I’ve been featuring a lot of conservative women lately, and not just Marsha Blackburn and Michele Bachmann. Earlier this week I featured Dawn Eden, who is a champion of chastity, and Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse who champions parenting, men and the family. (I found a very frank, funny podcast by Dr. J where she is speaking to a Catholic church about chastity, marriage and parenting – her podcast feed is here)
How are women different than men?
Here are some ways that women are different than men:
women tend to favor gun control, because guns are loud and scary
women tend to emphasize having their needs met by Christianity over theology and apologetics
women tend to favor compassion and forgiveness over responsibility and moral obligations
Well, let’s just see what Laura over the Pursuing Holiness blog thinks about all of that!
1. Laura likes guns
She writes:
Consider, for example, the New Bethel Church in Louisville, KY. Pastor Ken Pagano has decided to have a Gun Day at church. The Gun Day will include patriotic music and gun safety information. After all, recent shootings at churches have illustrated the need for responsible, defensive gun ownership.
I thought to myself, Sweet, maybe I should convert to the Assemblies of God and be a part of this.
What if church was about worshiping and learning about a holy and sovereign God? A radical idea, I know.
…What’s the point of filling a church with benchwarmers, or in turning a church into a community organization where people perform service in order to fulfill their own moral code instead of for the glory of God? We have a country full of people and groups intent on self-gratification. If the church is no different, people may as well sleep in on Sundays.
Is there something morally wrong about being required to pay for [medical] services we willingly received? It’s far more morally wrong to have people throw in the towel and just refuse to pay, but even that is an option that society chooses to accept via bankruptcy laws.
I really don’t understand why people are buying into the idea that it’s some massive, morally unsound, unfair burden to pay for the medical services that they willingly received. It’s entirely fair. You asked for those services, you accepted them, and now you need to quit whingeing and pay up.
I wanted to highlight some of the Christian blogs that I’ve discovered since I started blogging.
The top one in the list is definitely Neil Simpson’s blog. I was just reading over there today and he was really hard on poor Dawn Eden, whose book on chastity I have read. I recommend it, although she doesn’t go as far as I would. Anyway, she’s responded in the comments. She is currently taking classes in philosophy and theology, so it should be a good fight between her and Neil! Dawn’s blog is here.
I also noticed this post over on Laura’s blog, but it’s cross-posted on Hot Air. Laura writes about how the left implicitly doesn’t trust parents to make decisions about how they address the topic of sex when talking to their own children. She writes about the left’s view of parents:
Our teens are political pawns for the left. They’re helpless victims of our prudery, children that the government needs to provide for at every turn with health insurance and free college tuition (but don’t deserve an adequate secondary education except when it’s time to raise taxes), socially and technologically savvy enough to make their own entertainment and political choices free from our censorship, mature and wise enough to choose abortion (but not give birth), and 18 year old babies who need to be protected from sneaky military recruiters and beer. The rallying cry may be “it’s for the children!” but the only really consistent position I see in the left is that parents do not know best; government does.
Over on Muddling Toward Maturity, he links to a Chuck Colson story on how the self-esteem movement in education and parenting has undermined civility in our children. Here is an excerpt from Chuck Colson:
Whether or not today’s kids are actually “ruder than ever,” the article and others like it reflect the sense that something has gone wrong in the way we raise our children. Specifically, it has to do with “popular parenting movements focusing on self-esteem.”
These movements produce parents who “[respond] with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way.” By “getting in the child’s way,” they mean doing anything that might make the child feel less-than-wonderful about him or herself—in the classroom, among their peers, or on the playing field.
Denyse O’Leary takes on the theistic evolutionists here at Post-Darwinist. I love it when she gets mad at them! She gets right to the heart of the issue: is there objective evidence of intelligent agency active in nature? Intelligent design supporters say YES, atheists and theistic evolutionists (but I repeat myself) say NO.
A video of Denyse talking about her book “The Spiritual Brain” here: (H/T Mindful Hack)
She talks about whether faith is good for people, and how people invent genes to explain their bad behavior.
Kreitsauce writes about the importance of self-denial and self-sacrifice in the Christian worldview, which is neglected these days now that the church has bowed to the society at large and reduced Christianity to feelings of happiness.
Discipleship, in contrast to narcissism, brings true satisfaction with life, because life gains a whole new sense of meaning and purpose. We have real freedom to do what is right, to live a life of intimacy with God. This life of discipleship and self-denial does not mean living without desire or without anything that brings pleasure. God does not call us to the monastery but to live life in the world but not of the world.
Chad at Truthbomb Apologetics has a post up that I will be writing about shortly, because it’s that good. He links to an episode of Casey Luskin’s ID The Future podcast featuring a discussion between a Darwinist and Socrates. He has an excerpt from the dialog here on his blog. The entire dialog is in a PDF on his site.
Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so many arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic about human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. Even now, many do not want to be bothered with the infirm elderly or damaged infants, so we devise so-called humane ways to kill them and pretend that somehow they chose (or would have chosen) to die. Elderly patients are being killed in the Netherlands without their consent. A new protocol for euthanizing newborns with disabilities is institutionalized in the Netherlands…
The Australian utilitarian Peter Singer predicts confidently that the superstition that human life is sacred will be definitively put to rest by 2040.
…In an interview for a British magazine during the summer of 2005, Singer said that if he faced the quandary of saving from a raging fire either a mentally disabled child, an orphan child nobody wanted, or normal animals, he would save the animals. If the child had a mother who would be devastated by the child’s death, he would save the child, but unwanted orphans have no such value.
My buddy Rich and I scrap over whether chastity is better than marriage over at the Pugnacious Irishman. (He’s getting married shortly, and my friend Robb is getting married tomorrow, so it’s a hot topic for me!)
Over on the Western Experience, Jason has a post up on how Dick Cheney is taking on Obama on his lousy policies. Here’s a clip:
Unqualified teleprompter-reader versus qualified statesman. Nice Deb has a complete round-up here, featuring Michelle Malkin and others. I have to tell you, I am really liking what Liz Cheney has to say these days, as well.
It also ignited a trade war with Canada. In response to vague “buy American” provisions in the stimulus package, “A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts — the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.”
Yet, Obama had the audacity to claim that only passing the stimulus package would save us from “irreversible decline” and economic ““disaster”.
Remember how Democrats used to complain about Bush and his “tax cuts for the rich”? Yeah, it’s strange how only people who pay taxes (59% of the public) can actually get tax cuts, isn’t it. But Obama has an even better idea: “tax hikes for the poor”.
A senior administration official said the new standards would raise the cost of an average car by $1,300, $600 of which could be attributed to the rules being announced today.
On the other hand, let’s take a look at Canada in relation to the United States, courtesy of the Cato Institute. (H/T Heritage Foundation)
The Cato Institute writes:
Spending: Spending by all levels of the Canadian government peaked at 53 percent of the country’s GDP in the early 1990s, then plunged to 40 percent in 2008. U.S. government spending has risen, reaching 39 percent of GDP in 2008. And with the stimulus package, that number is likely to jump even higher.
Government spending as % of GDP
Debt: The Canadian government cut its debt from 71 percent of GDP in 1995 to 32 percent in 2008. Under President Obama’s budget plan, U.S. federal public debt will jump from 41 percent of GDP in 2008 to more than 60 percent next year.
Federal debt as % of GDP
Deficits: Canada has balanced its budget every year since 1998 — not by raising taxes, but by cutting spending. The United States balanced its budget for four years in the late 1990s, but now deficits are so large that it’s difficult to imagine that ever happening again.
Surplus / Deficit as % of GDP
Corporate Taxes: Canada has cut the corporate tax rate from 28 percent to just 15 percent, and most provinces have trimmed corporate taxes as well. The U.S. federalstate rate stands at about 40 percent, and the Obama administration is planning to increase corporate taxes.
Corporate tax rates
It’s important to note that the Liberal party in Canada is socially progressive, but moderate on fiscal issues. Of course, now that the Conservatives have been running things, it’s gotten even better. It would be great if they could win a majority. The biggest problem in Canada right now is the fascist Human Rights Commissions, but there are candidates from the Conservative Party who intend to abolish the HRCs in BC and Ontario.
WINTERY KNIGHT 