Category Archives: Polemics

Polemics

MUST-READ: What does the Bible say about forcing pro-lifers to perform abortions?

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Story from the New York Post. (H/T Hot Air – Cassy Fiano)

Excerpt:

A Brooklyn nurse claims she was forced to choose between her religious convictions and her job when Mount Sinai Hospital ordered her to assist in a late-term abortion against her will.

The hospital even exaggerated the patient’s condition and claimed the woman could die if the nurse, a devout Catholic, did not follow orders, the nurse alleges in a lawsuit.

“It felt like a horror film unfolding,” said Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, 35, who claims she has had gruesome nightmares and hasn’t been able to sleep since the May 24 incident.

The married mother of a year-old baby was 30 minutes into her early-morning shift when she realized she had been assigned to an abortion. She begged her supervisor to find a replacement nurse for the procedure. The hospital had a six-hour window to find a fill-in, the suit says.

Bosses told the weeping Cenzon-DeCarlo the patient was 22 weeks into her pregnancy and had preeclampsia, a condition marked by high blood pressure that can lead to seizures or death if left untreated.

The supervisor “claimed that the mother could die if [Cenzon-DeCarlo] did not assist in the abortion.”

But the nurse, the niece of a Filipino bishop, contends that the patient’s life was not in danger. She argued that the patient was not even on magnesium therapy, a common treatment for preeclampsia, and did not have problems indicating an emergency.

Her pleas were rejected, and instead she was threatened with career-ending charges of insubordination and patient abandonment, according to the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court.

Feeling threatened, Cenzon-DeCarlo assisted in the procedure.

She said she later learned that the hospital’s own records deemed the procedure “Category II,” which is not considered immediately life threatening.

WARNING: I am now going to be really mean. Please don’t read the rest of this if you don’t like me being judgmental against atheists.

I was thinking about the kinds of things that atheists think are “moral” and interpreting those things within a Biblical framework. I know that atheists support abortion because they don’t want to be compelled to diminish their own happiness by tending to the needs of their own baby, conceived as a result of their own irresponsible sexual behavior. So when they force a pro-life nurse to perform an abortion, what they are really saying is “I don’t want anyone punishing other people with the unhappy consequences of their own selfish pursuit of happiness, because then no one will judge and punish me when I do the same as they did”.

The problem is that atheists don’t want to be thought of as people who are willing to go as far as killing others in order to avoid facing judgment and consequences for their own actions. They have to invent some myth that justifies the abortion, instead. If they could only invent some plausible-sounding myth that would convince other people, and themselves, that their abortion was justified by some greater good. With the right myth, they could continue their pursuit of pleasure unimpeded by consequences and social disapproval. What possible myth could possibly provide moral justification for something as extreme as abortion?

Well, atheists decided to invent several myths to provide rationalization for abortion:

  • Darwinism – animals do it, and we’re just animals, so let’s do it!
  • overpopulation – we’ll all starve by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
  • resource exhaustion – we’ll be out of oil by 1970! Oops, I mean 1990! 2050!
  • global warming – too many people are driving cars so some have to go away!
  • embryonic stem-cell research – it will turn lead into gold, you’ll see!
  • rising crime rates – who cares about what economists say!
  • etc.

So basically they are inventing myths in order to justify abortion as a legitimate means of pursuing happiness in this life. And this made me think of how child sacrifice was used by pagan nations in the Bible. It’s exactly what is predicted in Romans 1:18-32, which is arguably the most useful passage in the Bible for understanding what our existence here is really about. They didn’t want to take responsibility for those demanding, expensive children they conceived during unmarried sex, because those children would reduce their selfish pursuit of pleasure. So they invented a variety of baseless myths in order to make abortion appear “moral” to themselves and to others.

The Bible mentions the habit of inventing “speculations” in order to avoid having to obey the moral law. Atheists feel that they are too “smart” to be restrained by authentic morality, especially one that is constantly under fire in the public schools, the mainstream media and pop culture. So they do destructive things and then are surprised to feel guilty about it. They want to be happy while sinning, and to avoid the natural consequences of sin that serve as warning signs of the judgment to come. If anyone dares to imply that there is any morality higher than selfishness, (say, by wearing a cross in public or by questioning Darwinism), then they use the power of the state to silence them.

That’s atheist “morality”. The Bible’s diagnosis of sin really hasn’t changed in 2000 years. The people who rebel against God have just found more sophisticated myths to justify their selfish pursuit of pleasure. Before, it was Molech. Today, it’s overpopulation causing global warming. And they are not afraid to enforce these myths on religious people using the power of the state. Anything to make everyone celebrate their destructive actions as though they were in fact good. And if they have to kill many people to pursue happiness, well, that’s fine on atheism – there is no “right to life” on atheism. It’s survival of the fittest. Morality is just an illusion created by evolution.

And that is why a pro-life nurse was forced to perform an abortion – because she made people who reject God feel guilty by calling attention to a real standard of objective morality which defies atheistic efforts to rationalize hedonism with speculative myths. She was telling them that we should not take the life of an innocent unborn human being just because it makes us happier to do so. She was opposing their hedonistic purposes, and the speculative myths that they had invented to justify their selfish, irresponsible pursuit of pleasure. Christian morality isn’t a headlong pursuit of selfish pleasure. It’s about self-denial and self-sacrifice – which is not pleasurable.

As I wrote before:

The great moral accomplishment of atheists in the last 100 years has been to murder 100 million people. And this is not counting the millions of deaths caused by abortion, and environmentalist bans on DDT. It also doesn’t count the millions of broken homes caused by the sexual revolution, or the social costs of raising children without fathers who go on to commit crimes.

When the intuitive awareness of God’s moral requirements conflicts with the atheistic desire for selfish happiness, atheists first do the crime, then they search around frantically for some fig-leaf to justify it as “moral”. Any speculation will do, and the “evidence” can be manufactured (at taxpayer expense) to fit the myths. They believe that if they could just get everyone to see that evil is really good, and to celebrate their selfish hedonism, then their feelings of guilt would vanish, and their happiness level would increase. Their attempts to demonize Christianity and Christians is also part of their plan – they want to celebrate their own behavior as moral and deride the behavior of authentic Christians as immoral.

The very concept of morality is illusory on an atheistic worldview.

And lest anyone think that I can’t defend the Christian worldview as true, click here and start engaging.

Polemics

MUST-READ: What does Climategate really prove about global warming?

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In my opinion, the most important thing to come out of the e-mail scandal is the source code for the graph generation program.

What does the CRU source code really say?

Here’s the source code for the file “briffa_sep98_e.pro“.

It contains this section of the code which defines an array of adjustments that will be applied to the raw data. The purpose of the adjustments according the programmers own comments (lines that start with ; are comments) is to hide the decline in temperatures, so that the graph will look like a hockey stick. In the words of the programmer, the adjustment is called a “fudge factor” and is “very artificial”.

Here’s the adjustment, called a fudge factor by the programmer:

;****** APPLIES A VERY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION FOR DECLINE*********
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor

Line 3 creates the 20 subsets from the raw tree ring data, with each subset spanning 5 years. The subsets start in 1904. Line 4 (which wraps to the line 5) creates an array of 20 adjustments that will be applied to the raw data to change the original values. The data is stored in a variable called yrloc and the adjustments are stored in a variable called valadj.

The data is left alone from 1904-1928, adjusted downward from 1929-1943, lowered for 1949-1953 and then raised at the end.

Year
 …….. Fudge Factor
1904 0
1909 0
1914 0
1919 0
1924 0
1929 -0.1
1934 -0.25
1939 -0.3
1944 0
1949 -0.1
1954 0.3
1959 0.8
1964 1.2
1969 1.7
1974 2.5
1979 2.6
1984 2.6
1989 2.6
1994 2.6
1999 2.6

And then the adjustment is actually applied to the data here, and stored in a variable called yearlyadj (line 3).

; APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,x)
densall=densall+yearlyadj

The true believers respond

I notice that on Science Blogs, they are claiming that the adjument is never applied because the line that applies it is commented out. But they are using the briffa_sep98_d.pro file, not the briffa_sep98_e.pro file. Someone actually pointed that out to them in the comments, but they haven’t printed a correction.

Here’s a sample comment from the post showing how the global warmists respond:

Apparently similar code appears in another snippet the results of which weren’t commented out, but still, it doesn’t matter.

Well, it certainly doesn’t matter to the mainstream media since they didn’t report the story for two weeks.

Other comments in the source code explain that data is omitted

You should also know about comments in the source code like this:

Hide the decline

(Click for larger version)

When the missing data is added, the decline appears

Here’s the graph of temperatures with the full data set used.

Hide the decline

There’s the decline they’re trying to hide in red.

Re-considering the hockey stick graph

Take a look at this post from JoNova which re-caps the work of Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre.

Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph needed to be corrected:

Jo writes:

In 1995 everyone agreed the world was warmer in medieval times, but CO2 was low then and that didn’t fit with climate models. In 1998, suddenly Michael Mann ignored the other studies and produced a graph that scared the world — tree rings show the “1990’s was the hottest decade for a thousand years”. Now temperatures exactly “fit” the rise in carbon! The IPCC used the graph all over their 2001 report. Government departments copied it. The media told everyone.

But Steven McIntyre was suspicious. He wanted to verify it, yet Mann repeatedly refused to provide his data or methods — normally a basic requirement of any scientific paper. It took legal action to get the information that should have been freely available. Within days McIntyre showed that the statistics were so flawed that you could feed in random data, and still make the same hockey stick shape nine times out of ten. Mann had left out some tree rings he said he’d included.

[…]Astonishingly, Nature refused to publish the correction. It was published elsewhere, and backed up by the Wegman Report, an independent committee of statistical experts.

And Keith Briffa’s hockey-stick graph that used cherry-picked data also needed to be corrected:

Jo writes:

In 2009 McIntyre did it again with Briffa’s Hockey Stick. After asking and waiting three years for the data, it took just three days to expose it too as baseless. For nine years Briffa had concealed that he only had 12 trees in the sample from 1990 onwards, and that one freakish tree virtually transformed the graph. When McIntyre graphed another 34 trees from the same region of Russia, there was no Hockey Stick.

The sharp upward swing of the graph was due to one single tree in Yamal.

Skeptical scientists have literally hundreds of samples. Unskeptical scientists have one tree in Yamal, and a few flawed bristlecones…

The CRU e-mails also reveal that CRU “scientists” sought to marginalize and persecute (Expelled?) individuals and scientific journals that disagreed with them. Is that science? Hiding your data and methods, and threatening people who disagree with you. Is that science?

So what does the graph of temperatures really look like?

Here’s what global temperatures have really done over time:

Does this graph show that global warming is man made? Do medieval knights drive around in SUVs too much? Well, if you are getting billions of dollars of taxpayer funding, then maybe they do. Maybe the data that shows that knights don’t drive SUVs is wrong. Maybe the data needs to be adjusted to show that knights DO drive SUVs. Maybe the sample needs to be tailored to prove that global warming is man-made.

Consider Melanie Phillips writing in the UK Spectator.

Melanie cites this e-mail about the Medieval Warming Period from Phil Jones, the director of the now disgraced Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.The Medieval Warming Period is a period during the Middle Ages when the Earth’s temperature was higher than it is today.

Phil Jones writes:

Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.

This is the director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This lab forms the backbone of the the case for global warming alarmism. Is this science? Is this how a scientist is supposed to treat the data?

Follow the money

Billions of dollars in funding are at stake.

Excerpt:

Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents hacked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he’d been awarded in the 1990s.

Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?

Thus, the European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.

Supply, as we know, creates its own demand. So for every additional billion in government-funded grants (or the tens of millions supplied by foundations like the Pew Charitable Trusts), universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them.

Popularizers like Al Gore would also benefit if the majority of non-scientists can be convinced that there is global warming, that global warming is man-made, and that government control of individuals and corporations is needed to fix the problem.

Here’s a simple explanation of how it works:

And the media covers up for them – they are lazy, ignorant of science, and they are overwhelmingly biased in favor of socialism.

Problems in the United States and New Zealand

Note: Christopher Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is suing NASA in order to get them to release their data. And in New Zealand, climate “researchers” have been caught modifying the raw data to show global warming that isn’t there. Take a look at this UK Telegraph article that tells the story so far.

Related posts

Consider Melanie Phillips writing in the UK Spectator.

Melanie cites this e-mail about the Medieval Warming Period from Phil Jones, the director of the now disgraced Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.The Medieval Warming Period is a period during the Middle Ages when the Earth’s temperature was higher than it is today.

Phil Jones writes:

Bottom line – their is no way the MWP (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and varaibility.