Category Archives: News

News

Society of Christian Philosophers shames invited speaker for expressing Biblical views

13 Comments
Anti-marriage gay activists vandalize church
Anti-marriage gay activists vandalize church

Something interesting happened at a recent meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers, which is a group of left-leaning philosophers who are (apparently) neither Christian, nor Philosophers.

How so?

Rightly Considered blog explains what happened:

[A]t the latest Midwest meeting of the SCP, Richard Swinburne presented a paper in which he argued for the view that homosexual acts are immoral and that homosexuality is a disability that should be cured. The response from some quarters was predictably hysterical and unremarkable. What is remarkable is that the President of the SCP, Michael Rea, shamefully acquiesced to the leftist hysteria by issuing an ingratiating public apology, accusing Swinburne of causing pain and undermining the SCP’s mission of ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion:

I want to express my regret regarding the hurt caused by the recent Midwest meeting of the Society for Christian Philosophers. The views expressed in Professor Swinburne’s keynote are not those of the SCP itself. Though our membership is broadly united by way of religious faith, the views of our members are otherwise diverse. As President of the SCP, I am committed to promoting the intellectual life of our philosophical community. Consequently (among other reasons), I am committed to the values of diversity and inclusion. As an organization, we have fallen short of those ideals before, and surely we will again. Nonetheless, I will strive for them going forward. If you have thoughts or feedback you would like to share with me, I would welcome hearing from you via email or private message.

Ed Feser had an interesting point-by-point response to that the SCP did the Swinburne.

I thought this part was the most interesting:

[W]hat is this business about the “hurt” Swinburne’s views allegedly caused?  Philosophers discuss and defend all sorts of ideas that some people are bound to find offensive.  So what?  If, to take just one example, a philosopher defends the moral legitimacy of abortion, he may well offend those who regard abortion as a species of murder; whereas if he argues instead that abortion is a species of murder, he may well offend those who have had abortions.  Still, philosophers discuss and debate abortion all the time, and no one regards this as noteworthy or in need of some disclaimer.  So why are things different in the case of Swinburne’s chosen topic?

[…]If the arguments for the side you disagree with in the abortion debate are not good arguments, then that is what you should be trying to show.  Going on about hurt feelings doesn’t add anything at all to the philosophical critique.  On the other hand, if the arguments for the side you disagree with are good arguments, then you should stop disagreeing with them and stop being offended by them.  In either case, hurt feelings are neither here nor there.  And every philosopher knows this where other topics are concerned.  Why are things any different in Swinburne’s case?

Apparently, if you attach the word “Christian” to the name “Society of Christian Philosophers”, it seems to mean as much as attaching the word “Affordable” to the “Affordable Care Act”. Unlike the Evangelical Philosophical Society, the SCP has no requirement for a statement of faith, and boy, does it show.

More Feser:

Fifth, Rea speaks about the SCP having “fallen short” of the ideals of diversity and inclusion and of his resolve to “strive for them going forward.”  Well, what does that entail exactly?  Evidently he thinks that letting Swinburne say what he did amounts to having “fallen short.”  So is Rea saying that, “going forward,” he will work to make sure that views like Swinburne’s are no longer expressed at SCP meetings, or at least in SCP keynote addresses?  How would preventing views from being expressed amount to the furthering of “diversity and inclusion”?  And how would that square with the free and open debate that philosophy is supposed to be all about?

Philosophy USED to be about free and open debate, now it’s just a bunch of crybabies silencing those who don’t celebrate their views.

Feser:

Civil and reasonable discussion about questions of sexual morality is increasingly difficult today, and it is precisely those who are most prone loudly to express their “hurt” feelings who make it so.  Even the most polite, reasoned, and carefully qualified objections to homosexual acts, transgenderism, etc. are routinely dismissed a priorias “bigotry,” fit only to be ridiculed and shouted down rather than rationally engaged.  In extreme cases those who express such views face cyberbullying, loss of employment, and the like.  As Justice Scalia pointed out in his dissenting opinion in United States v. Windsor, such views are now widely treated as “beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement” and their proponents shunned as if they were “enemies of the human race.”

To pretend (as some Christian philosophers I know do) that this sort of thing is essentially just a regrettable but understandable overreaction on the part of wounded souls who have had some bad experiences with obnoxious religious people is naiveté.  It is often rather a calculated political tactic aimed at making public dissent from liberal conventional wisdom on sexuality practically difficult or impossible.

Feser actually quotes several gay activists to prove that their goal is to shame opposition to their agenda at a non-rational level.

And that non-rational level seems to be the level that most left-wing philosophers are at. Rod Dreher quotes the response of one of the Yale philosophers to Swinburne’s views. It’s just name-calling and vulgarity. But maybe that’s all that philosophy is now. Sad to see that this is the case even with the Society of “Christian” Philosophers.

Philosophy, which used to be as rigorous as my own discipline of computer science because of its roots in symbolic logic, now appears to be as rigorous as any other far-left politically correct indoctrination on the modern university campus.

I’m a software engineer, I work for a living in the competitive private sector, where results matter. If I acted like philosophers do when confronted with opposing views, I’d be fired on the spot. But in the modern secular university, apparently sub-rational thuggery is a viable career alternative. I didn’t think that my opinion of philosophers and philosophy could go any lower, but it just did. No one should be paying money for a philosophy degree, and not one dime of taxpayer money should be funding these adult children.

News

New study: Contraceptives double risk of depression in teenage girls

Leave a comment
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood

The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

A Danish study of a million women has found a link between the use of hormonal contraception such as the the pill and increased risk of depression.

Compared with non-users, women and teenage girls aged 15 to 34 who used hormonal contraception had a 1.23 times higher risk of being diagnosed with depression, especially adolescents, according to a paper published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark analysed health registry data of one million Danish women from 2000 and followed them up after an average of six years.

Of the 55 per cent of those who used hormonal contraception, there were just over 23,000 first diagnoses of depression at the time of follow up.

More than 133,000 had received their first prescription of antidepressants.

The highest risk of depression was among the adolescent girls, who had a 1.8-times higher risk of first use of an antidepressant.

The risk varied slightly among the different types of hormonal contraception, but the risk was three times higher among those who used non-oral products, such as progestogen implants.

Few studies have quantified the effect of low-dose hormonal contraception on the risk for depression, but study author Ojvind Lidegaard says their research warrants the need for further studies into the potential adverse effects of the pill.

“Use of hormonal contraceptives was associated with subsequent antidepressant use and first diagnosis of depression at a psychiatric hospital among women living in Denmark.

“Adolescents seemed to be more vulnerable to this risk than women 20 to 34 years old,” Lidegaard said.

Of course, one wonders where these studies were BEFORE the pill was championed by the radical feminists. We didn’t have studies before we adopted abortion, no-fault divorce, single mother welfare and gay marriage, either. Do you think that those might have unintended consequences? Shouldn’t we care about the consequences before we adopt policies that go against traditional moral values?

Anyway, let’s review some studies on birth control pills, since no one ever tells young people these things before it’s too late.

This is from the ultra-leftist Time magazine, of all places.

Excerpt:

Dr. David Gaist, a neurologist at Odense University Hospital and the University of Southern Denmark, and his colleagues found that women taking hormonal contraceptives — those containing estrogen, progestin or a combination of both — showed higher rates of a rare brain tumor known as glioma. Their results, published Thursday in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, raise questions about the connection between oral contraceptives and brain cancer, but shouldn’t yet be interpreted as a reason to stop taking birth control, says Gaist.

Using data from Denmark’s national registries of health records, cancer cases and prescriptions, Gaist zeroed in on the women aged 15 years to 49 years diagnosed with glioma, and then analyzed whether they were prescribed contraceptives and for how long. Overall, women who had used hormonal contraceptives at any point in their lives showed a 50% higher risk of developing the brain tumors compared to those who had not used them. And women who used the birth control for more than five years nearly doubled their risk of the cancer.

Let’s take a look at some previous studies on the effects of contraceptives.

From the Times of India.

Excerpt:

 Women who take oral contraceptives regularly are at a higher risk of developing breast cancer compared to others, shows a study by AIIMS doctors. Breast cancer risk was found to be 9.5 times more in women with a history of consuming such pills. Early menstruation cycle, late marriage and lower duration of breastfeeding were the other major factors responsible for the disease among Indians, according to the study published in the latest issue of the Indian Journal of Cancer.

The study was conducted on 640 women, of which 320 were breast cancer patients. “We found long-term use of oral contraceptive pills (OCP) higher among those suffering from breast cancer-11.9%-compared to healthy individuals-1.2%,” said Dr Umesh Kapil, a professor at the public health nutrition unit, AIIMS. He said breast cancer is caused by repeated exposure of breast cells to circulating ovarian hormones, and long-term use of OCPs, which contain estrogen and progesterone, may be increasing this risk by causing hormonal imbalance.

The study mostly had women who used OCPs for birth control. Emergency contraceptives, popularly called morning-after pills, were not included.

This is not the first study, nor even the second study, to confirm this link.

Birth control pills

Many studies showed that taking birth control pills caused an increased risk of breast cancer.

Study 1: (March 2003)

RESULTS: Among the youngest age group (<35 years, n = 545), significant predictors of risk included African-American race (RR = 2.66: 95% CI 1.4-4.9) and recent use of oral contraceptives (RR = 2.26; 95% CI 1.4-3.6). Although these relationships were strongest for estrogen receptor-negative (ER-) tumors (RRs of 3.30 for race and 3.56 for recent oral contraceptive use), these associations were also apparent for young women with ER+ tumors. Delayed childbearing was a risk factor for ER+ tumors among the older premenopausal women (Ptrend < 0.01), but not for women <35 years in whom early childbearing was associated with an increased risk, reflecting a short-term increase in risk immediately following a birth.

Study 2: (October 2008)

Oral contraceptive use ≥1 year was associated with a 2.5-fold increased risk for triple-negative breast cancer (95% confidence interval, 1.4-4.3) and no significantly increased risk for non-triple-negative breast cancer (Pheterogeneity = 0.008). Furthermore, the risk among oral contraceptive users conferred by longer oral contraceptive duration and by more recent use was significantly greater for triple-negative breast cancer than non-triple-negative breast cancer (Pheterogeneity = 0.02 and 0.01, respectively).

When people talk about a war on women, maybe they should be thinking about this practice of promoting behaviors to women that make them sick. And eventually, we all have to pay for the increased costs of health care when we encourage people to do things that make them sick. We should not be promoting birth control to young women in order to enable them to have recreational sex. It’s not worth the harm it causes them. When you add in the psychological damage and the risk of abortion if the contraception fails, it really is not the right thing to tell a young woman.

News

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

Leave a comment
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.