“Celebrate the birth of your country by blowing up a small part of it”

My daughter’s Facebook greeting reminded me of that great line from The Simpsons TV show.

Happy 4th, everyone!  I hope you have safe and blessed weekend.

Quick responses to some guy’s “Top 10 problems with Christianity”

I threw out a few quick responses to this top 10 list.  I’m actually a little sympathetic in that many Christians offer bad answers that fuel the atheists’ arguments.

Biblical literalism is inconsistent with scientific knowledge.

Straw man. Check Genesis for the number of stars, for example (countless stars are referenced several times,  not the 1,100 most ancients believed), let alone the concept that the universe came into being at a point in time.  That’s just for starters from a book not even designed to be a science text.  Just lucky, eh?

Biblical interpretation proves the book to be a human invention or the god to be incompetent.

False.

Biblical law is immoral as it condones slavery, genocide, xenophobia, incest, rape, and misogyny.

Only if you don’t know how to read it properly. Of course, as usual, the atheist worldview has no explanation to explain why these things are wrong.

Biblical scholars’ god is very different than the layman’s god.

Sometimes true, but irrelevant.

We are fully capable of rational and critical thought yet we are only rewarded for blind faith and obedience.

Straw man. The Bible applauds the use of reason and the faith in the Bible is not blind faith but faith in something with evidence to back it up — Open-mindedness and Christianity

Historical evidence for Jesus outside the bible is largely thought to be forgeries or too ambiguous.

You couldn’t be more wrong. The existence of Jesus is a fact of history. Those who deny that tip their hand at either ignorance or disingenuousness.

Evangelical Christians give huge amounts of money to the church and are the poorest and least educated of all the major denominations. So much for the Prosperity Gospel.

Wow, great example of abusing statistics. Oh, and the prosperity Gospel is a false teaching, so that point wouldn’t be valid anyway. 

If we are all loved equally by this god why was Thomas and Paul given much more evidence than me?

Good question. If you are seriously interested, go study the Bible in depth. Romans 1 is a good place to start (i.e., you’ve been given more evidence than you care to admit).

Many of the sins in the bible are arbitrary and lack any founding in reason.

Says the clay to the potter.

The idea of Hell and an infinite punishment for a finite crime make very little sense when sinners could just be annihilated.

Again, says the clay to the potter, plus the fact that life-long rebellion against an infinite God would not be a finite crime.

My dogs are idiot savants.

Well, at least that is what I tell myself when they are doing something stupid.  I just picture them saying something truly profound or doing some higher math in their little brains.

Dedicated to Wishbone and Xannie, aka Cletus and Brandine, my all-time favorite dogs.

Planned Parenthood hides statutory rape again

Deja vu deja vu deja vu . . .

Yep, they got caught on video again.

Pro-lifer Lila Rose, 20 years old, went to a PP clinic in Alabama, posed as a 14 year old girl who became pregnant by her 31 year old boyfriend.  When Rose asks for an abortion, the PP worker she talks with says she needs parental consent.  Ok, so far so good…that’s a better start than the other clinics that have been caught willing to break the law.

But then Rose balks, saying her parents can’t know.  She reveals the reason: her boyfriend is 31.  Alabama state law requires health care officials to disclose cases of adult-child sex to the proper authorities.  The PP worker assures Rose, “as long as you consented to having sex with him, there’s nothing we can truly do about that.”

PPPPHHTTTT!!!

Wait, it gets better.  Tanisha, the PP worker, then proceeds to tell Rose that the clinic manager, Dr. Desiree Bates, “sometimes bends the rules a little bit…whatever you say stays within these walls…we can’t disclose any information to anybody.”

But they are getting smarter (?).  They posted Lila Rose’s picture so clinic counselors would know when she is coming in.  That is classic. I wonder if the caption says, “Do not hide statutory rapists for this girl.  But keep up the standard practice for the rest of the underaged victims.” 

Remember, this is your tax $ at work.  And to think, many Christians (must . . . resist . . . urge . . . to use . . . scare quotes) support Planned Parenthood.  Pathetic.

Oh, and once again the mainstream media ignores this.

P.S. Remember when Planned Parenthood was pro-life?

Question begging 101

Begging the question is a logical fallacy where you assume what you are supposed to be proving. 

I see this fallacy a lot with the oxymoronic “same sex marriage” debate.  I saw this comment at another site.

You can’t deny the right to marry to some and then cheat on your spouse. The right to happily marry belongs to all no matter how unhappy it makes you.

My response:

Actually, you shouldn’t cheat on your spouse, ever, regardless of what else you do.

And you also shouldn’t cheat and change the definition of marriage when the subject of the debate is the definition of marriage.

The definition of marriage is a union of a man and a woman.  The debate is whether to change that to “a union of man and a woman or man/man or woman/woman” or “whatever we want it to be.” 

But it is cheating to beg the question and say we should change to the new definition because everyone has a right to your new definition.

Do you all even realize how you commit that fallacy, or is it so habitual that you actually think you are making a point?

Opponents of real marriage beg the question by claiming that we are discriminating against gays by not having government recognize their unions as marriage.  But they do not meet the definition of marriage.  What is simultaneously sad and amusing is that they don’t seem to realize their inconsistency.

We aren’t denying anyone the right to marry.  Our opponents want to change the definition of marriage but are taking a shortcut.

Roundup

Wichita Pro-Life Group Attacked, Police Shrug and Pro-lifer dodges SUV driven by pro-abortionist — Hmmmm . . . why aren’t we hearing more about this from the MSM?  Because it doesn’t fit the stereotypes and the agenda?

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Speaking of the MSM, I wonder if they’ll cover this Duke rape case as thoroughly as they did the one with the Lacrosse players (this one involves a member of a white homosexual couple sexually offering up his adopted 5 yr. old son for sex). 

They aren’t off to a good start.

The Associate Press (AP) did not mention the fact that the five-year old offered up for molestation was black. Bringing that fact to light might be damaging to the political coalition that exists between blacks and gays. Nor did the AP mention that the adopted child is being raised by a homosexual couple. Bringing that fact to light might harm the gay adoption movement.

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Randy Alcorn on Counting the Cost of Sexual Immorality – we discussed adultery in a recent Roundup about Mark Sanford and I thought Randy’s advice was outstanding.  He has a list of all the anticipated consequences of sexual immorality for him.  Great reminders.  Read the whole thing.

Grieving my Lord; displeasing the One whose opinion most matters.

Dragging into the mud Christ’s sacred reputation.

Loss of reward and commendation from God.

Having to one day look Jesus in the face at the judgment seat and give an account of why I did it. Forcing God to discipline me in various ways.

Following in the footsteps of men I know of whose immorality forfeited their ministry and caused me to shudder. List of these names:

Suffering of innocent people around me who would get hit by my shrapnel (a la Achan).

Untold hurt to Nanci, my best friend and loyal wife.

Loss of Nanci’s respect and trust.

Hurt to and loss of credibility with my beloved daughters, Karina and Angela. (“Why listen to a man who betrayed Mom and us?”)

If my blindness should continue or my family be unable to forgive, I could lose my wife and my children forever.

And more . . .

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John Piper on Why I Don’t Have a Television and Rarely Go to Movies

I have a high tolerance for violence, high tolerance for bad language, and zero tolerance for nudity. There is a reason for these differences. The violence is make-believe. They don’t really mean those bad words. But that lady is really naked, and I am really watching. And somewhere she has a brokenhearted father.

. . .

But leave sex aside (as if that were possible for fifteen minutes on TV). It’s the unremitting triviality that makes television so deadly. What we desperately need is help to enlarge our capacities to be moved by the immeasurable glories of Christ. Television takes us almost constantly in the opposite direction, lowering, shrinking, and deadening our capacities for worshiping Christ.

One more smaller concern with TV (besides its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects): It takes time. I have so many things I want to accomplish in this one short life. Don’t waste your life is not a catchphrase for me; it’s a cliff I walk beside every day with trembling.

I don’t watch much TV anymore but I do watch a little more than in recent years.  That is a good reminder.

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More bad pro-legalized-abortion arguments

Watch abortion debates carefully and you’ll often see pro-legalized abortionists result to ad hominem arguments (attacking the person, not the message). Here’s an example from a recent thread here:

The other thing is whether or not even if it [the unborn] is a life, if you can condemn an uncontroversially human life needs to be forced to have their life risked and possibly lost for another being. Clearly, you think “no” because you think they need to be punished for sex.

Here is my response. I put a key line in bold that you can use in response.

I find it amusing how reflexively pro-abortionists read minds. Where do you all come up with these things? Please read the over 1,000 posts on my blog, many of which deal with the pro-life issue, and back up your claim that I want to punish women for having sex.

Do you support the rights of men to insist on abortion or to be released from 18 years of financial support? If not, then isn’t your motive to punish men for having sex?

Or do you just use that quip about punishment reflexively so you can demonize pro-lifers?

Where do you get off saying that I’ve “condemned” a human life (e.g., the mother) just because I think it should be wrong to do this to the unborn? [Warning: Graphic] I don’t oppose abortions to save the life of the mother (e.g., ectopic pregnancies). You are just trying to paint pro-lifers as anti-women, which is a lie.

They often combine that argument with the alleged right to do whatever you want with your own body, which ignores the right of the other human body in question and also ignores how the unborn got here to begin with.

They want to shift the arguments from what abortion really does to alleged defects in our character — e.g., wanting to punish women for having sex.  If you hear that argument, just point out the foolishness of it then get back to the facts.