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What’s in the Democrat’s 1.7 TRILLION dollar omnibus spending bill?

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I heard that the Democrats are trying to pass a huge “omnibus” spending bill, and I thought it would be useful for us to take a look at it. Who does this “omnibus” bill help? And will it cause inflation to continue to rise?

This is from Daily Wire:

And according to The Heritage Foundation, the omnibus bill they may not have time to read is packed with woke pet projects. Among them are a number of LGBTQ projects — from pride centers to museums — and “anti-racism” initiatives, according to a thread shared on Twitter on Tuesday.

What followed was a list of the “woke agenda” projects — along with their respective price tags and which areas of the country stood to benefit from omnibus money.

“$1.2 million for ‘LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers’; $1.2 million for ‘services for DACA recipients’ (aka helping illegal aliens with taxpayer funds) at San Diego Community College; $477k for the Equity Institute in RI to indoctrinate teachers with ‘antiracism virtual labs,’” the thread continued.

More projects were listed in the following tweets, including “$1 million for Zora’s House in Ohio, a ‘coworking and community space’ for ‘women and gender-expansive people of color’; $3 million for the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York City; $3.6 million for a Michelle Obama Trail in Georgia.”

New York’s state capital is set to receive three-quarters of a million dollars for “LGBT and Gender Non-Conforming housing”; Baltimore will rake in a cool $2 million for a wax museum dedicated to African Americans, tentatively named “Great Blacks in Wax”; and New York will get over $800,000 for an “LGBT center.”

An additional $750,000 is earmarked for the “TransLatin@ Coalition” in Los Angeles, which is supposed to create “workforce development programs and supportive services for Transgender and Gender nonconforming and Intersex immigrant women.”

On Twitter, North Carolina Republican congressman Dan Bishop had another list of wasteful spending items in the “omnibus” spending bill:

  • an additional $47 billion in Ukraine funding, and the bill also authorizes a “Ukrainian Independence Park” in Washington DC.
  • $11.33 billion for the FBI. $1.75 billion for the ATF. & $2.63 billion for US Attorneys, with an emphasis on J6 prosecutions and domestic terrorism cases. All with significant increases from the previous year.
  • $535 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which indirectly funds NPR via grants.
  • it expressly prohibits CBP funding from being used to improve border security.
  • it allocates $1,438,000,000 for membership in global multilateral organizations, including the UN.
  • it allocates at least $575 million for “family planning” in areas where population growth “threatens biodiversity.”
  • $524.4 million for a DEI and “structural racism” focused NIH subdivision
  • it allocates $410 million towards border security for Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Oman.
  • $335 million to prepare for an influenza pandemic! Including the use of surveillance tools.
  • $286 million in Title X funding, which funds Planned Parenthood.
  • Gender programs in Pakistan and a $200 million for a Gender Equity Fund.
  • $70 million for minority business development – an increase of $15 million from Fy22.
  • nearly $26 million for the House of Representatives Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
  • $7.5 million to better understand the “domestic radicalization phenomenon,” plus $1 million for gun violence research. These research programs are often a smokescreen for violating civil liberties down the road.

What will be the end result of spending $1.7 trillion for Americans? I think it will cause inflation to go up, and people will pay even higher prices for gas, groceries and everything else. The higher inflation goes, the more interest rates will rise.

One of my favorite places to go to find out what is going on in the economy is the Wall Street Journal. There, I found a recent article entitled “Inflation Isn’t Vanquished Yet”.

It says:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that inflation rose only 0.1% in November, and shelter made up half of the monthly increase. The 12-month inflation rate fell to 7.1% in November, which is down from 7.7% in October and is the fifth annual rate drop in a row since inflation peaked at 9.1% in June. The Fed’s monetary tightening is making a difference.

Yet a 7.1% increase in prices is still a long way from victory, and inflation continues to be sticky across much of the economy. Food rose 0.5%. Much of the decrease came in energy prices, which are volatile, and fell by 1.6%. But service prices excluding energy services rose 0.4% and are up 6.8% in the past year. The core CPI less energy and food rose 0.2% in the month and is still high at an annual rate of 6%.

What does this mean? It means that inflation is not under control, and interest rates will have to continue to rise. That’s bad news for economic growth. If Biden gets his omnibus bill passed, then we will be looking at rising inflation again, and an even longer recession that is currently being considered. I hope Democrat voters understand that they can’t spend their way out of inflation. It’s the spending that’s causing it.

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New study: psychotherapy improves mental health of autistic teens with gender dysphoria

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My podcast co-host Rose and I both want Christians to argue for the Christian worldview using studies and evidence. We want the other side to reply on feelings and intuitions, while we present hard data. With that said, I have a report on a new study for you that will help you discuss the issue of medical transitioning of autistic adolescents with gender dysphoria.

Consider this report on the new study from Daily Wire:

The study, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, found that guided, peer support group therapy showed positive mental health outcomes for autistic adolescents struggling with gender dysphoria. The study, conducted in the Netherlands, emphasized the importance of mental health treatments, while deprioritizing medical interventions like puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.

“These findings add to a quickly growing stack of evidence suggesting that it’s the psychotherapy and support that is improving these kids’ well-being, not medicalized transition,” said Dr. James Cantor, Director of the Toronto Sexuality Centre, and associate professor of the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine.

By the way, you may have heard that most gender dysphoria resolves itself without any need for medical intervention. The article says:

Dr. Cantor’s website, Sexology Today, is often cited as a resource that documents eleven studies finding that roughly 60–90% of children who identify as transgender, but do not socially or medically transition, will no longer identify as transgender in adulthood. These studies were referenced by the group of researchers, who acknowledged that gender dysphoria may resolve on its own.

“In a large proportion of children who express their desire for medical gender-affirming care, this seems to disappear during puberty,” the study read.

In a previous post, I blogged about the “social contagion” cause of transgenderism. The technical term is Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). Same-age peers and social media play a huge role in children having gender confusion.

But the Daily Wire article had even more interesting information – a link between autism and susceptibility to gender confusion:

Children and adolescents on the autism spectrum are disproportionately represented among the large, newly emerging cohort of children claiming to be transgender. Over the past 10 years, there have been at least nine studies connecting Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and transgender identities. Rates of autistic traits in these studies range from five percent to 54% among those with gender dysphoria, significantly higher than among the general population.

Data from the now-shuttered Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) at the U.K.’s Tavistock Centre found that autistic adolescents were significantly overrepresented in the population of referrals to the clinic. Pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass was commissioned to conduct a review of the services provided by the National Health Service and investigate why there has been such a huge rise in the number of adolescent biological girls seeking referrals to gender clinics.

Dr. Cass found that approximately one third of youth referred to GIDS had autism or autistic traits. By comparison, the prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorder during childhood in the UK have been estimated at 1%.

Previously, I blogged about how many countries that are more advanced in treating gender dysphoria are leaning towards psychotherapy instead of medical treatment. Something to think about if people in your life and jumping straight to medical treatment instead of psychotherapy,

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What criteria do historians use to get to the minimal facts about the historical Jesus?

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Have you ever heard Gary Habermas, Michael Licona or William Lane Craig defend the resurrection of Jesus in a debate by saying that the resurrection is the best explanation for the “minimal facts” about Jesus? The lists of minimal facts that they use are typically agreed to by their opponents during the debates. Minimal facts are the parts of the New Testament that meet a set of strict historical criteria. These are the facts that skeptical historians agree with, totally apart from any religious beliefs.

So what are the criteria that skeptical historians use to derive a list of minimal facts about Jesus?

Dr. Craig explains them in this article.

Excerpt:

The other way, more influential in contemporary New Testament scholarship, is to establish specific facts about Jesus without assuming the general reliability of the Gospels. The key here are the so-called “Criteria of Authenticity” which enable us to establish specific sayings or events in Jesus’ life as historical. Scholars involved in the quest of the historical Jesus have enunciated a number of these critieria for detecting historically authentic features of Jesus, such as dissimilarity to Christian teaching, multiple attestation, linguistic semitisms, traces of Palestinian milieu, retention of embarrassing material, coherence with other authentic material, and so forth.

It is somewhat misleading to call these “criteria,” for they aim at stating sufficient, not necessary, conditions of historicity. This is easy to see: suppose a saying is multiply attested and dissimilar but not embarrassing. If embarrassment were a necessary condition of authenticity, then the saying would have to be deemed inauthentic, which is wrong-headed, since its multiple attestation and dissimilarity are sufficient for authenticity. Of course, the criteria are defeasible, meaning that they are not infallible guides to authenticity. They might be better called “Indications of Authenticity” or “Signs of Credibility.”

In point of fact, what the criteria really amount to are statements about the effect of certain types of evidence upon the probability of various sayings or events in Jesus’ life. For some saying or event S and evidence of a certain type E, the criteria would state that, all things being equal, the probability of S given E is greater than the probability of S on our background knowledge alone. So, for example, all else being equal, the probability of some event or saying is greater given its multiple attestation than it would have been without it.

What are some of the factors that might serve the role of E in increasing the probability of some saying or event S? The following are some of the most important:

(1) Historical congruence: S fits in with known historical facts concerning the context in which S is said to have occurred.

(2) Independent, early attestation: S appears in multiple sources which are near to the time at which S is alleged to have occurred and which depend neither upon each other nor a common source.

(3) Embarrassment: S is awkward or counter-productive for the persons who serve as the source of information for S.

(4) Dissimilarity: S is unlike antecedent Jewish thought-forms and/or unlike subsequent Christian thought-forms.

(5) Semitisms: traces in the narrative of Aramaic or Hebrew linguistic forms.

(6) Coherence: S is consistent with already established facts about Jesus.

For a good discussion of these factors see Robert Stein, “The ‘Criteria’ for Authenticity,” in Gospel Perspectives I, ed. R. T. France and David Wenham (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1980), pp. 225-63.

Notice that these “criteria” do not presuppose the general reliability of the Gospels. Rather they focus on a particular saying or event and give evidence for thinking that specific element of Jesus’ life to be historical, regardless of the general reliability of the document in which the particular saying or event is reported. These same “criteria” are thus applicable to reports of Jesus found in the apocryphal Gospels, or rabbinical writings, or even the Qur’an. Of course, if the Gospels can be shown to be generally reliable documents, so much the better! But the “criteria” do not depend on any such presupposition. They serve to help spot historical kernels even in the midst of historical chaff. Thus we need not concern ourselves with defending the Gospels’ every claim attributed to Jesus in the gospels; the question will be whether we can establish enough about Jesus to make faith in him reasonable.

And you can see Dr. Craig using these criteria to defend minimal facts in his debates. For example, in his debate with Ehrman, he alludes to the criteria when making his case for the empty tomb.

Here, he uses multiple attestation and the criteria of embarrassment:

Among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion are the following:

1. The empty tomb is also multiply attested by independent, early sources.

Mark’s source didn’t end with the burial, but with the story of the empty tomb, which is tied to the burial story verbally and grammatically. Moreover, Matthew and John have independent sources about the empty tomb; it’s also mentioned in the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles (2.29; 13.36); and it’s implied by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthian church (I Cor. 15.4). Thus, we have again multiple, early, independent attestation of the fact of the empty tomb.

2. The tomb was discovered empty by women.

In patriarchal Jewish society the testimony of women was not highly regarded. In fact, the Jewish historian Josephus says that women weren’t even permitted to serve as witnesses in a Jewish court of law. Now in light of this fact, how remarkable it is that it is women who are the discoverers of Jesus’ empty tomb. Any later legendary account would certainly have made male disciples like Peter and John discover the empty tomb. The fact that it is women, rather than men, who are the discoverers of the empty tomb is best explained by the fact that they were the chief witnesses to the fact of the empty tomb, and the Gospel writers faithfully record what, for them, was an awkward and embarrassing fact.

There are actually a few more reasons for believing in the empty tomb that he doesn’t go into in the debate, but you can find them in his written work. For example, in his essay on Gerd Ludemann’s “vision” hypothesis. That essay covers the reasons for all four of his minimal facts.

So, if you are going to talk about the resurrection with a skeptic, you don’t want to invoke the Bible as some sort of inerrant/inspired Holy Book. You want to look at it as a historical book, and use historical criteria to get to some facts that critical historians would accept. From that, it’s possible to make a case for the resurrection, which is the guarantee that the words of Jesus are authoritative. Including the words of Jesus where he describes the Bible as a whole as God’s revelation of Himself to his creatures.

Here is the approach I use when talking to non-Christian co-workers:

  1. Explain the criteria that historians use to get their lists of minimal facts
  2. Explain your list of minimal facts
  3. Defend your list of minimal facts using the criteria
  4. Cite skeptics who admit to each of your minimal facts, to show that they are widely accepted
  5. List some parts of the Bible that don’t pass the criteria (e.g. – guard at the tomb, Matthew earthquake)
  6. Explain why those parts don’t pass the criteria, and explain that they are not part of your case
  7. Challenge your opponent to either deny some or all the facts, or propose a naturalistic alternative that explains the facts better than the resurrection
  8. Don’t let your opponent attack any of your minimal facts by attacking other parts of the Bible (e.g. – the number of angels being one or two, etc.)

And remember that there is no good case for the resurrection that does not make heavy use of the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. That passages is universally accepted as early, eyewitness testimony from Paul, and represents the core of early Christian beliefs about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Everyone who takes evidence seriously has to account for that early creed, which passes the historical tests I outlined above.

The best essay on the minimal facts criteria that I’ve read is the one by Robert H. Stein in “Contending with Christianity’s Critics“. It’s a good short essay that goes over all the historical criteria that are used to derive the short list of facts from which we infer the conclusion “God raised Jesus from the dead”. That whole book is really very, very good.