Saturday, May 7, 2011
The new robber barons
The New Robber Barons
Back at the turn of the 19th century a key problem with American society were the “Robber Barons”. They were bad because while their business made them immense fortunes they didn’t share their economic prosperity with their workers.
These people didn’t actually steal from their workers but by using a variety of tactics they managed to keep wages low, hours long, and benefits non-existent. Many of their tactics were based on the ability of their wealth and political connections to bring government in on their side in disputes with workers.
Looking at the bloated greedy unions that we have today in places like Wisconsin it’s often hard to remember that unions were founded to fight the evil of corporate tyranny. Over 100 years ago unions were a moral necessity because workers had to band together to be treated fairly.
Even today there is a need to counterbalance corporate power in the job arena. Clearly though the battle has shifted. Today no reasonable conservative or liberal, CEO or worker disagrees with the concept that workers have a right to share in the wealth they generate through their labor.
The argument has shifted to what a fair settlement is. Clearly the companies owners are putting money at risk in order to provide jobs for the workers so the stockholders deserve a return on their investment. Similarly the stock holders recognize that without the labor of the workers there would be no company and hence the workers deserve a fair wage. Because people are far from perfect there is no unanimity on what constitutes a fair shake for both parties. But the overall societal consensus has changed dramatically. Most workers and owners, but not all, share the same assumption that it isn’t fair to exploit either group.
In our enlightened times liberals are eager to point out the evils of the “Robber Barons”. They tend to associate the “Robber Barons” with conservatives but in reality the “Robber Barons” were often liberals on matters other than how much workers should be paid. But it is clear that liberals rejoice, as do most conservatives, that the age of the “Robber Baron” has passed.
Sadly however a new generation of “Robber Barons” has arisen and unlike their predecessors they do actually rob to get their wealth. Who are these new exploiters of the workers? They are none other than the liberals who support illegal immigration.
Like their predecessors in the “Robber Baron” era modern illegals are poorly paid and expected to work long hours without benefits. Like their predecessors they are kept in line by selective enforcement of the law brought about by the political clout of their employers.
Who are these modern “Robber Barons”? They’re the folk that say that illegals should get free medical care, at the expense of hard working Americans. They’re the ones that say that illegals don’t take jobs away from Americans. They’re the ones who say that we need cheap labor to maintain the American standard of living. They’re the Democrats and the liberals who claim to support illegals but who in fact work hard to ensure that illegals provide cheap labor.
We all agree that an illegal shouldn’t be denied medical care and allowed to die just because they are illegal. But liberals contend that the rest of America should foot the bill for the medical care of illegals, all medical care for as long as the illegals are in America. Obama included 15 million illegals when he said how many people in America don’t have health care.
But the real reason liberals support society paying for illegals medical care is that is spreads the burden around. Liberals couldn’t get cheap labor to work on their houses or to be their servants if the workers had to charge enough to cover their medical expenses. Before you cite Meg Whitman as a case of a conservative using cheap illegals remember that she paid her maid roughly $40,000 a year, hardly an exploitive wage. But even if conservatives do exploit illegals it is still wrong.
It’s a common and unsubstantiated myth that illegals only take jobs Americans won’t. If you look at any job field where illegals are common,-- yard work, maintenance crews etc--you’ll find that many Americans are doing the exact same jobs. What is true is that many Americans wouldn’t do the jobs illegals do for the wages illegals are willing to accept.
Illegals can accept lower wages than Americans for a number of reasons. They don’t have to pay income taxes, social security taxes, or medicare taxes. They don’t have to pay for medical insurance. They don’t have to conform to a variety of other regulations that drive up the cost of living of Americans.
Illegals are also cheaper because employers can pay them more poorly because if an illegal complains the employer can call in the INS. These modern “Robber Barons” are exploiting the illegals just as their predecessors exploited Americans at the turn of the 20th century. Don’t be fooled; all of the political efforts to protect illegals isn’t based on a humanitarian instinct but on the desire to have cheap exploitable labor. Times may have changed but the desire to exploit others hasn’t gone away.
If we didn’t allow the exploitation of immigrants then our standard of living would go down a bit. No one would starve and it would be the rich, who employee illegals, not the poor who would suffer most. We’d have to pay Americans, or guest laborers, fair salaries that would drive up the cost of goods. But that’s exactly what we had to do when America got rid of the original “Robber Barons”.
While liberals constantly attack conservatives for not caring about illegals it’s the liberals whose very political move serves to maintain illegals as an exploitable class useful to provide votes and cheap labor. It’s time to treat foreigners who want to work in American fairly through some sort of guest worker program. It’s time to stop having all Americans subsidize the rich by paying for the societal costs of illegal immigrants. It’s time to stop allowing free medical care for illegals to make medical insurance unaffordable for the lower middle class. It’s time to stop forcing the Americans with the least job skills, who are disproportionately minorities, to compete with illegals who don’t have to pay taxes or their medical bills and who are willing to live in poverty because American poverty is better than a middle class life where they came from.
American is a huge and very diverse family held together by a common commitment to our fellow citizens. It’s not right that a few rich folks can get richer by exploiting both illegals and American workers. It’s time for America to take a stand and quit exploiting foreigners in order to maintain an artificially high standard of living.
Back at the turn of the 19th century a key problem with American society were the “Robber Barons”. They were bad because while their business made them immense fortunes they didn’t share their economic prosperity with their workers.
These people didn’t actually steal from their workers but by using a variety of tactics they managed to keep wages low, hours long, and benefits non-existent. Many of their tactics were based on the ability of their wealth and political connections to bring government in on their side in disputes with workers.
Looking at the bloated greedy unions that we have today in places like Wisconsin it’s often hard to remember that unions were founded to fight the evil of corporate tyranny. Over 100 years ago unions were a moral necessity because workers had to band together to be treated fairly.
Even today there is a need to counterbalance corporate power in the job arena. Clearly though the battle has shifted. Today no reasonable conservative or liberal, CEO or worker disagrees with the concept that workers have a right to share in the wealth they generate through their labor.
The argument has shifted to what a fair settlement is. Clearly the companies owners are putting money at risk in order to provide jobs for the workers so the stockholders deserve a return on their investment. Similarly the stock holders recognize that without the labor of the workers there would be no company and hence the workers deserve a fair wage. Because people are far from perfect there is no unanimity on what constitutes a fair shake for both parties. But the overall societal consensus has changed dramatically. Most workers and owners, but not all, share the same assumption that it isn’t fair to exploit either group.
In our enlightened times liberals are eager to point out the evils of the “Robber Barons”. They tend to associate the “Robber Barons” with conservatives but in reality the “Robber Barons” were often liberals on matters other than how much workers should be paid. But it is clear that liberals rejoice, as do most conservatives, that the age of the “Robber Baron” has passed.
Sadly however a new generation of “Robber Barons” has arisen and unlike their predecessors they do actually rob to get their wealth. Who are these new exploiters of the workers? They are none other than the liberals who support illegal immigration.
Like their predecessors in the “Robber Baron” era modern illegals are poorly paid and expected to work long hours without benefits. Like their predecessors they are kept in line by selective enforcement of the law brought about by the political clout of their employers.
Who are these modern “Robber Barons”? They’re the folk that say that illegals should get free medical care, at the expense of hard working Americans. They’re the ones that say that illegals don’t take jobs away from Americans. They’re the ones who say that we need cheap labor to maintain the American standard of living. They’re the Democrats and the liberals who claim to support illegals but who in fact work hard to ensure that illegals provide cheap labor.
We all agree that an illegal shouldn’t be denied medical care and allowed to die just because they are illegal. But liberals contend that the rest of America should foot the bill for the medical care of illegals, all medical care for as long as the illegals are in America. Obama included 15 million illegals when he said how many people in America don’t have health care.
But the real reason liberals support society paying for illegals medical care is that is spreads the burden around. Liberals couldn’t get cheap labor to work on their houses or to be their servants if the workers had to charge enough to cover their medical expenses. Before you cite Meg Whitman as a case of a conservative using cheap illegals remember that she paid her maid roughly $40,000 a year, hardly an exploitive wage. But even if conservatives do exploit illegals it is still wrong.
It’s a common and unsubstantiated myth that illegals only take jobs Americans won’t. If you look at any job field where illegals are common,-- yard work, maintenance crews etc--you’ll find that many Americans are doing the exact same jobs. What is true is that many Americans wouldn’t do the jobs illegals do for the wages illegals are willing to accept.
Illegals can accept lower wages than Americans for a number of reasons. They don’t have to pay income taxes, social security taxes, or medicare taxes. They don’t have to pay for medical insurance. They don’t have to conform to a variety of other regulations that drive up the cost of living of Americans.
Illegals are also cheaper because employers can pay them more poorly because if an illegal complains the employer can call in the INS. These modern “Robber Barons” are exploiting the illegals just as their predecessors exploited Americans at the turn of the 20th century. Don’t be fooled; all of the political efforts to protect illegals isn’t based on a humanitarian instinct but on the desire to have cheap exploitable labor. Times may have changed but the desire to exploit others hasn’t gone away.
If we didn’t allow the exploitation of immigrants then our standard of living would go down a bit. No one would starve and it would be the rich, who employee illegals, not the poor who would suffer most. We’d have to pay Americans, or guest laborers, fair salaries that would drive up the cost of goods. But that’s exactly what we had to do when America got rid of the original “Robber Barons”.
While liberals constantly attack conservatives for not caring about illegals it’s the liberals whose very political move serves to maintain illegals as an exploitable class useful to provide votes and cheap labor. It’s time to treat foreigners who want to work in American fairly through some sort of guest worker program. It’s time to stop having all Americans subsidize the rich by paying for the societal costs of illegal immigrants. It’s time to stop allowing free medical care for illegals to make medical insurance unaffordable for the lower middle class. It’s time to stop forcing the Americans with the least job skills, who are disproportionately minorities, to compete with illegals who don’t have to pay taxes or their medical bills and who are willing to live in poverty because American poverty is better than a middle class life where they came from.
American is a huge and very diverse family held together by a common commitment to our fellow citizens. It’s not right that a few rich folks can get richer by exploiting both illegals and American workers. It’s time for America to take a stand and quit exploiting foreigners in order to maintain an artificially high standard of living.
Science in the world of politics
If you’re a conservative you’ll eventually, and in all probability very quickly, run into an invocation of science as god when debating a liberal. The liberal will tell you that global warming, nuclear winter, evolution, the genetic nature of homosexuality are proven scientific fact. At that they expect you to bow your head, sob, and walk off totally defeated. After all the secular god has spoken.
While it’s amusing to see the same liberals who constantly castigate religious conservatives for invoking God invoke “science” as a source of absolute truth about everything, including the spiritual aspect of man, it’s necessary to show them why they’re wrong.
Any one with a grain of common sense knows of course that science is neither perfect nor infallible. The problem is that the average person doesn’t know how science works and therefore has difficulty refuting whatever Delphic statement scientists are supposedly making.
The first thing to remember is that science only addresses the material world. It has no ability to address issues like faith, charity, or love. Science cannot tell us why we exist, although some scientists say we have no purpose and that everything is meaningless.
They say that because like the man with a screwdriver who’s using it to hammer in a nail they use science to try and address every issue they confront. But just as using religion to explain why gravity works is silly so to is using science to answer questions about the purpose and meaning of life. It’s not that either science or religion are bad it’s just that they’re not intended or capable of addressing everything.
When you hear someone trying to use science to explain the meaning of life you should ask them if they picked their wife/husband based on science? Unless they’re severely warped they’ll admit that they picked their spouse based on love, something that is beyond the ken of rationalistic science. Similarly given that science can’t predict individual human behavior if man is made in the image of God then it’s not surprising that science is unable to explain Gods actions.
But more importantly science is oblivious to half of reality, the spiritual half. Many scientists fall into the trap of saying that if you can’t measure it with a ruler it doesn’t exist. That’s circular reasoning. They start out by saying that everything is purely matter, no spirit. They then say that there is no spirit because we can’t see it. Yet by it’s very definition the spirit is not susceptible to measurement by physical means.
All scientists can logically say is that there is no scientific, ie materialistic, evidence for the spiritual aspect of man. But even that is a stretch. Because science can’t explain all of what man does and thinks what scientists should really be saying is that science hasn’t yet found any evidence for a spiritual world. Even there though there are potential problems. After all why do we, if we’re just random masses of chemicals, like beautiful things? Why do we show altruistic charity for people who are not related to us and hence don’t improve our chances of sending our genes to the future? Why do we care about honor and why do we feel bad when we sin?
Someday science might find explanations for these things but until it does it’s really presumptuous of scientists to claim that there is no God and that there is no aspect of people that is not purely material.
The second thing to remember is that scientists are human and generally liberal since they live in the womb of academia. As a result they’re not above lying to further their causes.
A great example of this was nuclear winter. Carl Sagan said that his computer models had shown that even a very limited nuclear exchange where a small number of Soviet nuclear weapons were detonated in North and South Dakota would result in the planet being pitched into darkness and billions of people dying.
He used this to say that the Strategic Defense Initiative(SDI), which was designed to protect Americans if the Soviets did attack, was a waste of money.
The problem is that his science was totally bogus. First there have been historical occurrences where much larger amounts of debris were probably lifted high in the atmosphere by volcanos than would be generated in Sagan’s minimal attack scenario. We know from these events that there could be shortened summers in places like Maine but we also know that there was no global darkness. In additions Sagans methodology was very questionable and did not justify the level of certainty with which he was proclaiming his results.
Why didn’t other scientists point this out? Well a liberal scientist who didn’t like SDI asked other scientists this. The answer he got was that those other scientists didn’t like SDI so they kept their mouths shut. Their motive wasn’t evil, they really thought that SDI would be bad for world peace. But they put their political beliefs ahead of their commitment to scientific truth. Eventually after years of analysis it was shown that by burning all the cities in the Northern Hemisphere a nuclear winter might occur. But that scenario is actually an argument for SDI since even a partially effective SDI might be able to reduce the number of burning cities enough to avoid a global nightfall.
We see a similar thing today with human caused global warming. The simple fact is there are a lot of arguments on both sides of this and there is clearly no objective scientific basis for declaring the issue settled.
Scientists are also willing to suppress data that is politically incorrect. The link between having an abortion before having a live birth and later getting cancer is much higher than the correlation between second hand smoke and lung cancer. But the scientific community buries the first result and proclaims the second. Similarly studies that show that having gay parents or a single parent is bad for kids are stifled and clearly biased reports that supposedly show the opposite are proclaimed.
Sadly scientists have shown themselves to be untrustworthy when their liberal beliefs are threatened.
The second thing to remember is that scientists are not philosophers and often don’t understand the reasoning that lies behind some of their proclamations. We see this when they say things like if evolution occurred then there is no need for a god. A bit of thought would reveal that perhaps God used evolution to make human bodies and then His divine power to put souls in us. Science has no way of disproving that. Further science can’t explain where the universe came from. There is no way to explain, and very smart scientists have tried, how something can come from nothing. In fact something coming from nothing violates all of the experiments scientists have done to date.
Which brings us to the question how do we separate the wheat from the chaff in scientific pronouncements? The key to that question is understanding what makes science so useful.
Modern science started with the discovery of the scientific method. That method is really very simple. Accept nothing as proven that can’t be validated by experiments. Experiments that anyone could, at least in principle, conduct. For example if Obama and Bush both conduct an experiment to see if apples fall down when released they’d get the same results irrespective of their philosophical and political differences.
By providing a way to know what’s true about the material world that is not colored by human biases science has been shown to be an extraordinarily powerful way to expand human knowledge. Who would have believed that time flows at a different rate as a function of how fast you’re moving? Yet innumerable experiments have shown this to be true. But until the first of these experiments were performed the scientific community did not accept the concept.
Problems arises when the scientific community embraces concepts that are not experimentally verifiable. Whenever you hear you should believe a scientific concept because the “vast majority of scientists” believe in it you need to be very cautious.
Science is not democratic. Back in the early 20th century one scientist suggested the concept of continental drift, the continents move around on the earth. The vast majority of scientists thought he was nuts. But by the 1960’s experiments proved him to be right. Consensus is just that, a bunch of scientists sharing the same opinion. If they can’t point to objective experiments that support their position and their position is being used in the political arena you have every right to ask them why they should be believed.
Not surprisingly none of the supposedly scientific positions used by liberals to bash conservatives is based on objective experiments.
There is no experiment that can be done to show that evolution occurred in the past. Ignoring the fact that scientists don’t have explanations for how evolution works--how do new species develop, how do very complex systems that require multiple mutations where each individual mutation does not help an organism survive develop, etc-- science has no objective way to prove that evolution occurred in the past.
Scientists point to fossils but they can’t prove, through experiments, that God--or super intelligent pan-dimensional beings-- didn’t create the world, including fossils, 6,000 years ago. Instead they use a philosophical argument called Occams razor.
Occams razor says that if you’ve got multiple explanations for something use the simplest one. This makes perfect sense for worldly things but it clearly doesn’t work when describing human actions. Since we’re made in God’s image it’s unclear why Occams razor should work for understanding what God did or does.
But the key point is that what makes science strong and objective are experiments. But experiments can’t prove that evolution happened in the past.
Yet many scientists are loath to admit this. If you go to the web page of the National Academy of Science you’ll see that they say that evolution is a fact just like the fact that the Earth orbits around the sun and that organisms are made out of cells.
The problem is that you can conduct experiments to show that the Earth orbits the Sun and you can use a microscope to see that organisms are made out of cells but you can’t do any experiments to show that evolution occurred in the past.
I personally agree that the simplest explanation of what we see is that evolution of the body occurred. But I realize that is a philosophical not scientific statement. Sadly many scientists refuse to acknowledge that.
It’s impossible to do experiments to validate that human activity is causing global warming. You can’t experiment on the climate. Instead scientists look at measurements and try and develop models that can predict what’s going on. If scientists could develop models and prove that those models were capable of accurately predicting future climate then that would be an experiment.
If a computer model predicts climate for the next 40 years and after 40 years it turns out to be correct you have good reason to believe that it will accurately predict the climate. Of course we haven’t had time for that sort of validation. Therefore scientists look to see if models can model what happened in the past without essentially building the past results into their model.
Interestingly enough scientists haven’t been able to accurately model the climate in the past or predict the future climate. Climate models didn’t predict the current global cooling phase they’ve now declared is occurring until after it started.
There is a difference between climate and weather but a 10 year cooling period is climate. That none of the models that supposedly show that mankind is causing global warming predicted that 10 year event before it started makes it pretty clear that those models aren’t accurate. Hopefully that will improve but until it does it’s irrelevant if “most” scientists believe that mankind is causing global warming. Just as it would be irrelevant if “most” scientists believed that the Mets were going to win the next World Series.
When confronted liberal invocation of science as god follow these rules to see if their claim has any credibility.
Is the claim about something non-material, since evolution occurred there is no God for example? If that’s the case you know that the argument is nothing more than the opinion of scientists because science can’t address non-material things.
Is the claim based on experiments? If the liberal you’re talking to can’t point to unbiased experiments that support the theory they’re advocating then once again the argument is merely based on the opinions of scientists not on facts.
Does the claim make sense? If evolution weeds out mutations that reduce the chances of sending your genes to the future how could being homosexual--which prevents one from sending one’s gene’s to the future--be based on genetics?
Does the theory seem to be ideal for supporting a liberal position? Politics isn’t based on science. If some new scientific theory just happens to prove a liberal position you can be fairly sure that it was made up for just that purpose and isn’t real science.
Does the theory claim to prove a negative, there is no soul? Since it’s very very hard to prove a negative of anything you can be pretty sure that any theory that claims to prove a negative is probably false.
If you have any doubt search the web. You might be amazed at how many sites address scientific issues and show the truth about many seemingly amazing claims made by “science”.
But keep in mind when speaking about purely materialistic things, and issues that aren’t political, science is still a wonderful gift from God that makes the world a much better place to live in. Don’t let liberals misuse of science cause you to distrust all science. Also remember that many if not most scientists don’t agree with the misuse of science but they don’t get any publicity due to the biases of the liberal media. So don’t go hating on your scientist friends!
While it’s amusing to see the same liberals who constantly castigate religious conservatives for invoking God invoke “science” as a source of absolute truth about everything, including the spiritual aspect of man, it’s necessary to show them why they’re wrong.
Any one with a grain of common sense knows of course that science is neither perfect nor infallible. The problem is that the average person doesn’t know how science works and therefore has difficulty refuting whatever Delphic statement scientists are supposedly making.
The first thing to remember is that science only addresses the material world. It has no ability to address issues like faith, charity, or love. Science cannot tell us why we exist, although some scientists say we have no purpose and that everything is meaningless.
They say that because like the man with a screwdriver who’s using it to hammer in a nail they use science to try and address every issue they confront. But just as using religion to explain why gravity works is silly so to is using science to answer questions about the purpose and meaning of life. It’s not that either science or religion are bad it’s just that they’re not intended or capable of addressing everything.
When you hear someone trying to use science to explain the meaning of life you should ask them if they picked their wife/husband based on science? Unless they’re severely warped they’ll admit that they picked their spouse based on love, something that is beyond the ken of rationalistic science. Similarly given that science can’t predict individual human behavior if man is made in the image of God then it’s not surprising that science is unable to explain Gods actions.
But more importantly science is oblivious to half of reality, the spiritual half. Many scientists fall into the trap of saying that if you can’t measure it with a ruler it doesn’t exist. That’s circular reasoning. They start out by saying that everything is purely matter, no spirit. They then say that there is no spirit because we can’t see it. Yet by it’s very definition the spirit is not susceptible to measurement by physical means.
All scientists can logically say is that there is no scientific, ie materialistic, evidence for the spiritual aspect of man. But even that is a stretch. Because science can’t explain all of what man does and thinks what scientists should really be saying is that science hasn’t yet found any evidence for a spiritual world. Even there though there are potential problems. After all why do we, if we’re just random masses of chemicals, like beautiful things? Why do we show altruistic charity for people who are not related to us and hence don’t improve our chances of sending our genes to the future? Why do we care about honor and why do we feel bad when we sin?
Someday science might find explanations for these things but until it does it’s really presumptuous of scientists to claim that there is no God and that there is no aspect of people that is not purely material.
The second thing to remember is that scientists are human and generally liberal since they live in the womb of academia. As a result they’re not above lying to further their causes.
A great example of this was nuclear winter. Carl Sagan said that his computer models had shown that even a very limited nuclear exchange where a small number of Soviet nuclear weapons were detonated in North and South Dakota would result in the planet being pitched into darkness and billions of people dying.
He used this to say that the Strategic Defense Initiative(SDI), which was designed to protect Americans if the Soviets did attack, was a waste of money.
The problem is that his science was totally bogus. First there have been historical occurrences where much larger amounts of debris were probably lifted high in the atmosphere by volcanos than would be generated in Sagan’s minimal attack scenario. We know from these events that there could be shortened summers in places like Maine but we also know that there was no global darkness. In additions Sagans methodology was very questionable and did not justify the level of certainty with which he was proclaiming his results.
Why didn’t other scientists point this out? Well a liberal scientist who didn’t like SDI asked other scientists this. The answer he got was that those other scientists didn’t like SDI so they kept their mouths shut. Their motive wasn’t evil, they really thought that SDI would be bad for world peace. But they put their political beliefs ahead of their commitment to scientific truth. Eventually after years of analysis it was shown that by burning all the cities in the Northern Hemisphere a nuclear winter might occur. But that scenario is actually an argument for SDI since even a partially effective SDI might be able to reduce the number of burning cities enough to avoid a global nightfall.
We see a similar thing today with human caused global warming. The simple fact is there are a lot of arguments on both sides of this and there is clearly no objective scientific basis for declaring the issue settled.
Scientists are also willing to suppress data that is politically incorrect. The link between having an abortion before having a live birth and later getting cancer is much higher than the correlation between second hand smoke and lung cancer. But the scientific community buries the first result and proclaims the second. Similarly studies that show that having gay parents or a single parent is bad for kids are stifled and clearly biased reports that supposedly show the opposite are proclaimed.
Sadly scientists have shown themselves to be untrustworthy when their liberal beliefs are threatened.
The second thing to remember is that scientists are not philosophers and often don’t understand the reasoning that lies behind some of their proclamations. We see this when they say things like if evolution occurred then there is no need for a god. A bit of thought would reveal that perhaps God used evolution to make human bodies and then His divine power to put souls in us. Science has no way of disproving that. Further science can’t explain where the universe came from. There is no way to explain, and very smart scientists have tried, how something can come from nothing. In fact something coming from nothing violates all of the experiments scientists have done to date.
Which brings us to the question how do we separate the wheat from the chaff in scientific pronouncements? The key to that question is understanding what makes science so useful.
Modern science started with the discovery of the scientific method. That method is really very simple. Accept nothing as proven that can’t be validated by experiments. Experiments that anyone could, at least in principle, conduct. For example if Obama and Bush both conduct an experiment to see if apples fall down when released they’d get the same results irrespective of their philosophical and political differences.
By providing a way to know what’s true about the material world that is not colored by human biases science has been shown to be an extraordinarily powerful way to expand human knowledge. Who would have believed that time flows at a different rate as a function of how fast you’re moving? Yet innumerable experiments have shown this to be true. But until the first of these experiments were performed the scientific community did not accept the concept.
Problems arises when the scientific community embraces concepts that are not experimentally verifiable. Whenever you hear you should believe a scientific concept because the “vast majority of scientists” believe in it you need to be very cautious.
Science is not democratic. Back in the early 20th century one scientist suggested the concept of continental drift, the continents move around on the earth. The vast majority of scientists thought he was nuts. But by the 1960’s experiments proved him to be right. Consensus is just that, a bunch of scientists sharing the same opinion. If they can’t point to objective experiments that support their position and their position is being used in the political arena you have every right to ask them why they should be believed.
Not surprisingly none of the supposedly scientific positions used by liberals to bash conservatives is based on objective experiments.
There is no experiment that can be done to show that evolution occurred in the past. Ignoring the fact that scientists don’t have explanations for how evolution works--how do new species develop, how do very complex systems that require multiple mutations where each individual mutation does not help an organism survive develop, etc-- science has no objective way to prove that evolution occurred in the past.
Scientists point to fossils but they can’t prove, through experiments, that God--or super intelligent pan-dimensional beings-- didn’t create the world, including fossils, 6,000 years ago. Instead they use a philosophical argument called Occams razor.
Occams razor says that if you’ve got multiple explanations for something use the simplest one. This makes perfect sense for worldly things but it clearly doesn’t work when describing human actions. Since we’re made in God’s image it’s unclear why Occams razor should work for understanding what God did or does.
But the key point is that what makes science strong and objective are experiments. But experiments can’t prove that evolution happened in the past.
Yet many scientists are loath to admit this. If you go to the web page of the National Academy of Science you’ll see that they say that evolution is a fact just like the fact that the Earth orbits around the sun and that organisms are made out of cells.
The problem is that you can conduct experiments to show that the Earth orbits the Sun and you can use a microscope to see that organisms are made out of cells but you can’t do any experiments to show that evolution occurred in the past.
I personally agree that the simplest explanation of what we see is that evolution of the body occurred. But I realize that is a philosophical not scientific statement. Sadly many scientists refuse to acknowledge that.
It’s impossible to do experiments to validate that human activity is causing global warming. You can’t experiment on the climate. Instead scientists look at measurements and try and develop models that can predict what’s going on. If scientists could develop models and prove that those models were capable of accurately predicting future climate then that would be an experiment.
If a computer model predicts climate for the next 40 years and after 40 years it turns out to be correct you have good reason to believe that it will accurately predict the climate. Of course we haven’t had time for that sort of validation. Therefore scientists look to see if models can model what happened in the past without essentially building the past results into their model.
Interestingly enough scientists haven’t been able to accurately model the climate in the past or predict the future climate. Climate models didn’t predict the current global cooling phase they’ve now declared is occurring until after it started.
There is a difference between climate and weather but a 10 year cooling period is climate. That none of the models that supposedly show that mankind is causing global warming predicted that 10 year event before it started makes it pretty clear that those models aren’t accurate. Hopefully that will improve but until it does it’s irrelevant if “most” scientists believe that mankind is causing global warming. Just as it would be irrelevant if “most” scientists believed that the Mets were going to win the next World Series.
When confronted liberal invocation of science as god follow these rules to see if their claim has any credibility.
Is the claim about something non-material, since evolution occurred there is no God for example? If that’s the case you know that the argument is nothing more than the opinion of scientists because science can’t address non-material things.
Is the claim based on experiments? If the liberal you’re talking to can’t point to unbiased experiments that support the theory they’re advocating then once again the argument is merely based on the opinions of scientists not on facts.
Does the claim make sense? If evolution weeds out mutations that reduce the chances of sending your genes to the future how could being homosexual--which prevents one from sending one’s gene’s to the future--be based on genetics?
Does the theory seem to be ideal for supporting a liberal position? Politics isn’t based on science. If some new scientific theory just happens to prove a liberal position you can be fairly sure that it was made up for just that purpose and isn’t real science.
Does the theory claim to prove a negative, there is no soul? Since it’s very very hard to prove a negative of anything you can be pretty sure that any theory that claims to prove a negative is probably false.
If you have any doubt search the web. You might be amazed at how many sites address scientific issues and show the truth about many seemingly amazing claims made by “science”.
But keep in mind when speaking about purely materialistic things, and issues that aren’t political, science is still a wonderful gift from God that makes the world a much better place to live in. Don’t let liberals misuse of science cause you to distrust all science. Also remember that many if not most scientists don’t agree with the misuse of science but they don’t get any publicity due to the biases of the liberal media. So don’t go hating on your scientist friends!
The Strange Case of Louis J. Marinelli III
Louis J. Marinelli III, not to be confused with Louis J. Marinelli Jr. or Louis J. Marinelli, started a page on Facebook called “Protect Marriage: One Man, One Woman” to defend the millenia’s old definition of marriage.
He worked hard and managed to get roughly 288K likes from people who thought that changing the definition of a primordial social institution to please a tiny minority wasn’t a good idea.
But then one day he woke up and decided that he was for civil gay marriages. I guess impolite gays need not apply. There’s nothing wrong with this; everyone is fully entitled under the First Amendment to be wrong. What’s odd though is that Louis seems to have decided that he has no obligation to the nearly 300,000 people who endorsed his page when he was against redefining marriage. He didn’t feel he should just resign and start a new Facebook page with his new views.
It’s as if the Huffington Post started streaming Glenn Beck shows, called for Obama to show his full form birth certificate, called for cutting taxes on the rich, and said that any woman who has an abortion should be jailed but kept kudos on their web site from NARAL and Planned Parenthood.
At first it appeared that this might have been a hack and there still is that possibility since Louis hasn’t answered my email. Full disclosure I’ve published a number of articles on Louis’s site but I’m not a personal friend of his so I don’t know what’s going on in his life.
However another member of National Organization for Marriage(NOM) has posted on Facebook that Louis has locked out the other administrators and they don’t know why he suddenly changed his position.
While one young man switching his position on redefining marriage is not a big deal there are some things that can be learned from this bizarre event.
The first is that in a world of instant journalism there is the possibility of black Facebook pages, black tweets, and black whatever Media 2.0 site you happen to love. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the lingo of deception a black news site is one that pretends to be of one inclination but is actually of another. For example a radio station that claimed to be the voice of Iranian revolutionaries but was actually run by the government of Iran would be a black radio station.
Why would anyone do such a thing? Historically it was to undermine the moral and to sow confusion. For example the Iranian government could put a lot of anti-government stories out via their black radio station, stories that most Iranians knew about already, but then insert an attack on the faithfulness to Islam of some well known Iranian who supports democracy. Because the attack would be couched in a sad tone and embedded with anti-government stories it would be credible. The result would be that at least some who favor overthrowing the Mad Mullahs who run Iran would no longer view the targeted Iranian as reliable.
In the case of Louis he’s effectively stealing the 288K likes he got. Someone who doesn’t know about the controversy, and that’s most of the world right now, would go to the Facebook page and see that nearly 300K people liked the redefinition of marriage.
That theft makes his position look much more popular than it is. That’s significant currency in the battle over the soul of America.
Louis is not alone of course. There’s at least one person on Facebook pretending to be a traditional Catholic but supporting Obama who’s pro-abortion. That’s pretty much like an Orthodox Jew supporting Hamas.
What this means is that we have to be careful when we read what’s out on the web not just because there are idiots out there but because there are those who will purposely try and deceive us.
For example if some false flag--another term for a black propaganda source-- conservative published a fake article saying that there was proof that Obama was taking money from Iranian sources for his reelection campaign anyone who ran with it without checking the source would destroy their credibility, at least with reasonable people.
That leads to the second point. Liberals seem to believe that the end justifies the means. They don’t seem bothered when liberal sources, like the NY Times, print incorrect insanity from the blogosphere without any fact checking. They seem happy that Louis is hijacking the “likes” of as many people as live in Cincinnati Ohio and significantly more than live in Madison Wisconsin.
This isn’t surprising in that they’ve tended to be quite sanguine with illegals voting and ballot box stuffing in the past. But it’s a useful incentive to get us enthused about pointing out liberal black propaganda.
Keep your eyes peeled for incongruities and don’t assume that every bad thing about liberals is actually true until you check it against a credible site. If you do find something odd check it out and if it smells like week old fish let the rest of the web know.
For those of you who oppose redefining marriage pull Facebook up and like the new NOM page at http://www.facebook.com/NationForMarriage?sk=wall and unlike Louis’s old page if you’d previously liked it. Don’t let him succeed in stealing what today passes as an internet vote from you.
Meanwhile I’m going to hope to see an email from Louis saying he was on vacation and this whole thing was a hack. But I’ll be inhaling air while I’m waiting.
But then one day he woke up and decided that he was for civil gay marriages. I guess impolite gays need not apply. There’s nothing wrong with this; everyone is fully entitled under the First Amendment to be wrong. What’s odd though is that Louis seems to have decided that he has no obligation to the nearly 300,000 people who endorsed his page when he was against redefining marriage. He didn’t feel he should just resign and start a new Facebook page with his new views.
It’s as if the Huffington Post started streaming Glenn Beck shows, called for Obama to show his full form birth certificate, called for cutting taxes on the rich, and said that any woman who has an abortion should be jailed but kept kudos on their web site from NARAL and Planned Parenthood.
At first it appeared that this might have been a hack and there still is that possibility since Louis hasn’t answered my email. Full disclosure I’ve published a number of articles on Louis’s site but I’m not a personal friend of his so I don’t know what’s going on in his life.
However another member of National Organization for Marriage(NOM) has posted on Facebook that Louis has locked out the other administrators and they don’t know why he suddenly changed his position.
While one young man switching his position on redefining marriage is not a big deal there are some things that can be learned from this bizarre event.
The first is that in a world of instant journalism there is the possibility of black Facebook pages, black tweets, and black whatever Media 2.0 site you happen to love. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the lingo of deception a black news site is one that pretends to be of one inclination but is actually of another. For example a radio station that claimed to be the voice of Iranian revolutionaries but was actually run by the government of Iran would be a black radio station.
Why would anyone do such a thing? Historically it was to undermine the moral and to sow confusion. For example the Iranian government could put a lot of anti-government stories out via their black radio station, stories that most Iranians knew about already, but then insert an attack on the faithfulness to Islam of some well known Iranian who supports democracy. Because the attack would be couched in a sad tone and embedded with anti-government stories it would be credible. The result would be that at least some who favor overthrowing the Mad Mullahs who run Iran would no longer view the targeted Iranian as reliable.
In the case of Louis he’s effectively stealing the 288K likes he got. Someone who doesn’t know about the controversy, and that’s most of the world right now, would go to the Facebook page and see that nearly 300K people liked the redefinition of marriage.
That theft makes his position look much more popular than it is. That’s significant currency in the battle over the soul of America.
Louis is not alone of course. There’s at least one person on Facebook pretending to be a traditional Catholic but supporting Obama who’s pro-abortion. That’s pretty much like an Orthodox Jew supporting Hamas.
What this means is that we have to be careful when we read what’s out on the web not just because there are idiots out there but because there are those who will purposely try and deceive us.
For example if some false flag--another term for a black propaganda source-- conservative published a fake article saying that there was proof that Obama was taking money from Iranian sources for his reelection campaign anyone who ran with it without checking the source would destroy their credibility, at least with reasonable people.
That leads to the second point. Liberals seem to believe that the end justifies the means. They don’t seem bothered when liberal sources, like the NY Times, print incorrect insanity from the blogosphere without any fact checking. They seem happy that Louis is hijacking the “likes” of as many people as live in Cincinnati Ohio and significantly more than live in Madison Wisconsin.
This isn’t surprising in that they’ve tended to be quite sanguine with illegals voting and ballot box stuffing in the past. But it’s a useful incentive to get us enthused about pointing out liberal black propaganda.
Keep your eyes peeled for incongruities and don’t assume that every bad thing about liberals is actually true until you check it against a credible site. If you do find something odd check it out and if it smells like week old fish let the rest of the web know.
For those of you who oppose redefining marriage pull Facebook up and like the new NOM page at http://www.facebook.com/NationForMarriage?sk=wall and unlike Louis’s old page if you’d previously liked it. Don’t let him succeed in stealing what today passes as an internet vote from you.
Meanwhile I’m going to hope to see an email from Louis saying he was on vacation and this whole thing was a hack. But I’ll be inhaling air while I’m waiting.
The Lifesaver Religion
When you drill down to the core of Christianity you find a set of truths. That Jesus is God and that He loves us so much that He was willing to be tortured to death for us. That God calls us children and that our purpose in life is to know, love, and serve God. Those beliefs guide us to love others as we love ourselves and to do good to everyone.
Upon examination the modern faith of atheism has no center. Like the Lifesavers® candy atheism has nothing at its core. For the core of atheism is a negative, there is no God. If there is no God then life is an accident, free will is an illusion, and there are no rules. Nietzsche realized this over a century ago. If there are no rules then anything goes and evil reigns.
Some might object to calling atheism a religion. But when dealing with worldly issues what is a religion? It is a set of beliefs that guide the actions of individuals. Buddhism does not recognize a god yet it is categorized as a religion. Similarly atheism is a set of beliefs that guides the actions of its followers.
Interestingly enough atheism requires much more faith than Christianity. Because it’s impossible to prove a negative atheists can never prove, in a scientific sense, that there is no God. Hence atheists have to believe based on their faith that there is no God.
Christians are given the gift of faith by God but they have many worldly supports for their faith ranging from the Bible to the miracles worked by God throughout the ages. Further reason can lead man to God.
For example faith provides a simple self consistent answer to where the universe came from, God made it. Atheists stumbles around producing various theories about why the universe exists but limited by the fundamental nature of science they can not now and will never be able to produce a self consistent theory of why anything exists.
The latest theories proposed by Steven Hawkings for example seem compelling but they require that gravity exists. But on what scientific basis should gravity exist? Something or someone had to cause gravity to come into existence. Since there is no basis in science for creation of anything, including gravity, from nothing--in fact there is a great deal of scientific evidence that that things can’t be created from nothing-- there can never be a scientific theory that explains why everything exists.
But the key difference between Christianity and atheism is that Christians can see that their core beliefs provide a rational basis for doing good, for helping others, and for leading a truly fulfilling life. Love thy neighbor as thyself is pretty good guidance for building a truly just society. Atheism has no equivalent teaching. In fact if atheism is right and man is just an accident and that death is a true ending then the only rational way to live would be to do whatever it takes to have the most worldly pleasure irrespective of the impact on others. To an honest atheist the guiding light of his faith is love thyself above all others.
Atheists look at the world through their concept of science and see man as nothing more than an animal. Of course looking at the world only using science is silly because by its very nature science is only capable of addressing material things. Hence there could be a veritable spiritual mountain out there and science could never see it. Just as faith is not the right tool to discover the next theory of gravity science is not the right tool to use to answer the spiritual questions of why we are here and how we should live our lives. Using science to address those questions is like using a screw driver to weld steel, an exercise in futility.
It may seem unChristian to lambast atheists. However pointing out the true nature of atheism is necessary since atheists have begun a major campaign to vilify Christianity while extolling atheism. From the dishonest, claiming that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t motivated to oppose racism by his deep Christian beliefs, to the historically incorrect, it was atheists who led the charge against slavery in the US, atheists have tried to gain credit for all that has been done by people of faith.
Simultaneously atheists reject any association with the crimes of those who reject God. Atheists continually harp on the Inquisition, a mostly secular activity that killed a few thousand people over the course of centuries, while ignoring the mass murders committed by atheists such as Adolf Hitler(11 to 17 million), Joseph Stalin(20 to 30 million), Mao(49 to 78 million), and Pol Pot(1.7 to 2.5 million, 25% of the Cambodian population).
While Christians have acknowledged that the Inquisitions were wrong, Pope John Paul II even apologized for them, atheists have not felt motivated to examine their own assumptions much less apologize for the massive killing fields of atheistic regimes.
Because atheists are claiming to be the guiding light for humanities march to the future on all moral issues, ranging from abortion to marriage, it’s important to see what atheism is truly like. What is it in their faith that allows them to overlook mass murder? What other problems might lurk unannounced in an atheistic utopia?
At the most obvious level it’s clear that atheism is a horrible world view by looking at the regimes that practice it. Historically atheistic regimes are a relatively new phenomena the first sad glimmering having occurred during the French Revolution. The true advent of atheistic societies however came from the birth of Communism and Fascism. Yet even though atheistic regimes have a short history they have a consistent record of human rights abuses and mass murder.
There has been no atheistic regime that has not oppressed and murdered its own people on scales that make any Christian country, including Spain at the height of the Inquisition, look like perfection. Yet atheists claim that there is no correlation.
It’s not surprising that the same individuals who will claim that all of the historical documentation for Christianity is a sham will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the crimes of atheistic societies.
But are they right? Are the murders unrelated to the core beliefs of atheism? The answer is no. In fact a core belief of atheism is that everything is meaningless. That we’re just an accident of nature without meaning or purpose. In fact all we are is a bunch of chemical reactions and the concept of free will and responsibility are meaningless. Atheism does not have a heart of darkness because it has no heart. The central tenant of atheism is a negative, there is no God.
Without a God to give value to everyone, the inalienable rights that form the basis of American Democracy, there is no reason to not kill those who stand in the way of “progress”. True atheism cannot object to the horrors done in its name because it has no basis for objecting to anything. By its nature atheism says that anything goes since nothing matters.
If atheism is so intrinsically horrible why are many atheists reasonable people? The answer is that atheists have grown up in the sea of Christian society. They know in their hearts, both through God’s actions and as a result of social conditioning, that other people have value, that charity is good, and that life is about more than selfishness.
But if those same people had been raised in an atheistic society they would have no social support for their good beliefs. Sure God would have written His natural law on their hearts so that they’d know what was right and wrong but history has shown that for many people that is not enough if society is corrupt.
Atheistic societies are inevitably horrible because atheism has no basis for requiring unselfish good. Man has been intrinsically damaged by Adam’s sin. Not all people are good as the crime rates show. Christianity provides a clear rationale for why people should live good lives. In Christian societies many don’t live up to that goal but at least society as a whole has a basis for saying why charity, kindness, and mercy are good. Atheistic societies can only invoke utilitarianism and rank people by their value to whomever is in power.
That’s why it’s essential to reveal the empty core of atheism. Atheism cannot provide intellectual or spiritual support to people trying to do unselfish good. Left to run society atheists will inevitably produce societies that reflect the worst in man because atheism has no basis to call man to his best.
In the end the fundamental difference between atheism and Christianity in the world is that Christianity calls us to goodness but many Christians have let God down and done evil while atheism calls us to selfishness but many atheists have overcome their faiths failures and done good.
Upon examination the modern faith of atheism has no center. Like the Lifesavers® candy atheism has nothing at its core. For the core of atheism is a negative, there is no God. If there is no God then life is an accident, free will is an illusion, and there are no rules. Nietzsche realized this over a century ago. If there are no rules then anything goes and evil reigns.
Some might object to calling atheism a religion. But when dealing with worldly issues what is a religion? It is a set of beliefs that guide the actions of individuals. Buddhism does not recognize a god yet it is categorized as a religion. Similarly atheism is a set of beliefs that guides the actions of its followers.
Interestingly enough atheism requires much more faith than Christianity. Because it’s impossible to prove a negative atheists can never prove, in a scientific sense, that there is no God. Hence atheists have to believe based on their faith that there is no God.
Christians are given the gift of faith by God but they have many worldly supports for their faith ranging from the Bible to the miracles worked by God throughout the ages. Further reason can lead man to God.
For example faith provides a simple self consistent answer to where the universe came from, God made it. Atheists stumbles around producing various theories about why the universe exists but limited by the fundamental nature of science they can not now and will never be able to produce a self consistent theory of why anything exists.
The latest theories proposed by Steven Hawkings for example seem compelling but they require that gravity exists. But on what scientific basis should gravity exist? Something or someone had to cause gravity to come into existence. Since there is no basis in science for creation of anything, including gravity, from nothing--in fact there is a great deal of scientific evidence that that things can’t be created from nothing-- there can never be a scientific theory that explains why everything exists.
But the key difference between Christianity and atheism is that Christians can see that their core beliefs provide a rational basis for doing good, for helping others, and for leading a truly fulfilling life. Love thy neighbor as thyself is pretty good guidance for building a truly just society. Atheism has no equivalent teaching. In fact if atheism is right and man is just an accident and that death is a true ending then the only rational way to live would be to do whatever it takes to have the most worldly pleasure irrespective of the impact on others. To an honest atheist the guiding light of his faith is love thyself above all others.
Atheists look at the world through their concept of science and see man as nothing more than an animal. Of course looking at the world only using science is silly because by its very nature science is only capable of addressing material things. Hence there could be a veritable spiritual mountain out there and science could never see it. Just as faith is not the right tool to discover the next theory of gravity science is not the right tool to use to answer the spiritual questions of why we are here and how we should live our lives. Using science to address those questions is like using a screw driver to weld steel, an exercise in futility.
It may seem unChristian to lambast atheists. However pointing out the true nature of atheism is necessary since atheists have begun a major campaign to vilify Christianity while extolling atheism. From the dishonest, claiming that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t motivated to oppose racism by his deep Christian beliefs, to the historically incorrect, it was atheists who led the charge against slavery in the US, atheists have tried to gain credit for all that has been done by people of faith.
Simultaneously atheists reject any association with the crimes of those who reject God. Atheists continually harp on the Inquisition, a mostly secular activity that killed a few thousand people over the course of centuries, while ignoring the mass murders committed by atheists such as Adolf Hitler(11 to 17 million), Joseph Stalin(20 to 30 million), Mao(49 to 78 million), and Pol Pot(1.7 to 2.5 million, 25% of the Cambodian population).
While Christians have acknowledged that the Inquisitions were wrong, Pope John Paul II even apologized for them, atheists have not felt motivated to examine their own assumptions much less apologize for the massive killing fields of atheistic regimes.
Because atheists are claiming to be the guiding light for humanities march to the future on all moral issues, ranging from abortion to marriage, it’s important to see what atheism is truly like. What is it in their faith that allows them to overlook mass murder? What other problems might lurk unannounced in an atheistic utopia?
At the most obvious level it’s clear that atheism is a horrible world view by looking at the regimes that practice it. Historically atheistic regimes are a relatively new phenomena the first sad glimmering having occurred during the French Revolution. The true advent of atheistic societies however came from the birth of Communism and Fascism. Yet even though atheistic regimes have a short history they have a consistent record of human rights abuses and mass murder.
There has been no atheistic regime that has not oppressed and murdered its own people on scales that make any Christian country, including Spain at the height of the Inquisition, look like perfection. Yet atheists claim that there is no correlation.
It’s not surprising that the same individuals who will claim that all of the historical documentation for Christianity is a sham will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the crimes of atheistic societies.
But are they right? Are the murders unrelated to the core beliefs of atheism? The answer is no. In fact a core belief of atheism is that everything is meaningless. That we’re just an accident of nature without meaning or purpose. In fact all we are is a bunch of chemical reactions and the concept of free will and responsibility are meaningless. Atheism does not have a heart of darkness because it has no heart. The central tenant of atheism is a negative, there is no God.
Without a God to give value to everyone, the inalienable rights that form the basis of American Democracy, there is no reason to not kill those who stand in the way of “progress”. True atheism cannot object to the horrors done in its name because it has no basis for objecting to anything. By its nature atheism says that anything goes since nothing matters.
If atheism is so intrinsically horrible why are many atheists reasonable people? The answer is that atheists have grown up in the sea of Christian society. They know in their hearts, both through God’s actions and as a result of social conditioning, that other people have value, that charity is good, and that life is about more than selfishness.
But if those same people had been raised in an atheistic society they would have no social support for their good beliefs. Sure God would have written His natural law on their hearts so that they’d know what was right and wrong but history has shown that for many people that is not enough if society is corrupt.
Atheistic societies are inevitably horrible because atheism has no basis for requiring unselfish good. Man has been intrinsically damaged by Adam’s sin. Not all people are good as the crime rates show. Christianity provides a clear rationale for why people should live good lives. In Christian societies many don’t live up to that goal but at least society as a whole has a basis for saying why charity, kindness, and mercy are good. Atheistic societies can only invoke utilitarianism and rank people by their value to whomever is in power.
That’s why it’s essential to reveal the empty core of atheism. Atheism cannot provide intellectual or spiritual support to people trying to do unselfish good. Left to run society atheists will inevitably produce societies that reflect the worst in man because atheism has no basis to call man to his best.
In the end the fundamental difference between atheism and Christianity in the world is that Christianity calls us to goodness but many Christians have let God down and done evil while atheism calls us to selfishness but many atheists have overcome their faiths failures and done good.
Democrats & Democracy
It’s funny how Democrats, here I’m talking about politicians and political activists not everyday folk who vote Democrat because they think Democrats help the poor, support of Democracy is so conditional. They have no problem with the political machine in Chicago that rigs elections and brings the dead out to vote but they got mighty upset about hanging chads in Florida.
Back in the day the Democrats were very hard on the democratically elected government of South Vietnam for not being as pure as the driven snow while seemingly finding no problem with the Communist dictatorship in North Vietnam.
Democrats get all worked up about dictators like Franco in Spain or Marcos in the Philippines but have nothing but kind words, or on a bad day excuses, for Mao in China or Stalin in the USSR. This is interesting given that Marcos fled the Philippines rather than use the military to slaughter his opponents and Franco set up a peaceful transition--don’t tell me he didn’t know that Juan Carlos would reinstate a democracy--while Mao killed more than 50,000,000 people and Stalin killed more than 20,000,000.
Democrats will often say that we should put the liberty and self determination of others ahead of the interests of America. While that sounds good it is clearly not true in all cases. Would the Democrats have allowed Nazi’s to take over Germany right after WWII if the Nazi’s had won elections? Well I hope not. Similarly was it wrong to force Democracy on the Japanese in order to try and restrain Japanese militarism?
If the only consequence of supporting a revolution in some country was that America would have to pay more for some commodity then I think we can all agree that America should be willing to pay that price in order to let people be free.
But what if the cost is a world war? Is it then worth it to support the revolution? It’s clearly going to require hard thought on a case by case basis to decide if from a purely selfish perspective America should support this or that revolution.
The good news is that in some cases we can forgo the hard thinking. The reason is that not all revolutions are good and not all Democracies are better. The liberals recognize this which is why when the Iranian people recently started to rise up against their theocratic dictators the Democrats looked the other way and were, generally, silent. Of course in that case their reasoning is highly suspect. But while there are certainly cases of good revolutions, the Philippines and Spain are examples where everyone won, there are situations where revolutions are clearly bad, starting with the famous French one.
Today Democrats are all excited about the possible revolution in Egypt. They don’t seem to mind that the revolutionaries are led by a bunch of anti-American religious fanatics who think terrorism is a good thing and are itching for a war against Israel.
But to those who know history this is no surprise. Way back when when Obama I, Jimmy Carter, was president Democrats did the same little dance about the Shah of Iran. They strongly supported the folks who rose up against the Shah claiming to bring Democracy to Iran. While more rational voices pointed out that the Shah was our ally and he wasn’t really all that bad of a dictator, he didn’t kill millions like Mao for example, and asked would the revolution really help anyone the Democrats were showing how enthused they were about Democracy! Too bad they lost that feeling when the Iranian people tried to get rid of the theocrats that Carter was so fond of.
Sadly the Iranians exchanged a moderate dictator for a fanatical religious dictatorship far worse than even the liberals misrepresentation of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. While the Shah wasn’t a saint he was far less repressive, and violent, than the current gang of thugs running Iran. He never denied that the Holocaust occurred nor did he help kill Americans by providing military training and aid to terrorists fighting Americans like the current “Democratic” regime in Iran does.
While dictators are never a good thing Democrats should listen to the sage advice of their hero Uncle Joe Stalin who said “The better is the enemy of the good enough.” Not all revolutionaries proclaiming their love of Democracy mean it and not all revolutionary movements are the right thing at the right time.
If overthrowing Mubarak in Egypt would bring about a true democracy that was tolerant of religious minorities then one could argue that even if the new government wasn’t friendly with the US it would be a price we have a moral obligation to pay. But why should we suspect that one group of Islamic fundamentalists, the Muslim Brotherhood, will be different than another, the Khomeini crew in Iran? Islam hasn’t changed since the 1980’s, at least not in the Middle East, so it would seem prudent to question the true motives of Islamic fundamentalists.
But even if the new Egyptian government wouldn’t oppress its own people there’s the problem of world war to ponder. Mubarak has taken a pragmatic approach to Israel. He’s not going to be starting any major wars. But Iran is consistently backing fanatics set on exterminating the Jewish people. If Egypt swings to the Iranian side, and Islamic fanatics do tend to make common cause when it comes to Israel, we could easily see a major war, a war in which at least one side has nuclear weapons.
Is the chance of a nuclear war between Israel and Iran so trivial that we should ignore it when deciding who to support in Egypt? The answer isn’t obvious and it requires a lot of thought, thought that Democrats aren’t applying at the present time. Just like back in 1979 Democrats are standing up for revolution without really looking at the consequences.
It appears that so long as the country is an ally of the US Democrats will support regime change with no problem. But if the country is our enemy, the USSR in the old days and Iran now, Democrats are much more hesitant to approve a change of guard. A cynical person might conclude the the Democrats support for Democracy is more of an extension of their political battles with Conservatives than a true love of liberty.
Clearly America has a moral obligation to try and help countries like Egypt transition to true Democracies. But Democrats knee jerk reaction to support mobs in the street probably stems more from nostalgia for the “Days of Rage” in the 1960’s than a well thought out assessment of the consequences of giving Mubarak the boot.
Back in the day the Democrats were very hard on the democratically elected government of South Vietnam for not being as pure as the driven snow while seemingly finding no problem with the Communist dictatorship in North Vietnam.
Democrats get all worked up about dictators like Franco in Spain or Marcos in the Philippines but have nothing but kind words, or on a bad day excuses, for Mao in China or Stalin in the USSR. This is interesting given that Marcos fled the Philippines rather than use the military to slaughter his opponents and Franco set up a peaceful transition--don’t tell me he didn’t know that Juan Carlos would reinstate a democracy--while Mao killed more than 50,000,000 people and Stalin killed more than 20,000,000.
Democrats will often say that we should put the liberty and self determination of others ahead of the interests of America. While that sounds good it is clearly not true in all cases. Would the Democrats have allowed Nazi’s to take over Germany right after WWII if the Nazi’s had won elections? Well I hope not. Similarly was it wrong to force Democracy on the Japanese in order to try and restrain Japanese militarism?
If the only consequence of supporting a revolution in some country was that America would have to pay more for some commodity then I think we can all agree that America should be willing to pay that price in order to let people be free.
But what if the cost is a world war? Is it then worth it to support the revolution? It’s clearly going to require hard thought on a case by case basis to decide if from a purely selfish perspective America should support this or that revolution.
The good news is that in some cases we can forgo the hard thinking. The reason is that not all revolutions are good and not all Democracies are better. The liberals recognize this which is why when the Iranian people recently started to rise up against their theocratic dictators the Democrats looked the other way and were, generally, silent. Of course in that case their reasoning is highly suspect. But while there are certainly cases of good revolutions, the Philippines and Spain are examples where everyone won, there are situations where revolutions are clearly bad, starting with the famous French one.
Today Democrats are all excited about the possible revolution in Egypt. They don’t seem to mind that the revolutionaries are led by a bunch of anti-American religious fanatics who think terrorism is a good thing and are itching for a war against Israel.
But to those who know history this is no surprise. Way back when when Obama I, Jimmy Carter, was president Democrats did the same little dance about the Shah of Iran. They strongly supported the folks who rose up against the Shah claiming to bring Democracy to Iran. While more rational voices pointed out that the Shah was our ally and he wasn’t really all that bad of a dictator, he didn’t kill millions like Mao for example, and asked would the revolution really help anyone the Democrats were showing how enthused they were about Democracy! Too bad they lost that feeling when the Iranian people tried to get rid of the theocrats that Carter was so fond of.
Sadly the Iranians exchanged a moderate dictator for a fanatical religious dictatorship far worse than even the liberals misrepresentation of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. While the Shah wasn’t a saint he was far less repressive, and violent, than the current gang of thugs running Iran. He never denied that the Holocaust occurred nor did he help kill Americans by providing military training and aid to terrorists fighting Americans like the current “Democratic” regime in Iran does.
While dictators are never a good thing Democrats should listen to the sage advice of their hero Uncle Joe Stalin who said “The better is the enemy of the good enough.” Not all revolutionaries proclaiming their love of Democracy mean it and not all revolutionary movements are the right thing at the right time.
If overthrowing Mubarak in Egypt would bring about a true democracy that was tolerant of religious minorities then one could argue that even if the new government wasn’t friendly with the US it would be a price we have a moral obligation to pay. But why should we suspect that one group of Islamic fundamentalists, the Muslim Brotherhood, will be different than another, the Khomeini crew in Iran? Islam hasn’t changed since the 1980’s, at least not in the Middle East, so it would seem prudent to question the true motives of Islamic fundamentalists.
But even if the new Egyptian government wouldn’t oppress its own people there’s the problem of world war to ponder. Mubarak has taken a pragmatic approach to Israel. He’s not going to be starting any major wars. But Iran is consistently backing fanatics set on exterminating the Jewish people. If Egypt swings to the Iranian side, and Islamic fanatics do tend to make common cause when it comes to Israel, we could easily see a major war, a war in which at least one side has nuclear weapons.
Is the chance of a nuclear war between Israel and Iran so trivial that we should ignore it when deciding who to support in Egypt? The answer isn’t obvious and it requires a lot of thought, thought that Democrats aren’t applying at the present time. Just like back in 1979 Democrats are standing up for revolution without really looking at the consequences.
It appears that so long as the country is an ally of the US Democrats will support regime change with no problem. But if the country is our enemy, the USSR in the old days and Iran now, Democrats are much more hesitant to approve a change of guard. A cynical person might conclude the the Democrats support for Democracy is more of an extension of their political battles with Conservatives than a true love of liberty.
Clearly America has a moral obligation to try and help countries like Egypt transition to true Democracies. But Democrats knee jerk reaction to support mobs in the street probably stems more from nostalgia for the “Days of Rage” in the 1960’s than a well thought out assessment of the consequences of giving Mubarak the boot.
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