Monthly Archives: October 2010

News

Rocket scientist Republican candidate pulls ahead in deep blue district

4 Comments

UPDATE: She’s now up 39 to 37 according to a new poll.

Amazing story from the moderately left-wing Politico. (H/T The Other McCain)

Excerpt:

Add Rep. Raul Grijalva to the growing list of Democratic worries this election season.
Party operatives say there’s increasing concern that the Arizona Democrat’s reelection bid could turn into a “sleeper” race for Republicans after Grijalva — responding to enactment of a tough new immigration law — called for an economic boycott of his own state amid a housing crisis and record unemployment.

Four Democratic sources from different parts of the country said that there is new attention to a race that was long considered in the bag.

And a recent poll, obtained by POLITICO, found that Grijalva and Republican challenger Ruth McClung, a real-life rocket scientist, were in a dead heat, even though Washington prognosticators have declared the deep-blue seat safely Democratic.

As they work to buttress their majority against a coming Republican storm, Democrats can ill afford to spend time or resources defending incumbents in seats where they should have a clear advantage. But the Grijalva seat potentially being in play is a sign of the increasingly expanding Republican playing field for the midterm elections. . . .

The bolding is from Robert Stacy McCain’s post.

McCain writes:

A couple weeks ago, when I first blogged about Ruth McClung’s campaign in AZ-7, it was basically as favor to an Arizona friend. Here was an excellent candidate running a g0od grassroots campaign and, as always, I love a scrappy underdog. Grijalva’s stupidity in calling for a boycott of his own state was so remarkable as to deserve another mention.

There was a chance for an against-the-odds upset but, honestly, I never expected to see a poll three weeks before Election Day showing a dead heat in AZ-7. Look at the data: Grijalva’s negatives are 47% against a positive of 39%, while Grijalva’s “deserves re-election” number is a mere 36% against 50% for “give new person a chance.” This is an incumbent in serious trouble.

To have these kind of results, when McClung reported a mere $16,000 cash on hand in early August — incredible!

Here’s her latest ad:

In related news, ECM sent me this Wall Street Journal article.

Excerpt:

Republican challengers are suddenly threatening once-safe Democrats in New England and the Northwest, expanding the terrain for potential GOP gains and raising the party’s hopes for a significant victory in next month’s elections.

Republican advances in traditionally Democratic states, including Connecticut, Oregon and Washington, may not translate into a wave of GOP victories. But they have rattled local campaigns and forced the Democrats to shift attention and money to races they didn’t expect to be defending.

[…]Democrats are buying advertising in places they hadn’t previously reserved it, a strong indication the battlefield is expanding. That includes New England, which hasn’t a single Republican House member. A new ad by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee began airing this week in the Massachusetts district covering Cape Cod, where Democratic Rep. Bill Delahunt is retiring and ex-police sergeant Jeff Perry is posting a strong GOP challenge.

In Connecticut, polls published this week show Democratic Reps. Chris Murphy and Jim Himes in dead heats with their GOP rivals. The non-partisan Cook Political Report on Friday moved Mr. Murphy’s race into a more competitive category, from a “likely” win to “lean” Democratic.

The November elections are looking very bad for the Democrats.

Commentary

Europe’s conflict with conscience protections

5 Comments

From Public Discourse. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

This Thursday the Council of Europe, a transnational body created in 1949 to promote democracy and human rights, will vote on a resolution and series of recommendations on conscience protection. Americans, who faced similar issues during the debate over the health care overhaul, will find much of interest in the resolution. It would create guidelines that encourage member states to force doctors to perform abortions in some circumstances and to make referrals for them in every circumstance. Drafted by the pro-abortion British parliamentarian Christine McCafferty, it is an all-out assault on conscience and community.

The central feature of the resolution is a call for enforcement against conscientious objectors who refuse to perform or make referrals for abortion. The report encourages member states to “establish effective complaint mechanisms that can address abuses of the right to conscientious objection and provide women with an effective and timely remedy.” While many European countries are woefully lacking in conscience protection, authorities have sometimes hesitated to enforce these unjust laws. This provision seeks to end that. As the European Center for Law and Justice says in its report on the proposed law, “the ‘conscience clause’ is nothing other than an official immunity from liability for refusing to participate in abortion.” While the law fails to specify how this unjust law will be enforced, doctors can be forgiven for worrying that its implementation will be far from sensitive and sympathetic.

Among the report’s many specific recommendations, the most sinister sounding may be a call for the creation of national registries of conscientious objectors in order to further what the report describes as “oversight and monitoring mechanisms.” In Norway, doctors are already required to notify hospitals of their conscientious objector status, and the hospitals in turn are required to report the names of conscientious objectors to state authorities. The goal of these mechanisms seems to be to enable a highly inappropriate and political scrutiny of doctors who have deeply held objections to procedures like abortion and euthanasia.

The new guideline further restricts conscience by requiring that doctors give timely notice of their conscientious objections. But what happens if a doctor’s view on conscience changes? What if he is serving as the sole medical provider in an under-served area? Will he be required to give up his job?

There is already discrimination against conscientious objectors in Britain, where the National Health Service has urged hospitals to ask job applicants whether or not they are conscientious objectors and to refuse to hire conscientious objectors unless there is an already present physician willing to perform acts like abortion. One’s conscientious objector status becomes a matter of administrative record that must be consulted at every step in one’s employment, from hiring, to promotion, to professional security. Conscientious objectors become last hired, first fired.

This will make it harder for Christians to have an influence where it matters.

Commentary

Does reading science fiction predispose people to atheism?

119 Comments

This is an interesting idea that ECM thought of and shared with me in our conversations. I went around the office and tested some of the engineers who were atheists and found that ECM was 100% correct. But let me explain ECM’s thesis in brief.

ECM thinks that science fiction (made-up fantasy stuff) that people read when they are younger causes them to believe that the religion is anti-science and that the progress of science always disproves religion. The stories they read colors their views of science and religion for life, before they ever get to assessing evidence. And that’s why when we produce evidence for them in debates, they will believe in speculations rather than go where the evidence leads. So they believe that maybe unobservable aliens caused the origin of life, and that maybe the untestable multiverse theory explains the fine-tuning of cosmological constants, and that maybe this universe has existed eternally despite the well-supported Big Bang theory which shows that the universe began to exist. Maybe, maybe, maybe. They seem to think that untestable speculations are “good enough” to refute observational evidence – and maybe it’s because of all the science fiction that they’ve read.

Here’s an article in the American Spectator that talks a bit about it. (H/T Denyse O’Leary via ECM)

Excerpt:

A magazine I frequently write for (not this one) recently published a review of a book of essays advocating atheism. The reviewer pointed out with some enthusiasm that a large number of the contributors were science-fiction writers.

This left me somewhat nonplussed. I publish a good deal of science fiction myself, I have also read quite a lot of it, and I am quite unable to see why writing it should be held to particularly qualify anyone to answer the question of whether or not there is a God.

[…]Historically the contribution of the Catholic Church to astronomy was massive and unequalled. Without it astronomy might very well never have grown out of astrology at all. Cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, Rome and elsewhere were designed in the 17th and 18th centuries to function as solar observatories. Kepler was assisted by a number of Jesuit astronomers, including Father Paul Guldin and Father Zucchi, and by Giovanni Cassini, who had studied under Jesuits. Cassini and Jesuit colleagues were eventually able to confirm Kepler’s theory on the Earth having an elliptical orbit. J.L. Heilbron of the University of California has written:

The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.

Science fiction is, by definition, fiction, that is, it deals with things which are the product of a writer’s imagination and are not literally true. In any event, what is and what is not science fiction is hard to define. Simply to say it is about science is meaningless, and while some science-fiction writers are qualified scientists, many are not. Probably even fewer are trained theologians.

Science fiction makes the mysteries of the universe seem easy to an atheist. Everything can be easily explained with fictional future discoveries. Their speculations about aliens, global warming and eternal universes are believed without evidence because atheists want and need to believe in those speculations. In the world of science fiction, the fictional characters can be “moral” and “intelligent” without having to bring God or the evidence for God into the picture. That’s very attractive to an atheist who wants the feeling of being intelligent and moral without having to weight actual scientific evidence or ground their moral values and behavior rationally. The science fiction myths are what atheists want to believe. It’s a placebo at the worldview level. They don’t want cosmic microwave background radiation – they want warp drives. They don’t want chastity – they want holodecks.

Why do people become atheists?

My theory is mainly that atheists adopt atheism because they want pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, without any restraints or guilt. They want to believe that sex without commitment has no consequences, especially a consequence like God judging them for it. Another contributing factor may be that atheists want to be thought of as smart by “the right people” – to sort of blindly accept whatever the “smart people” accept without really searching out reasons or dissenting views. They do this so that they are able to look down at some other group of people so they can feel better about themselves and be part of the right group – without actually having to weigh the evidence on both sides. And lastly, atheism may also be caused by weak fathers or abandoning fathers. But I think that ECM’s science fiction theory has merit, as well. I think that all four of these factors help to explain why atheists believe in a discredited worldview in the teeth of scientific progress.

I wonder if my readers would take some time out to investigate whether their atheist friends have been influenced by reading science fiction and whether they still read it. We really need to get to the bottom of why atheists are so hostile to science, morality, and reason. If we can also find out why they are so desperate to take on the views of people around them because of peer pressure, without caring to hear both sides of questions (e.g. – global warming), that would also be interesting.

Science fiction

Not science fiction