by Thomas E. Brewton
Left wing churches ignore the law, engage in the equivalent of judicial activism.
The Wall Street Journal, in its July 20, 2007, edition printed an article based on a Time Magazine story in the July 30 edition. The first two paragraphs are the following:
"Sanctuary Drive Could Bolster Religious Left TIME — JULY 30
"A movement to give sanctuary in churches to illegal immigrants threatened with deportation might bring new firepower to the long-quiescent religious left, writes David Van Biema in Time.
"Inspired by churches who offered sanctuary to Central Americans fleeing civil wars in the 1980s, members of a range of religious faiths have launched the New Sanctuary Movement in cities around the U.S. The effort has been small-scale, housing eight undocumented immigrants in churches in five U.S. cities. (While immigration authorities legally can raid a church, they rarely do.) NSM activists say four more congregations will house immigrants in August, and the mainline Protestant United Church of Christ has resolved to work with it."
A few observations:
First, deciding to break the law of the land solely on the basis of what an individual or a group, including a church, thinks the law ought to be is essentially what activist judges do when they ignore the Constitution or statute law and, in effect, legislate from the bench.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, Social Issues at 9:47 PM EDT
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Atheists thought that God really was dead
French revolutionary philosophers and the socialist theoreticians who followed them in the early 1800s were captured by what British socialist Graham Wallas called the liberal fallacy: the self-absorbed assumption that whatever their reasoning told them had, by definition, to be the truth and, furthermore, that everyone else on earth would naturally agree with their conclusions. It is a form of tunnel vision that ignores all factors other than what interests liberals.
We see this today in the prescriptions of liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats. They are confident that, because they abhor war, so too does Al Queda. Because liberals are willing to relinquish our national sovereignty to the UN, confident that every dispute can be resolved by rational discussion, they assume Islamic jihadists are wired the same way.
At the apogee of atheistic materialism, in the 1830s, Auguste Comte's well-intentioned expectation was that all the world would quickly recognize the superiority of his Positivistic philosophy and its Religion of Humanity. People from the rest of Europe, from America, and from Asia, he assumed, would all come to sit worshipfully at his feet to learn the proper new system of socialist government and its canon of materialistic ethics.
Central to the process, of course, would be accepting the belief that there is no God other than human reason and that the proper object of worship is Man in the abstract, Humanity.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism at 8:01 PM EDT
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by Thomas E. Brewton
The inconsistency of atheistic materialism. There's more there than Marx allowed for.
Our thoroughly secularized society explains events and behavior, human nature itself, as the product of the material conditions of living and earning a living, in accord with the Marxian thesis.
In The German Ideology Marx and his colleague Friederick Engels wrote:
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
Present-day liberals therefore deny the concept of a higher law, of timeless moral truths emanating from God the Creator of the universe. They fancy themselves capable of restructuring society, and human nature in the process. Hence the endless stream of new Federal welfare-state programs. In the liberal view, economic and social problems can be cured only by bountiful application of the most materialistic of all things: money.
School massacres, of which Virginia Tech is the latest and deadliest example, predictably are thought by liberals to result from a material factor: the availability of firearms. In liberal theory, make guns unavailable, and you change human nature.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, Social Issues at 11:38 PM EDT
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New York, May 2, 2007 - Actor Kirk Cameron and best-selling author Ray Comfort will square off with two atheists in New York on Saturday, May 5. ABC originally planned to stream the 90-minute debate LIVE on their website, but decided to reschedule the broadcast to capture a larger audience. They will broadcast the entire debate on ABC.com on Wednesday, May 9 at 1:00 p.m. EST.
Comfort-who claims he can prove the existence of God, scientifically, without mentioning faith or the Bible-stated, "The network originally offered me only four minutes to present my case. After speaking with Kirk and conferring with the atheists, they settled on 13 minutes. I'm ecstatic. I can prove the existence of God in that amount of time.
"We are very grateful to ABC for taking this courageous step," Comfort continued. "As far as we know, nothing like this has ever been done before. ABC's website is already the 7th most visited news site, with 19 million visitors every month. But with more than 177 million people in the U.S. who call themselves Christians, we are sure that it will draw an even larger viewing audience. Is there actually evidence for God? That's the most important question any of us will ever consider."
Cameron added, "We are excited that the network has decided to do this, because we have something very relevant to present. Most people think that belief in God is simply a matter of blind faith, and that His existence can't be proven. We will not only prove that God exists, but as an ex-atheist I'll show that the issue keeping so many people from believing in God-Darwinian evolution-is completely unscientific. It's a fairy-tale for grownups."
The debate came about after ABC ran a story in January about hundreds of atheists videotaping themselves blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
"But," Comfort continued, "there is something more sinister here than a few people not believing in God. Why would so many be so bitter against Christianity in particular? Why aren't they making videos that blaspheme Buddha or Mohammed or Ghandi? We made our own video clip and posted it on www.Hollywoodblasphemy.com to expose why.
As of May 2 there is still an opportunity for people to join in the debate, by submitting questions that will be passed on to the panelists. ABC will limit the live audience to 100 people, evenly divided between atheists and believers. The debate will be moderated by Martin Bashir, and on May 9 a shortened version of the debate will be aired on Nightline.
For further information, contact mark@livingwaters.com
Posted by Walt as Atheism, Creation, Witnessing at 7:32 AM EDT
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by Robert E. Meyer
Several days ago, I received an E-mail from a fellow who had read my recent series on atheism. His response started out rather promising, but unfortunately our dialogue degenerated into a progressively less civil exchange.
This gentleman didn't specifically take issue with any of my arguments made in the editorials, but rebuked me for my tone of certitude and arrogance. Let's face it; a humbling chastisement is a healthy experience for all of us at times.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism at 11:00 PM EST
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by Robert E. Meyer
Recently a letter writer in my local paper has forced me to amend a New Year's resolution to be a kinder, gentler columnist; but for good cause I abandon that vow. This gentleman, by virtue of his last two letters, has demonstrated that he can spoon feed us revisionist history with fragmented quotations and rhetorical quips pasted from the latest Richard Dawkins book, or his favorite atheist website. His quotes didn't address the actual issue I raised (whether America must be neutral in acknowledgment of God), but I will deal with his red herrings anyway.
He quotes Benjamin Franklin saying, "Lighthouses are more useful than churches." However, at the Constitutional Convention Franklin suggested praying for guidance in the midst of rancorous impasse saying…
"…how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understanding?"
Franklin may not have liked churches, but he apparently thought of God as the ultimate lighthouse.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, General at 10:50 PM EST
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by Robert E. Meyer
The Apostle Paul warns in 1 Timothy 6:20 : "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called."
Several centuries ago, the German astronomer Johann Kepler, justified scientific inquiry in that such investigation was "thinking God's thoughts after him." The scientific method was bathed and developed in a culture that presupposed the existence of God. Many scientific originators of whole branches of science were themselves biblically astute believers.
From that point forward, there was a gradual diversion from that philosophical approach, to a newer, evolving view, deeming science and theology as antithetical disciplines. This view eventually came to a codified perspective in the 19th century, due to voluminous treatises authored by John W. Draper and Andrew Dickson White, which chronicled the alleged war between science and theology. In that same era, Darwin’s Origin of the Species, provided skeptics with a pathway to become "an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
I have been puzzled, from the time of my earliest consideration of the matter, that science is used as a means of discrediting the existence of God. It should never be the objective of Christians to oppose the wonders of scientific progress, but only "science falsely so called;" that is, metaphysics festooned as science.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism at 10:35 PM EST
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by Robert E. Meyer
Many of the critiques I have received so far, have focused on debunking analogies I have used, more so than refuting specific points against atheism. If you are an accomplishing logician, you can probably find logical fallacies in virtually any polemic. It is simple to explain why this is the case. Whenever two things are compared which are not identical, or at least not substantially similar, someone opposing your perspective who wants to maintain the antithesis between the two views, will critique the analogy by only citing the dissimilarities. The individual making the argument, on the other hand, is emphasizing the commonalities.
Now I will focus on some of the philosophical elements of this topic.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, General at 1:45 AM EST
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by Robert E. Meyer
Defining atheism is a daunting undertaking. It can be an elusive moving target, with constantly varying definitions and ramifications. The dictionary of philosophy defines atheism as: "Belief that god does not exist. Unlike the agnostic, who merely criticizes traditional arguments for the existence of a deity, the atheist must offer evidence that there is no god or propose a strong principle for denying what is not known to be true."
Yet when this definition is applied, the atheist objects profusely. The atheist wants to instead define his position as merely lacking belief in a God, not one that positively asserts there is no God. The atheist will sometimes say that the proofs given for the existence of God are insufficient–they are unproven not disproved. The atheist clings to this standard because he realizes the utter difficulty, if not, virtual impossibility of proving a universal negative. In a sense, he has pulled the rug out from under himself by taking this minimalist approach. One must rightfully ask how atheists who define themselves this way constructively differ from agnostics, and we ought to chide him for his own insufficiency — satisfaction with a willingness to prove less than he ought to prove.
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, General at 6:30 PM EST
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by Robert E. Meyer
It is quite possible that atheists as a group are more intelligent than the community of theists at large. I don't have statistical evidence to support this claim, but anecdotally, I can believe that it is quite likely. Many, who become atheists, probably arrive at a crisis, where there are points of tension in reconciling Christianity with their own constructs of logic and reason. The atheist may say that this migration occurs because intelligent people gravitate toward a worldview distilled from logic and reason, as opposed to one conjured from superstition and unquestioning acceptance. That seems a bit self-serving and laced with hubris, though. Based on my observations, both groups are intellectually stratified—ignorant theists, astute atheists, and vice-versa. You realize that apologists for theism are themselves intellectual giants, when the best are pitted in debate against their atheist counterparts.
The positive argument about intelligent people is easily reversed. I could conclude that greater levels of intelligence present a pitfall of conceit that the atheist steps into. High levels of intelligence can cause a belief of invulnerability and hubris–that humanity will solve all problems and eventually gain a comprehensive knowledge of the universe–thus God is, or will become, unneeded and unwanted. This is the faith (though they might call their faith claims "confidence based on experience," if that is a distinction with a difference) of naturalism. That "faith" is justified according to its devotees, in that once upon a time, empirical knowledge existed as a small corpus of information, yet today it has snowballed into a juggernaut. While is it true that empirical knowledge has grown exponentially, few are sagaciously differentiating between that which is presently unknown and that which is by definition unknowable (as theists might say, hidden in the mind of God).
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Posted by Walt as Atheism, Social Issues at 9:49 PM EST
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