Tag Archives: Study

Commentary

Do you ever wish that your co-workers took your faith seriously?

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This is a problem that I used to have in the very beginning of my career, when I was still doing my undergraduate degree and working summer jobs and internships with software development companies. I was just in my early 20s, and was having to deal with being a Christian in the university and in the workplace. It’s very difficult to do it when you are young – everyone thinks that they know more than you do just because they are older – whether they have studied the issues or not. Not only that, but you have deal with the pre-conceptions that people have about Christianity from watching anti-Christian movies and televangelists, etc.

What a mess. So what is the way forward?

The way forward is for you to take Christianity OUT of the realm of private faith, Sunday singing, emotions and feelings, personal testimony, miraculous healings, apparations (if you’re Catholic), end times, Bible prophecies, and other stuff that scares non-Christians. And then you put Christianity INTO the realm of science, history, analytical philosophy, social science, economics, politics, law, and other public, testable, areas of knowledge.

After you’ve studied Chrsitianity and how it relates to public, testable areas of knowledge, it is easy to communicate your knowledge of things like the galactic habitability constraints, amino acid sequence specificity probabilities, minimal facts criteria for the historicity of the empty tomb, the grounding objection to middle knowledge, and the Laffer curve to other people. You are an expert at dumping the burden of proof on your opponent, every attempt by your opponent to make self-refuting statements is met with a whistle blow and a yellow card, and you wield Occam’s Razor like a samurai warrior.

Great! It all works great on people who will give you an hour at lunch to listen to your case. But what about the people who have heard through the grapevine that you are a Christian, identify you with Joel Osteen, and are snickering at you behind your back every time you walk by?

Decorating your cube at work

The solution is to decorate your cube at work.

Here is what you will need:

  1. a peer-reviewed paper on from a scientific journal (like this one, free version here)
  2. a peer-reviewed paper on from a social science journal (like this one)
  3. a news article on some foreign policy issue (like this one)
  4. a publication from a think tank on economic or social policy (like this one)
  5. a textbook on economics (like this one)
  6. a schedule of events from an apologetics event (like this one)
  7. a DVD of a William Lane Craig debate at a big university (like this one)
  8. a debate book from a big academic press (like this one)

Just print these out and read them, and then put them on your desk. That should get you some attention and end the snickering.

News

Is the media accurate in reporting on left-wing and right-wing violence?

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Here’s an post from Newsbusters dated March 2010 that talks about whether the left or right is more violent.

Excerpt:

Before letting the media continue to perpetuate a stereotype that may not actually exist at all, let me give you the facts that U.S. journalists refuse to cite. Let me show you where real violence comes from, and I don’t even need to mention the millions of babies killed every year by progressives or even the tens of millions of people murdered by their communist heroes.

But of course, you would never have this view if all you watched was the mainstream news media. Isn’t it funny how the pattern of leftist violence has been obscured by the way that the media presents the stories? Is it intentional?

Is the media biased to the left?

Here’s a UCLA study on media bias.

Excerpt:

Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.

Only Fox News’ “Special Report With Brit Hume” and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.

The most centrist outlet proved to be the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” CNN’s “NewsNight With Aaron Brown” and ABC’s “Good Morning America” were a close second and third.

“Our estimates for these outlets, we feel, give particular credibility to our efforts, as three of the four moderators for the 2004 presidential and vice-presidential debates came from these three news outlets — Jim Lehrer, Charlie Gibson and Gwen Ifill,” Groseclose said. “If these newscasters weren’t centrist, staffers for one of the campaign teams would have objected and insisted on other moderators.”

The fourth most centrist outlet was “Special Report With Brit Hume” on Fox News, which often is cited by liberals as an egregious example of a right-wing outlet. While this news program proved to be right of center, the study found ABC’s “World News Tonight” and NBC’s “Nightly News” to be left of center. All three outlets were approximately equidistant from the center, the report found.

“If viewers spent an equal amount of time watching Fox’s ‘Special Report’ as ABC’s ‘World News’ and NBC’s ‘Nightly News,’ then they would receive a nearly perfectly balanced version of the news,” said Milyo, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Missouri at Columbia.”

Here’s a Harvard University study on media bias.

Excerpt:

The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture… of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).

When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.

But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.”

And of course in the related links you will find surveys of journalists, records of political contributions made by journalists, and glaring examples of left-wing media bias. The Democrat party as a whole is more to the right than mainstream journalism as a whole.

Related posts

News

More details from that new study on the benefits of delaying sex

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Remember that study I wrote about on Christmas Eve?

It was also reported on by Fox News, but with more details. (H/T Mysterious C)

Excerpt:

In the new study, Busby and his colleagues looked specifically at timing of sexual relations. They recruited 2,035 heterosexual individuals who had an average age of 36 and were in their first marriages. Participants reported when they first had sexual relations with their current spouse; they also answered communication questions, which evaluated how well they could express empathy and understanding toward their partners, how well they could send clear messages to their partners, and other questions.

Other items on the questionnaire focused on relationship satisfaction and stability, with the latter gauged by three questions: how often they thought their relationship was in trouble; how often they thought of ending the relationship; and how often they had broken up and gotten back together.

Individuals were categorized as either having:
• Early sex (before dating or less than one month after they started dating).
• Late sex (between one month and two years of dating).
• And those who waited until after they married.

Relationships fared better and better the longer a person waited to have sex, up until marriage, with those hitting the sack before a month showing the worst outcomes.

Compared with those in the early sex group, those who waited until marriage:
• Rated relationship stability as 22 percent higher
• Rated relationship satisfaction as 20 percent higher
• Rated sexual quality as 15 percent better
• Rated communication as 12 percent better

“Curiously, almost 40 percent of couples are essentially sexual within the first or second time they go out, but we suspect that if you asked these same couples at this early stage of their relationship – ‘Do you trust this person to watch your pet for a weekend many could not answer this in the affirmative’ – meaning they are more comfortable letting people into their bodies than they are with them watching their cat,” Busby said.

He added that those couples who wait to be sexual have time to figure out how trustworthy their partner is, how well they communicate, and whether they share the same values in life “before the powerful sexual bonding short-circuits their decision-making abilities.”

That’s why I always encourage men to remain chaste before marriage. You do not want to have your decision-making capabilities ruined by sex. Not in a climate where a woman can divorce you and take you to the cleaners. And you also want to avoid harming women by making them commit physically and then breaking up – that turns them into nasty vengeful feminists, and God knows we don’t need any more of those… Not only that, but if there are children involved, you definitely do not want to be wrecking their lives with an unstable union entered into when you were not in your right mind. And lastly, you want to avoid harming yourself by turning yourself into the kind of person that uses people (even if they want to be used) and then just abandons them. It will mess up your ability to have close friendships and to love other people self-sacrificially.