All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese bans memes as “disinformation”

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I know that several left-wing countries have recently passed or are about to pass legislation that restricts free speech. Scotland, Ireland and Canada come to mind. All of those countries are led by secular-left fascists, so it’s not surprising. However, did you know that the secular left fascist who is leading Australia also wants to ban speech critical of his regime? Let’s take a look.

Consider this story from the radical left extremist UK Guardian, about a recent stabbing that occurred in a church in Australia:

Facebook’s parent company Meta and X/Twitter have been told to remove violent and distressing videos and imagery of the stabbing of a prominent Orthodox Christian leader in Sydney’s west on Monday evening.

The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, told reporters on Tuesday that X and Meta had been issued with notices to remove material within 24 hours that depicted “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact or detail”, with the companies facing potential fines if they fail to comply.

The notices relate to the alleged stabbing of Emmanuel at a service at the Assyrian Christ the Good Shepherd church in Wakeley just after 7pm on Monday. The service was being livestreamed and a recording of it has circulated online.

In Australia, the e-Safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant is known as “eKaren”. According to her biographies online, eKaren has no earned degrees in STEM and no private sector work experience in STEM. She has nevertheless been thrust into a position of authority, leading the government’s online censorship efforts.

Now, you might be asking “I wonder what made eKaren choose this particular act of violence to be censored”. And the answer is obvious. The victim is a Christian, and the aggressor was, of course, a Muslim – a fact which the UK Guardian declined to mention for obvious reasons. The secular left does not want voters to see Christians as victims. And the secular left does not want voters to see unskilled Muslims immigrants as violent. That’s why eKaren was deployed to ban the video so that voters could not see it.

Far-left Reuters (also known as Al-Reuters) reports:

Australian police on Tuesday said a knife attack on an Assyrian church bishop and some followers in Sydney was a terrorist act motivated by suspected religious extremism, as the country reeled from a second stabbing incident in three days.

At least four people were wounded in the attack, including Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel of the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church, when a man lunged at him with a knife during a service live-streamed on Monday.

The Premier of Australia is an extreme secular leftist. He had nothing specific to say to condemn the attacker, or defend Christians. Why would he? Like most secular leftists, he is in favor of opening the border to criminals – to get more votes from people who want higher taxes and bigger government.

In response to these attempts at censorship, Australians began posting memes mocking the secular left Prime Minister, his airhead chief censor eKaren, and his entire fascist regime. If you’ve read about other secular left dictators in history, you can guess what happened next.

Reclaim the Net reports:

Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has endorsed social media censorship of satirical memes about him.

Albanese insinuated that social media platforms are duty-bound to suppress the so-called “misinformation” present on their sites.

[…]X has initiated a legal challenge against the Australian government following an unprecedented court order mandating global content censorship. This move comes after the Australian Federal Court ordered X to block worldwide access to posts showing a violent stabbing in a Sydney church, despite X already geo-blocking the content within Australia.

Musk has openly criticized the Australian government, accusing it of attempting to impose censorship on a global scale. He argues that such court orders set a dangerous precedent, allowing any country to exert control over the entire internet. This approach threatens the foundational principles of free speech and the open internet, undermining users’ rights to access information from around the world.

Here is an example meme:

A lot of people who vote for the secular left believe that their votes won’t harm basic human rights, like free speech. But they are mistaken. Secular leftists are champions of making big promises, failing to deliver on them, and then censoring any criticisms of their failure. Communist regimes killed over 100 million people in the 21st century alone. We need to be careful about not electing uneducated, inexperienced, incompetent people to government.

News

New study: parent’s political ideology significantly affects adolescent mental health

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If you like to get into debates with secular leftists in the office, like I do, then you need a lot of STUDIES. Secular leftists are taught that conservatives and Christians have not done any work to form their views, whereas all the smartest people are secular leftists, because they are data-based. So, let’s take a look at a new study on political ideology, and see who produces better results?

This research seems to be some sort of collaboration between the moderate Institute for Family Studies, and the far-left Gallup polling company.

Here is the PDF of the publication.

And Fox News has an article about it:

Parenting styles and political beliefs can play a major role influencing teenagers’ mental health, new research from Gallup says.

A June 2023 study surveying 6,643 parents and 1,580 adolescents found that conservative and very conservative parents were the “most likely to adopt the parenting practices associated with adolescent mental health,” the research reported in the Institute for Family Studies found.

“Adolescents with very conservative parents are 16 to 17 percentage points more likely to be in good or excellent mental health compared to their peers with very liberal parents,” the report said. “Only 55% of adolescents of liberal parents reported good or excellent mental health compared to 77% of those with conservative or very conservative parents.”

Why would conservative parents produce such a huge beneficial result for their children? Well, I would guess it’s because conservative parents are more firm about having a vision for how their children are raised. They want their kids to do well in school, follow the law, and serve others. All things that will help them in the real free market world of serving customers. But conservative parents also reject “don’t judge” compassion and moral relativism. Whereas secular leftist parents take an “anything goes” approach to raising their kids, conservatives are more strict about truth, and moral values. Secular leftist parents hate the idea of punishment. They just want their kids to like them.

More:

Conservative parents were more likely to adopt an “authoritative parenting style, characterized by both warmth and a high level of discipline,” Gallup economist and study author Jonathan Rothwell explained to Fox News Digital.

“Parents who set boundaries, establish routines, convey warmth and affection, and enforce rules effectively report a less contentious relationship with their adolescent child than parents who do not do these things, and this relationship is recognized by that child to be stronger and more loving. Each of the two factors related to parenting practices has a similar effect on the relationship as an index of adverse experiences, related to parental drug abuse, death, or abandonment,” he described in the report.

Liberal parents, however, scored lowest in the survey, primarily because they were least likely to report successfully disciplining their child.

Homes with conservative parents will typically be homes where there is a “Constitution” of the relationship. And I mean a recognized authority that governs how the relationship will proceed. And that authority compels each adult to deny themselves, and sacrifice their own interests, in order to serve others, and keep the relationship amicable and stable. Secular leftists don’t have that, because they are trying to claw happiness out of everyone and everything around them. Secular leftists have no rules, and no reason to sacrifice your own interests for anyone or anything else. It’s basically the Wild West. And in the Wild West, no one has an obligation to love anyone else when it doesn’t feel good to them to do the work.

More:

Teens’ mental health outcomes were 8 percentage points lower when parents reported having difficulty disciplining their child.

“By contrast, conservative parents enjoy higher quality relationships with their children, characterized by fewer arguments, more warmth, and a stronger bond, according to both parent and child reporting,” the report said.

While 80% of very conservative parents said their child did not get their way in an argument, only 53% of liberal parents could say the same. The most conservative parents were also more likely to report showing affection to their children every day.

I would think that a lot of these secular left parents are really just secular left single moms. Either by premarital sex with the hot bad boys, or by frivolous divorce. Even secular leftist women with men in the home will prevent those men from “judging” and “punishing” the children. Women are just not as good as men (generally speaking) at disciplining children. Secular leftist women might think that they are strong, independent boss babes who don’t need no man, but the results show very different outcomes.

Polemics

How to defend the fine-tuning argument just like William Lane Craig

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Today, I decided to go back in time, and re-post something from April 2009. I started this blog in January 2009. It’s funny to see what I sounded like when I was just starting out. Dr. Craig has a short video about this argument, and Rose and I did a podcast about it, where we focused on the scientific evidence for cosmic fine-tuning. This is a simple argument. I wish Christian leaders taught it in church.

First of all, if you’re not clear on the fine-tuning argument, click here and read Walter Bradley’s exposition of it. Dr. Walter L. Bradley (C.V. here) is the Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Baylor University. He was also a professor and department head at Texas A&M before going to Baylor. He had his Ph.D at age 24 from the University of Texas and was a tenured professor at 27.

The first argument presented by Bradley in that post is the same argument that Craig used against Hitchens in their debate. (It’s Craig’s second argument in the set of five). Bradley’s version of the argument has been presented live, in-person by Bradley at dozens of universities here and abroad, in front of students and faculty.

The fine-tuning argument

The argument goes like this:

  1. The fine-tuning of the universe to support life is either due to law, chance or design
  2. It is not due to law or chance
  3. Therefore, the fine-tuning is due to design

What does it meaning to be fine-tuned for life?

Here are the facts on the fine-tuning:

  • Life has certain minimal requirements; long-term stable source of energy, a large number of different chemical elements, an element that can serve as a hub for joining together other elements into compounds, etc.
  • In order to meet these minimal requirements, the physical constants, (such as the gravitational constant), and the ratios between physical constants, need to be withing a narrow range of values in order to support the minimal requirements for life of any kind.
  • Slight changes to any of the physical constants, or to the rations between the constants, will result in a universe inhospitable to life.
  • The range of possible ranges over 70 orders of magnitude.
  • The constants are selected by whoever creates the universe. They are not determined by physical laws. And the extreme probabilities involved required put the fine-tuning beyond the reach of chance.
  • Although each individual selection of constants and ratios is as unlikely as any other selection, the vast majority of these possibilities do not support the minimal requirements of life of any kind. (In the same way as any hand of 5 cards that is dealt is as likely as any other, but you are overwhelmingly likely NOT to get a royal flush. In our case, a royal flush is a life-permitting universe).

Examples of finely-tuned constants

Here are a couple of examples of the fine-tuning. Craig only gave one example in the debate and didn’t explain how changes to the constant would affect the minimal requirements for life. But Bradley does explain it, and he is a professional research scientist, so he is speaking about things he worked in his polymer research lab. (He was the director)

a) The strong force: (the force that binds nucleons (= protons and neutrons) together in nucleus, by means of meson exchange)

  • if the strong force constant were 2% stronger, there would be no stable hydrogen, no long-lived stars, no hydrogen containing compounds. This is because the single proton in hydrogen would want to stick to something else so badly that there would be no hydrogen left!
  • if the strong force constant were 5% weaker, there would be no stable stars, few (if any) elements besides hydrogen. This is because you would be able to build up the nuclei of the heavier elements, which contain more than 1 proton.
  • So, whether you adjust the strong force up or down, you lose stars than can serve as long-term sources of stable energy, or you lose chemical diversity, which is necessary to make beings that can perform the minimal requirements of living beings. (see below)

b) The conversion of beryllium to carbon, and carbon to oxygen

  • Life requires carbon in order to serve as the hub for complex molecules, but it also requires oxygen in order to create water.
  • Carbon is like the hub wheel in a tinker toy set: you can bind other elements together to more complicated molecules (e.g. – “carbon-based life), but the bonds are not so tight that they can’t be broken down again later to make something else.
  • The carbon resonance level is determined by two constants: the strong force and electromagnetic force.
  • If you mess with these forces even slightly, you either lose the carbon or the oxygen.

Either way, you’ve got no life of any conceivable kind.

Is the fine-tuning real?

Yes, it’s real and it is conceded by the top-rank of atheist physicists. Let me give you a citation from the best one of all, Martin Rees. Martin Rees is an atheist and a qualified astronomer. He wrote a book called “Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe”, (Basic Books: 2001). In it, he discusses 6 numbers that need to be fine-tuned in order to have a life-permitting universe.

Rees writes here:

These six numbers constitute a ‘recipe’ for a universe. Moreover, the outcome is sensitive to their values: if any one of them were to be ‘untuned’, there would be no stars and no life. Is this tuning just a brute fact, a coincidence? Or is it the providence of a benign Creator?

There are some atheists who deny the fine-tuning, but these atheists are in firm opposition to the progress of science. The more science has progressed, the more constants, ratios and quantities we have discovered that need to be fine-tuned. Science is going in a theistic direction. Next, let’s see how atheists try to account for the fine-tuning, on atheism.

Atheistic responses to the fine-tuning argument

There are two common responses among atheists to this argument.

The first is to speculate that there are actually an infinite number of other universes that are not fine-tuned, (i.e. – the gambler’s fallacy). All these other universes don’t support life. We just happen to be in the one universe is fine-tuned for life. The problem is that there is no way of directly observing these other universes and no independent evidence that they exist.

Here is an excerpt from an article in Discover magazine, (which is hostile to theism and Christianity).

Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

The second response by atheists is that the human observers that exist today, 14 billion years after the universe was created out of nothing, actually caused the fine-tuning. This solution would mean that although humans did not exist at the time the of the big bang, they are going to be able to reach back in time at some point in the future and manually fine-tune the universe.

Here is an excerpt from and article in the New Scientist, (which is hostile to theism and Christianity).

…maybe we should approach cosmic fine-tuning not as a problem but as a clue. Perhaps it is evidence that we somehow endow the universe with certain features by the mere act of observation… observers are creating the universe and its entire history right now. If we in some sense create the universe, it is not surprising that the universe is well suited to us.

So, there are two choices for atheists. Either an infinite number of unobservable universes that are not fine-tuned, or humans go back in time at some future point and fine-tune the beginning of the universe, billions of years in the past.

Why the fine-tuning argument matters

We need to make a decision today about how we are going to live. The evidence available today supports the fine-tuning of the universe by a supernatural mind with immense power. The progress of science has strengthened this theory against determined opposition from rival naturalistic theories.

Those are the facts, and we must all choose what to do with them.

Further study

Here is a paper by Walter L. Bradley that contains many more examples of the fine-tuning, and explanations for what happens when you change the constants, quantities and rations even slightly.