All posts by Wintery Knight

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Did Google / YouTube suspend Steven Crowder for reporting on the rape of a child?

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What’s the official position of YouTube (owned by Google) on rape? In the Christians apologetics business, we have this argument called “the moral argument”, where we argue for a divine moral lawgiver on the basis of objective moral laws. The example that’s frequently given is “rape”. Christians think that even atheists will think that rape is objectively wrong. But do they?

YouTube (owned by Google) is well known for censoring speech that is critical of the Democrat party. Recently, a news story came out about a public school in Loudon county, Virginia where a female student was raped by a biological male in a skirt. After Steven Crowder reported on the story, Youtube / Google suspended him for 7 days.

Steven Crowder’s web site reproduced the e-mail from Youtube / Google.

It says (in part):

On September 30, Mr. Crowder uploaded another video… [that] contains a segment that targets the transgender community in an offensive manner, for example, by indicating that trans people pose a rape threat to women. Consistent with the recklessness provisions of its hate speech policy, YouTube has removed this video from the service and assessed a strike against the Steven Crowder channel. Per YouTube’s strikes policy, this results in a one-week upload freeze for the channel. Further violation of YouTube’s hate speech policy will result in additional penalties.

They didn’t want Crowder reporting on a rape committed by a boy in a skirt in a girl’s bathroom. Why would they not want people to know about that?

Let’s look at the facts of the case, as reported by Daily Wire.

On June 22, Scott Smith was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.

What people did not know is that, weeks prior, on May 28, Smith says, a boy, allegedly wearing a skirt, entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.

Juvenile records are sealed, but Scott’s attorney, Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school.

As a result of the viral video showing his arrest, Smith became the poster child for what the National School Boards Association has since suggested could be a form of “domestic terrorism”: a white blue-collar male who showed up to harangue obscure public servants on his local school board.

[…]Minutes before Smith’s arrest at the school board meeting, the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) superintendent lectured the public that concerns about the transgender policy were misplaced because the school system had no record of any assault occurring in any school bathroom.

[…]At 4:48 pm on the day of the incident, the principal sent out an email to the community that claimed nothing jeopardizing student safety had occurred, painting Smith as the villain, and offering counseling services for witnesses of Smith’s blowup…

[…]Smith was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Why did Youtube / Google not want Crowder telling people this story? Is it because they think that little girls are appropriate victims for boys dressed in skirts who go into women’s bathrooms? I would guess that there are a lot of people who work in Big Tech who do want biological men to be able to go into women’s bathrooms. And showers, too. They want naked biological men as close as possible to naked biological women. And the younger the girls, the better.

People who defend the rape of children and the arrest of the fathers of those children are immoral. I understand that the story makes teachers, teacher unions, school boards, etc. look bad. And I understand that the story makes Democrat politicians look bad. But no one should use suspensions to suppress the truth about what really happened.

My advice to people in Big Tech would be to be careful about letting devotion to the Democrat political party affect your products and services. But in addition to that, don’t let it affect your morality. It can be very tempting to use your products and services to bring about the election results that you want. And people who lack God as a ground for morality will not have much resistance to that desire. But if there is one thing that people should agree on, it’s that raping children is wrong. It’s also wrong to censor people who try to tell the truth about rape victims.

I think what this story shows is the importance of hiring people who have a rational basis for morality. If you hire a whole bunch of sexually immoral people whose atheistic worldviews don’t rationally ground objective morality, then you will get immoral behavior. The mantra of the secular left (“don’t judge”) doesn’t protect little girls from being raped.

By the way, I watched the Steven Crowder show about his suspension. He mentioned a lot of interesting news stories that Youtube / Google probably wouldn’t like. Stories about rapes of women in women’s bathrooms committed by biological men.

Here’s one:

Crowder says the LGBT activist spent months advocating for allowing biological men in women’s bathrooms. Isn’t that Google / Youtube’s position as well? What would they say to the rape victim? They’d probably say “Too bad”.

Here are a couple others:

Crowder talked about a whole bunch of stories like this.

Were these rapes morally wrong? I think so, but I’m really not sure what Google / YouTube would say. And I do think they would censor any reporting of the rapes as “hate speech”.

News

Viral Red State article answers: why don’t men want to marry any more?

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Here’s the article from Red State, written by Brandon Morse.

The first point he makes is that feminism teaches women to have character traits that make them unattractive to marriage-minded men. Feminism teaches women that evaluating men for marriage according to traditional male roles is “sexist”. There are no traditional male roles that women should prefer. Moreover, feminism teaches women that there are no female roles either. So, these women don’t understand men, and they aren’t prepared to be wives and mothers.

Brandon writes:

Even in modern families, men are taught how to treat a woman, provide for her, and work hard to keep her happy. Women aren’t taught how to treat a man or how to make him happy; they’re strictly taught what to expect from a man.

I can’t speak for all men, but in my case, I have definite plans for my marriage, and so a woman’s preparation and desire to be supportive is very important to me.

I’m trying to achieve these goals:

  • influence the church with apologetics
  • influence the university campus (students and professors) with apologetics
  • be involved in politics, advocate for conservative policy
  • open the house to students and neighbors to teach apologetics and demonstrate a loving marriage
  • raise 3-4 financially independent and influential children

And when I ask women what they bring to the table to help me to achieve all that, they often say that they’ve done nothing. Even the Christians try to get out of having to do anything hard by saying that God has a mysterious will that’s higher than my plans – plans which are designed to achieve specifically Christian goals. But if you look at the woman’s life, this mysterious God’s will never requires her to do anything difficult that would serve God. In practice, “God’s will” is just another word for doing what is easy, fun and peer-approved.

Brandon writes:

The sad truth is that many young women nowadays don’t know how to be in a marriage… they’re not taught how to treat a man, but what to expect from him… they’re flat-out dissuaded from providing anything but their presence to the partnership. They believe that offering their love to the man is sufficient and that men should just be grateful to have them.

What can you tell about a woman who has not prepared for tasks, like defending her faith, promoting conservative policies, or raising effective children? If she has not studied or practiced to do these things, then she isn’t suddenly going to become disciplined and effective after a wedding ceremony.

Men like when they set out to do something, and get support from their wives to achieve it. Can women today support men?

Brandon writes:

Along the lines of never learning how to treat a man, women are never taught how to value a man’s emotions unless they pertain positively to her. He must prove every day how much he values her for just existing. She expects this but is taught by our society to not reciprocate unless he earns it.

Men feel this weight, and the thing that would give them strength is withheld. Men suffer attempting to emotionally support the partner who has no interest in uplifting him in return. It’s a lonely existence in a relationship for two, making it, in truth, a relationship for one…her. What makes matters worse is that women are confused by their men’s lack of emotions. They were never taught how we think, much less appreciate it.

It’s rare for me to get support from younger women. Older Christian women can do it, but they are from a different time.

Now, people say to me “just go ahead and get married, and you can change the woman’s mind afterwards to value the things you care about”. But do young women today offer a way for men to change their minds about anything?

Brandon writes:

Now, let’s say you’re a young man entering into the stage of your life where dating to marry becomes typical. Looking at your prospects for marriage you see career-oriented women, some of whom make more money than you do and are very proud of this fact…. their opinions on any given subject seem more trendy than well thought out. They seem shallow as a result.

You see these women in your dating pool consistently exhibit opinions about your sex that are less than kind on social media. They’re taught they’re your intellectual superiors, that they’re right in any given argument no matter what… Very rarely do they display any joy in being giving or of service to their men. Even more rare are displays of humility. It reeks of narcissism.

One of the questions that I ask women to see if they are teachable is “where do you get your political news”? This question is to see if they care about anything other than their own feelings and social standing. I also ask “have you ever read any non-fiction that caused you to change your mind”? This to see whether she changes her mind about anything by increasing her knowledge.

But what I get from the Christian fundamentalists AND the career-focused feminists is the same: “I don’t read news, and I don’t read non-fiction”. If she doesn’t form her beliefs by gaining knowledge, then what method does a man have for leading her? She will only do what she feels like or what is pleasing to her peer group. If she doesn’t respect knowledge in general, then she doesn’t respect a man’s knowledge.

Brandon concludes:

Men want to feel welcome in their own relationships. Right now, they aren’t. They feel like passengers, or maybe even more accurately, chauffeurs. If women want men to marry them, then women will have to become marriage material and that means leaving behind the mainstream pop-philosophy and looking into the idea that maybe the feminists were wrong.

The schools, churches and culture are not doing anything to teach women how to be valuable to men. So why would a man marry? If I have to commit my time and money to being someone else’s slave / handbag then that will cause me to achieve goals less, right? As a Christian man, I don’t see how being a slave / handbag to a woman serves God.

News

The importance of having a narrative when confronting the assumption of naturalism

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How do you present theism as a rational belief to a person who thinks that the progress of science has removed the need for God?

Canadian science writer Denyse O’Leary writes about the history of cosmology at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

What help has materialism been in understanding the universe’s beginnings?

Many in cosmology have never made any secret of their dislike of the Big Bang, the generally accepted start to our universe first suggested by Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894-1966).

On the face of it, that is odd. The theory accounts well enough for the evidence. Nothing ever completely accounts for all the evidence, of course, because evidence is always changing a bit. But the Big Bang has enabled accurate prediction.

In which case, its hostile reception might surprise you. British astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) gave the theory its name in one of his papers — as a joke. Another noted astronomer, Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), exclaimed in 1933, “I feel almost an indignation that anyone should believe in it — except myself.” Why? Because “The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural.”

One team of astrophysicists (1973) opined that it “involves a certain metaphysical aspect which may be either appealing or revolting.” Robert Jastrow (1925-2008), head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, initially remarked, “On both scientific and philosophical grounds, the concept of an eternal Universe seems more acceptable than the concept of a transient Universe that springs into being suddenly, and then fades slowly into darkness.” And Templeton Prize winner (2011) Martin Rees recalls his mentor Dennis Sciama’s dogged commitment to an eternal universe, no-Big Bang model:

For him, as for its inventors, it had a deep philosophical appeal — the universe existed, from everlasting to everlasting, in a uniquely self-consistent state. When conflicting evidence emerged, Sciama therefore sought a loophole (even an unlikely seeming one) rather as a defense lawyer clutches at any argument to rebut the prosecution case.

Evidence forced theorists to abandon their preferred eternal-universe model. From the mid 1940s, Hoyle attempted to disprove the theory he named. Until 1964, when his preferred theory, the Steady State, lost an evidence test.

Here is a quick summary of some of the experimental evidence that emerged in the last few decades that caused naturalists to abandon the eternal universe that they loved so much when they were younger.

The importance of having a narrative

Now I want to make a very, very important point about Christianity and the progress of science. And that point is that it is very important that Christians present the evidence in exactly the way that Denyse presented it in that article – in its historical context, featuring the conflict between naturalists and the experimental evidence.

All Christians should be familiar with the following basic pieces of evidence which fit the war between science and naturalism narrative:

  1. The origin of the universe
  2. The cosmic fine-tuning
  3. The origin of life (biological information)
  4. The sudden origin of the Cambrian phyla
  5. The habitability/observability correlation

When you talk about these evidences as a Christian theist to non-Christians, you have to have cultivated a genuine interest in reconciling your beliefs with science. You have to accept that there are two books that reveal God’s character and attributes. The book of nature, and the book of Scripture. And you need to be flexible about getting these two books to fit together. The book of nature gives us natural theology (see Romans 1). It tells us that God is Creator and Designer. The book of Scripture tells us that God stepped into history as a man to save us by taking the punishment for our headlong rush away from God, which the Bible calls sin. Science is one way that humans can recover some of basic knowledge about God. Knowledge that is only possible because God created and designed the universe (and us) in such a way that we are capable of making discoveries, and that the universe is capable of being explored and understood.

It’s very important to present these five basic evidences to non-Christians in the historical context. And here is the story you must tell: “In the beginning, there was the naturalism, and the naturalism tried to argue from ignorance that God was not Creator and God was not Designer. And then came the science, and now people have to give up their naturalism in order to account for the science”. That’s the narrative you use when talking to non-Christians about science.

In the beginning was the naturalism:

  1. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that the universe was eternal
  2. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that a life-permitting universe was as likely as a life-prohibiting universe
  3. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that the cell was a simple blob of Jello that could spontaneously emerge in some warm pond
  4. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that the sudden origin of the Cambrian phyla would be explained by subsequent fossil discoveries
  5. In pre-scientific times, atheists maintained that there was nothing special about our galaxy, solar system, planet or moon

But then science progressed by doing experiments and making observations:

  1. Scientists discovered redshift and the cosmic microwave background radiation (evidence for a cosmic beginning) and more!
  2. Scientists discovered the fine-tuning of gravity and of the cosmological constant and more!
  3. Scientists discovered protein sequencing and exposed the myth of “junk DNA” and more!
  4. Scientists discovered an even shorter Cambrian explosion period and the absence of precursor fossils and more!
  5. Scientists discovered galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones and more!

And now rational people – people who want to have true beliefs about reality – need to abandon a false religion (naturalism).

Now naturally, science is in a state of flux and things change. But you have to look at the trend of discoveries, and those trends are clearly going against naturalism, and in favor of Christian theism. No one is arguing for a deductive proof here, we are simply looking at the evidence we have today and proportioning our belief to the concrete evidence we have today. People who are guided by reason should not seek to construct a worldview by leveraging speculations about future discoveries and mere possibilities. We should instead believe what is more probable than not. That’s what a rational seeker of truth ought to do. Proportion belief to probabilities based on current, concrete knowledge.

Atheism, as a worldview, is not rooted in an honest assessment about what science tells us about reality. Atheism is rooted in a religion: naturalism. And the troubling thing we learn from looking at the history of science is that this religion of naturalism is insulated from correction from the progress of science. Nothing that science reveals about nature seems to be able to put a dent in the religion of naturalism, at least for most atheists.

It falls to us Christian theists, then, to hold them accountable for their abuse and misrepresentation of science. And that means telling the story of the progress of science accurately, and accurately calling out the religion of naturalism for what it is – a religion rooted in blind faith and ignorance that has been repeatedly and convincingly falsified by the progress of science in the modern era.

Positive arguments for Christian theism