Tag Archives: Courage

News

Woman offended by seeing-eye dog ejects blind man from bus

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Note: My opinion is that the woman in the story is probably a Muslim because Muslims have an aversion to dogs, but the news article is not conclusive on this point.

ECM likes dogs, while I like birds. He sent me this story from the Reading Post in the UK.

Excerpt:

A driver told a blind cancer sufferer to get off his bus when a woman and her children became hysterical at the sight of his guide dog.

George Herridge, 71, told how the mum flew into a rage and shouted at him in a foreign language. A passenger explained she wanted him to get off the bus during the incident on May 20.

ECM also sent me this story from the UK Telegraph, linked by David Thompson, about the death of initiative and outrage.

Excerpt:

Few people now dare to challenge just simple, inconsiderate behaviour in others – behaviour which flies well under the criminality radar but which manages to alienate and intimidate. It’s this which is the most worrying, though understandable, aspect to it all. There is a section of our society that remains awfully polite about such issues, and prefers to see such non-reaction as part of a British desire not to make a fuss or cause embarrassment. It’s a nice, quaint idea but it no longer plays: they simply don’t get the fact that now, it’s all about fear.

And alongside this fear is the sense that the order of things has become so inverted that one will be on shaky ground if one does indeed speak up. Most people now register some degree of outrage at being asked to desist, no matter how politely you do it. You are the rude troublemaker in their eyes. For some kind of order to be restored, back-up is crucial. And formal authority has more or less left the scene. You are on your own.

I actually blame secularism for eroding the objective morality that was, until recently, dominant in the West. The moral relativism that emerged as objective morality declined does not allow people to rationally oppose injustice. Instead, people just keep quiet. If moral relativism is true, you can’t make moral judgments against anyone.

Mentoring

The Pugnacious Irishman invites Christians to defend their faith

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His post is boldly entitled “Walking Around with our Pants Around our Ankles”.

A little bit about Rich: his background is in teaching and his most recent post was in a school in a very rough part of Los Angeles.

Rich makes an important point about the need to find people who disagree with you and engage them. You won’t find them in your house or in your church. You’ve got to go to the workplace or the university campus and start making friends with them to find out what they believe and whether they are open to new ideas!

Rich reacts to my post from yesterday here:

…Another thing is that when people are caught in an environment where they have to defend God’s honor, they suddenly become starved for the kind of training Wintery advocates.  If you regularly find yourself amidst a bunch of atheists, agnostics, and Muslims who are constantly challenging you on the reasonableness of your faith, chances are, you’ll start searching for answers pretty quickly.  Hey, it happened to me. In other words, if your pants fall down, buying a belt suddenly moves up a few notches on your priority list.

The kicker is that many people never experience that felt need; they are sequestered in an environment of comfort.  A decent number go to great lengths to maintain this bubble, avoiding being exposed.  They are walking around in closeted quarters, with the shutters drawn and drapes pulled down, oblivious to the fact that their trousers are hanging around their ankles.

Many people assume apologetics is all about merely “winning an argument,” but nothing could be further from the truth.  WK puts it in the proper perspective: it’s about defending God’s honor in public.  If someone were clowning on your spouse at work, wouldn’t you want to stand up and say something?

That’s the first key point about apologetics: protecting God’s reputation as a way of participating in a friendship with God. He’s also got some book recommendations in his post for beginnners and I could not agree more. I own every stinking one of them!

And he’s got an update here, where he makes the second key point about apologetics.

Excerpt:

Addition to today’s post:  I don’t think I underscored enough another motivation of apologetics–love.

Why defend the faith?  Because we love our neighbors.

This is a good point for Christians who value love. Apologetics is love. It’s one way that you can love your neighbor. God expects us all to spend some time responding to his overtures to us in nature, in conscience, and in history. It does no good to help atheists to ignore God’s calling by keeping silent about God’s will for that person.

News

Democrats introduce bill to punish infanticide as a felony, not murder

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UPDATE: Sorry, the headline from before should read that infanticide up to one year will be reduced to a felony, not legalized outright! My mistake!

A post at Gateway Pundit, sent to me by the greatest commenter in the blogosphere, ECM.

Gateway Pundit has a link to the bill, but Cassy Fiano has a lot more.

Here’s a bit about the bill:

It defines infanticide as:

A person commits an offense if the person wilfully by an act or omission causes the death of a child to whom the person gave birth within the 12-month period preceding the child’s death
The bill says that infanticide should not be prosecuted as murder, though, as long as:

… at the time of the act or omission, the person’s judgment was impaired as a result of the effects of giving birth or the effects of lactation following the birth.
Infanticide would become a felony, punishable by no more than two years in prison, with a minimum of 180 days, and/or a fine of no more than $10,000.

We need to start getting serious about defending the pro-life view using facts and arguments. Here’s some stuff to get you started. Disagreeing with people is fun once you take time to learn your stuff in detail.

Here is a new video featuring pro-life supermodel Kathy Ireland talking to Mike Huckabee, who strikes as very ignorant. (No surprise, given his terribly uninformed positions on illegal immigration and fiscal policy!)

The Wintery Knight strongly approves of pro-life supermodels!