Tag Archives: Atheism

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Billionaire Democrat donor and Clinton ally accused of sex-trafficking underage girls

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Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton
Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton

After following the Jeffrey Epstein story for a few days, I decided to write about it. In a nutshell, a billionaire Democrat donor with connections to Bill Clinton and other Democrat elites was accused of sex-trafficking underage girls. I think this story reveals the heart of the Democrat party, and why they are so focused on separating daughters from fathers, and destroying marriage.

Here is the latest from Fox News:

Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.

Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.

[…][Epstein] allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on “Orgy Island,” an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

[…]Police in Palm Beach, Fla., launched a year-long investigation in 2005 into Epstein after parents of a 14-year-old girl said their daughter was sexually abused by him. Police interviewed dozens of witnesses, confiscated his trash, performed surveillance and searched his Palm Beach mansion, ultimately identifying 20 girls between the ages of 14 and 17 who they said were sexually abused by Epstein.

[…]One victim, in sworn deposition testimony, said Epstein began sexually assaulting her when she was 13 years old and molested her on more than 50 occasions over the next three years.

So the most important point to make is that Jeffrey Epstein made many, many donations to Democrat politicians and the Democrat party.

OpenSecrets.org, which tracks political donations, explains:

From 1989 up until 2003, Epstein donated more than $139,000 to Democratic federal candidates and committees and over $18,000 to Republican candidates and groups, according to data from OpenSecrets. Notable recipients include former President Bill Clinton and former Senator Bob Packwood, a Republican. In 2003, a couple of years before a full-scale investigation into the allegations of sexual exploitation of underage girls, his political giving abruptly stopped.

From 1999 to 2003, Epstein donated $77,000 to Democrats John Kerry, Richard Gephardt, Chris Dodd, and other high-profile politicians and committees. Dodd received a $1,000 contribution from Epstein during his reelection campaign in 2003, however, the contribution was returned in 2006.

After a hiatus in political giving during the investigations into his sexual abuse, Epstein gave to independent Connecticut House candidate Gwendolyn Beck in 2014 and U.S. Virgin Islands Democratic Delegate Stacey Plaskett both in 2016 and the most recent midterms (Epstein owns a private island in the Virgin Islands called Little Saint James).

Most recently, Epstein contributed $10,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in October 2018.

Keep in mind that this isn’t the first Democrat mega-donor who has been accused of behavior like this. You just have to take a trip to Hollywood to see many, many wealthy Democrats who have been accused of similar things… and worse. Yet we (not me) keep buying their movies.

The key to the Democrat party

So, now I want to say something about what this means about the Democrat party as a whole.

My view of the Democrat party is that their top priority is abortion. And this support for abortion is the key to all their other policies.

Think about what would have happened if Jeffrey Epstein or Bill Clinton got a young underage prostitute pregnant. They would want to escape the judgement of those nasty Christians, and they would want to avoid having their fun-seeking impacted by the need to provide for the child. And that’s why the Democrats support abortion. Their number one goal is to destroy anything that interferes with their desire to have recreational sex.

Now you might say, well, their plan won’t work, because we have the institution of marriage, so that girls are being raised by their biological fathers. And the churches will teach women to be chaste, and to prioritize marriage and children. But the Democrats have a plan to get the fathers out of the homes, and reduce the influence of Christianity on young women.

First, they push feminism, which results in women denouncing chastity, marriage and traditional male roles as “sexist”. So, instead of women choosing men who are traditional, they choose what their eyes can see: hot bad boys. Second, they destroy marriage with no-fault divorce, single mother welfare, etc. This gets the biological fathers out of the homes, and away from the daughters, so that the Democrat elites can farm plenty of underage women for their sex-trafficking. Third, they normalize premarital sex in the schools, by having abortion providers come in to teach women all about “sex education”. Fourth, they make contraceptives and abortions taxpayer-funded healthcare, so that premarital sex is free. Fifth, they have Hollywood remove every last vestige of normal romantic relationships, marriage and parenting from movies.

Their policies allow them to farm fatherless women who can then be raped, assaulted and abused by powerful men. And then there is a cultural push to shame people with traditional values, so that no one can judge them as morally wrong. In Christianity, each woman is made in the image of God, to know God in a personal relationship. It’s the job of Christian men to treat women as sisters, helping them to grow stronger, wiser and holier. But that’s not the view of women held by secular leftist men. They believe that the strong have a right to exploit the weak, in order to satisfy their selfish desires. For them, it’s survival of the fittest, and life ends at the grave – so have all the fun you can, and who cares who gets hurt?

And the powerful men have female allies. Epstein had women helping him to find his victims. And remember how Hillary Clinton defended her husband from credible accusations of rape and sexual assault, and the feminist left nearly elected her President. Some women willingly assist Democrat men, because they want the help of these powerful men in achieving their own ambitions.

That’s the Democrat party in a nutshell. All the other policies that sound so nice, (e.g. – amnesty for millions of low-skilled illegal immigrants, raising the minimum wage, etc.), are just vote-buying schemes to get what they really want: sex-trafficking of underage girls, with abortion on demand (including infanticide) to get them out of trouble if there are any “issues”. Issues = unborn babies.

If you really want to understand the true nature of the Democrat party, then look to the leaders. The adulterers, the divorcers, the pedophiles, the rapists, the sex-traffickers, etc. That’s their real priority. The rest is just a smokescreen.

News

If you accept Jesus and become a Christian, will God make you happy?

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

This is a wonderful, wonderful post from Amy Hall, who writes for the Stand to Reason blog.

She writes:

I had a brief interaction with an atheist on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that unexpectedly turned to the issue of suffering when she said:

You clearly never had a time you were hurt. I don’t mean sick. I don’t mean heart broken. I mean literally a near death experience or rape or abusive relationship…. You can keep floating on a [expletive] cloud thinking Jesus will do everything for you but it’s a lie. What makes you so special?

That surprised me at first because it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the tweet she was responding to, and I was confused as to why she would assume I’d never been through anything traumatic. But then in subsequent tweets, when she revealed she had been raped, it became clear that her trauma had played a central role in her becoming an outspoken, obviously angry “antitheist.” She’s a self-described antitheist now because she thinks Christianity teaches Jesus “will do everything for you” to give you a perfect life, and now she knows that’s a lie. The rape proved her understanding of Christianity false.

So it made sense for her to reason that since I believe Christianity is true, I must still be under the delusion that Jesus is making my life special, which means I obviously never encountered any evil or suffering to shake that delusion.

All right, readers. I don’t want any of you to be thinking that if you become a Christian that these things should be expected to happen:

  • you will feel happy all the time
  • you will be able to sense God’s secret plan for your life through your feelings
  • God’s secret plan for your life will automatically work, even though it’s crazy
  • God will give you a perfect spouse and lots of money without you having to study anything hard, or do any hard work
  • you get permission to do things that that make you happy, even if they are expressly forbidden by the Bible
  • you don’t have to do anything that makes you feel bad (e.g. – talk to non-Christians about Christian truth claims), because God wants you to be happy

No! Where do people get this idea that if they convert to Christianity, then God will become their cosmic butler?

Amy has the answer: (emphasis mine)

Hear me, everyone: This is a failure of the church.

A friend of mine who was deeply suffering once said to me that many Christians are in for “an epic letdown” when they realize their preconceived notions about what God is expected to do for us are false. Pastors who preach a life-improvement Jesus are leading people down this precarious path to disillusionment.

If suffering disproves your Christianity, you’ve missed Christianity. The Bible is filled with the suffering of those whom God loves. The central event of the Bible is one of suffering. Love involves suffering. “We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” That means suffering.

It’s the church. It’s the focus on happy things and having of happy feelings and happy songs and preaching designed to make us feel good. I would say the comforting devotional reading doesn’t help to make us any tougher or more practical, either. That happy-clappy stuff just gives you a false sense of safety about your precarious situation. God’s job is not to prevent you from suffering. In fact, even if you make really smart, practical decisions, you can expect to get creamed anyway.

Please take 15 minutes and read the book of 1 Peter in the New Testament.

Here’s a summary from GotQuestions.org:

Purpose of Writing: 1 Peter is a letter from Peter to the believers who had been dispersed throughout the ancient world and were under intense persecution. If anyone understood persecution, it was Peter. He was beaten, threatened, punished and jailed for preaching the Word of God. He knew what it took to endure without bitterness, without losing hope and in great faith living an obedient, victorious life. This knowledge of living hope in Jesus was the message and Christ’s example was the one to follow.

Brief Summary: Though this time of persecution was desperate, Peter reveals that it was actually a time to rejoice. He says to count it a privilege to suffer for the sake of Christ, as their Savior suffered for them. This letter makes reference to Peter’s personal experiences with Jesus and his sermons from the book of Acts. Peter confirms Satan as the great enemy of every Christian but the assurance of Christ’s future return gives the incentive of hope.

Practical Application: The assurance of eternal life is given to all Christians. One way to identify with Christ is to share in His suffering. To us that would be to endure insults and slurs from those who call us “goodie two shoes” or “holier than thou.” This is so minor compared to what Christ suffered for us on the Cross. Stand up for what you know and believe is right and rejoice when the world and Satan aim to hurt you.

Recently, I blogged about how suffering is compatible with an all-powerful God, so you might want to read that too if you missed it.

News

Is Sam Harris successful at rationally grounding objective moral values and duties?

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

I just wanted to put out a few snips from this layperson-level article on the Reasonable Faith web site. The article is about atheist scholar Sam Harris, and his attempt to provide a basis for morality on atheism.

Here’s the Harris project:

The question then is, what is the best foundation for the existence of objective moral values and duties? What grounds them? What makes certain actions good or evil, right or wrong? Traditionally, God has been the highest Good (summum bonum) and His commandments constitutive of our moral duties. But if God does not exist, what foundation remains for objective moral values and duties?

Dr. Craig is able to show why Harris’ attempt to ground the objective moral value of humans in “human flourishing” fails in the first part of his article, but I want to focus on the second part. Can Sam Harris’ atheism rationally ground his claim that human can make genuine moral choices?

Dr. Craig writes:

Does atheism provide a sound foundation for objective moral duties? Duty has to do with moral obligation and prohibition, what I ought or ought not to do. Here reviewers of The Moral Landscape have been merciless in pounding Harris’ attempt to provide a naturalistic account of moral obligation. Two problems stand out.

First: Natural science tells us only what is, not what ought to be, the case. As philosopher Jerry Fodor has written, “Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it wouldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are.” In particular it cannot tell us that we have a moral obligation to take actions that are conducive to human flourishing.

So if there is no God, what foundation remains for objective moral duties? On the naturalistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a lion kills a zebra, it kills the zebra, but it does not murder the zebra. When a great white shark forcibly copulates with a female, it forcibly copulates with her but it does not rape her — for there is no moral dimension to these actions. They are neither prohibited nor obligatory.

So if God does not exist, why think we have any moral obligations to do anything? Who or what imposes these moral duties on us? Where do they come from? It is hard to see why they would be anything more than a subjective impression ingrained into us by societal and parental conditioning.

So we might feel morally obligated to do something, maybe what our herd expects of us in this time and place we live in. But on atheism those feelings are arbitrary. After all, societies have evolved where feelings of obligation are felt by people to perform suicide bombings against civilians. On atheism, those feelings are as valid and grounded as any other “duties” because they emerge from the same process in other times and places. Obligations change between time and place – they are not objectively real. But that means that our moral duties are not objective, they are arbitrary – if atheism is true. The same “socio-biological evolution” is generating opposite moral duties in different times and places. This is not “objective”.

And the second objection is even more lethal:

Second: “ought” implies “can.” A person is not morally responsible for an action he is unable to avoid. For example, if somebody shoves you into another person, you are not to blame for bumping into this person. You had no choice. But Harris believes that all of our actions are causally determined and that there is no free will. Harris rejects not only libertarian accounts of freedom but also compatibilistic accounts of freedom. But if there is no free will, no one is morally responsible for anything. In the end, Harris admits this, though it’s tucked away in his endnotes. Moral responsibility, he says, “is a social construct,” not an objective reality: “in neuroscientific terms no person is more or less responsible than any other” for the actions they perform. His thoroughgoing determinism spells the end of any hope or possibility of objective moral duties on his worldview because we have no control over what we do.

Harris recognizes that “determinism really does threaten free will and responsibility as we intuitively understand them.” But not to worry! “The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.” The point, I take it, is that we do not really have the illusion of free will. Not only is such a claim patently false phenomenologically, as any of us can attest, but it is also irrelevant. The fact remains that whether we experience the illusion of free will or not, on Harris’ view we are thoroughly determined in all that we think and do and can therefore have no moral responsibilities.

On Harris’ view, human beings are computers made out of meat. But if you cannot freely make moral choices, then you cannot choose to perform moral duties or not. What is amazing to me is why he wants to deny free will in the first place. He is surely very well aware of his own experience of free will, and his own consciousness, for that matter. Before we even start to look at scientific evidences against atheism like the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine-tuning, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, etc. we already have evidence within ourselves that naturalism is false.

Just in passing, my friend Micah sent me this article about Sam Harris’ academic credentials. Although Harris has a PhD in neuroscience, the underlying reality is a bit more complicated. When I watched him debate William Lane Craig, he seemed to be ignorant of simple problems with his utilitarian moral views, and his inability to ground libertarian free will. The problems with utilitarianism have been known for hundreds of years. You can watch the debate yourself and see if you think he was prepared or not.