News

Court forces baker to make gay wedding cakes and undergo sensitivity training

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Todd Starnes covers the story at Fox News.

Excerpt:

A family owned bakery has been ordered to make wedding cakes for gay couples and guarantee that its staff be given comprehensive training on Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws after the state’s Civil Rights Commission determined the Christian baker violated the law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, in Lakewood, Colorado was directed to change his store policies immediately and force his staff to attend the training sessions. For the next two years, Phillips will also be required to submit quarterly reports to the commission to confirm that he has not turned away customers based on their sexual orientation.

[…]Nicolle Martin, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, called the ruling Orwellian and said they are considering an appeal.

“They are turning people of faith into religious refugees,” Martin told me. “Is this the society that we want to live in – where people of faith are driven out of business?”

Martin said it was “truly frightening” that Phillips will be forced to submit quarterly reports to the government disclosing whether he turned away any wedding cake business.
“There will be some reporting requirements so that Jack can demonstrate that he doesn’t exercise his belief system anymore – that he has divested himself of his beliefs,” she said.
He will also be required to create new policies and procedures for his staff.

“We consider this reporting to be aimed at rehabilitating Jack so that he has the right thoughts,” Martin said. “That’s offensive to everything America stands for.”

Phillips, who is celebrating his 40th year in business this week, told me he’s not going to create any new policies.

“My old ones are pretty adequate as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “I don’t plan on giving up my faith and changing because of that.”

The controversy started in 2012 when a gay couple asked Phillips to make their wedding cake. Phillips politely declined, saying he could not make a cake promoting a same-sex ceremony because of his faith. He offered to make them any other baked item they wanted.

Charlie Craig and David Mullins filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission alleging they were discriminated against because of their sexual orientation. For the record, same-sex marriage is against the law in Colorado.

The commission affirmed a civil court’s ruling that the bakery cannot discriminate against persons in a public place based on sexual orientation.

“You can have your beliefs, but you can’t hurt other people at the same time,” Commission Chairwoman Katina Banks told The Denver Channel.

ACLU attorney Amanda Goad, who heads up the organization’s LBGT group, heralded the ruling.

“Religious freedom is undoubtedly an important American value, but so is the right to be treated equally under the law free from discrimination,” she said in a statement.

[…]“Jack doesn’t turn people away,” Martin told me. “There are just some events that he won’t lend his artistry to.”

[…]Martin said the Alliance Defending Freedom will “continue to stand with Jack against overreach and tyranny by the state.”

“Jack has gone out on a limb and taken this stand – and not capitulated to the government’s demands,” she said. “That speaks volumes about him.”

And should the highest court in the land force Jack to do the bidding of homosexuals?

“There’s civil disobedience,” Phillips told me. “We’ll see what happens. I’m not giving up my faith. Too many people have died for this faith to give it up that easily.”

Meanwhile, the bullying tactics of the militant gay rights community have not hampered the bakery’s bottom line. They’ve gotten so much business from the sales of cookies and brownies, they’ve temporarily stopped making wedding cakes.

“Obey Christ rather than worry about what man can do to you,” Phillips said.

There you have it, folks. In Colorado, you can’t have your cake and religious beliefs, too.

The most alarming thing that I see in the culture is the astonishing speed at which religious liberty is being crushed by the government in order to force everyone to promote gay rights. I don’t mind that people have a different sexuality than I do, but I don’t want to be forced to participate in a celebration of it.

Polemics

Can atheists have meaning and purpose in life?

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Here’s a post about it from Aaron Brake, writing on Please Convince Me blog.

Excerpt:

The question of God’s existence is the most important question we can seek to answer. If God does not exist and we do not survive the death of our bodies, life is ultimately absurd. J.P. Moreland provides an illustration which helps bring this truth home:

Suppose I invited you over to my house to play a game of Monopoly. When you arrive I announce that the game is going to be a bit different. Before us is the Monopoly board, a set of jacks, a coin, the television remote, and a refrigerator in the corner of the room. I grant you the first turn, and puzzlingly, inform you that you may do anything you want: fill the board with hotels, throw the coin in the air, toss a few jacks, fix a sandwich, or turn on the television. You respond by putting hotels all over the board and smugly sit back as I take my turn. I respond by dumping the board upside down and tossing the coin in the air. Somewhat annoyed, you right the board and replenish it with hotels. I turn on the television and dump the board over again.

Now it wouldn’t take too many cycles of this nonsense to recognize that it didn’t really matter what you did with your turn, and here’s why. There is no goal, no purpose to the game we are playing. Our successive turns form a series of one meaningless event after another. Why? Because if the game as a whole has no purpose, the individual moves within the game are pointless. Conversely, only a game’s actual purpose according to its inventor can give the individual moves significance.[1]

As Moreland articulates, if the game of Monopoly as a whole has no purpose, the individual moves within the game have no meaning or value. The only way your moves within the game of Monopoly have significance is if you discover the purpose of the game and you align yourself with that purpose.

As it is with Monopoly, so it is with life. Like the game of Monopoly, the only way our individual lives have any ultimate meaning or value is if life has purpose behind it, and real purpose requires both God and life after death.

My experience with atheists is that they are not really concerned about letting their life be accountable to facts. In atheism, the desire for happiness comes first, and the facts have to be massaged to justify it. For example, if there is a fine-tuning argument, they invent the multiverse. If there is a cosmological argument, they invent the eternal universe. If the origin of life is a problem, they invent aliens to seed the Earth with life. If the resurrection is a problem, then Jesus never existed. The main thing is that no God is there to suggest any other purpose to the atheist than what he wants to do himself.

Brake explains:

Some atheists object at this point: “But I do have purpose in life. I do have meaning.” In a 2010 debate entitled “Does the Universe Have a Purpose?” skeptic Michael Shermer offers four things that allow people to feel more happy, fulfilled, and purposeful in life, regardless of whether or not God exists:[7]

  1. Deep love and family commitment
  2. Meaningful work and career
  3. Social and political involvement
  4. A sense of transcendency

Later in the debate, Shermer goes on to say,

Don’t you think even if there isn’t a God that you should find some purpose?…Maybe there’s a God, maybe there’s not. Either way, don’t you think you ought to roll up your sleeves and see if you can figure out some useful things to do to give yourself purpose outside of God? Don’t you think that’s worthwhile?…Shouldn’t I be doing these nice things for other people? Shouldn’t I be finding love and commitment to somebody, a meaningful career, helping my social community and being involved in politics, trying to transcend myself and do something outside of myself? Shouldn’t I be doing those things anyway?

But notice that Shermer here completely misses the point, which is this: if there is no God, then there is no ultimate, objective meaning, value, and purpose in life. Sure, you can create subjective meaning and purpose if you so desire. You can live for any personal, subjective cause or reason that makes you happy. You can even do nice things regardless of whether or not God exists. But Shermer offers no account or explanation as to why if there is no God any of these things are objectively good, or why any of these things are objectively meaningful, valuable or purposeful, or why we should pursue these ends as opposed to others that may make us more fulfilled and happy. In the end, it makes no difference, objectively speaking, whether or not you pursue these goals or not because in the end, everything winds up the same anyway: you die, I die, the universe dies, and that’s just all there is to it. Christian theist William Lane Craig offered this rejoinder both to Shermer and Richard Dawkins in the debate:

There has been a major shift in the last two speeches in this debate. Did you see what it was? We’ve argued tonight first of all that if God does not exist, then the universe has no purpose. Our atheist colleagues admit that. But now what they’ve been claiming is, “But look, we can construct a purpose for our lives,” in Richard Dawkins’ words, or in Michael Shermer’s words, “We can develop ways to make us feel better, feeling like we have a purpose.” Now you see this just is to say that we can pretend that the universe exists for some purpose, and this is just make-believe. This is the subjective illusion of purpose, but there is on this view no objectivepurpose for the universe. And we of course would never deny that you can’t develop subjective purposes for your life. The point is on atheism they’re all illusory…But you cannot live as though your life were purposeless and meaninglessness and therefore you adopt subjective illusions of purpose to make your live livable. And that’s why I think atheism is not only irrational, it is profoundly unlivable. You cannot live consistently and purposefully within the context of an atheistic worldview.

The problem with atheism is that they can’t prefer Stalin’s purpose to William Wilberforce’s purpose, on their view, because people just choose their own purpose and everyone’s purpose is as valid as anyone else’s. On their view, BOTH Stalin and Wilberforce’s purposes are equally rational to choose because the criterion for choosing is happiness and satisfaction in this life. An atheist can claim that such and such is “meaningful” or “good”, to try to sound reasonable in front of a Judeo-Christian crowd. But the problem is that on their view, any purpose that anyone might choose for themselves is equally justified because they are all SUBJECTIVE. If there are no rules to the game, then any arbitrary choice of how to play it is as justified as any other.

What you find when talking to atheists is that they tend to very much favor the rights of the strong over responsibilities to the weak. You won’t find too many atheists in favor of chastity, right to life or natural marriage. Chastity, right to life and natural marriage exist to provide children (who are less powerful) with what they need, at the expense of selfish adults. How would you ground that in an atheistic universe. Give up my sexual rights for some weak child? No way. What Shermer says sounds so good until you think it through a little more and realize that he is pushing for relativism.

Polemics

Are bad or sub-optimal designs in nature supportive of atheism?

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Engineer Bill Pratt explains why “bad design” is not supportive of atheism at Tough Questions Answered.

Excerpt:

The other day I heard an atheist say that the fact that he sees poor design in the natural world leads him to the conclusion that the Christian God does not exist. Here is the argument:

  1. An omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent creator God would create organisms that have optimal design.
  2. Organisms have features that are sub-optimal.
  3. Therefore, God either did not create these organisms or is not omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

There are several things wrong with this argument, but I want to focus on premise 2 – organisms have features that are sub-optimal.

I am an electrical engineer who has been designing integrated circuits (IC) for 20 years, either personally or through managing other engineers. I am extremely familiar with IC design. Over the years, I have often heard young engineers, who did not design a particular IC, criticize the design of that IC by saying it is sub-optimal, that they could do a better job. I have then seen these same engineers eat crow when they finally talk to the original designer and discover the constraints that original engineer was under when he designed the IC and the purposes for which he designed the IC.

It is impossible to judge a design as optimal or sub-optimal without knowing the purposes of the designer and without knowing the constraints the designer faced during the design. Young engineers just assume that they know both when they look at somebody else’s design. After being embarrassed a few times, they usually drop this approach and gain some humility.

Engineers know that designs are always a balance between competing NFRs – non-functional requirements. Many of the the NFRs are often opposed to each other, like speed and memory. If you want something fast, it often requires more memory. If you want something cheap, you sacrifice memory and your program runs slower because there is more disk access.

Even more than that, atheists assume that if God designed organisms, then he should have designed it for our benefit – to make us happy, healthy and long-lived. But that is not God’s purpose for making us. He doesn’t want us to be happy (apart from him), he wants us to know him. And there is nothing to say that designs that are “bad” for happiness are also bad for knowing God.