Category Archives: News

News

Canada’s prime minister explains why pro-life groups are not eligible for job grants

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Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau
Kathleen Wynne and Justin Trudeau

First, the news story, and after we’ll see the prime minister explain his reasons for this policy in his own words. As you are reading, keep in mind that the federal government sells no products or services of value in a free market. They earn no money. All the money they have was confiscated from people working in the free (private sector) market.

The Calgary Herald reports: (H/T McKenzie)

In the name of “inclusion” and “tolerance,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government are excluding and being intolerant to faith-based social agencies and churches from even applying for the Canada Summer Jobs program that provides subsidies to hire summer students.

In so doing, Trudeau will hypocritically be harming the very people he claims to care for the most — youth seeking work experience and the poorest of the poor in Canada.

The new application for the Canada Jobs Grant requires that the organization’s core mandate respects “reproductive rights” along with other human rights, and unless that “attestation” is checked, the online application cannot be submitted. That means fewer students will be hired to help the most vulnerable in society.

Now why do you think that Trudeau, a secular left fascist, would do this? Could it be that he wants people to see the secular state as the sole provider of assistance to people in need, by attacking private Christian charities?

In the name of tolerance, the Trudeau government is being intolerant to a huge swath of society that does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to caring for the poor and vulnerable in Canada.

According to the report Religion, Participation, and Charitable Giving — written at the behest of Canadian Heritage, Statistics Canada, Health Canada and other organizations — author Kurt Bowen found that actively religious people are far more likely to give of their time and money to charitable causes — including secular charitable causes.

According to the 1999 report, “the religiously active are 32 per cent of all Canadians, but they are responsible for 65 per cent of all direct, charitable donations. Conversely, the 42 per cent of Canadians who are religiously inactive generate only 20 per cent of all charitable givings.”

Famous economist Thomas Sowell discussed a study by Arthur Brooks on who gives to charity in National Review. The study found that religious people give far more of their time and money to helping others than secular people. So, by attacking the part of the population that actually cares about morality, Trudeau is basically trying to cut off the poor from private-sector charity, so that they have nowhere else to turn for help except the secular government.

Now let’s hear Trudeau – a former substitute drama teacher, who was elected because of his looks and famous name – explain why taxing pro-lifers and then discriminating against them is a good idea.

Townhall reports: (H/T Sean McDowell)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke Wednesday about a new requirement in the Canadian summer jobs grant application that groups must indicate support for “the right to access safe and legal abortions” to be included in the program. Trudeau defended the requirement and called groups opposed to abortion “not in line with where we are as a government, and quite frankly where we are as a society.”

“If you’re pro-life then you are ridiculed and insulted, but if you’re pro-choice then you are praised,” a student told Trudeau at a town hall at McMaster University and was greeted with applause.

Trudeau replied that defending rights and freedoms “is at the core of who I am and, quite frankly, is at the core of who Canada is. … At the same time, we need to know that there is a difference between freedom of expression and acting on those expressions and beliefs.”

He went on to explain his issue with pro-life groups receiving the grant.

“An organization that has the explicit purpose of restricting women’s rights by removing rights to abortion and the right for women to control their own bodies is not in line with where we are as a government, and quite frankly where we are as a society,” he said.

He also clarified that while people can believe what they want, acting on those beliefs was problematic, in his view.

“Of course, you’re more than allowed to have whatever beliefs you like,” he continued. “But when those beliefs lead to actions determined to restrict a woman’s right to control her own body, that’s where I, and I think we, draw the line as a country. And that’s where we stand on that.”

You can have whatever beliefs you like, as you’re working hard to earn the money that will be spent by your secular leftist fascist overlords. You’re certainly good enough to work for money, you’re just not good enough to get anything from the government for it.

And this is why we need pro-lifers to realize that the government is not their friend when it comes to spending money. We should not be giving them any more money than they need to do their  Constitutionally-determined responsibilities. When you grow the government to meet every need, e.g. – health care, then you find out that their idea of health care isn’t what you expected. In Canada, abortion is health care. Pro-lifers pay taxes to the government, and the government takes those taxes and performs abortions with them. If you don’t like it, then don’t vote for the government to take over health care. We need people who are moral to understand what it means to trust a secular government to do the things that should be done by individuals, families, churches, and community organizations. And when those entities keep their own money, they can do more than the government can anyway.

News

New study: unborn child’s heartbeat is detectable at 16 days

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I'm Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this study
I’m Scheming Unborn Baby, and I approve this study

A new study conducted by University of Oxford was published in the journal eLife. (H/T Dad)

Here is the report from the Oxford University website:

When does our heart first start to beat? Until now, researchers thought that the first time our heart muscle contracted to beat was at eight days after conception in mice, which equates to around day 21 of a human pregnancy.

Now, a team funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF) at the University of Oxford has demonstrated earlier beating of the heart in mouse embryos which, if extrapolated to the human heart, suggests beating as early as 16 days after conception.

In the study, published in the journal eLife, researchers looked at the developing mouse heart and found that the muscle started to contract as soon as it formed the cardiac crescent – an early stage in heart development. In mice, this crescent forms 7.5 days after conception, which is equivalent to day 16 in the human embryo. Previously, it was thought that the heart started to contract a stage later, when the heart appears as a linear tube.

Here’s how they did it:

By adding fluorescent markers to calcium molecules within the mouse embryo, the team was able to see at exactly which point in time the calcium tells our heart muscle cells to contract and then become coordinated enough to produce a heartbeat.

The team also found that this initiation of beating was essential for the heart to develop properly at an early stage and that a protein called NCX1 plays a key role in the generation of the calcium signals needed to produce the beating action of the heart.

The heart is the first organ to form during pregnancy and is critical in providing oxygen and nutrients to the developing embryo. The process of heart development is highly conserved between mammalian species, meaning that these findings may add considerably to our understanding of how the human heart develops.

Abortion is another one of those issues where conservatives are determined to abide by what the progress of science reveals, while liberals are determined to block out what science reveals.

Here is a nice video that shows how unborn children develop in the womb:

From the moment of conception, a new set of human DNA is formed, different from the mother, different from the father. And already the little unborn child is in relationship with his or her mother. He or she is depending on her to honor her obligation to him or her, because it was she who chose to have sex, and who chose the man to have sex with, and who chose when in the relationship to have sex with him.

Those of us who are Christians have always believed that abortion was morally wrong, going write back to the beginning of the Christian faith.

This is from Birds of the Air.

Summary:

Recently I came across a reading of the Didache. “The what?” you may ask. The Didache is a book written somewhere in the first or second century. For a long time it was up for consideration as Scripture. It was believed to be the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Eventually it was agreed that the book was an excellent book, but not inspired Scripture. So I was pleased to be able to download this admirable book containing good teachings from the early Church fathers.

The book seemed to be largely a lot of quotes from Scripture. You’ll learn the basic rules of Christianity — “First, you shall love God who made you; second, love your neighbor as yourself.” You’ll learn that “grave sins” are forbidden, like adultery, murder, fornication, and so on. (They specifically include pederasty in the list.) There are instructions regarding teachers, prophets, Christian assembly, and so on. Lots of the normal, good stuff. But, since this was written sometime prior to 200 AD, I was somewhat surprised at this instruction: “You shall not murder a child by abortion” (Didache, Ch 2).

Christians really would benefit from looking at the moral values of the early church. These days, we tend to decide what is right and wrong based on our feelings, including the feelings we have when other people like us or don’t like us. But deciding things based on your feelings was not real popular with the earliest Christians. They decided what to do based on what was morally right, and they always protected the weak rather than favoring the selfishness and hedonism of the strong.

News

New study: children of divorced parents are less likely to be religious

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A family praying and reading the Bible
A family praying and reading the Bible

This is from the leftist Washington Post, of all places.

Excerpt:

Two widely recognized trends in American society might have something to do with each other.

Divorce rates climbed to the highest levels ever in the 1980s, when about half of all marriages ended in divorce.

And in the present day, Americans are rapidly becoming less religious. Since 1972, the share of Americans who say they do not adhere to any particular religion has increased from 5 percent of the population to 25 percent.

Could those two trends be related? A new study from the Public Religion Research Institute says yes. The children of divorced parents have grown up to be adults of no religion.

People whose parents divorced when they were children are significantly more likely to grow up not to be religious as adults, the study found. Thirty-five percent of the children of divorced parents told pollsters they are now nonreligious, compared with 23 percent of people whose parents were married when they were children.

[…]Cox said his team found that even children of divorced parents who are religious are less religious than their peers. Thirty-one percent of them go to services every week, compared with 43 percent of religious people whose parents were married when they were growing up.

This part about Protestant pastors wimping out of thorny issues is very interesting:

Andrew Root, a professor at Luther Seminary who has written a book about the spiritual consequences of divorce for children, was not surprised to hear about the study’s findings.

“Everything in a divorce gets divided. Literally everything. Parents’ friends get divided. Relatives get divided. Everyone takes sides,” Root said. “Even religion takes sides. The church gets divided. Dad leaves Mom’s faith, or vice versa. Negotiating those worlds becomes difficult.”

Root said churches are not doing enough to speak directly to the concerns of children in those situations, so the kids lose faith in the ability of the church to help them. He said that when the divorce rate climbed in the 1980s, many members of the clergy, especially mainline Protestant pastors, stopped speaking out against divorce so as not to alienate struggling congregants. But by going silent on the subject, they didn’t offer any comfort to the kids.

As adults, Root said, those same people do not believe the church will respond to their adult problems. “They’re now thinking, ‘I’m dealing with depression.’ Or, ‘I’m dealing with my own marital troubles.’ The church must not have anything to say to me, because when I was 8 and dealing with divorce, my Sunday-school teacher didn’t even say, ‘Man, Amanda, that must be really complicated for you’,” Root said.

I get e-mails all the time from people who are suffering from the effects of the Sexual Revolution, which was put in place by selfish adults so they could do whatever they wanted. Children suffered a lot from this. Obviously, the painful of experience of their parents divorcing hurt their view of God. But divorce also hurts a child’s ability to know what a man loving a woman in a stable commitment looks like, and what a woman loving a man in a stable commitment looks like. I mean – what does love between sexes look like when the “in love” feeling has worn off, and all that remains is the commitment to build something together? I think that a lot is riding on the stability of the relationship between the child’s mother and father.