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Not just aborting babies with Down’s syndrome – Dawkins supports infanticide

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Listen up you atheists, the Pope has spoken
Listen up you atheists, the Pope has spoken

The UK Telegraph reports on the latest Dawkins blunder.

Excerpt:

Richard Dawkins, the atheist writer, has claimed it is “immoral” to allow unborn babies with Down’s syndrome to live.

The Oxford professor posted a message on Twitter saying would-be parents who learn their child has the condition have an ethical responsibility to “abort it and try again”.

His comments were dismissed by charities and prompted fury online from opponents but he insisted his stance was “very civilised” because foetuses do not have “human feelings”.

He claimed that the important question in the abortion debate is not “is it ‘human’?” but “can it suffer?” and insisted that people have no right to object to abortion if they eat meat.

[…]Anti-abortion campaigners describe the practice of aborting foetuses on physical grounds as a form of “eugenics”.

But Prof Dawkins strongly defended its as simply standard practice and ridiculed his critics as portraying him as “a horrid monster”.

The row erupted during a debate on Twitter about calls for further changes to Ireland’s abortion laws in the wake of the case of a rape victim who was forced to carry the child until she could deliver by caesarean section.

One participant said they would suffer a real ethical dilemma if they were carrying a child with the condition.

Prof Dawkins replied: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

Another pointed to recent figures asking: “994 human beings with Down’s Syndrome deliberately killed before birth in England and Wales in 2012 – is that civilised?”

He responded: “Yes, it is very civilised. These are foetuses, diagnosed before they have human feelings.”

I’m really not sure why anyone is surprised by this. Dawkins is an atheist and as such, he has no rational grounding for objective moral values and duties. He also does not have any rational grounding for free will, which is required for making moral choices and bearing moral responsibility. To an atheist, what people ought to do is decided by conventions and customs that vary by time and place. There is no objective moral standard for the way humans ought to be. Dawkins is an evolutionist. He believes in survival of the fittest. The unfit should die – if necessary, directly at the hands of the fit.

Listen to what he writes in his book:

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

–Richard Dawkins, (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995))

I’m not misrepresenting him – the man is a very consistent atheist, and there is no room for morality on atheism. It’s not rationally grounded.

Here’s how far Dawkins takes his view that there is no evil and no good:

Richard Dawkins explains morality on atheism
Richard Dawkins explains morality on atheism

But wait!

He goes even further than mere abortion – he also supports infanticide:

Richard Dawkins even advocates for adultery. So I’m really not sure why people are so fascinated by atheism, when this is the kind of person it produces.I am not saying that every atheist is going to treat morality as all personal preference and social convention. Just the ones who really understand it, and are consistent with it. Real atheists don’t have any rational grounding for morality in their worldview. This man has 1 million twitter followers. He is their spokesman because he reflects their views.

And finally, in the past, Dawkins has expressed that his goal is to destroy Christianity. Is this the same kind of destruction of Christianity that his fellow atheist Stalin wanted? Given Dawkins views on murdering innocent unborn and born children, I think we can infer what he means by “destroy Christianity”.

By the way, Nick Peters has also written about Dawkins’ comments, and I stole the image of Pope Dawkins from his post.

News

109,631,000 Americans collect welfare, more than full-time year-round workers

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From CNS News.

Excerpt:

109,631,000 Americans lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded “means-tested programs” — also known as welfare — as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau has not yet reported how many were on welfare in 2013 or the first two quarters of 2014.

But the 109,631,000 living in households taking federal welfare benefits as of the end of 2012, according to the Census Bureau, equaled 35.4 percent of all 309,467,000 people living in the United States at that time.

[…]What did taxpayers give to the 109,631,000 — the 35.4 percent of the nation — getting welfare benefits at the end of 2012?

82,679,000 of the welfare-takers lived in households where people were on Medicaid, said the Census Bureau. 51,471,000 were in households on food stamps. 22,526,000 were in the Women, Infants and Children program. 20,355,000 were in household on Supplemental Security Income. 13,267,000 lived in public housing or got housing subsidies. 5,442,000 got Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. 4,517,000 received other forms of federal cash assistance.

[…]In 2012, according to the Census Bureau, there were 103,087,000 full-time year-round workers in the United States (including 16,606,000 full-time year-round government workers). Thus, the welfare-takers outnumbered full-time year-round workers by 6,544,000.

Democrats tell us that we need to raise taxes on those who work in order to spread the wealth around. But I submit that there is too much redistribution of wealth going on already, and we need to stop it. We are not sending the right message to people about the importance of working and earning with this much taxing and welfare spending.

 

News

Host a same-sex wedding on your property or pay a $13,000 fine

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From the Daily Signal.

Excerpt:

Should the government be able to coerce a family farm into hosting a same-sex wedding?

In a free society, the answer is no. Family farms should be free to operate in accordance with the beliefs and values of their owners. Government shouldn’t be able to fine citizens for acting in the market according to their own—rather than the government’s—values, unless there is a compelling government interest being pursued in the least restrictive way possible.

But the New York State Division of Human Rights doesn’t see things this way. On August 8, it fined Cynthia and Robert Gifford $13,000 for acting on their belief that marriage is the union of a man and woman and thus declining to rent out their family farm for a same-sex wedding celebration. The Human Rights Commission ruled that “the nature and circumstances of the [Giffords’s] violation of the Human Rights Law also warrants a penalty.”

[…]Here’s the back story. In 2012, Melissa Erwin and Jennie McCarthy contacted the Giffords to rent the family’s barn for their same-sex wedding ceremony and reception. Cynthia Gifford responded that she and her husband would have to decline their request as they felt they could not in good conscience host a same-sex wedding ceremony at their home. The Giffords live on the second and third floor of the barn and, when they host weddings on the first floor, they open part of the second floor as a bridal suite.

[…][The Giffords] do not object to gay or lesbian customers attending the fall festivals, or going berry picking, or doing any of the other activities that the farm facilitates. The Giffords’ only objection is to being forced to abide by the government’s views on sexuality and host a same-sex wedding. The Human Rights Commission has now declared this historic belief about marriage to be “discrimination.”

The Giffords must pay a $1,500 mental anguish fine to each of the women and pay $10,000 in civil damages penalty to New York State. If they can’t pay in 60 days, a nine percent interest rate will be added to that total. Like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Giffords must also institute anti-discriminationre-education classes and procedures for their staff.

How would gay marriage affect your marriage? Well, you would have to go to court, be found guilty, be re-educated, pay the gay people you offended, and then pay the government for punishing you. And remember, you’re already paying for the government to prosecute you for your views on marriage every time you pay taxes. We pay the salaries of our own executioners. How did it come to this?

Well, may I suggest that Christian pastors who drive a wedge of separation between the Christian faith and public knowledge are to blame. What I find in church is that pastors preach the same shallow gospel sermon every week, week in and week out. Everything is assumed to be true without examination, no alternatives or critical viewpoints are presented and defeated, and nothing in the sermon is ever connected to evidence in the real world. There is no emphasis on defining the Christian worldview, or on criticizing other worldviews like postmodernism, naturalism, pluralism or relativism. It’s all mystical privatized fundamentalist anti-intellectual emotional piety.

The net result of this is that when Christians go out into the world, they are not equipped to discern the dangers posed by non-Christian ideologies, and they often vote for the very policies that later come back to destroy them – because secular leftists make their policies sound so nice. Who could be against “affordable health care” – until you realize that you’re going to be paying for someone else’s abortion drugs. Maybe pastors need to do a better job of connecting the Bible to real world knowledge and policies so that we don’t just retreat from the field and let secular leftists rule over us.