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Evidence that Laken Riley was a pretty serious Christian

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I remember having a debate at the SBC church I was attending, with someone from Russell Moore’s ERLC. The ERLC is a group that pretends to be religious and conservative, but they frequently align with Democrats. The ERLC person was explaining to me why they are in favor of open borders. And I tried to explain to him how open borders costs ordinary Christians money and puts them at risk.

So, with that in mind, here is an interesting article from Christian Post, about the young woman who was recently murdered by an illegal immigrant when she resisted his attempts to rape her.

First, here is the news about the trial:

The mother of Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student murdered by an illegal immigrant earlier this year, wept as she begged the judge to sentence the killer to life in prison, asking that he not receive mercy when he showed none to her daughter or the family he destroyed.

Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison without parole for Riley’s murder Wednesday.

Haggard sentenced Ibarra to the maximum possible punishments for multiple charges, including kidnapping, aggravated assault with intent to rape, obstruction of a 911 call, tampering with evidence and a peeping tom charge. The judge ordered that the defendant serve each sentence consecutively, according to CNN, condemning Ibarra to two life sentences and 27 years in prison.

Now, I already wrote about this crime, and about the role that the Department of Homeland Security had in allowing it to happen.

But I have to write about it again, because of the facts that came out about the victim, at the sentencing:

In a victim statement read before the court Wednesday, Allyson Phillips called her daughter a “child of God” who demonstrated her love for the Lord through missionary work and caring for the elderly.

Missionary work and caring for the elderly?

This girl was not out doing risky things, like partying with drunk bad boys, she was just out for a JOG on a university campus:

Riley, a student at Augusta University College of Nursing, never returned home after she left that morning to go jogging around the University of Georgia campus.

She wrote a letter to her future husband, which is a pretty good sign that she was thinking about an early marriage:

John Phillips, Riley’s stepfather, spoke before Ibarra’s sentencing on Wednesday, referring to Riley as a “shining beacon of light in the life of everyone that knew her.” The stepfather read one of Riley’s last journal entries, in which the young woman wrote a letter to her future husband.

“‘I pray that you know that it is with my full faith and trust in God that I know this relationship has been handcrafted by Him,’” Phillips read. “I pray that we continue to glorify the Lord, prioritize Him in every aspect of our lives, and raise our future family to be God-fearing Christians as well.’”

I just thought that it was important to highlight this so that Christians understand how to process the political positions of people like David French, Russell Moore, Matt Chandler, etc. Frankly I think that even Christians who are silent about border security are also to blame. I think that Christian leaders ought to speak up about the policies and past actions of the political candidates, so that everyone understands what is at stake.

We really need to have Christian leaders who understand policy. And I don’t mean only abortion. I mean fiscal policy, social policy and foreign policy. During elections, it’s not the time to lay low, and try to get along with everyone. It’s the time to speak up for people who are going to be hurt by bad policy. Not just the unborn ones, the born ones, too.

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Luke Barnes on the fine-tuning of the strong force and fine structure constant

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By now, anyone who has had discussions about scientific evidence for the existence of God knows about the fine-tuning argument. In a nutshell, if the fundamental constants and quantities given in the Big Bang were even slightly other than they are, then the universe itself would not be hospitable for complex, embodied intelligent life.

Here is an article from The New Atlantis written by Australian cosmologist Luke Barnes.

Excerpt:

Today, our deepest understanding of the laws of nature is summarized in a set of equations. Using these equations, we can make very precise calculations of the most elementary physical phenomena, calculations that are confirmed by experimental evidence. But to make these predictions, we have to plug in some numbers that cannot themselves be calculated but are derived from measurements of some of the most basic features of the physical universe. These numbers specify such crucial quantities as the masses of fundamental particles and the strengths of their mutual interactions. After extensive experiments under all manner of conditions, physicists have found that these numbers appear not to change in different times and places, so they are called the fundamental constants of nature.

[…]A universe that has just small tweaks in the fundamental constants might not have any of the chemical bonds that give us molecules, so say farewell to DNA, and also to rocks, water, and planets. Other tweaks could make the formation of stars or even atoms impossible. And with some values for the physical constants, the universe would have flickered out of existence in a fraction of a second. That the constants are all arranged in what is, mathematically speaking, the very improbable combination that makes our grand, complex, life-bearing universe possible is what physicists mean when they talk about the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life.

Let’s look at an example – the strong force. Not only must the strong force be fine-tuned so we have both hydrogen and helium, but the ratio of the strong force must also be fine-tuned with the fine structure constant.

Barnes writes:

The strong nuclear force, for example, is the glue that holds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei of atoms. If, in a hypothetical universe, it is too weak, then nuclei are not stable and the periodic table disappears again. If it is too strong, then the intense heat of the early universe could convert all hydrogen into helium — meaning that there could be no water, and that 99.97 percent of the 24 million carbon compounds we have discovered would be impossible, too. And, as the chart to the right shows, the forces, like the masses, must be in the right balance. If the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for the attraction and repulsion of charged particles, is too strong or too weak compared to the strong nuclear force, anything from stars to chemical compounds would be impossible.

Here’s the chart he’s referencing:

Fine-tuning of the strong nuclear force and the fine structure constant
Fine-tuning of the strong nuclear force and the fine structure constant

As you can see from the chart, most of the values that the constants could take would make complex, embodied intelligent life impossible.

We need carbon (carbon-based life) because they form the basis of the components of life chemistry, e.g. proteins, sugars, etc. We need hydrogen for water. We need chemical reactions for obvious reasons. We need the light from the stars to support plant and animal life on the surface of a planet. And so on. In almost every case where you change the values of these constants and quantities and ratios from what they are, you will end up with a universe that does not support life. Not just life as we know it, but life of any conceivable kind under these laws of physics. And we don’t have any alternative laws of physics in this universe.

By the way, just to show you how mainstream these examples of fine-tuning are, I thought I would link to a source that you’re all going to be familiar with: The New Scientist.

The fine-tuning of the force of gravity

So here is an article from the New Scientist about a different constant that also has to be fine-tuned for life: the force of gravity.

Excerpt:

The feebleness of gravity is something we should be grateful for. If it were a tiny bit stronger, none of us would be here to scoff at its puny nature.

The moment of the universe‘s birth created both matter and an expanding space-time in which this matter could exist. While gravity pulled the matter together, the expansion of space drew particles of matter apart – and the further apart they drifted, the weaker their mutual attraction became.

It turns out that the struggle between these two was balanced on a knife-edge. If the expansion of space had overwhelmed the pull of gravity in the newborn universe, stars, galaxies and humans would never have been able to form. If, on the other hand, gravity had been much stronger, stars and galaxies might have formed, but they would have quickly collapsed in on themselves and each other. What’s more, the gravitational distortion of space-time would have folded up the universe in a big crunch. Our cosmic history could have been over by now.

Only the middle ground, where the expansion and the gravitational strength balance to within 1 part in 1015 at 1 second after the big bang, allows life to form.

Notice how the article also mentioned “the universe’s birth”, which is part of mainstream science.

When I’m writing to you about things like the origin of the universe, or the cosmic fine-tuning, I’m not talking to you about things that pastors found in the Bible. These discoveries are known and accepted by mainstream scientists. It’s amazing that people are constructing their worldviews without having to account for the birth of the universe and this cosmic fine-tuning. We all, as rational individuals, have to bound our view of the universe with the findings of science. Right now, those findings support the existence of a Creator and a Designer. So why am I seeing so many atheists who are just plain ignorant about these facts? Maybe we should tell them about this evidence. Maybe we should ask them why they don’t account for scientific evidence when forming their beliefs.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

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Can you trust the Department of Homeland Security to secure the homeland?

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Anyone who has been following me on Twitter will know that I have been watching the new president of Argentina Javier Milei closely, and getting more and more excited by his actions to cut wasteful spending and slim down government. I’ve been especially excited to see that DONALD TRUMP has met with him at Mar-A-Lago. Maybe we’ll see some of that awesome government waste cutting here?

Here’s a story from Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire (full text) that talks about another big government department that doesn’t do good work for taxpayers.

He has two cases that show the same problem with secular leftists in government putting virtue signaling above duty.

First one:

Three years ago, a 25-year-old Honduran national named Medina Ulloa was stopped by border patrol agents in Texas. He gave them a fake name and lied about being a juvenile. But instead of kicking him out of the country, authorities gave him a “notice to appear” for a court date that everyone knew he’d never actually attend. Then Ulloa was flown to Jacksonville, Florida, where he was taken in by a 46-year-old father of four. Soon afterwards, the immigrant beat the man to death inside his own home.

[…]How did Medina Ulloa get to Jacksonville? Did he buy a ticket himself, even though he had no money?

[…]In this case, the victim’s daughter claimed that Ulloa had indeed arrived on one of these [Biden-Harris administration] resettlement flights. And she would have reason to know that. Again, her father had allowed this guy into his home, and presumably they talked about how he had arrived in Jacksonville in the first place.

You might have heard about these “resettlement flights”. This is where the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security uses taxpayer dollars – dollars that will be put on the $36 trillion debt and paid back by your children – to flying illegal immigrants around the country.

Now here’s the second story from Matt Walsh’s article:

As you may have heard, the trial of 26-year-old Venezuelan illegal alien Jose Ibarra got underway this week in Athens, Georgia. Ibarra is accused of murdering Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, near a jogging trail at the University of Georgia back in February. Prosecutors say Ibarra put on a hoodie-style jacket, a black hat, and black disposable gloves, before going off to “hunt for females” on the university’s campus.

What we didn’t know until yesterday is how exactly Ibarra got to Georgia in the first place. The government certainly didn’t bother to tell us. But during the trial yesterday, we learned the answer to that question. According to Ibarra’s roommate, just like Medina Ulloa, he received a taxpayer-funded resettlement flight. In the case of Ibarra, the flight took him from New York City to Georgia.

In other words, the Biden-Harris administration didn’t just enable the murder of Laken Riley with their lax border policies, they also facilitated the murder.

So, what should we do with the secular leftist activists in the Biden-Harris Department of Homeland Security? We pay their salaries. But are we getting good value for the money we pay them? Why do they think that it is OK to use the money we pay them to import more Democrat voters into the country, and even criminals who commit violence against the very people who PAY THEIR SALARIES with our taxes?

Remember – every government worker only gets money by taking that money from real workers in the productive private sector. Many of these public sector workers have useless non-STEM degrees that they got by running up student loan debt. Many of them have no marketable skills, and no private sector work experience. They survive by being parasites on the productivity of real workers in the private sector. And then the government gives them massive salaries, benefits, and even student loan bailouts for their worthless non-STEM degrees.

We are $36 trillion in debt. We can’t be paying a bunch of public sector trash to enjoy adult day care at taxpayer expense. We either need to reform the Department of Homeland Security with new employees who have real skills and real integrity, or we need to scrap it. We just don’t have the money to pay Democrat party activists to do secular leftist activism all day, when they are supposed to be keeping us safe.