All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

New study shows how fathers reduce stress in children

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Story from ultra-left-wing CNN. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

A new study presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association reveals that men who had positive relationships with their fathers are better equipped to deal with the stress of everyday life than men who did not remember their dads fondly.

“A big take-home message is that if there is a father present in a child’s life, he needs to know how important it is to be involved,” said Melanie Mallers of California State University, Fullerton.

Researchers interviewed 912 men and women during an eight-day period about their psychological and emotional state that day. Participants also had to answer questions about their relationships with their mothers and fathers growing up, and how much attention their parents gave them.

The major finding of the study is that men who said they had bad relationships with their fathers in childhood were more likely to be distressed by the stressful incidents of daily life.

If we as a society would like to have men who are able to love and support families, then we need to vote for policies that keep fathers in the home. We can’t just do whatever makes us feel good and impose anti-father ideologies like feminism and then expect men to just keep doing what they normally do. Men respond to these changes in policy, and the answer is not to blame them. If we want men to get married and become fathers, then we need to understand what men are like, and to have policies that help them. Policies like all-male schools, male teachers, abolition of welfare for single mothers, abolition of Title IX, abolition of no-fault divorce, etc.

Podcasts

Michael Behe and Stephen Barr debate intelligent design

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Michael Behe is Catholic and Stephen Barr seems to be a theistic evolutionist (naturalist). (H/T Evolution News via ECM)

The main page is here, and it has the video.

There is an MP3 file here, 71 minutes long.

Michael Behe goes first, then Stephen Barr.

Keep in mind that the dividing line in the debate on intelligent design vs. Darwinism is between open-minded scientists who think that there might be objective evidence that material cause-and-effect may not be able to account for specific kinds of complexity (specified complexity) in nature, and philosophers who believe that is never permissible to overturn the philosophical assumption of materialism, regardless of what the scientific evidence shows.

So the pro-ID side is like “let’s look at the evidence and see what naturalism can and can’t do” and the anti-ID side is “the presupposition of materialism is absolute for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door”. It’s ID scientists vs naturalist materialism pre-supposers. Reason vs faith. Inquiry vs dogmatism.

UPDATE:

Upcoming conference features pro-ID scholars and theistic evolutionists in Austin, Texas in October.

News

Barack Obama, sharia law, stealth jihad and the 9/11 mosque

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Story here from defense analyst Frank Gaffney.

Excerpt:

At a White House celebration of Ramadan tonight in the company of representatives of several of the Nation’s most prominent Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, President Obama announced his strong support for one of their most immediate objectives: the construction of a mega-mosque and “cultural center” at Ground Zero.  In so doing, he publicly embraced the greatest tar-baby of his presidency.

Obama actually wants Americans to not just tolerate the 9/11 mosque – but to respect it.

Gone too is the option of continuing to conceal an extraordinary fact: the Obama administration is endorsing not only this “local matter,” but explicitly endorsing the agenda of the imam behind it – Feisal Abdul Rauf.  Rauf is the Muslim Brother, who together with his wife Daisy Khan (a.k.a. Daisy Kahn for tax purposes, at least) runs the tellingly named “Cordoba Initiative.”   He is believed to be on a taxpayer-underwritten junket and/or fund-raising tour of the Middle East, courtesy of the State Department, which insists that he is a “moderate” in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. Interestingly, the President’s rhetoric – like that of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other apologists for and boosters of the GZM – tracks perfectly with the Muslim Brotherhood line about why we need to allow what Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin has correctly described as an “Islamist victory arch”  close by some of America’s most hallowed ground.  It is, we are told, all about “religious freedom” and “tolerance.”

Actually, it is all about submission to shariah – arguably the most intolerant of theo-political-legal codes, ironically particularly when it comes to respect for freedom of religion.  Rauf’s mosque complex and the shariah ideology/doctrine that animates it – the same program that animated the jihadists who destroyed the World Trade Center and many of its occupants on 9/11 – has everything to do with power, not faith.

The rest of Gaffney’s first article has profiles of some of the people who attended the dinner, like these:

Ingrid Mattson heads the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the country, the Islamic Society of North America.  ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator in the biggest terrorism financing trial in the nation’s history and was identified as a Brotherhood “associated or friendly” group in documents introduced as evidence uncontested in that Holy Land Foundation prosecution.  Ms. Mattson now presides over the selection, training and certification of Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military and prison system – interestingly, a job formerly in the hands of Muslim Brother Abdurahman Alamoudi, the founder and first head of the American Muslim Council, who is currently serving a 23-year sentence on terrorism charges.

Salam Al-Marayati is president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).  In 1999, then-House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt withdrew his nomination of Al-Marayati to a leadership position on the National Commission on Terrorism when it became public that Al-Marayati claimed that the terrorist group, Hezbollah, was a legitimate organization and has the right to attack the Israeli Army.

I note that Gaffney has a follow-up post with the response from the families of 9/11 victims.