Great article from Dr. Michael Brown in The Stream.

Read the whole thing, here’s some:

[Trump-voting conservatives] agreed that Trump’s character and personality could be negative and destructive. But we hoped that the good policy decisions he would make, decisions of massive, life and death proportions, would outweigh his character flaws.

And so, when it came to fighting against the slaughter of the unborn, numbering more than 60 million to date in America since 1973, Trump was our clear choice over Hillary Clinton or Biden. Jesus cares about “the least of these,” which most certainly includes the defenseless babies in the womb.

When it came to preserving our religious liberties and our freedoms of conscience and speech, Trump was our clear, hands-down choice.

More:

When it came to standing up to radical Islam or facing down tyrannical China, Trump was our definite preference.

One of my colleagues in the Middle East recently told me how the bloodbath which took more than 650,000 lives during the Obama administration virtually stopped with Donald Trump.

My friend recounted to me the horrific torture and abuse of women in his region at the hands of Islamic extremists, including their repeated gang rapes (and worse). In his mind, Trump was a champion who helped put a stop to such horrors.

A Chinese émigré to Australia told me early last year he was terribly afraid of President Xi and saw Trump as a hero, especially as Trump stood with the Hong Kong protesters.

Needless to say, the same Israelis who felt betrayed by the Obama administration were profoundly grateful to Trump for canceling the Iranian nuclear accords, knowing the real dangers of that terrible deal.

Foreign policy? What’s that? Christian Democrats didn’t see any foreign policy on NPR or PBS or CNN or MSNBC. They were in a leftist echo chamber. They had no awareness of reality outside their own lives.

More:

Are you surprised that Biden signed into law a radical transgender bill that has even caused consternation among gay, feminist, and transgender leaders and individuals? Do you feel good about the fact that by voting for him, you have negatively impacted women and girls throughout the country, as well as strengthened Big Tech’s crack down on our freedoms?

Are you surprised that there is already great concern within Israel that Biden might derail the amazing peace progress made by the Trump administration? Were you unaware that he might well give back to terroristic Iran a potential path to nuclear armament?

I first wrote about the Equality Act – an LGBT bill deisgned to crush dissenters from the LGBT agenda – in 2015. I had been warning about it all along. But I have yet to meet a Biden voter who knew anything about it, even though it passed the Democrat House and only failed because Republicans held the Senate. No longer.

It seems to me that Christians wanting to find work, keep their earnings, and be public about their Christian convictions did a lot better living under Trump’s laws, policies, judges, etc. That’s what matters to me. I want to work without comprimising my values. I want to keep what I earn instead of handing it to people who aren’t moving towards God. I want to invest in people and organizations who are working for God, not against him.

I’m not interested in making the lives of non-Christians happier or more prosperous. I don’t think I should have give money or compelled speech to make irresponsible, immoral people feel better about their immorality or recklessness. I’m talking about people who turn their backs on God with things like LGBT lifestyles and having fatherless kids with hot bad boys.

I liked Trump’s laws, policies, judges, etc. That worked best for my Christian life plan. I had more money and time for people who really wanted God. Now I have to be scared about my job, do with less money (higher taxes, inflation, regulation and growing national debt), and watch what I say and do for fear of offending reckless, immoral, irresponsible non-Christians. The sort of authentic Christian life I enjoyed has suddenly gotten a lot harder. And I don’t like it. I don’t like being taxed and controlled by non-Christians.

(Image source)

What I often see among atheists is this tendency to set up expectations of how God would have acted and then complain that he doesn’t met those expectations. I don’t think that this is a good way to argue against a religion, because it’s subjective. God isn’t obligated to comport with atheist expectations. A much better way of evaluating religions is to test the claims each makes against evidence.

So in this post, I wanted to show how a reasonable person can evaluate and reject different worldviews using evidence.

Falsifying a religion using science

Consider this argument:

1. Hindu cosmology teaches that the universe cycles between creation and destruction, through infinite time.
2. The closest cosmological model conforming to Hindu Scriptures is the eternally “oscillating” model of the universe.
3. The “oscillating” model requires that the universe exist eternally into the past.
4. But the evidence today shows the the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.
5. The “oscillating” model requires that the expansion of the universe reverse into a collapse, (= crunch).
6. In 1998, the discovery of the year was that the universe would expand forever. There will be no crunch.
7. Therefore, the oscillating model is disconfirmed by observations.
8. The oscillating model also faces theoretical problems with the “bounce” mechanism.

Notice how the oscillating model is falsified by mathematics and experimental evidence. Remarkable, when you remember how the public schools would play Carl Sagan videos which promoted this no-Creator model of the universe.

The absolute origin of the universe out of nothing is also incompatible with atheism, Buddhism, Mormonism, etc. because they also require an eternally existing universe.

Atheism in particular is incompatible with the universe “coming into being”, because that would be a supernatural cause – a cause that created the natural world. According to the Secular Humanist Manifesto, atheism is committed to an eternally existing universe, (See the first item: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”). If something non-material brought all existing matter into being, that would be a supernatural cause, and atheists deny that anything supernatural exists. The standard Big Bang theory requires that all the matter in the universe come into being out of nothing.

Falsifying a religion using history

Consider this argument:

1. To be a Muslim, you must believe that the Koran is without error.
2. The Koran claims that Jesus did not die on a cross. (Qur’an, 4: 157-158)
3. The crucifixion of Jesus is undisputed among non-Muslim historians, including atheist historians.
4. Therefore, it is not rational for me to become a Muslim.

I’m going to support the premise that Jesus was crucified by citing historians from all backgrounds.

Consider some quotes from the (mostly) non-Christian scholars below:

“Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.” Gert Lüdemann

“That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”  J.D. Crossan

“The passion of Jesus is part of history.” Geza Vermes

Jesus’ death by crucifixion is “historically certain”. Pinchas Lapide

“The single most solid fact about Jesus’ life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion.” Paula Fredriksen

“The support for the mode of his death, its agents, and perhaps its co-agents, is overwhelming: Jesus faced a trial before his death, was condemned, and was executed by crucifixion.” L.T. Johnson

“One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Ponitus Pilate.” Bart Ehrman

That’s 7 famous historians: 3 atheists, 3 Jews and 1 moderate Catholic. The atheists, Ludemann, Crossan and Ehrman, have all debated against the resurrection of Jesus with William Lane Craig. Johnson is the moderate Catholic, the rest are Jewish historians. The Koran was written in the 7th century. That is why no professional historian accepts the Koran as more authoritative than the many earlier Christian and non-Christian sources for the crucifixion story. Many of the sources for the crucifixion are dated to the 1st century. It’s not faith. It’s history.

I have seen debates with Muslim scholars, and I have never once heard them cite a non-Muslim historian to the effect that Jesus was not crucified. To my knowledge, there is no (non-Muslim) historian who denies the crucifixion of Jesus in his published work.

Can Christianity be falsified by science or history?

Yes. If you prove that the universe is eternal than would falsify the Bible’s claim that God created the universe out of nothing. That would be a scientific disproof. If you could find the body of Jesus still inside a tomb, that would falsify the Bible’s claim about a resurrection. That would be a historical disproof. The nice thing about Christianity is that we make lots of testable claims. When someone claims to be a Christian, it’s a good thing if they can show how they arrived at that conclusion. Being able to square God’s existence with science, and Jesus’ resurrection with history are two crucial steps to showing the reasonableness of Christianity.

From far-left NBC News:

A new study suggests transgender women maintain an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers even after a year on hormone therapy.

The results, published last month in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, could mean the current one-year waiting period for Olympic athletes who are transitioning is inadequate.

“For the Olympic level, the elite level, I’d say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the tran5 women on average still have an advantage over the cis women,” he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.

[…]For the first two years after starting hormones, the tran5 women in their review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more situps than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts told NBC News, “they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.”

Their running times declined as well, but two years on, tran5 women were still 12 percent faster on the 1.5 mile-run than their cisgender peers.

Very interesting to think about when you consider Biden’s executive action allowing transgender women into biological women’s sports.

But you can’t say anything about it, because it you do, Big Tech will ban you.

Attacks against free speech by big tech companies have quickly escalated into a full-blown censorship campaign as social media giants are now regularly targeting and silencing Christians and conservatives. Their latest target? Focus on the Family.

The Christian organization has just been censored by Twitter. The platform locked the global ministry’s “Daily Citizen” publication for allegedly violating their rules against posting “hateful” content.

Focus on the Family CEO Jim Daly said this accusation is absolutely untrue.

The Daily Citizen tweeted a quote on Jan. 19 from one of its articles acknowledging that the Biden administration appointed a transgender woman to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of HHS.

The tweet read: “Dr. Lev1ne is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.”

It’s “inclusivity”. You can’t even explain what the terms mean any more, because feelings are more important than facts to the people in charge of permitting speech.