Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

American Atheists PR Director announces he wants to be a woman

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Story from the Christian Post.

Excerpt:

Dave Muscato, the public relations director for American Atheists, has announced that he’ll be transitioning into a transgender woman in the near future, and has chosen the name Danielle as a new identity.

“I consider my gender identity to be personal and, despite my passion for PR, don’t intend to do much in the way of interviews about my personal gender identity if I can help it. I fully support intersectionality and working together with LGBTQ activists on mutual goals, but I’m first and foremost an atheist activist, and that hasn’t changed,” Muscato wrote in a blog post on Monday for The Friendly Atheist.

“There are many other people who are significantly more educated about trans activism than I am and who are already doing great work in that area. I support them and obviously have an interest in their success, but it’s not my area of expertise. Exposing the harms that religion causes and making the world a better place for atheists will always be my passion.”

Muscato noted that she’s (formerly he) grateful for the full support of American Atheists President David Silverman and Managing Director Amanda Knief, as well as other co-workers.

Muscato added that gender identity and gender expression don’t always go hand-in-hand.

“While I have identified internally as a woman for a long time, for now, I will be presenting more-or-less as a man; that is, I will continue to wear mostly traditional men’s clothing, speak in my natural lower voice, and so on,” the American Atheists public relations director wrote.

“Transitioning is a slow, painful, and expensive process and can take many months to several years. As I begin to take bigger steps to change my appearance, I will also begin dressing differently and changing other aspects of my gender expression.

American Atheists, one of the largest secular organizations in the U.S., launched the world’s first ever TV channel dedicated exclusively to atheism earlier this year.

“Atheist TV,” as the channel is called, is shown through Internet-streaming service Roku 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and has partnered with other notable atheist groups, such as the Richard Dawkins Foundation.

“There’s a glut of religious TV programming out there, from televangelists to Christmas specials,” Muscato told New York Daily News in May. “But there’s no atheist channel. We wanted to fill that void. … We’ll have shows about philosophy, science, history — a critical examination of the facts.”

His new biography on the American Atheists page says he is “a former Christian praise & worship musician”. As if I wasn’t suspicious of them enough already! Ha ha.

So I think the take-away lesson here is that although atheists like to portray themselves are being motivated by reason, it’s not generally the truth, in my experience.

After all, we live in a created universe that is fine-tuned for complex embodied life. Those are the facts. We have evidence for intelligent causes at the origin of life and in the Cambrian explosion. More facts. Our galaxy, solar system and planet support intelligent life, even though most possible galaxies, solar systems and planets do not have what it takes to support life – and that’s an understatement. Facts again. So when a person claims to be an atheist after being presented with these facts, it’s not reason that is causing them to stay an atheist. It’s something else. And it’s not reason that causes them to spend so much time and effort trying to get rid of God, and objective moral values and duties. It’s something else.

Commentary

Is asking “Am I going to Hell?” a good response to scientific arguments for theism?

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I want to use this woman’s story to show how sensible atheists reach a belief in God.

Excerpt:

I don’t know when I first became a skeptic. It must have been around age 4, when my mother found me arguing with another child at a birthday party: “But how do you know what the Bible says is true?” By age 11, my atheism was so widely known in my middle school that a Christian boy threatened to come to my house and “shoot all the atheists.” My Christian friends in high school avoided talking to me about religion because they anticipated that I would tear down their poorly constructed arguments. And I did.

As I set off in 2008 to begin my freshman year studying government at Harvard (whose motto is Veritas, “Truth”), I could never have expected the change that awaited me.

It was a brisk November when I met John Joseph Porter. Our conversations initially revolved around conservative politics, but soon gravitated toward religion. He wrote an essay for the Ichthus, Harvard’s Christian journal, defending God’s existence. I critiqued it. On campus, we’d argue into the wee hours; when apart, we’d take our arguments to e-mail. Never before had I met a Christian who could respond to my most basic philosophical questions: How does one understand the Bible’s contradictions? Could an omnipotent God make a stone he could not lift? What about the Euthyphro dilemma: Is something good because God declared it so, or does God merely identify the good? To someone like me, with no Christian background, resorting to an answer like “It takes faith” could only be intellectual cowardice. Joseph didn’t do that.

And he did something else: He prodded me on how inconsistent I was as an atheist who nonetheless believed in right and wrong as objective, universal categories. Defenseless, I decided to take a seminar on meta-ethics. After all, atheists had been developing ethical systems for 200-some years. In what I now see as providential, my atheist professor assigned a paper by C. S. Lewis that resolved the Euthyphro dilemma, declaring, “God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God.”

Joseph also pushed me on the origins of the universe. I had always believed in the Big Bang. But I was blissfully unaware that the man who first proposed it, Georges Lemaître, was a Catholic priest. And I’d happily ignored the rabbit trail of a problem of what caused the Big Bang, and what caused that cause, and so on.

By Valentine’s Day, I began to believe in God. There was no intellectual shame in being a deist, after all, as I joined the respectable ranks of Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers.

I wouldn’t stay a deist for long. A Catholic friend gave me J. Budziszewski’s book Ask Me Anything, which included the Christian teaching that “love is a commitment of the will to the true good of the other person.” This theme—of love as sacrifice for true good—struck me. The Cross no longer seemed a grotesque symbol of divine sadism, but a remarkable act of love. And Christianity began to look less strangely mythical and more cosmically beautiful.

So, I want to point out the progression of her beliefs from atheist to deist to Christian. First, she listened to the scientific arguments for God’s existence, which took her to deism, which is a variety of theism where God just creates the universe and then doesn’t interfere with it after. Those arguments, the Big Bang and the cosmic fine-tuning, were enough for her to falsify atheism and prove some sort of theism. After that, she remained open to the evidence for Christian theism, and finally got there after looking at other evidence.

But this makes me think of how some of the atheists that I talk to do the exact opposite of what she did. I start off by explaining to them scientific evidence for a Creator and Designer. I explain the mainstream discoveries that confirm an origin of the universe (e.g. – light element abundance predictions and observations), and I cite specific examples of fine-tuning, (e.g. – the gravitational constant). I explain protein sequencing and folding, and calculate the probabilities of getting a protein by chance. I explain the sudden origin of the phyla in the Cambrian explosion, and show why naturalistic explanations fail. I talk about the fine-tuning needed to get galaxies, solar systems and planets to support life. But many of these atheists don’t become deists like the honest atheist in the story. Why not?

Well, the reason why not is because they interrupt the stream of scientific evidence coming out of my mouth and they start to ask me questions that have nothing to do with what we can know through science. See, evangelism is like building a house. You have to start with the foundation, the walls, the plumbing, the electricity, etc., but you can’t know all the specific details about furniture and decorations at the beginning. But militant atheists don’t care that you are able to establish the foundations of Christian theism – they want to jump right to the very fine-grained details, and use that to justify not not building anything at all. Just as you are proving all the main planks of a theistic worldview with science, they start asking “am I going to Hell?” and telling you “God is immoral for killing Canaanite children”, etc. They want to stop the construction of the house by demanding that you build everything at once. But, it is much easier to accept miracles like the virgin birth if you have a God who created the universe first. The foundation comes first, it makes the later stuff easier to do.

So rather than adjust their worldview to the strong scientific evidence, and then leave the puzzling about Hell and Old Testament history for later, they want to refute the good scientific arguments with “Am I going to Hell?”. How does complaining about Hell and unanswered prayer a response to scientific evidence? It’s not! But I think that this does explain why atheists remain atheists in the face of all the scientific evidence against naturalism. They insulate their worldview from the progress of science by focusing on their emotional disappointment that they are not God and that God isn’t doing what they want him to do. That’s the real issue. Authority and autonomy. In my experience, they are usually not accountable to science, although there are, thank God, exceptions to that rule.

Commentary

Will pro-life women vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 just because she is a woman?

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Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

This story is from Life News.

Excerpt:

Candidates such as out-going Colorado Senator Mark Udall and Iowa Senator-wanna-be-but-defeated Iowa Rep. Bruce Braley, along with other Democratic candidates, ran campaigns based on an extremist pro-abortion position. They were absolutely convinced that the American public would vote for candidates who say it’s okay to kill helpless, innocent unborn babies at any stage, provided they mischaracterized opposition to this extremism as a “war on women.”

But they took this charade even further. Pro-abortion figures such as Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards tried to tell voters that female candidates who oppose abortion know nothing about what women really want.

Clinton, at a pro-Braley rally, told voters in Iowa, “It’s not enough to be a woman, you have to be committed to expand rights and opportunities for all women.” Because Joni Ernst (who defeated Braley) thinks unborn babies should be protected, she isn’t committed to expanding rights and opportunities for women?

Obviously, the voters didn’t see Ernst in that light. She won by almost a hundred thousand votes and she is now the pro-life Senator-elect from Iowa.

Pro-abortion advocates like to say abortion is a woman’s issue, but only pro-abortion women should voice their opinions. Indeed, they come very close to saying it is illegitimate for a woman who is pro-life to speak on abortion. The voices of pro-life women just don’t count. The hypocrisy, or should I say the gall, of people who think you have to want to kill unborn children in order to be pro-woman is stunning.

In 2008 and 2012, many, many black people who were personally pro-life voted for Barack Obama. Will pro-life women do the same for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

I have to say that it is always a concern to me, as someone who would like to get married, when the majority of young, unmarried women vote Democrat. Maybe I am wrong, but I not only see this as a vote against family in favor of bigger government (via taxes), but I also see it as a rejection of the pro-life and pro-marriage views.

It bothers me when a woman says she is pro-abortion, because to me it means that she wants to perform actions (sex) that are pleasurable to her, but then resort to murder to avoid being burdened with the natural consequences of her actions. You can’t make a marriage with a woman who is willing to resort to murder in order to avoid taking responsibility for her actions. If you’re going to marry a woman, you want her to be pro-life – to put the lives of little innocent babies first – however they come into being. You want her to have the attitude that it is more important to care for innocent people than to be without the encumbrance of relationships with others. After all, she will be encumbered by a relationship to you if you marry her, and that will not always be pleasant.

It also bothers me when a woman says she is pro-gay-marriage, because to me it means that she is denying the complimentary nature of men and women. She is saying that men can take the place of a mother, and a woman can take the place of a father. In that case, it seems to me that you are dealing with a person who doesn’t take the needs of children seriously. Rather than taking a child’s real needs seriously, they are more interested in telling selfish adults what they want hear. A man shouldn’t make children with a woman who doesn’t care about the child’s need for a mother and a father. If she doesn’t think that a father is necessary to raise a child, then it will be much easier for her to divorce you. It’s wrong to celebrate any arrangement that deprives a child of biological parents.