All posts by Wintery Knight

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News

Can atheists be moral? Let’s look at a “rising star” in the Democrat party

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I’ve heard from atheists how easy it is to jettison a moral Lawgiver from one’s worldview, and still be able to rationally ground objective morality. No matter how many times these atheist’ “philosophers” are caught supporting pedophiles, rapists, and the policies that enable pedophiles and rapists, they never seem to learn the lesson – dump God, and you will end up championing immorality.

Story from National File:

Arizona State Senator, Tony Navarrete, an openly gay Democrat and founding member of Arizona’s LGBTQ Caucus, has been arrested for child molestation. Phoenix Police confirm that Navarrete, widely considered a “rising star” within the Democrat Party, faces multiple counts of sexual conduct with a minor, among other charges.

While few details surrounding the charges and arrest have been made immediately available, local media has confirmed with Phoenix Police that Democrat State Senator Tony Navarrete “was arrested on Thursday, Aug. 5, and charged with multiple counts of sexual conduct with a minor among other charges.”

[…]Navarrete has been a member of Arizona’s legislature since 2017, first winning election to the State’s House of Representatives where he served one two-year term before being elected to the Arizona Senate, entering that body in 2019. As a member of the legislature, Navarrete, who is openly gay, has made his homosexuality a centerpiece of his political schtick, helping to found the Arizona LGBT Caucus during his first year in office.

Navarrete has made several appearances alongside high-profile Democrats, including Vice President Kamala Harris and far-left New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Considered a “rising star” within the Democrat Party, Navarrete was expected to announce a statewide run for Treasurer of Arizona.

What do atheists who support Democrats and celebrate redefining marriage to embrace atheist values of non-exclusivity and non-permanence have to say about this? They say “well, I didn’t do it – I only voted for it. I only voted for it for decades, and promoted it through my voting and political advocacy”.

The problem with atheism is that it isn’t really a rational position or a cognitive worldview at all. It’s just the denial of moral accountability, and the denial of whatever parts of reality challenge that.

Why do atheists deny science, such as the origin of the universe or intelligent design? Because science points to an objective moral lawgiver, and they don’t want that. Why do “moral” atheists vote for pedophiles and support rapists running for office? Because the most important overriding concern is autonomy from that pesky moral lawgiver. It doesn’t matter what science they have to deny.

It doesn’t matter which children – born and unborn – have to suffer. It doesn’t matter what the lives of fatherless children are like. They cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door, to mess with their pursuit of hedonism. They vote for a world where every trace of objective morality and moral accountability has been erased.

It really is that simple. Atheists become atheists when their desire for happiness is first thwarted – LONG BEFORE they ever look through a telescope or a microscope at the evidence. It’s not the result of some long, dispassionate chain of reasoning. Logic and evidence DON’T MATTER.

If they have to elect a few pedophiles and rapists in order to protect their right to an abortion, that’s what they’ll do. Too bad for the weak, because it’s survival of the fittest in an atheist universe – that’s the way they like it. The goal is to keep God as far as possible from their reckless, irresponsible actions.

News

Return to civility: Antifa fascists assault Christian families in Portland, Oregon

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Wow, here is that return to civility that all the woke evangelical leaders like Beth Moore, Russell Moore, Tim Keller, David French, etc. promised me when they told me not to vote for that horrible Donald Trump. We had to put a stop to his mean tweets somehow, they said, and never you mind about the violence and damage caused by Black Lives Matter and Antifa Democrats.

Here’s the latest on the secular left fascists from The Post Millennial:

A large group of Antifa carrying shields and melee weapons attacked a group of Evangelical Christians congregating for a prayer and worship event at the waterfront in downtown Portland, Ore. Video recorded at the scene showed children and families running away as black-clad Antifa militants tore apart the sound equipment and assaulted attendees with pepper spray and projectiles.

[…]Shocking video recorded at the violent event show dozens of armed Antifa members in black bloc and riot gear moving in to physically confront attendees of the event. One of the Antifa members sprayed a congregant with an unidentified, gas-like substance that is suspected to be pepper spray. The congregation took several steps back to avoid injury. “Where is your god now?” an Antifa member can be heard saying in the video.

After pulling apart the sound system, the Antifa toss the equipment into the Willamette River. A woman can be seen panicking as she and her fellow parishioners backed away to avoid further altercation. “They threw a flash bomb into a group of kids,” said a female attendee who spoke to a videographer at the scene while the injured were being treated. An Antifa account on Twitter later posted that they stole the Christian attendees’ food and water.

Yes, yes. These are all the good things that Evangelicals for Biden wanted us to have. Get rid of all those “Christian nationalist” policies (i.e. – border security, law enforcement and low taxes), and bring back the good, wholesome Marxist morality of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

When are we going to get some real leadership from “Christian leaders” about the issues that Christians actually care about? I oppose atheism. Let’s see some evidential apologetics. I oppose feminism. Let’s see some opposition to no-fault divorce, abortion and same-sex marriage. I oppose socialism. Let’s see some support for lower taxes, job creation, school choice and limited government.

I just don’t think that the “evangelical” left (Russell Moore, David French, Beth Moore, Tim Keller, etc.) understand what their allies on the secular left are capable of. But they are still responsible for enabling it when they support the secular left at election time.

News

Study: the early Earth’s atmosphere contained oxygen

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

Here’s a paper published in the prestigious peer-reviewed science journal Nature, entitled “The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth’s atmosphere”. This paper is significant because it undermines naturalistic scenarios for the origin of life.

Evolution News explains what the paper is about.

Excerpt:

A recent Nature publication reports a new technique for measuring the oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere some 4.4 billion years ago. The authors found that by studying cerium oxidation states in zircon, a compound formed from volcanic magma, they could ascertain the oxidation levels in the early earth. Their findings suggest that the early Earth’s oxygen levels were very close to current levels.

[…]Miller and Urey conducted experiments to show that under certain atmospheric conditions and with the right kind of electrical charge, several amino acids could form from inorganic compounds such as methane, ammonia, and water. Several experiments have been done using various inorganic starting materials, all yielding a few amino acids; however, one key aspect of all of these experiments was the lack of oxygen.

If the atmosphere has oxygen (or other oxidants) in it, then it is an oxidizing atmosphere. If the atmosphere lacks oxygen, then it is either inert or a reducing atmosphere. Think of a metal that has been left outside, maybe a piece of iron. That metal will eventually rust. Rusting is the result of the metal being oxidized. With organic reactions, such as the ones that produce amino acids, it is very important that no oxygen be present, or it will quench the reaction. Scientists, therefore, concluded that the early Earth must have been a reducing environment when life first formed (or the building blocks of life first formed) because that was the best environment for producing amino acids. The atmosphere eventually accumulated oxygen, but life did not form in an oxidative environment.

The problem with this hypothesis is that it is based on the assumption that organic life must have formed from inorganic materials. That is why the early Earth must have been a reducing atmosphere. Research has been accumulating for more than thirty years, however, suggesting that the early Earth likely did have oxygen present.

[…]Their findings not only showed that oxygen was present in the early Earth atmosphere, something that has been shown in other studies, but that oxygen was present as early as 4.4 billion years ago. This takes the window of time available for life to have begun, by an origin-of-life scenario like the RNA-first world, and reduces it to an incredibly short amount of time. Several factors need to coincide in order for nucleotides or amino acids to form from purely naturalistic circumstances (chance and chemistry). The specific conditions required already made purely naturalist origin-of-life scenarios highly unlikely. Drastically reducing the amount of time available, adding that to the other conditions needing to be fulfilled, makes the RNA world hypothesis or a Miller-Urey-like synthesis of amino acids simply impossible.

So here’s where we stand. If you are a materialist, then you need a reducing environment on the early Earth in order to get organic building blocks (amino acids) from inorganic materials. However, the production of these organic building blocks (amino acids) requires that the early Earth atmosphere be oxygen-free. And the problem with this new research, which confirms previous research, is that the early Earth contained huge amounts of oxygen – the same amount of oxygen as we have today. This is lethal to naturalistic scenarios for creating the building blocks of life on the Earth’s surface.

Other problems

If you would like to read a helpful overview of the problems with a naturalistic scenario for the origin of life, check out this article by Casey Luskin.

Excerpt:

The “origin of life” (OOL) is best described as the chemical and physical processes that brought into existence the first self-replicating molecule. It differs from the “evolution of life” because Darwinian evolution employs mutation and natural selection to change organisms, which requires reproduction. Since there was no reproduction before the first life, no “mutation – selection” mechanism was operating to build complexity. Hence, OOL theories cannot rely upon natural selection to increase complexity and must create the first life using only the laws of chemistry and physics.

There are so many problems with purely natural explanations for the chemical origin of life on earth that many scientists have already abandoned all hopes that life had a natural origin on earth. Skeptical scientists include Francis Crick (solved the 3-dimensional structure of DNA) and Fred Hoyle (famous British cosmologist and mathematician), who, in an attempt to retain their atheistic worldviews, then propose outrageously untestable cosmological models or easily falsifiable extra-terrestrial-origin-of-life / panspermia scenarios which still do not account for the natural origin of life. So drastic is the evidence that Scientific American editor John Horgan wrote, “[i]f I were a creationist, I would cease attacking the theory of evolution … and focus instead on the origin of life. This is by far the weakest strut of the chassis of modern biology.”3

The article goes over the standard problems with naturalistic scenarios of the origin of life: wrong atmosphere, harmful UV radiation, interfering cross-reactions, oxygen levels, meteorite impacts, chirality, etc.

Most people who are talking about intelligent design at the origin of life talk about the information problem – how do you get the amino acids to form proteins and how do you get nucleotide bases to code for amino acids? But the starting point for solving the sequencing problem is the construction of the amino acids – there has to be a plausible naturalistic scenario to form them.