My sources were wrong. Wednesday is a hearing to set the date for sentencing (unless it is a date to fix the date for the hearing into when sentencing will happen). Fees, fees, fees.
Here is an explanation of Godol’s Incompleteness Theorems, which I believe can be usefully applied to naturalism or scientism, the current ideology of militant atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and widely accepted by people looking for a post-Christian creed—pharmacists and doctors and such who believe their profession attaches to the them the prestige of scientism’s overweening claims to explain everything .
“The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an “effective procedure” (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of thenatural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.”-wikipedia
There continues to be debate as to whether these theorems are even true of mathematics, but I have long thought (and probably been persuaded by others whom I have forgotten) something similar about the claims of Dawkins et al that science has disproved the supernatural’s existence, especially the supernatural’s intrusions into the natural, i.e., miracles. That is, can science prove through scientific methods that anything it cannot explain cannot happen? I think not.
I’ve used sports as a metaphor in the past to explain the weakness of naturalism’s claims. . You cannot judge which sport, hockey or basketball, is the better sport, or which of a hockey and a basketball game was the better match, using the rules or standards of either sport. Since both sports have as their immediate object the scoring of goals, basketball is always superior, you might say, because more points are always scored. To judge the two you would have to go beyond the field of hockey criticism or basketball criticism to some hypothetical higher criticism practiced by fans of both sports. And while there would be room for subjective disagreement, I propose that a group of 10 fans of both sports would be able to agree consistently which of many hockey-basketball games were “better” as sports matches –in terms of better played, of satisfactory “story arc” (come from behind, or holding on against comeback, etc).
Similarly the claims of atheist scientists that science explains everything cannot be proven by science. A higher field of thinking than science or religion must be appealed to: would that be logic or philosophy?
So apply this to science’s claim to disprove miracles. It cannot. Science applies only to the laws and rules and behaviour of natural objects. By definition it can only judge what happens within the closed system of nature. For an event for which miraculous claims have been made, it can prove that the event has natural explanation, and it can declare, that no natural explanation has been found—yet. It cannot prove the sufficient natural explanation is in fact the true cause . It cannot prove in either case that a supernatural cause was not the real cause. Such causes are not subject to the scientific method. Similarly, but not identically, it cannot “prove” or “explain” the life of Julius Caesar. It cannot test his recorded actions or replicate them. Or anything in history. Perhaps history is the field of thinking that can test the miraculous, if only it renounces any responsibility to carry water for scientism.
Back to sports: they are unlike the modern ideology of naturalism , that claims whatever science can’t measure doesn’t play any part in the natural world (i.e,. religion can have the unmeasurable and essentially unreal and subjective world of values, it cannot have miracles such as cures, multiplication of loaves and fishes and resurrections from the dead).
Sports such as hockey and baseball do have rules that allow for outside interventions: lightning striking the ball, deer running onto the field, the referees all absent because weather. That’s what science needs, a little humility.
Here is another piece I just did for http://www.thechristians.com. Again I commend this site to you and ask you to subscribe. Many good stories there by a fine group of writers.
No one doubts the influence of television on culture. Where once programming cautiously trailed attitudinal shifts in the population, now it leads, no more so than in the area of sexual morality. Twenty years ago a gay or transgendered character was likely to be a predator who was caught or shot within the hour. Now gays are being cast for regular and even major parts and portrayed doing just what hetero characters do—hooking up, marrying, adopting children, becoming boy scout leaders, mourning dead partners and only occasionally—like the Ellis character in the musical series Smash—behaving villainously. But Smash will be gone next Fall along with many other gay-positive shows: the New Normal, Go On, the Office, 1600 Penn, Happy Endings, Don’t trust the B___ in Apartment 23, 90210, Emily Owens, M.D., the LA Complex, Partners and Southland. Entertainment industry observers are speculating whether a trend is afoot, though not yet daring to consider the obvious explanation for it—audience turnoff.
The British are not so circumspect. The news that the ratings had fallen suddenly by 29 per cent for the iconic working class soap opera Coronation Street was greeted with complaints about the recent influx of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered characters. Declared Brian Sewell on the Mailonline website : “There’s too much, not only of gay men—who are estimated to make up just 6 per cent of the population, but who dominate the story lines in the soap—but also of Lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered community, cross-dressers and anyone else with some sexual quirk or fetish.” Several former stars on the show have chimed in, notably Nick Cochrane, who asked “How many streets in Britain would have schoolgirl lesbians, gay married couples, a transsexual and children to gay couples? It is a little bit far-fetched.” And what’s more, tweeted “Jim” from Leyland, “People are now switching off… fed up with the ridiculous storylines and having Gay and transvestite characters being crammed down their throats.”
American media observers were unwilling to join “Jim” in making the causal link. Writing for Slate, June Thomas merely stated the obvious: “These shows were all killed because they didn’t attract enough viewers.” John Doyle of Toronto’s Globe and Mail agreed: “It’s not that the U.S. networks have suddenly become wary of the characters and the shows. The shows are axed because they failed to find enough viewers.”
However, Matthew Philbin, managing editor of the Virginia-based, conservative Culture and Media Institute, was willing to go further. “Perhaps TV executives and script writers feel they’ve pushed as far as they can and need to pull back.” He adds,”There is no doubt the television industry has an agenda. It reflects and promotes the values they have in Hollywood and New York City but not of the people in between, who are a big part of people they want to buy their show.”
However, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation spokesman Wilson Cruz said, “These cancellations mean networks have to make a concerted effort to ensure the 2013-2014 season truly reflects the diversity of their audience. With inclusive programs like Modern Family and Glee continuing to lead the ratings and collect praise from critics, it’s in a network’s best interest.”
The past TV season was the biggest ever for homosexual content according to The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). It reported that 4.4 percent of series regulars were LGBT, up from 2.9 percent the previous year and 1.1 percent in 2007. That meant last season offered 31 LGBT regular characters out of 701 in all. “That amount may reflect the reality of Hollywood but it doesn’t reflect everyone’s,” said Philbin. “Hollywood is willing to insert characters and storylines to absolutely advance their worldview. And while most people manage to sit through shows whose values they disagree with, if they keep doing that, gradually they end up accepting those values.”
An October 21012 Hollywood Reporter poll agreed here http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/thr-poll-glee-modern-family-386225.
Conducted In the runup to the U.S. federal election, it found that over the past 10 years three times as many “likely voters” had become more favorable to same sex marriage as had become less favorable. What’s more, 27 percent, mostly younger viewers, said watching TV made them more favorable to same sex marriage and only six per cent said it made them less favorable. But the poll also indicated that homosexual content was a literal turnoff for many, especially Republican voters, who were five times as likely as Democrats to turn off a show when a gay actor played at a straight character, and eight times as likely to stop watching when a straight actor played a gay. Commented Philbin. “Nearly half the country voted Republican. Why risk alienating them when you want to maximize your reach?”
Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council added that viewers may just be getting bored with portrayals of LGBT characters as uniformly positive. “It’s often pretty blatant that they have more of a political purpose than a dramatic or comedic one. The industry may have to either write more realistic gay parts or place them in shows in more realistic numbers.” Sprigg added that television may not have woken up to the same degree as the movie industry to the fact that “positive, pro-family, pro-Christian shows do better at the box office than shows that are not.”
I understand Father Phil Jacobs will be sentenced on Wednesday. I’ll let you know as soon as I myself know.
This first appeared at www.thechristians.com ==please check it out, then subscribe!
Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism. New Atlantis Books. $25.95.
By Robert Zubrin
On April 26, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to speak at a Planned Parenthood conference, declaring that “for nearly a century now one core principle has guided everything all of you do – that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health. It’s a simple principle.”
Truly simple, but, alas, simply not true. As Robert P. Reilly, the pro-life movement’s onetime liaison to President Ronald Reagan, quickly blogged, “The real founding principle behind the group from which Planned Parenthood sprang was purely eugenicist, deriving from Charles Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest.’
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/reagan_versus_obama_on_abortion
He cited Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger explaining: “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”
Defectives, as in: Irish, Italian and Portuguese immigrants amidst whose crowded tenements Sanger planted her first, illegal birth control clinics. Sanger plays a crucial part in this saga of death-dealing, ruthless, classist and racist policies that flow throw modern American and European history like a poisoned watercourse.
Author Robert Zubrin has connected the dots, linking Sanger to Adolf Hitler, American foreign policy to Social Darwinism, and 1950s overpopulation alarmism to Al Gore and global warming. All, to Zubrin, are “antihumanist”: all , implicitly or explicitly, view each newborn child as an extra mouth to feed, an additional exhaler of dreaded CO2.
But for Zubrin,an old-style, can-do American optimist, every baby is a potential Einstein. Both 20th Century population hysteric Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestselling Population Bomb, and 18th Century economist Robert Malthus predicted population growth plus diminishing resources would lead to starvation and war. Their predictions failed, says Zubrin, because both failed to factor in human creativity.
The father of modern antihumanism, Malthus was, significantly, an employee of the East India Company. This suggests the genesis of modern antihumanism stems from the visceral shock experienced by privileged Europeans like him when they encountered the crowded, hot and smelly cities of the East. Zubrin quotes Ehrlich, explaining how Population Bomb was inspired by his first trip to India.
The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
Ughh! Get it? Too many Indians!
Malthus, in the laissez-faire spirit of his age, urged Britain to do nothing about mass starvation because there were too many poor anyway, hence death tolls in India and Irish famines. Ehrlich—in the interventionist spirit of his age—urged the U.S. and United Nations to grant foreign aid only to countries willing to force mass sterilization on their poor, which India, China and others proceeded to do.
After Malthus came Charles Darwin to provide the moral justification for American eugenics, European imperialism and Nazi mass murder. Evolution meant that the fittest must and should survive: it was not only right to help evolution along by sterilizing the poor, murdering Congolese or gassing Jews, Slavs and Gypsies. It was scientific.
After the Nazi Holocaust, Zubrin recounts how the eugenics movement rebranded itself as population control, attracting U.S. statesmen, generals, Ivy League bluebloods and scientists like Ehrlich. US and UN development aid was tied to mass sterilization in India and China, and contraception in Africa.
More deceptively, antihumanism strain infected the environmental movement, beginning with Rachel Carson’s famous Silent Spring, a bestselling polemic against DDT, which she claimed was killing all the birds. More junk science. But the US and then the UN banned DDT, resulting in millions in the Third World dying of malaria. Oh well, too many damned People, people, people.”
How does global warming fit in? First, `says Zubrin, as bogus science: (unproven, possibly natural, probably beneficial). But more significantly, the ersatz remedies for warming require state intervention on a huge scale, which probably won’t solve the problem but will throttle human creativity as exemplified by the Alberta Tar Sands on the one hand, and Green Revolution on the other, choking Third World development with sky-high fuel costs, and -expanding state control over economies and individual lives.
.Zubrin argues convincingly that while the likes of Ehrlich, or his collaborator John Holdren, Obama’s chief science advisor, see natural resources as finite, resources are actually limited only by human ingenuity.
Zubrin gives credit where it is due to Marxists on the one hand and the Catholic Church on the other as longtime opponents of antihumanism. But the Left, he notes with regret, has lately joined the antihumanists in opposing growth.
In sum,what antihumanism desires is that “human aspirations must be crushed and authorities must be constituted to do the crushing.” The time is long past due,” says Zubrin, and we can’t disagree, “to put a stake in the heart of this monster.”
here is a book review I did for a new webmagazine:www.thechristians.com. It is a conservative, Christian, news and comment magazine that is written from a “Mere Christianity” perspective spanning Catholic-Orthodox and Evangelical Protestant. We leave out the liberal Christian perspective in whatever denomination it appears. Please check it out, subscribe to it, and boost our ad sales.
Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism. New Atlantis Books. $25.95.
By Robert Zubrin
On April 26, Barack Obama became the first U.S. president to speak at a Planned Parenthood conference, declaring that “for nearly a century now one core principle has guided everything all of you do – that women should be allowed to make their own decisions about their own health. It’s a simple principle.”
Truly simple, but, alas, simply not true. As Robert P. Reilly, the pro-life movement’s onetime liaison to President Ronald Reagan, quickly blogged, “The real founding principle behind the group from which Planned Parenthood sprang was purely eugenicist, deriving from Charles Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest.’
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/reagan_versus_obama_on_abortion
He cited Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger explaining: “Birth control itself, often denounced as a violation of natural law, is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”
Defectives, as in: Irish, Italian and Portuguese immigrants amidst whose crowded tenements Sanger planted her first, illegal birth control clinics. Sanger plays a crucial part in this saga of death-dealing, ruthless, classist and racist policies that flow throw modern American and European history like a poisoned watercourse.
Author Robert Zubrin has connected the dots, linking Sanger to Adolf Hitler, American foreign policy to Social Darwinism, and 1950s overpopulation alarmism to Al Gore and global warming. All, to Zubrin, are “antihumanist”: all , implicitly or explicitly, view each newborn child as an extra mouth to feed, an additional exhaler of dreaded CO2.
But for Zubrin,an old-style, can-do American optimist, every baby is a potential Einstein. Both 20th Century population hysteric Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestselling Population Bomb, and 18th Century economist Robert Malthus predicted population growth plus diminishing resources would lead to starvation and war. Their predictions failed, says Zubrin, because both failed to factor in human creativity.
The father of modern antihumanism, Malthus was, significantly, an employee of the East India Company. This suggests the genesis of modern antihumanism stems from the visceral shock experienced by privileged Europeans like him when they encountered the crowded, hot and smelly cities of the East. Zubrin quotes Ehrlich, explaining how Population Bomb was inspired by his first trip to India.
The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
Ughh! Get it? Too many Indians!
Malthus, in the laissez-faire spirit of his age, urged Britain to do nothing about mass starvation because there were too many poor anyway, hence death tolls in India and Irish famines. Ehrlich—in the interventionist spirit of his age—urged the U.S. and United Nations to grant foreign aid only to countries willing to force mass sterilization on their poor, which India, China and others proceeded to do.
After Malthus came Charles Darwin to provide the moral justification for American eugenics, European imperialism and Nazi mass murder. Evolution meant that the fittest must and should survive: it was not only right to help evolution along by sterilizing the poor, murdering Congolese or gassing Jews, Slavs and Gypsies. It was scientific.
After the Nazi Holocaust, Zubrin recounts how the eugenics movement rebranded itself as population control, attracting U.S. statesmen, generals, Ivy League bluebloods and scientists like Ehrlich. US and UN development aid was tied to mass sterilization in India and China, and contraception in Africa.
More deceptively, antihumanism strain infected the environmental movement, beginning with Rachel Carson’s famous Silent Spring, a bestselling polemic against DDT, which she claimed was killing all the birds. More junk science. But the US and then the UN banned DDT, resulting in millions in the Third World dying of malaria. Oh well, too many damned People, people, people.”
How does global warming fit in? First, `says Zubrin, as bogus science: (unproven, possibly natural, probably beneficial). But more significantly, the ersatz remedies for warming require state intervention on a huge scale, which probably won’t solve the problem but will throttle human creativity as exemplified by the Alberta Tar Sands on the one hand, and Green Revolution on the other, choking Third World development with sky-high fuel costs, and -expanding state control over economies and individual lives.
.Zubrin argues convincingly that while the likes of Ehrlich, or his collaborator John Holdren, Obama’s chief science advisor, see natural resources as finite, resources are actually limited only by human ingenuity.
Zubrin gives credit where it is due to Marxists on the one hand and the Catholic Church on the other as longtime opponents of antihumanism. But the Left, he notes with regret, has lately joined the antihumanists in opposing growth.
In sum,what antihumanism desires is that “human aspirations must be crushed and authorities must be constituted to do the crushing.” The time is long past due,” says Zubrin, and we can’t disagree, “to put a stake in the heart of this monster.”
By Steve Weatherbe
Here is a commentary I did for a new webmagazine called (and found at) http://www.thechristians.com. Please check it out==news and comment from an orth0dox Christian perspective.
A nameless blogger in South Africa at http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/Death-of-Religion-Continued-20130419
has collected some census data from here, some polling results from there, and put them all together to announce the dying out of religion – and good riddance, too, given that religious countries have higher “murder, rape, woman abuse and general crime rates.”
Mr. Death of Religion, for so shall I call him, or DOR, presents telling statistics showing religious belief declining in England and Wales, Canada, the U.S.A., Australia and South Africa, then throws in snapshot numbers on atheism’s current prevalence in China (47 per cent) and Japan (31 per cent) to prove that the decline “is not just a Western idea.”
It’s a curiously – shall we say – Anglo Saxon, selection; until you get to China, when the sudden resort to one-off numbers looks decidedly evasive. While it is true there are a lot of atheists in China, what is surprising is that the number is not considerably larger than half in a communist country that has brutally suppressed religious faith for 60 years. It is also true that the world’s most populous country is seeing phenomenal growth in the number of Christians – already 70 million – of seven per cent a year.
But where religion – and especially Christianity – is growing even more than in China is in Latin America and Africa. In Sub-Saharan Africa in 1910 there were but 8.5 million Christians; now there are 515 million, and, since they now comprise 62 per cent of the region’s people, there is plenty of room for even more growth.
In Latin America the picture is cloudier statistically, but still showing impressive expansion. One century ago nearly 100 percent of South Americans were Roman Catholic. However, even Catholics now concede that the population was never more than nominally evangelized by a generally complacent church. This allowed it to grow apace with the population, so that now there are officially 550 million Catholic Christians in Latin and South America.
Mr. DOR may take comfort in the reality that the Christianity of many South Americans never got beyond the baptismal font. But he would be discouraged by a deeper look: evangelical/pentecostal Christianity is on the march throughout the region, turning token Christians into fervent ones. The effect has been electric: just as Wesleyism (see The Christians, Volume Ten, We the People) transformed the debased and debauched human debris of the Industrial Revolution into prosperous, prudent, Christian tradesmen, so pentecostalism is rudely awakening Latino Protestants from their fatalism and passivity and turning them into forward-looking savers, entrepreneurs and believers. In Brazil, which has the third largest nominally Catholic population in the world, you will find twice as many Protestant pastors as priests, and a quarter of the population calling itself Protestant. This in turn has prodded awake a “new evangelism” in the Catholic church, exemplified by the new Argentinian pope, Francis, the fruits of which are already starting to show.
South America, therefore, represents neither a decline so much as a renewal. These are new Christians. And in varying degrees it is happening worldwide, even in the Muslim world, as Christianity expands – under Mr. DOR’s radar.
As for the alleged link between religion and crime, Mr. DOR might find enlightening the recent book of sociologist Rodney Stark, America’s Blessings: How America Benefits Everyone, Including Atheists. Stark’s own studies, and those he surveys, show the opposite. Religious people are half as criminal as the unchurched, and (among other things) more likely to stand for the national anthem, to pick up litter, and to attend school.
Mr. DOR, along with many like-minded social scientists, should not be surprised that people who believe in a loving God tend to behave better on average than those who don’t. Nor need he be surprised that people continue to be attracted to such a God.
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