News

Obama administration gave $500 million of foreign aid to Islamic radicals

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

The sequester has “cost jobs,” says President Obama, and “gutted investments in education and science and medical research.” But somehow he’s earmarked $500 million for Hamas terrorists.

Circumventing Congress and with no fanfare, President Obama last week issued an executive order enabling him to send an additional $500 million directly to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — much of which you can bet will wind up going to the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist organization.

According to Obama, “it is important to the national security interests of the United States to waive the provisions of” Congress’ legislative restrictions “in order to provide funds . .. to the Palestinian Authority.”

At the beginning of his first term, Obama promised close to $1 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledging none of it would reach Hamas.

But the Hebrew-language newspaper Yediot Acharonot has documented that tens of millions of dollars in aid for the PA — from Israel — ended up being used by Hamas for weapons. If Israel can’t guarantee its own aid is safe, how can we?

The Christian Science Monitor has more on Obama’s generous use of taxpayer dollars.

Excerpt:

The US military has been ignoring warnings that its spending in Afghanistan is funding Al Qaedaand the Taliban. And John F. Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), appears to have had enough.

He issued a blistering cover letter with SIGAR’s quarterly report to Congress today that called into question what “appears to be a growing gap between the policy objectives of Washington and the reality of achieving them in Afghanistan.”

The US has $20 billion of Afghan reconstruction spending scheduled, and a further $10 billion requested for the 2014 budget. But after 11 years of war, there are “serious shortcomings in US oversight of contracts: poor planning, delayed or inadequate inspections, insufficient documentation, dubious decisions, and – perhaps most troubling – a pervasive lack of accountability,” Mr. Sopko wrote. Good intentions, he added, appear to be running way ahead of commitment to execution.

Now I know what Obama meant when he said that the economy works better when you “spread the wealth around”.

Podcasts

Cell biologist Michael Denton interviewed on the merits of the design argument

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The latest ID the Future podcast is short (11 minutes) and sweet.

The MP3 file is here.

Quick biography of Dr. Michael Denton:

Michael Denton is a Senior Research Fellow in Human Genetics in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Dr. Denton studied medicine at Bristol University and developmental biology at Kings College, London University, where he gained a PhD in 1974. He trained in Pathology at the Post-Graduate Medical School, London, and at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. He has held university lectureships in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. For many years his main research focus has been on the genetics of human retinal disease, and he wrote the book Nature’s Destiny.

He is critical of Darwinism, but his own theories about the design of the cell tend more towards higher order physical laws than direct intervention by an intelligent agent. But he does acknowledge design arguments in three areas, see below.

Topics:

  • The mechanistic reductionist view of cells has broken down
  • Now, people are more looking at the higher order organization of matter
  • A better explanation is that there are higher order laws that organize base matter
  • These are not mysterious, these are higher order physical laws
  • The focus used to be on genes are everything – the building blocks
  • The form of the cell is more important
  • The machine analogy is failing at the higher order level – that’s the first area of design
  • Another area of design is at the lower level
  • At the lower order level, there are machines like the ribosome
  • These machines have complex specified information, and they need an explanation too
  • The origin of life, the origin of ribosomes, are another area that looks designed
  • A third area of design is the fine-tuning of the universe for biological organisms
  • The argument made by Stephen C. Meyer about the origin of life is correct
  • Origin of life research is declining because it cannot be explained without design
  • Design is the best explanation for the OOL we have right now, based on the data we have

See below for other recent ID the Future podcasts.

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Polemics

Answering 9 objections to the resurrection of Jesus

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I found this post on Eric Chabot’s Think Apologetics blog.

Here is his list of objections:

  1. The Legends Hypothesis
  2. The Naturalistic Objection
  3. We Can’t Use the Historical Method to Determine Whether A Resurrection Took Place
  4. False Testimonies Hypothesis
  5. The Resurrection Story Was Invented From Other Dying and Rising God Stories
  6. The Intramental/Hallucination Hypothesis Objection
  7. The Analogical Objection
  8. The Genre of the Gospels Are Historical Fiction!
  9. The Faulty Sources Objection

Here’s the detail on #4:

There is no reason to distrust the conviction of those that testified to having seen the risen Jesus. As James Warner Wallace points out in his latest book people lie or have an ulterior motive for three reasons:

1.Financial Gain: In this case, we don’t see any evidence for this. The NT shows the disciples/apostles being chased from location to location, leaving their home and families and abandoning their property and what they owned.

2. Sexual or Relational Desire: The NT does not say much about their “love lives.” There are Scriptures that speak to sexual purity and chastity.

3. Pursuit of Power: While Christianity became a state sponsored religion in the 4th century and the Popes became powerful both politically and religiously, there is no evidence (pre 70 AD), for the early disciples pursuing power as they proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus. Just look at Paul’s testimony here:

“I have worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. 24 Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. 25 Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, 26 I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my fellow Jews, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false believers. 27 I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked.” – 2 Cor. 11: 23-27

There are lots of useful links to answer many of the objections. It’s worth reading because Eric is used to having to deal with these objections in his daily work. What you see on the list is what he sees on the ground, dealing with the questions of skeptical students at a major university.