Tag Archives: Humanism

Videos

UK media discussing whether Christians are fit to be foster parents

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Here’s the video:

Basically, the state thinks that Christians cannot be parents because their individual morality clashes with the moral relativism and sexual hedonism of the state. Many (most) people of the people who agree with fascism will be on the political left. That’s why fascism is only and exclusively a phenomenon of the political left.

But not all people on the secular left are fascists.

Here’s some useful commentary about one of the speakers: (H/T Mary)

The historian, television and radio presenter, David Starkey is gay and an atheist.  He is also an honorary member of the National Secular Society.  You might therefore expect him to be clearly in favour of the ruling in the High Court this week that banned a Christian couple from fostering children because of their religious beliefs.

Starkey is not a fascist. I thought it was interesting that he mentioned his mother but not his father in the clip. Homosexuality is highly co-related with a breakdown in the relationship of the same-sex parent. When you have an absent/abusive/weak father and a domineering mother, that puts you at risk, if you are male. And the situation is reversed for women, where different environmental factors come into play, making the little girl feel devalued and vulnerable as a little girl. Parents – take heed. And be careful how you present Christianity to your children. If you present it as rules with no evidence or warrant, you will get a rebellion. If you present in the context of being informed about science, etc., within the context of a respectful, open-minded relationship, you may win the child over.

Back to the video – I thought it was interesting when the red-haired woman said that Christians could have their pro-life, pro-marriage, anti-slavery, anti-infanticide morality at home, but at work they had to object the state’s version of morality. She would fit in well in Nazi Germany or Communist North Korea. David Starkey would not have fit into to those fascist regimes at all.

Fascism is the imposition of state morality and purposes over individual morality and purposes. Conservatism limits the state’s ability to impose morality and purpose onto the citizens, and also limits involuntary wealth redistribution from one group of individuals to another. In conservatism everyone makes their own choices and pays their own way. In liberalism, the government endorses certain lifestyles over others, and transfers wealth involuntarily from unfavored groups to subsidize the favored groups – as with taxpayer funding of abortion, in vitro fertilization or sex changes. Christians are usually not favored by the state because our strong moral views conflict with the sexual hedonism that is so prevalent today. We have nothing to gain from an overbearing state, and much to lose.

Here’s a debate I posted a while back in which British fascists agree with the red-haired woman that Christians have no human rights to things like free speech, and that some group of people (atheists) have the right to silence other groups (Christians) because they are “offended”.

News

Obama administration rolls back conscience protections for health care workers

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From Life Site News.

Excerpt:

The Obama Administration has rescinded a federal regulation from 2008 that protected the conscience rights of health care providers opposed to providing abortifacient contraception, such as the Plan-B “morning-after” pill.

The Health and Human Services Department under Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, issued the new “final rule,” which leaves health-care workers of federally funded entities a narrower conscience exemption that only protects them from having to participate in abortions or sterilizations.

The new regulation replaces the earlier one enacted in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, which broadened the interpretation of existing federal conscience statutes related to abortion to include health professionals opposed to emergency contraception, such as Ella or Plan-B, drugs which pro-life advocates say also act as abortifacients.

Sebelius alleged in the promulgation of the new final rule that the Bush-era conscience regulations “instead led to greater confusion”, citing comments received by HHS. She said her department was changing the rule because it was “unclear and potentially over-broad in scope.”

The HHS Secretary said in her statement that her department did share the concern of those in favor of rescinding the rule that it had the “potential to negatively impact patient access to contraception and certain other medical services” esp. for certain sub-populations, such as “low income patients, minorities, the uninsured, patients in rural areas, Medicaid beneficiaries, or other medically under-served populations.”

The ruling is a victory for Planned Parenthood and other “family planning” groups that have insisted that drugs like Plan-B (taken within 72 hours of sexual intercourse) and Ella (taken within five-days of intercourse) should be defined as “contraception.” Pro-life groups countered that pro-life health providers should be protected from discrimination under federal statutes, because these drugs could prevent a conceived human embryo from implanting in the mother’s womb, thereby aborting it.

[…]“Today’s erosion of conscience protections for medical professionals is a blow both to medicine and the right to practice one’s deeply-held convictions,” said Dr. J. Scott Ries, on behalf of the 16,000-member Christian Medical Association (CMA).

Ries said the new HHS final rule disregarded the findings of the previous HHS 2008 final rule which stated that allowing health professionals to practice according to their convictions would negatively impact patient services or create “new barriers.”

“Losing conscientious healthcare professionals and faith-based institutions to discrimination and job loss especially imperils the poor and patients in medically underserved areas,” said Ries. “We are already facing critical shortages of primary care physicians, and the Obama administration’s decision now threatens to make the situation far worse for patients across the country who depend on faith-based health care.”

As the days go on, I find myself missing George W. Bush more and more. Say what you like about him, he was a Christian. And now we have a non-Christian (atheist) president and an atheistic administration. Things like conscience protections are naturally under attack. Naturally, people on the secular left think that the state has a right to impose their views and overrule the religious and moral views of individual citizens. That’s what fascism is – and fascism is exclusively a phenomenon of the political left. The right values individual liberty and free market capitalism.

Podcasts

William Lane Craig on Sam Harris’ attempt to ground morality with science

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William Lane Craig is going to be debating atheist Sam Harris in April, so I thought that I would link to a couple of resources in which Craig assesses Harris’ views. Harris thinks that you can use science to discover an objective morality. Does his view make sense?

Here’s an audio clip from Youtube:

And in this MP3 file, Craig assesses Harris’ attempt to grounded morality on naturalism.

Topics:

  • Harris opposes ground moral values and moral duties on a theistic worldview
  • Harris thinks that the factual statements made by science can ground moral values and moral duties
  • Harris thinks that these findings of science lead to an objective morality
  • Harris’ view is that what is “good” is what contributes to “human well-being”
  • Human happiness and flourishing is “good” and human unhappiness and decline is “evil”
  • Craig agrees that science can show what factors contribute to human flourishing
  • On atheism, there is no reason to select the fourishing of human beings as “good”
  • Craig asks: why say that human well-being and flourishing is a moral good?
  • there are non-moral uses of the word “good” and moral uses of the word “good”
  • the moral sense of “good” refers to the “good life” and what we ought to do to be good
  • Harris equivocates between different uses of the word good
  • in chess, there are good moves and bad moves with respect to winning the game – but that’s not moral good
  • similarly, someone who cleans your yard can do a good job or a bad job – but that’s not moral good
  • what is the explanation, on atheism, for human flourishing having the moral dimension of being “good”?
  • how does Harris deal with the fact-value divide? (the fallacy of deriving an ought from an is)
  • how does Harris leap from facts about brains to the moral property of “goodness”?
  • what scientific experiments does Harris propose to show that human flourishing is the “good”?
  • is Harris’ view just utilitarianism? (the view that the good is whatever makes the most number of people happy)
  • can Harris ground human rights like the right to life on his view?
  • Can human rights be overridden if it makes lots of people happy, on Harris’ view?
  • does Harris’ view lead to eugenics? how could Harris oppose the elimination of the weak or undesirables?

I think the question that Sam Harris has to answer is this: on atheism, why should a person limit their own pursuit of happiness when they can be more happy by being selfish and spurning the “flourishing of humans”? Why should any individual atheist care about the flourishing of humans when self-sacrificial actions to improve the flourishing of others diminishes his own happiness?

You can hear even more about Harris’ views from New Zealand philosopher Glenn Peoples.