Tag Archives: Agnosticism

News

Atheist who shot Gabrielle Giffords read Communist Manifesto, liked flag burning

42 Comments

The alleged shooter of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and Federal Judge John Roll has now been identified as Jared Lee Loughner.

What can we learn about the shooter from his YouTube channel?

Communism:

His favorite books include the Communist Manifesto and the founding document of national socialism in Germany. Yes, Hitler was a socialist.

Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

Flag burning:

I won’t link to a flag-burning video, but that video and the book list are right on his Youtube page. He favorited a video of someone burning an American flag. As a supporter of flag-burning, he would have opposed the Tea Party and their pride in their Constitution and their country. Only the left is anti-American. Right-wingers never burn flags.

Atheism:

One of his other videos comments that he resented being given a Bible by a military recruiter since he professes no religion or faith. In short, the man is likely an atheist who resents people who hand him Bibles when he has no need for one.

The video says this:

Every United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenis is receiving one mini bible before the tests.

Jared Loughner is a United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix.

Therefore, Jared Loughner is receiving one mini bible before the tests.

I didn’t write a belief on my Army application, and the recruiter wrote on the application; None.

[…]No! I won’t trust in God!

If he likes communism, then he is necessarily an atheist, since communism is an atheist worldview that asserts that religion is the “opiate of the masses”. Is it really so surprising that someone who thinks that the universe is an accident and that there is no judgment for sin after death would shoot up his innocent neighbors? I don’t find it difficult to believe. Just take a look at the suicidal Columbine murderers – they were anti-Christian atheists and Darwinists.

Left-wing progressive?

Update from MSNBC:

A 22-year-old woman in Arizona, Caitie Parker, claimed on her Twitter feed that she went to high school and college with the gunman, and was in a band with him. She described his politics in the past as “left wing, quite liberal, & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy.” She also described him as having a lot of friends “until he got alcohol poisoning in ’06” and dropped out of school. “Mainly loner very philosophical.”

Parker described the gunman meeting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords previously: “He was a political radical & met Giffords once before in ’07, asked her a question & he told me she was ‘stupid & unintelligent.'”

That MSNBC link has transcripts of his videos, in which he professes having no belief in God, and no trust in God.

More details are emerging on Michelle Malkin’s blog, too. Including this post from the Daily Kos showing the rage on the left against Giffords for voting against Nancy Pelosi as House Leader of the Democrats. (The post has now been pulled with an apology, but the Malkin link goes to a screen shot of the original post before it was pulled – and you can still find it in the Google’s cache).

Related posts

Polemics

William Lane Craig answers questions from an arrogant atheist

7 Comments

Mary sent me this question and answer from William Lane Craig’s Question of the Week.

Here are the questions:

Hi there, I’m writting in regards to your “Q&A 170: So many athiests, so little time” answer. First of all, your two simple questions have very simple answers, and an athiest who can’t answer them isn’t a true athiest.

1)
Q. What do you mean by (you don’t believe in God)
A. I mean that I have a lack of belief the the existance of a deity, your christian God or any other.

2)
Q. What reasons do you have to think that (there is no God)
A. The Earth shows no proof of creation, every single thing on this Earth has a natural explanation, simply becasue modern science has not yet solved every problem, does not mean it never will. I’d go in to detail, but no need to bore you with the science of it all.
So, I’ve given my proof and will give far more if you ask it of me, and any wel linformed athiest will be able to answer those questions in a flash and have the burden of proof back in your hands.
In regards to scholarly work, may I point out Charles Darwin’s “The Origins of Species”, the works of Gregor Mendel, father of Genetics, William “Strata” Smith, father of Geology, Alfred Wegener “The Origin of Continents and Oceans”, Issac Newton, Galileo, On and on I go, where I stop, nobody knows!
Now, if I may turn to the real point of this e-mail besides to point out that you havent really told anyone how to argue christianity other than asking easy questions and throwing names at them. Your God is Omnicient so you say, operating on this assumption, here is how morality plays out in the bible…
1) God creates heaven and Earth and then he creates Humans.
2) God KNOWS that humans will sin
3) God puts the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden KNOWING it will drive Adam to sin.
4) God Determines that Adams sin is transmutable down to every single person that will ever exist. (Moral objection 1: The sins of the father are logically not related to the son in any way shape or form)
5) God decides that to punish people for this one sin they had nothing to do with or anything else he deams bad, they shall be sentenced to an eternity of burning hellfire. Infinite punishment for a finite crime? That sounds like Moral objection #2 to me!
6) When God sees that his creations have really gone bad, he drowns the world, killing millions of innocent people.
7) only 1600 years after the mass murder of his creations(following biblical chronology) they’ve already fallen back in to sin. So God, in his infinite wisdom, determines the best course of action, is to sacrafice his Son, who is part of himself, TO HIMSELF, to make up for the sins of the creations he made knowing they would sin!

How in the world do you rectify this!?

Cheers,

Luke

I think that Bill is doing a great thing to come down to the level of village atheist once in a while and reply, and if you read his answer, he’s actually pretty mean. And it’s a good thing, in this case, because the worldview of village atheists is a lot like the worldview of Islamic terrorists. They are so insulated from outside criticism that you really have to thrash them around a little bit in order to get them to see that they have been involved with a cult their whole lives. That’s not going to be the case with some of the better atheists like Austin Dacey and Paul Draper, but it is going to be the case with many rank and file atheists, and we need to know how to answer them, too.

News

How universities discriminate against evangelical Christians

12 Comments

From the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ). (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

We are preparing for trial in a very important religion discrimination case in Kentucky that’s likely to attract a lot of attention.

We represent Professor Martin Gaskell, an internationally-respected astronomer who was turned down for the post of Observatory Director at the University of Kentucky in 2007 after concerns were voiced that some of his writings contained in a personal website discussing the relationship between science and religion showed him to be “potentially evangelical.”

Professor Gaskell has filed suit against the University claiming that, by considering his religion in the hiring process, Kentucky violated Title VII, the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

The University of Kentucky tried to avoid a trial, but Judge Karl Forester ruled that there was enough evidence to go to trial, such as:

  • The record contains “substantial evidence that Gaskell was a leading candidate for the position until the issue of his religion” became part of the search committee’s deliberations.
  • The head of the search committee wrote in an email to the Chair of the Physics & Astronomy Department that “no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin [Gaskell] on any basis other than religious . . .”
  • The Department Chair admitted “that the debate generated by Gaskell’s website and his religious beliefs was an ‘element’ in the decision not to hire Gaskell.”
  • One member of the search committee admitted that Gaskell’s “views of religious things” were “a factor” in his decision not to support Gaskell’s candidacy.
  • Another member of the committee, having discovered Gaskell’s website, warned fellow committee members that Gaskell was “potentially evangelical.”
  • The search committee head, anticipating a decision against Gaskell by his fellow committee members, wrote that “Other reasons will be given for the choice . . . but the real reason we will not offer him the job is because of his religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy or to any of the other duties specified for this position.”

This is why I blog under an alias. And I recommend it to any evangelical Christian who aspires to have an influence in academia.