The Rational Reply

Abstinence only: Not teaching and calling it education

2008-07-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

The Family Research Council trumpets abstinence only sex "education"

Promiscuity Leads the Pact

Despite the angst over fuel prices and the presidential race, rumors of a high school pregnancy pact are stealing headlines in America's largest newspapers

Yep! It's a major issue and should be treated with respect. For example, we probably shouldn't just sweep it under the rug and tell people "don't have sex, it's bad".

and prompting more parents to question what public education is teaching their children about sex.

Because we all know that the solution to any problem is ignorance!

During the 2007-08 school year, Joseph Sullivan, the principal of Massachusetts' Gloucester High School (GHS), noticed a serious spike in the number of girls who became pregnant during the school year. In an interview with Time, he admitted that the teen pregnancy rate had quadrupled at GHS, and he suspected that a group of sophomore girls agreed to "get pregnant and raise their babies together."

Interesting, if true. That would actually sound like a reasoned response to how to manage the pressures of being a parent - form a community and help each other. What would be wrong with that? Is helping each other a problem?

While the media is consumed with whether or not such a pact exists, the story raises far more troubling issues about the school's message on sexuality.

And now we get down to it! Yay!

If these students never struck an agreement, as Gloucester's Mayor Carolyn Kirk insists, we can presume at the very least that these 16-year-old girls thought it was acceptable to be sexually active and become pregnant.

God turned on the equipment to do so, right? Who are we to dispute His judgment?

And why wouldn't they? GHS's own policy encourages it.

If "encourage" means "doesn't vilify a teenager for not following bogus religious rules", then this is correct.

The school offers free on-site daycare for teen moms so that students can bring their babies to school.

As opposed to forcing the girls to drop out because they have to take care of their baby.

It also teaches "comprehensive" sex education to students in the ninth grade, just in time for high school.

So in the science classroom, we should give the kids all of the facts and let them decide. But in sex education, we should only teach them one thing and one thing only. And that thing should be the one thing that the entire species is hardwired not to do. Okay! Got it!

If the school is bending over backward to accommodate teen mothers and encouraging the promiscuity that leads to it,

Remember folks, "encourage" currently means "doesn't vilify a teenager for not following bogus religious rules". This recap courtesy of Webster! Rewriting the dictionary for over 200 years!

these girls would have no choice but to assume that premarital sex and motherhood are acceptable social norms.

Yep! No choice at all! No other places anywhere in the world that they could possibly get information about one of the largest life impacting choices they will ever make!

Parents? No way! They can't talk to them.

TV? Nope! Nothing about sex there!

Internet? Please! There's no sex on the internet! No chat rooms, no IMs, no blogs, no email, no text messages about it. Get serious!

Newspapers, magazines, libraries, et al? No way! These kids can barely read.

Friends? Yeesh! Who do you think is getting these girls pregnant?

Other family members? As if! They're all going to tell them just not to have sex!

There we go! We're fresh out of possibilities. Kids have no choice!

Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy said, "This is not a story about sex education." Of course it is! It just happens to be a story that liberals are trying to hide, as it confirms--once again--the failure of comprehensive sex education.

Yep! Complete failure! We didn't whip the pregnant girl down the middle of the street for the offense against God of having sex?!? We all fail! Our school had the audacity to teach teenagers about the very instincts that every single human being gets when they hit puberty?!? Clearly that's a horrible idea!

Planned Parenthood celebrated when Gov. Deval Patrick (D) refused the federal funds for abstinence programs in Massachusetts schools. Had he accepted the grant and encouraged schools like GHS to use it to teach sexual restraint, the storyline in this storied fishing village might have been different.

Certainly would have been different! They still would have had sex, but with abstinence only education they would have been branded evil, lying, stinking, traitors to their community as well!

Instead schools like Gloucester insist on promoting promiscuity over abstinence in direct contradiction of the wishes of 78 percent of parents (as expressed in a 2007 Zogby poll)

Note the lack of teenagers who were polled. It's pretty easy to say "no" when you're not the one giving anything up.

Like us, these parents don't understand what's wrong with telling kids to simply say "no." Isn't that the message we give them on other dangerous activities like drug and alcohol use?

So everyone is pre-programmed with a huge smoking drive and if we all didn't smoke the human race would end? Dude, your analogy needs some serious work. Try going after something that the human body really needs - like eating, for example.

We tell them not to smoke. And unlike sex education, we don't hand them filters and say "If you're going to light up, smoke safely."

Yeah, the smoking thing still isn't working. Did you get this one out of "Sucky Analogies to Use to Try to Confuse Idiots"? Or did it come from "1001 Lousy Analogies That Won't Work At All"?

Now that public schools are starting to reap what they've sown with the "just do it" mentality, states are scrambling to accommodate kids and their poor decision-making. On teen sex, it's time to stop treating the problem and start preventing it with the only birth control that is 100% effective--abstinence.

And we're finally to the crux of the issue. Abstaining from sex is 100% effective in avoiding sex. But Abstinence Only Sex Education is utterly proven to be a completely worthless pipe dream. It fails every study that it's been subjected to. More importantly it fails the basic precept of education: That we should be teaching the next generation what we know.

Abstinence Only education is, by definition, refusing to teach the subject that is claims to teach. That, my friends, is always going to be a bad idea.

Dr. Henry Morgentaler, Order of Canada

2008-07-18T08:40:00.000-07:00

On July 1st, Canada Day by the way, Dr. Henry Morgentaler was inducted into the Order of Canada! Cause for celebration? Yep! Except for those that dislike freedom and choice and women controlling their own bodies.

See his induction cheapens Wayne Gretkzy's Dad's order, apparently. Read on!

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said Tuesday he supports the decision to award abortion crusader Dr. Henry Morgentaler with the Order of Canada.

Dr. Henry Morgentaler was named a member of the Order of Canada on July 1.

McGuinty, himself a Catholic, appears to be the first premier to address the issue publicly. His stance opposes that of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has said he would have preferred to have seen the award bestowed on someone who unifies Canadians.

Fighting for freedom and personal liberties has never been a very Canadian thing, you see.

"I know that Dr. Morgentaler's been seen as a controversial figure, but I believe in a woman's right to make a very difficult decision," McGuinty said.

Yay McGuinty!

"And if she makes that difficult decision and chooses to have an abortion, I want her to be able to do that in a way that's safe, in a way that's publicly funded. So I know it's divisive, but I think it's important."

You rock, man! I'm going to move to Canada and become a citizen there just so I can start voting for you.

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean named Morgentaler as a member of the order on July 1 for his services to women and for leadership in the fields of humanism and civil liberties. The controversial appointment was made on the advice of the independent Order of Canada selection committee.

McGuinty's comments came the same day an Ontario Catholic organization returned an Order of Canada medal to the Governor General to protest the decision to give Morgentaler the honour.

sigh

No good deed goes unpunished.

Order 'devalued'

Members of the Madonna House took the medal, along with a letter of explanation, to Rideau Hall, the Governor General's official residence in Ottawa.

The medal had been awarded to the organization's late founder in 1976.

"It is only after much prayer and consultation with our community, as well as with heavy hearts, that we are undertaking this action," Rev. David May, one of the Madonna House directors, said in a news release.

So they took a long, long time to decide specifically to behave like petulant children. Got it!

Catherine Doherty, who died at the age of 89 in 1985, was named a member the Order of Canada for "a lifetime of devoted services to the underprivileged of many nationalities, both in Canada and abroad," according to the Governor General's website.

Sounds really good!

She and her husband started Madonna House in 1947 in Combermere, about 180 kilometres west of Ottawa. The organization now counts 200 members and operates soup kitchens and retreats in seven countries around the world. All involved have taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

May said he believes Doherty would support the organization's decision to return her award.

He prayed to her today and the table lamp bumped just like it used to when she was alive! QED!

"The order has been devalued in recent days, and we are confident that Catherine is spiritually present with us, affirming this gesture of love for our country and for the values which alone can sustain it. Without absolute respect for the gift of life, no society can survive," he said.

Isn't that great, flowery language for forcing a woman to suffer through a pregnancy and bare a child that she doesn't want?

Madonna House's decision to return the award came five days after Rev. Lucien Larré, a B.C. priest, returned his Order of Canada medal to protest Morgentaler's appointment.

And the beat goes on.

Morgentaler fought to legalize abortion

Morgentaler, a Polish Holocaust survivor who immigrated to Montreal after the Second World War, struggled for decades to have abortion legalized in Canada.

Sounds like a scumbag, doesn't he? He really devalues the Order of Canada!

He opened his first illegal abortion clinic in Montreal in 1969 and performed thousands of procedures.

A family physician, Morgentaler argued that access to abortion was a basic human right and women should not have to risk death at the hands of an untrained professional in order to end their pregnancies.

The brute! Giving young women proper medical care?!? Yep, that has devalue written all over it!

His abortion clinics were constantly raided, and one in Toronto was firebombed.

I'm always amazed that anyone can justify murdering someone who has been born as a reasonable response to making safe abortions available. I'm just saying.

Morgentaler was arrested several times and spent months in jail as he fought his case at all court levels in Canada.

On Jan. 28, 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada's abortion law. That law, which required a woman who wanted an abortion to appeal to a three-doctor hospital abortion committee, was declared unconstitutional.

Canada now has no federal laws governing abortion, and leaves regulation of the procedure up to individual provinces.

So the man who put his life on the line, risked being murdered, firebombed, and raided, went toe to toe with the federal government, spent time in jail because of it, and in the end won for the rights of freedom and privacy everywhere is given the highest honor Canada can bestow. Bravo!

Anyone who thinks that this man devalues anything needs a remedial course in the Inigo Montoya School for Terminally Dictatorially Clueless.

Congratulations, Dr. Morgentaler!

Mutant mice!

2008-07-17T09:42:00.000-07:00

Our friend, Brian Thomas at the ICR, makes another ignorant stab at evolution.

Human Stem Cells Cure Mutated Mice
by Brian Thomas, M.S.*

Researchers are intelligently designing techniques to combat mutations that cause neurological disorders.

Excellent! And here we were worried that they were wasting their time eating caviar and salsa dancing.

If evolution works according to the standard neo-Darwinian model of time + selection + mutation, then why are we interfering with the process?

Is this a trick question? Because we have particular goals in mind that we want to accomplish. That would be the same answer as to why we clean the house instead of just letting nature eventually clean it for us.

Shouldn’t we let evolution run its course?

That would depend on what course nature is running and what we want to achieve.

Perhaps these diseased individuals would grow a new organ or something, and become the next step in our naturally upward progression from hydrogen to human and beyond.

I'm betting not. And I think you agree.

It seems that such evolutionary philosophy becomes practically unlivable.

Your bizarro world evolutionary philosophy is, I agree!

Rather than let ”evolution” take its course, researchers are thankfully taking steps to remedy mutations’ harmful effects.

Woot! Yay for the researchers!

Nature News reported on June 41 the successful treatment of mice that are born with a mutation that prevents myelin from forming around their nerve cells. Without myelin, the mice live tortured, short lives. Myelin-related disorders in humans include multiple sclerosis and adrenoleukodystrophy. The lead researcher of the study, Stephen Goldman from the University of Rochester in New York, described these as “awful, awful diseases.”

Very nasty! Ouch!

His treatment involved injecting human nervous tissue stem cells into the spinal cords of newborn mice. Untreated mice with this mutation typically died young, but some of the treated mice grew myelin and were normalizing as they developed. The successful stem cells were harvested not from human embryos, but from human adults.
As always, the mutation in these mice represents a loss of valuable genetic information. It is this very loss that these researchers are seeking to restore with stem cell treatments.

Very reasonable.

Does anybody else find it ironic that biomedical researchers are pouring their lives into reversing the effects of mutations, after having been taught in our universities and medical schools that mutations are the essential engines of evolution? Perhaps time + selection + mutation isn’t such a good formula after all.

Nope, not in the slightest. The reason why is that those scientists are not stopping evolution, they're stopping that undesirable mutation in mice. Evolution can and will continue on. Rather than challenging the formula above, they're demonstrating that it's true. And then going forward and using that knowledge to help mice and perhaps someday help humans in much the same way.

It is ironic that a group that prides itself on easing human suffering does it's level best to prevent the people who are actually doing real work to help ease suffering.

More marriage lunacy!

2008-07-15T06:33:00.000-07:00

More twisted fairy tales from our good friends at Protect Marriage.

In this section learn more about the legal and legislative issues surrounding the ProtectMarriage.com Amendment, review frequently asked questions (FAQs) and read articles related to protecting marriage.

Why It’s Needed

1. Children need the love of both a father and a mother.

Which, of course, means that anything other than the love of both a mother and a father is full blown torturing the child. We're talking the equivalent of putting the tyke into a room with Sayid Jarrah from Lost and telling Sayid to use "any means necessary" here. Clearly no child raised with out the love of both a mother and a father (and I'm talking about a female parent and a male parent here) has been anything but a traumatized, homicidal drain on our society.

The body of research-proof is overwhelming and consistent. (Read Glenn Stanton’s writings on the Focus on the Family Web site for more information.)

By all means consult a conservative Christian corporation for all of your research! That's a great idea! Oh....wait a minute...it's not.

2. Traditional marriage deserves protection because of its contributions to societal well-being. The historic purpose for governmental recognition of marriage has been about children and society, not the relationship of two adults. (For more information, consult the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.)

Yep, no need to give good, loving, caring, hardworking adults those governmental protections! Why would we do a silly thing like that?!?

3. Expanding the definition of marriage by including homosexual relationships adds to the continued disregard for marriage’s ultimate purpose.

No. It would continue to disregard what marriage means to you and your religion. There's a difference! The really neat part is that we have religious freedom in the USA so we don't have to pay attention to what a particular religion thinks about a secular, legal condition. And that protection is what keeps the government from stomping on your religion!

Where it has been legalized, same-sex marriage decreases the total number of marriages while increasing illegitimacy. Nine European nations have had same-sex marriage since the early 90s—and just 2 percent of same-sex couples in these countries ever bother to marry, while there has been a 46 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births. (Read more)

Okay, I'm just confused. If the argument is that gay couples won't get married anyway, then that's an argument to go ahead and save your money on the campaign. If they aren't going to take advantage of getting married after all, there's no reason to try to stop them from doing so. Really, get your arguments straight here!

4. Expanding the definition of marriage begs the question: Why stop at same-sex couples? What legal basis would remain to limit the number of partners in marriage?

Common sense comes to mind.

5. Legalizing same-sex marriage necessarily mandates changes to all California public-school curriculum. Children will be subjected to a mandatory acceptance of homosexuality and all of its practices. Public school curriculum will actively discriminate against the values of the majority of its community’s families.

Schools teaching tolerance is a good thing. Really! It is!

6. Religious freedom has been the cornerstone of success for the United States of America. It is naïve to believe that when acceptance of same-sex marriage is legislatively or judicially forced upon citizens via employment law, education, or other government mandates, rights of religious liberty won’t decrease.

I hope you're not saying that you think that you have the right to descriminate against others. We were having such a good conversation up until this point! * sigh *

Did you know…?

…that just eight years ago, California voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 22, by 61.4% of the vote, to keep marriage only between a man and a woman.

You don't say!

So why do we now need to amend the state constitution?

Because you just found out that it supersedes statewide propositions!

On May 15, the California Supreme Court ruled that the statutory changes made by Propositoin 22 were invalid. The only way to overturn this is decision is with a Constitutional Amendment. See our news release on this decision. (Read the decision.) The Court declared a right to “same-sex marriage” in direct opposition to the definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman, established by Proposition 22.

Not to point out the obvious here, but usually when a court strikes down a law, it does so in direct opposition to that law. I'm just saying.

In the majority decision authored by Chief Justice Ronald George, he wrote “an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.”

Yay for equality!

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Marvin Baxter stated, “…marriage is, as it always has been, the right of a woman and an unrelated man to marry each other.” Baxter added “…there is no deeply rooted tradition of same-sex marriage, in the nation or in this state.”

True!

Prop 22 added a regular statute to the California Family Code (not the state constitution) to keep marriage between a man and a woman and prevent the state Legislature from redefining marriage without a vote of the people. Since then however, politicians and judges have chipped away at Prop 22 and ignored the will of the voters. For example:

• In 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom thumbed his nose at California voters by issuing marriage licenses to thousands of homosexual couples in open defiance of Proposition 22. Ultimately, the courts declared those so-called “marriages” to be invalid, but left the door open to a future constitutional challenge against traditional marriage.

An elected representative did what he felt was the right thing?!? Now I've seen it all!

• Additionally, the courts have undermined Proposition 22 and marriage by upholding an act of the Legislature that gave homosexual “domestic partners” the full legal status of married spouses. A San Francisco judge ruled that Proposition 22, a regular statute, violates the California Constitution and ordered the licensing of same-sex “marriages.” On May 15, 2008, the California Supreme Court overruled Proposition 22 and declared that homosexuals have a constitutional right to marry.

Wow...a court overturned an unconstitutional law. Who do they think they are? A judge or something?!?

Seriously, this one is really simple. There are people who love and care for each other who just happen to be the same gender. The purpose of life is happiness: we should just let them be happy with each other. If allowing them to get married helps them on the universal path to their own happiness, it should be our pleasure to open that door for them.

The greatest damage religion can do is to make good people do bad things. These couples are not encroaching on anyone else's life by asking to get married. Standing in the way of their happiness is bad.

Conservapedia on Creation Science

2008-07-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

Conservapedia on Creation Science! Woot!

Creation science

Creation science is science free from atheist and evolutionist bias, which shows that supernatural creation of the material universe by God is consistent and compatible with scientific evidence.

That's an encyclopedic definition?!?

So if we had a scientific theory that was free of "evolutionist bias", showed the universe was made by God in a supernatural event, but had "atheist bias", that isn't creation science, right?

How about we have "atheist bias" and "evolutionist bias" but the universe was created by some competing god down the street? Would that be creation science?

And lest we forget, here is the list of the creaionist theories that are free of "atheist and evolutionist bias", show God to have created the universe, and are compatible with all scientific evidence:

None.

Yep! That's right! Throw in the "all" clause - meaning that the theory has to meet all evidence, not just a few pieces here and there and the entire subject washes away with the tide.

Most advocates of creation science believe the earth is approximately 6,000 years old

This isn't even true if we just talk about creation scientists. It's only the bible literalists that hold to the Y6K motif like a drowning man clutches to a life preserver.

In addition, scientists in the discipline of creation science state that the first law of thermodynamics and second law of thermodynamics argue against an eternal universe.

That would be the same ones that state the Earth is 6,000 years old.

They also claim that these laws point to the universe being created by God.

Great hypothesis! Too bad it failed the testing protocols. Bummer.

Creation scientists also assert that naturalistic processes alone cannot account for the origin of life and that the theory of evolution cannot account for the various kinds of animals and plants.

Can I be a creation scientist, too? Making stuff up and just stating it or asserting it sounds way easier than what real scientists do!

Both evolutionary scientists and young earth creation scientists believe that speciation occurs;

So they don't just state that speciation occurs? How quaint!

however, young earth creation scientists state that speciation generally occurs at a much faster rate than evolutionists believe is the case. Many scientists in the field of creation science, such as the scientists at Creation Ministries International and Answers in Genesis, assert that the Bible contains an understanding of scientific knowledge beyond that believed to exist at the time the Bible was composed.

Ah, back to the assertions. And here I thought we were moving forward!

In addition, Christianity profoundly influenced the development of modern science.

For example, torturing Galileo did, in fact, have a profound influence on him.

Creation Science and Genetic Programs and Biological Information

Scientists in the area of creation science and intelligent design advocates state the genetic code, genetic programs, and biological information argue for an intelligent cause in regards to the origins question.

Broken record time, here, but really just stating stuff isn't science any more than holding your hand over the bible is theology.

Dr. Werner Gitt, former director and Professor of Information Systems at the prestigious German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt), wrote that human beings are the most complex information processing systems on earth. Dr. Gitt estimated that the human body processes thousands of times more information than all the world's libraries contain.

This part might be true. We'd need to see his evidence, but the fact is the human brain is an amazing information processing organ.

Dr. Gitt has written several points regarding the origin of biological information:

It's story time!

1. In his work In the Beginning Was Information Dr. Gitt stated that “There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.”

He might want to read Dawkins, sometime. He has a book or two on this subject. I'm sure it's just an oversight on Dr. Gitt's part to not know of a 159 year old theory.

2. Dr. Gitt argued that the density and complexity of DNA information is millions of times larger than mankind's current technology

Might be true!

and this means a supremely intelligent being was the author of this information

Completely false!

What it really means is that there has to be some mechanism to create this complexity. It's completely false to say that only a god could do that, especially since there are other alternatives.

Similarly, Dr. Stephen C. Meyer in his 1996 essay The Origin of Life and the Death of Materialism, wrote that "the information storage density of DNA, thanks in part to nucleosome spooling, is several trillion times that of our most advanced computer chips.

We're amazingly complex, yep!

3. Gitt stated that the author of the information encoded into the DNA molecule, who constructed the molecular biomachines to encode, decode and run the cells was supremely intelligent.

So another axiom that we either believe or don't. Here a hint, scientists, the ones that actually follow the scientific method and test their theories and other weird stuff that you haven't heard of - like independent reviews - don't believe this axiom. They've even come up with other ways that this could happen. And then tested those ways and found that they work!

Isn't real science fun?!? Yeah!

4. Dr. Gitt asserted that because information is a nonmaterial entity and does not originate from matter, the author of biological information must be nonmaterial (spirit).

And is spooky!

Dr. Walt Brown concurs in regards to the supernatural origin of biological information and states that the genetic material that controls the biological processes of life is coded information and that human experience tells us that codes are created only by the result of intelligence and not merely by processes of nature.

Evidence! *whistles like whistling for a dog* Where are you evidence! Come on over, Evidence! Show yourself...someday!

Dr. Brown also asserts that the "information stored in the genetic material of all life is a complex program. Therefore, it appears that an unfathomable intelligence created these genetic programs."

Appears? Perhaps. Did? No.

It really doesn't matter how many times you state or assert something. Until you show evidence of that something you've got nothing more than a bunch of unsupported hopes and wishes.

To support his creation science view regarding the divine origin of genetic programs,

Look, ma! They might get around to showing us some evidence!

Dr. Walt Brown cites the work of David Abel and Professor Jack Trevors who wrote the following:
“No matter how many "bits" of possible combinations it has, there is no reason to call it "information" if it doesn't at least have the potential of producing something useful. What kind of information produces function? In computer science, we call it a "program." Another name for computer software is an "algorithm." No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms' genomes programmed? - David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors, “Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information,” Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, page 8"
Creation Science and the Evolutionary Science Community

Nope. No evidence here. Just an unanswered question. Bummer!

Creation science is not accepted by most scientists either in terms of its claims or as a science, on the pretext that it cannot be disproved and therefore cannot be considered "science".

Yep, that's really, really important.

However, Dr. Walt Brown argues that the field of creation science is scientific.

Okay! State your evidence of this.

Also, creation scientists state the evolutionists' objections to creation science are due to the worldviews and preconceptions of the scientists, rather than on the basis of scientific evidence or the scientific validity of the idea.

Oh, of course. You're not going to give any evidence. How silly of me!

Also, Karl Popper, a leading philosopher of science and originator of falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation of science from nonscience, stated that Darwinism is "not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme." Michael Ruse, a leading Darwinist and philosopher of science, conditionally acknowledged Popper's statement: "Since making this claim, Popper himself has modified his position somewhat; but, disclaimers aside, I suspect that even now he does not really believe that Darwinism in its modern form is genuinely falsifiable."

Here's another quote from Karl Popper: “I have changed my mind about the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation”. You see, Karl found out that he was wrong and so, like a good scientific mind, when he was presented with new data, he changed his mind.

Although a belief in God does not automatically imply a belief in creation science, it is interesting to note that a poll among United States scientists showed that approximately 40% of scientists believed there is a God, while a similar survey found that 93% of members of the United States National Academy of Sciences do not believe there is a God.

And thank you, Conservapedia, for staying on topic!

Hagee on cremation

2008-07-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

John Hagee's comedy FAQ show continues on. This time with cremation!

Q. Is it wrong for a Christian to choose to be cremated?

A. Burial and cremation are personal choices;

So we’re done. The answer is “No.”

the Bible does not prescribe a particular method for disposing of bodies after death.

Still “No.”

However, Christians have historically followed the Jewish custom of burial, for several reasons.

So “Yes”, then?

First, it shows respect for our physical bodies, which are the creation of God. We are "fearfully and wonderfully made," the Bible says (Ps. 139:14).

Fear, a wonderful trait for any religion.

Jesus Himself chose to come to earth in a physical body just like ours, and He was resurrected in that same body.

As told in the clear contemporary documentation of…I’m sure it’s around here somewhere…

Lets see, Jesus was a big, important figure in first century religion. I’m sure there are lots of people who wrote about him at the time…

Rats.

No worries. I’ll keep looking!

Our bodies are also destined for resurrection;

Really?!? I thought that was reserved for “the Family”

our "natural" bodies will be gloriously transformed into "spiritual" bodies when the dead in Christ are raised (1 Cor. 15).

Sounds great!

At that time, when we receive our glorified bodies, it will not matter whether we were buried or cremated at death.

So we’re back to “No.” Your concision is amazing!

Many Christians who have perished in fires have been involuntarily cremated.

Clearly “No.”

Think of those believers who lost their lives in the collapse of the World Trade Center, for example.

“Randolph Scott!”

Most of the bodies were not recovered; the victims' remains were obliterated and their ashes scattered in the massive pile of rubble. It was humanly impossible to identify the dead, yet the God who created them can identify their bodies down to the last atom.

Cool! Just a side question – for the guy who had just clipped his fingernails before the planes hit, do those atoms count as still his? At what point do the atoms of someone’s spit stop being part of him and start being not his atoms anymore? I’m just asking.

And He will resurrect them "in the twinkling of an eye," exactly as He will those Christians whose bodies were buried and decomposed naturally.

So we’re back to “No.”. It seems odd to use 262 words just to say “No.”

Burial or cremation is a very personal choice.

Ah! A time honored tradition of school kids reaching a word requirement – repeat yourself unnecessarily.

You should discuss it with your closest family members before making a decision, so they will be comfortable in carrying out your decision and living with the memories.

Very good advice! It got really wordy in the middle and never really said “No, it’s not wrong”, so Johhny, you get a C+.

God hates bison

2008-07-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

From the same loony bin that brought you creationism as viewed from a banana (but only the selectively bred bananas, of course) we now bring you the bison!

Buffalo easy to kill, but a real nightmare for evolutionists to explain.
E. Norbert Smith, Ph.D.

It is difficult to imagine an indigenous people any place in the world more closely connected to an animal than were the various Native American plains tribes to the American Bison or buffalo. Indeed, even today tribal leaders refer to the time before the disappearance of the buffalo. Their disappearance marked the end of a way of life that had been in harmony with nature for thousands of years.

With the notable exception of not really being in harmony with the bison. I'm just saying.

They depended on the unlimited bison for food, clothes, tools, medicine, ornaments and shelter. Have you marveled at the success of Native Americans in killing bison survival? Their success plagued me until graduate school. Let me explain.

Please do! That sounds like fun!

Historically there were actually three ways bison were killed by Native Americans. Some were stampeded over cliffs or trapped in box canyons. This can only occur in a limited number of places and could surely not support a vast plains people for centuries. A second way was running down a single animal by horse. Often it took as many as 5 or more fresh horses to finally fatigue the bison. This would only work after Europeans introduced horses and even then could only provide a few animals so the question remains.

Inefficiencies galore.

The third method and the one most often seen on TV involves a horse back rider shooting a running bison with a bow and arrow. This is the one that bothered me for years. I am not a bow hunter, but the idea of hitting the heart of a running bison from a galloping horse seems difficult if not impossible. This problem was uniquely solved by the Creator of man and bison.

God hates bison?

With the notable exception of the American Bison most mammals have two separate pleural or lung cavities. As we all know, one side of our chest can be penetrated collapsing that lung, but the other side remains intact and the remaining lung can support life. The bison has what is called an incomplete mediastinum, that is there is but one pleural cavity containing both lungs. Thus the problem for the Native bow hunter with or without a horse is solved. An arrow must only penetrate the chest at any point and both lungs collapse. The fatally wounded animal would only continue a few yards providing unlimited food, clothing and tools.

Perhaps not unlimited food, but the basic point is valid: The bison has an Achilles heel and the native tribes milked that weakness for everything it was worth. Pretty reasonable of them, really, especially since running out of bison wasn't even a consideration for them.

Before the availability of horses bison could be shot by stealth from a blind or other hiding place. One problem is solved yet another serious comes to mind...a problem seldom mentioned, yet demanding an answer.

There's more?!? Cool!

The problem is for the evolutionist.

Excellent! Scientists love mysteries. What is it?

Other than providing food for hungry people, of what selective advantage is an incompletely divided mediastinum?

Not much of one, which is why a divided mediastinum is an evolutionary advantage.

From an evolutionary sense this makes absolutely no sense.

It makes no sense that there would be creatures in various stages of evolutionary advantages? No, that makes perfect sense actually. And that is exactly what you'd expect to see if evolution is correct.

Indeed conventional wisdom would argue for its elimination from the gene pool.

Which the natives happily provided!

Yet it did remain and fed a continent of Native American for centuries.

There were a lot of them to mow through.

It must indeed require faith and dedication to remain an evolutionist. I am glad I know the Creator of Bison and Native Americans. You can know Him too.

Okay, lets just get down to brass tax here. There's no particular evolutionary advantage to the incompletely divided mediastinum compared to a completely divided mediastinum. But there's no particular disadvantage to it until you start facing a predator armed with projectile weaponry. Then that basic problem of getting pierced once in the chest becomes a really, really big deal.

So what does evolution say will happen for the bison? It says that absent a predator that can take advantage of this weakness, it'll thrive. It's big, bad, and has massive endurance. Evolution further says that once it faces a predator that can take advantage of that weakness, the bison is in a world of hurt. Both of these match up exactly with what actually happened.

It must indeed require faith and dedication to remain a creationist!

The bible is true because we said so!

2008-07-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

Our friend, the Yominator, at the Canada Free Press tells us that the bible is true because...the bible says so!

THE BIBLE

One cannot conclude a column like this without mentioning philosophical and logical proofs of the Divinity of the Bible, the Torah. To begin with, the Bible is the only book in the history of mankind to make the claim that part of it was given by the Creator in front of an entire nation (of 600,000 families, totaling a few million people).

Wow. That claim is so completely not impressing me in the slightest. You see a claim like that would naturally generate a ton of collaborating evidence from those millions of people. So to verify the claim that it was presented to millions of people – which wouldn’t cover the Creator part, of course – we’d just have to check for effects on those millions.

And that’s where the trial runs rather cold.

If someone were to come along today with a book, claiming that its Divine transmission had been witnessed by millions of people, they'd be laughed out of the room.

There’s a reason for that

One cannot convince an entire nation, including its greatest analytical thinkers and its most ardent skeptics, that such a transmission occurred and had been witnessed by them when it hadn't.

Yep. Keep going with this thought. You’re really getting somewhere!

To those who would counter "What if the Bible came along a few hundred years later?" (claiming to have been witnessed a few hundred years back), such a claim would have been met with equal ridicule, just as a book claiming to have been given by the Creator, as witnessed by millions in the 1700s would be met with ridicule today. There would have been a well known history of such a happening. Simply put, a book that claims to have been Divinely given to millions cannot take hold on a widespread level if it is not true. That's a basic philosophical case.

So it’s true because enough people believe it’s true. Let’s check a few ideas that are true by that standard:

The sun revolving around the earth
The earth is flat
Witches
Milli Vanilli sang their own songs

This “basic philosophical case” isn’t holding up very well. How about we go with “it’s true when its claims are self consistent with itself and the empirical evidence”? It’s a pain, of course, since your claims are neither, but that definition has the added bonus of being actually useful and connected to reality.

There are also more hard physical reasons that point to the Bible's Divinity.

Do tell!

The Bible states in Genesis and in Jeremiah that the stars of the heaven cannot be counted. Scientists believed that the number of stars were only 1,100, those which could readily be seen. The Bible was way ahead of the time it was given and showed knowledge of that which could not have been known or seen by man.

It’s too bad that God didn’t let us know exactly how many stars he created and a timetable for the generation of new ones by the methods that He set in motion to do so. That would be much better evidence than the rather vague statement that they “cannot be counted”.

The Bible also attested to the laws of thermodynamics, a field that science only hammered out thousands of years later. The first law of thermodynamics is that the total sum of matter and energy in the universe can never change. Energy can change into matter and vice versa, but their combined sum is always constant. Until this discovery, the Bible's statement that "there is nothing new under sun" seemed like a statement that was ready to be disproven. Reasoning went that somewhere in the universe there must be new energy or matter developing. But there wasn't. Universally accepted science showed us that less than 200 years ago. The Bible told us that about 3,000 years before.

Or perhaps we could take the context of which that statement was written and not apply it willy nilly to a completely different context. I’m just saying.

More compelling is the Bible's clear attestation to the second law of thermodynamics (which was originally the first principle of this field, formulated by Sadi Carnot in 1824). This is that physicality becomes increasingly random and broken apart. Psalm 102 speaks of the heavens and the earth perishing and clearly implies a gradual decay, telling us this law well before it was discovered.

Another vague, ambiguous statement from the ancient goat herders. Sigh.

It should be noted here, at least for the sake of accuracy,

Accuracy is now important? Cool!

that the Bible also speaks of a new heaven and earth, meaning a newly fortified one, after the Divine presence is revealed. Such a heaven and earth will exist continuously according to most Biblical commentary, but will reveal their Divine Creator within them.

Be still my beating heart.

Eventual perfection of the world, after we've been given a chance to do our part, is a key tenet of most religion and is the only logical explanation for the Creation of a world in need of perfection.

Yeah…the only logical explanation…

Okay, let’s take a stab at another one. How about that the world was formed via natural forces over billions of years and not created by an invisible fantasy man who has never shown a single piece of verifiable evidence.

That sounds like another logical explanation. I’m just saying.

Such an advent also seems closer than ever according to any study of what the Bible says about its occurrence, especially in view of the rapid and radical changes the world has undergone in the last few decades alone.

And how about what things other than the Bible say? You’re about to get right on that, correct?

However, the physical universe as it stands now is in a slow state of decay (before it is refortified), a fact that only the Bible knew for thousands of years.

Your evidence that the Bible knew this is irretrievably weak. Do you actually have any evidence that no one else wrote comparable things or is this statement completely made up?

It should be noted that although this column is comparatively lengthy, it is still only a column and barely scratches the surface of the clear proofs that evidence the existence of the Divine and the Divine nature of the Bible, the Torah. The reader is encouraged to study further and to ask questions.

That’s so nice of you! And I’m sure that someday you might write something that doesn’t rely on the bible as your primary source about the veracity of the claims in the bible. Here’s looking forward to that day!

Moral panic surrounds religion - Part 3

2008-07-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

Moral panic surrounds religion!

And now the end of our 3 part series on the moral panic surrounding religion. Enjoy! And if you missed part 1 and part 2, I'd suggest you read them first!

One does not want to deny anyone the consolations of a faith, but it is obvious that the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.

Or it’s just an observed fact that we’ve progressed by building on the accomplishments of our forefathers. Take your pick!

The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not).

Really? I thought it assumed that we have to work really, really hard to make progress.

It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics.

That’s possible. We haven’t tried yet so it’s just a belief so far.

In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society.

Society is a bit slow that way. It might have something to do with all the religious nutjobs holding onto Bronze Age thinking.

Slavery was abolished in much of the world during the 19th century, but it returned on a vast scale in nazism and communism, and still exists today. Torture was prohibited in international conventions after the second world war, only to be adopted as an instrument of policy by the world's pre-eminent liberal regime at the beginning of the 21st century. Wealth has increased, but it has been repeatedly destroyed in wars and revolutions. People live longer and kill one another in larger numbers. Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

Sounds like it’s time for a change then! I can think of one thing that’s been really consistent during the course of man’s recorded history, has produced nothing good that can’t be produced without its overhead and requires people to go out and kill in it’s name.

I’ll even give you a hint – it starts with an R!

Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.

An intellectually rigorous scientist would start by questioning your claim that belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history. So I will. Evidence please!

This is what Nietzsche did when he developed his critique of Christianity in the late 19th century, but almost none of today's secular missionaries have followed his example. One need not be a great fan of Nietzsche to wonder why this is so. The reason, no doubt, is that he did not assume any connection between atheism and liberal values - on the contrary, he viewed liberal values as an offspring of Christianity and condemned them partly for that reason. In contrast, evangelical atheists

Back to describing atheism as a religion again. Atheism is a religion just like bald is a hair color.

have positioned themselves as defenders of liberal freedoms - rarely inquiring where these freedoms have come from, and never allowing that religion may have had a part in creating them.

Among contemporary anti-religious polemicists, only the French writer Michel Onfray has taken Nietzsche as his point of departure. In some ways, Onfray's In Defence of Atheism is superior to anything English-speaking writers have published on the subject. Refreshingly, Onfray recognises that evangelical atheism

That he recognizes “evangelical atheism” is disturbing.

is an unwitting imitation of traditional religion: "Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy." More clearly than his Anglo-Saxon counterparts, Onfray understands the formative influence of religion on secular thinking. Yet he seems not to notice that the liberal values he takes for granted were partly shaped by Christianity and Judaism. The key liberal theorists of toleration are John Locke, who defended religious freedom in explicitly Christian terms, and Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish rationalist who was also a mystic. Yet Onfray has nothing but contempt for the traditions from which these thinkers emerged - particularly Jewish monotheism: "We do not possess an official certificate of birth for worship of one God," he writes. "But the family line is clear: the Jews invented it to endure the coherence, cohesion and existence of their small, threatened people." Here Onfray passes over an important distinction. It may be true that Jews first developed monotheism, but Judaism has never been a missionary faith. In seeking universal conversion, evangelical atheism belongs with Christianity and Islam.

That makes perfect sense! Since atheists send out hordes of missionaries to foreign lands to convert the heathens to their creed and atheistic leaders tell their flocks that they’ll be rewarded after death if they convert everyone to atheism, they’re just like Christianity and Islam!

Except for the missionaries, converting the heathens, getting instructions from atheistic leaders, or any reward after death. But other than that it makes perfect sense!

In today's anxiety about religion, it has been forgotten that most of the faith-based violence of the past century was secular in nature.

Wouldn’t that make that violence not “faith-based”? I’ve really got to get a dictionary for this.

To some extent, this is also true of the current wave of terrorism. Islamism is a patchwork of movements, not all violently jihadist and some strongly opposed to al-Qaida, most of them partly fundamentalist and aiming to recover the lost purity of Islamic traditions, while at the same time taking some of their guiding ideas from radical secular ideology. There is a deal of fashionable talk of Islamo-fascism, and Islamist parties have some features in common with interwar fascist movements, including antisemitism. But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

So the guys who were recruited by religious means, promised a religious reward in a religious afterlife and willingly killed themselves and murdered others specifically for their God…were doing this for secular reasons?

What are you smoking, man?!?

Are you even reading the fruitcake, bizarro world, grasping at straws, insane-o comments coming out of your keyboard now?

The influence of secular revolutionary movements on terrorism extends well beyond Islamists. In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens notes that, long before Hizbullah and al-Qaida, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka pioneered what he rightly calls "the disgusting tactic of suicide murder". He omits to mention that the Tigers are Marxist-Leninists who, while recruiting mainly from the island's Hindu population, reject religion in all its varieties. Tiger suicide bombers do not go to certain death in the belief that they will be rewarded in any postmortem paradise. Nor did the suicide bombers who drove American and French forces out of Lebanon in the 80s, most of whom belonged to organisations of the left such as the Lebanese communist party. These secular terrorists believed they were expediting a historical process from which will come a world better than any that has ever existed. It is a view of things more remote from human realities, and more reliably lethal in its consequences, than most religious myths.

Great theory! Now start demonstrating some evidence to back it up, please.

It is not necessary to believe in any narrative of progress to think liberal societies are worth resolutely defending. No one can doubt that they are superior to the tyranny imposed by the Taliban on Afghanistan, for example.

Backhanded compliments-R-Us.

The issue is one of proportion. Ridden with conflicts and lacking the industrial base of communism and nazism, Islamism is nowhere near a danger of the magnitude of those that were faced down in the 20th century. A greater menace is posed by North Korea, which far surpasses any Islamist regime in its record of repression and clearly does possess some kind of nuclear capability. Evangelical atheists rarely mention it. Hitchens is an exception, but when he describes his visit to the country, it is only to conclude that the regime embodies "a debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship". As in Russia and China, the noble humanist philosophy of Marxist-Leninism is innocent of any responsibility.

And this connects to religion being in a state of moral panic…how?

Writing of the Trotskyite-Luxemburgist sect to which he once belonged, Hitchens confesses sadly: "There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb." He need not worry. His record on Iraq shows he has not lost the will to believe. The effect of the American-led invasion has been to deliver most of the country outside the Kurdish zone into the hands of an Islamist elective theocracy, in which women, gays and religious minorities are more oppressed than at any time in Iraq's history. The idea that Iraq could become a secular democracy - which Hitchens ardently promoted - was possible only as an act of faith.

Yeah, Iraq ditching religion won’t happen anytime soon. What a pity. That reality is squarely on religion’s shoulders and the penchant it has for brainwashing people into believing all sorts of outlandish things.

In The Second Plane, Martin Amis writes: "Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally." Amis is sure religion is a bad thing, and that it has no future in the west.

Sounds good to me!

In the author of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million - a forensic examination of self-delusion in the pro-Soviet western intelligentsia - such confidence is surprising. The intellectuals whose folly Amis dissects turned to communism in some sense as a surrogate for religion, and ended up making excuses for Stalin. Are there really no comparable follies today? Some neocons - such as Tony Blair, who will soon be teaching religion and politics at Yale - combine their belligerent progressivism with religious belief, though of a kind Augustine and Pascal might find hard to recognise. Most are secular utopians, who justify pre-emptive war and excuse torture as leading to a radiant future in which democracy will be adopted universally. Even on the high ground of the west, messianic politics has not lost its dangerous appeal.

Religion has not gone away.

Bummer.

Repressing it is like repressing sex, a self-defeating enterprise.

Which is why no one is repressing it. They’re arguing against it and trying to convince people to abandon it. And that’s working well!

In the 20th century, when it commanded powerful states and mass movements, it helped engender totalitarianism.

Unlike religion which…helped engender totalitarianism by convincing people that Kings ruled by divine right. How exactly did atheism help engender totalitarianism again?

Today, the result is a climate of hysteria.

For religious people. For the atheists, we’re throwing a party celebrating all those best sellers!

Not everything in religion is precious or deserving of reverence.

Correct! Did you mean to say that nothing in religion is precious or deserving in reverence? That would be true, too!

There is an inheritance of anthropocentrism, the ugly fantasy that the Earth exists to serve humans, which most secular humanists share.

Isn’t it great when someone claims that his opposition believes something and then knocks down that something? I think there’s even a debating term for it!

There is the claim of religious authorities, also made by atheist regimes, to decide how people can express their sexuality, control their fertility and end their lives, which should be rejected categorically. Nobody should be allowed to curtail freedom in these ways, and no religion has the right to break the peace.

Right-o! We’re on the same page here!

The attempt to eradicate religion, however, only leads to it reappearing in grotesque and degraded forms.

To attempt to force the eradication of religion would do so. That’s why no one is doing that. It would be silly!

A credulous belief in world revolution, universal democracy or the occult powers of mobile phones is more offensive to reason than the mysteries of religion, and less likely to survive in years to come.

Huh? You lost me totally there.

Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote of believers being left bereft as the tide of faith ebbs away. Today secular faith is ebbing, and it is the apostles of unbelief who are left stranded on the beach.

This might be true…if “secular faith” had any meaning whatsoever. Unfortunately for your arguments, but as a boon to clear thinking people everywhere, it means as much as “evangelical atheist”.

Thanks for sticking around, everyone, to the end of this three part series on moral panic! It's been fun!

Moral panic surrounds religion - Part 2

2008-07-09T20:59:00.000-07:00

Moral panic surrounds religion!

Here's part 2! To catch up on what this is all about, check out part 1 from yesterday!

The growth of knowledge is a fact only postmodern relativists deny. Science is the best tool we have for forming reliable beliefs about the world, but it does not differ from religion by revealing a bare truth that religions veil in dreams. Both science and religion are systems of symbols that serve human needs - in the case of science, for prediction and control. Religions have served many purposes, but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than explanation.

That’s weird. I’d have put “control” on the list of things that religion does really, really, really, really, really, REALLY well.

A great deal of modern thought consists of secular myths - hollowed-out religious narratives translated into pseudo-science.

It does? Really? I assume you’ll be backing up this whopper soon with some evidence.

Dennett's notion that new communications technologies will fundamentally alter the way human beings think is just such a myth.

Or perhaps you won’t.

In The God Delusion,

And off we go onto another tangent! Good thing I bought a program! I’d be lost without it.

Dawkins attempts to explain the appeal of religion in terms of the theory of memes, vaguely defined conceptual units that compete with one another in a parody of natural selection. He recognises that, because humans have a universal tendency to religious belief, it must have had some evolutionary advantage, but today, he argues, it is perpetuated mainly through bad education.

“Bad education” being the practice of indoctrinating religion into children who have no defenses against it, for those of you who haven’t read the book.

From a Darwinian standpoint, the crucial role Dawkins gives to education is puzzling. Human biology has not changed greatly over recorded history,

Recorded history: 6,000 years

Evolution of primates: 85,000,000 years

and if religion is hardwired in the species, it is difficult to see how a different kind of education could alter this.

We could stop brainwashing children. That might change things a little bit.

Yet Dawkins seems convinced that if it were not inculcated in schools and families, religion would die out. This is a view that has more in common with a certain type of fundamentalist theology than with Darwinian theory, and I cannot help being reminded of the evangelical Christian who assured me that children reared in a chaste environment would grow up without illicit sexual impulses.

I suggest that you call his bluff. Stop your church from teaching religion to the kids and watch them all flock to religion anyway. That’ll show Dawkins to be completely wrong!

Dawkins's "memetic theory of religion" is a classic example of the nonsense that is spawned when Darwinian thinking is applied outside its proper sphere. Along with Dennett, who also holds to a version of the theory, Dawkins maintains that religious ideas survive because they would be able to survive in any "meme pool", or else because they are part of a "memeplex" that includes similar memes, such as the idea that, if you die as a martyr, you will enjoy 72 virgins. Unfortunately, the theory of memes is science only in the sense that Intelligent Design is science. Strictly speaking, it is not even a theory. Talk of memes is just the latest in a succession of ill-judged Darwinian metaphors.

Bad debate style checklist - sound off!

Unexplained use of quotation marks to minimize the opposition – check

Name calling using words like nonsense, balderdash, ridiculous, etc. – check

Claims of misapplication of a theory – check

Comparison to something that is complete pseudoscience, in this case Intelligent Design – check

Vague use of “Darwinian” and an insult – check

Bravo! Well done!

Dawkins compares religion to a virus: religious ideas are memes that infect vulnerable minds, especially those of children.

It is tragic that so many people choose to brainwash those that have no chance of defending themselves against superstitious nonsense.

Biological metaphors may have their uses - the minds of evangelical atheists seem particularly prone to infection by religious memes, for example.

And the reasoning behind this statement is what, exactly?

At the same time, analogies of this kind are fraught with peril. Dawkins makes much of the oppression perpetrated by religion, which is real enough.

Thank you for admitting it! We’re getting somewhere! Yay!

He gives less attention to the fact that some of the worst atrocities of modern times were committed by regimes that claimed scientific sanction for their crimes. Nazi "scientific racism" and Soviet "dialectical materialism" reduced the unfathomable complexity of human lives to the deadly simplicity of a scientific formula. In each case, the science was bogus, but it was accepted as genuine at the time, and not only in the regimes in question. Science is as liable to be used for inhumane purposes as any other human institution. Indeed, given the enormous authority science enjoys, the risk of it being used in this way is greater.

Bad people can use science – a good thing – in an evil way. Yep, that’s right. Here’s another insight: Bad people can use religion – at best a neutral thing – in an evil way as well. What was the point here?

Contemporary opponents of religion display a marked lack of interest in the historical record of atheist regimes.

Perhaps stemming from the fact that no regime has slaughtered people in the name of atheism unlike the constant stream of leaders and common zealots who are more than happy to do exactly that in the name of religion.

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, the American writer Sam Harris argues that religion has been the chief source of violence and oppression in history. He recognises that secular despots such as Stalin and Mao inflicted terror on a grand scale, but maintains the oppression they practised had nothing to do with their ideology of "scientific atheism" - what was wrong with their regimes was that they were tyrannies.

Yep. Nothing in atheism – which is only the lack of believing in God and nothing else – gave any despot the idea that he should go kill, maim, or slaughter people. It’s really a shame that the same cannot be said about religion. The world would be a better place!

But might there not be a connection between the attempt to eradicate religion and the loss of freedom?

Nope. People having the freedom to believe what they want without other people trying to kill them for those beliefs just adds to everyone’s freedom.

It is unlikely that Mao, who launched his assault on the people and culture of Tibet with the slogan "Religion is poison", would have agreed that his atheist world-view had no bearing on his policies. It is true he was worshipped as a semi-divine figure - as Stalin was in the Soviet Union. But in developing these cults, communist Russia and China were not backsliding from atheism. They were demonstrating what happens when atheism becomes a political project. The invariable result is an ersatz religion that can only be maintained by tyrannical means.

And the lesson today, boys and girls, is that we should not have our government force our religious beliefs – or lack thereof – upon us. That’s what you’re getting to, right? Of course it is.

Something like this occurred in Nazi Germany. Dawkins dismisses any suggestion that the crimes of the Nazis could be linked with atheism. "What matters," he declares in The God Delusion, "is not whether Hitler and Stalin were atheists, but whether atheism systematically influences people to do bad things. There is not the smallest evidence that it does."

Perfectly reasonable thinking there. Since Atheism doesn’t tell us to go kill anyone – unlike every major religion on the planet – it’s not responsible for someone else using it to go kill people. Seems pretty straightforward to me. I’m sure you agree.

This is simple-minded reasoning.

I guess not.

Always a tremendous booster of science, Hitler was much impressed by vulgarised Darwinism and by theories of eugenics that had developed from Enlightenment philosophies of materialism. He used Christian antisemitic demonology in his persecution of Jews, and the churches collaborated with him to a horrifying degree. But it was the Nazi belief in race as a scientific category that opened the way to a crime without parallel in history. Hitler's world-view was that of many semi-literate people in interwar Europe, a hotchpotch of counterfeit science and animus towards religion. There can be no reasonable doubt that this was a type of atheism, or that it helped make Nazi crimes possible.

A madman using religious and scientific propaganda to kill millions of people is the fault of…atheism. Congratulations! That’s tortured logic at its finest!

Nowadays most atheists are avowed liberals. What they want - so they will tell you - is not an atheist regime, but a secular state in which religion has no role. They clearly believe that, in a state of this kind, religion will tend to decline. But America's secular constitution has not ensured a secular politics. Christian fundamentalism is more powerful in the US than in any other country, while it has very little influence in Britain, which has an established church. Contemporary critics of religion go much further than demanding disestablishment.

None of this will work until people stop wanting to have religions. But that does seem like the trend, doesn’t it?

It is clear that he wants to eliminate all traces of religion from public institutions. Awkwardly, many of the concepts he deploys - including the idea of religion itself - have been shaped by monotheism. Lying behind secular fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.

Huh? I thought we were talking about “most atheists”. Who is “he”? Did I miss an antecedent?

AC Grayling provides an example of the persistence of religious categories in secular thinking in his Towards the Light: The Story of the Struggles for Liberty and Rights That Made the Modern West. As the title indicates, Grayling's book is a type of sermon.

Really, man, you’re never going to understand people who are not religious if you insist on using religious terms to describe them.

Its aim is to reaffirm what he calls "a Whig view of the history of the modern west", the core of which is that "the west displays progress". The Whigs were pious Christians, who believed divine providence arranged history to culminate in English institutions, and Grayling too believes history is "moving in the right direction". No doubt there have been setbacks - he mentions nazism and communism in passing, devoting a few sentences to them. But these disasters were peripheral. They do not reflect on the central tradition of the modern west, which has always been devoted to liberty, and which - Grayling asserts - is inherently antagonistic to religion. "The history of liberty," he writes, "is another chapter - and perhaps the most important of all - in the great quarrel between religion and secularism." The possibility that radical versions of secular thinking may have contributed to the development of nazism and communism is not mentioned. More even than the 18th-century Whigs, who were shaken by French Terror, Grayling has no doubt as to the direction of history.

But the belief that history is a directional process is as faith-based as anything in the Christian catechism.

Off you go again with sucking non-religious people into your rat hole. Really, man, think outside of the box here

Secular thinkers such as Grayling reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal - a civilisation based on science that will eventually encompass the entire species.

It beats believing in fantasy creatures that never, ever show up. But we’re open to other options as long as they’re consistent with the observed facts. Try us out!

In pre-Christian Europe, human life was understood as a series of cycles; history was seen as tragic or comic rather than redemptive. With the arrival of Christianity, it came to be believed that history had a predetermined goal, which was human salvation. Though they suppress their religious content, secular humanists continue to cling to similar beliefs.

They do?!? Would you care to back this claim up with some facts?

We’ve got time. No rush. But please do go get some evidence for this.

I'll give you until tomorrow for part 3!

Moral panic surrounds religion - Part 1

2008-07-08T06:07:00.000-07:00

Moral panic surrounds religion!

Yay! And it's not just me saying this, it's John Gray saying so!

This article was so long and has so much good stuff that I've broken it up into 3 parts. Today: Part 1!

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils.

I’ve got an idea for these religions. Quit giving people reasons to be extremely crappy to other people all because someone once heard voices in his head.

Rather, there are some great guidelines that just about every religion claims to follow. Follow those and be sanguine when others follow your footsteps.

As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands.

Wow! That sounds like a lot of demand for those types of books.

For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future.

It’ll have a future if it produces something that helps people. Lots of religions have done lots of good works, but it turns out that those good works can be done just as well – if not better – without the superstition attached. Food production, healing, education, they all work better when we devise better ways to make and distribute food, study medicine, and open minds to reach out for new and fresh conclusions.

Praying for bread, laying on hands, and telling kids that the answer is “Godidit” doesn’t have quite as good of a track record.

The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

It might have something to do with their books holding to internally consistent truths. I'm just saying.

The abrupt shift in the perception of religion is only partly explained by terrorism. The 9/11 hijackers saw themselves as martyrs in a religious tradition, and western opinion has accepted their self-image. And there are some who view the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a danger comparable with the worst that were faced by liberal societies in the 20th century.

Amazing how we all accepted the image that their religion brainwashed into them and that they murdered and died to uphold.

We’re all funny that way!

For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day.

I’m sure that you’ll clearly show where they’re all wrong.

The urgency with which they produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase.

Or perhaps you’re going for showing how religion got to the sad state that it has found itself?

In the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.

So religion isn’t in a sad state? I’m losing the thrust of this argument here. Throw me a freaking bone, please!

It is true that religion has declined sharply in a number of countries (Ireland is a recent example) and has not shaped everyday life for most people in Britain for many years. Much of Europe is clearly post-Christian.

So religion is in a sad state compared to the utter dominance it had over human affairs previously. Got it.

However, there is nothing that suggests the move away from religion is irreversible, or that it is potentially universal. The US is no more secular today than it was 150 years ago, when De Tocqueville was amazed and baffled by its all-pervading religiosity.

Nothing suggests that the move away is irreversible? How about Occam’s Razor and the lack of any need to have a god to explain anything? That seems like it kind of suggests that a move away from religion is irreversible.

The secular era was in any case partly illusory.

So religion is in moral panic and books about atheism being bestsellers are just illusions? What is the point of this article then? Color me confused here.

The mass political movements of the 20th century were vehicles for myths inherited from religion,

It’s nice when a religious person uses the word myth to describe his religion’s stories. It saves the rest of us time and effort.

and it is no accident that religion is reviving now that these movements have collapsed.

The movements that involve those best selling books, right? Those are the ones that have already collapsed?

The current hostility to religion is a reaction against this turnabout. Secularisation is in retreat,

But didn’t you start off this article saying…?

and the result is the appearance of an evangelical type of atheism not seen since Victorian times.

Evangelical atheism is bad. Got it. An atheist being like a religious person is bad. We agree! Yay!

As in the past, this is a type of atheism that mirrors the faith it rejects. Philip Pullman's Northern Lights - a subtly allusive, multilayered allegory, recently adapted into a Hollywood blockbuster, The Golden Compass - is a good example. Pullman's parable concerns far more than the dangers of authoritarianism. The issues it raises are essentially religious, and it is deeply indebted to the faith it attacks. Pullman has stated that his atheism was formed in the Anglican tradition, and there are many echoes of Milton and Blake in his work. His largest debt to this tradition is the notion of free will. The central thread of the story is the assertion of free will against faith. The young heroine Lyra Belacqua sets out to thwart the Magisterium - Pullman's metaphor for Christianity - because it aims to deprive humans of their ability to choose their own course in life, which she believes would destroy what is most human in them. But the idea of free will that informs liberal notions of personal autonomy is biblical in origin (think of the Genesis story). The belief that exercising free will is part of being human is a legacy of faith, and like most varieties of atheism today, Pullman's is a derivative of Christianity.

And has grossed $372 million worldwide!

Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody.

Nah, they just don’t see a need for imaginary friends to be taken seriously by people over, say, the age of six.

To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind.

Which is good, since it isn’t.

It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion.

Yep! The hard part is that religious people tend to get all verklempt about making fun of people who believe in imaginary friends, fantasy stories, and drug induced visions supplanting measurable, testable results. It makes them not nearly as fun at parties!

It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.

Either that or you have a very low bar for what constitutes demonizing religion. We really should publish a handbook on what atheists can and cannot say around people who believe in Bronze Age mysticism. It would help a lot!

A curious feature of this kind of atheism is that some of its most fervent missionaries are philosophers.

A curious feature of this article is that you keep referring to people who have no religion at all in religious terms.

Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon claims to sketch a general theory of religion. In fact, it is mostly a polemic against American Christianity. This parochial focus is reflected in Dennett's view of religion, which for him means the belief that some kind of supernatural agency (whose approval believers seek) is needed to explain the way things are in the world. For Dennett, religions are efforts at doing something science does better - they are rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, someday, someone is going to refer to it as a duck. People are wacky that way!

"The proposition that God exists," he writes severely, "is not even a theory."

It’s a theory all right. It’s a bad one that has zero evidence to support it despite millennia of people trying desperately to gather such evidence. So maybe he’s just saying that it’s not a scientific theory. There’s a small issue of that word getting used differently by different people – especially scientists who are really specific about that particular term and non-scientists who regularly butcher it.

But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories.

Very true! If they were we’d have thrown them out centuries ago.

The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.

This is a neat paragraph! Religious writers really can write well when they stick to talking about religion. Bravo!

The notion that religion is a primitive version of science was popularised in the late 19th century in JG Frazer's survey of the myths of primitive peoples, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.

People might also have gotten the idea that religion gave answers when, I don’t know, it started giving answers. Despite not even understanding the questions. I’m just saying.

For Frazer, religion and magical thinking were closely linked. Rooted in fear and ignorance, they were vestiges of human infancy that would disappear with the advance of knowledge. Dennett's atheism is not much more than a revamped version of Frazer's positivism. The positivists believed that with the development of transport and communication - in their day, canals and the telegraph - irrational thinking would wither way, along with the religions of the past. Despite the history of the past century, Dennett believes much the same. In an interview that appears on the website of the Edge Foundation (edge.org) under the title "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion", he predicts that "in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today". He is confident that this will come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television)". The philosopher has evidently not reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban, or the emergence of a virtual al-Qaida on the web.

I’m thinking that it has more to do with the anonymity of the internet allowing people to express their real beliefs freely without fear of direct reprisals and discovering that there are many, many other people out there who also don’t believe in imaginary friends.

That's it for part 1! Stay tuned for part 2 coming up tomorrow!

Be careful out there

2008-07-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

Let me take a quick break from the normal religious inanities to another way that religion gets used - this time against the faithful. The following chain letter appeared in my mailbox the other day.

DONATION FOR THE LORD
From: Mrs. Monica Tema

PLEASE ENDEAVOUR TO USE IT FOR THE CHILDREN OF GOD.

The only place anyone can get my email address is from my blog, my writings in other forums, and from someone who has seen either of the two. I think it's really safe to say that I am not in the set of "Children of God"!

I am the above name person from Sierra-Leone.

Sure you are.

I am married to Dr Ebenezer Tema who worked with Sierra Leonian Embassy in South Africa for nine years before he died in the year 2001.

Right. Uh huh.

We were married for eleven years without a child.

Aww...that would be sad if it were true.

He died after a brief illness that lasted for only four days. Before his death we were both born again Christians and we lived happilly. Since his death, I decided not to re-marry.

When my late husband was alive he secured $15Million (Fifteen Million U.S. Dollars) with financial institution here in Cote D'Ivoire. Presently, this money is still with the financial institution.

I suggest investing. Even a simple CD at 2% would produce a $300,000 income for you on $15,000,000. That's more than enough for anyone to live comfortably.

Recently, my Doctor told me that from all the test conducted on my health, I am not going to last long, expecially, due to my cancer and stroke. But what disturbs me most now is stroke.

Quick death worries you more than slow, painful, lingering death? Okay. I'd choose differently, but that's me.

Having known my condition, I decided to donate this fund to churches or Christian individual that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct. I want a church or individual that will use this money to fund churches, Orphanages and Widows. Also, the propagation of the work of God, building and maintaining the house of God through this money, is very important.

That would be why you sent this offer to a man who publishes commentary every day about how insane religions are. Got it!

The Bible made us to understand that Blessed is the hand that giveth. I took this decision because I don't have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not Christians.

Quick hint, because I'm sure that my previous writings haven't been clear on this point: I'm not a christian either.

I don't want my husband's hard earned money to be misused by unbelievers, for their own selfish interest and in an ungodly manner.

So you mailed me for what reason again?

I am not afraid of death hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the bossom of the Lord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says that the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace.

Awwww, that would be so sweet again...if it were true.

I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health,

Now we get down to the brass tax of the scam. Don't call, because that would require a sick woman to talk on the phone. Every scam has ways of keeping the mark in a box and not checking the facts for himself. This is one.

and because of the presence of my husband's relatives around me sometimes. I don't want them to know about this development, but I know that With God all things are possible.

As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of the Financial institution in Ivory coast. I will also give you all information regarding the deposit of this money. I will also issue you a letter of authority that will empower you as the original- beneficiary of this fund.

And there won't be and delays, red tape, or issues to overcome! Honest!

Well, as honest as the rest of this tripe.

I want you and your church to always pray for me because God work in misterious ways. My happiness is that I lived a life of a worthy Christian. Who ever that wants to serve the Lord must serve him in spirit and truth. Please always be prayerful all through your life.

Any delay in your reply will give me room in sourcing for a church or christian individual for this same purpose. Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I stated herein. Hoping to hear from you soon.

Remain blessed in the name of the Lord.

Yours in Christ,
Mrs Monica Tema

I spend an inordinate amount of time laughing and poking fun at religious people, but for this moment I'm on your side, religious folks.

The above scam is directly preying on your religious beliefs. They are targeting you with flowery words of praise and religious homage. But the bottom line is that they'll want to either have you pay "fees to get past a bit of red tape" or access to your bank account so it can be the final destination of their check kiting scheme and you're stuck with the final bill.

Never, ever respond to these evil scumbags. Remember, they sent this garbage to me. My lack of Christian beliefs are published every day and are exceeded only - perhaps - by a Dawkins or a Harris.

I do want people to recognize what the fables of religion can do for you (make you feel warm and fuzzy) and what they should not do (be used to explain the real world or set public policy). But what I do not want to see is anyone scammed. Unfortunately the state of mind that the religious are put into make them very, very vulnerable to this indeed.

Be careful out there.

Who gets to define atheism?

2008-07-06T09:59:00.000-07:00

It seems pretty obvious: atheists. Outside of theists, is there any other group out there that feels the right to define what their opposition believes? That really seems crazy.

Undeterred, our good and noble friends at Apologetics are busy defining atheism. Read on!

Presumption of Atheism or Agnosticism?

In some of the comments, a theme keeps showing up:

Wildly improbable claims from religious nutcases?

Theism (especially the Christian variety) seems guilty until proven innocent; while atheism seems innocent until proven guilty.

Oh. Okay, that too.

Why is this?

Because one makes wildly improbable claims only supported by general ignorance and weird, psudo-hippie posturing about the wonder of the world and the beauty of a sunset. The other one is exactly a lack of belief in a god or gods.

Lack of belief is something we’re all born with.

This is known as the “presumption of atheism.”

Or common sense. Or logic. Whichever.

But should Atheism be the default setting?

Because the burden of proof is always on the side that is making a claim.

One of the leading Philosophers of Religion of our day, William Lane Craig, shares why it should not be:

I can’t wait!

“….another philosophical relic is the much-vaunted presumption of atheism. At face value, this is the claim that in the absence of evidence for the existence of God, we should presume that God does not exist.

Very reasonable.

Atheism is a sort of default position,

Correct

and the theist bears a special burden of proof with regard to his belief that God exists.

Right again!

So understood, such an alleged presumption seems to conflate atheism with agnosticism.

You’re not about to swap around some definitions on us, are you?

For the assertion that “God does not exist” is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that “God exists,”

Ah, rats! And here we were having such a pleasant, polite conversation and you go an muck it up with a blatant misrepresentation of what an atheist claims.

*sigh*

Let’s say it together: Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. No atheist has to disprove God exists because he’s not the one claiming that God exists in the first place. The burden of proof is on the claimant. Always.

Great! Now that we have that out of the way, we can go on with your argument. I’m sure you have many more brilliant points to make on this subject and not just a tired old falsification of what your opposition says.

and therefore the former requires justification just as the latter does. It is the agnostic who makes no knowledge claim at all with respect to God’s existence, confessing that he does not know whether God exists or does not exist, and so who requires no justification. (I speak here only of a “soft” agnosticism, which is really just a confession of ignorance, rather than of a “hard” agnosticism, which claims that it cannot be known whether or not God exists; such a positive assertion would, indeed, require justification.) If anything, then, one should speak at most of a presumption of agnosticism.”

Or not. Oh well. Sucks to be you.

If there is a default setting, it is agnosticism, not atheism. In that case, the atheist has just as much explaining to do as the theist.

Or slightly less since we can throw out this pathetic strawman and you now have to explain this article! Have fun with that!

Morals!

2008-07-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

Our friends over at Powells bring us this interesting take on morality.

There is nothing inherently moral about being a believer or a nonbeliever.

Good start! This part is true.

There are many people of great moral probity and courage who seek meaning outside of formal religious structures,

Thanks for noticing!

who reject religious language and religious ritual and define themselves as atheists.

Is there a difference between “defining themselves as atheists” and “are atheists”? If there’s no difference, the former seems like a really wordy way to say it.

There are also many religious figures that in the name of one god or another sanctify intolerance, repression, and violence.

All of them - especially the intolerance and repression. Lots dip into the well of violence, too!

I Don't Believe in Atheists is not an attack on atheists so much as it is an attack on the utopian belief systems peddled by most self-proclaimed atheists,

Again with the “self-proclaimed” and “defining themselves”. I’m starting to think that you find a difference that I was talking about earlier. That would be sad and pathetic.

belief systems that are shared by the Christian fundamentalists these atheists excoriate.

Okay! Got it. Your thesis is Atheists and Christian Fundamentalists are alike! Lets see the evidence!

The New Atheist authors, from Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris to Daniel Dennett to Christopher Hitchens, embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic, and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists.

Restating the thesis. Great! We might have forgotten in the intervening zero sentences.

They too propose a route to collective salvation.

They do?!? Did you just make this up or did you graduate from the Inigo Montoya school of debating?

They too believe in the moral advancement of the human species, this time through science and reason.

Those fiends!

The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the idea that we are moving toward collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and of the Enlightenment.

Yep! Salvation is all the rage from the Enlightenment! The philosopher Immanuel Kant clearly wrote in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” that the Enlightenment is the search for salvation!

Of course, he might have obscured it a little bit by talking about free thinking, using one’s own intellect, and not being dependent on external authority, but we all know what he was really talking about! Salvation!

Those who believe in the possibility of this perfection often call for the silencing or eradication of human beings who are defined by them as impediments to human progress.

Yep! Happens all the time. Except that it only happens in poorly written religious nutcase articles.

They turn their particular good into a universal good.

Which is why, like the Christian armies, there have been so many armies that have marched because of the will of the god those soldiers don’t believe in.

They are blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil. They soon commit evil not for evil's sake but to make a better world. And they do this in the name of religion or science or reason.

Absolutely. Not believing in someone else’s imaginary friend is pure, unadulterated evil.

These New Atheists attack a form of religious belief many of us hate.

Woot!

I wrote a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I am no friend of Christian radicals.

Good show!

The New Atheists and I dislike the same people. We do not dislike them for the same reason. This is not a small difference.

Do tell.

These atheists share a naïve belief with these fundamentalists in our innate goodness and decency.

So it’s not the consequences of actions and the long term effects thereof that those atheists pay attention to, unlike what those lying dogs keep telling us. Got it.

They, like all religious fundamentalists,

Not having a religion makes someone religious? Or are you using “religious” as an epithet?

If so, I’m confused – is being religious a good thing or not? I’d kind of like you to keep your story straight. It’s really hard to follow if you don’t.

fail to grasp the dark reality of human nature, our own capacity for evil, and the morally neutral universe we inhabit.

But I thought that God created the universe and saw that it was good! Now it’s morally neutral? I’m so confused.

There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally.

New thesis time! It’s a little bit bad form to start a new thesis in the middle of your paper on another thesis entirely, by the way. I’d suggest that you should start this one from scratch and develop it separately.

We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression, and economic exploitation and to accelerate environmental degradation as well as to nurture and sustain life. There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving toward a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere.

Bummer. I’d be even more bummed out if I didn’t remember that you can’t figure out if being religious is good or evil or if the universe is neutral or good.

Most of these atheists, like the Christian fundamentalists, support the imperialist projects and preemptive wars of the United States as a necessity. They see the war in Iraq and the greater conflict in the Middle East as an attack on irrational religion and a fight for the civilizing values of western culture.

Wow. Someday, I’d like to see what it’s like to hang around the atheists you’ve been hanging around. Most of the ones I know are against lying to the country about made up reasons to attack sovereign nations.

They too divide the world into superior and inferior races, those who are enlightened by reason and knowledge and those who are governed by irrational and dangerous religious beliefs. Hitchens and Harris — who asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world — describe the Muslim world, where I spent seven years, most of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, in language that is as racist, crude, and intolerant as that used by Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell. These authors are as culturally, historically, and linguistically illiterate as Christian fundamentalists, reducing one-fifth of the world's population to their cartoonish visions of what it means to be a Muslim. They are a secular version of the religious right.

Unlike your cartoonish version of atheistic beliefs. That one’s spot on, of course!

God needs money!

2008-07-04T10:21:00.000-07:00

As the late, great George Carlin said: God needs money. Or at least that's what every church tells us, oddly enough. You'd think that anything God would need, he'd be able to provide himself, but apparently that's not the case. For proof of this, we turn to John Hagee's FAQ section

Q. I thought tithing was an Old Testament principle. Is it something Christians are supposed to practice? Will it guarantee me financial prosperity?

A. Giving to the

Church

Lord

God needs money?!?

is an important principle in

Making the church rich

both the Old and New Testaments, and obedience in tithing-which is giving one-tenth of your income-is a good place to start.

I’m sure it’s good for someone.

It is God who gives us the power to get wealth (Deut. 8:18), and He expects us to be good stewards of the resources He has placed in our hands.

Yep! Make sure that you’re getting your money’s worth. It is, after all, your money.

Jesus did not do away with tithing.

Certainly not! That would be silly.

On one occasion He lambasted the Pharisees and teachers of the law for their legalistic methods of giving. They scrupulously tithed 10 percent of even tiny spices like mint and dill while neglecting "the more important matters of the law-justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter," Jesus told them, "without neglecting the former" (Matt. 23:23 NIV).
Money was an important part of Jesus' teaching.

Very much so! Mr. Christ is helping me set up an IRA and is working on finding the right no load Mutual Fund now. He’s a diva at it!

Of the 38 parables recorded in Scripture, 16 of them deal with money or possessions and how to manage them. The Lord advised us to invest our "treasures" in God's work, "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matt. 6:21).
Investing in God's kingdom pays great dividends! If we give sparingly, we will reap sparingly, the Bible says; but if we sow generously, we will reap God's abundance (2 Cor. 9:6). God's word promises that if we're faithful to "bring all the tithes into the storehouse" [the church], He will pour out a blessing we can scarcely contain. On the other hand, if we don't tithe, we are robbing God. (Mal. 3:8-10)

How exactly do you steal from an omnipotent being? And what does he need money for again?

While God wants to prosper us,

“God wants to prosper us” - Huh?!? What does this even mean? It looks like English words, but I’m really not sure how to prosper someone.

true prosperity is not measured solely in dollars and cents.

Which is really, really important since they’re not giving you anything for that 10% of all your wealth that you’re forking over.

God has promised to meet all our needs (Phil. 4:19);

Except when He kills you

He has not promised to fund all our greeds.

Like housing, heat, food, those kinds of greedy things.

Your giving is a reflection of your priorities.

Horribly, terribly, mindmeltingly true.

When the things of God become your priority, your checkbook will prove it.

Very true again!

"So let each one give as he purposes in his heart, not grudgingly or of necessity; for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Cor. 9:6-7).

But keep the receipt for your taxes.

Conservapedia on starlight

2008-07-03T09:04:00.000-07:00

Eight days ago, we had a guest replier here on the Rational Reply and I mentioned a few things about the insanity that is Conservapedia. What is Conservapedia? We'll no amount of simple introduction of mine will suffice to truly explain the insanity that goes on there, but I'll give it a shot.

Imagine an encyclopedia where the actual stated goal is to be biased. Imagine an encyclopedia where all articles are filtered through one person. If he says that article is good, it is. If he says that article is bad, it is. Imagine an encyclopedia where people are banned regularly for the act of talking about the articles they are writing.

That can't possibly work, can it? Of course not. It's a flaming train wreck of site, a testimony to religious stupidity, and absolutely hilarious to read!

Today, we delve into one of their works - the Starlight Problem!

What is the Starlight Problem? Well, it's that pesky detail that Albert Einstein brought to our attention: the speed of light is a constant. Since we can measure that speed and we can measure the distance to various stars in the cosmos and we find that those things are more than 6,000 light years from Earth, anyone who believes that the Earth is only 6,000 years old has a rather large problem on his hands. Rational people, on the other hand, don't have a problem at all.

Here is, and remember I'm not making this one up, Conservapedia's article addressing this "problem".

Starlight problem

The starlight problem, or starlight travel-time problem is an objection against the young-Earth creationist argument that the universe is only 6,000 years old, in which the age of the universe is based primarily on the Genesis narrative. The problem is that if the universe is only 6,000 years old, one has to explain how light from stars more than 6,000 light years from Earth has reached us in the time available.

This so feels like the Spanish Inquisition Monty Python skit!

* cheesy inquisitor voice *
The problem is how light reached us in only 6,000 years...and measuring the age of the universe from a religious book!

The problems are how light reached us in only 6,000 years, measuring the age of the universe from a religious book, and choosing the bible for that book!

The several problems are...how light reached us in only 6,000 years, measuring the age of the universe from a religious book, choosing the bible for that book, and not checking the accuracy of that book against the rest of the universe!

Amongst these issues are such diverse problems as how light reached us in only 6,000 years, measuring the age of the universe from a religious book, choosing the bible for that book, not checking the accuracy of that book against the rest of the universe, and actively making up bizzaro world theories that kinda, sorta fit in with that book!

Despite this frequently being put as an argument against young-Earth creationism, light travel time is also a problem for the Big Bang theory.

There's stuff we don't know about the Big Bang theory?!? That's it! Young Earth Creationism must be completely correct!

Creationists have proposed a number of solutions. The currently-favoured solutions involve time dilation, in which time passed slower on Earth than in other parts of the universe.

Okay! That makes perfect sense! It's not the ancient goat herders that were wrong, it's that time itself has been altered! It's all clear now.

The size of the universe

Big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it really is.

Using parallax calculations, the Milky Way galaxy alone can be directly observed to have a diameter of approximately 80-100,000 light years. Calculations based on the observed brightness of supernovae of known energy output can determine the distance to more distant objects. The most distant object known is a star cluster approximately thirteen billion light-years away from Earth, observed by the Hubble Telescope using gravitational lensing.

Although creationists have at times disputed the size of the universe, virtually none propose that it is less than 12,000 light years across.

That's a refreshing breath of sanity scented air!

Suggested solutions to the problem

That the book is wrong? Nah! What was I thinking?!?

Several solutions have been proposed by creationists to explain how a young universe may be reconciled with these observations.

* pulls up a chair *

* gets some Doritos *

Oh boy! I can't wait to hear this!

They also point out that there is a logical fallacy in the argument, as the observation that many stars are millions of light years away is one of distance, not time. No matter how reasonable, it is a deduction, not an observation, that the starlight from stars millions of light years away would have required millions of years to reach Earth.

All except for that pesky "speed of light in a vacuum is a constant" thing. Curse you, Albert!

Light created in transit

Some creationists have proposed that the light we see from stars more than 6,000 light years away was not emitted by those stars, but was created 'in transit' by God.

Godidit! But did he use His Noodly Appendage?

However, most creationists reject this explanation,

Because they're not completely stupid.

as the light contains images of events that would therefore never have actually happened, including supernovae, meaning that we are seeing an image of a star exploding, even though the star never existed. This would make the creator a deceiver.

And He would never invite us to the really good parties ever again. He's kind of vicious that way with a really, really, really long memory for those kinds of slights.

Moon-Spencer theory

Some creationists promoted an idea by Parry Moon and Domina Spencer that light somehow takes a shortcut through "Riemannian Space", taking no more than 15 years to reach Earth from the outer limits of the universe. However, this idea never really caught on and appears to no longer have adherents.

And is therefore included in this article for what reason?

Decrease in the speed of light

Creationist Barry Setterfield has proposed that the speed of light was faster in the past. This idea initially found wide acceptance by creationists, but is now widely rejected, although some still hold to the idea.

And, of course, an encyclopedia is the place to postulate widely discredited ideas.

One criticism of it by anticreationists

What is an anticreationist exactly? Is that anyone who disputes any creationist idea? Or is it a code word for evolutionist? Or perhaps a code word for scientist?

was that if the speed of light had changed, we should see the difference in the Fine Structure Constant as measured by nearby stars versus distant stars, but this was not observed. Yet in 1999, John Webb, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues reported astronomical observations suggesting that the value of the fine-structure constant may indeed have changed. They subsequently published this in Physical Review Letters. However, although this showed that mainstream scientists are prepared to entertain the idea of a change in the speed of light when it suits them, the size of the change did not provide specific support for Setterfield's idea.

In addition, there were other problems with the theory, leading most creationists to drop the idea, although some credit it with stimulating further research.

Which leaves us 0 for 4 with 4 strikeouts so far with the theories! And we're not saying that the scientists have rejected these ideas, it's the creationists that are saying they don't work!

Not to point out the breathtakingly obvious again, but if no one believes these theories - why are they in an alleged encyclopedia?

* knock knock knock *

UPS delivery man, sir!

* Front door opens *

Yes?

I have a letter for you from a Brother William of Ockham

Thank you!

* Opens the letter *

"Jim, thanks for taking the time to listen to the advice of a friar who's been dead for 660 years! The answer to your question is really, really simple. It's not really an encyclopedia.

Have fun watching the fireworks show tomorrow!

Brother Bill"

You know that guy is so helpful sometimes! He rocks!

Humphreys' model

In 1994 Dr. Russell Humphreys proposed a new cosmology that includes a bounded universe with a center and an edge, that God had created 6,000 years ago as a much smaller body than today, then stretched it out, making it much larger. In Humphreys' model, because the universe has a center and an edge (unlike the unbounded model of the Big Bang universe), the center of the universe is also the center of a gravity well, meaning that gravity is stronger at the center of the universe than at the edge.

As gravity can affect the rate at which time passes, he calculated that while the six days of creation week were passing on Earth, billions of years' of time was passing at the edge of the universe. According to this idea, the Biblical references to time are according to an observer (real or imaginary) on Earth, so ages are given in "Earth time".

This model receives cautious but wide support among creationists.

By jove, this one is just wacko enough to confuse people who a) want to believe him and b) aren't actually scientists! Woot!

Time dilation field

Dr. John Hartnett, a creationist physicist, spurred by Humphreys' model, has proposed an alternative time dilation model, by theorizing the Earth was in a time-dilation field during the first few days of creation, from Earth's point of view, while billions of years passed for the rest of the universe. According to the Bible, God "stretched out" the heavens (space), and this movement during creation week caused time to travel faster for those objects, in accordance with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, adding to the time dilation caused by gravity, per Humphreys, in accordance with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

When all else fails, lets just go back to the old standard of the Earth being the center of the universe and really, really special!

Starlight Problem for the Big Bang Theory

Despite the use of the Starlight Problem in arguing against young-Earth creationism, the Big Bang theory has its own light travel problem, known as the horizon problem.

The Big Bang model proposes that the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) would have varied considerably from place to place early in the universe, yet because the speed at which this radiation can disperse from hotter to colder parts of the universe is limited by the speed of light, there has not been enough time for the radiation to even out, yet observations today show it to be extremely uniform (with fluctuations at the part-per-million level).

The problem is this: even assuming the big bang timescale, there has not been enough time for light to travel between widely separated regions of space. So, how can the different regions of the current CMB have such precisely uniform temperatures if they have never communicated with each other? This is a light-travel–time problem.

A number of solutions to this problem have been proposed, including several versions of an "inflationary model", in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light early in the Big Bang, but after different areas exchanged radiation to even out the temperature. However, there is no consensus on which explanation is correct, and each of the proposed solutions have their own problems.

Which is why the Cosmic Background Explorer's findings completely blow away the Big Bang theory! Oh wait a minute...they don't. It's data actually has shown a great fit with the predicted black body curve.

Still! It's not like they know everything! So that makes one thing crystal clear....Godidit! Yay! Is it time to declare victory and rush back to the church? Of course it is!

Hagee writes a fantasy novel!

2008-07-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

Well, okay, it's an outline. And a bad outline from his Weekly Devotional at that.

“Witchcraft, sorcery, magic and idol worship have been around since the earliest days of man.

Oh boy! I love fantasy stories! I heard this one about a guy who could fly and bullets bounced off his chest and we wore a red “S” on his chest. That was a neat story!

They do indeed, pre-date Christianity, as we know it today—just as their practitioners like to point out with pride. But they do not pre-date, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob-the one who created the universe. They are, in fact, part of a rebellion against Him and His laws.” (WND Editor Joseph Farah)

Hmmm…the start of this one is a little flat. Maybe you could talk about the witch herself or introduce the evil force that she has to face. Or something about how the magic works in your fantasy world. That would be neat!

The church in America

America! So this is one of those alternate reality stories where witchcraft and magic exist. Those are great!

is getting used to the dark, not because the light doesn’t have the power any more, but because we haven’t turned on the light.

You’re losing readers here. This is both boring and confusing for a fantasy story.

The closing chapters of American history are being dominated by the prince of darkness.

Prince of Darkness! Okay, you got my attention again. He must be the bad guy.

Abortion…anarchy…homosexuality…pornography…drugs…alcohol…divorce…child abuse…suicide…rape…murder…incest…men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil (John 3:19).

You really need to pick a topic for your book and stick with it. You seem to be lacking focus now.

We are surrounded by artificial illumination.

And bad plot development!

Education does not have the light. Education without God only produces intellectual barbarians. Hitler’s Nazis had Ph.D.’s and they threw live Jewish children into the ovens. They were absolutely brilliant, but they were barbarians.

So Nazis are the bad guys? Okay, it’s a bit hackneyed, but whatever.

The New Age movement does not have the light. This is not the dawning of a new era of light; this is the beginning of the new dark ages.

Whoa! You haven’t introduced this character to the readers yet. That’s just bad form.

Feminists do not have the light. The feminist movement is not about equality; it’s about control.

You’re losing focus and readers again! Check your plot outline, I’m sure you can do better!

Environmentalists do not have the light. Much of the ecology movement is not about saving the environment; it’s about nature worship. There is a difference between Mother Earth and Father God. The earth is the Lord’s…the earth is not Lord.

Or perhaps you can’t.

The occult does not have the light. Reading your horoscope is not a harmless diversion; it is witchcraft. Isaiah says, “…Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee form these things that shall come upon thee. Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them; they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame…” (Isa.47: 13,14).

The occult! That would be the people in your fantasy world who can actually do the witchcraft and magic you talked about earlier, right?

We’re getting used to the dark. There is a slow, subtle, sinister brainwashing process

True! Except for the slow and subtle parts.

going on whereby we are gradually being desensitized to the dark. What the church is calling broad-minded tolerance, is merely peaceful coexistence with evil.

Another new character, the church! Since they’re coexisting with evil, does that make this character a good guy or a bad guy? I’m confused.

There is no fellowship between light and darkness.

Conflict! Excellent! This story might just yet be saved.

When the world wants you to be “broad-minded” and tolerant,” what they actually want is for you to crucify your conscience and compromise with their evil.

Me? But I don’t live in a fantasy world where witchcraft and magic actually work! Who are you talking to exactly?

Our job is to turn on the light. But too many Christians suffer from photophobia-they are afraid of the light.

Spooky and indistinct. That’s great for the narrator!

They are so fearful of being offensive that they are not effective. They would rather grieve the Holy Spirit than grieve the fat cats who control their churches financially.

Now it’s just confusing. Okay, you’ve got a good cast of characters, a nice make believe world where magic works in some unspecified way, and the groundwork for some nice conflict that can eventually be resolved.

I’ll give you a B- on this outline. Go back to your plot development and tighten it up a lot, don’t jump to the middle of your main ideas before you introduce the characters, and focus on the foreshadowing. Right now it feels like you’re in a rush to tell the readers everything about your story – especially all that stuff about various characters not having the light – and not giving them the background details.

But keep working on it! If you do so, I know that someday your work will be worth reading!

Litigation for Mr. Christ

2008-07-01T20:43:00.000-07:00

Our good friends over at the Alliance Defense Fund brought us this gem a few months back.

Darkest before the dawn
Inside the Issues with Alan Sears

March 25, 2008

After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said."
- Matthew 28:1-6a

My family watched "The Passion of the Christ" this weekend. Though I have seen the movie on several occasions, I am overwhelmed each time I see its vivid portrayal of the Gospel. It also strikes me that the film's conclusion is not a Hollywood ending... the scars do not disappear, the impact of the lashes upon Christ's back is not imagined. But praise to God, it is a holy ending, because death is swallowed up in victory and the gift of eternal life is extended to all who believe and accept our Savior as Lord.

Hallelujah!

Easter weekend truly encompasses all of human emotion.

Really? Why would that be? Please give some evidence

Our sins and Christ's death weigh so heavily on Friday, as we remember His suffering and our responsibility. It gives us perhaps a brief glimpse of what life without hope looks like, which is what many of Jesus' disciples and followers surely experienced that long-ago Friday and Saturday.

Sounds like a bummer, especially for a fairy tale.

Sunday morning brings the dawn...and life...and hope. A hope that is only possible through a knowledge of our Savior's death and resurrection.

Or possible via love and happiness! I prefer that view, but if you really want guilt and suffering, you have my sympathy on that odd choice.

This new dawn comes after the darkest moment, and its brilliance is nearly blinding.

Perhaps explaining why it doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny.

America was founded as a nation that cherished and protected religious freedom.

Yay! A true statement!

Freedom that has provided the opportunity for so many to hear this message of hope and to be forever changed by it. Easter weekend is a reminder of what God has done, but it also reminds me of what He has called this ministry to do.

Maintain our freedoms! Especially our religious freedoms, which includes the freedom to not be religious at all.

The Alliance Defense Fund is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation. In other words, we exist to protect your right to share the message of Christ with those who still live without hope. By God's grace, we are winning victories from coast to coast, and reclaiming rights that had previously been lost.

And those victories are what exactly?

Through your continued and prayerful support, we will continue to fight these legal battles, knowing that together, on our knees, we can win. It may be darkest before the dawn, but by God's grace...dawn does come.

I wish you luck, provided that you’re not stomping on other people’s rights and beliefs such as when you want to have prayer in schools, put “In God We Trust” on our money, and pass laws saying that atheists, because they are atheists, aren’t competent to sit on juries, or murder people on the theory that the guy only you can hear has told you to.

You see, it’s those little setbacks in your doctrine that leaves us a tad worried about you!

The Cons of The Cons of The Cons of Creationism

2008-06-30T05:44:00.000-07:00

The irredoubtable Brian Thomas of the Institute for Creation Research comes to us today with a rebuttal! It seems that some meanies at the New York Times have cast (Gasp!) aspersions against creationism!

The Cons of "The Cons of Creationism"

A recent New York Times online editorial titled “The Cons of Creationism”1 is a typical example of the way the secular media routinely mischaracterize creation science.

As opposed to mis-characterizing creationism as "science".

I'm racking my brain on this one, but complaining about someone else mis-characterizing creationism while you blithely mis-characterize creationism is such insane levels of irony that I guessing you took time off of your day job selling iron pyrite encased irons to Iron Man to write this article.

Let us critique the editorial’s claims, one item at a time.

Yes! Lets! * sits down and waits to watch the train wreck coming *

[Creationists] believe that students who are taught a creationist view of biology—or who are taught to disregard the Darwinist view—are not being disadvantaged.
So creationists believe that it is best to teach students to be ignorant about Darwinian biology? Actually, for decades informed creationists have advocated a two-model approach,2 where students are taught the pros and cons of both views

Both views! The view that God created man and the universe in 6 days and the view that God created evolution and let it run it's course. You see, down here in the Bible Belt, we listen to both kinds of theology! Yee-haw!

and then permitted to evaluate the situation for themselves.

This is one of the weirdest parts of the deal. Since when is high school the proper place to decide scientific theories? Shouldn't we be doing that in professional laboratories and then teaching them what the experts have already learned?

Oh wait...I forgot! We already have done exactly that and the support for creationism is exactly zero whereas the support for evolution is decade after decade of scientific analysis, testing, and verification!

[Teaching] the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution…is code for teaching creationism.
We beg the reader to consider that teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution is actually code for “teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.”

Considered...and rejected once we took an actual look at the goals of the people who are saying this garbage.

The idea that creationists are being subversive is without merit, a mere smear. It is likely that the author has not bothered to consider that there actually are weaknesses to evolution.

Wow! So, you've never met an actual scientist before, eh?

The trouble is, a creationist system of science is not science at all. It is faith. All science is “naturalist” to the extent that it tries to understand the laws of nature and the character of the universe on their own terms, without reference to a divine creator.
What is “a creationist system of science”? The author seems to think that creationists invoke God to explain every empirical phenomenon. That may be animism, but it is certainly not creationism.

Here's a nice view of what a creationist system of science is as according to your own institute. Thanks for asking!

Adequate clarity on these important issues requires more precise definitions.

And use of, you know, actual science.

We must distinguish between historical science and empirical science. Both creation scientists and evolutionary scientists practice the same kind of empirical science—observing the repeatable. Just like creation scientists, Darwinists typically use naturalistic interpretations to explain the operation of observable and repeatable phenomena. However, Darwinists mistakenly, and by faith, presume exclusively naturalistic causes to explain the origin of phenomena. There are no “gods” causing light to refract or masses to gravitate, but that does not mean that there was no God responsible for the origin of lights and masses!

Occam's Razor...the New Faith!

The New York Times editorial ends with “The religious faith underlying creationism has a place, in church and social studies courses. Science belongs in science classrooms.” Of course science belongs in science classrooms—that is our point! The religion of evolutionary atheism does not belong, nor does evolutionary history or methodological naturalism philosophy.

"The religion of evolutionary atheism"

These words...I do not think they mean what you think they mean. Because it seems like you think they mean anything at all!

I mean, really..."the religion of evolutionary atheism"?!? Get a dictionary and come back after reading it. It'll help everyone involved. Seriously.

California dreamin'

2008-06-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

On June 16th, California started issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples in accordance with the May 15th State Supreme Court decision on the matter. Protect Marriage.com immediately chimes in with a campaign against people who are doing nothing to them whatsoever.

ProtectMarriage calls for measured response to licensing of same-sex marriages.

Starting Monday at 5:01 pm, several California counties began issuing same-sex “marriage” certificates.

Yay for fairness and equality! Woot!

This follows the order of the four Supreme Court judges striking down Proposition 22, which the voters overwhelming approved just a few years ago to reaffirm marriage as only between a man and a woman.

Yep, judges are odd that way about states passing laws that contradict both the rest of the laws and common sense.

Yet, this debate is not over.

Sadly, this is true.

Thankfully, the Protection of Marriage Amendment will appear on this November’s ballot.

Oh joy, another round of legislating morality.

The campaign of the next few months will be our opportunity to remind Californians why the unique role of traditional marriage in society is worth protecting.

The major media would love to see us engage in fierce protests and hostile demonstrations of outrage against the licensing of same-sex “marriages”.

They love it when you make fools of yourselves. It sells papers.

Of course they will take any opportunity they can find to portray us as unreasonable.

That's pretty easy when you're being this unreasonable.

We must not fall into this trap.

Too late!

So let us keep in mind: Our battle is not against the same-sex couples who are pursuing the opportunity to “marry”

It's against their evil twin, Skippy?!? Really, the level of doublethink required to actually believe this would make Winston Smith turn around and say "You gotta be kidding me!"

granted them by the activist judges on the California Supreme Court.

And fairness, equality, and common sense.

Our battle is against the flawed reasoning of the court’s decision; our purpose is to reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage. Marriage is at the core of family security and is an essential element in our society. The Supreme Court has effectively rendered marriage meaningless at a time when we should be taking steps to strengthen families.

Agreed! Lets strengthen families by allowing more loving, caring, committed couples to enjoy the legal protections granted by our society to them in exchange for the expectations that we have on them!

Fortunately, the Protection of Marriage Amendment will give voters the final say in this debate.

Until overturned again by the courts.

We are confident that voters will reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage, just as they overwhelmingly did in 2000, and overturn the court’s flawed decision.

So the merry-go-round will continue to turn!

To succeed, however, we must raise the funds needed to launch an organized grassroots campaign and purchase statewide TV and radio advertisements urging a “yes” vote on the Marriage Amendment. Please mail a check or donate online today to support our campaign for marriage.

It costs a lot of money to properly demonstrate our bigotism and deny those rights to law abiding citizens, you know!

P.S. Please help us reach even more supporters like you… please forward this email to at least 5 friends or family members who can join this important battle to save traditional marriage. Thank you.

And we don't stop at bigoted efforts - we create chain letters as well!

More fun from the FAQ!

2008-06-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

Continuing this week's series on wacky Johns, here's another installment of the Revving John Hagee's FAQ page!
Today's episode: Healing

Q. Does God really heal diseases today? How can I be healed?

A. Absolutely!

Undoubtedly! Completely! Except that he doesn’t.

God's healing power has never diminished,

Completely true.

and divine health is His desire for us.

Which is why he made all those wonderful diseases for us to get!

One of the descriptive names of God in the Bible is Jehovah Rophe, which means, "The God Who Heals."
Scripture is full of examples of the healing power of Jesus.

So full of them that you’d think that someone else at the time would have mentioned it in passing. Somewhere.

While He walked this earth, He healed the lame, the blind, the sick, and the deaf. He healed one-on-one and He healed en masse. The Bible says that "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Heb. 13:8). He is still the Great Physician.

And I hear that he’s an ace at Blackjack, too!

Furthermore, His power resides in us as believers.

Which neuron exactly do I have to fire in order to unlock this mystical power?

The gospels specify that Jesus delegated His healing power to the twelve disciples (Matt. 10:1; Luke 9:1). Luke states that an additional seventy disciples were commissioned to preach the gospel and heal diseases (10:1-9).

Woot!

And Jesus did not intend for them to stop healing the sick after His resurrection and ascension.

Yeah, that would’ve been rude.

In fact, He told the disciples that after He returned to heaven, they would do even "greater works" than their Master (John 14:12).

Which is true…from a certain point of view

As part of the Great Commission-Jesus' final instructions to the original Twelve as well as disciples throughout the ages-He said that certain "signs will follow those who believe: In My name . . . they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover" (Mark 16: 17-18). This "laying on of hands" in prayer for the sick was practiced by the early church (James 5:14-15), and it has been the custom of believers ever since.

Which explains why faith healing has withstood all of the rigorous observation and testing that has been done on it!

If you need healing, ask the elders of your church to anoint you with oil and pray for you according to the biblical pattern. Or ask other believers in your Sunday School class or home Bible study to pray with you. If you have no Christian support, call our Prayerline at 210-491-5100 or click here to send Prayer Request online and ask for prayer. One of our staff members or trained volunteers will be glad to pray for you and help you have faith for healing. Every month we share testimonies in our magazine and on our website from people who have been healed by a touch from God. You can be healed too!

Or you could go to a doctor. Your call.

Prayer should be a Christian's first response to sickness,

Before seeing a doctor?

but too many believers use prayer as a last resort. Instead of running to the Great Physician, they run to the medicine cabinet in search of pills or vitamins or other remedies.

Given to them by those wacky doctors. What do they know anyway?

I'm a firm believer in medicine and doctors,

Really?!? It doesn’t sound like it.

and I'm thankful for their healing ministry.

Umm, just to let you in on a little secret – it’s called a clinic or a hospital. Ministries are for a different profession entirely.

But when I am sick, my ultimate reliance is on the God who made me.

If only that was true. Sigh.

Faith is the key to divine health and healing.

If you weren’t healed, it’s all your fault.

Remember, your faith should not be placed in the person who prays for you.

Having faith isn’t enough. It has to be put in the right place, after all.

That person is just a vessel used by God, and a frail little gray-headed prayer warrior in your church can be just as effective as some big-name healing evangelist.

And he’s certainly a better bargain!

That's because the proper object of your faith is Jehovah Rophe, the God Who Heals.

And he’s having a special today!

Release your faith and receive your healing today.

No warranty expressed or implied.

A creationist answers our points...well one point...maybe

2008-06-27T02:29:00.000-07:00

Our friend - and a saint no less! - Johnny enjoyed the fun we have here at the Rational Reply so much so that he decided to address the critical issue of what Monty Python song went with which movie while utterly glossing over the apparently worthless point of what constitutes a sign from God. Which is odd since it was the fundamental concept of his article in the first place!

So Saint Johnny, my good and noble dead purveyor of at least two miracles, here's your Rational Reply!

Par for the Course: Pot Shots from the Atheist Peanut Gallery

I loved this wacky ‘point by point’ response to a blog entry

Glad to hear it! We do aim to entertain here!

I wrote like 8 months ago.

There's this little secret about the internet. The stuff that's put onto it never, ever goes away and can be analyzed and built on months and even years later! I know this comes as a shock to anyone who is accustomed to things being built in six days and then never again changing and anyone who thinks that all of the answers that were written by ancient wandering tribes is 100% accurate and no new information is significant, but it's really true!

One already knows that he’s in for sarcastic inside jokes that miss the point when, in the first paragraph, the fellah says:

I've been promoted to "fellah". Sweet!

[Quoting Sntjohnny]I am reminded of the scene in Monty Python’s movie “The Life of Bryan” where a leper is healed and complains about it because it took away his livelihood of begging. Bryan replies “There’s just no pleasing some people!” and the Leper says, “That’s just what Jesus said!”[/end quote]

That’s a great movie! “Every sperm is Sacred” is an awesome song that just gets better and better the more I think about the truths that it hammers home. It rocks!

Of course, everyone knows that “Every sperm is Sacred” is not in the Life of Bryan. It’s in The Meaning of Life, as any true fan of Monty Python would know. Perhaps ‘Jim Rational’ picked up the skeptical reader to the Monty Python corpus. :)

Or went after a song that resonated with the subject at hand while segueing from the comment on Life of Brian. Either one.

And, I hesitate to mention this one, but please spell it Life of Brian, not Life of Bryan. Especially if you're going to question anyone's Python credentials. I'm just saying.

In typical fashion, Mr. Rational’s points resonate only with those who agree with him

No comment. I bow to your expertise in this particular field.

, and unless you can speak atheistese you’d never imagine that there was a point buried in his responses. I am fluent in atheistese, however.

So you'll be addressing these soon, right?

I will not respond in detail to a post

Shocked! Shocked I am that you're not bothering to explain lunacies such as having a Jesus that is not logically consistent, blithely reversing the scientific method, failing to see how atheists have morals, and claiming that someone who has been handed his morals on a platter isn't taking them for granted.

Gasp! Choke! No one saw that coming at all!

that is the epitome of preaching to the choir, but I will speak to one particular point where I think the man, despite crystal clear language on my part, missed the point.

Well, it's not as good as actually responding to the points above, but we'll take what we can get.

[Sntjohnny Quote]For example, I know an atheist who requested a sign from God. He received it. We spoke together on the phone about it. He was freaked out. After a few months he decided it wasn’t enough and that it was all probably a trick of the mind. Surely we can see how if God had done more or does more my friend can still chalk it up to a trick of the mind? Why should God give him what he wants when it won’t make him happy anyway?[/end quote]

Ah. I see your choice would be to write him off instead of trying to figure out what would convince him. Oh well. Too bad for you.

Ah, right. Let’s see. The man REQUESTED A SIGN FROM GOD. It isn’t brain surgery to ‘figure out what would convince him.’ The man himself asked for a sign, and he received it. Seriously, is this so difficult? I do hope that true rational Jims that are out there will pardon me for figuring that if a man asks for and receives a sign from God, but still isn’t convinced by that sign, my role in the matter is pretty limited. Indeed, about the only thing that I can do at that point is say, “Dude. You asked for a sign. You got it. What’s your problem?” Which, by the way, did say- though in kinder terms, as the gent is a friend.

The problem, Pussycat Jonathon, lies in what we believe that a sign from God actually is.

Faith healers, conjurers, ESP claimants, animal telepaths, and others of their ilk understand a particular basic human reality. That reality is that if you put someone in a context where they want to believe the insanity that you feed him, he will believe it. It's just that simple.

One important way to test this is to let the person out of that box, let him examine the realities of what he experienced in his own way without pressure and allow him to rationally review what really happened. Scientists, real ones who actually follow the scientific method, experience this as a matter of course by handing their findings over to other scientists for them to repeat the findings.

The description is far too lacking in detail, but here are just a few problems with your test:

The test subject talked to someone who wanted to convince him that there would be a sign from God. He didn't talk to anyone who would talk sense to him.

The test of "receive a sign from God" is laughably vague. Which one of a trillion coincidences did this prepared subject get freaked out about? I'm thinking it was at a Dairy Queen.

The test subject immediately called the person who prepared him to believe and received reinforcement. He didn't talk to anyone else. Getting prepared by someone to interpret random things in a particular way and then getting reinforced by that same person is what we call "bias". And that's the nice term for it. That's a really bad thing if you're trying to draw conclusions that actually match up to the real world. This test that you speak of belongs on the Lame List.

By the way, if your friend really received an undeniable sign from God that can stand up to actual test protocols, James Randi has a million dollars for him. Even if he doesn't need the money, I'm sure he has a charity that can use the cash. Go for it!

My hats off to you, Rational Jim! More proof that no Christian ever worry that there is any reason to worry about the challenges of the atheistic community! Peace, homeslice.

And peace to you, my good friend! But please, the name is Jim Rational. And thanks for demonstrating that no scientist need ever worry about rational challenges from your quarter!

The Minimal Facts Approach

2008-06-26T09:33:00.000-07:00

Our good an noble friends over at Apologetics have come up with an interesting whopper - the "Minimal Facts Approach".

Yep, no fooling around here! You have to give them some credit here, when they don't have the facts every once in awhile, they just come right out and say it! Read on for some jaw dropping stuipity!

We have seen that the resurrection of Jesus and Christianity are bound up together

Yep! Can we go back to that and fill in some more detail, though? We need a DNA sample from Mr. Christ, for example.

…but is there good historical evidence that it actually occured?

Good enough for you? No doubt.

Gary Habermas argues there is. In his “minimal facts approach”

* jaw drops *
Minimal facts approach?
Minimal facts approach?!?!?

Would this be the approach where we just get to make stuff up when there aren’t any actual facts for something?
Sorry…I’m just staggered that someone would so bald facedly give his lack of evidence a name that so clearly screams out that he has no evidence…and then publish it! Can I do this in other situations, too?

Police Officer: Do you know how fast you were going?
Me: Yep! But there’s no need for a ticket, I’m using the “doesn’t matter what speed I’m going” approach

Or how about…?

Me: Do you know why my car is making a grinding noise when I step on the brake?
Mechanic: Don’t worry about it. I’m using a “minimal noise noticing” approach

he has come up with 5 facts that virtually all scholars in the field of New Testament studies (liberal, moderate, conservative) affirm. The question before us, is what best explains these facts?
Fact #1 - Jesus died by crucifixion. This fact is recorded in all four gospels as well as being referred to by other NT writers. In addition to these Christian sources, there are several Non-Christian sources that report Jesus’ crucifixion. For example, in AD 115 the Roman historian Tacitus

It took 80 something years for someone to note Mr. Christ’s crucifixion?!? Doesn’t this seem ever so slightly insane? Where were the contemporary accounts? This is like an 80’s hockey writer not knowing Wayne Gretzky.

describes how Christians were blamed for the burning of Rome: “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus [cf. Matt 27:2].” Due to passages like this from outside of the NT

Passages 80 years out of date.

and the strong witness in the NT,

Be still my beating heart.

there is no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was executed by Roman crucifixion around AD 30-33.

Yeah. No doubt at all.

The real question is why?

Why you blithely gloss over the lack of any contemporary documentation and cite something as ridiculous as a "minimal facts approach"? Yeah, that’s a real question, all right.

Special guest replier: Professor Richard Lenski!

2008-06-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Professor Richard Lenski, as both of my readers know, is an evolutionary biologist who has achieved what creationists claim is impossible - direct evidence of evolution occurring in his lab.

Faced with this horrible blow to their inane beliefs, creationists such as Andrew Schlafly, the chief moron of Conservapedia, have done what they always do when a scientist achieves a landmark breakthrough to help the human race. They attack him mercilessly and stupidly.

Now normally on the Rational Reply, I take the good time and effort to reply to the idiots and their ridiculous claims. But today, we have a special guest star. Professor Lenski himself has taken the time and trouble to reply to the ignorant, impolite, and insane demands of the Schlafly crew. So to see to it that we help the good professor "make sure that [his reply] is made publicly available through other channels", I yield the floor to him to give The Rational Reply.

Take it away Professor!

Dear Mr. Schlafly:

I tried to be polite, civil and respectful in my reply to your first email, despite its rude tone and uninformed content. Given the continued rudeness of your second email, and the willfully ignorant and slanderous content on your website, my second response will be less polite. I expect you to post my response in its entirety; if not, I will make sure that is made publicly available through other channels.

I offer this lengthy reply because I am an educator as well as a scientist. It is my sincere hope that some readers might learn something from this exchange, even if you do not.

First, it seems that reading might not be your strongest suit given your initial letter, which showed that you had not read our paper, and given subsequent conversations with your followers, in which you wrote that you still had not bothered to read our paper. You wrote: “I did skim Lenski’s paper …” If you have not even read the original paper, how do you have any basis of understanding from which to question, much less criticize, the data that are presented therein?

Second, your capacity to misinterpret and/or misrepresent facts is plain in the third request in your first letter, where you said: “In addition, there is skepticism that 3 new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000.” That statement was followed by a link to a news article from NewScientist that briefly reported on our work. I assumed you had simply misunderstood that article, because there is not even a mention of proteins anywhere in the news article. As I replied, “We make no such claim anywhere in our paper, nor do I think it is correct. Proteins do not ‘appear out of the blue’, in any case.” So where did your confused assertion come from? It appears to have come from one of your earlier discussions, in which an acoltye [sic] (Able806, who to his credit at least seems to have attempted to read our paper) wrote:

"I think it might be best to clarify some of Richard's work. He started his E.Coli project in 1988 and has been running the project for 20 years now; his protocols are available to the general public. The New Scientist article is not very technical but the paper at PNAS is. The change was based on one of his colonies developing the ability to absorb citrate, something not found in wild E.Coli. This occurred around 31,500 generations and is based on the development of 3 proteins in the E.Coli genome. What his future work will be is to look at what caused the development of these 3 proteins around generation 20,000 of that particular colony."

As further evidence of your inability to keep even a few simple facts straight, you later wrote the following: “It [my reply] did clarify that his claims are not as strong as some evolutionists have insisted.” But no competent biologist would, after reading our paper with any care, insist (or even suggest) that “3 new and useful proteins appeared in the colony around generation 20,000” or any similar nonsense. It is only in your letter, and in your acolyte’s confused interpretation of our paper, that I have ever seen such a claim. Am I or the reporter for NewScientist somehow responsible for the confusion that reflects your own laziness and apparent inability to distinguish between a scientific paper, a news article, and a confused summary posted by an acolyte on your own website?

Third, it is apparent to me, and many others who have followed this exchange and your on-line discussions of how to proceed, that you are not acting in good faith in requests for data. From the posted discussion on your web site, it is obvious that you lack any expertise in the relevant fields. Several of your acolytes have pointed this out to you, and that your motives are unclear or questionable at best, but you and your cronies dismissed their concerns as rants and even expelled some of them from posting on your website. [ http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed] Several also pointed out that I had very quickly and straightforwardly responded that the methods and data supporting the evolution of the citrate-utilization capacity are already provided in our paper. One poster in your discussions, Aaronp, wrote:

“I read Lenski's paper, and as a trained microbiologist, I thought that it was both thorough and well done. His claims are backed by good data, namely that which was presented in the figures. I went through each of the figures after Aschlafly said that they were uninformative. Actually, they are basic figures that show the population explosion of the bacterial cultures after the Cit+ mutation occurred. These figures show that the cultures increased in size and mass at a given timepoint, being able to do so because they had evolved a mechanism to utilize a new nutrient, without the assistance of helper plasmids. … Lenksi’s paper, while not the most definite I’ve seen, is still a very well-researched paper that supports its claims nicely.”

(As far as I saw, Aaronp is the only poster who asserted any expertise in microbiology.) As further evidence of the absence of good-faith discussion about our research, in the discussion thread that began even before you sent your first email to me, I counted the words “fraud” or “fraudulent” being used more than 10 times, including one acolyte, TonyT, who says bluntly that I am “clearly a fraudulent hack.” In the discussion thread that also includes comments after my first reply, the number of times those same words are used has increased to 20, with the word “hoax” also now entering the discussion. A few posters wisely counseled against such slander but that did not deter you. I must say, it is surprising that someone with a law degree would make, and allow on his website, so many nasty comments that implicitly and even explicitly impugn my integrity, and by extension that of my collaborators, without any grounds whatsoever and reflecting only your dogmatic adherence to certain beliefs.

Finally, let me now turn to our data. As I said before, the relevant methods and data about the evolution of the citrate-using bacteria are in our paper. In three places in our paper, we did say “data not shown”, which is common in scientific papers owing to limitations in page length, especially for secondary or minor points. None of the places where we made such references concern the existence of the citrate-using bacteria; they concern only certain secondary properties of those bacteria. We will gladly post those additional data on my website.

It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unicorn_in_the_Garden] And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion]

One of your acolytes, Dr. Richard Paley, actually grasped this point. He does not appear to understand the practice and limitations of science, but at least he realizes that we have the bacteria, and that they provide “the real data that we [that’s you and your gang] need”. Here’s what this Dr. Paley had to say:

“I think there’s a great deal of misunderstanding here from the critics of Mr. Schlafly and obfuscation on the part of Prof. Lenski and his supporters. The real data that we need are not in the paper. Rather they are in the bacteria used in the experiments themselves. Prof. Lenski claims that these bacteria ‘evolved’ novel traits and that these were preceded by the evolution of ‘potentiated genotypes’, from which the traits could be ‘reevolved’ using preserved colonies from those generations. But how are we to know if these traits weren’t ‘potentiated’ by the Creator when He designed the bacteria thousands of years ago, such that they would eventually reveal themselves when the time was right? The only way this can be settled is if we have access to the genetic sequences of the bacteria colonies so that we can apply CSI techniques and determine if these ‘potentiated genotypes’ originated through blind chance or intelligence. But with the physical specimens in the hands of Darwinists, who claim they will get around to the sequencing at some unspecifed future time, how can we trust that this data will be forthcoming and forthright? Thus, Prof. Lenski et al. should supply Conservapedia, as stewards, with samples of the preserved E. coli colonies so that the data can be accessible to unbiased researchers outside of the hegemony of the Darwinian academia, even if it won’t be put to immediate examination by Mr. Schlafly. This is simply about keeping tax-payer-funded scientists honest.”

So, will we share the bacteria? Of course we will, with competent scientists. Now, if I was really mean, I might only share the ancestral strain, and let the scientists undertake the 20 years of our experiment. Or if I was only a little bit mean, maybe I’d also send the potentiated bacteria, and let the recipients then repeat the several years of incredibly pain-staking work that my superb doctoral student, Zachary Blount, performed to test some 40 trillion (40,000,000,000,000) cells, which generated 19 additional citrate-using mutants. But I’m a nice guy, at least when treated with some common courtesy, so if a competent scientist asks for them, I would even send a sample of the evolved E. coli that now grows vigorously on citrate. A competent microbiologist, perhaps requiring the assistance of a competent molecular geneticist, would readily confirm the following properties reported in our paper: (i) The ancestral strain does not grow in DM0 (zero glucose, but containing citrate), the recipe for which can be found on my web site, except leaving the glucose out of the standard recipe as stated in our paper. (ii) The evolved citrate-using strain, by contrast, grows well in that exact same medium. (iii) To confirm that the evolved strain is not some contaminating species but is, in fact, derived from the ancestral strain in our study, one could check a number of traits and genes that identify the ancestor as E. coli, and the evolved strains as a descendant thereof, as reported in our paper. (iv) One could also sequence the pykF and nadR genes in the ancestor and evolved citrate-using strains. One would find that the evolved bacteria have mutations in each of these genes. These mutations precisely match those that we reported in our previous work, and they identify the evolved citrate-using mutants as having evolved in the population designated Ara-3 of the long-term evolution experiment, as opposed to any of the other 11 populations in that experiment. And one could go on and on from there to confirm the findings in our paper, and perhaps obtain additional data of the sort that we are currently pursuing.

Before I could send anyone any bacterial strains, in order to comply with good scientific practices I would require evidence of the requesting scientist’s credentials including: (i) affiliation with an appropriate unit in some university or research center with appropriate facilities for storing (-80ºC freezer), handling (incubators, etc.), and disposing of bacteria (autoclave); and (ii) some evidence, such as peer-reviewed publications, that indicate that the receiving scientist knows how to work with bacteria, so that I and my university can be sure we are sending biological materials to someone that knows how to handle them. By the way, our strains are not derived from one of the pathogenic varieties of E. coli that are a frequent cause of food-borne illnesses. However, even non-pathogenic strains may cause problems for those who are immune-compromised or otherwise more vulnerable to infection. Also, my university requires that a Material Transfer Agreement be executed before we can ship any strains. That agreement would not constrain a receiving scientist from publishing his or her results. However, if an incompetent or fraudulent hack (note that I make no reference to any person, as this is strictly a hypothetical scenario, one that I doubt would occur) were to make false or misleading claims about our strains, then I’m confident that some highly qualified scientists would join the fray, examine the strains, and sort out who was right and who was wrong. That’s the way science works.

I would also generally ask what the requesting scientist intends to do with our strains. Why? It helps me to gauge the requester’s expertise. I might be able to point out useful references, for example. Moreover, as I’ve said, we are continuing our work with these strains, on multiple fronts, as explained in considerable detail in the Discussion section of our paper. I would not be happy to see our work “scooped” by another team – especially for the sake of the outstanding students and postdocs in my group who are hard at work on these fronts. However, that request to allow us to proceed, without risk of being scooped on work in which we have made a substantial investment of time and effort, would be just that: a request. In other words, we would respect PNAS policy to share those strains with any competent scientist who complied with my university’s requirements for the MTA and any other relevant legal restrictions. If any such request requires substantial time or resources (we have thousands of samples from this and many other experiments), then of course I would expect the recipient to bear those costs.

So there you have it. I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior. And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve. However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange.

Sincerely,

Richard Lenski

P.S. Did you know that your own bowels harbor something like a billion (1,000,000,000) E. coli at this very moment? So remember to wash your hands after going to the toilet, as I hope your mother taught you. Simple calculations imply that there are something like 10^20 = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 E. coli alive on our planet at any moment. Even if they divide just once per day, and given a typical mutation rate of 10^-9 or 10^-10 per base-pair per generation, then pretty much every possible double mutation would occur every day or so. That’s a lot of opportunity for evolution.

P.P.S. I hope that some readers might get a chuckle out of this story. The same Sunday (15 June 2008) that you and some of your acolytes were posting and promoting scurrilous attacks on me and our research (wasn’t that a bit disrespectful of the Sabbath?), I was in a church attending a wedding. And do you know what Old Testament lesson was read? It was Genesis 1:27-28[2], in which God created Man and Woman. It’s a very simple and lovely story, and I did not ask any questions, storm out, or demand the evidence that it happened as written at a time when science did not yet exist. I was there in the realm of spirituality and mutual respect, not confusing a house of religion for a science class or laboratory. And it was a beautiful wedding, too.

P.P.P.S. You may be unable to understand, or unwilling to accept, that evolution occurs. And yet, life evolves! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pur_si_muove] From the content on your website, it is clear that you, like many others, view God as the Creator of the Universe. I respect that view. I find it baffling, however, that someone can worship God as the all-mighty Creator while, at the same time, denying even the possibility (not to mention the overwhelming evidence) that God’s Creation involved evolution. It is as though a person thinks that God must have the same limitations when it comes to creation as a person who is unable to understand, or even attempt to understand, the world in which we live. Isn’t that view insulting to God?

P.P.P.P.S. I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.” That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another. Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong. For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’” You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.

Hagee on abortion

2008-06-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

The Rev. John Hagee gives us his insights on abortion from his FAQ section. Yes, this is not an off the cuff answer, but rather the standard response he gives to everyone.

Q. Abortion is legal, but is it morally wrong? What about abortion in cases of rape or incest?

A. That no one should have the right to take the life of the unborn has been a principle of medicine from ancient times.

Really?!? I seem to have missed the great debates on this one in the Roman senate. And I’m missing the part where – and this might be some small bit of importance – we could actually abort a pregnancy in ancient times without insane risk to the woman.

If you want to make stuff up out of whole cloth, you really need to do better than this.

The Hippocratic Oath, first formulated as a sworn rule of conduct for doctors and physicians in ancient Greece some 2,400 years ago,

So you’re swearing to Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea now? You might want to stick with your religion. I hear that your god is a jealous god.

says, "I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest such counsel; and in a like manner I will not give a woman a pessary to induce an abortion."

Good council! We have much better, safer, and easier ways to have abortions now. It’s all about that march of scientific progress.

Even then, four hundred years before the birth of Christ, people were clamoring for euthanasia and wanting to kill their unborn babies.

Yep, especially women who were raped.

If Hippocrates-a pagan physician who believed in all sorts of mythological gods and goddesses

Which is, of course, much worse than simply believing in one mythological god

-knew that it was wrong to take a life, what defense do we have today after the intervening two millennia of research and learning?

Is this a trick question? As stated, we have 2,000 years of understanding, progress, and abilities that Hippocrates did not have, a far better understanding of what life actually is, and far, far better ways to make choices about childbirth than a young girl failing to be able to run away from a marauding barbarian rapist.

When it comes to abortion, I believe God is pro-life.

Tell that to all the people who weren’t on Noah’s Ark.

Let me demonstrate that in Scripture.

Please do! It won’t mean a thing since that’s a made up book of stories, but it’s fun to watch you thrash about in it!

Speaking through Moses, God told his people: "I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live" (Deut. 30:19).

A clear quote directly talking about unborn children, obviously.

God created us as free moral agents, with the capacity to choose our course of action.

So God is Pro-Choice then!

But He certainly gave us explicit direction for making wise choices: "Choose life."

Again…he wants us to be able to choose!

The Bible places great value on children. They are the "heritage" of the Lord, His "reward" (Ps. 127:3).

Absolutely. It’s tough to brainwash other people’s kids, so it’s better to have your own.

The Bible also makes it clear that a child's life is to be protected, even while the child is in the mother's womb. Among the ancient Hebrews, penalties were prescribed against a person who injured a pregnant woman and thereby caused her to miscarry (Ex. 21:22-23).

Just like the abortion laws today.

God's Word says that if you hurt a pregnant woman and she loses the baby, you have to pay a penalty-not because it was a "blob of tissue," as abortion proponents would have us believe, but because it was a living human being.

Either that or the ancient goat herders who wrote the bible had never heard of genetics, modern abortion techniques, and accepted massive infant mortality rates as common.

Furthermore, God knows us, and even speaks to us, while we are in the womb. God called both Isaiah and Jeremiah to be prophets while they were still in the womb (Isa. 49:1, 5; Jer. 1:4-5). Would God name and ordain a meaningless blob? That unborn child in the womb is not a blob of flesh but a life sophisticated enough to have a relationship with God Almighty!

Judging from the sophistication of this argument, I’d say that you’ve set the bar way, way too low.

It is tempting to rationalize abortion in dire circumstances, such as pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. Statistically, such pregnancies are very rare.

True. But when rape or incest actually happen, rape or incest is 100% common.

If pregnancy does occur, the woman's trauma and guilt

Guilt?!? For being raped?!?

should not be compounded by the taking of innocent human life.

Rather we should torture a poor girl for her entire life by forcing her to raise a rapists’ child.

Abortion does not solve the problem of violence or abuse-it increases the problem.

Removing a woman’s decisions does not help her life, it destroys it.

We should punish the criminal, not the victim.

Agreed! Please start by not punishing the victim. That might help!

Ken Ham - Wackaloon!

2008-06-23T01:40:00.000-07:00

Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis and religious nutter, objects to PZ Myers calling him a "wackaloon". Amusingly enough, PZ detailed a few more comments for Hammy and, of course, the Rational Reply!

Biology Professor Calls Me “Wackaloon”

PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota–Morris, ranted in a blog item (which is apparently quite popular among anti-creationists)

Woot! Anti-creationists! Would that be the same thing as evolutionists? If so, why the bizarre negative term? If not, what is it exactly? How much creationism do you have to believe in order to no longer be an anti-creationist? Do Old Earth creationists qualify or only Young Earth creationists?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Okay, I'm sorry, Ken. You're not used to dealing with any inquiring minds, so I'll take it slower. Forgive me, please.

about my speaking at a prayer breakfast at the Pentagon. The arrogance and intolerance of some of these people is remarkable

Almost as arrogant as someone saying that they have all the answers in this little book and only their interpretation is correct? And almost a intolarant as a group of people going to war against lots of other groups because they have the wrong book? That arrogant and intolerant? Wow!

Considering this person is supposed to be an academic teaching good research skills to students at a university, I would not want to trust any of his lectures considering the logic he used in his recent blog.

He stated:

Ken Ham, chief wackaloon at Answers in Genesis, was invited to speak…at a Pentagon prayer breakfast.

Just let that sink in.There are people at the Pentagon who are in charge of planning where your sons and daughter and nephews and nieces and other beloved family members and friends will be sent to put their lives at risk. There are military personnel there who can send missiles and bombers anywhere in the world. There are people there who control nuclear weapons.

And they think Ken Ham is a fine-and-dandy, clever feller.

It’s almost enough to make me wish I could pray. It’s not just Ham, either—it’s that the people with the big guns have prayer breakfasts.

Now consider this:

1. Over 23,000 people work at the Pentagon. I spoke to 100 Christians at a prayer breakfast—less than 0.5% of the Pentagon workforce (good response from those present by the way).

I don't think he's worried about the percentages of employees that you talked to. I think he's worried because you're a wack job and anyone is listening to you. And especially worried if those people actually have influence on important things.

2. The military is now one of the most “politically correct” places in the USA. Not only do Christians have the freedom to meet—but so do Muslims, Hindus, and almost any other group you could name. Of course, if I had been a Muslim and went to the Pentagon to address a Muslim prayer breakfast, I’m sure PZ Myers would not have ranted against that—it is only Christians one is allowed to be intolerant of nowadays, it seems.

That makes sense! Anyone who opposes a religious nut job having influence would...not oppose a different religious nut job having influence...

Um, Ken, buddy...I'm just not following you on this one. Can you help me out here?

3. What’s he so worked up about anyway? If he’s right, God doesn’t exist—so prayer can’t do anything and, therefore, can’t harm anything. But, then, who cares about harm in a world without moral absolutes?

Every rational person

It’s the survival of the fittest; so, evolution will inexorably eliminate these weak-minded “idiots” at the Pentagon.

That would be a bad thing, Ken. Really.

If they nuke some people along the way, so what?

Dude, you're losing it here. Stay with me, Ken.

That’s just the death of the weakest in this purposeless accidental existence of ours; sooner or later the more fit will triumph, and the world will be more evolved.

Dude, there's no such thing as "more evolved", there's just "evolution" which is to say "change".

So, what’s Myers concerned about?

That would be all that nuking and killing and knocking off of people that you were talking about. The fact that nature kills off weak things doesn't mean that's a good idea or that we want to. I'm just saying.

This is all just time and chance and the laws of nature at work

No, that would be us at work, actually.

What is, is. There are and can be no “oughts.”

4. Notice how these evolutionists use such emotive language and name calling (e.g., “wackaloon”)—very academic, scientific arguments!

Ken, relax and take a chill pill or something. You're starting to foam at the mouth a little.

Don't worry about us. We have time.

Come on back after you calm down a little and start talking English again.

We'll wait.

People like PZ Myers are those who call for tolerance—but their intolerance for Christians illustrates clearly the spiritual nature of this battle—otherwise, why would they care?

Oh good! You've calmed down a little bit. That's great to see!

Back to your questions, though, it's not intolerance of Christians, it's intolerance of wack jobs. There's a difference, although it might take some effort to explain it to you. Lots of Christians have it down pat, though!

You can't always get what you want

2008-06-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

Our good and noble friends over here have penned a complaint about atheists not being decisive about Mr. Christ. Enjoy!

One of the things that really irks me is when a person can’t be pleased no matter what you give them. I am reminded of the scene in Monty Python’s movie “The Life of Bryan” where a leper is healed and complains about it because it took away his livelihood of begging. Bryan replies “There’s just no pleasing some people!” and the Leper says, “That’s just what Jesus said!”

That’s a great movie! “Every sperm is Sacred” is an awesome song that just gets better and better the more I think about the truths that it hammers home. It rocks!

If you can’t please someone no matter what you give them, for my own part I tend to stop trying to please them at all. At the very least, when confronted with such behavior, I tend to view it as marked irrationality. I do not feel threatened by people’s arguments if they can’t say what will satisfy them.

I agree! When my son says he wants a Tool CD and I get it for him and he’s not happy about it, I really don’t feel like getting him the next thing that he says he wants. Of course, when he says that he wants a “good CD” and I get him Tito Pointe’s Greatest Hits and he’s not happy, it’s probably because there was some confusion on what makes for a “good CD”.

So I could just write him off as never being happy or try to figure out what a “good CD” is. I know what my choice would be!

For example, I know an atheist who requested a sign from God. He received it. We spoke together on the phone about it. He was freaked out. After a few months he decided it wasn’t enough and that it was all probably a trick of the mind. Surely we can see how if God had done more or does more my friend can still chalk it up to a trick of the mind? Why should God give him what he wants when it won’t make him happy anyway?

Ah. I see your choice would be to write him off instead of trying to figure out what would convince him. Oh well. Too bad for you.

Such themes have come to my mind again as I read the Phillip Pullman trilogy for an eventual review. I am through book 2 beginning book 3 and I am curious as all get out to see if ‘Jesus’ enters the scene, but already I have seen him describe- with approval- behavior that in other places I have heard atheists despise. There is no way I can go deep into it right now. As a brief example, consider Pullman’s approval of bravery, courage, and even the use of lethal force under certain conditions.
Now compare that with an exchange I had recently with an atheist who, because I granted him superhero status and the title “Hyperbole Boy”

Oh boy! *sits down with a big smile*

I can’t wait to hear the story of how you faced off against someone else on the internet who was just WRONG and showed him the error of his ways!

These stories are so much fun!

has concluded that there is no better example of a Christian being unloving, for, after all (and he cites passages), Jesus was so nice. This sort of disproportionate response to what I said is exactly why I gave him the name “Hyperbole Boy.”

As disproportionate as dubbing someone “Hyperbole Boy” and coming to your own site and crowing about it?

But perhaps my atheistic friend is unaware of instances where Jesus went well beyond such playful jabs. For example, he calls the Pharisees Sons of Satan and Whitewashed Tombs. In Matt 23 he calls them snakes and a brood of vipers. And of course, we all remember his ‘cleansing’ of the temple- probably twice. My atheistic friend acts as though if I had played it completely straight he would have considered Christianity more credible. Is it his view that Jesus was a panzy? Do people find Christianity attractive because its founder was a wuss?

At the same time, we often hear complaints about conduct in the Bible where people are wiped out and killed wholesale. We aren’t usually given the reasons, but we are told that it is just. This is considered a perfect example of how religion is evil. But it is, in fact, the same sort of argumentation we see in Pullman’s books, where so long as the cause is just, the violence is justified under certain conditions.

Zzzzzzzzz…huh? Oh I’m sorry, I fell asleep there. Where were we?

The fact is, the reason why Jesus is compelling is not that he was a sissy pacifist, but rather that he was overwhelmingly mighty, but, to accomplish a particular deed, he set aside his aggressiveness and took whatever was thrown at him. He could have overthrown the gates of Hades by force, but only by laying down his arms did he not only defeat Hades but also freed its prisoners.

Which Hades were we talking about? Did the writers of Christian and Greek mythology have a crossover issue where Jesus wooed Persephone and had a battle royal against Hades for control of the underworld and the hand of the fair maiden?

I’m bummed that I missed that issue. It sounds good!

When a soldier throws himself on a grenade to save his fellows, all except a handful of Ayn Randian objectivists applaud his valor. Here, to save his fellows it would have done no good to charge out of the trench when the grenade tumbled in and kill those who tossed the grenade. Here, only self-sacrifice could achieve the goal, but it did not follow that the soldier was soft and tender in spirit. You see, it depends a great deal on the circumstances and what one wants to achieve. There is a time for aggressiveness but there is also a time for meekness. The problem is knowing exactly which time it is. (Ecc. 3)

Yep, knowing when the right time to do the right thing is hard. Thank you for writing an article about that!…

Or did you write an article about people who aren’t happy no matter what you do for them? Why are we here again?

I think most of us agree that there is a time for negotiation and a time for action.

Controversial to the core, you are!

The time to have persuaded Hitler was years before WW2,

I don’t think Hitler could have been persuaded, but I get your point here.

and when it was clear that the time for persuasion was over, the pacifist Dietrich Bonhoeffer realized that to pursue justice and mercy it would mean trying to kill Hitler. Do we really think Roosevelt was being ‘unchristian’ because he went to war against Hitler? Should he have endlessly spoken in soft terms? Would we think of FDR as a great war time president if he had?

Odd question since if FDR had done so then he wouldn’t have been a wartime president. How does this fit with people not being happy again?

Atheists are going to have to make up their minds. Do they want a Jesus meek and mild? Or do they want a Jesus that administers justice? But they complain when we hear about justice being administered and likewise they complain that it was sadism for God to punish his own son.

That’s an even odder question since its Christians who want a Jesus in the first place. He’s your savior after all. All atheists want is some truth from the Christians that is self consistent, fits with what we see in the real world, and doesn’t just mean whatever someone else wants it to mean ip post facto.

But Pullman gives it all away: The truth is that there is a balance. The problem is how do we discover that balance.

That would be to make a theory, check that theory against reality, and then adjust that theory in accordance with the observations. That’s pretty much the way we discover everything.

The argument is over what world view best explains the fact that there is a balance at all.

So your idea is to start with a “world view” and explain how that view is a good idea? Okay, but you’re not going to discover much that way.

I see no reason at all to expect atheism to explain why such moral realities exist.

That’s fine. Atheism does explain why moral realities exist, but you’re free not to expect it.

I expect them only to take them for granted and use them when it suits them to judge God, Jesus, and yes, of course, Christians.

Ding! Ding!

In the red corner, we have a person who has been simply handed a set of rules and told to follow them without evidence. He does so.

In the blue corner, we have a person who spends years looking at himself and his society, deriving the reasons why people should behave in a good and decent way and why that personally works for him.

Which one is taking something for granted?

Reason is on the rise in Europe

2008-06-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

...Or so it would seem according to the complaints here.

Last november I spent a week in Germany courtesy of the Konrad Adenauer Institute, a foundation named after the first chancellor of West Germany. Adenauer had the unenviable job of restoring government to a demoralized land in which every large city had been bombed to rubble. He founded the Christian Democratic Union political party and, with the help of U.S. largesse in the Marshall Plan, led Germany into a new era.

Oh well. No one's perfect.

This party's very name shows a major difference in European and American approaches to religion and politics.

Clearly! The US wisely stays clear of religious entanglements in government by keeping them separate.

Whereas the U.S. insists on a strict separation of church and state, the monarch of Britain holds the title "Supreme Governor of the Church of England," Polish priests openly campaign for like-minded politicians, and many European governments subsidize church activities, including the teaching of religion in public schools.

Yep. The US saw the effects of these horribly misguided ideas and chose a better path to follow. Good job, USA!

On the day Nicolae Ceausescu was executed in Romania, ending 45 years of Communist rule, the state television station led with the pronouncement, "Today the Antichrist died and Jesus Christ was reborn in Romania!" To European eyes, our controversies over Christmas crèches and the Ten Commandments in public places seem strange indeed.

Too bad for them. Not having the government dictate our religious beliefs is a really good idea.

Yet in the last 50 years, almost all European countries have seen a precipitous decline in church attendance and religious belief. When Harris pollsters asked, "Do you believe in any form of God or supreme being?" only 27 percent of French and 35 percent of British respondents said yes; the others counted themselves atheist, agnostic, or unsure.

Yay! Reason is on the rise in Europe!

Germany offers an interesting case study. Although only 41 percent of adults claim to believe in God, a majority of Germans still formally belong to a church, though few attend. Church affiliation in Germany matters, if for no other reason than it adds an extra 8 percent or so to your income tax bill. In other words, if you declare yourself an unbeliever, you save significant money. The government distributes the "church tax," more than $10 billion annually, to approved denominations for their work in schools, hospitals, and general church upkeep.

So what are you arguing for exactly, again? That the US government should ask its citizens what religion they adhere to and then charge them money for answering it? That sounds like an Abbott and Costello skit:

Abbott: So what religion are you, Lou?
Costello: Um...Christian?
Abbott: That'll cost you $3000.
Costello: $3000?!?
Abbott: Yep
Costello: How much to become a Mormon?
Abbott: Oh that'll be $4000
Costello: Rats. Protestant?
Abbott: Special this week. $2500
Costello: Buddhist?
Abbott: We're still meditating on that price
Costello: Muslim?
Abbott: You can't afford it
Costello: Doh!

Now churches are seeing an alarming decline in their income stream.

Which should concern them...not in the slightest. They're in the business of saving all those souls, right?

Every year some 300,000 Germans remove their names from church rolls, with the number of Protestants declining by half since World War II. In one meeting I attended, the bishop of Saxony—the region where Martin Luther posted his 95 theses and Bach wrote his cantatas—calmly reported that of 4.5 million citizens, only 850,000 had affiliated with a church. He expected that number to decline to 350,000 by 2015 and perhaps dip as low as 30,000 by 2030. After four decades under Communist rule, citizens of the East feel no civic pressure to keep traditional ties with a church.

That those citizens feel no civic pressure to do something they don't want to do is a good thing! That they feel no pressure whatsoever to keep ties to a church says lots and lots about what the church is actually offering them.

The bishop faces a discouraging task: cutting pastors' salaries, eliminating hospital chaplains, and shuttering churches and schools.

It is a nasty job of getting rid of services that people are freely choosing not to support, isn’t it?

In the same meeting, a lively pastor showed a far more upbeat spirit. First he recounted personal stories of the difficulties that Christians faced under Communist rule. His children had limited educational opportunities, and he had to work as a plumber to supplement his meager pastor's salary. Everything changed "after the wall came down" (a phrase I often heard).

I’m confused. Was there a point we were getting to here?

Although less than 20 percent of Saxony's citizens may belong to a church, he estimated that 70 percent of those in Parliament are active, practicing Christians.

Having 20% of the people occupying 70% of Parliament is a really, really bad thing to anyone who believes in a representative government.

Having lived under Communism, Christians quickly volunteered to step into a cultural vacuum of meaning and help the newly free society lay a foundation for moral and legal structure. They realized all too personally what can happen when Christians are excluded from the public square.

I’m sure all the Atheists, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews are grateful to them for it.

In my writing, I sometimes caution Christians in the U.S. against confusing our mission with political causes; the close association of evangelicals with particular political causes can easily derail our mission.

Good plan. Lets keep religion and government separate. Sounds like we’re on the same page here!

The East Germans have a different perspective, for understandable reasons. They believe that Christians have an important role to play in society. As one of the German politicians expressed it, "A liberal democratic state requires conditions that it cannot create."

Oh. Nevermind.

In this election year, Americans are once again vigorously debating the precarious balance between religion and politics. Europe offers a cautionary tale in both directions. In many places, the historic coziness between church and state has soiled the church's reputation. The church in Spain, for example, is still trying to recover from the damage done by its close ties with the dictator Francisco Franco. Yet as the Saxon pastor pointed out, Christians remove themselves from the public square only at their peril. Finding the proper balance has profound implications for both church and state.

Yep. The cautionary tale is that if you force people to have a particular religion that they don’t want, it’s a bad thing. And if you force people not to have religion when they want one, it’s a bad thing.

The only reasonable idea, therefore, is to not have the government interfere at all and remain neutral. Doesn’t that make perfect sense? Of course it does. That’s what you’re getting at, I’m sure.

God performing supernatural powers? Don't be silly!

2008-06-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

Another day, another bizarre set of claims from John Hagee's FAQ section!

Q. Why is Bible prophecy so important? And what do you mean when you talk about the "rapture" of the church?

A. Prophecy

The art of making religious predictions that fail scientific analysis

is important because such a significant amount of Scripture is devoted to it: about one-quarter of the Bible was prophetic when it was written.

I’m dying to know what the definition of prophecy is now

Bible prophecy proves beyond any reasonable doubt that God knows and controls the future,

And writes fortune cookies, too!

and the fact that He included so much prophecy in His Word shows that He wants us to understand the things to come.

There’s an easier way for an all-knowing god to do that – make unambiguous statements like “automobiles will replace horses as the primary means of transportation in the 20th century” or “John Wooden will lead UCLA to seven straight NCAA basketball championships”. Please provide these from the bible!

Most of the events prophesied in Scripture have already come to pass, but some remain to be fulfilled at a later date, including the Rapture of the Church.

Including such specific claims as “Israel will ultimately prevail over its enemies" and "God will never forget the children of Israel"

While the term rapture is not used in the New Testament, the concept of a "catching away" is vividly described. It refers to a future event when the church-all members of the body of Christ, past and present-will be reunited with Jesus.

The door is that-a-way folks! Feel free to mosey on to Jesus. It’s been a slice!

First Thessalonians says, "For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ [Christians who have died] will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord" (4:16-18; see also 1 Cor. 15:51-52).

Pretty stirring stuff coming out of those ancient goat herders! Bravo!

When will this take place? Although no one knows the day or the hour,

Which makes it one of the all time worst predictions ever. Seriously, what bookie would take that kind of bet?

“I’d like to bet $50 that Duke will win”

“Okay! I’ve got you down for $50 that Duke will win today”

“No! Not necessarily today. They’ll win…someday. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. But they’ll win! I’m sure of it.”

the Bible describes the time period immediately preceding. I have written extensively about why I believe that the generation that is alive today will see the mass ingathering of believers commonly called the Rapture.

That might have something to do with whipping them into a religious frenzy whereupon they’ll hand you large chunks of money. I’m just saying.

The Bible says that as they did when Noah was building the ark, people on earth will be conducting their daily affairs, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, buying and selling, right up to the moment of His return.

Just like they’re doing….right now! Wow! I’m convinced!

And just as God set apart His chosen ones by placing Noah and his family into the ark for safe-keeping, He will remove his Church from the seven years of tribulation that will follow the Rapture.

That’s it? The big key to know that the rapture is coming is that people are conducting their normal daily affairs?

The Rapture will also protect the church from Satan's ultimate delusion. (See 2 Thess. 2:9-12.) Jesus prophesied that before His return there would be many false messiahs and false christs (Matt. 24:23). Think about it. Anyone can stand up and say, "I am Jesus."

Too bad no one did 2000 years ago.

Anyone can wear a white robe and claim to be the descendant of King David.

And look mah-velous!

Anyone can place surgical scars in his hands and feet.

As opposed to wrists and ankles where people who are actually crucified are nailed.

How can you tell the real from the false Jesus?

Dilemmas! Dilemmas!

Not by dramatic displays of supernatural power.

Exactly. Don’t require our supernatural deities to perform supernatural acts. That would be silly!

Remember this: a man with supernatural power is not necessarily from God; the devil has supernatural power too, as do his demons.

* Begin Monty Python skit *
Run away! Run away!

So how will you know when the real Jesus comes to earth? I'll know Jesus has reappeared when my glorified body sails through the heavens past the Milky Way into the presence of God.

How about this afternoon? Does that work for you?

I'll know I'm with the real Jesus

That you can’t identify from the fake ones

when I stand in His glorious presence

When he’s, of course, showing no supernatural powers

with my brand new

And under warranty!

disease-proof,

Or your money back!

never-dying,

Because you’re already dead. Tricksies!

fatigue-free body!

You go, girl!

The Yominator Strikes Back!

2008-06-19T00:54:00.000-07:00

Our good friend and gold mine, The Yominator, is at it again! He was so much fun last time that I just can't help myself. Lets see which set of 100 year old, time obliterated, pre-debunked, completely discredited arguments he wants to come forward with this time!

Logical and philosophical case for the Divine: Follow Up to Logical Proof of the Existence of a Divine Creator, Why Atheism is Not Logically Sound

*pulls up a chair*

Oh boy! It's like finding the last Wii in town! Sweet!

As many readers know, I recently wrote a column titled “Logical Proof of the Existence of a Divine Creator, Why Atheism is Not Logically Sound,”

We've been briefed.

which explored the logical and philosophical case for the Divine.

"explored" meaning that you looked for some good arguments and, finding none, wrote a piece of worthy of Tweety's cage.

As I painstakingly pointed out in the column, all of the arguments hold true whether one believes in evolution or not.

Oddly, the spirit of this statement is true. His previous argument's truth value does not depend on evolution. They are worth less than a Louisiana Governor's scholastic opinion regardless of if you believe that evolution is true or not.

In fact, for that very reason I chose not to get involved in the debate on evolution,

That and you'd have to do actual research to talk on that subject. Best to stick to something else that you don't know!

as I felt it to be a distraction from the main point,

There's a point to this?!? Woot!

that a universe so complex in design, and a world that would not sustain life if any one of a trillion necessary ingredients for life were missing, does not come into being in and of itself.

Zzzzz....Sorry, man, but you're repeating yourself here. Let me dig out the archives...

Okay! Here it is!

"1 - I don’t understand the universe, therefore God exists"

Whew! I was worried that I'd have to write new material in response to your recycled stuff. Lucky call there!

Although I had recently concluded a debate with atheists on evolution,

Was that the one where you threatened to tell the world how evil they all were? I get so confused trying to keep up with all your wanderings across the net.

a roughly written

No way! I'd have never guessed that with you, my good and dear friend!

but highly detailed transcript of which can be found at creationistsearcher.wordpress.com,

Would that be "On the Lies and Harassment Tactics of Martin Wagner and Russell Glasser", the former of which so traumatized you that you were forced - forced I say! - to vandalize his Wikipedia page with accusations of pedophilia?

That Martin! Stalking you night and day by - *shudder* - looking up your name on Google!

I felt that delving into the scientific reasons against evolution would detract from the main theme of the column,

And require all that irritating time, effort, and thought. Who needs that?!? You've got several new blogs to write!

that no matter how you believe the universe was designed, it had to have been done so intelligently. (As a side note, the above referenced debate touches on a number of pertinent issues and should be of value to the reader).

Once you buy that the universe was designed, it makes perfect sense that it had to be designed intelligently. Now just provide the proof that the universe was designed and we're good to go!

Nonetheless, many chose to attack the column from a scientific standpoint, not by bringing specific examples, but because of the lack thereof. While they entirely missed the meaning of the column, I would still like to address their issues.

Please do! That sounds like fun!

To begin with,

Dude, we're a long way into this article for the phrase "To begin with". I'm just saying.

not only is evolution far from proven science, in fact there are gaping holes in its theory.

Do tell! There is an entire world full of scientists who would be happy to hear about any actual, real, sound problems with the theory.

One central problem with the theory of evolution is that it dictates that life formed from non-life. This is not plausible.

Okay! There's a good thesis statement: It's not plausible that life formed from non-life. I presume that you're about to talk about those experiments with the creation of ammino acids and abiogenesis, right? Blast holes in those experiments! Batten down those hatches, mateys! Yomin's coming through with a full head of steam!

Furthermore, for there to be a rich enough variance in DNA/RNA this would have had to happen millions of times, separately. DNA and RNA are also both needed to reproduce a single cell.

Um...dude? You were talking about abiogenesis...you had a full head of steam...our ship was blasting through their defenses like the walls of Jericho!

What happened?

A much larger problem with evolution is the lack of transitional fossils, fossils that show a gradual change from one form of species to the next. This isn’t an arbitrary problem. It is inconceivable that if man transitioned from ape, over time, that on the one hand we’d find a plethora of human fossils as well as a plethora of ape ones, but none in between that document such a slow and gradual change.

No one believes that such a transformation could have been sudden. If it had happened we’d have as many transitional fossils as there are human and as there are ape fossils. It also isn’t logical to suppose that reptiles formed into mammals when we have a plethora of both reptilian and mammalian fossils, but none that show a clear transition between one form and the next.

Oh, no...you didn't go there? *sigh*

Okay, so much for the momentum. Okay, hold up a minute and check this one out. Then come on back.

No rush, man.

We'll wait.

No really, take your time. Your readers will thank you for it.

Darwin was aware of this and thought that future fossils would be discovered.

Another win for Chucky!

But in the past 150 years, thousands of fossils were excavated and no conclusively transitional ones were found.

You understand that a transitional form, to the animal in question, would simply be a form, right? That we're all actually transitional and if we die and actually become fossils - something of a rarity really - that we're all transitional fossils. And so every fossil we've ever found is a transitional fossil. Is this getting past Yomin's Demon?

I didn't think so.

He recognized that it isn’t logical that we’d have a plethora of human and of ape fossils but no transitional ones. The late Harvard Professor Steven J. Gould also had to admit that, quote, “the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology.”

Ouch! Wrong choice of guy to quote. Here's another from Professor Gould: "Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but are abundant between larger groups. The evolution from reptiles to mammals...is well documented."

Given the amount of fossils excavated and the utter lack conclusively transitional ones (and the scarceness of any that scientists can even claim to be possibly transition), it’s entirely possible that Darwin himself would reject the theory of evolution today.

"Yomin! This is your demon talking...you just keep on writing! What you're saying fits with all of the facts that you've ever seen come through that gate that I've been helping you by guarding for your entire life! Aren't I a good demon? Helping you filter out all the useless, pedantic, time wasting information such as what evolution actually means, what the scientific process is and can do, what transitional fossils are, and countless other pieces of garbage that would just distract you from the meaning of your message. Keep it up!"

Proponents of evolution incorrectly cite the Archaeopteryx, a fossil that had feathers and scales, as a transitional form. In fact, it has fully developed feathers and fully developed scales. This doesn’t prove transition at all as nothing points to any transformation from scale to feather, like a half-scale for example.

The same is true of the oft-miscited duck-billed platypus. It has features that are reptilian and some mammalian, but none that show a transition from one to the other. Its reptilian, mammalian and other characteristics are each fully formed and do not show any transition of one to the other. In fact, all of its characteristics are perfectly suited to its unique climate. Furthermore, there’s no difference between modern day platypuses and those found in fossils.

The same is true of the hominids, the supposed ape to human transitional forms. Of the 12 hominids cited by evolutionists, 9 have been documented to be extinct species of ape/monkey with no human characteristics at all. The other 3 are modern day humans with no animal characteristics. A true half human half ape fossil has never been found.

Those wacky evolutionists! Pointing to different species that have "traits" "in common" and trying to deceive us into thinking that this might show that these "traits" can be "passed down" to "other generations". What kind of rubbish is that?!?

But none of this was the point of the original column. Its central point was that no matter how the universe was formed, no one can plausibly argue that it happened by itself.

No one! No one at all! Well, except for maybe one or two guys who have actually studied it.

How one can argue that both RNA and DNA came into existence, by chance, at the exact same time (because if not, no cell would reproduce, and it’s unfeasible that they developed separately and then joined together, as they are not found outside of the cellular form) is also unattainable. And we can go on and on about the trillions of coincidences needed for the evolutionist to deny a conscious Creator.

We covered this twice already. Something about the universe being to complex, therefore God exists or something like that. I'm sure I've got it around here somewhere...

I would encourage those who disagree to give these columns fair consideration.

Oh, they have. Much more than fair given the content, really.

The fact that some chose to misread the last column to the extent that they did seems ingenuous,

Or "informed". Either one.

just as those who chose to mistake the meaning of “spontaneous” as it was featured (the point there being that even the theory of evolution necessitates far too many and too complex random coincidences, trillions of them, for it to plausibly have occurred without a conscious designer) did so by reading the column in a way that differed from its obvious and intended meaning. Some even mistook “elements of life” to refer to the Periodic Table of Elements, which was an absurd interpretation and showed a lack of ability to openly think over the points of the column. Please treat the matter with fair consideration. I believe that you will gain from the experience.

I definitely have! It's been a blast...again!

Gov. Bobby Jindal doesn't understand that we teach art in art class

2008-06-18T00:45:00.000-07:00

Hey look! The current sitting governor of Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal - and considered by Newt Gingrich to be “far and away the best candidate” to be McCain's running mate - wants Intelligent Design taught in science class. Here's the piece from his interview on Meet the Press:

I don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them. … I want them to see the best data. I personally think human life and the world we live in wasn’t created accidentally. I do think that there’s a creator. … Now the way that he did it, I’d certainly want my kids to be exposed to the very best science. I don’t want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from them because of political correctness.

Lets break this one down a bit, shall we?

I don’t think students learn by us withholding information from them

It's facinating how a professional politician can lie by ommission, isn't it? Lets take a moment to make a quick list of information that we "withhold from them" in science class:

The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
How to properly spot someone who is lifting weights
The Queen's Gambit defense
How to hit a fastball
Which of Henry the Eighth's wives outlived him
The uses of oil based paints in modern artwork
How to play the clarinet
The book of Genesis

Do you see something in common here, Mr. Governor? I'll clue you in - none of these things are taught in science class because they - stay with me here - are not science.

All of them have a perfectly valid place to be taught to students. All of them are useful pieces of information that students will help themselves by learning. But they're still not science. And that - exactly - is why ID should not be taught in science class - it's not science either. It's a religious subject as per the United States courts. Including non-science in a science class is ridiculous.

I want them to see the best data.

Good! Then you support teaching only science in a science class. Right on!

I personally think human life and the world we live in wasn’t created accidentally.

Agreed! It nice that religious people and non-religious people can agree on this point. Although it's odd that religious people don't seem to understand that we're all in agreement on this one.

I do think that there’s a creator. … Now the way that he did it, I’d certainly want my kids to be exposed to the very best science.

There is nothing scientific about saying "Godidit"

I don’t want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from them because of political correctness.

Agreed! Science should be taught in science class because...it's science class. Shockingly enough, art should be taught in art class and music should be taught in music class and so on and so forth. Political correctness has nothing to do with this. Teaching the actual subject in a given class is the issue.

You know, after giving it full consideration...what am I thinking?!? Lets teach Intelligent Design in art class. After all, God is the source of all beauty, right? And it's an alternative view of art. And lets teach ID in music class since music is just a call out to God anyway!

So why are you stopping at science class, Gov Jindal? You're withholding ID from the poor students of every other subject!

God doesn't know the future

2008-06-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

John Hagee has important tips on prayer in his FAQ section

Q. How important is prayer? Doesn't God already know what we need?

A. As powerful as God is, He cannot answer prayers until they are prayed.

That seems like an odd limitation on an omniscient being!

Prayer is the key that unlocks the storehouses of God's grace and power.

Without it, God is powerless!!! Muahahahahahaha!

Prayer is not a matter of overcoming God's reluctance,

Of course not. You’ll never overcome that!

and it is not a means of sending God to run your errands.

God, this latte is cold! Fetch me another one!

Many people consider prayer a form of divine insurance or a game of chance-heaven's version of Let's Make a Deal.

“Would you like what’s behind Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3?”

“Door #3, Jesus! Please give me Door #3!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. That’s the damned to eternal torment door. Step right this way.”

…Yeah, I see your point. That would be a bummer.

It's not that at all.

Whew! That’s good. I never figured that Jesus looked like Monty Hall.

Prayer is submitting to the purposes of God. Find out what God wants and pray for that.

And supposing to know the purpose of God is arrogance! So prayer is arrogance! Got it!

When you meet God's conditions

Which will become clear to you after eating these brownies

in prayer, you get an answer every time.

Which explains why all the controlled studies on the subject agree whole-heartedly with this claim!

Realize that there are three possible answers: yes, no, and wait.

Vegas calls this “hedging your bet”.

Of course, we don't want to hear two of those answers, because we hate to wait on anything.

Especially on that terminal illness. We’re picky that way.

America is the land of fast cars and fast food, instant potatoes and instant coffee. But Isaiah said, "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength" (40:31).

Except when he doesn’t.

Through prayer, you can tap into the supernatural world,

And feel like you’re doing something when you’re not!

and you can pray with intelligence that goes beyond the knowledge of man.

Clearly

Romans 8:26 says that when we don't know how to pray, the Holy Spirit helps us and makes intercession for us.

Yay! And here I was worried that there’d be a test.

I have learned to pray with a legal pad close by. When I finish telling God what's on my mind, I listen to see what's on His mind-and I write it down.

God obviously needs a secretary

What He tells me when I shut up and listen is what gives birth to every sermon I preach and every book I write.

In addition to those brownies!

If you want to hear from God-and He does want to talk to you-then don't just bombard heaven with a laundry list of requests. Pour your heart out to God, then take time to listen. It will revolutionize your life.

You too could become an obese, adulterous, million dollar a year televangelist! Yay!

Ignorance by the truckload

2008-06-16T06:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I run into someone who is so far out there, so determined to be ignorant that I have to question whether or not this is just a parody article. I decided to run with this one since it seemed like fun anyway.

I turns out that it's not a parody. In fact, last night the author came onto the Dawkins forums and complained about being attacked because of his article. That little drama has a couple of directions to it that I'll leave to you all to follow up on if you want. But if you do follow up on it, don't miss out on him being eviscerated by his own people as well!

Without further ado, here's his article!

Logical Proof of the Existence of a Divine Creator, Why Atheism is Not Logically Sound

Great hypothesis! “That God exists can be logically proved”. Do that one and I’ll even give you a free pass on the second part namely that “Atheism is not logically sound”.

One of the beautiful aspects of self evident truths is that they can be proven on both the simplest and the most complex of levels.

Not an auspicious beginning but lets move past that to the proof.

By contrast, to make an argument for what is in fact an illogical fallacy, one must use plenty of skill, sophistry and remain beholden to a dogmatic protection of what is really an illogical position.

Yes…and someone else’s bad proofs have what to do with your soon to be stated, logically sound, undeniable proof of God’s existence?

Yet even after a detailed case is made for the illogical side of the argument, it can instantly be deflated like a balloon with the simplest poke of clear logic. It can also be attacked piece by piece with even greater skill and logic, stemming from a steadfast pursuit of the truth.

Zzzzzzz…oh sorry! I fell asleep there waiting to hear something connected to an actual proof.

Nowhere does the above hold more true than with regard to the existence of a Divine Creator. Proof of a conscious Creator is readily available.

Great! Lets hear it, then.

The simplest proof (yet one that no atheist has ever been able to counter effectively) is that a universe of this size and magnitude does not somehow build itself, just as a set of encyclopedias doesn't write itself or form randomly from the spill of a massive inkblot.

“Take that, Mr. Atheist Guy! You can’t counter logic like that. I know you can’t because I don’t believe that you ever have and I can’t believe that anything can come about without someone creating it. My logic is good enough for Brady and it’s good enough for me! So there!”

The atheist, on the other hand, needs to build a plausible case for this irrational scenario. But first, let's examine how irrational it is:

* sits down in front of the old fireplace with a cup of hot cocoa and listens in raptured silence *

No one in their right mind would claim that 10,000 hundred story buildings built themselves from randomness, even over time.

True! We’ve seen people build buildings, watched architects work and studied their plans, taken pictures of buildings being built, and so on. We’re pretty sure how they come to exist.

Yet those who doubt the existence of a Creator believe that an entire universe, containing all of the billions of elements necessary for life to form, may have come about without a builder.

Yeah. You see we’ve never met this builder you’re talking about. He hasn’t given us his blueprints, we didn’t watch him making the universe, and we don’t have pictures of the universe being built.

I’m awfully sorry, but that kind of leaves a pretty large gap in the analogy.

If you have some blueprints or videotape of the building process, we’d love to see them! That would make a big difference.

As such, they give credence to billions of times more coincidences to having come about.

As opposed to the far more likely scenario of a mythical, supernatural being who never shows up for dinner parties no matter how many invitations we send. Got it! I’m convinced!

They believe that not only did whole planets appear spontaneously, but also believe that the fact that these planets do not collide as meteors do,

Really?!? I’ve heard whole theories based on collisions in the cosmos. You might want to read up on the subject.

that they have gravity, that they contain the proper atmospheric conditions for life to take hold and contain sustenance to sustain this life all happened by mere fluke.
Yet the same people would (rightly) denounce as preposterous the notion that the Egyptian pyramids built themselves.

Again, we’ve seen the blueprints, so to speak, and have really good theories on how those things were built that don’t involve breaking of the laws of the universe or inventing a god.

They would point to the structure and detailed design of these impressive inanimate objects. Yet they outrageously chalk up to coincidence billions upon billions of times more detail and design in all parts of life found in this universe.

To be sure, someone can build sandcastles in the sky on how the spontaneous coming together of molecules, then turning into bricks, changing further into buildings, culminating in 10,000 perfectly aligned skyscrapers all built with no builder is a plausible scenario. They can form intricate arguments to support this theory. But in the end, the entire proposition remains offensive to logic itself.

Wow! I guess that it’s a good thing that no one actually makes that claim, isn’t it?

While there are complex proofs of the Divine, some dating back to the philosophical writings of Plato and others using modern science, the most clearly logical concepts are all readily apparent and simple. An entire world does not create itself.

QED! Zing! Scorch! Pow! Take that all you godless heathens!

Furthermore, proof of a Divine creator can be seen more readily in the small and intricate details of the universe than by considering the enormity of the universe as a whole.

You’ve got more?!? Sweet!

Consider the following:

Even if all the planets somehow formed themselves, all somehow staying in perfect orbit and possessing gravity, even take for granted that all the chemicals needed for life were so how there as well, by sheer happenstance, would it then be possible for billions of species to spontaneously come about, each with a male and female of each kind so that they could exist in the long run?

Lets break this one down a bit:

somehow staying in perfect orbit

Orbits are important. Of course we haven’t found life in very many places other than Earth. Zero so far, to be exact.

and possessing gravity,

Possessing gravity…you mean like every piece of matter in the universe? I think we can safely get away with one.

even take for granted that all the chemicals needed for life were so how there as well,

Which has been shown to be possible in laboratory experiments

by sheer happenstance,

But not by sheer happenstance, actually

would it then be possible for billions of species to spontaneously come about, each with a male and female

Lots of species don’t have sexual reproduction at all. That development is an evolutionary benefit to a species that gets it.

of each kind so that they could exist in the long run?

Lots of them didn’t. Extinction is kind of brutal that way.

Even if this were possible, would the simplest of animals have been able to survive were it missing even one essential organ?

Yep. Name an “essential” organ, I’ll show you a creature that does without it.

Would human beings survive if one organ or cavity was missing or displaced, even after somehow being otherwise perfectly formed with no designer?

You mean like an appendix?

The simple fact is that even if humans were so perfectly formed, if food, water, sunlight or any one of a host of details necessary for life to exist were somehow missing, human life would have lasted on this planet for a maximum of a few days.

Or more correctly, would never have evolved. Good point!

The contention of atheists, that life simply adapted to the conditions it found itself in is also irrational,

Completely irrational. We never see this happen anywhere. Pay no attention to that giraffe eating leaves from that tall tree over there.

as were this to be the case we'd have animals that could solely subsist on snow and ice in some regions.

Huh? I’m trying here man, but this gap is too far for me to jump. I’d try pole vaulting, but you know all about that bum hip of mine…

By contrast, the ability to adapt to small conditional changes is also a fascinating aspect of the body, one that shows that much detail was put into its design.

Ooh! This sounds good! Do go on and tell us more about this part!

The central point of the atheist,

Hey! You were about to actually talk about some designs, blueprints, construction diagrams, or something. Okay, I’m not really sure what exactly, but it sounded like you had something good!

that all somehow came about randomly through evolution, does not help them either.

You’re absolutely right! It doesn’t help them in the slightest! Of course they figured that out a long time ago, rejected the random hypothesis, and replaced it with a far better one. Joe Bob says check it out sometime!

While a separate column will deal with the scientific arguments for creationism and evolution, the topic is not germane here.

I’m not holding my breath.

Going back to the example of a set of encyclopedias,

Oh man! We already covered that! Boring!

a set of Britannicas does not write itself, not from one massive ink blot and not starting out as dots, which form letters, which align into perfect phrases, paragraphs, books and sets. In fact, it's even more incredulous to say that they aligned so perfectly, step by step and dot by dot than it is to say that all appeared at once. Yet that's what the atheist contends when he chalks up life's existence to gradual and detailed formation with no Creator at the helm.

Zzzzzz….

However, despite the fact that even after much debate on the issue I have yet to meet an atheist who can make even a feeble argument to counter any of these points,

Hi! My name’s Jim and I just did so.

You might want to meet actual atheists who have done actual research into the actual subjects that you’re talking about. They really do have lots of arguments that rise above “feeble”. It’s really neat!

they often feel that such grounded proofs aren't complicated enough. Just as a man who spends years coming up with a thousand reasons why an elephant is really a duck will not be persuaded of his error without first addressing all of his complicated fallacies, so too the atheist's contentions must be addressed in detail. For this reason, we will also address some of the more detailed proofs of the existence of the Divine.

Yay! Back to the topic!

Of the many philosophic and scientific arguments brought forth for the existence of the Divine, three stand out.

Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!

The anthropic argument contends that the universe is too complex to have no Creator. This is in effect the central point of this column, although explained in a more common manner. The cosmological argument maintains that finite matter (original matter, which was clearly finite) cannot create a universe that is greater than itself. Especially compelling is the teleological argument, that the existence of a Creator can be seen from the fact that the universe works in perfect harmony, as would a giant machine. Gravity, orbits, chemical atmospheres and all other ingredients needed for life to exist come together in unison to allow such existence to happen. An enormous machine that works like clockwork needs to have a Creator.

In other words:

1 - I don’t understand the universe, therefore God exists
2 – I’ll ignore the equivalence between matter and energy, therefore God exists
3 – I get a warm fuzzy feeling when looking at the cosmos, therefore God exists.

Okay! I’m all sorts of convinced!

THE TRUTH OF OUR SIDE AND THE REAL CHALLENGE TO DEBATING ATHEISTS

But all of these reasons, in reality, are unnecessary. The youngest school child can tell you that a building does not build itself and that, by extension, neither does a universe.

It still makes no sense, but coming from a young schoolchild it’s really cute!

And this is the beauty of self evident truths.

No need to actually prove them?

After all the proofs and reasoning in the world, they remain just as self evident, just as they are also, on the deepest levels, thoroughly profound. Here too, all that is needed to demonstrate proof of a Creator is that the world doesn't create itself, not instantly and not over time. All other issues can then be examined in that light.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what you do.

However, we must realize that while the sophistry it takes to purport a falsehood can be easily countered, the person who has upheld such notions for decades must have each of his or her counterpoints addressed. This is able to be done smoothly, in light of the inherent logic that necessitates the existence of a conscious Creator, but it must be done thoroughly.

Encouraging atheists to open their minds to pure logic and to possibilities that they hitherto only sought to counter or to avoid on any pretext also involves an emotional challenge for them, as they must open themselves to the possibility of having to shed preconceived notions that they've held firm for decades. And that, rather than facts, is the primary challenge to exposing them to insightful logic. However, if they are willing to address the issue honestly, a search for the truth should be of paramount importance and enough reason for them to take an open look.

”Captain! The irony meter can’t take any more o this!”

“Hold it together, Mr. Scott! He can’t keep a straight face through all of this. He’ll crack soon! I’m sure of it!”

NOT RELIGION AND SCIENCE, BUT RELIGION AND SCIENTISTS

Scientists as a whole are increasingly open to the idea of a conscious Creator.

Yes. That’s what scientists do. They evaluate positions with an open mind.

They realize that science points to the complexity of the universe, a complexity that dictates the inevitability of a Creator.

No, that’s what religious idiots do. They believe that the facts they will find down the line will inevitably lead to a particular conclusion.

However, some stick to old ways and old dogmas. A question that arises is why these seemingly logical people possess such illogical beliefs. This fact alone has prevented many from considering the existence of a Creator. But when we understand the reason for their animus to belief, their bias comes to the forefront as opposed to any reasoned argument.

This is one of those moments where I really enjoy this. Here's a devout believer claiming that believing in an invisible, mythological super being is more logical than actually going around the world and looking at the universe itself, collecting evidence, making theories and putting those theories to the harsh test of the real world. And this is more logical to him because some middle eastern tribes made wild claims about a couple of thousand years ago - claims that have crumbled like a house of cards under the hash light of actually checking evidence and building theories that have to work in the real world.

This really isn't that complex. Mapping claims to reality and throwing out claims that don't fit is more logical than making claims and refusing to change them when reality doesn't work the way your claims say it should.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled snarkiness!

Throughout the 20th century, many scientists were enthralled with the progress that science had made. They mistakenly believed that the physical universe, instead of being a creation, contained all answers in and of itself. Any questions would be resolved by science. To look beyond that was viewed in disdain.

Because it isn’t supported by actual, you know, evidence.

The fact that logic necessitates that physical matter must have originated at some point and that a formed universe cannot emerge without a designer was overlooked in the hope that physical science would prove the impossible. Other scientists, today a greater number than the more dogmatic former group, conceded that there may well be a Creator.

Just about all of them do. And then they get persnickety and ask for some evidence. Those fiends!

But they were wholly disinterested in the subject. They too did not realize that our physical universe points to the fact that it was consciously designed. And many of them had the same rigid disdain for religion as the former.

What's true of both groups is that they refused to consider the subject. As such, their rejection of a Creator does not stem from some well reasoned research or thought, but rather from the absence of such reasoning. Their knowledge of religion and philosophy was on par with their knowledge of economics or any other subject that they had never studied. They knew as much about religion as they knew how to paint a house, the only difference between the two being that had they delved into the former instead of reflexively dismissing it, they would have found it to be of profound logic and give depth to their other areas of study.

But these scientists did not give religious or philosophical questions a moment's notice. And what becomes abundantly clear from their statements on the issue is that they have grave misconceptions about religion, misconceptions that stem from their lack of interest. And while it is their right to do so, reflexively and often emotionally dismissing a belief without giving it a moment's thought isn't logic, but rather the opposite of logic.

To be sure, these scientists are indeed very logical and analytical within their main doctrine. It's just that they refuse to examine that which transcends it. As such, anyone who gives credence their views on this issue should beware, as their opinions do not stem from logic. Scientists who have thought over the issue are generally in agreement on this as well.

In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: These words….they do not mean what you think they mean.

Seriously, man. Guys like Stenger really have studied your God hypothesis. They didn’t reject it because they weren’t aware of it. A billion religious TV shows remind us of that failed theory all the time.

They rejected it because they did actual research on actual evidence and found out that none of it points to the universe being consciously designed. Claiming that they never studied it is prima facie stupidity.

But please keep on writing! You're a gem!

A champion comes forth!

2008-06-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

Over at Campus Report Online, the have an interesting method of refuting scientific studies. Read on.

If getting rich is your goal, steer clear of a conservative Protestant church.

Okay, I was all set to devote my life to that church, but I want to eat, too, so thanks for the warning!

That's the absurd conclusion of a study by Duke University professor Lisa Keister, who authored "Conservative Protestants and Wealth: How Religion Perpetuates Asset Poverty" in this month's American Journal of Sociology.

Oh. So that’s what a scientific study on the matter says. And since you find that conclusion ‘absurd’ you’re going to spend lots of time analyzing why a study would come to this conclusion, refuting the data collected and will clearly show us the flaws in the study!

I can’t wait!

Keister suggests that wealth is "among the most fundamental indicators of well-being"

Fairly reasonable. It’s tough to get good medical care, housing, food, or clothing without money, so that seems like a reasonable connection.

and, according to her, the church is sorely lacking it.

But you’ll show us the Truth soon!

When comparing net worth in the year 2000, conservative Protestants (CPs) averaged $26,000 compared to $66,200 for the wider population.

Short 40 thousand dollars sounds like ‘lacking’ to me. So get cranking with the refutation already!

"[The findings] are consistent with the argument that long-term exposure to CP values, particularly during the critical childhood years when people learn to save, adversely influences asset ownership..."

Yeah, yeah, Professor Keister – if that really is your real name – we all hear your absurdities. But Tony’s about to set you straight!

Keister tries to validate the liberal stereotype of Protestants as poor, uneducated people who force their women to stay home barefoot and pregnant.

Um, Tony, she didn’t say anything about uneducated or forcing women to be barefoot and pregnant. Come on man, you’re teasing us! Start raining the brimstone on this study already!

She claims that biblical teachings are hostile to the accumulation of wealth and cites people who say that it "prevents one from knowing God."

Again…that sounds pretty reasonable. Telling people that they shouldn’t accumulate money leads to people not trying to accumulate money. And not trying to accumulate money leads to not having money.

Dude! We’re waiting here and you’re doing your Casey at the Bat impressions! Connect with that high hard one already!

Unfortunately, Keister ignores the obvious explanations,

Hold the phone!

You’re not disputing the facts found in this study?!? You’re not going after the methodology that The Keister used to base her study? You’re…agreeing with her?!?

What kind of a refutation is this?!?!?

which are that believers are more inclined to give sacrificially

Possibly true, my former champion. But you need to go demonstrate it now. Perhaps you could do a scientific study to show this like say…Professor Lisa Keister actually went and did.

and place less priority on material things.

Isn’t this exactly what Professor Keister said in her study? You know, directly agreeing with your opposition is not the way to refute her findings. I’m just saying.

In fact, as Arthur Brooks notes in his book Who Really Cares, one of the best things that could happen in the fight to reduce poverty would be for Americans to become more religiously conservative. Brooks writes, "Religious people are, inarguably, more charitable in every measurable way."

So are we talking about religious conservatism or Conservative Protestants? I’m confused here now.

In contrast to Keister's theory, most Protestants don't have an objection to riches but refuse to be defined by them.

This contrasts her theory?!?

As our Dr. Pat Fagan has pointed out, men and women of faith place a higher priority on producing human capital than financial capital.

Resulting in not having financial capital.

Keister's report seems to feed into society's notion that that success is determined by what you accumulate, rather than what people accomplish or how they serve. In the end, wealth is no more an indication of success than it is of happiness.

So in the end, you agree that they are poor, just like the professor says, but they don’t mind it.

Wow. F on the refuting, but I’ll give you a D- just for old times sake when you were once my champion. Sigh.

The US has been warned! Gasp!

2008-06-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

Our good friend, Jason Lovelace over at Rapture Ready, has a dire warning for all of us in the United States. It seems the protecting hand of God is about to be removed! Gasp!

A Warning to the United States of America

* Cue dramatic music *

Dun, dun….dun!!!!

Key Scripture:

Judges 2.16-17 – Nevertheless the LORD raised up judges, which delivered them out of the hand of those that spoiled them. And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the commandments of the LORD; but they did not so.

So you’re saying that judges are whores who make judgments based on the teachings of the Wrong Gods. Got it.

The United States has long been a bastion of Christian ideals, religious freedom, and liberty.

As well as Jewish ideals, Muslim ideals, Buddist ideals, atheist ideals, and so on.

Everywhere U.S. Military Personnel have gone, fought, bled, and died, freedom has come on their heels, including the freedom to worship as one chooses.

Perhaps not exactly true all of the time, but it’s generally been the goal.

Unfortunately in these days of post-modernistic personal subjectivity, anything Christian has become more and more ridiculed, more and more marginalized, and seen more and more of Christian Freedoms curtailed n the name of Separation of Church and State.

Really? Where are the laws being passed against Christians, say making a Christian not competent to sit on a jury because of his beliefs? Or proclaiming Christians as heretics and thus torturing them all to death and taking their stuff? Or the SWAT teams stopping people from going to their church and preventing them from praying at gunpoint?

Could the USA be in God’s crosshairs for judgment?

No.

As Israel was judged, time and time again by God for her many trespasses, could God be warning the USA that such is coming to her?

Again, no.

The USA: Founded on Religious Freedom…

Like it or not, believe it or not, nor view it as really true, the United States of America was founded as a place where the worship of God was to be free.

Yes!

The second permanent colony in the USA was established specifically for the purpose of allowing the Puritans to worship God without the interference of the British Crown. In every subsequent colony, religious freedom, the freedom to worship God as one chose, was established. The freedom to worship God is also an inherent and unalienable right of all Americans, as written in the Declaration of Independence and established n the Constitution of the United States of America in 1789.

The first amendment was added in 1791, actually.

In the first two centuries of the United States’ existence as a nation, God was freely prayed to, Jesus Christ freely spoken of, the Bible freely taught, and worship freely allowed in the US Public forum.

Same as today!

Anywhere and everywhere one could travel in the USA, God – though not always followed nor obeyed, was, at the very least, respected.

And you have the right to respect your myths as much as you like. I don’t see the problem here.

Even early TV Shows, movies, and literature, even if God wasn’t mentioned directly, nor given the proper obedience, He was respected for being God, even in such characters as Otis the town drunk of Mayberry from the Andy Griffith Show.

And if a TV writer wants to do that, he is perfectly free to do so. Also, and stay with me here because it’s important to understand this, if a TV writer does not want to do that he is also perfectly free to do so.

You see, that’s what freedom is. It’s the freedom to do stuff.

They Went a Whoring After Other gods…

A question: Is the USA still a Christian Nation?

I hope not. It never was, as per the founding fathers and the US Congress and it never has been since.

Is Christianity and Christian Values, and Jesus Christ, still the primary driving force in US Culture today?

Where they are contrary to freedom and democracy, I sure hope they aren’t.

Looking at American Mainstream Media, one can soon and easily see that the USA is no longer the home to Christian Values that she once was.

Yay!

Today, US post-modern culture continually mocks and marginalizes values that fly in the face of what is fun, desired, and looked upon as civilized.

Damning people to hell, torture, religious wars, and so on.

Fifty years ago, a woman who was found to be with child by someone she was not married to, was viewed as one with clouded morals at the very least. In these days, single mothers are the new heroines, supported and upheld as examples of undying courage, unparalleled strength, and models to others.

So we’re now supporting and helping these women instead of vilifying them? I heartily approve!

Single motherhood is just one symptom of a culture that has made sex and sexual desire one of its gods.

Or perhaps it’s that whole thing of perpetuating the species.

Another example is abortion on demand. In ancient Canaan, the god Molech required the adherent to sacrifice his or her (or their) firstborn child on the altar. In today’s world, more and more expectant mothers are sacrificing their unborn children on the altar of sexual freedom, convenience, and self.

Notice the difference between being born and not being born. That’s a significant difference.

More and more of the USA’s workforce and working-age population are sacrificing their values, their consciences, and their families on the altar of big money, corporate power, and/or financial success.

No. They’re sacrificing your values, your conscience, and your view of what they should have for a family.

It is easy to see that the USA is now a country where every other god under the sun is given privilege and place. Just as Ancient Israel under the judges, and later, the kings, which turned away from God, the USA has also turned away from the God of her forefathers.

The USA is a country where every god is given a place. We’re working on giving those who have no god a place as well. That’s what freedom actually means. It does not mean that your religion should have a special place of privledge.

Freedom To Worship or Freedom From Religion?

In 1962, the United States Supreme Court, in the landmark case Murray v. Curlett, made the decision to remove administration-sponsored prayer from Public School.

Yay for common sense, rational thinking, and helping religions stay clear of being dominated by the federal government!

Since that time, Jesus Christ and the freedom to worship his name have taken a long and hard slide downward.

This claim is true. Of course, Mr. Christ was elevated far above where he should’ve been, but there’s no argument that he’s dropped from that pinnacle.

Where even into the late 1950s and even into the `60s, God was at the very least respected in US society at large, the long slide that leads us to these post-modern 21^st century years now sees anything about God, any mention of Jesus Christ, and any quote from the bible ridiculed, mocked, and marginalized to the point that church by and large has become more of a social club than a soul-saving station.

I don’t see the problem there at all.

This is a fact that is most glaringly seen in mainstream media outlets. Hollywood rarely – if ever – presents the viewing public with anything that remotely uplifts the name of Jesus Christ.

If the people are clearly showing that the idea of your myth laying a guilt trip on them does not help, then perhaps you should listen.

Quite often in modern motion picture production, the villain is some crazed maniac who happens to claim being saved and quotes Scripture verbatim.

There’s a reason that this image is so believable. It’s because crazed maniacs show up every day quoting scripture.

In television, Biblical ideals – once revered and respected — are now mocked, decried as ancient and unnecessary,

True. We’ve figured out more about the world than ancient goat herders knew.

with only the old, the feeble, the mentally challenged, or the ignorant being portrayed as believing in such.

False. There are plenty of people who are young, not feeble, not mentally challenged, or not ignorant who are religious believers on TV. A brief jaunt through the channels, even if we don’t count the religious channels or specifically religious shows, will demonstrate this clearly.

More and more in radio and modern music, every kind of filth and sin is glorified,

There’s an odd story on this. Watch an episode of arguably the best demonstrator of this premise, the Jerry Springer Show and something odd shows up in every single episode. All those people who cheat on their spouses have sex with their dogs, deal drugs to their children’s friends, and so on are constantly hammered by Jerry’s audience.

If you want to know what’s bad to do, listen to the idiots on stage and watch the reaction of the crowd. They know that cheating is bad and they vilify the cheater. They know that dealing drugs is bad and they vilify the drug dealer. About the only thing they really get wrong is when they cheer the fights. That’s a problem across our society that probably should be addressed – our sanctioning of violence instead of questioning it.

while God is mocked, moral values defamed, and Christian values torn to shreds and cast out.

This would not be a problem if your God taught things worth learning, if your morals didn’t include killing and torturing people and Christian values didn’t include inciting hatred toward non believers.

Where homosexuality was once dealt with as a mental illness, it is now accepted even in many mainstream US Churches.

Good for them! It isn’t an illness and we shouldn’t vilify people for it.

Sex outside of marriage, once decried as totally sinful and immoral by the Church, now has seen some denominations declare that no matter what is done to teach them otherwise, teens cannot control themselves and have given allowances for sexual activity aside from marriage (mainstream media long ago cast aside sexual restraint and sexual purity as something unable to be accomplished [with the former] and only for spinsters and prudes out-of-touch with reality [for the latter]).

Good! Punishing people for violating rules that make no sense is…follow me on this one…a bad thing. It harms people without reason and tears apart families for no benefit. I know this is a difficult concept to grasp, so take it slow and sound it out: It is not a good thing to punish people who are not doing anything to hurt anyone else.

God has slowly been replaced by something else, and that something else is bringing forth wretched fruit.

Says you. Rational people disagree.

God is Still a Judge!!!

Who fails to show up to every court we look for him in. It’s annoying. If he wasn’t God, we’d have fired him a long time ago for failure to show up to work.

In these post-modern days, people who are exposed to or presented with their sins usually retort with, “Doesn’t Jesus say ‘Judge not lest ye be judged’? How dare you judge me?!?”

Which is odd since what you’ve been complaining about is people mocking and marginalizing Christianity. What the responder here is doing is accepting it and arguing within its framework. Staying in the framework of sin and judgment seems like a clear win for your religion.

I think a more rational response to your claim of sin is that we don’t choose to play by the rules handed down by middle eastern tribes wandering in the desert. Your religion invented sin and has done it’s level best to foist it on us – your religion can keep it.

Yet the fact of the matter is, these people go on their merry ways totally oblivious to the glaring fact that God will one day judge them, should they remain unrepentant of sin. The Bible is rife with example after example of the Lord God passing judgment and carrying out sentence against the children of Israel for turning away from him. Time and time again, after warning them through his word, through prophets, and through even miracles, God was forced to move his hand of judgment against Israel precisely because of their continual rejection of him.

And real life is curiously absent of confirming examples of this. We’ll stay in real life and you can stay in your fantasy world. It’s probably best that way.

History is further rife with nation after nation being reduced from golden-age glory to ashes of destruction because her people turned away from Jesus Christ, rejected the Bible, and changed from God to false gods.

* pulls up a chair *

Oh…do tell. I’m sure this will be good!

From Ancient Rome, which persecuted the church of Jesus Christ,

Didn’t Rome convert to Christianity, thus paving the way for it to flourish as a religion and then the whole empire collapsed?

I’m getting mixed signals here.

to the United Kingdom of Great Britain, which once boasted a queen who read her Bible and prayed daily (Queen Victoria) to a nation where Islam is gaining serious ground on the church

Aren’t you supposed to be talking about nations that rejected Mr. Christ and thus were smited by God? I’m not seeing the smiting that Britain has received.

(which has all but ceased in being the soul-saving station she was ordained to be centuries ago).

Stay on target here, man. We’re talking about nations getting hammered by God. That’s important stuff!

God still allows disaster when nations reject him; he still pulls his hand of protection away from countries – though historically Christ-loving – which have turned away from him.

Examples please. The ones above suck.

Conclusion – For the USA, It’s Just the Tip of the Iceberg.

Many in the United States of America asked this question after the September 11^th, 2001, terrorist attacks: “Is God Judging the USA?”

The answer is no.

For the USA, those terrorist attacks – as tragic and devastating as they were – were just the very tip of the iceberg. The judgments carried out on Israel, on Egypt, and on every other nation mentioned in the Bible as having turned away from God, are very graphic in nature, and such has yet to fall on the United States.

Good! And here I was thinking that you were proposing that the Christian God uses Muslim terrorists to carry out his smiting. I’m glad to hear that you backed off on that one.

For decades, the United States was the bastion of Christian Values,

As well as every other religion, as per above.

the haven for all those who desired to be free to worship God without Government interference.

That’s a great plan that we should stick to.

As stated above, however, all things Christian are now being herded into a corner and into an area of society that may well be the point of no return.

As demonstrated by those laws against going to church that were just enacted…wait a minute…that didn’t happen? Pardon me.

The USA has replaced the God of her Founding Fathers

Which was not the Christian God at all.

with the false gods of self, convenience, lust, power, sex, and greed. If we, as the citizenry of the United States, do not turn back to God, worse judgments – far, FAR worse – than what we saw on 9/11/01 will take place.

You’ll keep writing this kind of drivel?

God – as he has done with every other nation in history – will remove his hand of protection, and the USA will surely fall just as Rome and every other adanced, technological civilization has fallen when they rejected God.

So queue up the dramatic music again, eh?

Only a Holy Ghost Revival, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1800s, can possibly save the USA at this point. When Israel turned, she was saved, but when she continued down the path of idolatry and godlessness, she suffered. It will be the same for the USA if we don’t change out ways.

Prayer – Father, we need revival! Bring it to us, the USA, we pray, in Jesus’ Name, Amen.

For thousands of years people have been inventing and praying to some god or another for protection and salvation. According to this very article, it hasn’t worked as God has still smited all of these nations, some of whom were directly responsible for creating Christianity!

A good operating definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. I’m just saying.

Heroes explained

2008-06-13T06:56:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder why some people are heroes? Now we have the answer!

2007 was a banner year for atheism. Anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins were bookstore blockbusters. And The Golden Compass, a not-so-subtly atheistic children’s film, hit theaters last month.

Yay! We’re only a few thousand years behind in banner years, but we’ll take what we can get.

With all the attention the atheist agenda is receiving, doesn’t it seem strange that most Americans find heroes among those who reflect a biblical worldview?

Hmm…that sounds just vague enough to be printed on a fortune cookie. Lets check:

Most Americans find heroes among those who reflect a biblical worldview…in bed.

That’s slightly funny. It passes the fortune cookie test.

Earlier in 2007, CNN began polling people for a list of their heroes. As the results began rolling in, it became apparent that the frontrunners had something in common. Whether or not they professed belief in God, they all lived their lives in a way that would not make sense if He did not exist.

So some of them believe in religious doctrines and some of them don’t. And you’re going to argue that we should give credit to religious doctrines for all those heroes who don’t believe?

Wow, that’s the silliest thing I’ve read today. I’d say this week, but it doesn’t beat the guy taking science lessons from psycho murderers.

One of the nominees, Wesley Autrey, a construction worker with two small children, jumped onto the New York subway tracks to rescue a young man who had fallen off the platform. Then Autrey sheltered the man with his own body as a train passed overhead.

After the rescue, Autrey told an interviewer: “It was as if something was telling me to do what I done. A voice out of nowhere said, ‘Go and save that life, that life is a life worth saving, and don’t worry about your own.’ It seemed like something just lifted me up off the platform.”

Sounds like a good guy to me. Bravo Wesley!

Another nominee was Major Scott Southworth of the Wisconsin National Guard, who adopted a severely handicapped orphan boy when he was serving in Iraq several years ago. Now he is working to bring more than 20 other neglected and abused handicapped boys from Baghdad to the United States for medical treatment.

Rocking! Great job Scott!

Then there was Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor and the professor at Virginia Tech who used his body as a shield to protect his students from the gunman. And 15-year-old Zach Hunter from Atlanta who has raised more than $20,000 to help free modern-day slaves. And American Jewish doctor Rick Hodes who volunteers his time and expertise to care for the sick in Ethiopia.

Great folks! I heartily approve.

Atheism has no explanation for these acts of self-giving and even self-sacrificing charity.

That’s completely, 100%, perfectly true. Except for the fact that it’s not true at all.

Atheism has plenty of explanations for this type of behavior ranging from tribal welfare to observing the consequences of actions and choosing those that create the greatest good for everyone. They’re even published in books and everything! You really should take some time to read them. That way perhaps you can not spout falsehoods out to the world and make yourself look like an uneducated moron in the process.

Reading! It’s fun-damental!

As Chuck Colson has said many times, Darwinian evolution cannot explain this kind of altruism: How does one who willingly dies for another pass on his or her genetic traits for the improvement of the species?

You know, if you want to get a source for explaining scientific concepts I have this wacky idea: make the source an actual scientist instead of a political crook.

I know that sounds absurd, but try it! You might get reasonable answers out of it.

No, defenders of atheism and Darwinism, if true to their convictions, should sneer at this kind of self-sacrifice as weak and pointless.

And yet they don’t. It might be because their convictions are nothing at all like what you say they are. I’m just saying.

But we know better. Why? Because we—and these modern-day heroes—are made in the image of God. His very character is stamped into our beings. We see in these heroes a reflection of the same God, who in Christ “being made in human likeness . . . humbled himself and became obedient unto death—even death on the cross.” This is the same God who tells us “to lay down our lives” for our friends, “to let the little children come,” and “to act justly and love mercy.”

Neat theory! Heroes are heroes because they are made in the image of God. I like it. It’s simple and succinct. Now let’s go out and test it!

Tragically, many people, including many Christians, are practical atheists, living our lives in a way that ignores God’s existence. But in the final analysis, we are all still wired to find heroes in those who live life as though God does exist.

Hey! Weren’t we going to go test a wonderful theory? You had your thesis statement and everything all prepared. Oh well, no worries. I’ll just wait until you finish up your research and come back and show us your supporting materials.

We have time…

Lots of it…

I’ll order pizza!

Bones of Mr. Christ

2008-06-12T00:35:00.000-07:00

Our friends, the apologizers have chimed in with what it would take for them to give up their faith. Lets take a good look!

Several blogs ago, EG asked a fair question in response to Flew’s question of his fellow atheists…what would it take for you to believe in God? It was what would it take for you as a Christian to reject Christianity?

That’s a great question! I can’t wait to see how you weasel your way out of this one

Not wanting to shift the question,

Nice weasely start!

but I will let the Apostle Paul take a stab at that one.

Weird since you were asked the question and Paul’s dead, but okay.

In 1 Cor. 15:17, he says, if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is worthless. So Christianity rises or falls with the resurrection of Jesus of Nazereth.

Got it. Jesus had to be resurrected or Christianity all falls down like a house of cards.

There are other strong challenges to the Christian faith (e.g., religious pluralism and the problem of evil), but none of these–strictly speaking–provide a game, set, match disproof of Christianity in the same way that digging up the bones of Jesus would.

Some kind of ironclad proof that God doesn’t exist sure seems like it would be game, set, and match. Or perhaps another visiting god could stop by and explain what it’s all about with soil samples of Nirvana, photos of the last picnic held in the Happy Hunting Grounds, and video of the wicked game of darts between Thor and Zeus.

I feel like you haven’t really given this serious thought if all you can come with is digging up bones. It’s almost like you really did think about this and tried to come up with something that sounded good, but really isn’t…Nah! Couldn’t be that!

NT Theologian George Ladd captures this point well:

“The uniqueness and the scandal of the Christian religion rests on the mediation of revelation through historical events. Christianity is not just a code for living or a philosophy of religion. It is rooted in real events of History.

Events that are curiously absent in accounts by Jesus’ contemporaries. Funny, huh?

To some people this is scandalous because it means that the truth of Christianity is inexplicably bound up with the truth of certain historical facts. And if those facts should be disproved, Christianity would be false.

The scientific process is pretty harsh that way. The people who actually use it run into that problem all the time. You might want to look into it yourself!

This however, is what makes Christianity unique because, unlike other world religions, modern man has a means of actually verifying Christianity’s truth by historical evidence.”—George Ladd

It’s too bad that evidence keeps not fitting with the guesses that some middle eastern tribes made a couple thousand years ago.

So I will agree with Paul…I would reject Christianity if the resurrection is false.

Great! There’s one. Now how would this be proven to you? That is, of course the next step and I’m certain that you’re about to clarify this point.

Since Easter is almost upon us, what better time to discuss the historicity of the resurrection? That is what we will do for the next couple of blogs. I look forward to the dialogue about the central claim of Christianity.

Oh. You’re not.

But wait! You said we could disprove Christianity by digging up Jesus’ bones! So if we dig up some bones, how do we know they’re Mr. Christs’?

And if we fail to dig up those bones, how do we tell if this means there was a resurrection, we just haven’t found them yet, they got ground into powder in the intervening centuries, or he just flat out didn’t exist in the first place?

Hello?

Is anyone still here?

Rats.

God's fingerprints in a Dairy Queen

2008-06-11T00:43:00.000-07:00

Our good friend, Lenya Heitzig offers us this tidbit of wisdom:

Holy Moments
Recognizing God's fingerprints in your life

It's easy to find evidence of God in the midst of extraordinary circumstances.

Really? Show me some. Seriously. Show me one piece of irrefutable evidence of God. We’ve been looking really, really, really hard and are coming up blank. Please provide!

It's not so easy to detect him during the ordinary events of our lives. But that's exactly where you and I live.

“Ordinary events of our lives” meaning every single moment of our existence.

Most of us will never walk on water,

Since we’re not carpenter ants.

heal the sick,

Unless, you know, you happen to be a doctor or a nurse or a parent or something weird like that.

or cast out demons.

To quote the great Meatloaf, two out of three ain’t bad.

But we may provide a meal for the needy, offer encouragement to the downhearted,

Rocking! Good works on both counts.

or receive an answer to one of our prayers.

Wait…what?!? Even if prayer actually worked, wouldn’t receiving an answer to a prayer count as something someone else is doing? Above we’re talking about being the guy giving the free meal, not being the guy getting it.

I’m all confused now as to what counts here. Maybe I should start looking into work as a carpenter ant.

We live amidst the nuance of the normal with God's voice echoing somewhere off in the distance, not thundering from the mountain peaks.

Which is really annoying since I’ve heard he used to do that a lot.

That is precisely the reason we need to be sensitive to his quiet voice and gentle leading, to the holy moments we often overlook as we rush madly through our daily routines.

We need to become aware of the more subtle ways that God works and amplify our spiritual sensitivity to his inescapable presence.

So is God “subtle” or “inescapable”? I’m trying here, but I can’t come up with anything that is both. Or is this like getting credit for being on the receiving end of a prayer?

Nineteenth-century Scottish theologian James Denney wrote, "The important thing in religion is not to believe that God is omniscient but to experience that God knows me. The important thing is not that God is everywhere, but that wherever I am, God is with me."

Great idea! Don’t think that God is omniscient. That leads to a lot of prickly paradoxes.

Heaven Sent
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary that bright Sunday morning as I jogged down the same route I had taken the previous six days of my vacation in Honolulu. It was a picture-postcard day in paradise. As I ran, I passed surfers catching blue-green waves that would eventually crash and subside on the sandy shores of Waikiki. I followed a course past touristy Kalakaua Avenue, through exotic Kapiolani Park and up the stark volcanic slopes of Diamond Head.

Dialing up my travel agent now. Hawaii sounds great!

Suddenly, trouble in paradise hit hard. Ouch! At the halfway point of a five-mile excursion, I stopped dead in my tracks. The mother of all charley horses gripped my left calf—I was paralyzed with pain. Stumbling, then fumbling for a nearby wall, I did every conceivable stretch in a desperate attempt to loosen the unrelenting cramp. Nothing worked. I was two-and-a-half miles away from my hotel with no money for a taxi, so I began hobbling toward my final destination.

After navigating several blocks in agonizing discomfort, God tapped me on the shoulder—or I should say, spoke to my heart: Lena, why don't you pray?

Why didn't I think of that sooner? Then I asked him, "Lord, help! I can't make it back without damaging my leg further. Please send me help or heal me. What should I do?"

Hanging up the phone now. I hear that God strikes down people randomly in Hawaii.

Through the park, strewn with palm trees and fragrant plumeria blossoms, I spotted a bright banner stretched across a minibus: Heaven Sent. I smiled at God's sense of humor and his impeccable timing. What was that minibus doing smack-dab in my path? Should I limp up and knock on the window?

Door number 3! Pick door number 3!

Then the rest of the sign came into focus: Heaven Sent: Mobile Massage Therapy. "This is too good to be true," I mumbled. Then I wondered, Could this be a holy moment orchestrated by God's good hand?

Right after he smote you with His bad one. Sure! Why not!

Just then a local named Bunny Gabaylo stepped out to ask if I needed help. A pleading request tumbled out of my mouth. "I've just injured myself running. I've got two more miles to go. Could you work out the knot in my calf? The problem is, I'm not carrying any money to pay you."

He simply handed me a flyer, and said in Pidgin English, "It your lucky day. I offering two-minute massage free to first time customer."

That shouldn’t be a problem since Bunny’s on God’s payroll. We’re still going with the “God set all of this up just to help with your muscle cramp” theory, right?

Bunny, a licensed massage therapist worked on my calf for nearly 20 minutes applying shiatsu acupressure, deep-tissue massage, and Tiger Balm. While I lay on the padded exam table, listening to Julio Iglesias over the high-tech sound system, Bunny graciously offered his healing touch. When I noticed a picture of Jesus on the wall of his minibus, I said, "Are you a Christian?"

He affirmed that he was and added, "I should be at church, since it Sunday. But a friend invite me to Kapiolani Park for race that end here today." When I stood up, I was overjoyed to discover that my gait had straightened out and my leg was greatly improved. I thanked him and offered to send a check in payment for his services. But Bunny refused, saying, "This my calling. No charge for you."

The next two miles seemed more like two blocks as I delighted myself in the Lord who had granted me the desires of my heart by answering my prayer the precise moment it was uttered. I asked God for help during a time of need, and he provided an answer that was truly heaven-sent.

To recap: You ran into a massage truck on a Sunday on a route of a major road race – which is not even a coincidence. You were running in that area because you were also jogging – which is not even a coincidence. You didn’t notice the truck until you looked for it and you started looking for it when your leg actually started hurting – which is not even a coincidence.

And all of these things which don’t even rise to the level of coincidence - let alone unusual – is what tells you that there is an all powerful, supernatural entity who created the universe and cares so much about you that he answers at your beck and call to provide a massage truck. But not just fix the cramp directly. Or not give you the cramp in the first place.

Okay. Got it.

Are you sure you don’t want to revise your story? This one seems a little weak.

The divinely appointed meeting with Bunny was not my first holy moment,

Very true!

and God has showered me with many other such moments since then.

Do they also involve readily available commercial enterprises appearing exactly where we would expect them to be?

All these events have convinced me that they are available to anyone,

Commerce is great that way.

from unbelievers to those who are passionate about following God—and he can send holy moments to many people simultaneously. Holy moments are God's subtle way of getting our attention. They serve as a sweet reminder that he is near.

Remember this the next time you’re hungry and God helps you spot a Dairy Queen.

I am not more special than anyone else

Oh, I disagree. You’re way more special. From the sounds of it, that massage truck was a short bus. You’re that special.

—our heavenly Father doesn't play favorites.

Except when He sends all those non-believers to hell. Or saves Noah and his family and their menagerie. Or rains fire and brimstone down on Soddom and Gamorah. Or crashes the Red Sea down…

You know…come to think of it. I think you might want to revise that statement as well.

However, I've developed a sensitivity to holy moments because of a Scripture that became my life's verse many years ago.

It’s all in where you set the bar, isn’t it?

Delight yourself in the LORD, and he shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD, trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass (Ps. 37:4–5).

Meditating upon this psalm opened my eyes to the ways that God moves among us. He longs to intersect our paths with his heavenly interruptions. There are five phrases found in this psalm that tell us how to stay in tune with him.
Delight in the Holy One
Develop holy desires
Dedicate your direction
Depend wholly on him
Discover holy moments
The five pearls of wisdom extracted from this passage can radically impact your Christian journey with incredible moments of divine inspiration and intervention.

And some of God’s holy moments even have value menus now!

Homicidal maniacs giving science lessons

2008-06-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Evolution: It's such a unifying force in the world. It's brought together whole disciplines of scientific endeavors and continues to bring forward bizarre claims from theists. Over at EverVigilant.net, they put in their 2 cents worth.

Atheists have this strange notion that once they have destroyed all belief in the supernatural and have convinced everyone to embrace "rational thought" (their twisted version of proselytizing), the world will be a better place. Sorry, but no.

And your evidence about this would be that time in human history when everyone of consequence gave up their irrational beliefs, embraced rational thought and the entire world was dropped into utter chaos, anarchy, and war. And you compared this to the time in human history when everyone embraced imaginary beings as the answers to our human problems and the world was a beautiful, calm, and peaceful place.

Wait a minute…neither of these things have actually happened?!?

Of course, given the choice between everyone not believing in supernatural beings and everyone believing in supernatural beings, the former has one advantage of having never, ever been tried before and therefore at least stands a chance of working.

What exactly do you get when the atheistic worldview is carried out to its logical conclusion?

Reason! People truly examining the real consequences of their actions. No one imagining some paradise that they will go to for doing truly evil acts.

Chaos. Death. Destruction.

Wow. That’s way different than I thought you were going to say. And oddly similar to what a theistic world view has already given us for centuries.

The citizens of Jokela, Finland, found that out earlier today:

Finnish police said five male pupils, two females and the middle-aged female principal were shot dead when an 18-year-old pupil the building at around midday with a .22 calibre handgun and started shooting randomly.

The suspected gunman, Pekka-Erik Auvinen, had no prior criminal record, but he did have other problems:

Auvinen, described as holding "extreme Darwinian" views, is also thought to be responsible for another video recently posted on You Tube called "Just testing my gun" where an individual dressed in black shoots a pistol at a piece of fruit in a snowy forest.

"I'm a natural selector and will eliminate all those I see as unfit," Sturmgeist89 wrote on You Tube recently.

That's Darwinism in a nutshell.

That’s Darwinism in a nutshell the same way that the idea that we should kill every person on the planet save one family and a menagerie of animals on a boat is Christianity in a nutshell. It’s the conclusion that only nutjobs would agree with.

Seriously man, I’m worried about you. You’re taking science lessons from deranged, psychotic killers. I’m trying to come up with a situation where learning science from homicidal maniacs is a good thing and I’m coming up blank.

Take a rest and try deep breathing exercises. They might help.

Anyone adheres to an atheistic worldview lacks the necessary foundation to make moral judgments.

Interesting theory coming from a man who mistakes Ted Bundy for Mr. Wizard.

Oh, the atheist will try to say that his worldview allows for things like good and bad, right and wrong,

Those wacky atheists! They’re always trying to convince the rest of us that they’re not evil. But we know better, of course. I mean…they’re atheists! What more evidence do we need really? But I’m sure you’ll provide ironclad proof in just a couple of sentences. I can’t wait!

but such notions are meaningless in a philosophy that wishes man to remain unaccountable to a Creator. Doing what's "right" boils down to doing what feels good "right now."

Huh. That’s it? That’s your big ironclad proof for how evil atheists are?

Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that you’re busy taking a sex-ed class from Professor Albert DeSalvo right now. When you’re out of class, please feel free to come back and finish up.

Existence proof...well not really

2008-06-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

Our friends at apologetics.org have gifted us with this choice morsel to digest:
(EDIT - it seems that apologetics has moved it's blog, burned this article, and salted the earth behind them. I'm guessing out of embarrassment. Or at least that's what it seems when I tried to find it again. I wrote this one awhile ago, so if anyone knows the whereabouts of the article, please drop me a line)

When it comes to the existence or non existence of God, well meaning people often talk past each other because they are not using terms the same way
And God has this annoying habit of never, ever showing up

(equivocation) or they do not share the same standard of what constitutes a good explanation or argument (burden of proof).
Which is a problem since God never, ever shows up. God showing up would really render this issue moot.

If we can get a bit more clarity on these issues,
By God ever once showing up

then I think people from different viewpoints will be better able to see just what the central issues are
The central issue being that God never shows up

–not red herrings, smoke strings interesting rabbit trails.
Which is all we have left since…well because of something that’s right on the tip of my tongue. It seems like I’ve mentioned it somewhere around here…

For example, the Theist is often told, “prove God exists.”
Which is pretty reasonable since that’s a pretty central tenet of what a theist claims.

And anything short of a 100% absolute mathematical certainty is assumed to be a failure.
I think there are lots of people who would be happy with God being simply more probable than not, actually. The problem is that God is so incredibly, mind meltingly, staggeringly improbable that complaining that you can’t give 100% proof is like trying to buy a house with pocket change. Not only are you not going to get to your 100% proof, you’re not even going to get to 1%

But the kind of “proof” sought here is totally unrealistic because there is precious little in life (if this were the standard) that anyone could know. You can only get this kind of proof in mathematics.
I get this kind of proof of my dad’s existence every day by calling him up on the phone.

So I think it is unhelpful to talk about proof. Rather, I think we would do better to talk about whether or not we have good reasons or good arguments for the existence or non existence of God.
A phone number would be better, but I’ll play along!

Well, what is a good argument? Generally speaking it is when the conclusion (and the premises therein) is more plausible than not. More specifically, a good argument contains 3 features:

Logically Valid
True Premises
Premises must be more plausible than not

This would meet the preponderance of evidence standard, btw, and fail as a proof. Just saying.

So what would one of these arguments look like? The following is a formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause
The Universe began to exist
Therefore, the Universe has a cause

Now, this is a logically valid argument meaning that if the premises are true (1 & 2), then the conclusion necessarily follows (3). So the question is whether the premises are true or at least more probable than not. On the face of it (sometimes referred to as Prima Facie), these premises have good evidence behind them (scientific, personal experience, and philosophical).
*Lame list hair shaking*

Lame! Lame! Lame! Lame! Lame! Lame! Lame!

Really, is this grade school logic the best you can do?

My purpose here is not necessarily to support this argument today
Bummer. And here I thought you were casting yourself as the Salmon in the new Neil Simon play “Fish in a Barrel”.

(maybe in later blogs),
Please do! That would be fun!

the point was to show what a good argument would look like.
Feel free to show one sometime. We’re still waiting.

So if an atheist would want to deny “3″, then she will need to challenge either “1″ or “2.”
Or just laugh at you!

Now what makes something plausible can vary from person to person (e.g., background beliefs).
But you won’t get into that right now, right?

And we will talk about this a bit more later along with explanation.
Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Though, in an earlier Blog, Antony Flew is highlighting this when he poses questions to his former atheistic friends as to what it would take for them to believe.

BTW - if you just can’t wait to see some of the evidence of for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, you can check out this book by Dr. William Lane Craig. I will offer some more popular level resources later.
I can’t wait!

Hagee on suffering

2008-06-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

Recently a couple of things happened. First, Senator John McCain rejected the endorsement from John Hagee on the grounds that he's a religious nutcase and only morons and a particular rare species of Austrailian seaweed would consider an endorsement from Mr. Hagee to be a good thing. Second, a friend of mine had a direct experience with the bizarre claims and activities of Mr. Hagee.

So I took a wander over to Hagee's website to find out what all the hub-bub was about. It didn't take long. This was found in the FAQ section. As with all commentaries here, the original article is in bold. My commentary is not.

Q. Are suffering and sickness a sign that a Christian lacks faith or has sin in their life? Why are some people healed and not others?
Could it be that some people send thousands of dollars to tele-ministries and some people don’t? Nah, that’s not it!

A. It is certainly possible that a Christian may go through problems or become ill because of sin or disobedience.
Those evil sickos!

Sickness can also result from not taking care of our bodies, or it can be a response to stress or worry. But sometimes illnesses, or various trials and difficulties, strike precisely because we are in the center of God's will and Satan wants to derail us.
There will be a test on this, so pay attention. All good things come from God. All evil things come from Satan. I realize that this is a hard concept, so it will be repeated. Constantly.

Please pay no attention to God’s omniscience and omnipotence.

Overcoming struggles is at the heart of the Christian life.
And we here provide for that by giving your wallets a further struggle to overcome! Hallelujah!

The Bible teaches that we should not be surprised by suffering. "Dear friends," Peter wrote the church, "do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed" (1 Peter 4:12 NIV).
Correct! No surprise that the omniscient and omnipotent God allows suffering

In spite of that clear teaching, some preachers give the impression that if you're truly living by faith, you won't experience suffering or sickness, or that if you do, God is obligated to deliver you and heal you. That's not a reasonable position to take.
True! I mean God can’t be everywhere for everyone at all times! What were we thinking?!?

There are two extremes to the faith message.
Yes. Yes, there really are.

Some preach that God never heals, which is dead wrong. Others preach that God heals every time, which is also wrong. God responds to our faith, but there is no "magic formula" that insures God will answer our prayers exactly as we want.
So how do we tell this from pure, unadulterated random chance?

God is not a cosmic bellhop that we can command to do our will. The purpose of prayer is to change us so that we want to do His will.
Either that or give us something to do when it’s already all hit the fan.

At Cornerstone Church we always pray in faith for the sick, believing it is God's general will that we live in divine health.
What’s your evidence for this assumption?

However, we do not always know His specific will for a person at a particular time.
Shouldn’t that be “we never know His will for any person at any time”? Otherwise that would be presumption of the highest order, right?

So sometimes God does not heal a person, even when that person prays in genuine faith.
He killed Kenny!!!

God is sovereign, and He acts according to His purposes-which we do not always know in advance.
So does a random number generator, strangely enough.

What we do know is that God works everything together for good in the life of a believer (Rom. 8:28), that He has ordained a divine purpose for us, and that he works everything out according to His eternal plan (Eph. 1:11).
What a guy!

Sometimes it is the people with great faith who face the most suffering. Smith Wigglesworth witnessed mighty miracles of God's power in his healing crusades. Yet he would go home and roll on the floor in pain from kidney stones. The apostle Paul worked many miracles and successfully prayed for multitudes of people to be healed. Yet Paul himself was never healed of a physical malady he referred to as his "thorn in the flesh" (2. Cor. 12:7-10). The apostle prayed earnestly, but God did not remove this sickness from him. Instead, God's greatness was made all the more manifest in Paul's weakness.
This really makes me wonder what kind of suffering would someone have to go through or not go through to disprove this belief in supernatural healing:

Devout believer doesn’t get healed = God’s greatness made all the more manifest

Devout believer gets healed = God mercifully answering his prayers

Non-devout person doesn’t get healed = person didn’t have faith in God and thus didn’t get healed

Non-devout person gets healed = God has a plan that we don’t understand.

It looks like every result leads to the same conclusion. Odd!

Welcome to The Rational Reply!

2008-06-08T12:10:00.000-07:00

I'm Jim Rational, your host and writer in this little corner of the internet.

This blog is all about evaluating and commenting on the mindnumbingly inane claims made by religious writers everywhere. Whether it's a theist citing a homicidal maniac as his source for science information or a multi-million dollar a year televangelist telling us that a raped woman has no right to have an abortion, I'll be here telling the rational side of the story.

The problem, of course, is that religious folks, especially those that make money at being religious, make insane claim after insane claim, very often right in the face of contradictory evidence. I have nothing but scorn for this. But the neat part is that it's really enjoyable to make fun of it, too!

So welcome and join me for the ride! Send me mail at jim.rational@gmail.com if you have any comments to make to me or articles that need my attention. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!