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Humanists force school to cancel Christmas-themed charity that benefits children

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Letitia posted this Fox News article on Facebook.

Excerpt:

A South Carolina charter school has canceled its annual Christmas toy drive after a group of self-described humanists complained that the project violated the U.S. Constitution and accused them of bribing children to convert to Christianity.

Renee Mathews, the principal of East Point Academy in West Columbia, S.C., said the annual Operation Christmas Child project was halted because the American Humanist Association threatened to sue the school.

“We received a letter saying we had to cease and desist immediately or they would take legal action against us,” Mathews told me.

[…]Mathews said their small school had no choice.

“We have a very small budget and very small legal budget. We felt that we could not risk using our school funding for classrooms and teachers to fight a court case.”

[…]The small charter school had been participating in Operation Christmas Child for the past two years without any controversy. The program is associated with Samaritan’s Purse, an international Christian relief and evangelism organization.

For the past several weeks, students had been working with their parents to decorate shoe boxes and fill them with toys. They were supposed to deliver the boxes to the school Friday morning.

Even though Operation Christmas Child is connected to an evangelical Christian ministry, Mathews said there were no religious materials included in the boxes. She also pointed out the project was voluntary, non-religious, and not tied to any graded assignments.

Nevertheless, the American Humanist Association decided to intervene on behalf of a perturbed parent.

I think this story serves as a reminder to everyone that humanists are essentially bullies who want to force others to act like humanists in public. They are so sensitive about hearing different points of view that they have to resort to the power of big government in order to silence and coerce anyone who disagrees with them.

Polemics

Carson Weitnauer: putting atheism on the defensive

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Here’s an article at Reasons for God that explains a few simple questions that you can ask your atheist friends.

He writes:

Though it has been persistently marketed to us as a worldview that stands for reason and science, the truth is that the atheistic worldview is riddled with contradictions and outlandish claims. And because most secular people haven’t studied why atheism is true, an excellent evangelistic strategy for you and your church is to understand these five challenges for atheism.

In my experience, it is only once people realize that their own worldview doesn’t work that they become interested in seeking something that does. While some would suggest you just have to wait for people to hit rock bottom, I think a more gracious and effective approach is to humbly challenge their pretense to have a sensible worldview.

By God’s grace, studying these five holes in the atheistic worldview can create a powerful opportunity for you and your church to share the wisdom and love of Jesus Christ.

[…]Because of their fundamental commitment to impersonal matter and laws, the atheist faces very difficult problems in at least five unique areas:

  • Consciousness
  • Free will
  • Purpose
  • Reason, including mathematics and science
  • Objective moral facts, including universal human rights and the reality of evil

Here’s my favorite of the 5:

Leading atheists such as Sam Harris dismiss free will as a matter of course. Or as Tom Clark at Naturalism.org puts it, “Judged from a scientific and logical perspective, the belief that we stand outside the causal web in any respect is an absurdity, the height of human egoism and exceptionalism.”

Dr. Angus Menuge, the current President of the Evangelical Philosophical Society, explains the problem: “before we can talk of being responsible for our decisions, we need an account of why those decisions belong to us. But the trouble is, on a naturalistic view, there is no entity that can plausibly own any mental states, there is simply a plurality of parallel, impersonal processes in the brain.”

The denial of free will logically leads to the denial of personal responsibility for any of our behaviors or beliefs. But if everything about “you” is determined, then “you” could not have reasonably chosen to believe what you do. If a-rational things and laws determined your neurological structure, “you” literally cannot make any decisions about what you believe or why you believe it.

This article is worth a look if you want to start a discussion with an atheist.

News

Health insurance companies will raise rates to comply with Obamacare delay

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CNS News explains how health insurance companies will respond to the last-minute attempt by Democrats to delay the implementation of Obamacare.

Excerpt:

After President Obama unilaterally changed his health care law on Thursday, the insurance industry issued a warning.

“Changing the rules after health plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for consumers,” said Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP).

Here’s Ignagni’s full statement:

Making sure consumers have secure, affordable coverage is health plans’ top priority.  The only reason consumers are getting notices about their current coverage changing is because the ACA requires all policies to cover a broad range of benefits that go beyond what many people choose to purchase today.

Premiums have already been set for next year based on an assumption of when consumers will be transitioning to the new marketplace.  If due to these changes fewer younger and healthier people choose to purchase coverage in the exchange, premiums will increase in the marketplace and there will be fewer choices for consumers.  Additional steps must be taken to stabilize the marketplace and mitigate the adverse impact on consumers.

A recent Weekly Standard podcast predicts that the Democrats are going to come down hard on insurance companies, and blame them for the failure of Obamacare.