Tag Archives: Christianity

News

How Michele Bachmann’s miscarriage shaped her pro-life views

07/01/2011 Wintery Knight 7 Comments

Excerpt:

Campaigning in South Carolina, Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said a “devastating” miscarriage helped shape her pro-life views on abortion. The compelling personal story ties in to her rationale for becoming a foster care mom.

While on the campaign trail in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the Minnesota congresswoman revealed she had a miscarriage decades ago and that the event led her to solidify her pro-life views and prompted her and her husband to become a foster home to 23 children over the years.

“After our second child was born, we became pregnant with a third baby,” Bachmann said, according to a Politico report. “And it was an unexpected baby, but of course we were delighted to have this child. And the child was coming along, and we ended up losing that child. And it was devastating for both of us, as you can imagine if any of you have lost a child.”

She said the miscarriage also prompted Bachmann and her husband Marcus to re-evaluate their personal and professional life goals.

“At that moment we didn’t think of ourselves as overly career minded or overly materialistic,” she said, according to Politico. “When we lost that child, it changed us. And it changed us forever.”

“We made a commitment that no matter how many children were brought into our life, we would receive them because we are committed to life,” she added.

Reporters at the event say Bachmann shared it about halfway through her town hall at Winthrop University on Wednesday night. The miscarriage story is not one that Bachmann has shared much and Peter Hamby from CNN reports that “Even some of Bachmann’s staffers were caught by surprise when she talked about the miscarriage and had not heard [the] story before.”

You can see pictures and videos of the event at Right Wing News, courtesy of John Hawkins. I really appreciate that John has been broadly supportive of Michele, because he is a major figure in the conservative blogosphere.

You can also find out more about Michele Bachmann from interviews, campaign speeches and speeches in the legislature.

Commentary

Is absence of evidence for God evidence of his absence?

06/29/2011 Wintery Knight Leave a comment

From Christopher Copan Scott. (H/T The Poached Egg)

Excerpt:

There is a central question that must be answered in the philosophy of religion: Is absence of evidence, evidence of absence? The answer is that it all depends on what the thingin question is.

Examine these two scenarios:

Suppose in S1 (scenario one) Bob is invited on a challenge to find one golden ant, the only golden ant, and it happens to be somewhere in the 1.7 billion acres known as the Amazon Rainforest. If you were to find this one golden ant in 24 hours you would be rewarded with a large sum of money. Furthermore, suppose Bob the contestant is unsuccessful in this challenge and as a result complains to the organizers of the event saying that because he could not find the golden ant, it therefore does not exist. The problem with his complaint is that in S1, the absence of evidence for this one golden ant, gives little to no justification for you to conclude the non-existence of it.

Let us go on to S2. Here Bob is confronted with a similar challenge, instead he is not trying to find an ant but an elephant, and the environment is not the Amazon Rainforest, but his small office room. In S2, one’s assertion that the lack of evidence of the elephant in his office is evidence of absence of the elephant would be warranted.

This demonstrates that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence for the existence of a particular entity, if and only if it meets the following two conditions:

1) If the postulated entity were to exist, we should expect to have some evidence of its existence.

2) We have thoroughly examined the area which we would expect to find the entity.

Now what does this mean when it comes to the existence of God? This means that those who assert that the lack of evidence for the existence of God provides sufficient grounds to assert that this is evidence of absence must take the burden of proving (1) and (2).

This debate has been taken up in what is called the hiddenness of God. So at the least, in order to assert that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence for God one is required to provide justification for this claim.

For a longer treatment of the question of the hiddenness of God, please see a paper by philosopher Michael Murray, which I discuss in this post. This is an important philosophical problem that rarely comes up in the formal academic debates that we all love to watch with William Lane Craig. On a related note, it’s worth taking a look at the concept of burden of proof as it relates to the problems of evil and suffering. There are lots of links to lectures and essays in that post.

News

AT LAST! Michele Bachmann is officially running for President in 2012

06/27/2011 Wintery Knight 5 Comments

Full text of the announcement is here.

Excerpt:

This election is about big issues, not petty ones. When all is said and done, we cannot be about big government as usual. Then America will lose.

In Washington I am bringing a voice to the halls of congress that has been missing for a long time. It is the voice of the people I love and learned from growing up in Waterloo. It is the voice of reasonable, fair-minded people who love this country, who are patriotic, and who see the United States as the indispensable nation of the world.

My voice is part of a movement to take back our country, and now I want to take that voice to the White House. It is the voice of constitutional conservatives who want our government to do its job and not ours and who want our government to live within its means and not our children’s and grandchildren’s.

I am here in Waterloo, Iowa to announce today: We can win in 2012 and we will. Our voice has been growing louder and stronger. And it is made up of Americans from all walks of life like a three-legged stool. It’s the peace through strength Republicans, and I’m one of them, it’s fiscal conservatives, and I’m one of them, and it’s social conservatives, and I’m one of them. It’s the Tea Party movement and I’m one of them.

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