Facebook censoring pro-life content, because it’s an election year!
On Monday, Facebook decided to censor a well-known pro-lifer who had an interview with a well-known abortion survivor. I have an idea why Facebook might be interested in censoring pro-lifers in an election year. It’s because Silicon Valley / Seattle Big Tech has a preferred candidate, and he is very opposed to protecting the unborn from violence.
In yet another apparent attempt to silence pro-lifers, Facebook has removed a post created by Seth Gruber of Life Training Insitute. Gruber had interviewed abortion survivor Melissa Ohden and was sharing information about the interview on his personal Facebook page when he was sent a warning message from the social media giant — and his post was removed.
Facebook told Gruber that his Facebook post, seen below in two screenshots, went “against our community standards on spam.”
“We have these standards to help prevent people from misleading others,” the notification stated. “We may restrict your account if you violate our standards again.”
Now, this is not a fringe pro-life person. This person has actually testified before Congress. Here is the page from House of Representatives web site.
Censorship is not unusual for Facebook, especially during an election year:
Facebook has a history of censoring pro-life groups and individuals, including Live Action and Live Action President Lila Rose. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called last year’s censorship of Live Action by Facebook and its third-party abortionist fact checkers “clearly biased.”
One reason why Facebook censors might be cracking down on pro-lifers is because their preferred candidate, Pete, is so strongly in favor of abortion. So let’s look at some of Pete’s views on abortion to see why his Facebook supporters might want to censor pro-lifers in order to influence the election.
Over the weekend, pro-abortion Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg created a nationwide controversy when he refused to welcome pro-life Democrats into the party. Now he’s creating another controversy — by refusing to condemn infanticide.
[…]Last year, he failed to condemn legislation in two states, New York and Virginia, that legalized abortions up to birth, and even infanticide.
Pete Buttigieg wants to force American taxpayers to pay for the killing of unborn babies, not only in America but all across the world.
The former South Bend, Indiana mayor and Democrat presidential candidate spoke about his plans during a private event with Planned Parenthood abortion activists Sunday in Nevada, according to the Washington Times.
Buttigieg told the abortion activists that his plan for national health care would “support, reimburse and fund” abortions and family planning.
[…]Earlier, Buttigieg also said he would end the Mexico City policy, which prohibits U.S. international aid to groups that promote and/or provide abortions. When President Donald Trump enacted the Mexico City policy, he defunded two of the largest abortion chains in the world, Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International, of nearly $200 million American tax dollars.
Pro-life President Donald J. Trump and his Administration have established more pro-life policies than any other president in history.
Ever.
In recognition of President Trump’s many pro-life achievements, on July 4, 2019, on the eve of its 49th annual convention, the National Right to Life Committee, the federation of state right-to-life affiliates and local chapters, endorsed pro-life President Donald Trump for his re-election.
On that day, Carol Tobias, National Right to Life president, said
“As our nation celebrates Independence Day, we are proud to endorse the only presidential candidate who stands for the unalienable right to life. From his first day in office, President Trump and his Administration have been dedicated to advancing policies that protect the fundamental right to life for the unborn, the elderly, and the medically dependent and disabled.”
One of the President’s first acts in office was to restore the Mexico City Policy, which prevents tax funds from being given to organizations that perform abortions or lobby to change abortion laws of host countries. Later, the president expanded this policy to prevent $9 billion in foreign aid from being used to fund the global abortion industry.
The Trump Administration also cut off funding to the United Nations Population Fund because of that agency’s involvement with China’s forced abortion program.
On this day we celebrate fewer tax dollars going toward pro-abortion policies because of President Trump’s policies.
President Trump pledged “to veto any legislation that weakens current pro-life federal policies and laws, or that encourages the destruction of innocent human life at any state.”
President Trump is committed to signing pro-life legislation, including
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act;
The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act; and
The No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act.
On this day we celebrate the lives that will be saved due to President Trump’s pro-life policies.
Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are dead in the UK
My UK Christian friends are always tell me how weird it is that American Christians insist that government operate within Constitutional limits. Why not let government ban self-defense? Why not let government to run education and healthcare? Why not let government to control energy production and consumption? Why not let government open the borders for multiculturalism?
Here’s an example of what happens in a country where Christians decide to abdicate law and policy to secular leftists.
Evangelist and missionary Franklin Graham’s seven-city tour of the United Kingdom is now a trial, as all seven venues have dropped him.
Graham’s canceled dates likely are due to an “an outcry over his homophobic and Islamophobic comments,” CNN reports.
[…]Graham has been outspoken about other cultural issues, including gay rights and radical Islam, both hot topics in the U.K., where Islam is the fastest growing religion. Graham has said gays should go to “conversion therapy” to change, and once called Islam “evil.”
Interestingly, although multiple venues canceled Graham this year, this isn’t the first time the U.K. has had enough of the evangelist. In 2017, several members of Parliament moved to ban Graham from the U.K. for “hate speech” regarding gays and Muslims.
At the time, a “petition against Graham being granted a visa” had gathered 4,600 signatures. Nina Parker, pastor of Liberty Church in Blackpool, who organized the petition, said Graham’s presence would be “extremely destructive.”
Parker told The Guardian: “As a Christian and as a leader of a church that particularly welcomes LGBT people, I’m horrified that other local churches are inviting someone with this record of hate speech.”
Censorship of free speech, discourse, and individual autonomy in the United Kingdom has increased in the past several years.
British officials have cracked down on internet freedom. Even though several groups have pushed back against the government’s flagship internet regulation policy—which is so vague it covers nearly every kind of speech existent—it’s been an uphill battle.
In several dramatic cases, parents have lost their rights to their sick children as the U.K.’s court system usurped them and decided what care was best—typically, a removal of life support against the parents’ wishes.
Of course, any discourse offering a different perspective on LGBT groups or anything that might be seen as anti-transgender receives the most censorship—including being fired from one’s job…
I’ve blogged before about how the police in the UK occupy themselves with monitoring the Internet to punish citizens who dissent from the UK’s promotion of LGBT rights. If you disagree with LGBT rights, you’re sure to get a visit from armed policemen. On the other hand, the police officers don’t have any interest in investigating multiple sex-trafficking rings in multiple UK cities being run by immigrants from Middle Eastern countries. They don’t care about the gang-raping of fatherless teen girls – the important thing is to not look Islamophobic. That’s how they keep their jobs – they attack critics of the government’s LGBT and open borders policies so the government can be re-elected. When they’re not suppressing dissent from the government, they’re blocking off parents from taking their child home from a government-run hospitals that decided that the child (e.g. – Alfie) is beyond medical treatment.
That’s big government in the UK, and it’s supported by many, many conservative Christian pastors, who think that the free and open practice of Christianity is somehow compatible with an overpowered secular left centralized government. So, the conservative Christians in the UK love to mock the gun rights and low tax rates of American Christians, even as they can’t even safeguard their own freedom of speech and religious liberty. American Christians knew that big government and widespread dependency on welfare programs would destroy our religious liberty, so we fought it. They capitulated.
I’ve spoken to several prominent Christians in the UK, and even some who are deeply involved in apologetics and pro-life causes. I just want to be really clear. These people are so bad at Christian worldview, that they literally vote in the secular leftists who then turn around and enact government-funded abortion, LGBT fascism and sex-trafficking rings run by unskilled immigrants from the Middle East. Then they have the temerity to COMPLAIN about the policies of the leaders they voted for.
When people ask me whether the progress of science is more compatible with theism or atheism, I offer the following four basic pieces of scientific evidence that are more compatible with theism than atheism.
Here are the four pieces of evidence best explained by a Creator/Designer:
the kalam argument from the origin of the universe
the cosmic fine-tuning (habitability) argument
the biological information in the first replicator (origin of life)
the sudden origin of all of the different body plans in the fossil record (Cambrian explosion)
And I point to specific examples of recent discoveries that confirm those four arguments. Here are just a few of them:
Nature 302, 505 – 506 (07 April 1983); doi:10.1038/302505a0
The impossibility of a bouncing universe
ALAN H. GUTH* & MARC SHER†
*Center for Theoretical Physics, Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA
†Department of Physics, University of California, Irvine, California 92717, USA
Petrosian1 has recently discussed the possibility that the restoration of symmetry at grand unification in a closed contracting Robertson–Walker universe could slow down and halt the contraction, causing the universe to bounce. He then went on to discuss the possibility that our universe has undergone a series of such bounces. We disagree with this analysis. One of us (M.S.) has already shown2 that if a contracting universe is dominated by radiation, then a bounce is impossible. We will show here two further results: (1) entropy considerations imply that the quantity S (defined in ref. 1 and below), which must decrease by ~1075 to allow the present Universe to bounce, can in fact decrease by no more than a factor of ~2; (2) if the true vacuum state has zero energy density, then a universe which is contracting in its low temperature phase can never complete a phase transition soon enough to cause a bounce.
The universe is not only expanding, but that expansion appears to be speeding up. And as if that discovery alone weren’t strange enough, it implies that most of the energy in the cosmos is contained in empty space — a concept that Albert Einstein considered but discarded as his “biggest blunder.” The new findings have been recognized as 1998’s top scientific breakthrough by Science magazine.
[…]The flood of findings about the universe’s expansion rate is the result of about 10 years of study, said Saul Perlmutter, team leader of the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Perlmutter and others found such a yardstick in a particular kind of exploding star known as a Type 1A supernova. Over the course of several years, the astronomers developed a model to predict how bright such a supernova would appear at any given distance. Astronomers recorded dozens of Type 1A supernovae and anxiously matched them up with redshifts to find out how much the universe’s expansion was slowing down.
To their surprise, the redshift readings indicated that the expansion rate for distant supernovae was lower than the expansion rate for closer supernovae, Perlmutter said. On the largest scale imaginable, the universe’s galaxies appear to be flying away from each other faster and faster as time goes on.
“What we have found is that there is a ‘dark force’ that permeates the universe and that has overcome the force of gravity,” said Nicholas Suntzeff of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, who is the co-founder of another group called the High-z Supernova Search Team. “This result is so strange and unexpected that it perhaps is only believable because two independent international groups have found the same effect in their data.”
There has only been one creation of the universe, and the universe will never reverse its expansion, so that it could oscillate eternally. That view is popular, perhaps in part because many people watched videos of Carl Sagan speculating about it in public school classrooms, but all it was was idle naturalistic speculation, (Sagan was a naturalist, and held out hope that science would vindicate naturalism), and has been contradicted by good experimental science. You should be familiar with the 3 evidences for the Big Bang (redshift, light element abundances (helium/hydrogen) and the cosmic microwave background radiation. There are others, (radioactive element abundances, second law of thermodynamics, stellar lifecycle), but those are the big three. Point out how the experimental evidence for the Big Bang has piled up, making the problem even worse for the eternal-universe naturalists.
2) The multiverse has not been tested experimentally, it’s pure speculation.
Multiverse thinking or the belief in the existence of parallel universes is more philosophy or science fiction than science. ”Cosmology must seem odd to scientists in other fields”.
George Ellis, a well-known mathematician and cosmologist, who for instance has written a book with Stephen Hawking, is sceptical of the idea that our universe is just another universe among many others.
A few weeks ago, Ellis, professor emeritus of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town, reviewed Brian Greene’s book The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Knopf/Allen Lane, 2011) in the journal Nature. He is not at all convinced that the multiverse hypothesis is credible: ”Greene is not presenting aspects of a known reality; he is telling of unproven theoretical possibilities.”
According to professor Ellis, there is no evidence of multiverses, they cannot be tested and they are not science.
Ellis is not the only multiverse sceptic in this universe. A few months ago, science writer John Horgan wrote a column in Scientific American, expressing his doubt in multiverses.
When you get into a debate, you must never ever let the other side get away with asserting something they have no evidence for. Call them on it – point out that they have no evidence, and then hammer them with evidence for your point. Pile up cases of fine-tuning on top of each other and continuously point out that they have no experimental evidence for their speculations. Point out that more evidence we get, the more cases of fine-tuning we find, and the tougher the problem gets for naturalists. There is no evidence for a multiverse, but there is evidence for fine-tuning. TONS OF IT.
3) Naturalistic theories for the origin of life have two problems: can’t make the amino acids in an oxydized atmosphere and can’t make protein and DNA sequences by chance in the time available.
The oxidation state of Hadean magmas and implications for early Earth’s atmosphere
Dustin Trail, E. Bruce Watson & Nicholas D. Tailby
Nature 480, 79–82 (01 December 2011) doi:10.1038/nature10655
[…]These results suggest that outgassing of Earth’s interior later than ~200?Myr into the history of Solar System formation would not have resulted in a reducing atmosphere.
Estimating the prevalence of protein sequences adopting functional enzyme folds.
Axe DD.
The Babraham Institute, Structural Biology Unit, Babraham Research Campus, Cambridge CB2 4AT, UK. doug.axe@bbsrc.ac.uk
Proteins employ a wide variety of folds to perform their biological functions. How are these folds first acquired? An important step toward answering this is to obtain an estimate of the overall prevalence of sequences adopting functional folds.
[…]Starting with a weakly functional sequence carrying this signature, clusters of ten side-chains within the fold are replaced randomly, within the boundaries of the signature, and tested for function. The prevalence of low-level function in four such experiments indicates that roughly one in 10(64) signature-consistent sequences forms a working domain. Combined with the estimated prevalence of plausible hydropathic patterns (for any fold) and of relevant folds for particular functions, this implies the overall prevalence of sequences performing a specific function by any domain-sized fold may be as low as 1 in 10(77), adding to the body of evidence that functional folds require highly extraordinary sequences.
So atheists are in double jeopardy here. They don’t have a way to build the Scrabble letters needed for life, and they don’t have a way to form the Scrabble letters into meaningful words and sentences. Point out that the more research we do, the tougher the problem gets to solve for naturalists, and the more it looks like an effect of intelligence. Write out the calculations for them.
4) The best candidate to explain the sudden origin of the Cambrian era fossils was the Ediacaran fauna, but those are now recognized as not being precursors to the Cambrian fossils.
Evidence of the single-celled ancestors of animals, dating from the interval in Earth’s history just before multicellular animals appeared, has been discovered in 570 million-year-old rocks from South China by researchers from the University of Bristol, the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the Paul Scherrer Institut and the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences.
[…]This X-ray microscopy revealed that the fossils had features that multicellular embryos do not, and this led the researchers to the conclusion that the fossils were neither animals nor embryos but rather the reproductive spore bodies of single-celled ancestors of animals.
Professor Philip Donoghue said: “We were very surprised by our results — we’ve been convinced for so long that these fossils represented the embryos of the earliest animals — much of what has been written about the fossils for the last ten years is flat wrong. Our colleagues are not going to like the result.”
Professor Stefan Bengtson said: “These fossils force us to rethink our ideas of how animals learned to make large bodies out of cells.”
The trend is that there is no evolutionary explanation for the body plans that emerged in the Cambrian era. If you want to make the claim that “evolution did it”, then you have to produce the data today. Not speculations about the future. The data we have today says no to naturalism. The only way to affirm naturalistic explanations for the evidence we have is by faith. But rational people know that we need to minimize our leaps of faith, and go with the simplest and most reasonable explanation – an intelligence is the best explanation responsible for rapid generation of biological information.
Conclusion
I do think it’s important for Christians to focus more on scientific apologetics and to focus their academic careers in scientific fields. So often I look at Christian blogs, and I see way too much G. K. Chesterton, Francis Chan A. W. Tozer, and other untestable, ineffective jibber-jabber. We need to bring the hard science, and stop making excuses about not being able to understand it because it’s too hard. It’s not too hard. Everyone can understand Lee Strobel’s “The Case for a Creator“. That’s more than enough for the average Christian on science apologetics. We all have to do our best to learn what works. You don’t want to be anti-science and pro-speculation like atheists are. I recommend reading Uncommon Descent and Evolution News every day for a start.
