Category Archives: News

News

Atheist morality: 10 Seattle police officers arrest man for reading the Bible near Gay Pride event

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Seattle has a reputation as being the most atheistic city in America. LGBT scandal after LGBT scandal. Including the resignation of their gay mayor for sex with an underage minor. Does atheism make a difference to human rights and moral behavior? I think it makes human rights and moral behavior impossible to rationally ground.

Anyway, here is the story from the Daily Wire: (H/T Samizdat, a Canadian apologetics web site)

A Seattle street preacher says he was arrested for simply reading his Bible at a public park near a Seattle Gay Pride event.

Matthew Meinecke was surrounded by Seattle police officers and taken to the police station, where he was fingerprinted before being released.

“So at this point we can no longer stand by,” a police officer told Meinecke as he arrested him. “The risk that you pose for public safety by remaining here can be mitigated if you leave, it’s your last chance.”

“I don’t want to leave because I’m not in danger,” Meinecke responded.

The video of the arrest is here:

Here’s what you can expect in the way of morality, in atheist Seattle:

One Seattle Pride event featured several men riding their bicycles naked as some children watched; during another event some men paraded around naked in front of children, according to footage posted of the event.

Meinecke posted a video of Bibles that he said had been seized from him and ripped as one person yelled at him, “Get the f*** out of here! Get your holy water off my ovaries, b****! Get the f*** out!”

One person yelled at Meinecke to “forget about your imaginary fairy in the f***ing sky.”

What is rational, once you accept the idea that the universe is an accident, and human beings are machines made out of meat? What kind of morality is possible if you accept “survival of the fittest”?

Can you rationally ground human rights on atheism?

On atheism, morality is reduced to cultural fashions, like clothing fashions and cooking fashions. It differs by time and place, and each standard is “right” in that time and place. Infanticide is right in some times and places, and wrong in other times and places. When an atheist says X is wrong now, the same atheist can say X is right in a different time and place. Atheists aren’t referring to any objective standard when they talk about right and wrong, they’re just describing what cooking or clothing is OK for their time and place. The words are just to present themselves a certain way to people around them. Moral language is meaningless. It’s just social behavior – saying what will make people like you. Atheists don’t spend time thinking about morality. There’s nothing to study. There’s nothing to reason about. There’s nothing to submit to. Who would waste a moment thinking about which flavor of ice cream is “morally right” for everyone, in all times and in all places?

But even this pretense of morality stops the moment that a prescribed course of action goes against an atheist’s self-interest. This is the only life they have, and they are determined to feel as happy as they can, regardless of who else gets hurt. Right to free speech? Right to religious liberty? Those things can be trampled by the state the minute they offend an atheist. Just look at what happens to Christian business owners who decline to participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies in atheist cities like Seattle. Atheists don’t think that forcing people to disobey their consciences is wrong. That article I linked to points out how the laws are never enforced when it’s an LGBT-owned business discriminating against Christians. “Atheist morality”. Justice is not rationally-grounded on atheism. It’s all about power.

I recently linked to a couple of excellent posts on morality and atheism. Check them out. In that post, I also linked to a post by James Bishop, featuring TONS of interesting quotes by famous atheists, about the implications of adopting the worldview of atheism.

Here’s one by former Cornell University paleontologist Will Provine:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.

There are tons of quotes like that from leading atheists on James Bishop’s blog. It’s very important to understand that atheists who use moral language are speaking about things that they believe do not actually exist in reality. You really have to check a person’s worldview before you can trust them.

News

Are suicide rates lower for sexual minorities in LGBT-affirming countries?

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Are suicide rates for LGBT people the same as the suicide rates for heterosexual people in countries with high levels of LGBT-affirmation? In case I get asked this question, I thought it might be good to look at the data in advance, and decide what the evidence looks like, and what line I should take in a debate about it. And since I have a blog, I’m going to post all of my findings below.

First, I want to note that in this NBC News article, the following countries are listed in the “15 Best Countries for LGBTQ Expats“:

  • Denmark
  • Iceland
  • Sweden

I say this, because these are the countries measured in the studies below.

So, here is one study from November 2019, published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, entitled “Suicide among persons who entered same-sex and opposite-sex marriage in Denmark and Sweden, 1989–2016: a binational, register-based cohort study“.

The abstract says:

This large register-based study found higher suicide rates among individuals who entered an SSM, compared with those who entered an OSM. A lower suicide rate was noted for individuals in SSMs in recent years. More research is needed to identify the unique suicide risk and protective factors for sexual minority people.

SSM means same-sex “marriage” and OSM means opposite-sex marriage.

Here’s another study from Sweden about same-sex “married” LGBT people, published May 2016, in the European Journal of Epidemiology. The title is the “Suicide in married couples in Sweden: Is the risk greater in same-sex couples?”

The abstract says:

Even in a country with a comparatively tolerant climate regarding homosexuality such as Sweden, same-sex married individuals evidence a higher risk for suicide than other married individuals.

Here’s another study from Sweden about LGBT individuals, published in March 2016 in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, entitled “Self-reported suicide ideation and attempts, and medical care for intentional self-harm in lesbians, gays and bisexuals in Sweden“.

The abstract says:

Positive histories of suicidal ideation, attempts and medical care for intentional self-harm, including higher levels of recurrence, are more prevalent among LGB individuals in contrast to heterosexuals. Lesbian/bisexual women evidence an earlier age of onset of treatment.

Here’s another study from Sweden about people who underwent sex-reassignment surgery, published in February 2011, PLoS One, entitled “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden“.

The abstract says:

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.

Here’s a study from Iceland about LGBT adolescents, published in May 2015, and entitled “Suicidal risk and sexual orientation in adolescence: A population-based study in Iceland“.

The abstract says:

The LGB girls were six times more likely to have had frequent suicide attempts, whilst the LGB boys were 17 times more likely to have attempted suicide that often.

So, there are some studies I found, and if anyone asks me about this, I’ll explain that although I am not a social science researcher, the studies of people in LGBT-friendly countries show that there is a higher risk of suicidal thoughts and attempted suicide for LGBT individuals and couples than there is for heterosexual individuals and couples. And if they ask which countries, I’ll say Sweden, Iceland and Denmark. I’ll say that these are countries where same-sex “marriage” is legal.

News

How the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation 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 the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Here’s the history of how that discovery happened, from the American Physical Society web site:

Bell Labs radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were using a large horn antenna in 1964 and 1965 to map signals from the Milky Way, when they serendipitously discovered the CMB. As written in the citation, “This unexpected discovery, offering strong evidence that the universe began with the Big Bang, ushered in experimental cosmology.” Penzias and Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 in honor of their findings.

The CMB is “noise” leftover from the creation of the Universe. The microwave radiation is only 3 degrees above Absolute Zero or -270 degrees C,1 and is uniformly perceptible from all directions. Its presence demonstrates that that our universe began in an extremely hot and violent explosion, called the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

In 1960, Bell Labs built a 20-foot horn-shaped antenna in Holmdel, NJ to be used with an early satellite system called Echo. The intention was to collect and amplify radio signals to send them across long distances, but within a few years, another satellite was launched and Echo became obsolete.2

With the antenna no longer tied to commercial applications, it was now free for research. Penzias and Wilson jumped at the chance to use it to analyze radio signals from the spaces between galaxies.3 But when they began to employ it, they encountered a persistent “noise” of microwaves that came from every direction. If they were to conduct experiments with the antenna, they would have to find a way to remove the static.

Penzias and Wilson tested everything they could think of to rule out the source of the radiation racket. They knew it wasn’t radiation from the Milky Way or extraterrestrial radio sources. They pointed the antenna towards New York City to rule out “urban interference”, and did analysis to dismiss possible military testing from their list.4

Then they found droppings of pigeons nesting in the antenna. They cleaned out the mess and tried removing the birds and discouraging them from roosting, but they kept flying back. “To get rid of them, we finally found the most humane thing was to get a shot gun…and at very close range [we] just killed them instantly. It’s not something I’m happy about, but that seemed like the only way out of our dilemma,” said Penzias.5 “And so the pigeons left with a smaller bang, but the noise remained, coming from every direction.”6

At the same time, the two astronomers learned that Princeton University physicist Robert Dicke had predicted that if the Big Bang had occurred, there would be low level radiation found throughout the universe. Dicke was about to design an experiment to test this hypothesis when he was contacted by Penzias. Upon hearing of Penzias’ and Wilson’s discovery, Dicke turned to his laboratory colleagues and said “well boys, we’ve been scooped.”7

Although both groups published their results in Astrophysical Journal Letters, only Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the CMB.

The horn antenna was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990. Its significance in fostering a new appreciation for the field of cosmology and a better understanding of our origins can be summed up by the following: “Scientists have labeled the discovery [of the CMB] the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century.”8

It’s the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century.

In the New York Times, Arno Penzias commented on his discovery – the greatest discovery of the 20th century – so:

The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the bible as a whole.

Just one problem with the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th century: atheists don’t accept it. Why not?

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