Video of a progressive atheist engaging in some secular humanism.
John of Verum Serum writes: (with links)
Did he have “caps” and not real bullets as someone in the video claims? According to the AP, Duke killed himself with his own gun. So it appears the bullets were real and the people on the board were very lucky (or very blessed) to avoid being killed.
We know the media loves stories about right-wing violence, but it’s going to be hard to spin Clay Duke into a Tea Party terrorist. His Facebook page contains a kind of suicide note which references the movie V for Vendetta (a film in which the “hero” blows up Parliament). His religion is listed as “humanist” which means he was an atheist. He also quotes part of Shelley’s poem Masque of Anarchy, not a Tea Party favorite. (click for full size)
Also interesting is the list of favorite websites he provides, including Media Matters and The Progressive Mind along with about a dozen others.
Read the rest of the post to see how the media makes much of some stories where conservatives can be smeared, but how it covers up stories like this one. And it also covers up stories where the victims are conservatives. You’ve probably never heard of Kenneth Gladney.
This reminds me of the last radical leftist environmentalist who shot up the Discovery Channel building. He was inspired by Democrat environmentalist Al Gore. The gunman loved evolution. And he didn’t like “greed” or “religion” either.
The gunman doesn’t like the rich
The gunman’s Facebook page screen shot says this: “I was born in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse and economically enslave 95% of the population… Our Masters, the Wealthy, do as they like to us.”
The wealthy? That sounds a lot like “the rich”, doesn’t it?
And who do we know who rants against “the rich”?
Barack Obama doesn’t like the rich
Here he is talking about taxing the rich.
Here is Barack Obama calling in Democrats to “argue with them and get in their face.“.
Not to mention asking Latinos to come out and “punish our enemies“.
Could Obama have incited this gunman to violence with his hate speech?
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.
Methodological materialism is the view that requires scientists to explain everything they observe in nature using material causes and never intelligent causes.
And now, from the Evangelical Philosophical Society blog, an article entitled “Is methodological materialism good for science?”. The article is written by Dr. Angus Menuge, whom I wrote about before.
Intro:
Should science by governed by methodological materialism? That is, should scientists assume that only undirected causes can figure in their theories and explanations? If the answer to these questions is yes, then there can be no such thing as teleological science or intelligent design. But is methodological materialism a defensible approach to science, or might it prevent scientists from discovering important truths about the natural world? In my contribution to The Waning of Materialism (OUP, 2010), edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer, I consider twelve of the most common arguments in favor of methodological materialism and show that none of them is convincing.
Of these arguments, perhaps the most prevalent is the “God of the gaps” charge, according to which invoking something other than a material cause is an argument from ignorance which, like a bad script writer, cites a deus ex machina to save our account from difficulty. Not only materialists, but also many Christian thinkers, like Francis Collins, worry that appeal to intelligent design commits the God of the gaps fallacy.
As I argue, however, not only is an inference to an intelligent cause not the same as an inference to the supernatural, it is a mistake to assume that all gap arguments are bad, or that only theists make them. If a gap argument is based solely on ignorance of what might explain some phenomenon, then indeed it is a bad argument. But there are many good gap arguments which are made both by scientific materialists and proponents of intelligent design.
So how do you make an argument like that?
As Stephen Meyer has argued in his Signature in the Cell, intelligent design argues in just the same way, claiming not merely that the material categories of chance and necessity (singly or in combination) are unable to explain the complex specified information in DNA, but also that in our experience, intelligent agents are the only known causes of such information. The argument is based on what we know about causal powers, not on what we do not know about them.
Since the inference is based on known causal powers, we learn that the cause is intelligent, but only further assumptions or data can tell us whether that intelligence is immanent in nature or supernatural. It is a serious mistake to confuse intelligent design with theistic science, and the argument that since some proponents of design believe that the designer is God, that is what they are claiming can be inferred from the data, is a sophomoric intensional fallacy.
Basically, you identify what material processes have been OBSERVED to be capable of, and then you show that the effect you are trying to explain is beyond the reach of those powers. For example, think of a Scrabble board left alone in a locked room with an open window from morning till evening. It’s summer, so the air conditioner is working hard all day. If you come home and enter the room and find a sentence on the Scrabble game board that says “IF YOU LEAVE YOUR WINDOWS OPEN THEN YOU PAY HIGHER ELECTRICITY BILLS” then does it make more sense to attribute that effect to the wind, or to an intelligent intruder?
If you are a materialist, then you can only appeal to matter, chance and time (and not much time, too). By ruling out intelligence, you are really confining yourself to an obviously wrong answer. But suppose you came home and found that that the tiles were scattered all over the board and on the floor and the only sequences spelled out “AN” and “ZYKDSFGOJD”. I think a better inference there is that the wind blew the bag open made a couple of nonsense sequences. Of course the idea that wind could blow open a bag of Scrabble letters at all is very unlikely, but if you rule out intelligence, that’s all you have left, no matter how strained the inference. You have to believe nonsense.
But what about the design theorist who can rule nonsense out as impossible? Well he hits on the correct explanation of the effect – intelligence.
As the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes says:
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
But if an intelligent design theorist comes along and rules out material causes as an explanation of the effect by showing that the effect is beyond the reach of matter, time and chance, then the explanation of intelligence must be, however improbably, true. The important thing is to rule out materialism by evaluating what material causes can do. We don’t want to rule it out by pre-supposition, because that’s what the naturalists do when they rule out intelligence as an explanation. Ruling things out by pre-supposition is how you get wrong answers to questions. Everything has to be on the table that we have experienced. And every human knows what it is to sequence Scrabble letters into meaningful words and phrases
By the way, the publisher of the book, OUP, is Oxford University Press. Angus Menuge doesn’t mess around.
WINTERY KNIGHT 