an act and agree with said person.
OKAY, OFF WE GO WITH THIS REVISED CRITIQUE.
Sexual Abuse
Sexual Abuse — Catholic Church.Other religious and non-religious organizations “PRACTICE” this abuse… wherever there is a person of authority over children and the chance to be alone with a child, you will find people who fill these positions for the direct purpose of abusing these young victims.
For instance,
EDUCATION K-12
I was challenged with the following thought via a VERY OLD debate I was involved in about the “Mosque at Ground Zero”:
Sean…. If we are to follow your logic, I guess no Catholic churches should be located within a few blocks of daycare centers, no?
This RESPONSEis updated with fresh information for the current reader vs. my debates from 2010:
Nearly 200 K-12 educators are being charged with sex crimes involving children so far in 2022… But the left denies grooming at schools
While the left may deny child grooming in schools outright or claim that it is shockingly rare, this year’s arrest records prove them liars.
181 K-12 educators have been charged with sex crimes against children just in the first half of 2022, with 140 allegedly committing sex crimes against their students.
These crimes range from child pornography to rape and are all heinously vile.
The average for the 181-day period from January 1st to June 30th is one educator arrested for sex crimes every single day. That means that every single day these horrible acts are happening at schools.
Four principals, 153 teachers, 12 teachers’ aides, and 12 substitute teachers make up the 181 arrested pedophiles and groomers. Male teachers made up 78% of those arrested, some of the educators arrested, and about 40 of them were also women….(NTD)
NUMBER TWO, I wish to discuss this issue of molestation by priests that you intimated about.
School counselors, dentists, Buddhist monks, foster parents, and the like — all have abused children. Men who are pedophiles look for positions of AUTHORITY OVER [*not yelling, merely emphasizing*] children that afford MOMENTS OF PRIVACY with these same children. Dentists do not violate children or women in the name of dentistry. Buddhists monks do not sodomize children in the name of Siddhartha. School counselors in the name of psychology, foster parents in the name of Dr. Spock, etc, … you get the point. Likewise, priests do not violate children in the name of Christ. (The many terrorist attacks are in the name of something… can you tell me what Nora?)
[….]
So I hope you can see that mentioning churches next to schools is a non-sequitur, I think we can agree that any church moving priests (Catholicism) or pastors (Protestantism) from one parish or church to another is a problem that has to be dealt with. Just like teachers who have the same issues levied towards them are moved from district-to-district (N.E.A.).
Here is an updated stat for clarity on this subject:
While sexual repression might explain the horrific history of sexual abuse committed by Catholic clergymen, it does not explain the much greater incidence of sexual abuse by secular educators in the public school system.41
[41] “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” Shakeshaft, C. Ph.D., U.S. Department of Education report. 2002. [The 2004 study can be seen here in PDF FORM. I believe the author meant 2004]
Vox Day, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, And Hitchens (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2008), 174.
…But according to Charol Shakeshaft, the researcher of a little-remembered 2004 study prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, “the physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
After effectively disappearing from the radar, Shakeshaft’s study is now being revisited by commentators seeking to restore a sense of proportion to the mainstream coverage of the Church scandal.
According to the 2004 study “the most accurate data available at this time” indicates that “nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.”
“Educator sexual misconduct is woefully under-studied,” writes the researcher. “We have scant data on incidence and even less on descriptions of predators and targets. There are many questions that call for answers.”
[….]
Weigel observes that priestly sex abuse is “a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared,” [see recomended book to the right] and that in recent years the Church has gone to great lengths to punish and remove priestly predators and to protect children. The result of these measures is that “six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members.”
Despite these facts, however, “the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young.”
[….]
In 2004, shortly after the Shakeshaft study was released, Catholic League President William Donohue, who was unavailable for an interview for this story, asked, “Where is the media in all this?”
“Isn’t it news that the number of public school students who have been abused by a school employee is more than 100 times greater than the number of minors who have been abused by priests?” he asked.
“All those reporters, columnists, talking heads, attorneys general, D.A.‘s, psychologists and victims groups who were so quick on the draw to get priests have a moral obligation to pursue this issue to the max. If they don’t, they’re a fraud.”
EASILY PUT:
Because teacher’s unions transfer teachers who molest children around the districts means one should reject education.
…OR…
Because teacher’s unions transfer teachers who molest children around the districts means education doesn’t exist.
In other words, would Columbia University have to stop teaching about education because the N.E.A. shuffles around rapists and child predators? The argument is a non-sequitur designed merely to stir up feelings of animosity and then direct them towards an entirely different subject. There tends to be a blurring of subject/object distinction on the professional left. Here is a short list of what I alluded to above:
The conclusion just doesn’t follow the premise. In the case of religious comparisons, you would have to isolate the founders and their lives in order to properly judge a belief, not the followers. I would engender the reader to consider well this quote by Robert Hume:
Two Buddhist monks and eight other men were arrested on Wednesday, accused of sexually abusing 11 children orphaned by the island’s 19-year civil war, an official said.
Investigations revealed that the children, aged between nine and 13, had been sexually abused over a period of time at an orphanage where the men worked, said Prof. Harendra de Silva, head of the National Child Protection Authority….
Mr. Tripp was arrested for sexually abusing a former 15-year-old foster care child.
The investigation started when the Oregon Department of Human Services was contacted by a school counselor who learned that there may be sexual abuse involving a student and Mr. Tripp. DHS workers then contacted Sheriff’s Detectives who took over the investigation.
Detectives learned that Mr. Tripp has been a foster parent since 1995 and has had at least 90 children placed in his home during that time. Sheriff’s Detectives are concerned that there may be more victims who have not yet reported sexual contact involving Mr. Tripp….
3) A therapist who worked at Booker T. Washington Middle School in Baltimore was arrested in Catonsville and charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy, Baltimore County police said yesterday.
Robert J. Stoever, 54, of the 1500 block of Park Ave. was arrested Sunday night after a county police officer saw him and the boy in a car in a parking lot at Edmondson Avenue and Academy Road, said Cpl. Michael Hill, a police spokesman.
Stoever was charged with a second-degree sex offense and perverted practice, according to court documents. He was sent to the Baltimore County Detention Center, Hill said….
4) A Bronx dentist was arrested yesterday on charges that he twice raped a 16-year-old patient whom he had placed under anesthesia during an office visit on Thursday, police said.
The girl, a patient of the dentist for several years, was hired for a summer job as his receptionist on Thursday, and had an appointment with him for treatment that afternoon, said Lieut. Hazel Stewart, commander of the Bronx Special Victims Squad.
[….]
“She went in and she changed into a little uniform that he gave to her, and he gave her some files to work on,” the lieutenant said. “Then he said that it was time to take a look at her teeth.”
At that point, Lieutenant Stewart said, “he used some type of anesthesia on her and he allegedly raped her.”
The young woman told officers that she was never fully anesthetized, Lieutenant Stewart said, but that “the effects of the anesthesia were strong enough to render her helpless to such a degree that he was able to rape her again.”
These folks that commit these crimes are atheists, Christians, Buddhists (which are epistemologically speaking, atheists), and every other ideology and from every stripe of life and culture in the world.
Thus, the argument is as strong as this:
There have been many cases of dentists molesting and raping children, therefore, dentists cannot take moral positions on secular society.
The conclusion just doesn’t follow the premise.
There have been many cases of priests molesting and raping children, therefore, the Pope (or any religious Catholic) cannot take moral positions on secular society.
MORE
There have been many cases of dentists’ drugging men, women
and children sexually assaulting them against their will, therefore,
I do not believe in the INSTITUTION of dentistry any longer
?
There have been many cases of teachers sexually assaulting children
in their positions of authority over these naive, immature, minds,
therefore, I do not believe in INSTITUTION of K-12 education any longer.
Do you see the fallacy in using such loose logic shot from the hip?
Comparing Like Kinds
In the case of religious comparisons, you would have to isolate the founders and their lives in order to properly judge a belief, not the followers. I would engender the reader to consider well this quote by Robert Hume:
While Steven Crowder did not expect his comedic skit to be used in a serious apologetic, sometimes humor best illustrates a point as well:
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 – 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]:
my wife and I for instance, as well as family,
the love in community/Body of Christ,
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.
The point is this, if you are to judge an ideology by the merits of its followers, then atheism is to be judged by the same standard, and it does not fare well.
The nine founders among the eleven living religions in the world had characters which attracted many devoted followers during their own lifetime, and still larger numbers during the centuries of subsequent history. They were humble in certain respects, yet they were also confident of a great religious mission. Two of the nine, Mahavira and Buddha, were men so strong-minded and self-reliant that, according to the records, they displayed no need of any divine help, though they both taught the inexorable cosmic law of Karma. They are not reported as having possessed any consciousness of a supreme personal deity. Yet they have been strangely deified by their followers. Indeed, they themselves have been worshipped, even with multitudinous idols.
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. Confucius, late in life, confessed his own sense of shortcomings and his desire for further improvement in knowledge and character. 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. The most remarkable and valuable aspect of the personality of Jesus Christ is the comprehensiveness and universal availability of his character, as well as its own loftiness, consistency, and sinlessness.
(Robert Hume, The World’s Living Religions [New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959 – original edition 1939], 285-286.)
For instance, while on a six-winery tasting tour north of Santa Barbara, California, in Santa Ynez (a sweet-spot for wine lovers), a discussion was struck between a high school history teacher – whom I refer to as a theophobe – and myself. (I wish to point out that William Lobdell displays no theophobia whatsoever.) The point becomes clear as the debate continues (entitled, “Defending My Faith Over a Syrah” — which, by the way, I cannot think of a better way to defend my faith) towards this all too often used premise by atheists:
At this point the usual litany of “straw man” arguments proceeded to spill forth as they normally do when ones precious bumper-sticker beliefs are challenged and shown to be vacuous. The next thing out of Felicia’s mouth was that organized religion has killed more people and started more wars than any other reason in history. This is where I cringed — a teacher that is charged with children who makes such false claims is a red-flag to me. These types of people repeat such lines not because they have studied history or religion in-depth, but because a politically motivated historian like Howard Zinn or Noam Chomskey said such a thing, or they simply picked up the saying from another friend (who themselves had heard it from another) and it fit so well in their theophobia framework to make the rejection of religion an easy thing in their mind’s eye. This is more of a commentary on said person’s psychosis than making any sort of valid argument. This being said let us deal with this charge:
The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [Christians] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana), and the church is liable for the unjustified murder of about (taking the high number here) 300,000-women over about a 300 year period. A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no evolutionary/naturalistic natural law is being violated in other words (as non-theists reduce everything to natural law — materialism). However, and this is key, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law. (Adapted from, “The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?”)
So the historical reality that this teacher of history seemed to ignore is that non-religious movements have killed more people in the Twentieth-Century than religion has in the previous nineteen (or for that matter, all of mankind’s history). I also pointed out to Felicia during our conversation that the non-religious view of origins has no moral law to point to any of the above acts as morally wrong or un-ethical. They are merely currently taboo. For someone to say the Nazis were morally wrong they have to borrow from the theistic worldview that posits a universal moral code. If there is no Divine moral law, then as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s maxim makes the point, “If there is no God, all things are permissible.” Without an absolute ethical norm, morality is reduced to mere preference and the world is a jungle where might makes right.
This portion out of a larger debate I was in touches on my second point… but before moving on, I want to reiterate the first point:
if one were to use evil or wrongs done towards innocent persons as a criterion of an ideologies validity, no faith or unfaith stands this test.
It is more a commentary on human nature.
The question is
which worldview explains best human nature and has the best answer to resolve it.
Religious Belief Reduces Crime Summary of the First Panel Discussion Panelists for this important discussion included social scientists Dr. John DiIulio, professor of politics and urban affairs at Princeton University; David Larson, M.D., President of the National Institute for Healthcare Research; Dr. Byron Johnson, Director of the Center for Crime and Justice Policy at Vanderbilt University; and Gary Walker, President of Public/Private Ventures. The panel focused on new research, confirming the positive effects that religiosity has on turning around the lives of youth at risk.
Dr. Larson laid the foundation for the discussion by summarizing the findings of 400 studies on juvenile delinquency, conducted during the past two decades. He believes that although more research is needed, we can say without a doubt that religion makes a positive contribution.
His conclusion: “The better we study religion, the more we find it makes a difference.” Previewing his own impressive research, Dr. Johnson agreed. He has concluded that church attendance reduces delinquency among boys even when controlling for a number of other factors including age, family structure, family size, and welfare status. His findings held equally valid for young men of all races and ethnicities.
Gary Walker has spent 25 years designing, developing and evaluating many of the nation’s largest public and philanthropic initiatives for at-risk youth. His experience tells him that faith-based programs are vitally important for two reasons. First, government programs seldom have any lasting positive effect. While the government might be able to design [secular/non-God] programs that occupy time, these programs, in the long-term, rarely succeed in bringing about the behavioral changes needed to turn kids away from crime. Second, faith-based programs are rooted in building strong adult-youth relationships; and less concerned with training, schooling, and providing services, which don’t have the same direct impact on individual behavior. Successful mentoring, Walker added, requires a real commitment from the adults involved – and a willingness to be blunt. The message of effective mentors is simple. “You need to change your life, I’m here to help you do it, or you need to be put away, away from the community.” Government, and even secular philanthropic programs, can’t impart this kind of straight talk.
Sixth through twelfth graders who attend religious services once a month or more are half as likely to engage in at-risk behaviors such as substance abuse, sexual excess, truancy, vandalism, drunk driving and other trouble with police. Search Institute, “The Faith Factor,” Source, Vol. 3, Feb. 1992, p.1.
Churchgoers are more likely to aid their neighbors in need than are non-attendees. George Barna, What Americans Believe, Regal Books, 1991, p. 226.
Three out of four Americans say that religious practice has strengthened family relationships. George Gallup, Jr. “Religion in America: Will the Vitality of Churches Be the Surprise of the Next Century,” The Public Perspective, The Roper Center, Oct./Nov. 1995.
Church attendance lessens the probabilities of homicide and incarceration. Nadia M. Parson and James K. Mikawa: “Incarceration of African-American Men Raised in Black Christian Churches.” The Journal of Psychology, Vol. 125, 1990, pp.163-173.
Religious practice lowers the rate of suicide. Joubert, Charles E., “Religious Nonaffiliation in Relation to Suicide, Murder, Rape and Illegitimacy,” Psychological Reports 75:1 part 1 (1994): 10 Jon W. Hoelter: “Religiosity, Fear of Death and Suicide Acceptibility.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 9, 1979, pp.163-172.
The presence of active churches, synagogues… reduces violent crime in neighborhoods. John J. Dilulio, Jr., “Building Spiritual Capital: How Religious Congregations Cut Crime and Enhance Community Well-Being,” RIAL Update, Spring 1996.
People with religious faith are less likely to be school drop-outs, single parents, divorced, drug or alcohol abusers. Ronald J. Sider and Heidi Roland, “Correcting the Welfare Tragedy,” The Center for Public Justice, 1994.
Church involvement is the single most important factor in enabling inner-city black males to escape the destructive cycle of the ghetto. Richard B. Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p.354.
Attending services at a church or other house of worship once a month or more makes a person more than twice as likely to stay married than a person who attends once a year or less. David B. Larson and Susan S. Larson, “Is Divorce Hazardous to Your Health?” Physician, June 1990. Improving Personal Well-Being
Regular church attendance lessens the possibility of cardiovascular diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and arteriosclerosis. George W. Comstock amd Kay B. Patridge:* “Church attendance and health.”* Journal of Chronic Disease, Vol. 25, 1972, pp. 665-672.
Regular church attendance significantly reduces the probablility of high blood pressure.* David B. Larson, H. G. Koenig, B. H. Kaplan, R. S. Greenberg, E. Logue and H. A. Tyroler:* ” The Impact of religion on men’s blood pressure.”* Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 28, 1989, pp.265-278.* W.T. Maramot:* “Diet, Hypertension and Stroke.” in* M. R. Turner (ed.) Nutrition and Health, Alan R. Liss, New York, 1982, p. 243.
People who attend services at least once a week are much less likely to have high blood levels of interlukin-6, an immune system protein associated with many age-related diseases.* Harold Koenig and Harvey Cohen, The International Journal of Psychiatry and Medicine, October 1997.
Regular practice of religion lessens depression and enhances self esteem. *Peter L. Bensen and Barnard P. Spilka:* “God-Image as a function of self-esteem and locus of control” in H. N. Maloney (ed.) Current Perspectives in the Psychology of Religion, Eedermans, Grand Rapids, 1977, pp. 209-224.* Carl Jung: “Psychotherapies on the Clergy” in Collected Works Vol. 2, 1969, pp.327-347.
Church attendance is a primary factor in preventing substance abuse and repairing damage caused by substance abuse.* Edward M. Adalf and Reginald G. Smart:* “Drug Use and Religious Affiliation, Feelings and Behavior.” * British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 80, 1985, pp.163-171.* Jerald G. Bachman, Lloyd D. Johnson, and Patrick M. O’Malley:* “Explaining* the Recent Decline in Cocaine Use Among Young Adults:* Further Evidence That Perceived Risks and Disapproval Lead to Reduced Drug Use.”* Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 31,* 1990, pp. 173-184.* Deborah Hasin, Jean Endicott, * and Collins Lewis:* “Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Patients With Affective Syndromes.”* Comprehensive Psychiatry, Vol. 26, 1985, pp. 283-295. * The findings of this NIMH-supported study were replicated in the Bachmen et. al. study above.
Second point is this, and I will take also from a previous critique of a Hugh Hewitt show where he had atheist Christopher Hitchens, polemicist extraordinaire, debate Mark D. Roberts, professor at Fuller Seminary, for all three hours of his show. In my opinion, Hitchen’s won the debate on style/rhetoric, not on substance. However, in my critique entitled “Responding to Christopher Hitchens and a Friend: Explaining the Failings of a Worldview,” I quoted Tom Morris and his erudite refutation of determinism, which would result if atheistic evolution were to be the truth in the battle for origins:
ROBOTS AND COSMIC PUPPETRY: THE SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGE TO FREEDOM
Since at least the time of Sir Isaac Newton, scientists and philosophers impressed by the march of science have offered a picture of human behavior that is not promising for a belief in freedom. All nature is viewed by them as one huge mechanism, with human beings serving as just parts of that giant machine. On this view, we live and think in accordance with the same laws and causes that move all other physical components of the universal mechanism.
According to these thinkers, everything that happens in nature has a cause. Suppose then that an event occurs, which, in context, is clearly a human action of the sort that we would normally call free. As an occurrence in this universe, it has a cause. But then that cause, in turn, has a cause. And that cause in turn has a cause, and so on, and so on [remember, reductionism].
“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player” | Albert Einstein.
As a result of this scientific world view, we get the following picture:
Natural conditions outside our control…
cause…
Inner bodily and brain states,
which cause…
mental and physical actions
But if this is true, then you are, ultimately, just a conduit or pipeline for chains of natural causation that reach far back into the past before your birth and continue far forward into the future after your death. You are not an originating cause of anything [this includes brain activity of all degrees, that is, love, pain, etc.). Nothing you ever do is due to your choices or thoughts alone. You are a puppet of nature. You are no more than a robot programmed by an unfeeling cosmos.
Psychologists talk about heredity and environment as responsible for everything you do. But then if they are, you aren’t. Does it follow that you can then do as you please, irresponsibly? Not at all. It only follows that you will do as nature and nurture please. But then, nature on this picture turns out to be just an illusory veil over a heartless, uncaring nature. You have what nature gives you. Nothing more, nothing less.
Where is human freedom in this picture? It doesn’t exist. It is one of our chief illusions. The natural belief in free will is just a monstrous falsehood. But we should not feel bad about holding on to this illusion until science corrects us. We can’t have helped it.
This reasoning is called The Challenge of Scientific Determinism. According to determinists, we are determined in every respect to do everything that we ever do.
This again is a serious challenge to human freedom. It is the reason that the early scientist Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) once said that if you could give a super-genius a total description of the universe at any given point in time, that being would be able to predict with certainty everything that would ever happen in the future relative to that moment, and retrodict with certainty anything that had ever happened in any moment before that described state. Nature, he believed, was that perfect machine. And we human beings were just cogs in the machine, deluded in our beliefs that we are free.
(Philosophy for Dummies, 133-134)
J.P Moreland agrees with this summation that there would be no standard to judge whether a particular position about reality were true if we are the products of a completely naturalistic, chance, chain of atoms bouncing off one another happened. To be clear, if atheistic origins of the universe were true, then one liking chocolate ice cream over vanilla would be just as true as someone choosing atheism over theism:
MIND/BODY PHYSICALISM REFUTED
A number of philosophers have argued that physicalism must be false because it implies determinism and determinism is self-refuting. Speaking of the determinist, J. R. Lucas says:
If what he says is true, he says it merely as the result of his heredity and environment, and nothing else. He does not hold his determinist views because they are true, but because he has such-and-such stimuli; that is, not because the structure of the structure of the universe is such-and-such but only because the configuration of only part of the universe, together with the structure of the determinist’s brain, is such as to produce that result…. Determinism, therefore, cannot be true, because if it was, we should not take the determinists’ arguments as being really arguments [say, whether or not homosexuality is a right or not] as being really arguments, but as being only conditioned reflexes. Their statements should not be regarded as really claiming to be true, but only as seeking to cause us to respond in some way desired by them. (Freedom of the Will, by John Lucas)
H. P. Owen states that:
Determinism is self-stultifying. If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism. But if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false. (Christian Theism, p. 118)
… if one claims to know that physicalism is true, or to embrace it for good reasons, if one claims that it is a rational position which should be chosen on the basis of evidence [as one does when they reject theism], then this claim is self-refuting. This is so because physicalism seems to deny the possibility of rationality. To see this, let us examine the necessary preconditions which must hold if there is to be such a thing as rationality and show how physicalism denies these preconditions. At least five factors must obtain if there are to be genuine rational agents who can accurately reflect on the world. First, minds must have internationality; they must be capable of having thoughts about or of the world. Acts of inference are “insights into” or “knowings of” something other than themselves.
Second, reasons, propositions, thoughts, laws of logic and evidence, and truth must exist and be capable of being instanced in people’s minds and influencing their thought processes. This fact is hard to reconcile with physicallism. To see this, consider the field of ethics. Morality prescribes what we ought to do (prescriptive); it does not merely describe what is in fact done (descriptive). Objective morality makes sense if real moral laws or oughts exist and if normative, moral properties like rightness, goodness, worth, and dignity exist in acts (the act of honoring one’s parents) and things (persons and animals have worth) [this all applies to the debate over homosexuality]. If physicalism is true as a worldview, there are no moral properties or full-blooded oughts. Physical states just are, and one physical state causes or fails to cause another physical state. A physical state does not morally prescribe that another physical ought to be. If physicalism is true, oughts are not real moral obligations telling us what one should do to be in conformity with the moral universe. Rather, “ought” serves as a mere guide for reaching a socially acceptable or psychologically desired goal (e.g., “if one wants to have pleasure and avoid pain, then one ‘ought’ to tell the truth”). Moral imperatives become grounded in subjective preferences on the same level as a preference for Burger King over McDonald’s….
(Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity, by J. P. Moreland, 90-92)
The atheist has no way ultimately to point out that an act that society currently considers taboo, such as rape, is morally wrong. The atheist, unlike the theist, would not be able to say that rape is morally wrong at all times and places in the entire history of the known universe. Again, all that can be said is that at this point in our evolutionary history and culture it is currently outlawed in most societies by the majority of peoples. This majority can change thus making an act morally acceptable that is currently outlawed, or immoral. Back to the chemical, or biological basis for rape though, a couple of books that deal with this specifically have addressed this issue by philosophical naturalists. For example, in this exerpt from a larger paper I did for a class on Natural Law and homosexuality, I point out that without creation ex nihilo, rape is not morally wrong in the ultimate sense:
IDOLATROUS TOOLS
Idolatry is referenced in connection with human sexuality by Anthony Hoekema who points out that while “primitive man use to make idols out of wood and stone, modern man, seeking something to worship, makes idols of a more subtle type: himself, human society, the state, money, fame.”[1] Thusly, an idol can be fallen man using the gift of relationships as a tool to manipulate others for his or her selfish ends,[2] idolizing pleasure by making it an end-to-a-means, so to speak. In doing so, the person seeking gratification (whether emotional or physical) utilizes or instrumentalizes another in order to worship self-gratification. This concept is seen in the slang term “tool”[3] used by today’s generation either to reference a man’s genitalia or to reference another person.[4]
The reader by now should have clearly established in his mind that homosexuality rejects the created order and designs its own contrary vision.[5] Moreover, part of this vision is an atheistic, naturalistic (almost Epicurean[6]) rejection of Creation ex-nihilo.[7] How does the “carnal” person deal with the unnatural order of the homosexual lifestyle? Since it is a reality it is incorporated into their epistemological system of thought or worldview.[8] Henry Morris points out that the materialist worldview looks at homosexuality as nature’s way of controlling population numbers as well as a tension lowering device.[9] Lest one think this line of thinking is insane, that is: sexual acts are something from our evolutionary past and advantageous;[10] rape is said to not be a pathology but an evolutionary adaptation – a strategy for maximizing reproductive success.[11] How do the naturalist, those who have rejected the created order and the moral laws of nature, view such an instrumentalizing of the human body for the end-result of idolatrous worshiping of pleasure?
Liberal sexual morality, based in an ancient epicurean view of the nature of man that “denies that marriage is inherently heterosexual necessarily supposes that the value of sex must be instrumental” in order to pleasure oneself, which makes such an act a tool in the hand of a person’s desires, or, an “end-in-itself.” In other words, the traditional understanding of marriage rejects the view that sees the ultimate point or value of sex in marriage as an instrument to attain either affection or sexual pleasure, which is what the epicurean is left with. Sex, in the homosexual context, then, is the instrumentalization of the body.[12]
Ethical Evil?
The first concept that one must understand is that these authors do not view nature alone as imposing a moral “oughtness” into the situation of survival of the fittest. They view rape, for instance, in its historical evolutionary context as neither right nor wrong ethically.[13] Rape, is neither moral nor immoral vis-à-vis evolutionary lines of thought, even if ingrained in us from our evolutionary paths of survival.[14] Did you catch that? Even if a rape occurs today, it is neither moral nor immoral, it is merely currently taboo.[15] The biological, amoral, justification of rape is made often times as a survival mechanism bringing up the net “survival status” of a species, usually fraught with examples of homosexual worms, lesbian seagulls, and the like.[16]
This materialistic view of nature will give way to there being no difference in the emerging ethic between married couples, homosexual couples, or couples in a temporary sexual relationship. Some go as far to say – rightly so – that with the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle follows shortly thereafter the legalization of polyamorous relationships,[17] which is already considered as a viable option by many in Sweden for instance.[18] After polyamory is legal – about the only thing left is for the Peter Singer’s (professor at Princeton’s Center for Human Values) of the world to argue for “cross species” sex acts.[19] Columnist George Will aptly calls this type of legislation “the moral equality of appetites.”[20]
Footnotes
[1] Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 84.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “One [person] that is used or manipulated by another.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2003), cf., “tool.” This concept of using another was also known as “cat’s-paw,” which is defined as “one used by another as a tool.” (ibid., cf., “cat’s-paw.”)
An aside: the term “cat’s-paw” comes from an old fable in which a monkey was cooking chestnuts in the fireplace. When it was time to remove the chestnuts from the coals, he found that the fire was too hot, and he could not pull them out. He looked around for something to help him pull them out, but did not see anything — until his eye fell on the cat sleeping by the fire. He grabbed the cat, and held it tight while it struggled, using its paw to remove the chestnuts from the fire. (Author/origins unknown)
[4] Example: “She’s a ‘tool’.”
[5] DeYoung, 15.
[6] “Epicurus (341-271 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who was born on the isle of Samos but lived much of his life in Athens, where he founded his very successful school of philosophy. He was influenced by the materialist Democritus (460-370 B.C.), who is the first philosopher known to believe that the world is made up of atoms…. Epicurus identified good with pleasure and evil with pain.” He equated using pleasure, diet, friends, and the like as “tools” for minimizing bad sensations or pain while increasing pleasure or hedonism. Taken from Louise P. Pojman, Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Press, 2002), 499.
[7] Romans 1:25; 1 Timothy 6:5, 20.
[8] Worldview:
“People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By ‘presuppositions’ we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. ‘As a man thinketh, so he is,’ is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who ‘lives in the mind’ and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, ‘not many men are in the room’ — that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions.”
Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1976), 19-20.
[9] Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1989), 136.
[10] Remember, the created order has been rejected in the Roman society as it is today. This leaves us with an Epicurean view of nature, which today is philosophical naturalism expressed in the modern evolutionary theories such as neo-Darwinism and Punctuated Equilibrium.
[11] Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural history of Rape: Biological bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 71, 163.
[12] Robert P. George, The Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001), 81.
[13] Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 208-209.
[14] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002), 162-163.
[15] Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 176-180.
[16] Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Touchstone Book, 1995), 492.
[17] Defined as having more than one intimate relationship/spouse at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.
[18] Alan Sears and Craig Osten, The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Define Moral Values (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 42.
[19] The following is from an on-line article:
“To prove this is no joke, here’s a passage from a recent article on the website Nerve.com by Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton’s Center for Human Values:
“The potential violence of the orangutan’s come-on may have been disturbing, but the fact that it was an orangutan making the advances was not. That may be because Galdikas understands very well that we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.
“This is not a marginal figure, by the way; this is a professor at Princeton whose ideas are spreading widely in the respectable academic circuit. The problem with his argument is that it is impeccably logical if you accept the premise that there is no fundamental dividing line between man and animals. And if one swallows evolution whole-hog, it sure looks that way, doesn’t it? Those anti-Darwinist hicks may be right after all, at least with respect to the consequences of believing in evolution.”
Taken from FrontPage Magazine website. The article itself was by Robert Locke, “Bestiality and America’s Future,” published on March 30, 2001. Found at: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=23284, (last accessed 7-18-10).
[20] Francis Canavan, The Pluralist Game: Pluralism, Liberalism, and the Moral Conscience (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), 126-127.
According to atheistic evolution, these appetites are driven by some chain of events that go back through history to the big bang. Everything is the way it is because of this chain of chance events that resulted in our environments and firing of neurons and their chemical reactions in our brain… making us believe and do what we believe and do. It is really fascism, or so called:
“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 pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist [Ignatius Press; 1999], by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.)
So since all acts are of equal value in the struggle for survival, the acts that only temporarily determine the highest possible survival of the species at that moment in evolutionary progress/history is the most beneficial… which could be interpreted as being the most “moral” in evolutionary vernacular. Therefore, atheists (which include Lobdell) have no metaphysical basis to say that rape, or the killing of innocent people by religious persons, and similar actions like unjust wars by Marxist revolutionaries, are morally wrong in a meaningful way. They are merely pointing out that they personally disagree with the action they are describing. Arguing, then about the immorality of acts committed by the religious (and I would contend, non-religious peoples) would be just as powerful morally if the same person argued with a friend about the superiority of chocolate ice-cream over that of vanilla ice-cream.
Since that took longer than I expected, I will only give one other critique of a response by Lobdell to a caller that was tongue-tied and wasn’t getting his point across well. Lobdell cut him off mid sentence (after politely allowing the man to try and make a coherent point) and asked if he thought that all the animals that exist on earth were on the ark. This is a red-hearing. It is a mischaracterizing of the opposing argument, setting up a straw man in other words.
Broadly speaking, yes, all the animals were on the ark. But that is the same as Bill Clinton and John Kerry during their runs for office (successfully and unsuccessfully, respectively) saying that women make 73 cents on every dollar earned by a man. While broadly speaking this is true, and very “impactful” for making their proposed policies all that much more important… it just isn’t true. In the same way, the volume of animals proposed to be on the Ark by Lobdell and other critics is skewed as well.
YES! If you compare all men to all women, then yes, there is a disparage present. This stat doesn’t take into account a few things. It doesn’t consider the fact that women tend to choose the humanities when entering college and men seem to choose the hard sciences. So by choice women tend to choose professions that pay less. Not only that, when you compare oranges to oranges, you get something much different than expected, or that we would expect from the liberal side of things. If a woman and a man have had the same level of education and have been on the same job for an equal amount of time, the woman makes (on average) up to $5 more than the man a year on every $1,000 dollars earned. Another sobering note reported by USA Today: According to a U.S. Department of Education study, 135 women receive their bachelor’s degrees per every 100 men.
(Adapted from Larry Elder, 10 things You Can’t Say In America)
The same applies to this dilemma. In Lobdell’s mind every finch was on the Ark. That’s hundreds of species. A finch with a ¼ centimeter smaller beak is a separate species according to Darwin and Lobdell. Every dog, from Chihuahua’s to Great Danes, and everything in between, was on the Ark. This is a straw man. Rhetorically it sounds great, I would have responded back rhetorically rather than the detailed response I am giving here if I was on the radio myself. Short and sweet! He is trying to make the questioner sound insane by mischaracterizing his argument, I will clarify — properly — his argument to make him sound “just as crazy.” I would have said,
“Well, that isn’t nearly as incredible as one believing he came from a rock, as you do.”
Which is what evolution teaches. After the earth cooled and the rock began to solidify, it rained making the early oceans and lakes. These rains eroded the minerals from the rock which began to pool in a particular spot on earth coming together to finally form the first life, which over millions of years became you or I judging that the Crusades were morally wrong and that religious people, more than non-religious, should live up to some ideal found originally in molten lava!? “You shouldn’t kill innocent people because we were brothers in crystalline from side-by-side… minerals to the end brother.” This is “just as crazy,” rhetorically speaking that is. The question remains: do you have to have every dog on the Ark or just one dog, say, like the wolf? You see, the wolf has most of the parent genes in it that over a 1,000 years we end up with the Chihuahua to the Great Dane by man’s input of knowledge… not natural selection. I say “man’s input of knowledge, and not ” of knowledge and shelter because natural selection would weed out the Tea Cup Terrier from even surviving. Outside the arms of Paris Hilton, that is.
Back to Noah’s Ark and the rhetorical divide between the atheist and the biblical literalist, if you take all the dinosaurs known to scientists, the average size is that of a lamb. Not to mention that the largest — taking the most extreme end of the biblical literalists argument — T-Rex or Superasuarus started out in an egg. So they were small in their juvenile stage. Not every type or species of Bull had to be on the Ark, just one. Some say that natural selection could not move that quick. Well, humanity has been farming and trying to produce better “species” for some time. For instance,
In 1811 French chemist Benjamin Delessert set up a small factory at Passy and, following the example of German chemists, made the first small quantity of crystallized sugar from sugar beets. At this time cane sugar was a strategic material denied the French because of their war with the other European powers, so Napoleon was immensely impressed by this scientific achievement. He ordered no less that forty factories to be set up in France.
However, now that France had the capability to manufacture beet sugar, it urgently needed to find, or breed, a type of beet that contained the maximum amount of raw sugar. To achieve this, Bonaparte enlisted the greatest botanists in France, through the Academia des Sciences. A program was begun to breed selectively those sugar beet plants that gave a higher-than-average yield of sugar, a program which succeeded. At first the common varieties of sugar beet contained, but this was rapidly improved — 5 percent; 10 percent; 15 percent. Then things started to go wrong. At 17 percent average yield, the sugar content of the new plants stuck, and it has stayed there to this day. In addition, the French discovered, repeated attempts to continue crossing high-yield varieties eventually resulted in the hybrids reverting to the low yields of their ancestral stock.
(An adaptation from a paper I did many years previous. That was taken from a source I do not currently recall.)
There may be many “species” of sugar beets, but they are all from one. In a study, probably one of the most in-depth done to date put into book form is that of evolutionist Jonathan Weiner. In his book, The Beak of the Finch, pages 178-180, he mentions that the speciation, in general, is considerably faster than had been supposed by earlier beliefs. So could we get a Dingo, a Great Dane, and other types of dogs from one or two kinds (species). This is what the biblical literalist argues; not that every animal on earth today was on the Ark, but that every animal on the earth came from a common species that was on the Ark. Of course, now you can argue the finer points of how fast speciation can happen and how this argument hurts or helps these two opposing sides, but that is neither here nor there. At the very least, however, we are beyond the oft repeated mischaracterization thrown the way of the biblical literalist. It also makes the opposing side, in this case Lobdell, seem fair in its summation of arguments from whom he is trying to refute.
THIS IS UN-EDITED, I WILL EDIT SOME TIME MONDAY… HOWEVER, I WANTED TO CATCH THE “FERVOR” OVER PART OF THIS WEEKEND.
Let me here disagree a small bit with Hugh Hewitt. In the interview with evangelical turned atheist, William Lobdell, author of, Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America-and Found Unexpected Peace (Amazon.com), Hugh mentioned that this is not an apologetics issue. Which is partially true, apologetics does not regenerate, only the Holy Spirit can do that. However, after listening to this interview, I believe a strong apologetic can break through the weak responses I heard by Lobdell to sometimes strong, sometimes weak as well, challenges to Lobdell’s atheism via callers to the Hugh Hewitt show.
The 2-hour interview can be found either in the free podcast section of the ITunes store under the Hugh Hewitt show, or one can listen here:
I will work my way through a few of the rejections found in the interview in a fashion that deals with Lobdell’s reasoning behind rejecting his faith. Some of these rejections are implied implicitly by him, other are explicit rebuttals by Lobdell to callers to the show.
In hour one, near the beginning, Lobdell starts out with the sex abuse cases that have hit the Catholic church. He seems to be saying that these abuse cases made him begin to deconstruct his faith. I will deal with this issue in two ways: first, I will make the case that atheists, Buddhists (atheists), and others commit these crimes, which should make the skeptic ask if he or she is rejecting an ideology for this reason seems to be just as strong for atheism as it is for Christianity. In other words, if the rejection of Christianity is because of the evil it produces, then what about the evil seemingly produced by atheism. A deeper explanation of this will come shortly. Secondly, to judge an act “evil,” one would have to have a metaphysics, excuse me, a coherent – non-self-refuting – logical worldview in order to judge some act on a scale that says an act is morally wrong while expecting another person to know (inherently) this scale by which to judge an act and agree with said person. Okay, here we go with the critique.
Sexual Abuse — Catholic Church. Other religious and non-religious organizations practice this abuse… wherever there is a person of authority over children and the chance to be alone with such a person, you will find people who fill these positions for the direct purpose of abusing these young victims. For instance:
Two Buddhist monks and eight other men were arrested on Wednesday, accused of sexually abusing 11 children orphaned by the island’s 19-year civil war, an official said.
Investigations revealed that the children, aged between nine and 13, had been sexually abused over a period of time at an orphanage where the men worked, said Prof. Harendra de Silva, head of the National Child Protection Authority.
“There are maybe more who have been abused and we are continuing investigations,” de Silva said, after a special police unit attached to the authority arrested the suspects.
The men, including the saffron-robed monks, will be produced before a magistrate and held in custody for further investigation, he said.
Child abuse in Sri Lanka is a non-bailable offense and with a maximum 10-year prison sentence.
The children’s home where the suspects worked was established to care for thousands of children from all over the country who lost their families during the war.
Mr. Tripp was arrested for sexually abusing a former 15-year-old foster care child.
The investigation started when the Oregon Department of Human Services was contacted by a school counselor who learned that there may be sexual abuse involving a student and Mr. Tripp. DHS workers then contacted Sheriff’s Detectives who took over the investigation.
Detectives learned that Mr. Tripp has been a foster parent since 1995 and has had at least 90 children placed in his home during that time. Sheriff’s Detectives are concerned that there may be more victims who have not yet reported sexual contact involving Mr. Tripp.
A psychologist accused of performing oral sex on a 13 year old boy has been fired by the Baltimore City Public School System.
Baltimore County Police have arrested and charged 54 year old Robert James Stoever with the second degree sex offenses and perverted practices.
According to charging documents, police discovered the contract employee with a 13-year-old boy in a car located at the Christian Temple in Catonsville on Sunday. Police say that an officer approached the vehicle and discovered both Stoever and the young boy in the front seat of the vehicle.
Police say that when questioned, Stoever admitted performing oral sex on the boy and told the officer that this was not the first time it has occurred.
Stoever had been working at the Booker T. Washington Middle School #130 in Baltimore City., where the boy is a student. In a letter sent home to parents, city school officals say Stoever was not employed by them, rather he had been contracted by the school system through an outside vendor since September 2007.
Tammy Bruce on pages 90, and 99 of her book The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values, says this:
“… and now all manner of sexual perversion enjoys the protection and support of once what was a legitimate civil-rights effort for decent people. The real slippery slope has been the one leading into the Left’s moral vacuum. It is a singular attitude that prohibits any judgment about obvious moral decay because of the paranoid belief that judgment of any sort would destroy the gay lifestyle, whatever that is…. I believe this grab for children by the sexually confused adults of the Gay Elite represents the most serious problem facing our culture today…. Here come the elephant again: Almost without exception, the gay men I know (and that’s too many to count) have a story of some kind of sexual trauma or abuse in their childhood — molestation by a parent or an authority figure, or seduction as an adolescent at the hands of an adult. The gay community must face the truth and see sexual molestation of an adolescent for the abuse it is, instead of the ‘coming-of-age’ experience many [gays] regard it as being. Until then, the Gay Elite will continue to promote a culture of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, and suicide by AIDS.”
These folks are atheists, Catholics, Buddhists (which are ontologically speaking, atheists), and every other ideology and stripe of life and culture in the world. The argument is as strong as this:
There have been many cases of dentists’ drugging men and women and groping them against their will, therefore, I do not believe in dentistry.
The conclusion just doesn’t follow the premise. In the case of religious comparisons, you would have to isolate the founders and their lives in order to properly judge a belief, not the followers. I would engender the reader to consider well this quote by Robert Hume:
The nine founders among the eleven living religions in the world had characters which attracted many devoted followers during their own lifetime, and still larger numbers during the centuries of subsequent history. They were humble in certain respects, yet they were also confident of a great religious mission. Two of the nine, Mahavira and Buddha, were men so strong-minded and self-reliant that, according to the records, they displayed no need of any divine help, though they both taught the inexorable cosmic law of Karma. They are not reported as having possessed any consciousness of a supreme personal deity. Yet they have been strangely deified by their followers. Indeed, they themselves have been worshipped, even with multitudinous idols.
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. Confucius, late in life, confessed his own sense of shortcomings and his desire for further improvement in knowledge and character. 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. The most remarkable and valuable aspect of the personality of Jesus Christ is the comprehensiveness and universal availability of his character, as well as its own loftiness, consistency, and sinlessness.
** The World’s Living Religions (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 285-286.
While Steven Crowder did not expect his comedic skit to be used in a serious apologetic, sometimes humor best illustrates a point as well:
The point is this, if you are to judge an ideology by the merits of its followers, then atheism is to be judged by the same standard, and it does not fare well. For instance, while on a six-winery tasting tour north of Santa Barbara, California, in Santa Ynez (a sweet-spot for wine lovers), a discussion was struck between a high school history teacher – whom I refer to as a theophobe – and myself. (I wish to point out that William Lobdell displays no theophobia whatsoever.) The point becomes clear as the debate continues (entitled, “Defending My Faith Over a Syrah” — which, by the way, I cannot think of a better way to defend my faith) towards this all too often used premise by atheists:
At this point the usual litany of “straw man” arguments proceeded to spill forth as they normally do when ones precious bumper-sticker beliefs are challenged and shown to be vacuous. The next thing out of Felicia’s mouth was that organized religion has killed more people and started more wars than any other reason in history. This is where I cringed — a teacher that is charged with children who makes such false claims is a red-flag to me. These types of people repeat such lines not because they have studied history or religion in-depth, but because a politically motivated historian like Howard Zinn or Noam Chomskey said such a thing, or they simply picked up the saying from another friend (who themselves had heard it from another) and it fit so well in their theophobia framework to make the rejection of religion an easy thing in their mind’s eye. This is more of a commentary on said person’s psychosis than making any sort of valid argument. This being said let us deal with this charge:
The Bible does not teach the horrible practices that some have committed in its name. It is true that it’s possible that religion can produce evil, and generally when we look closer at the details it produces evil because the individual people [Christians] are actually living in rejection of the tenets of Christianity and a rejection of the God that they are supposed to be following. So it [religion] can produce evil, but the historical fact is that outright rejection of God and institutionalizing of atheism (non-religious practices) actually does produce evil on incredible levels. We’re talking about tens of millions of people as a result of the rejection of God. For example: the Inquisitions, Crusades, Salem Witch Trials killed about anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 persons combined (World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana), and the church is liable for the unjustified murder of about (taking the high number here) 300,000-women over about a 300 year period. A blight on Christianity? Certainty. Something wrong? Dismally wrong. A tragedy? Of course. Millions and millions of people killed? No. The numbers are tragic, but pale in comparison to the statistics of what non-religious criminals have committed); the Chinese regime of Mao Tse Tung, 60 million [+] dead (1945-1965), Stalin and Khrushchev, 66 million dead (USSR 1917-1959), Khmer Rouge (Cambodia 1975-1979) and Pol Pot, one-third of the populations dead, etc, etc. The difference here is that these non-God movements are merely living out their worldview, the struggle for power, survival of the fittest and all that, no evolutionary/naturalistic natural law is being violated in other words (as non-theists reduce everything to natural law — materialism). However, and this is key, when people have misused the Christian religion for personal gain, they are in direct violation to what Christ taught, as well as Natural Law. (Adapted from, “The Real Murderers: Atheism or Christianity?”)
So the historical reality that this teacher of history seemed to ignore is that non-religious movements have killed more people in the Twentieth-Century than religion has in the previous nineteen (or for that matter, all of mankind’s history).I also pointed out to Felicia during our conversation that the non-religious view of origins has no moral law to point to any of the above acts as morally wrong or un-ethical.They are merely currently taboo. For someone to say the Nazis were morally wrong they have to borrow from the theistic worldview that posits a universal moral code.If there is no Divine moral law, then as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s maxim makes the point, “If there is no God, all things are permissible.” Without an absolute ethical norm, morality is reduced to mere preference and the world is a jungle where might makes right.
This portion out of a larger debate I was in touches on my second point… but before moving on, I want to reiterate the first point: if one were to use evil or wrongs done towards innocent persons as a criterion of an ideologies validity, no faith or unfaith stands this test. It is more a commentary on human nature. The question is which worldview explains best human nature and has the best answer to resolve it. In fact, another criterion is well used for the validity of faith; here I will post a blog I did quite some time ago entitled “Religion’s Positive Influence: Faith-Based Society Healthier, Lives Longer:”
Social Scientists Agree:
Religious Belief Reduces Crime Summary of the First Panel Discussion Panelists for this important discussion included social scientists Dr. John DiIulio, professor of politics and urban affairs at Princeton University; David Larson, M.D., President of the National Institute for Healthcare Research; Dr. Byron Johnson, Director of the Center for Crime and Justice Policy at Vanderbilt University; and Gary Walker, President of Public/Private Ventures. The panel focused on new research, confirming the positive effects that religiosity has on turning around the lives of youth at risk.
Dr. Larson laid the foundation for the discussion by summarizing the findings of 400 studies on juvenile delinquency, conducted during the past two decades. He believes that although more research is needed, we can say without a doubt that religion makes a positive contribution.
His conclusion: “The better we study religion, the more we find it makes a difference.” Previewing his own impressive research, Dr. Johnson agreed. He has concluded that church attendance reduces delinquency among boys even when controlling for a number of other factors including age, family structure, family size, and welfare status. His findings held equally valid for young men of all races and ethnicities.
Gary Walker has spent 25 years designing, developing and evaluating many of the nation’s largest public and philanthropic initiatives for at-risk youth. His experience tells him that faith-based programs are vitally important for two reasons. First, government programs seldom have any lasting positive effect. While the government might be able to design [secular/non-God] programs that occupy time, these programs, in the long-term, rarely succeed in bringing about the behavioral changes needed to turn kids away from crime. Second, faith-based programs are rooted in building strong adult-youth relationships; and less concerned with training, schooling, and providing services, which don’t have the same direct impact on individual behavior. Successful mentoring, Walker added, requires a real commitment from the adults involved – and a willingness to be blunt. The message of effective mentors is simple. “You need to change your life, I’m here to help you do it, or you need to be put away, away from the community.” Government, and even secular philanthropic programs, can’t impart this kind of straight talk.
=======================
Sixth through twelfth graders who attend religious services once a month or more are half as likely to engage in at-risk behaviors such as substance abuse, sexual excess, truancy, vandalism, drunk driving and other trouble with police. Search Institute, “The Faith Factor,” Source, Vol. 3, Feb. 1992, p.1.
Churchgoers are more likely to aid their neighbors in need than are non-attendees. George Barna, What Americans Believe, Regal Books, 1991, p. 226.
Three out of four Americans say that religious practice has strengthened family relationships. George Gallup, Jr. “Religion in America: Will the Vitality of Churches Be the Surprise of the Next Century,” The Public Perspective, The Roper Center, Oct./Nov. 1995.
Church attendance lessens the probabilities of homicide and incarceration. Nadia M. Parson and James K. Mikawa: “Incarceration of African-American Men Raised in Black Christian Churches.” The Journal of Psychology, Vol. 125, 1990, pp.163-173.
Religious practice lowers the rate of suicide. Joubert, Charles E., “Religious Nonaffiliation in Relation to Suicide, Murder, Rape and Illegitimacy,” Psychological Reports 75:1 part 1 (1994): 10 Jon W. Hoelter: “Religiosity, Fear of Death and Suicide Acceptibility.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 9, 1979, pp.163-172.
The presence of active churches, synagogues… reduces violent crime in neighborhoods. John J. Dilulio, Jr., “Building Spiritual Capital: How Religious Congregations Cut Crime and Enhance Community Well-Being,” RIAL Update, Spring 1996.
People with religious faith are less likely to be school drop-outs, single parents, divorced, drug or alcohol abusers. Ronald J. Sider and Heidi Roland, “Correcting the Welfare Tragedy,” The Center for Public Justice, 1994.
Church involvement is the single most important factor in enabling inner-city black males to escape the destructive cycle of the ghetto. Richard B. Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p.354.
Attending services at a church or other house of worship once a month or more makes a person more than twice as likely to stay married than a person who attends once a year or less. David B. Larson and Susan S. Larson, “Is Divorce Hazardous to Your Health?” Physician, June 1990. Improving Personal Well-Being
Regular church attendance lessens the possibility of cardiovascular diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and arteriosclerosis. George W. Comstock amd Kay B. Patridge:* “Church attendance and health.”* Journal of Chronic Disease, Vol. 25, 1972, pp. 665-672.
Regular church attendance significantly reduces the probablility of high blood pressure.* David B. Larson, H. G. Koenig, B. H. Kaplan, R. S. Greenberg, E. Logue and H. A. Tyroler:* ” The Impact of religion on men’s blood pressure.”* Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 28, 1989, pp.265-278.* W.T. Maramot:* “Diet, Hypertension and Stroke.” in* M. R. Turner (ed.) Nutrition and Health, Alan R. Liss, New York, 1982, p. 243.
People who attend services at least once a week are much less likely to have high blood levels of interlukin-6, an immune system protein associated with many age-related diseases.* Harold Koenig and Harvey Cohen, The International Journal of Psychiatry and Medicine, October 1997.
Regular practice of religion lessens depression and enhances self esteem. *Peter L. Bensen and Barnard P. Spilka:* “God-Image as a function of self-esteem and locus of control” in H. N. Maloney (ed.) Current Perspectives in the Psychology of Religion, Eedermans, Grand Rapids, 1977, pp. 209-224.* Carl Jung: “Psychotherapies on the Clergy” in Collected Works Vol. 2, 1969, pp.327-347.
Church attendance is a primary factor in preventing substance abuse and repairing damage caused by substance abuse.* Edward M. Adalf and Reginald G. Smart:* “Drug Use and Religious Affiliation, Feelings and Behavior.” * British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 80, 1985, pp.163-171.* Jerald G. Bachman, Lloyd D. Johnson, and Patrick M. O’Malley:* “Explaining* the Recent Decline in Cocaine Use Among Young Adults:* Further Evidence That Perceived Risks and Disapproval Lead to Reduced Drug Use.”* Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 31,* 1990, pp. 173-184.* Deborah Hasin, Jean Endicott, * and Collins Lewis:* “Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Patients With Affective Syndromes.”* Comprehensive Psychiatry, Vol. 26, 1985, pp. 283-295. * The findings of this NIMH-supported study were replicated in the Bachmen et. al. study above.
Second point is this, and I will take also from a previous critique of a Hugh Hewitt show where he had atheist Christopher Hitchens, polemicist extraordinaire, debate Mark D. Roberts, professor at Fuller Seminary, for all three hours of his show. In my opinion, Hitchen’s won the debate on style/rhetoric, not on substance. However, in my critique entitled “Responding to Christopher Hitchens and a Friend: Explaining the Failings of a Worldview,” I quoted Tom Morris and his erudite refutation of determinism, which would result if atheistic evolution were to be the truth in the battle for origins:
Robots and Cosmic Puppetry: The Scientific Challenge to Freedom
Since at least the time of Sir Isaac Newton, scientists and philosophers impressed by the march of science have offered a picture of human behavior that is not promising for a belief in freedom. All nature is viewed by them as one huge mechanism, with human beings serving as just parts of that giant machine. On this view, we live and think in accordance with the same laws and causes that move all other physical components of the universal mechanism.
According to these thinkers, everything that happens in nature has a cause. Suppose then that an event occurs, which, in context, is clearly a human action of the sort that we would normally call free. As an occurrence in this universe, it has a cause. But then that cause, in turn, has a cause. And that cause in turn has a cause, and so on, and so on [remember, reductionism].
“Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible player” ~ Albert Einstein.
As a result of this scientific world view, we get the following picture:
Natural conditions outside our control…
cause…
Inner bodily and brain states,
which cause…
mental and physical actions
But if this is true, then you are, ultimately, just a conduit or pipeline for chains of natural causation that reach far back into the past before your birth and continue far forward into the future after your death. You are not an originating cause of anything [this includes brain activity of all degrees, that is, love, pain, etc.). Nothing you ever do is due to your choices or thoughts alone. You are a puppet of nature. You are no more than a robot programmed by an unfeeling cosmos.
Psychologists talk about heredity and environment as responsible for everything you do. But then if they are, you aren’t. Does it follow that you can then do as you please, irresponsibly? Not at all. It only follows that you will do as nature and nurture please. But then, nature on this picture turns out to be just an illusory veil over a heartless, uncaring nature. You have what nature gives you. Nothing more, nothing less.
Where is human freedom in this picture? It doesn’t exist. It is one of our chief illusions. The natural belief in free will is just a monstrous falsehood. But we should not feel bad about holding on to this illusion until science corrects us. We can’t have helped it.
This reasoning is called The Challenge of Scientific Determinism. According to determinists, we are determined in every respect to do everything that we ever do.
This again is a serious challenge to human freedom. It is the reason that the early scientist Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) once said that if you could give a super-genius a total description of the universe at any given point in time, that being would be able to predict with certainty everything that would ever happen in the future relative to that moment, and retrodict with certainty anything that had ever happened in any moment before that described state. Nature, he believed, was that perfect machine. And we human beings were just cogs in the machine, deluded in our beliefs that we are free.
(Philosophy for Dummies, 133-134)
J.P Moreland agrees with this summation that there would be no standard to judge whether a particular position about reality were true if we are the products of a completely naturalistic, chance, chain of atoms bouncing off one another happened. To be clear, if atheistic origins of the universe were true, then one liking chocolate ice cream over vanilla would be just as true as someone choosing atheism over theism:
Mind/Body Physicalism Refuted
A number of philosophers have argued that physicalism must be false because it implies determinism and determinism is self-refuting. Speaking of the determinist, J. R. Lucas says:
If what he says is true, he says it merely as the result of his heredity and environment, and nothing else. He does not hold his determinist views because they are true, but because he has such-and-such stimuli; that is, not because the structure of the structure of the universe is such-and-such but only because the configuration of only part of the universe, together with the structure of the determinist’s brain, is such as to produce that result…. Determinism, therefore, cannot be true, because if it was, we should not take the determinists’ arguments as being really arguments [say, whether or not homosexuality is a right or not] as being really arguments, but as being only conditioned reflexes. Their statements should not be regarded as really claiming to be true, but only as seeking to cause us to respond in some way desired by them. (Freedom of the Will, by John Lucas)
H. P. Owen states that:
Determinism is self-stultifying. If my mental processes are totally determined, I am totally determined either to accept or to reject determinism. But if the sole reason for my believing or not believing X is that I am causally determined to believe it I have no ground for holding that my judgment is true or false. (Christian Theism, p. 118)
… if one claims to know that physicalism is true, or to embrace it for good reasons, if one claims that it is a rational position which should be chosen on the basis of evidence [as one does when they reject theism], then this claim is self-refuting. This is so because physicallism seems to deny the possibility of rationality. To see this, let us examine the necessary preconditions which must hold if there is to be such a thing as rationality and show how physicalism denies these preconditions.
At least five factors must obtain if there are to be genuine rational agents who can accurately reflect on the world. First, minds must have internationality; they must be capable of having thoughts about or of the world. Acts of inference are “insights into” or “knowings of” something other than themselves.
Second, reasons, propositions, thoughts, laws of logic and evidence, and truth must exist and be capable of being instanced in people’s minds and influencing their thought processes. This fact is hard to reconcile with physicallism. To see this, consider the field of ethics. Morality prescribes what we ought to do (prescriptive); it does not merely describe what is in fact done (descriptive). Objective morality makes sense if real moral laws or oughts exist and if normative, moral properties like rightness, goodness, worth, and dignity exist in acts (the act of honoring one’s parents) and things (persons and animals have worth) [this all applies to the debate over homosexuality]. If physicalism is true as a worldview, there are no moral properties or full-blooded oughts. Physical states just are, and one physical state causes or fails to cause another physical state. A physical state does not morally prescribe that another physical ought to be. If physicalism is true, oughts are not real moral obligations telling us what one should do to be in conformity with the moral universe. Rather, “ought” serves as a mere guide for reaching a socially acceptable or psychologically desired goal (e.g., “if one wants to have pleasure and avoid pain, then one ‘ought’ to tell the truth”). Moral imperatives become grounded in subjective preferences on the same level as a preference for Burger King over McDonald’s….
(Scaling the Secular City: A Defense of Christianity, by J. P. Moreland, 90-92)
The atheist has no way ultimately to point out that an act that society currently considers taboo, such as rape, is morally wrong. The atheist, unlike the theist, would not be able to say that rape is morally wrong at all times and places in the entire history of the known universe. Again, all that can be said is that at this point in our evolutionary history and culture it is currently outlawed in most societies by the majority of peoples. This majority can change thus making an act morally acceptable that is currently outlawed, or immoral. Back to the chemical, or biological basis for rape though, a couple of books that deal with this specifically have addressed this issue by philosophical naturalists. For example, in this exerpt from a larger paper I did for a class on Natural Law and homosexuality, I point out that without creation ex nihilo, rape is not morally wrong in the ultimate sense:
Idolatrous Tools
Idolatry is referenced in connection with human sexuality by Anthony Hoekema who points out that while “primitive man use to make idols out of wood and stone, modern man, seeking something to worship, makes idols of a more subtle type: himself, human society, the state, money, fame.”[1] Thusly, an idol can be fallen man using the gift of relationships as a tool to manipulate others for his or her selfish ends,[2] idolizing pleasure by making it an end-to-a-means, so to speak. In doing so, the person seeking gratification (whether emotional or physical) utilizes or instumentalizes another in order to worship self-gratification. This concept is seen in the slang term “tool”[3] used by today’s generation either to reference a man’s genitalia or to reference another person.[4]
The reader by now should have clearly established in his mind that homosexuality rejects the created order and designs its own contrary vision.[5] Moreover, part of this vision is an atheistic, naturalistic (almost Epicurean[6]) rejection of Creation ex-nihilo.[7] How does the “carnal” person deal with the unnatural order of the homosexual lifestyle? Since it is a reality it is incorporated into their epistemological system of thought or worldview.[8] Henry Morris points out that the materialist worldview looks at homosexuality as nature’s way of controlling population numbers as well as a tension lowering device.[9] Lest one think this line of thinking is insane, that is: sexual acts are something from our evolutionary past and advantageous;[10]rape is said to not be a pathology but an evolutionary adaptation – a strategy for maximizing reproductive success.[11] How do the naturalist, those who have rejected the created order and the moral laws of nature, view such an instrumentalizing of the human body for the end-result of idolatrous worshiping of pleasure?
Liberal sexual morality, based in an ancient epicurean view of the nature of man that “denies that marriage is inherently heterosexual necessarily supposes that the value of sex must be instrumental” in order to pleasure oneself, which makes such an act a tool in the hand of a person’s desires, or, an “end-in-itself.” In other words, the traditional understanding of marriage rejects the view that sees the ultimate point or value of sex in marriage as an instrument to attain either affection or sexual pleasure, which is what the epicurean is left with. Sex, in the homosexual context, then, is the instrumentalization of the body.[12]
Ethical Evil?
The first concept that one must understand is that these authors do not view nature alone as imposing a moral “oughtness” into the situation of survival of the fittest. They view rape, for instance, in its historical evolutionary context as neither right nor wrong ethically.[13] Rape, is neither moral nor immoral vis-à-vis evolutionary lines of thought, even if ingrained in us from our evolutionary paths of survival.[14] Did you catch that? Even if a rape occurs today, it is neither moral nor immoral, it is merely currently taboo.[15] The biological, amoral, justification of rape is made often times as a survival mechanism bringing up the net “survival status” of a species, usually fraught with examples of homosexual worms, lesbian seagulls, and the like.[16]
This materialistic view of nature will give way to there being no difference in the emerging ethic between married couples, homosexual couples, or couples in a temporary sexual relationship. Some go as far to say – rightly so – that with the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle follows shortly thereafter the legalization of polyamorous relationships,[17] which is already considered as a viable option by many in Sweden for instance.[18] After polyamory is legal – about the only thing left is for the Peter Singer’s (professor at Princeton’s Center for Human Values) of the world to argue for “cross species” sex acts.[19] Columnist George Will aptly calls this type of legislation “the moral equality of appetites.”[20]
According to atheistic evolution, these appetites are driven by some chain of events that go back through history to the big bang. Everything is the way it is because of this chain of chance events that resulted in our environments and firing of neurons and their chemical reactions in our brain… making us believe and do what we believe and do. It is really fascism, or so called:
“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 pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist [Ignatius Press; 1999], by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.)
So since all acts are of equal value in the struggle for survival, the acts that only temporarily determine the highest possible survival of the species at that moment in evolutionary progress/history is the most beneficial… which could be interpreted as being the most “moral” in evolutionary vernacular. Therefore, atheists (which include Lobdell) have no metaphysical basis to say that rape, or the killing of innocent people by religious persons, and similar actions like unjust wars by Marxist revolutionaries, are morally wrong in a meaningful way. They are merely pointing out that they personally disagree with the action they are describing. Arguing, then about the immorality of acts committed by the religious (and I would contend, non-religious peoples) would be just as powerful morally if the same person argued with a friend about the superiority of chocolate ice-cream over that of vanilla ice-cream.
Ravi Zacharias answers a similar veined question during a Q&A at Harvard:
Since that took longer than I expected, I will only give one other critique of a response by Lobdell to a caller that was tongue-tied and wasn’t getting his point across well. Lobdell cut him off mid sentence (after politely allowing the man to try and make a coherent point) and asked if he thought that all the animals that exist on earth were on the ark. This is a red-hearing. It is a mischaracterizing of the opposing argument, setting up a straw man in other words.
Broadly speaking, yes, all the animals were on the ark. But that is the same as Bill Clinton and John Kerry during their runs for office (successfully and unsuccessfully, respectively) saying that women make 73 cents on every dollar earned by a man. While broadly speaking this is true, and very “impactful” for making their proposed policies all that much more important… it just isn’t true. In the same way, the volume of animals proposed to be on the Ark by Lobdell and other critics is skewed as well.
YES! If you compare all men to all women, then yes, there is a disparage present. This stat doesn’t take into account a few things. It doesn’t consider the fact that women tend to choose the humanities when entering college and men seem to choose the hard sciences. So by choice women tend to choose professions that pay less. Not only that, when you compare oranges to oranges, you get something much different than expected, or that we would expect from the liberal side of things. If a woman and a man have had the same level of education and have been on the same job for an equal amount of time, the woman makes (on average) up to $5 more than the man a year on every $1,000 dollars earned. Another sobering note reported by USA Today: According to a U.S. Department of Education study, 135 women receive their bachelor’s degrees per every 100 men.
(Adapted from Larry Elder, 10 things You Can’t Say In America)
The same applies to this dilemma. In Lobdell’s mind every finch was on the Ark. That’s hundreds of species. A finch with a ¼ centimeter smaller beak is a separate species according to Darwin and Lobdell. Every dog, from Chihuahua’s to Great Danes, and everything in between, was on the Ark. This is a straw man. Rhetorically it sounds great, I would have responded back rhetorically rather than the detailed response I am giving here if I was on the radio myself. Short and sweet! He is trying to make the questioner sound insane by mischaracterizing his argument, I will clarify — properly — his argument to make him sound “just as crazy.” I would have said,
“Well, that isn’t nearly as incredible as one believing he came from a rock, as you do.”
Which is what evolution teaches. After the earth cooled and the rock began to solidify, it rained making the early oceans and lakes. These rains eroded the minerals from the rock which began to pool in a particular spot on earth coming together to finally form the first life, which over millions of years became you or I judging that the Crusades were morally wrong and that religious people, more than non-religious, should live up to some ideal found originally in molten lava!? “You shouldn’t kill innocent people because we were brothers in crystalline from side-by-side… minerals to the end brother.” This is “just as crazy,” rhetorically speaking that is. The question remains: do you have to have every dog on the Ark or just one dog, say, like the wolf? You see, the wolf has most of the parent genes in it that over a 1,000 years we end up with the Chihuahua to the Great Dane by man’s input of knowledge… not natural selection. I say “man’s input of knowledge, and not ” of knowledge and shelter because natural selection would weed out the Tea Cup Terrier from even surviving. Outside the arms of Paris Hilton, that is.
Back to Noah’s Ark and the rhetorical divide between the atheist and the biblical literalist, if you take all the dinosaurs known to scientists, the average size is that of a lamb. Not to mention that the largest — taking the most extreme end of the biblical literalists argument — T-Rex or Superasuarus started out in an egg. So they were small in their juvenile stage. Not every type or species of Bull had to be on the Ark, just one. Some say that natural selection could not move that quick. Well, humanity has been farming and trying to produce better “species” for some time. For instance,
In 1811 French chemist Benjamin Delessert set up a small factory at Passy and, following the example of German chemists, made the first small quantity of crystallized sugar from sugar beets. At this time cane sugar was a strategic material denied the French because of their war with the other European powers, so Napoleon was immensely impressed by this scientific achievement. He ordered no less that forty factories to be set up in France.
However, now that France had the capability to manufacture beet sugar, it urgently needed to find, or breed, a type of beet that contained the maximum amount of raw sugar. To achieve this, Bonaparte enlisted the greatest botanists in France, through the Academia des Sciences. A program was begun to breed selectively those sugar beet plants that gave a higher-than-average yield of sugar, a program which succeeded. At first the common varieties of sugar beet contained, but this was rapidly improved — 5 percent; 10 percent; 15 percent. Then things started to go wrong. At 17 percent average yield, the sugar content of the new plants stuck, and it has stayed there to this day. In addition, the French discovered, repeated attempts to continue crossing high-yield varieties eventually resulted in the hybrids reverting to the low yields of their ancestral stock.
(An adaptation from a paper I did many years previous.That was taken from a source I do not currently recall.)
There may be many “species” of sugar beets, but they are all from one. In a study, probably one of the most in-depth done to date put into book form is that of evolutionist Jonathan Weiner. In his book, The Beak of the Finch, pages 178-180, he mentions that the speciation, in general, is considerably faster than had been supposed by earlier beliefs. So could we get a Dingo, a Great Dane, and other types of dogs from one or two kinds (species). This is what the biblical literalist argues; not that every animal on earth today was on the Ark, but that every animal on the earth came from a common species that was on the Ark. Of course, now you can argue the finer points of how fast speciation can happen and how this argument hurts or helps these two opposing sides, but that is neither here nor there. At the very least, however, we are beyond the oft repeated mischaracterization thrown the way of the biblical literalist. It also makes the opposing side, in this case Lobdell, seem fair in its summation of arguments from whom he is trying to refute.
[1] Created in God’s Image (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 84.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “One [person] that is used or manipulated by another.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, Inc., 2003), cf., “tool.” This concept of using another was also known as “cat’s-paw,” which is defined as “one used by another as a tool.” (ibid., cf., “cat’s-paw.”)
An aside: the term “cat’s-paw” comes from an old fable in which a monkey was cooking chestnuts in the fireplace. When it was time to remove the chestnuts from the coals, he found that the fire was too hot, and he could not pull them out. He looked around for something to help him pull them out, but did not see anything — until his eye fell on the cat sleeping by the fire. He grabbed the cat, and held it tight while it struggled, using its paw to remove the chestnuts from the fire. (Author/origins unknown)
[4] Example: “She’s a ‘tool’.”
[5] DeYoung, 15.
[6] “Epicurus (341-271 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who was born on the isle of Samos but lived much of his life in Athens, where he founded his very successful school of philosophy. He was influenced by the materialist Democritus (460-370 B.C.), who is the first philosopher known to believe that the world is made up of atoms…. Epicurus identified good with pleasure and evil with pain.” He equated using pleasure, diet, friends, and the like as “tools” for minimizing bad sensations or pain while increasing pleasure or hedonism. Taken from Louise P. Pojman, Philosophy: The Quest for Truth, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford Press, 2002), 499.
[7] Romans 1:25; 1 Timothy 6:5, 20.
[8] Worldview: “People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By ‘presuppositions’ we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. ‘As a man thinketh, so he is,’ is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who ‘lives in the mind’ and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, ‘not many men are in the room’ — that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions.” Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1976), 19-20.
[9] Henry M. Morris, The Long War Against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1989), 136.
[10] Remember, the created order has been rejected in the Roman society as it is today. This leaves us with an Epicurean view of nature, which today is philosophical naturalism expressed in the modern evolutionary theories such as neo-Darwinism and Punctuated Equilibrium.
[11] Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, A Natural history of Rape: Biological bases of Sexual Coercion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 71, 163.
[12] Robert P. George, The Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001), 81.
[13] Nancy Pearcy, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 208-209.
[14] Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002), 162-163.
[15] Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004), 176-180.
[16] Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life (New York: Touchstone Book, 1995), 492.
[17] Defined as having more than one intimate relationship/spouse at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.
[18] Alan Sears and Craig Osten, The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Define Moral Values (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005), 42.
[19] The following is from an on-line article:
“To prove this is no joke, here’s a passage from a recent article on the website Nerve.com by Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton’s Center for Human Values:
·“The potential violence of the orangutan’s come-on may have been disturbing, but the fact that it was an orangutan making the advances was not. That may be because Galdikas understands very well that we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes. This does not make sex across the species barrier normal, or natural, whatever those much-misused words may mean, but it does imply that it ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.
“This is not a marginal figure, by the way; this is a professor at Princeton whose ideas are spreading widely in the respectable academic circuit. The problem with his argument is that it is impeccably logical if you accept the premise that there is no fundamental dividing line between man and animals. And if one swallows evolution whole-hog, it sure looks that way, doesn’t it? Those anti-Darwinist hicks may be right after all, at least with respect to the consequences of believing in evolution.”
Taken from FrontPage Magazine website, http://www.frontpagemag.com/ — The article itself was by Robert Locke, “Bestiality and America’s Future,” published on March 30, 2001. Found at:
This morning a woman most Americans have never heard of checked herself into prison to begin serving a sentence she should not have been given.
Her name is Victoria Charity White, and what happened to her on January 6th showed that terrible crimes were committed that day against the American people.
This is another “connective reading” post. These come about when I am on a trip with time to think through well what is in front of me. The last time was a 10-hour layover coming back from Michigan — a series of cancelled flights. Southwest. In that post I was connecting a book I read many years ago on the effects of marijuana with a totally unrelated book on apologetics.Marijuana | Doing Some Connective Reading In An Airport
This connective reading lies less far apart timespan wise. Before heading to Utah for a family hike through Zion, I came across this FEDERALISTarticle about Russell Kirk and the foundation for conservatism. Here is the excerpt:
… Michael Federici gives a brief but insightful introduction to the newly rereleased version of The Politics of Prudence, Kirk’s collection of essays first published in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The work attempted to present conservatism anew in an age now free from the ideological struggle of the Cold War.
Conservative Character
Federici notes that Kirk understood conservatism to be “a disposition of character rather than a collection of reified, abstract political doctrines. It is the rejection of ideology rather than the exercise of it.” This, too, is the understanding of conservatism laid out by the champion of conservatism in the 21st century, my former teacher Sir Roger Scruton.
This understanding may help one realize why conservatism fails as an ideology — because it is not an ideology. As Kirk humorously notes early on in one of the early chapters of this book, conservatives who attempt to ideologize conservatism make the first and most egregious error in understanding conservatism.
If, though, conservatives are united in “a disposition of character” and “rejection of ideology,” what is that “disposition” and what does the “rejection of ideology” entail?
[….]
Second, the conservative accepts that the cosmos is governed by a transcendent moral order. This transcendent moral order serves as the basis of the mystery and wonder of existence, which makes possible the life of love. This disposition of love that guides conservatives is opposed to the modernist view of existence, “an arid and loveless realm” that “is a stage for the ego, with its appetites and self-assertive passions.”
Against Ideology and Centralized Power
Next, the rejection of ideology is principally opposed to the double threat of “an earthly paradise” and “centralized power,” which motivate totalitarian impulses.
Three of the chapters, originally lectures given by Kirk, illustrate these ideas. First, “The Errors of Ideology” explores the ideologue’s outlook and disastrous policies. The ideologue, Kirk explains, “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature.” This outlook and ideological construction of politics is what the conservative rejects.
Second, Kirk’s brief but illuminating reflection on “The Politics of T.S. Eliot” helps the reader understand more fully the conservative disposition. The life and writings of Eliot reveal the conservative’s distrust of “centralized power” in any form, be it under “capitalism” or “socialism” or any other ism. The destruction of ethics and theology by practical utilitarianism has caused the despotism of merciless and heartless politics.
We are told, repeatedly, to keep God and morality out of politics. Yet, as Eliot insisted, society is bound together by common religion and a common ethical outlook. Without the recovery of the ethics of kindness and compassion, rooted in the Christian God, Western society runs to its own destruction under “the cult of the colossal.”
Hang with me here, there is going to be some biographical info coming up.
My professor of missions was Ray D. Arnold… he was one of the 1,000 missionaries that General MacArthur called to go to Japan at the conclusion of WWII. One blog notes this about the endeavor:
Perhaps General MacArthur didn’t succeed in bringing Christianity to Japan in the institutional sense. But he did bring mercy, forgiveness and respect for human dignity–the heart of Christianity–and these the Japanese graciously accepted.
In November 1945, two months after he accepted the surrender of Japan on the deck of the USS Missouri, General Douglas MacArthur sat down with a delegation of American clergy at his headquarters in the Dai-Ichi Insurance Building in downtown Tokyo. The four churchmen had come to Japan to rekindle a dialogue with Japanese Christians cut short by World War II and were the first Americans in civilian dress to enter postwar Japan. MacArthur, a lifelong Episcopalian, asked them to send 1,000 missionaries to Japan as soon as possible. “Japan is a spiritual vacuum,” he said. “If you do not fill it with Christianity, it will be filled with communism.”
So began one of the strangest episodes of the Cold War: MacArthur’s attempt to harness Christianity in his mission to transform Japan into an American-style democracy. Over the next five years, over 1,500 American missionaries arrived in Japan in answer to the call from MacArthur and a recruitment drive launched by the mainline American churches. Most of them were young people who came to Japan fresh from college, bible school or the military, filled with visions of remaking Japan and providing spiritual guidance and sustenance to a defeated nation.
[….]
Going by the numbers, MacArthur’s crusade was a miserable failure. In the political turbulence after World War II, millions of Japanese joined the reborn Japanese Communist Party and cooperated with communists and leftists to organize labor unions and demonstrate against the spread and testing nuclear weapons. Fifty years after the war, the number of Japanese who call themselves Christians remains a little over one-half of one percent of the population, the same level it was before Pearl Harbor.
But judged on human terms, the American missionary influx after 1945 helped heal the wounds of war and exposed the defeated Japanese to a new kind of American, neither businessman or soldier, willing to forgo the comforts of home to share in the uncertainties and poverty of postwar Japan. “They were young and idealistic, and identified with Japan,” recalls Kiyoko Takeda Cho, a prominent Christian intellectual who lives in Tokyo. “They represented not the ruling country, but came for reconciliation. That attitude was very much appreciated, not only by Christians but also non-Christians.”….
Of course, in today’s ever more politically correct world, would you ever fathom a well-known general today calling for missionaries to, say, Iraq? However, the main point here is that both Russell Kirk and General MacArthur had a keen sense of the extent of Communism and that void it fills.
As does the author of the book I brought. The author was introduced to me through a class I took on missions with Dr. Arnold as the professor. Dr. Arnold used a smaller quote from Lit-Sen Chang’s booklet, but you can see the keen awareness of the extent of this “do-goodism,” Communism and Socialism give people:
As Dr. Carl F. H. Henry pointed out: “The Chicago evangelicals, while seeking to overcome the polarization of concern in terms of personal evangelism or social ethics, also transcended the neo Protestant nullification of the Great Commission.” “The Chicago Declaration did not leap from a vision of social utopia to legislation specifics, but concentrated first on biblical priorities for social change.” “The Chicago evangelicals did not ignore transcendent aspects of God’s Kingdom, nor did they turn the recognition of these elements into a rationalization of a theology of revolutionary violence or of pacifistic neutrality in the face of blatant militarist aggression.” (Cf. Dr. Carl F. H. Henry, “Evangelical Social Concern” Christianity Today, March 1, 1974.) The evangelical social concern is transcendental not merely horizontal.
We must make it clear that the true revolutionaries are different from the frauds who “deal only with surface phenomena. They seek to remove a deep-seated tumor from society by applying a plaster to the surface. The world’s deepest need today is not something that merely dulls the pain, but something that goes deep in order to change the basic unity of society, man himself. Only when men individually have experienced a change and reorientation, can society be redirected in the way it should go. This we cannot accomplish by either violence or legislation” (cf. Reid: op. cit.). Social actions, without a vertical and transcendental relation with God only create horizontal anxieties and perplexities!
Furthermore, the social activists are in fact ignorant of the social issues, they are not experts in the social sciences. They simply demand an immediate change or destruction of the social structures, but provide no blueprint of the new society whatsoever! They can be likened to the fool, as a Chinese story tells, who tried to help the plant grow faster by pulling it higher. Of course, such “action” only caused the plant to wither and die. This is exactly what the social radicals are doing now! And the W.C.C. is supporting such a tragic course!
We must challenge them [secular social activists] to discern the difference between the true repentance and “social repentance.” The Bible says: “For the godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret; but worldly grief produces death” (II Cor. 7:10). This was the bitter experiences of many former Russian Marxists, who, after their conversion to Christ came to understand that they had only a sort of “social repentance”—a sense of guilt before the peasant and the proletariat, but not before God. They admitted that “A Russian (Marxist) intellectual as an individual is often a mild and loving creature, but his creed (Marxism) constrains him to hate” (cf. Nicolas Zernov: The Russian Religious Renaissance). “As it is written, there is none righteous, no, not one…. For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:10,23). A complete change of a society must come from man himself, for basically man is at enmity with God. All humanistic social, economic and political systems are but “cut flowers,” as Dr. Trueblood put it, even the best are only dim reflections of the Glory of the Kingdom of God. As Benjamin Franklin in his famous address to the Constitutional Convention, said, “Without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building no better than the builders of Babel.” Without reconciliation with God, there is no reconciliation with man. Social action is not evangelism; political liberation is not salvation. While we shall by all means have deep concern on social issues; nevertheless, social activism shall never be a substitution for the Gospel.
Lit-Sen Chang, The True Gospel vs. Social Activism, (booklet. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co: 1976), 9.
Now, for some more biographical background to Lit-sen Chang, it fits well with the drive of this post.
Again, hang in there:
What is Apologetics? is the English translation of a portion of the late Dr. Lit-Sen Chang’s four-volume work, Comprehensive Christian Apologetics. I have taken the first six chapters of Volume 1 (originally published by Tien Dao Publishing House, Hong Kong, in 1982), and rendered them in a style which is compatible with his original Chinese. The result is a piece of theology-as-proclamation, a sermon-in-print.
Dr. Chang (1904-1996) is probably the most prolific Chinese Protestant theologian during the second half of the twentieth century. He had been a zealous promoter of Confucianism and Buddhism, a brilliant university professor and author, and a confidante of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), before he met Jesus Christ in the 1950s. Thereafter he devoted himself to theological study and the defense of the Christian faith. He had several memorable encounters with God during his Christian career, including healing from sickness. For decades he was professor of missions at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts; but his passion was apologetics, defending Christianity and proclaiming it to the Chinese people. To make the best use of his time, Dr. Chang would often only sleep for two hours a night. A meticulous manager of his time, he took his supper as a “second breakfast,” as it were, and pursued his writing, editing and correspondence into the night. He was the author of over eighty books and booklets (these do not include significant works penned before his conversion).
Lit-sen Chang, What Is Apologetics (translated by Samuel Ling, Phillipsburg, NJ: 1999), xiii.
[….]
Dr. Lit-Sen Chang, Chinese Christian apologist and theologian, tireless author and distinguished scholar in Far Eastern philosophy and religion, gave his life to the exposition and defense of the historic Christian faith in obedience to his Lord and Master. He was born on May 9, 1904 in Wu Hsi, Kiangsu province, China. From a young age he received a thorough education in the Confucian classics, and imbibed the traditional Confucian scholar’s passionate concern to rescue China from her national plight. As he witnessed his country on the verge of extinction, he cried out for national salvation through individual endeavor. He became a prolific author.
Dr. Chang graduated from Fu Tan University, Shanghai, intent on serving and saving his country through a career in law and government. At age twenty-one he became a university professor in Peking, thus becoming the youngest professor of his time. He studied law at the Sorbonne, Paris, and traveled to the universities of London, Cambridge, Oxford and to Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland in search of China’s national salvation. He returned to China at twenty-six, and was appointed professor at several leading universities, as well as dean of the College of Social Sciences, Labor University.
When Japan invaded mainland China in 1937, Dr. Chang was recruited by the central government to important positions in the Nationalist Party, the National Government and the Ministry of Defense, turning his attention from law to political strategy. After China’s victory over Japan in 1945, he won a seat to the Parliament of the Republic of China, and was later appointed Deputy Commissioner for Overseas Chinese Affairs.
Confronted by multiple and complex social ills in China, Dr. Chang realized that the way to peace and national strength lay beyond law and government, in the human heart. He immersed himself in Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, including the mystical Ch’ien school of Buddhism. He felt called to regenerate Chinese culture and the religions of the East. He founded Chiang Nan University, and recruited noted contemporary Confucian philosophers such as Ch’ien Mu, T’ang Chun-I and Mou Tsung-san as professors. He planned to visit India and strategize with scholars there to revive the traditional religions of Asia.
As the political situation in China deteriorated, Chang became exiled in Indonesia. There he heard the gospel by the grace of God, repented of his sin and committed his life to Jesus Christ. He gave up all his plans and ambitions, and came to Boston to study theology at Gordon Divinity School. He was fifty-three by that time. He graduated from Gordon summa cum laude, and served as professor of missions for many years. He was honored with the Doctor of Literature degree from Wheaton College, and when he retired from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, he was named “Distinguished Professor Emeritus.”
Dr. Chang knew God’s vocation to devote his later life to the propagation of the Christian faith through literature. He wrote day and night in order to “give the reason for the hope” within (I Peter 3:15), and to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3). Departing from popular trends of the twentieth century, Dr. Chang boldly proclaimed the infinite absolute God of the Bible, and critiqued humanistic thinking East and West without compromise. He lived a simple, frugal and diligent life, tirelessly writing and publishing his works with no regard for return or reward. His writings in Chinese and English totaled over eighty volumes. His mature thought is seen in the four-volume work on apologetics and eight-volume opus on systematic theology. These are not only valued for their scholarship, but comprise a unique treasure for the Body of Christ, as they both edify the reader’s heart, and inform the reader’s mind through a passionate and reasoned defense of the whole counsel of God revealed in Scripture.
Dr. Chang died on January 19,1996 in Boston at the ripe old age of ninety-two. He was survived by five children and seven grandchildren. May the glorious Triune God who called him home continue to give fruit to his voice in the twenty-first century, that “by faith he still speaks, even though he is dead” (Heb. 11:4).
Lit-sen Chang, What Is Apologetics (translated by Samuel Ling, Phillipsburg, NJ: 1999), xvii-xix.
So, Dr. Chang was very familiar with Maoist Communism.
Okay, what is the foundation then for a Christian life in response to all the “isms” offered to man?
Character. Virtues.
Roger Scruton Quickly Defines American Culture
Here is the short excerpt followed by a scan of the page it came from:
We will conquer the strong with meekness; our victory is based on Christian virtues, winning the relationship, and not just the argument. Love is the greatest power in apologetics. Even if our opponent attacks unreasonably, let us keep our peace. If we move forward emotionally, we may win with words, but not with our lives.
CHRISTIAN virtues [character, really of Christ]. Not our virtues.
Of course, this reminds me of John Adams quote:
“…we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams, first (1789–1797) Vice President of the United States, and the second (1797–1801) President of the United States. Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York, 1848), pp 265-6.
Our form of government is set up to incorporate this character and virtues assuming the Judeo-Christian ethic. Without those we are a ship without a sail.
This quote from an article my Pastor posted on his FB notes (more currently) the issue:
Either way, it does point to an emerging problem within the United States: the collapse of a shared moral consensus that saw as a source of public good the broad moral contours of a Christian ethic, even if detached from the religious claims of Christianity. (WORLD MAGAZINE)
Yep. Apologist! preach the totality of our view, and how our virtues differ in their foundation from other views.
“Instead of thinking of Christianity as a collection of theological bits and pieces to be believed or debated, we should approach our faith as a conceptual system, as a total world-and-life view.”
Ronald H. Nash, Worldviews in Conflict: Choosing Christianity in a World of Ideas (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992), 19.
Famous actress and model, Moran Atias, with a clear message to all hypocritical women’s organizations.
It is interesting that in todays political world the most radical and vocal activists in politics are Leftist women. The graph is of Jonestown with this demographic:
“Black females made up the largest group of residents of Jonestown (45%), with white females comprising 13%. Black males made up over one-fifth (23%), with white males making up a tenth, and the remainder falling in the Mixed or Other categories (Figure 2). Clearly women played an important role in the community, both numerically and organizationally.” (REBECCA MOORE)
Similarly, as THE AMERICAN MINDasks, “Why is extreme anti-Israel activism dominated by wild-eyed young women?”
Especially after the violent sexual rapes and murder of women by Hamas?
The pic to the right is from the NYT article. Click to enlarge.
Other examples can be seen in the female heads of Harvard and MIT saying the violence against Jews can be “contextual”
And the WASHINGTON POST notes “this new liberal movement has emerged largely outside the traditional party structure. It is led by hundreds of thousands of mostly white, college-educated, middle-aged women …“.
As President Biden’s approval ratings have tanked with nonwhite voters, the Democratic Party increasingly has become dominated by liberal white women who virtue-signal with suburban lawn signs and then henpeck people in supermarkets to pull their face masks up over their noses. Or, put more simply, the Democratic Party is at risk of becoming a party of “Karens.”
Which is why “white Lefty women” are more prone to their brand of activism… they are lashing out in a mentally “skewed” way (Pew Poll Graph included to bolster the FREE BEACON excerpt):
….Nearly half of young white liberals (46 percent) reported being diagnosed with a mental health condition. That was significantly higher than the percentage of young white moderates (26 percent) and young white conservatives (21 percent) who reported a mental health diagnosis. Young white people who identified as “very liberal” were considerably more likely to report mental health problems, even compared with their peers who identified as liberal.
Across all demographics, young white females who identified as liberal or very liberal were by far the most likely to report a mental health diagnosis. In fact, a majority of young white liberal women (56 percent) said they had been diagnosed with a mental health condition, compared with 28 percent of young moderate women and 27 percent of young conservative women.
The ideological disparity was also present, albeit less pronounced, among young white men. Within this demographic, 34 percent of liberals reported having mental health problems, compared with 22 percent of moderates and 16 percent of conservatives.
Zach Goldberg, the doctoral candidate who dissected the Pew data on Twitter, suggested the disparity could be a result of white liberals being “more likely to seek mental health evaluations.” It could also indicate a “genuine” difference in personalities, he argued, given that white liberals are more likely to exhibit neuroticism, according to the data.
“I didn’t write this thread to mock white liberals or their apparently disproportionate rates of mental illness (and you shouldn’t either),” Goldberg wrote. “Rather, this is a question that’s underexplored and which may shed light on attitudinal differences towards various social policies.”
The article in Evie Magazine made some compelling points in response to Goldberg’s thread, noting that liberal ideology often “forces its followers to wallow in feelings of helplessness and victimhood,” as opposed to “building resiliency against hardship,” which can be a crucial tool for combating anxiety and depression.
White liberals in particular, who are often at the forefront of social justice movements that don’t necessarily affect them directly, may be susceptible to “white guilt and savior narratives,” which are “pretty much as bad as any genuinely racist agenda because it robs the very group they’re trying to help of their own voice.”…..
It has been said before that “liberalism is a mental disorder”, but there is research that shows that phrase may be more than just a right wing hashtag, especially among white women.
Comedian Norm Macdonald waged an epic nine-year battle with cancer and fought cancer to a draw. When he occasionally got serious during interviews, he would share his ideas about God, Jesus, Christianity, the Bible, evil, and the soul. In this video, David Wood examines Norm’s thoughts on people being created in the image of God, and shows how Norm was actually fumbling his way to the Gospel.
