An absolute, fricking MUST READ from Mark Shea April 13, 2007
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. . .only because I spend so much time doing the Don Quixote in here to the Pharyngulite/Kraken windmill, this post requires studious attention from (limited) admirers and (probably even more limited) critics.
Shea hits the nail on the head -as usual-: (more…)
Mark Shea strafes the Atheist Materialist stronghold. . . February 14, 2007
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. . with absolutely deft yet powerful logic bombs.
Sadly, there is yet no “smart” bomb that can penetrate the minds of the willfully hidebound.
I am thinking of making his post required reading for my apologetics class.
I MUST sign up for the Atheist Materialist Conspiracy. . . January 29, 2007
Posted by Administrator in atheism, Idiots, Mechanistic Relativism.1 comment so far
. . .I’ve NEVER SEEN a more compelling argument. I mean, Christianity might as well fold up its tent and go home now.
Let’s flaunt Jane Fonda and John Phillip Law, let’s disrespect religion, let’s give gay men and women some dignity, let’s just do everything to make the other side gnash their teeth and tear at their beards and rend their garments…because we’re so much better.
More verbal diarrhea from the Internet’s resident cholera-of-the-brain victim, PZ Myers.
The phrase in bold is just teeming with irony. Granted, Myers is attempting to be ironic in making such a statement. He would claim that he never makes ad hominem arguments. But therein lies the deeper irony: His arguments against religion are either deeply flawed, fallacious straw-man errors or outright ad-him claims/attacks. Basically, his argument in favor of unbridled atheistic nihilism is simply what he wrote above; “because we’re so much better.” This really is the best he can do. And he couches it as irony.
And he’ll keep sitting there in dumbfounded bemusement as hordes of American sensibilities continue to disregard his out-there ravings.
Notice I don’t provide a link. Frankly, I’m too lazy and nauseated. I simply don’t want to visit his sad little site again to copy-and-paste his address. It’s Pharyngula, if anyone is really interested.
So, now the KosKids endorse the exploitation of Marty McFly October 21, 2006
Posted by Administrator in Cultural Pessimism, Liberal Hypocrisy, Mechanistic Relativism, Stupid Party vs Evil Party.add a comment
At this link, you will find a very disturbing and painful video of Parkinson’s victim Michael J. Fox, stumping for Missouri Senatorial candidate Claire McCaskill. She is one who is willing to expand research into embryonic stem-cell research in hopes of finding cures for chronic, painful diseases such as theParkinson’s Disease that Mr. Fox suffers from so tragically.
Fox, given his illness, is probably not to be blamed for the making of this video. I cannot imagine the frustration with his increasingly debilitated condition, nor his rage at what he perceives to be the deliberate desire to keep him sick.
But no one wishes for Marty McFly to be sick. Just like no one in this country would wish for their fighter pilots to die unnecessarily in extremes of low pressure and bone-cracking cold.
But they WOULD object to studies being done -to humans- to determine the absolute limits of humans in those conditions. Such as forcing human subjects to spend the night outdoors, in sub-zero conditions, without clothing, and being subject to repeated dousings with cold water to simulate ditching conditions in the North Atlantic.
It would not be the issue of who would benefit from the studies that would appall putatively objective observers. What would offend them would be the callous and inhumane treatment of the experimental subjects; observers would cry -with justified outrage- that to strip the inherent dignity of the human person for the sake of scientific progress is morally reprehensible.
And these studies have been done. By the Nazis, of course.
Just like torture.
And in both cases, the observers would be both ethically and morally correct.
But the modern -or post-modern- observers turns this logic on its head in defense of embryonic stem-cell research. There, the dignity of the human person is routinely denied -even as ever having existed– in the name of the furtherance of science so that Marty McFly might be able to sit still and hold a conversation without looking like a speed freak with a speech disorder.
In the end, I cannot blame Fox for making this sordid and repulsive video. And the source of its repulsion is not the sight of Fox himself. That alone evokes sympathy -or at least empathy- and fills one with a sense of tragedy.
What is repulsive is the tag line:
I’m Claire McCaskill, and I approved this message.
McCaskill has no problem with the exploitation of the wounded and sick, so that the slaughter of innocents may continue unabated. Her position is one of evil, and it must not be allowed in the halls of public decision making.
McCaskill herself is not evil, but she has endorsed the creation of one of the most evil campaign images I ever hope to see in the seemingly ever-increasing squalor that is American public debate.
I do not like voting Republican. But with messages such as these, I simply CANNOT vote Democratic.
And as for the berserk Pandagonites that would dare to use this post to suggest that this is all part of. . .
(A conspiracy that leads Christians to). . . spout. . . the exact same empty platitudes about abortion and Teh Gheyz, then the reason is that red staters are under a non-stop, top-down, pseudo-Christian propaganda blitz that preys on people’s. . .anxieties. . . (link)
Yeah, Mandy, it’s a conspiracy, all right. Led from the top down. The problem is, the top in this case is the teachings of a creature much greater than you or me. The difference between the two of us is that I at least try to understand and follow what He is saying. You deliberately ignore Him.
You and McCaskill are certainly free to continue to do so. At the peril of more than your lives. Your souls.
God have mercy on this country. Cause God also knows that if I were in charge. . .I’d be far less patient.
More of that good, ol’ time, down–home Missouri mudslinging. . .
UPDATE: The Anchoress, as usual, has her finger on the pulse of this sordid nonsense.
Ben Stein tells people off. . .again? September 8, 2006
Posted by Administrator in Blogging, Cultural Pessimism, Liberal Hypocrisy, Mechanistic Relativism, Parenting.9 comments
I’m not sure this is him, but what the heck, let’s take a look at it.
Think About This
If they know of him at all, many folks think Ben Stein is just a quirky actor/comedian who talks in a monotone. He’s also a very intelligent attorney who knows how to put ideas and words together in such a way as to sway juries and make people think clearly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary:
Herewith at this happy time of year, a few confessions from my beating heart: I have no freaking clue who Nick and Jessica are. I see them on the cover of People and Us constantly when I am buying my dog biscuits and kitty litter. I often ask the checkers at the grocery stores. They never know who Nick and Jessica are either. Who are they? Will it change my life if I know who they are and why they have broken up? Why are they so important?I don’t know who Lindsay Lohan is either, and I do not care at all about Tom Cruise’s wife. Am I going to be called before a Senate committee and asked if I am a subversive? Maybe, but I just have no clue who Nick and Jessica are.
If this is what it means to be no longer young. It’s not so bad.
Next confession:
I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are: Christmas t rees.
It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, “Merry Christmas” to me. I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn’t bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it’s just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.
I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find it in the Constitution, and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat.
Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and we aren’t allowed to worship God as we understand Him? I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too.
But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we knew went to.
In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it’s not funny, it’s intended to get you thinking.
Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her “How could God let something like this Happen?” (regarding Katrina)
Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, “I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.
And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out.
How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?”
In light of recent events…terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare (she was murdered, her body found recently) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.
Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.
Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self -esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about. And we said OK.
Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.
Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out.
I think it has a great deal to do with “WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.”
Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell.
Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.
Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.
Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.
Are you laughing?
Funny how when you forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you’re not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it.
Pass it on if you think it has merit. If not then just discard it…..no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don’t sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in
The difference between hypocrisy and Catholic fidelity August 24, 2006
Posted by Administrator in Blogging, Catholicism, Mechanistic Relativism.2 comments
I have been struggling -for the longest time- with atheist and relativist magpies who holler in the most strident terms that Christianity (particularly Catholicism) is the ne plus ultra of hypocrisy. People who read this blog know this as I am constantly reporting back on my (usually failed) battles with these people and their sycophants in their cramped scho chambers.
And I kept stretching for a proper means of rebutting their arguments.
Well, I’ve finally found it, courtesy of a fellow named Dr. Philip Blosser commenting on a post by Dreadnought back in January:
There are two kinds of inconsistency that need to be sharply distinguished . . .
First, there is the inconsistency of the Catholic life of obedient struggle against sin, which admittedly is not always a smooth and steady progress in sanctification but an advance in fits and starts and slips backward into sin that sometimes leaves one wondering whether it is an advance at all. The important thing, however, is that the faithful Catholic never compromises what he professes to be true. He never calls vice virtue. He never says that what the Church calls sinful or disordered is a “beautiful gift from God.” He never says “F__k the Church.” His is an inconsistency of sin and weakness, not an inconsistency of principle.
Second, there is the inconsistency of professing to be Catholic while rejecting what the Catholic Church teaches. This is refusing to agree with the Church that sin is sin, that what is gravely disordered is so, and insisting that it’s something else, something good, simply because one wishes it were so. This is not an inconsistency of sin or weakness, but an inconsistency of dishonesty, an inconsistency of conscious heresy concerning the moral teaching of the Church while still insisting that one is a bona fide Catholic.
Boom.
And again.
KA-Boom.
Perfect. Dr. Blosser (and Dreadnought, more on whom another time) Go Directly to Good Guy’s Links.
PZ pushing idiot science now to bolster his anti-religious hatred August 19, 2006
Posted by Administrator in Cultural Pessimism, Liberal self-loathing, Mechanistic Relativism.3 comments
Brother. The guy simply does not know when to stop jamming both feet into his mouth.
Here is this biologist who essentially claims that all religion is evil and science is the Answer to Everything, pushing a nearly year-old article that claims religion is the root cause of all our ills. I wrote days after the thing came out that it was taking correlations and claiming they detect causation. I have some training in stats, and the article smelled wrong to me.
Yet, PZ has disinterred it from its musty and deserved grave, crowing once again that he. . .
Yet another irresponsible “scientist” misreading stats to support his faith-based belief.
To PZ’s credit, he is not willing to lay all the claims that Paul makes at the feet of religion:
Now, to be fair, I don’t think this necessarily says that being religious is bad for the individual; it’s just not good for a culture. I also think it’s a bit sweeping in associating these ills with religious belief in general, because the US is afflicted with particularly malignant forms of religion (and at the root, the problem may not be religion itself, but irrationality and anti-intellectualism and ignorance, something our country has in volume).
I very nearly fell out of my chair when I saw that. Perhaps, since he now feels that he has successfully slain the religious dragon, he may now spare a few words in support of its valiance.
It was nice to see, but in the end, whatever. PZ is deluded, once again.
See here, here and here for lucid, rational analyses that take Paul’s irresponsible and WRONG study out to the woodshed for a serious and well-deserved flogging.
My favorite quote from the de-bunking of Paul?
This is one of the most common errors in interpretation of statistics: Correlation is not at all the same thing as causation.
Which I had said here, at almost the same time that StatGuy said it.
Now watch. If we can even get PZ off his high horse long enough to acknowledge the existence of Paul’s destruction, he will dismiss it. Why? Because StatGuy is a Christian.
I don’t EVER want to hear again that scientists don’t have faith-based beliefs.
UPDATE: PZ continues his state of quasi-religious denial:
If you want to invalidate it, you’d have to either show that the US, for instance, actually isn’t steeped in public displays of religion, or that we don’t have an immense prison population and high rates of such things as teen pregnancy and homicide.
Whining that the author wasn’t a professional statistician or that there are other analyses that could be done to try and salvage religion’s reputation don’t cut it. The major valid complaint I’ve seen is that the US is such a freaky outlier in all measures that it tends to skew the results…but that observation is a kick in the groin to the pious patriots of America, too.
He’s still claiming that a correlation proves causation.
And his echo-chamber sycophants are already starting in with the ad hom arguments:
O’Brien means leave the statistics to christian statisticians. That’s who did the “debunking”.
Sigh. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragically predictable.
UPDATE II: Comments at PZ’s have gone over the edge. I’m done over there. See for yourself.
UPDATE III: Now Kos went around the bend, suggesting that Gallup’s support of Paul’s pseudo-science and possible Christian influence allowed BUsh to steal the election.
My God, these people are completly unhinged.
Yet another DERANGED Pandagon post, now saying abortion is safer than childbirth August 3, 2006
Posted by Administrator in Cultural Pessimism, Mechanistic Relativism, Pandamansanity.13 comments
That’s right. Amanda has gone completely around the bend and is now saying that abortion is healthier than child-birth.
The key quote:
Go ahead and click the link. Where, at this MoonBat medical “ethics” site, does it back up Amanda’s monstrous claim? Answer: No where. It just gives Amanda a chance to foam at the mouth.
So at least now we know where Amanda is at: That organ which is such a focus for her rants -the vagina- is good only for sex, entirely on the woman’s terms. Any subsequent consequences, most especially thos pesky chlidren that come about from intercourse, interfere with the vagina’s (and consequently, the woman’s) main purpose).
The face of feminism’s third wave in reality looks much like this: 
UPDATE:
Here is something else to consider, given some less-than-useful exchanges that have occurred in the comboxes: Amanda, in backing up the claim that abortion is safer, is equating pregnancy with a diseases that needs to be treated. That’s right. A natural process is -in the minds of the MoonBats- a disease.
And the dance of de-humanization marches on and on.
Un. Fricking. Hinged. July 30, 2006
Posted by Administrator in Cultural Pessimism, Liberal Hypocrisy, Mechanistic Relativism, Stupid Party vs Evil Party.4 comments
Some of the choicer quotes.
Fallujah. Signing statements. Abu Ghraib.
Waterboarding. Stress positions. Free speech zones.
The theological and historical differences between Sunni and Shi’ite. How levees are constructed. Why levees fail.
These are things I knew nothing about until George W. Bush.
(snip)
Some nights I go to sleep under this administration and wonder: What new horror am I going to have cram into my head tomorrow morning? What new form of torture? What unfamiliar town or province?
My brain’s been hijacked and my eagerness to read news killed. I know too much now compared with how much I knew in the innocent 1990’s. And there seems no way to un-know it or bleach it clean of the flavor of its original acquisition.
(snip)
When I was 20, I was in a serious car accident. . .The day I was released from the hospital, I went home and took a shower, the first in nearly six weeks. As I lathered up – a luxury I can still savor in memory after weeks and weeks of bed-bound sponge baths – my fingers found, underneath my arm and along my shoulder blade, embedded pieces of gravel and glass that had not been properly debrided. I realized they were going to be a part of me forever because my flesh had already healed over them.
I feel like George W. Bush and his policies are gravel and glass in my brain. Forever.
The final deranged point being, I suppose, that the knowledge this poor woman has been forced to gain these past five years is more than she can handle, and she equates these bits of knowledge with the horror she experienced in her car accident.
Perhaps, if Clinton were still in office, we could instead contemplate the actions of a President obsessed with getting fat young interns to fellate him, and the meanings of terms like “Sex, lies and fellatio” and to focus on that, rather than a culture that desires to wipe us off the face of the earth.
If Clinton/Gore were still in power, we wouldn’t face that threat, because Bill and his ilk would be too busy chasing skirts, ignoring the threat of Islamofacism, and the NOW would simply nod in agreement, since they keep the abortion license available.
While the Kossacks would be whining that not enough aid is being sent to the Islamofacists, since that is the source of their rage. We have, and they don’t.
When the reality is that we are not Islamic, and they are.
Yeah. Sure. Let’s go back to the alternative.
Kos never ceases to amaze.
Go to Camp Atheist July 22, 2006
Posted by Administrator in Cultural Pessimism, Liberal Hypocrisy, Mechanistic Relativism.19 comments
via the deranged PZ comes this article describing camp for “free thinkers” in Minnesota; a camp for people . . .
who maintain a naturalistic, not a supernaturalistic, world view,”
and where the “free thinkers” are subjected to camp rallies on such breathtaking topics as
First Amendment rights, featuring a speaker from the American Civil Liberties Union; secular ethics, evolution and lighter topics such as “science fiction and humanism,”
What fun. The counselor/camper ratio is 2/1, which should be no surprise, as I expect that kids -even those with self-proclaimed atheist parents as PZ- are not beating down the doors to attend this left-wing inculturation fest.
Oh, and PZ is going to speak there. WHOOPEE!!!
Call it whatever they like, just not a gathering of free thinkers. Those poor kids are being as heavily inculcated in groupthink as the Hitler Youth were in the ’30s.
A Whole Lot About Mostly Nothing 
