Here’s a neat video from a normally mean atheist, named Penn. Since I don’t own a TV, I have no idea who he is, but this is a thoughtful talk. Penn does not expect Christians to act like atheists in public.
From this, we learn two things:
Making fun of atheists on the Internet is one thing, but if you have atheists that you relate to in person, be nice.
Some atheists are grown-ups. They admire authentic, consistent Christianity, boldly expressed.
I will be surveying Christians soon to see why we don’t do what Penn says, and I’ll publish the results.
By the way, blogging is light today, because I had to work on a guest post for someone.
If you haven’t read any of my mentoring posts, you can read some of those to keep busy!
You will watch this 3 minute video about the Democrats’ plan for single-payer health care right now! (H/T Heritage Foundation)
This video is courtesy Verum Serum, the same guys who brought us that Jan Schakowsky video where she admits that Obama’s plan will destroy private medical insurance. They seem to be a Christian blog, so I blogrolled them, along with Bush White House economist Keith Hennessey, who I linked to twice.
Quick quote from Heritage Foundation’s post:
As Yale professor Jacob Hacker says in the video: “Someone once said to me this is a Trojan Horse for single payer and I said well its not a Trojan Horse, right? Its just right there.”
And then later: “One of the virtues of it though is that you can at least make the claim that there is a competitve system between the public and private sectors.”
Don’t forget some other videos I posted on health care, (that post has a link to Laura’s amazing post on health care that was on Hot Air, which had more helpful videos!).
A comprehensive, point-by-point refutation of government-run health care is here, at the Heritage Foundation.
They cover:
the hidden costs of government-run health care, that are paid by the private sector
the low efficiency and low quality of existing government plans like Medicare and Medicaid
how government-run health care would lead to controls on your private life to reduce health costs
the real solution to the health care mess: competition, de-regulation and consumer choice
Some good news on health care
OK, Heritage Foundation had this story on a bill introduced by Republican senators Tom Coburn and Richard Burr. It’s called the “Patient’s Choice Act”.
Excerpt: (I bolded the stuff I liked)
As Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph Antos with American Enterprise Institute note in The Wall Street Journal, the legislation “provides a path to universal coverage by redirecting current subsidies for health insurance to individuals. It also provides a new safety net that guarantees access to insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.”
By restructuring the tax treatment for health insurance, the plan would give every taxpayer direct assistance to buy private health insurance, and end the inequities that plague the current system. The bill would shift the $300 billion annual tax exclusion for employer-based health benefits toward refundable tax credits for families and individuals. Families would get $5,700 a year and individual consumers would get $2,300 a year to purchase private plans and invest in health savings accounts (HSAs).
Low-income families would receive a supplemental debit card worth up to $5,000 that would help them pay for health coverage and out-of-pocket medical bills. They’d also be incentivized to make the most of their health care dollars since the remaining balance on their card would roll over to the next year. The expected expansion of private health plans would reduce the dependence of many uninsured Americans on the hospital emergency rooms for routine care, saving American taxpayers billions of dollars.
“The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance,” Turner and Antos add.
This is what Republicans would do if we could elect enough of them.
Spotted this video over at Hot Air, posted by AllahPundit, who is an atheist. He is beginning to question whether atheism leads to great heights of moral behavior. You’ll recall that this is one of the factors that convinced A.N. Wilson, as well as the Wintery Knight himself.
Atheism maintains that the universe is an accident, that there is no objective moral standard, no free will, no accountability when you die, no ultimate significance to our actions, no after-life, and no one to whom moral duty is owed. Bill Maher is a committed atheist. Let’s see what counts as morality on atheism.
And here is an excerpt from AllahPundit’s comments:
A quickie from last night’s show displaying all the charm and subtlety we’ve come to expect, and surely the first time in his life that he’s had an unkind word to say about breast implants. There’s something cosmically apt about him attacking her: No one in American media better embodies the lefty paradox of libertinism paired with judgmentalism, therefore no one’s better qualified to prosecute her for the left’s capital crime of hypocrisy.
Why are atheists making moral judgments in an accidental universe, where their moral standards are just their own personal preferences, or at best the arbitrary conventions of their society? Why even attribute blame to Carrie Prejean if she doesn’t even have free will, which is an impossibility on atheism, since we are just mindless matter?
There are some things that other people do that I don’t like based on personal preferences. For example, I do not like people who spend a lot of time following sports or watching popular movies in the theater. But I don’t insult them for not complying with my preferences. And that’s all morality is, on atheism. Individual preferences and cultural conventions.
You can only judge others if there is an objective standard that is binding on this other person. What sense does it make to mock and deride people who have different preferences than you do? It seems as if atheists do believe in objective morality, however inconsistently. But only when judging others, never when judging themselves.
WINTERY KNIGHT 