This post is part of a series of posts on the subject of a debate that occurred at Cambridge University between Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Arif Ahmed. The topic is “Does God Exist?”.
Please leave your comments about who you think about who is winning and why. Please keep comments SHORT – less than 300 words, please.
I am especially interested in hearing from young earth creationists and their response to Craig and Ahmed’s views on the big bang theory, and what it implies. (I am not a young earth creationist – I think the big bang is based on reliable science, including the red-shifting of light from distant galaxies, the light element abundance predictions and the cosmic background radiation predictions)
Note: I wrote an e-mail to Dr. Ahmed to follow up with him, and got a very gracious reply. He thought that the fine-tuning issue was the most interesting, and he did not change his mind about the intellectual viability of Craig’s worldview as a result of the debate. Anyway, try to be nice. Nicer than me, I mean!
I will not be available to approve comments on Thursday night from 6 PM to about 2 AM on Friday morning.
After action reports from pro-life speaker Jose Ruba’s event at McGill University. (H/T Andrew) This is the same event that the student society voted to shut down, but that the Provost refused to shut down.
As Ruba began his presentation, about 20 students, including members of SSMU, began protesting, chanting, and singing children’s songs such as Old MacDonald and the hokey pokey. They bombarded the stage, blocked the screen, and one protester even grabbed at Ruba’s written materials, before being stopped by campus security.
The police arrived and eventually warned the protesters that they would be taken away by force if they did not get off the stage. Two resisted and were arrested, while others joined the audience and continued to heckle Ruba after police had left, until the designated time had run out and Choose Life ended the event.
Ruba told LifeSiteNews that he was able to present about half an hour of his presentation, but there was no moment where he was able to speak clearly.
Ruba had hardly finished the first sentence of his lecture when a protester near the front of the room stood up and announced that she believed he had no right to deliver his speech at McGill. The protesters proceeded by singing various songs, at one point completing an entire rendition of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
Protesters held their arms, jackets, and signs in front of Ruba’s video projections, which included photographs from biology textbooks, videos of the early stages of an abortion, and images of the Holocaust.
[…]Ruba told the protesters he was open to discussion, and that Choose Life had asked for a pro-choice speaker to engage in debate.
[…]In the midst of the confusion, Ruba explained to The Daily why he felt it was important for protesters to hear his message.
“[The protesters] have accused us of all these things, and frankly they haven’t heard this presentation yet. When people pre-judge someone based on heresy and rumours, that’s called prejudice,” Ruba said. “We don’t mind protests; that’s what free universities and free societies do. But they don’t censure people simply because they disagree or prevent people from sharing their ideas. That’s no longer what protests should be about. That’s censorship.”
They won’t debate with Mr. Ruba, because they would lose. Violence, then, is the only option they have left. A one-sided, public school, cradle-to-job indoctrination doesn’t really prepare students for open debate. (Especially when coupled with binge-drinking, irresponsible sex and drug use). When a fanatical true believer encounters facts and arguments, their response can only be disbelief, rage and violence.
I doubt that any of these students will ever be exposed to books like Dr. Francis J. Beckwith’s magnum opus “Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice“, published by Cambridge University Press. Or maybe Princeton University professor Robert P. George’s book “Embryo: A Defense of Human Life“. Pro-abortionists have never been exposed to an academic case for the pro-life position. That’s why they rage and attack.
And it leads to cases like this, where peaceful pro-lifers are shot and killed or nearly killed by being run over with SUVs. After all, if a person is willing to kill a helpless baby, why should they be concerned about killing grown-ups? Only pro-lifers are consistently pro-life. Only pro-lifers oppose taking the lives of innocent people at all stages of life, born and unborn.
I was present when the most fundamental rights of Mr. Ruba, the invited speaker from the Canadian Centre of Bio-Ethical Research and the rights of the students who actually wanted to listen to him were infringed upon. The anti-free speech mob refused the offer of a civilized debate and thus made it abundantly clear that they don’t espouse the same democratic values as the majority of Canadians.
To see this sad spectacle which took place at McGill, go to:
Take a provision in the Baucus bill that would punish any physician whose “resource use” is considered too high. Beginning in 2015, Medicare would rank doctors against their peers based on how much they cost the program—and then automatically cut all payments by 5% to anyone who falls into the 90th percentile or above. In practice, this rule will only apply to specialists.
[…]In Medicare, meanwhile, the Administration is using regulation to change how doctors are paid to benefit general practitioners, internists and family physicians. In next year’s fee schedule, they’ll see higher payments on the order of 6% to 8%.
[…]this boost for GPs comes at the expense of certain specialties. The 2010 rules, which will be finalized next month, visit an 11% overall cut on cardiology and 19% on radiation oncology. They’re targets only because of cost: Two-thirds of morbidity or mortality among Medicare patients owes to cancer or heart disease.
[…]The basic tools of heart specialists—echocardiograms (stress tests) and catheterizations—are slashed by 42% and 24%, respectively.
[…]Cancer doctors get hit because the Administration believes specialists order too many MRIs and CT scans. Certain kinds of diagnostic imaging lose 24% under new assumptions that machines are in use 90% of the time, up from 50%. There isn’t a radiologist in America running an MRI 10.8 hours out of 12, unless he’s lining up patients on a conveyor belt. But claiming scanners are used far more often than they really are lets the Administration “score” spending cuts.
And this change is applied to all expensive equipment, not just MRIs and CTs, so payments for antitumor radiation therapy will fall by up to 44%.
This will primarily affect the middle-aged and the elderly.
Opponents of the public option maintain that Canadian-style health care would entail rationing, caps on care, bureaucratic interference in medical decision-making and even “death panels” deciding when the ill become too expensive to save. Most Canadians believe this is a gross exaggeration of reality. But then how to characterize Ontario’s decision to cut off funding for colorectal cancer patients taking a life-prolonging drug, in order to save $9-million a year?
[…]Ontario Health Minister David Caplan rejected the suggestion that the cap on treatment was a financial decision alone, arguing it was based on clinical evidence. But it’s easy to reach the conclusion that the province decided nine extra months of life for a dying patient wasn’t worth the money. Which is pretty much the kind of decision a “death panel” would be confronted with.
There are ways to reduce the costs of health care while retaining freedom of choice in a capitalist system. Health care is so highly-regulated already that we are not even trying a fully capitalist system, like the one in Switzerland that I wrote about earlier.
Further study
Learn more about health care policy from my previous posts on health care:
WINTERY KNIGHT 