Whole Reason

When George W. Bush won a dis­puted and con­tro­ver­sial elec­tion in 2000, many on the left were quick to throw around words like “stolen,” “rigged,” and “ille­git­i­mate.” Despite the fact that a media recount showed Bush widen­ing his vote lead in Florida, to this day lib­er­als feel no qualms about claim­ing that Bush stole the elec­tion and shred­ded the Constitution.

Con­trast that with the hes­i­tance of many of those same indi­vid­u­als to refer to the elec­tion in Iran with the same ter­mi­nol­ogy. They cau­tion that we should not jump to con­clu­sions or make hasty state­ments. We should refrain from rhetoric that would make the sit­u­a­tion worse. Why does this sit­u­a­tion call for patience and under­stand­ing, while the other demanded the tough­est of words?

How can you refuse to accept an elec­tion in one of the freest nations in the his­tory of civ­i­liza­tion, yet be some­what trust­ing a mur­der­ous, racist, terror-supporting, theo­cratic dic­ta­tor would par­tic­i­pate in a fair elec­tion. It strikes me as odd, and a bit trou­bling, that so many in our coun­try are more accept­ing of votes in states with dic­ta­tors (Iran, Venezuela, Saddam’s Iraq, etc.) than they are of America’s elections.

Yes­ter­day, a right-wing vet­eran and white suprema­cist who hated Pres­i­dent Obama, pushed the con­spir­acy the­ory that his birth cer­tifi­cate was forged, crit­i­cized the media for their attacks on George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, was influ­enced by Fox News and con­ser­v­a­tive talk radio, had ties to anti-government groups like all those at the tea par­ties and had a screed repub­lished at right-wing mes­sage board Free Repub­lic mur­dered an African Amer­i­can union secu­rity guard, which should cause us all to accept the recent DHS memo warn­ing of an uptick in domes­tic ter­ror­ism from anti-government vet­er­ans as well as encour­age us to sup­port tighter gun laws and union leg­is­la­tion.

Which is strange because on Wednes­day an anti-semitic, Christian-hating, sup­porter of 9/11 con­spir­acy the­o­ries, reg­is­tered Demo­c­rat, who has writ­ten about the evils of “neo-cons” like Bill O’Reilly, Rupert Mur­doch, George W. Bush and John McCain, while blam­ing Chris­tian­ity for the demise of the Roman Empire and West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion also killed a guard at the Holo­caust Museum and may have had plans for other tar­gets includ­ing offices for the con­ser­v­a­tive mag­a­zine Weekly Stan­dard and a Fox News stu­dio.

Read more…

Here’s some recent stuff:

• Why athe­ism is polit­i­cally unpop­u­lar in the US (Econ­o­mist) — “One prob­lem is that they are hardly a cohe­sive group. Another issue
  
  
  
  
  
  either; one can be a Chris­t­ian sec­u­lar­ist.
  But another fail­ing of the irre­li­gious move­ment has been its ten­dency, fre­quently, to pick the wrong fights.”

Read more…

As I said yes­ter­day, too many good sto­ries and posts, too lit­tle time. So you get the sheer joy of sneak­ing a peak at the type of sto­ries that catch my atten­tion in my RSS feeder. As I said yes­ter­day, com­ment on any­thing you see that grabs your attention.

Read more…

What hap­pens when I get sick for a few days, get bogged down with loads of work, have a huge lock-in at church to plan for, preach a few ser­mons, try to apply for some sem­i­nary schol­ar­ships,  and find my RSS feed has way too many blog posts and news arti­cles saved just wait­ing for me to expand on them with my *expert* opin­ion? You get this fan­tas­tic group of links. There’s some­thing for every­body here, more than likely a cou­ple of some­things for everybody.

Read more…

• Warmer planet can sup­port glacial ice (UCSD) — New research chal­lenges the gen­er­ally accepted belief that sub­stan­tial
  ice sheets could not have existed on Earth dur­ing past super-warm
  cli­mate events. The study by researchers at Scripps Insti­tu­tion of
  Oceanog­ra­phy at UC San Diego pro­vides strong evi­dence that a glacial
  ice cap, about half the size of the mod­ern day glacial ice sheet,
  existed 91 mil­lion years ago dur­ing a period of intense global warming.
• Global tem­per­a­tures have plateaued (the Aus­tralian) — “Actu­ally, there has been cool­ing, if you take 1998 as your point of
  ref­er­ence. If you take 2002 as your point of ref­er­ence, then
  tem­per­a­tures have plateaued. This is cer­tainly not what you’d expect if
  car­bon diox­ide is dri­ving tem­per­a­ture because car­bon diox­ide lev­els
  have been increas­ing but tem­per­a­tures have actu­ally been com­ing down
  over the last 10 years.…The head of the IPCC has
  actu­ally acknowl­edged it. He talks about the appar­ent plateau in
  tem­per­a­tures so far this cen­tury. So he rec­og­nizes that in this
  cen­tury, over the past eight years, tem­per­a­tures have plateaued …
  This is not what you’d expect.”

• 
  Why wives should sub­mit
  – Tim Chal­lies has a nice list of “ten proofs that sub­mis­sion pre­cedes
  the Fall and is part of God’s nat­ural order”, taken from Wayne Grudem’s
  Evan­gel­i­cal Fem­i­nism and Bib­li­cal Truth.
• Tem­po­rary Divorce for the chil­dren
  – cou­ples in Spain are gam­ing the edu­ca­tional sys­tem by divorc­ing so
  that their chil­dren can get to the top of the list for entry into good
  schools.
• Japan’s pop­u­la­tion prob­lem caused by pornog­ra­phy — A new study shows that the declin­ing pop­u­la­tion in Japan is due in large part to men aban­don­ing sex with women for mas­tur­ba­tion and sex toys. “Pornog­ra­phy, mas­tur­ba­tion aids, Inter­net porn sites and social net­works that lead to “vir­tual rela­tion­ships”, soa­p­lands and Japan’s wide­spread pros­ti­tu­tion indus­try all allow men out­lets for sex­ual ful­fill­ment while not ful­fill­ing other needs, such as pro­cre­ation. The alarm­ing trend has led med­ical experts in Japan to coin a new term for a con­di­tion they call “vagi­nal ejac­u­la­tion dys­func­tional dis­or­der.” Per­haps Planned Par­ent­hood can add this to their fam­ily plan­ning reg­i­men — might be cheaper than condoms.

Most of these I wanted to write full posts on, but work is crazy so I haven’t had the chance. I don’t want to wait too long to get these up and out there, so here you go.

Read more…

• Church builds out­door sanc­tu­ary
  -  A Simi Val­ley church has decided to build their main sanc­tu­ary
  out­doors, in order to allow peo­ple to enjoy God’s cre­ation, and to make
  it more like a 140 acre park that is open to the world, instead of a
  closed com­pound.  Nice.
• How to Crit­i­cize — 9 Marks, the church devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tion, has pub­lished 5 points on how to crit­i­cize others. 
• Demon Dea­cons? (apolo­gies to Duke U.) — Dea­cons in a 400 mem­ber Florida church are unhappy that they are being asked to ful­fill the bib­li­cal role of dea­con, since they are now hav­ing to give up con­trol of the church and start serv­ing wid­ows and orphans. “We were run­ning things just fine around here. I’m not about to start serv­ing food, or fix­ing someone’s porch, I’ll tell you that right now.”  Maybe they should learn the dif­fer­ence between Dea­con and Elder.
• Suc­cess­ful Diverse Com­mu­ni­ties seen — A recent Har­vard study reveals that com­mu­ni­ties with increased eth­nic and racial diver­sity actual suf­fer a worse sense of com­mu­nity, and worse com­mu­nity ties.  The rea­son?  Because diver­sity and shared human­ity are not enough to pro­duce a tight com­mu­nity — you need a bet­ter com­mon thread than being human — you need com­mon val­ues and ideals.  And where, accord­ing to the report, is the only place in Amer­i­can cul­ture that diverse com­mu­ni­ties seem to work?  Sur­vey says — Evan­gel­i­cal megachurches. Lib­er­als, eat your heart out.

• Did Jesus Say He Cre­ated in Six Lit­eral Days? — AIG argues from scrip­ture that Jesus under­stood the Gen­e­sis story as lit­eral, and in a young-earth sense. “‘But from the begin­ning of the cre­ation, God made them male and female.‘
  From this pas­sage, we see that Jesus clearly taught that the cre­ation
  
  of years after the uni­verse and earth came into existence.”
• Abo­li­tion of Man? How Pol­i­tics and Cul­ture Have Been Dehu­man­ized in the Name of Sci­ence — very good Her­itage Foun­da­tion lec­ture on sci­ence and human value.
• Does Dis­tant Starlight Prove the Uni­verse Is Old? — AIG argues “no.”  “When big bang sup­port­ers use dis­tant starlight to argue against
  bib­li­cal [YE] cre­ation, they are using a self-refuting argu­ment since the
  big bang has a light travel-time prob­lem of its own.”
• OEC v. YEC — An OEC takes on the YEC stances.  Very com­plete — but prob­a­bly wrong ;)