Category Archives: News

News

Secular left feminist Sarah Stankorb explains why women leave Christianity

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I sometimes read articles from mainstream conservative pastors and theologians. One of these is the famous Doug Wilson who blogs at Blog and Mablog. Well, recently he was attacked by a secular left feminist named Sarah Stankorb. I looked over her recent articles, and a pattern emerged about what she – and the women she writes about – think that Christianity is about.

Here’s an article entitled “These Evangelical Women Are Abandoning Trump and Their Churches”.

She talks about a woman named Katie Loveland, who leaves her church for the following reasons:

  1. If a church allows a man to act like a fool towards women, then Christianity is false.
  2. If a church allows a man who has passed a background check and holds a concealed carry permit to be armed so he can protect church members from attacks like this one, then Christianity is false.
  3. If Christians support a politician who has a pro-life record of demonstrated achievements over a politician who promises to remove all state and local restrictions on abortion from conception to birth, then Christianity is false.

And another woman named Elaina Ramsey, and her reasons for rejecting Christianity:

  1. If Christianity requires you to disagree with your gay and queer friends, then Christianity is false.
  2. If Christians refuse to marry you because you’ve been raped, then Christianity is false.
  3. If the Bible records (and condemns) the rape of Bathsheba by David, then Christianity is false.
  4. If Christianity teaches that murdering humans is wrong, and science says that the unborn are human, then Christianity is false.

And more about another woman named Deirdre Sugiuchi, and her reasons for rejecting Christianity:

  1. If your father claims to be a Christian and spanks you, then Christianity is false.
  2. If you are sent to an abusive Christian reform school for being rebellious, then Christianity is false.
  3. If Christianity feels anti-gay, anti-black or anti-woman, then Christianity is false.
  4. If the United States opposes Al Qaeda for carrying out the 9/11 attack, then Christianity is false.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

It turns out that a lot of emotion-based people claimed to be Christians and were accepted as “Christian”, without any rational basis for believing it. And later on, when Christianity made them feel bad about being reckless and irresponsible, or when it loses them non-Christian friends, then they abandoned it. It’s not that they discovered that Christianity is illogical. It’s not that they discovered evidence to falsify Christian truth claims. Their stated reasons for leaving Christianity are entirely subjective. And none of the reasons do the work of falsifying core Christian truth claims, such as God’s existence, the inspiration of the Bible, or the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

Just to review, here are some of the reasons why authentic Christians believe in Christian theism:

  • scientific evidence for the origin of the universe
  • scientific evidence for cosmic fine-tuning
  • scientific evidence for the origin of life
  • scientific evidence for habitability
  • scientific evidence for sudden origin of body plans
  • scientific evidence for molecular machines
  • scientific evidence for irreducible complexity
  • the argument from consciousness
  • the argument from objective morality
  • the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus

These arguments – and many more like them – are defended by scholars in books published by top academic presses. But I see no evidence that emotion-based ex-Christians have ever read such books. Why would they? They aren’t interested in forming their worldview based on objective reality. They aren’t interested in constructing a life plan where their desire for happiness comes second to following Jesus.

People who abandon Christianity because of feelings or experiences have not “left Christianity”. They just stopped faking being Christians. They were never actually Christian in the first place. To be a Christian in the first place, you have to know that Christianity is true. People who accept the arguments for Christianity listed above have just as many disappointments with God, bad experiences with Christians, and bad experiences with churches as people who were guided by their emotions and experiences. 

In fact, I personally know women who grew up fatherless, or had defective parents, or other setbacks. They got themselves into a lot of trouble with churches and immoral men, and yet today, not only are they solid Christians, but they actually take the lead in gospel enterprises, such as apologetics. Why? Because for them, the objective truth of Christianity was more important than their subjective feelings and experiences.

The differences between Christians and non-Christians is that Christians overlook bad feelings, shame and rejection, because we know facts don’t care about our feelings. For real Christians, the normal Christian life requires bad feelings, disappointments, bad experiences and rejection by non-Christians. We actually read the Bible, and so we expect bad things to happen to us.

Note: if you are relying on someone to act in a Christian way – say, as a marriage partner – then you’d better find out what kind of “Christian” they are, by asking them how they arrived at their beliefs. Do not marry a fake Christian who just reads romance novels and fiction. A person can’t determine the truth of Christianity by focusing on career, travel, entertainment, promiscuity, etc.

News

Steven Crowder discusses Ayesha Curry’s “Call Her Daddy” interview

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Steph Curry is an NBA player who has earned over a billion dollars in salary. Unfortunately, he made a terrible choice of wife. His wife, Ayesha Curry, recently went on the far-left feminist “Call Her Daddy” podcast, and essentially complained about the life that he provides for her. I just thought it was the most interesting thing to see how modern young women think of men who provide.

Her bio is here, it seems like she has no earned degrees or private sectory work experience beyond being an entertainer. And I’m pretty sure that any success she has at that is going to be due to her husband’s fame!

Here’s the video:

So, I think Ayesha’s interview shows a major reason why marriage to a modern young woman is a terrible deal for a successful Christian man. Why? Because everything that Christian men do that is awesome and difficult seems to be seen as an entitlement by modern young women. It doesn’t get you any consideration as a man that you are good at these things especially when women are getting helped along in school and at work to earn the same as a man, sometimes with much less effort. Whereas the previous generation would give a man respect and gratitude for slogging through STEM degrees, waking up early, saving money, remaining chaste and sober, etc., modern young women tend to dismiss it all. In addition, modern women are overwhelmingly leftist, and see a man’s moral and spiritual leadership as liabilities. So those skills actually count against a man.

And I know why, too. I once was dating a woman who had an unused degree in business administration. She graduated in 5 years, but she never ever used the degree for business administration. In fact, she turned down jobs that I found her in FT100 companies that were for business administration. She just wanted to do easy jobs, have huge gaps in her resume, and have fun. But the interesting part is that when I showed her the preparations that I had made to be a good provider – graduate degree, 6-figure portfolio, provisional patent, publications, etc. – she was dismissive and disrespectful. And I’ll never forget what she said about my investment portfolio. She said “I hope that you’ll consider my advice when you’re buying and selling securities, because I learned a lot about that in school”. She was 20K in debt and had been carrying that debt unpaid for 7 years after graduation. Never bought a stock or an option or a mutual fund in her life. Her money was being spent on fun, thrills and travel! That’s what this Ayesha interview reminded me of.

So, I think it’s just something for young men to think about. When you are deciding whether to date and get married, you have to think about whether the hard things that you have done are going to get you any respect and gratitude. Especially if you have some sort of plan for your family! Over the course of dating during my 20s and 30s, I had a non-stop line of Christian women with student loan debt and low-earning easy jobs telling me how they didn’t know how to cook, didn’t want to clean, didn’t want to homeschool the kids, didn’t want to have more than 2 kids, didn’t want to do campus ministry, didn’t want to learn science or economics, and so on. They just felt entitled to everything that I would provide, but they weren’t willing to do anything that I wanted the marriage to achieve for the Boss. They were quite confident that marriage was about making the woman happy, not God. Men are just “servant leaders”. Their achievements in the real world don’t qualify them to lead.

And the worst part of this was the responses of pastors, parents, and Christian leaders. Instead of reining in the entitlement of young Christian women, they would instead say things like “you need to lower your standards” and “why don’t you let your 30-year-old girlfriend go to EUROPE for a couple of years, and just wait for her to come back”. I’m sure that these Christian parents, pastors and leaders thought that they were whipping men into shape, but the end result is that men just decline the bad deal that’s being offered to them. We can do ministry and early retirement instead. And that’s better for the Boss than a marriage that is just going to be led by a woman’s feelings.

Country breakfast

Anyway, Crowder did mention something called “country breakfast” and I looked it up, and here’s what it is:

Now, Ayesha didn’t cook this. This Christian grandmother of 15 grandkids makes it. It looks amazing! American breakfast is one of my 3 favorite foods. (I also love Indian food and Thai food). But do you think that any modern young woman can cook something like that? That’s ground sausage in the top left, and STEAK STRIPS at 7 o’clock. Two kinds of potatoes and two kinds of eggs and two kinds of cheese and two kinds of pig!

It’s no wonder that men 100 years ago were chasing traditional women for marriage. But you can’t get anything like that today! Today, you’re more likely to have your pick of aging feminists who have nothing to offer. That’s not a good deal for a man. We have other things that we can do that will be better for the Boss.

News

How the WMAP satellite confirmed nucleosynthesis predictions and falsified atheism

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Prior to certain scientific discoveries, most people thought that the universe had always been here, and no need to ask who or what may have caused it. But today, that’s all changed. Today, the standard model of the origin of the universe is that all the matter and energy in the universe came into being in an event scientists call “The Big Bang”. At the creation event, space and time themselves began to exist, and there is no material reality that preceded them.

So a couple of quotes to show that.

An initial cosmological singularity… forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity… On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.

Source: P. C. W. Davies, “Spacetime Singularities in Cosmology,” in The Study of Time III, ed. J. T. Fraser (Berlin: Springer Verlag ).

And another quote:

[A]lmost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.

Source: Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, The Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 20.

So, there are several scientific discoveries that led scientists to accept the creation event, and one of the most interesting and famous is the discovery of how elements heavier than hydrogen were formed.

Nucleosynthesis: forming heavier elements by fusion
Nucleosynthesis: forming heavier elements by fusion

Here’s the history of how that discovery happened, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) web site:

The term nucleosynthesis refers to the formation of heavier elements, atomic nuclei with many protons and neutrons, from the fusion of lighter elements. The Big Bang theory predicts that the early universe was a very hot place. One second after the Big Bang, the temperature of the universe was roughly 10 billion degrees and was filled with a sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons and neutrinos. As the universe cooled, the neutrons either decayed into protons and electrons or combined with protons to make deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen). During the first three minutes of the universe, most of the deuterium combined to make helium. Trace amounts of lithium were also produced at this time. This process of light element formation in the early universe is called “Big Bang nucleosynthesis” (BBN).

The creation hypothesis predicts that there will be specific amounts of these light elements formed as the universe cools down. Do the predictions match with observations?

Yes they do:

The predicted abundance of deuterium, helium and lithium depends on the density of ordinary matter in the early universe, as shown in the figure at left. These results indicate that the yield of helium is relatively insensitive to the abundance of ordinary matter, above a certain threshold. We generically expect about 24% of the ordinary matter in the universe to be helium produced in the Big Bang. This is in very good agreement with observations and is another major triumph for the Big Bang theory.

Moreover, WMAP satellite measurements of mass density agree with our observations of these light element abundances.

Here are the observations from the WMAP satellite:

Scientific observations match predictions
Scientific observations match predictions

And here is how those WMAP measurements confirm the Big Bang creation event:

However, the Big Bang model can be tested further. Given a precise measurement of the abundance of ordinary matter, the predicted abundances of the other light elements becomes highly constrained. The WMAP satellite is able to directly measure the ordinary matter density and finds a value of 4.6% (±0.2%), indicated by the vertical red line in the graph. This leads to predicted abundances shown by the circles in the graph, which are in good agreement with observed abundances. This is an important and detailed test of nucleosynthesis and is further evidence in support of the Big Bang theory.

“An important and detailed test”.

For completeness, we should learn how elements heavier than these light elements are formed:

Elements heavier than lithium are all synthesized in stars. During the late stages of stellar evolution, massive stars burn helium to carbon, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, and iron. Elements heavier than iron are produced in two ways: in the outer envelopes of super-giant stars and in the explosion of a supernovae. All carbon-based life on Earth is literally composed of stardust.

That’s a wonderful thing to tell a young lady when you are on a date: “your body is made of stardust”. In fact, as I have argued before, this star formation, which creates the elements necessary for intelligent life, can only be built if the fundamental constants and quantities in the universe are finely-tuned.

Now, you would think that atheists would be happy to find observations that confirm the origin of the universe out of nothing, but they are not. Actually, they are in denial.

Here’s a statement from the Secular Humanist Manifesto, which explains what atheists believe about the universe:

Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

For a couple of examples of how atheistic scientists respond to the evidence for a cosmic beginning, you can check out this post, where we get responses from cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, and physical chemist Peter Atkins.

You cannot have the creation of the universe be true AND a self-existing, eternal universe ALSO be true. Someone has to be wrong. Either the science is wrong, or the atheist manifesto is wrong. I know where I stand.

Positive arguments for Christian theism