All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

Whose policies are responsible for the Islamic State terrorist attack against children?

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Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

First, the news story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Salman Abedi, 22, who was reportedly known to the security services, is thought to have returned from Libya as recently as this week.

Devout Muslim:

He had become radicalised recently – it is not entirely clear when – and had worshipped at a local mosque that has, in the past, been accused of fund-raising for jihadists.

Abedi’s older brother Ismail had been a tutor at Didsbury mosque’s Koran school. The imam last night said that Salman Abedi, who wore Islamic dress, had shown him “the face of hate” when he gave a talk warning on the dangers of so-called Islamic State.

A family friend described him as “very religious”.

Parents were Islamic refugees:

Born in 1994, the second youngest of four children, Abedi’s parents were Libyan refugees who fled to the UK to escape Gaddafi.

Well educated:

Abedi went to school locally and then on to Salford University in 2014 where he studied business management before dropping out.

He lived in a “red-brick terrace” home with his parents. No poverty to speak of.

Wall Street Journal says:

Islamic State on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest in the U.K. since 2005.

[…]In a statement published online, Islamic State said the attack was revenge for “aggression toward Muslim countries” and identified the assailant as a “soldier of the caliphate.”

The root problem is, of course, the open borders immigration policies enacted by the Labour Party of the UK. It was their attempt to tilt the electorate away from the free enterprise system, towards government dependency. And it worked. Of course, if a few UK citizens have to die for the far left Labour Party to win election after election… so be it, right?

Sober-minded Christian writer David French commented on this story at National Review:

While it’s impossible to predict any given terror attack, there are two laws of terrorism that work together to guarantee that attacks will occur, and they’ll occur with increasing frequency. First, when terrorists are granted safe havens to plan, train, equip, and inspire terror attacks, then they will strike, and they’ll keep striking not just until the safe havens are destroyed but also until the cells and affiliates they’ve established outside their havens are rooted out. Second, when you import immigrants at any real scale from jihadist regions, then you will import the cultural, religious, and political views that incubate jihad. Jihadist ideas flow not from soil but from people, and when you import people you import their ideas.

Let’s look at how these two ideas have worked together in both Europe and America. The map below (from AFP) charts significant terror attacks in Europe (including Turkey). You’ll note a significant increase in activity since 2014, since ISIS stampeded across Syria and into Turkey and established a terrorist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. There existed a safe haven and a population to inspire back in Europe. The result was entirely predictable:

This is the predicable result he mentions:

Map of terrorist attacks in EuropeMap of terrorist attacks in Europe

And this is significant:

What about the United States? A similar phenomenon was in play. This Heritage Foundation timeline of terror attacks and plots documents a total of 95 incidents since 9/11. The numbers are revealing. After the implementation of the (now) much-derided Bush strategy, there were a grand total of 27 terror attacks and plots — almost all of them foiled.

After the end of the Bush administration, the numbers skyrocketed, with 68 plots or attacks recorded since. A number of them, including the Fort Hood shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino mass murder, and the Orlando nightclub massacre, have been terrifying successful. Indeed, there have been more domestic terror plots and attacks since the rise of ISIS in the summer of 2014 than there were in the entirety of the Bush administration after 9/11. And make no mistake, jihadist terrorists are disproportionately immigrants and children of immigrants.

What did Bush do that was so successful? He not only pressed military offensives in the heart of the Middle East, he fundamentally changed the American approach to immigration and implemented a number of temporary measures that, for example, dramatically decreased refugee admissions and implemented country-specific protective measures that have since been discontinued.

You’ll recall that Islamic State was caused by Barack Obama’s decision to retreat from Iraq. The refugee crisis worsened because of his other failed interventions in Libya and Syria. This is what happens when people are carried away by a happy-sounding “anti-war” message. Wiser voters thought about what would happen if we pulled out of Iraq, and voted against Obama. The wiser voters lost.

Speaking of Democrats, I wonder if Barack Obama and his Democrat supporters will call this terrorist attack “workplace violence”, like he did with the Fort Hood terrorist attack by Major Nidal Hassan? I’ve talked to a few Democrats about immigration from countries with a significant population of radicalized Muslims, and they are all in favor of increased immigration from those countries. Democrats are more scared of pro-marriage, pro-life Christians than of Islamic terrorists. After all, it’s not them dying in these attacks. Give them their gay marriage and their free birth control.

But I’m also noticing a lot of Christians trying to appear generous and compassionate lately, by embracing the same open borders policies as the progressives. They’re claiming generosity and compassion in public by spending other people’s money and risking other people’s lives. This is especially popular among Christians in academia, seeking to curry favor with their secular colleagues. For many Christian leftists like Russell Moore, embracing open borders immigration policy, is a quick way to avoid charges of lacking compassion. Except nobody ever asks these pious Christians who has compassion for the victims of their policies.

Finally, national security expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes that the current Republican administration’s efforts to vet incoming immigrants from Muslim countries has been opposed by Democrats in the judiciary, and far-left civil rights groups. Republicans are trying to prevent terrorist attacks like this at home, but they are opposed at every turn by naive Democrat voters who are more interested in feeling good and looking good than in protecting the victims of terrorist attacks. You can’t have it both ways when it comes to national security.

News

Republican legislators getting things done for social conservatives in Texas

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott
Texas Governor Greg Abbott

Texas is the most economically successful state in the union, but that’s not the only thing special about Texas. Texas governor Greg Abbott is a strong promoter of the free enterprise system. But he is also serious about defending Judeo-Christian values. Right now, he is my pick to be the next Republican nominee for President, even more than my previous favorite, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. Abbott’s doing a lot for social conservatives, as well as fiscal conservatives.

This Texas Tribune story shows what achievements he will be able to run on in a Republican primary:

Gov. Greg Abbott has signed into law legislation shielding pastors’ sermons from government subpoena power.

Senate Bill 24 stemmed from the 2014 battle over Houston’s anti-discrimination ordinance, when the city subpoenaed sermons of five pastors who opposed it. The legislation was a priority of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who joined Abbott on Sunday for a bill-signing ceremony at the churches of one of those pastors.

[…]Authored by state Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, SB 24 says a government cannot “compel the production or disclosure of a written copy or audio or video recording of a sermon delivered by a religious leader during religious worship … or compel the religious leader to testify regarding the sermon.” It went into effect immediately when it was formally signed by Abbott on Friday in Austin.

You’ll remember that this law became necessary when Houston’s gay Democrat mayor decided to subpoena the sermons of Christian pastors to try to intimidate them into not talking about moral issues.

There’s another story from the Daily Signal about another bill that is headed to Governor Abbott’s desk:

The Texas Senate early Monday passed a bill to allow faith-based adoption and foster care providers to operate based on their religious beliefs.

By a final vote of 21-10, state senators agreed with their counterparts in the Texas House of Representatives that society should continue to make room for adoption and foster care services associated with a religious tradition, whether Christian or Muslim.

Only one Democrat joined the Senate’s 20 Republicans in voting for the bill. The remaining 10 voted against it.

In an interview Monday with The Daily Signal, state Rep. James Frank, a Republican who co-wrote the legislation, predicted that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott would sign it.

“I am obviously very excited about it passing the Senate, and I fully expect … that Governor Abbott will sign it and it will be law,” Frank said, “and we’ll have, I hope, more people serving and free to serve children in the state of Texas.”

Not sure why Democrats would vote against a bill like this, but I notice a lot of Democrats are getting busted for underage sex and underage sexting lately. We already knew how Democrats felt about no-fault divorce and adultery: they’re all for it! Any sort of selfishness that adults can engage in is more important than providing kids with a mom and a dad. Democrats oppose prioritizing opposite sex couples, because it might offend gay couples or single parents.

Polemics

Why is the universe so big, and why is so much of it hostile to life?

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

Review: In case you need a refresher on the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments, as presented by a professor of particle physics at Stanford University, then click this link and watch the lecture.

If you already know about the standard arguments for theism from cosmology, then take a look at this post on Uncommon Descent.

Summary:

In my previous post, I highlighted three common atheistic objections to to the cosmological fine-tuning argument. In that post, I made no attempt to answer these objections. My aim was simply to show that the objections were weak and inconclusive.

Let’s go back to the original three objections:

1. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does it have to be so BIG, and why is it nearly everywhere hostile to life? Why are there so many stars, and why are so few orbited by life-bearing planets? (Let’s call this the size problem.)

2. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does it have to be so OLD, and why was it devoid of life throughout most of its history? For instance, why did life on Earth only appear after 70% of the cosmos’s 13.7-billion-year history had already elapsed? And Why did human beings (genus Homo) only appear after 99.98% of the cosmos’s 13.7-billion-year history had already elapsed? (Let’s call this the age problem.)

3. If the universe was designed to support life, then why does Nature have to be so CRUEL? Why did so many animals have to die – and why did so many species of animals have to go extinct (99% is the commonly quoted figure), in order to generate the world as we see it today? What a waste! And what about predation, parasitism, and animals that engage in practices such as serial murder and infant cannibalism? (Let’s call this the death and suffering problem.)

Here’s an excerpt for the size argument:

(a) The main reason why the universe is as big as it currently is that in the first place, the universe had to contain sufficient matter to form galaxies and stars, without which life would not have appeared; and in the second place, the density of matter in the cosmos is incredibly fine-tuned, due to the fine-tuning of gravity. To appreciate this point, let’s go back to the earliest time in the history of the cosmos that we can meaningfully talk about: the Planck time, when the universe was 10^-43 seconds old. If the density of matter at the Planck time had differed from the critical density by as little as one part in 10^60, the universe would have either exploded so rapidly that galaxies wouldn’t have formed, or collapsed so quickly that life would never have appeared. In practical terms: if our universe, which contains 10^80 protons and neutrons, had even one more grain of sand in it – or one grain less – we wouldn’t be here.

If you mess with the size of the universe, you screw up the mass density fine-tuning. We need that to have a universe that expands at the right speed in order for the matter to clump together to form galaxies, stars and planets. Too fast, and you get no clumping. Too slow, and the whole thing re-collapses into a hot fireball. You need stars and planets to have a place to form life – a place with liquid water at the surface, and more.

And an excerpt for the age argument:

(a) One reason why we need an old universe is that billions of years were required for Population I stars (such as our sun) to evolve. These stars are more likely to harbor planets such as our Earth, because they contain lots of “metals” (astronomer-speak for elements heavier than helium), produced by the supernovae of the previous generation of Population II stars. According to currently accepted models of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, this whole process was absolutely vital, because the Big Bang doesn’t make enough “metals”, including those necessary for life: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and so on.

Basically, you need heavy elements to make stars that burn slow and steady, as well as to make PEOPLE! And heavy elements have to be built up slowly through several iterations of the stellar lifecycle, including the right kinds of stellar death: supernovae.

Read the rest! These arguments come up all the time in debates with village atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. It’s a smokescreen they put up, but you’ve got to be able to answer it using the scientific evidence we have today. They always want to dismiss God with their personal preferences about what God should or should not do. But the real issue is the design of the cosmological constants that allow life to anywhere. That’s the part that’s designed. And that’s not a matter of personal preference, it’s a matter of mathematics and experimental science.