Tag Archives: Brown Shirt

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Advice for atheists who want to appear to value reason

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Tom Gilson writes about how an atheist professor committed the straw man fallacy, and what it means.

Excerpt:

We need to turn to his PSU talk, wherein he speaks (after about 29:00) of “three core reasons for why one believes one’s faith tradition is true…. Reason number one: Miracles. We’re going to examine a few miracles.”

Let me pause and ask you to consider which faith-truth-convincing miracles he might want to examine and debunk. The resurrection? Healings? Visions? No, none of these. Ladies and gentlemen, for the safety of your clothing, lower your drinks. The miracles he chooses to debunk, and thereby to destroy the faith-enhancing credibility of miracles, are:

    1. Transubstantiation: the substantial change of the Eucharist elements into the body and blood of Jesus, according to Catholic doctrine…. and
    2. Tongues, or glossolalia.

So this atheist philosophy professor thinks that Christians argue for God’s existence using transubstantiation and tongues.

Have you ever seen any Christian scholar talk about that in a debate? I haven’t even seen it in blog posts, much less books or papers.

Now if I were going to give arguments for God’s existence, I would offer arguments like these:

  • origin of the universe
  • cosmic fine-tuning
  • origin of life’s building blocks
  • origin of biological information
  • convergence
  • epigenetics
  • molecular machines, like the ribosome
  • limits on mutation-driven change
  • Cambrian explosion
  • galactic habitability
  • stellar habitability
  • the effectiveness/applicability of mathematics to nature
  • consciousness
  • free will
  • rationality
  • objective moral values and duties
  • the minimal facts case for the resurrection

Dear atheists: those are the kinds of arguments that you see in actual debates and read in actual apologetics books. And those are the arguments that need a response. But before responding to those arguments, they have to be understood properly by reading the primary sources where those arguments are laid out in a rigorous way, e.g. – The Design Inference. And when you respond to them, you should cite the original texts, with page numbers, to show that you understand them.

What I really find disturbing about this Boghossian fellow is how the audience reacts:

His performance in both these lectures amounts to a parade of fallacies.

Yet if you watch these two lectures through to the end, you’ll find that the audiences eat it up; or many of the people do, at any rate. They’re being taught by a distinguished looking university professor. They like what they’re hearing. It agrees with their prejudices. And — in the role of an educator, mind you — he’s leading them on with obviously fallacious thinking. There’s something seriously wrong about that tactic.

I’m really not sure why anyone would applaud someone like Boghossian who is clearly more interested in ridicule than debate. What does this say about atheism? I mean – these people are applauding something that could be corrected by reading a short, introductory book like Lee Strobel’s “Case for a Creator”. Yet they don’t appear to be educated enough to even do that. Worse, the atheist professor is actually encouraging them to persist in their ignorance. Either the professor hasn’t read introductory books on apologetics or he just finds pleasure in hearing the sneers and jeers of the mob, as he feeds them lies and propaganda.

Here’s my suspicion about atheism. I don’t think that most rank and file atheists really are interested in truth at all. They are more interested puffing themselves up and in putting other people down. This Boghossian episode is not an isolated case. You can see this in action with the 1-star reviews of books like Darwin’s Doubt. The negative reviewers don’t reference page numbers or cite passages, because the reviewers haven’t actually read the book. And they don’t feel that they need to read it in order to insult it. In their view, proper atheism is about mocking – not about informed reasoning. For them, the less that is known about what the opposition really believes, the better. Should we take this forced ignorance to be a central tenet of the atheist worldview, then? What is a good name for this predilection they have for preferring stand-up comedy to rational thought?

News

Obama enlists radical groups and labor unions to push for amnesty

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Story from the lefty AP. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

President Barack Obama is enlisting activists and labor leaders in a push for comprehensive immigration legislation that will showcase Republican opposition and include a speech by the president.

The strategy was discussed during a meeting Monday by a range of prominent labor leaders and activist groups. Participants said Obama reiterated his support for immigration legislation but noted the political realities that have stalled it in Congress.

Latino leaders say they will work in coming months to pressure Republicans to give way and support an immigration bill — and make opponents pay at the ballot box if they don’t.

“We’re going to make absolutely crystal clear who’s at fault here,” said Eliseo Medina, a leader of the Service Employees International Union.

I hope these union people don’t organize a mob to chant on my front lawn. They do things like that, you know. They’re unions. That’s what unions do. They march around and intimidate people. Sometimes they even beat people up.

News

SEIU union thugs rage against private citizen on his own front lawn

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SEIU union thugs storm private citizen's home

Story here from CNN Money. (H/T Peter Sean Bradley at Lex Communis)

Excerpt:

Last Sunday, on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon, our toddler finally napping upstairs, my front yard exploded with 500 screaming, placard-waving strangers on a mission to intimidate my neighbor, Greg Baer. Baer is deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), a senior executive based in Washington, D.C. And that — in the minds of the organizers at the politically influential Service Employees International Union and a Chicago outfit called National Political Action — makes his family fair game.

[…]As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

[…]Now this event would accurately be called a “protest” if it were taking place at, say, a bank or the U.S. Capitol. But when hundreds of loud and angry strangers are descending on your family, your children, and your home, a more apt description of this assemblage would be “mob.” Intimidation was the whole point of this exercise, and it worked-even on the police. A trio of officers who belatedly answered our calls confessed a fear that arrests might “incite” these trespassers.

And why were the SEIU trying to intimidate a private citizen on his own property?

[Bank of America] is the union’s lender of choice — and SEIU, suffering financially, owes the bank nearly $4 million in interest and fees. Bank of America declined comment on the loans.

Now you know everything you need to know about the people who get Democrats elected. When I think of the SEIU, I think of Hitler’s brown-shirts. (Just as when I think of Obama’s former employer ACORN, I think of the mafia).

This new tactic of violent intimidation defines what it means to be a Democrat today. They don’t want to debate with those who disagree with them, they want to shout obscenities and intimidate dissenters with threats of violence and vandalism – or to attack people and their property, if that’s what is needed. There was a time when Democrats were a mainstream, respectable party – the party of JFK. But that time is gone.

It’s not difficult for me to compare Democrats gangs with the socialist Greek rioters who murdered three people while burning down a bank – it’s the next stage of the “striking” and “community organizing” that the left is so fond of. They want their inflated salaries, their pensions, and their generous health care plans – and they will use violence and intimidation in order to get someone else’s money to pay for it.