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News

Southern Baptists stand up for traditional marriage, freedom of conscience and religious liberty

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Winston Churchill on appeasement
Winston Churchill on appeasement

Life Site News reported on a resolution by the largest Protestant denomination.

Excerpt:

Southern Baptists voted to officially defend marriage, religious freedom and natural gender at their annual meeting this week, making strong statements against controversial measures over the last year that pose a threat to each.

In addition to laying out the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed a resolution specifically rejecting last year’s Supreme Court Obergefell decision redefining marriage, along with Barack Obama’s “guidance” requiring public schools to provide transgender bathroom access, handed down last month.

“The Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015 purporting to redefine marriage does violence to the Constitution and is contrary to the Bible and natural order,” the resolution states. “The Obama Administration’s recent ‘guidance’ requiring transgender access in public school bathrooms and locker rooms based on itsunauthorized redefinition of ‘sex’ in federal law rejects God’s design of male and female.”

The declaration, titled, “On Biblical Sexuality and the Freedom of Conscience,” was adopted with overwhelming support from the more than 7000 conference participants, Juicy Ecumenism reports, part of what led to made many there terming the gathering a historic event.

“We dissent from the Obergefell opinion that purports to redefine the institution of marriage created by God,” the Baptist resolution states, along with pledging to strengthen Biblical marriage in homes, schools and communities. “We applaud and support the efforts of eleven state attorneys general in their challenge to the Obama Administration’s transgender ‘guidance.’”

The nation’s largest Protestant denomination affirmed the Biblical definition of marriage at its conference last year, just prior to the Obergefell ruing being released in late June.

The year prior at the annual meeting the SBC voted to oppose “sex reassignment” surgery, urging transgender people to “trust in Christ and to experience renewal in the Gospel,” and affirming “God’s good design that gender identity is determined by biological sex and not by one’s self-perception.”

Baptists met for this year’s conference Tuesday and Wednesday this week in St. Louis, reaffirming love for individuals identifying as transgender in their convention statement, “seeking their good always,” and offering them welcome in Baptist churches.

“God alone is Lord of the conscience,” Baptists said in their resolution, making several references supporting religious freedom protection and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

“Any law that directly contradicts natural law and biblical truth is an unjust law,” it states. “Our highest respect for the rule of law requires that we not affirm an unjust law that directly contradicts higher law.”

They also made mention of recent religious liberty attacks suffered by U.S. citizens targeted for their biblical values, stating, “Business owners and employees of various faiths are increasingly faced with decisions to submit to unjust laws about marriage and sexuality or violate their consciences.”

“Experience and recent history have shown that when the government redefines marriage as anything other than between a man and a woman, the police power of the state is brought to bear to enforce that redefinition,” their resolution continued, “resulting in an inevitable collision with religious freedom and conscience rights.”

Baptist convention attendees also voted to call on the U.S. Congress to pass the First Amendment Defense Act, along with civic leaders at all levels to pass legislation supporting religious freedom, and stated their unity with those persecuted for their religious convictions on marriage.

The First Amendment Defense Act is our best chance at stopping the attacks by the Democrats on free speech and religious liberty. Ted Cruz had vowed to pass the First Amendment Defense Act – he is the co-sponsor of the legislation. If we had selected Cruz as the nominee, we would have got this passed. But, we selected Donald Trump, who promised gay activists “forward motion” on gay rights issues. He gets an F from marriage rights activists on gay rights issues, which is not surprising given his history of political donations to Democrats and sexual immorality. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are (of course) champions of gay marriage and the gay rights movement, and they oppose free speech, freedom of conscience and religious liberty.

News

Obama administration will scrub “Islamic State” from Orlando terrorist’s 911 transcripts

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Don't worry, the real threat to America is climate change
Don’t worry, the real threat to America is climate change

So, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that all references to Islamic motivations for the Orlando attack have to be removed from the 911 transcript, lest the public understand that this attack was actually another instance of radical Islamic terrorism.

Real Clear Politics reports:

In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that on Monday, the FBI will release edited transcripts of the 911 calls made by the Orlando nightclub shooter to the police during his rampage.

“What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda,” Lynch said. “We are not going to hear him make his assertions of allegiance [to the Islamic State].”

The Obama administration does not want any connection made by the public between this terrorist attack and radical Islam – even though the terrorist himself made them. It all has to be covered up, because the first duty of the Democrat Party is not to protect you from crime or terrorism. Their job is to make radical Islamic terrorists look as peaceful as the Girl Scouts. That’s what you’re paying them taxpayer dollars to do, isn’t it?

The Obama administration’s plan to protect us

So, there is a plan to protect us from terrorist attacks, and it was announced by Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch. Are you ready for the plan? This is the great plan that moral relativists on the secular left are offering to protect us. Are you ready?

Here it is from the Daily Wire:

Speaking to the audience at the Muslim Advocates’ 10th anniversary dinner Thursday, Lynch said her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America and vowed to prosecute any guilty of what she deemed violence-inspiring speech.

“The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence,” she said.

[…]After touting the numbers of “investigations into acts of anti-Muslim hatred” and “bigoted actions” against Muslims launched by her DOJ, Lynch suggested the Constitution does not protect “actions predicated on violent talk” and pledged to prosecute those responsible for such actions.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch declined to charge Lois Lerner for using the IRS as a weapon to persecute conservative groups in an election year.

What did the IRS do?

Wall Street Journal explains:

Three years on, the Internal Revenue Service has finally handed over its list of the organizations the agency’s tax-exempt division targeted for their political views. All it took to shake the disclosure from the agency were dozens of lawsuits and a federal appeals-court order.

In a court filing last month, the IRS produced a list of 426 groups that were singled out for special scrutiny and in some cases had approval of their application for tax-exempt status delayed. The filing was in response to a lawsuit by NorCal Tea Party Patriots, which has struggled for three years to get the agency to acknowledge the names of those it mistreated, so that the targets have the option of joining the litigation. The targets run the gamut from big outfits such as the Tea Party Patriots to local groups that used the “tea party” moniker.

The list doesn’t include 40 groups that have already opted out of the suit, so the actual number targeted is 466. The lawsuit’s goal is to find out how the targeting occurred and to seek damages for “viewpoint discrimination,” among other legal violations.

So, no prosecution for the IRS fascists, but you’ll likely be prosecuted by the government if you report suspicious behavior by radicalized Muslims.

Do you feel safe now? Do you think that the Democrats are serious about the threat of Islamic terrorism? Do you think that you should elect the Democrats again in November 2016?

News

A must-read series of posts on cosmic fine-tuning by Allen Hainline

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

There are four posts in the series, so far. I think Allen might be done, so I’m going to link to all four and snip something I like from each one.

The first post is on whether the fine-tuning is real, and whether a multiverse explains the fine-tuning so that there is no need for a cosmic Designer.

I just have to choose this quote from the atheist Stephen Hawking on the fine-tuning:

The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers [i.e. the constants of physics] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded. It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers [i.e. the constants of nature] that would allow for development of any form of intelligent life.

And from Luke Barnes, who I’ve mentioned before on this blog:

In my years of researching this topic, I’m amazed at how few scientists who have studied the fine-tuning details disagree with this core claim that the subset of life-permitting physics is a tiny fraction among possibilities. Since Luke Barnes is a top researcher on this topic, consider his input on the level of acceptance of the fine-tuning claim: “I’ve published a review of the scientific literature, 200+ papers, and I can only think of a handful that oppose this conclusion, and piles and piles that support it.[3]”

And on the multiverse as a way to escape the fine-tuning:

The key issue though is that for the multiverse to be an adequate explanation for the fine-tuning it requires the conjunction of several hypotheses for which we lack any empirical evidence:

  1. A universe-generating mechanism that generates a plethora of universes
  2. That this mechanism doesn’t itself require fine-tuning
  3. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics
  4. The ability to widely vary constants in those universes. If you think that it’s a foregone conclusion that String Theory/M-Theory[8] will come to the rescue in this area, you should watch this video clip by Oxford physicist Roger Penrose where he exclaims that “it’s not even a theory … it’s a collection of hopes”.

Occam’s razor therefore does seem to favor design over the multiverse. When one accounts for the extensive problems in affirming premise 2 and how these multiverse theories make predictions incompatible with our universe, the hypothesis that God designed the physics of the universe to bring about life is more plausible.

Here’s the second post, where he explains the fine-tuning argument philosophically, and gives an example of one of the constants that has to be fine-tuned in order to support complex, embodied intelligence of any kind.

The cosmological constant:

The inference to design will be more easily recognized if we shed some light as to the specialness of the required values. Consider the size of the bull’s eye and wall based on just 1 parameter – the cosmological constant. There is a natural range for possible values for this constant because there are known contributions that are 10120times larger than the overall net value. (There is a near perfect but inexact cancellation of contributions accurate to 120 decimal places). Let’s use the most conservative numbers in the physics literature that indicate a fine-tuning to 1 part in 1053. If the cosmological constant, which governs the expansion rate of the universe, had been larger than its current value by this tiny fraction, then the universe would have expanded so fast that no stars or planets would have formed and therefore no life. If the value were smaller by this amount then the universe would have rapidly collapsed before the universe cooled sufficiently to allow for stable information storage which is required by any self-replicating system such as life.

In the third post, he responds to objections to the fine-tuning argument. One objection you hear from atheists who don’t understand the science is that any selection of constants and quantities is as likely as any other, so our life-permitting set is just random. Now, first off, there are only 10 to the 80 atoms in the visible universe, so if the cosmological constant is fine-tuned to 1 in 10 to the 120, it’s not rational to say “it just happened randomly”.

But here is Allen’s response:

However, the assumption that any set of constants is just as likely as any other is the very thing that we want to know. Starting off with that as an assumption begs the question against design. As Luke Barnes articulates in this excellent podcast dealing with responses to the fine-tuning claim, suppose we’re playing poker and every time I deal I get a royal flush. If this continues to happen, you become increasingly convinced that I’m likely to be cheating. If I responded to an accusation of cheating by just saying “well any set of 5 cards is just as likely as any other so you can’t accuse me of cheating” you would be rational to reject this explanation. The question is not “how likely is any set of 5 cards?” but rather “how likely is it I’m cheating if I just dealt myself 10 straight royal flushes?” This question accounts for the possibility that I’m cheating which would almost certainly be true in this scenario. So the right fine-question is “given the fine-tuning evidence, how likely is it that the constants were set at random?” The values for physical constants conform to a very particular pattern – that which supports life. The fact that we have so many finely-tuned constants makes it unlikely that they were all set at random (at least in the single universe scenario and I’ve already shown some of the problems/challenges in multiverse explanations.)

Every 5-card hand that you draw is equally unlikely, but the royal flush is the highest hand in the game and always wins. Every hand you draw is unlikely, but whatever you draw is overwhelmingly likely to not be a royal flush.

Finally, the fourth post deals with the objection that the constants and quantities could not have been other than they are.

He quotes physicist John Barrow giving 5 reasons why the constants can vary, and then this:

Even if the constants and laws of physics couldn’t vary, there is even more reason to think that there were many physically possible sets of initial conditions. Paul Davies states this emphatically:

“Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn’t follow that the physical universe itself is unique…the laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions…there is nothing in present ideas about ‘laws of initial conditions’ remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it…it seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise.[4]”

John A. Wheeler agrees: “Never has physics come up with a way to tell with what initial conditions the universe was started off. On nothing is physics clearer than what is not physics.”

The constants and quantities are not determined by physics. They were selected by whoever created nature in the first place.

So that’s the series. I noticed that he kept linking to this Common Sense Atheism podcast featuring famous cosmologist Luke Barnes. I grabbed it to listen this weekend, and you might want to get it, too. It’s over an hour. It seems like it is one stop shopping to understand common objections to the fine-tuning argument, and how strong each one is.