Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Connecticut requested a wide range of premium increases, which will take effect Oct. 1, to cover the costs of new benefits required by federal health reform. Higher prices mostly affect new members shopping for a health plan on the individual market rather than people who have group plans through an employer or some other organization.
The Connecticut Department of Insurance approved Anthem’s request without changes, including a boost of as much as 22.9 percent just to comply with one provision: eliminating annual spending limits per customer. But it’s unclear how much more customers will pay because of the variety of plans and the complexity of other factors, such as a person’s age.
New provisions mandated by federal law to start Thursday include allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ plan until they turn 26, eliminating annual and lifetime limits on the amount of money an insurer spends per customer and mandating that insurers cover the full cost of preventive services, such as mammograms and colonoscopies.
The looming question is how much those new mandated benefits, along with rising medical costs, will raise prices for health insurance next year. Insurers will submit a new batch of rate requests in October and November to take effect in 2011.
Employers like AT&T, Caterpillar, John Deere, and Verizon have already reported major cost increases due to the new health care law.
As noted earlier, the health care law raises taxes on the middle-class and investors in future years. Obamacare will cause many harms, such as reducing life-saving medical innovation and increasing state budget deficits. It is based on accounting gimmicks that will increase the federal deficit, as even some Obama supporters have admitted — like David Brooks, who in a moment of candor called arguments for the bill ““unbelievable” and “insane.””
This is what talking about “hope” and “change” amounted to.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins suggests that our “extraordinary predisposition” to “insist on believing in God” is that we, like computers, tend to do what we’re told. Young minds are susceptible to “infection” and mental “viruses” especially when they latch on to the bad or worthless religious ideas of charismatic preachers and other adults.1 Anthropologist Pascal Boyer believes that the latest “scientific” developments reveal that our “central metaphysical urge”—an “irredeemable human propensity toward superstition, myth and faith, or a special emotion that only religion provides”2 stands at the root of all religion. Author Matthew Alper considers humans to be religious animals whose brains are hard-wired for “God,” though no God exists, and maintains that the “spiritual” is really the “scientific.”3
And here’s the solution:
To say God doesn’t exist because people believe for inferior reasons or motivations is to commit the genetic fallacy—to say that a view is true/false based on its origin. God’s existence, however, is logically independent of how people come to believe in Him.
Consider the strong reasons for God’s existence distinct from human hard-wiring and psychology. The existence of valuable, morally responsible, self-aware, reasoning, living human beings who inhabit a finely tuned universe that came to exist a finite time ago is not plausibly explained naturalistically—namely, as the result of disparate valueless, mindless, lifeless physical processes in a universe that came into existence uncaused out of nothing. The better unifying explanation is a supremely valuable, supremely aware, reasoning, truthful, powerful, intelligent, beautiful Being. Such a context robustly explains—and unifies—a wide range of factors where naturalism fails. If God exists and leaves clues of his existence, then CSR’s reductionistic claims about theistic belief lose their force.
There is a LOT more in the Paul Copan essay on cognitive science of religion (CSR).
Critics argue that belief in God is unwarranted because it arises from evolved, hard-wired cognitive mechanism. But, if these psychologists are right, so are many (if not all) of our other beliefs.
“Surely the critic doesn’t want to say that any belief that is the output of our mental tools—our cognitive tools—is unwarranted,” Murray notes, because “we can’t reasonably think that all of our beliefs are unreliable.” Further,
most of these critics think that our cognitive tools usually get things just right. To see this, just substitute the following words (or phrases) into the argument [above] and see if the critic would still find the underlying reasoning acceptable: human minds, rocks, rainbow, or science’s ability to discover the truth.
In other words, “Why do they think it’s fair to single out belief in the existence of God as the one thing that turns out to be unreliable or unwarranted?”
Hence, Murray notes, this sweeping argument is self-defeating. For if all brain-dependent beliefs are unwarranted, then the idea that “belief in God is unwarranted” is itself unwarranted.
Dawkins and many of his peers think this argument shows belief in God to be “merely” a “by-product” of human evolutionary development. Theistic intellectuals like Murray conclude that “God instead, designed us so that belief in him is easy and natural. The human mind is naturally constructed in such a way that we have a tendency to form beliefs in God concepts, and even of a somewhat specific sort.”
So if you believe Koukl, the argument commits the genetic fallacy. But even if you allow it to go through, like Michael Murray does, it’s self-refuting. (You can read more about Murray’s views in “Contending With Christianity’s Critics” and “Passionate Conviction” – and don’t worry about chastising him about his moderate views of intelligent design, I already wrote to him and beat him up about that, and he said it was just a bias / preference he had against intervening acts of fine-tuning subsequent to the moment of creation).
Andy Stephenson, 35, and Kathryn Sloane, 19, both committed Christians, were detained after a peaceful protest outside a publicly-funded abortion clinic.
The Crown Prosecution Service will decide next month whether to press charges against the pair for causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ under the Public Order Act.
[…]The pair were arrested last month as they held a banner aloft outside Wistons abortion clinic in Brighton.
Police were called by a member of staff concerned that patients entering the clinic felt traumatised and upset.
Officers asked Mr Stephenson and Miss Sloane to take down a 7ft by 5ft placard depicting an aborted eight-week-old embryo – which they duly did but only to replace it with another banner showing a 10-week-old foetus.
The pair were arrested and taken to Brighton police station where they were held until three in the morning.
Mr Stephenson, a father-of-two and a carpenter, from Worthing in East Sussex, said: “We went to the clinic because we know what women are going in there for and it seems the obvious place to hold a protest.
“We had no desire to be arrested but we sincerely believe this is a legal form of demonstration.
“We were arrested around midday. We were taken to the local police station where we were treated like common criminals.
“They took our fingerprints and put us in cells – they didn’t interview us until midnight and we weren’t let out until three in the morning.”
The UK is a party dominated by secular humanists on the political left. Their desire for selfish pleasure is so strong that they look upon any attempt to disagree with them or make them feel bad about what they are doing as a punishable offense. Secular humanists are very clear about what they believe. They believe that life is about the pursuit of happy feelings. They have no concept of human rights like the right to free speech in their atheistic worldview. So if you interrupt them in their pursuit of pleasure and draw attention to the destruction they are causing, they will attack you. They believe that the strong have a right to crush and coerce the weak into serving their desires for happiness.
To a secular humanist, everyone else exists as a depersonalized object to be used and thrown away. Other people have no value – and there is no such thing as virtue or a way humans “ought to be”. It’s is very much a Darwinian struggle to use the people around you in order to have the most happiness you can until you die. Morality is is just the fashion of the time and place – it’s not real. There is no standard of conduct. You obey the fashions of your place and time unless you can somehow break the rules and avoid being caught and sanctioned. Ethics is illusory on secular humanism. It’s just traffic laws and personal preferences.
The same people who oppose pro-lifers today would have opposed the abolition of slavery. The situation is identical. Declare a group of weaker, disadvantaged people to be non-persons, and then exploit them. Anyone who is pro-abortion (i.e. – who votes for left-wing parties like the Democrats) is pro-slavery. Period. The principle of abusing and killing the weak for your own happiness is the common denominator between both views. Only in a theistic universe do persons have human rights granted by God, like the right to life, and the right to free speech. In an atheistic universe, rights can be brushed aside by the strong.
