Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Case for God Not a Pile of Crap

On Edward Feser's new book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God by an atheist at The Secular Outpost: Feser’s Case for God – Part 1: What Feser Gets Right

I don’t know at this point whether any of Feser’s arguments are good or bad, valid or invalid, sound or unsound, but even if they are all weak and defective arguments, I am still very grateful to Feser for providing a case for God that meets some basic intellectual requirements for making a reasonable case for God. Unlike the cases for God by Geisler and Kreeft, Feser’s case is NOT a Steaming Pile of Crap, and it is a great pleasure to consider a case that at least has the potential to be a reasonable and intelligent case for God.

Monday, October 30, 2017

Arby's Cajun Deep Fried Turkey Sandwich

More Quotes of the Day

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."
Rob Siltanen

"War has all the characteristics of socialism most conservatives hate: Centralized power, state planning, false rationalism, restricted liberties, foolish optimism about intended results, and blindness to unintended secondary results."
Joseph Sobran

"Human liberty can only exist or be restored with an accurate perception of reality. Mind distorting fictions of government and external authority must be exposed. To do otherwise is to keep us dependent on an ivory tower mysticism based on lies and the duplicity of politicians and bureaucrats."
Bob Livingston

"Forced wealth redistribution via political power has grown over time. It’s unlawful, unconstitutional, immoral and it has never done Americans any good. If this is what SJWs want more of, forget it. It’s only more of the same destructive social-political idiocy. The sensible idea and the just idea is to create wealth, not force people to give it up to others for any baseless reasons."
Michael Rozeff

"The alt-right and white supremacists seek to achieve their goals through racist propaganda. The leftists seek to achieve their goals by tricking Americans into believing that all they want are brotherhood and multiculturalism. If either group achieves its goals, we Americans will lose not only our liberty but also our civility. Few Americans recognize and respect the fact that multiracial societies are inherently unstable. What we’ve been doing for decades, through various government policies, is stacking up combustible racial kindling awaiting a racial arsonist to set it ablaze. There are too many historical examples of what happens to a nation when race hustlers are allowed to take over."
Walter Williams

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg…Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose rein to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation."
Thomas Jefferson

"Our culture is one of extreme superficiality. This is exactly why so many people lose their minds over NFL players taking a knee, but could never be driven to such burning outrage over a war launched based on falsehoods that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Politicians and oligarchs encourage such superficiality, because if the public can be kept extremely ignorant and stupid then those who actually call the shots and craft the legislation can be left alone to steer society in the way they deem fit without the general public interfering. The end result is the rabble fights about the national anthem, flags and Milo, while the country continues to get looted."
Mike Krieger

"As a kitten chasing the projection of a laser-pointer, Trump’s target of admiration is an ever moving one; darting left, right, and left again. And like King Lear, Trump has rewards for which side best professes love for him, but little else will move him."
Ryan Thorson

How the States Can Save America

Washington is gigantic, corrupt, and unaccountable. Can it be fixed? Yes, but not by Congress. Only by we the people. It's called a Convention of States, and it's right there, in Article V of the Constitution. Jim DeMint, former Senator from South Carolina, explains.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Quotes of the Day

"Political parties are disease vectors. They are hybrid cocktails of the Milgram Experiment and the Stockholm Syndrome with a strong police state chaser to set the virus in place. The virus is used to render an otherwise healthy ecology of spontaneous order into a shambling and largely inefficient engine for a select group of controllers to benefit at the expense of the whole. It is no more complex than that."
Bill Buppert

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."
Thomas Sowell

"We need to move beyond the political practice of providing simple-minded answers to superficial questions by developing an understanding of the value of life that is not calculated in terms of dollars or statistics. We must respond to wars, genocides, torture, murders, rapes, the forceful taking of private property, police-brutalities, and other dehumanizing behavior, not by calculating the numbers of victims or their racial, ethnic, gender, religious, or other collective identities, or by seeking the motives of the wrongdoers; but by declaring that 'people should not do these things to other people'."
Butler Shaffer

"What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing."
John W. Whitehead


"Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books."
Etienne de La Boétie

"Set apart from the religious superstitions of the world is gospel Christianity which is based on the ultimate individuality above all political and spiritual collectivism. There is only a remnant who are spiritual beneficiaries of sovereign grace. The millions of professing Christians have fallen to the deception of the organized church and so have become integrated into the religious and political evil of authoritarianism. Evil is evil if we can remove its shroud and discern its spirit. The reward is freedom of the human spirit from political and spiritual manipulation."
Bob Livingston

"In a fully privatized libertarian order there exists no such thing as a right to free immigration. Private property implies borders and the owner’s right to exclude at will. And 'public property' has borders as well. It is not unowned. It is the property of domestic tax-payers and most definitely not the property of foreigners. And while it is true that the State is a criminal organization and that to entrust it with the task of border control will inevitably result in numerous injustices to both domestic residents and foreigners, it is also true that the State does something also when it decides not to do anything about border control and that, under the present circumstances, doing nothing at all in this regard will lead to even more and much graver injustices, in particular to the domestic citizenry."
Bionic Mosquito

 "Of course, we know that these radical students are not going to take over the government. What they are going to do is provide the excuse for the government to take over the people, by passing more and more repressive laws to ‘keep things under control.
The radicals make a commotion in the streets while the Limousine Liberals at the top in New York and Washington are Socializing us. WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A DICTATORSHIP OF THE ELITE DISGUISED AS A DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.
The poor are merely pawns in the game…only those who understand that the Establishment’s game plan is SOCIALISM understand what is going on before their very eyes."
Frank Capell

"Don’t get caught in the word game which confuses Communism, Socialism, the Corporate State, Fascism, and Crony Capitalism.
When you put all these terms through the wash, they come out looking the same. They mean power at the top, disguised to appear as popular movements."
Jon Rappoport

"Today, many people perceive fascism as a tyrannical condition that’s suddenly imposed by a dictator, but this is rarely the case. Fascism is in fact a logical step. Just as voters succumb over time to the promises of socialism, so a parallel decline occurs as fascism slowly replaces capitalism. Fascism may appear to be capitalism, but it’s the antithesis of a free market."
Jeff Thomas

"Devalue the currency, you devalue the labor of men. 
Devalue the labor of men, you devalue the morality of the culture. 
Devalue the morality of the culture, the culture crumbles. 
The bankers then buy the crumbs."
Anonymous

Christopher Hitchens Discussing Religion with Robert Wright

Burt Bacharach Documentary

Burt Bacharach

What Does A Pious Religious Practice Require?

I understand why certain religions demand professions of faith in the literal truth of fantastical and implausible things. But for me, I couldn't do it, neither to have such faith nor to profess it. I think a pious religious practice need only require: 1) That you learn, teach, and use the myths and traditions of your people. 2) That you participate in their rituals and community life. 3) That you live their values. By these standards, I am not any more religious than by those others. But at least those are standards by which I *could* be religious. Nassim Taleb argues it is naive to conceive of religious faith by the epistemic standards of "true belief." Rather, he argues it is more appropriate to think of it as a form of trusting, in calls to action, and in interdicts upon action. Something like this is expressed in the old saying "it is not enough that your heart be in the right place. Your arm and your hand must be in the right place as well." - Eli Harman

Leftism Saved England From This Horrible Fate

Will there always be an England? Not if the Left has anything to say about it!

New findings have physicists questioning reality

Physicists at CERN are working to determine why the equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe haven't annihilated each other. CBS News science and futurist contributor and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku joins CBSN to discuss this discovery.

Researchers have been frantically looking for some difference between matter and anti-matter that could explain why the universe is still around. But they have tried a range of different possibilities – that they have different mass, electric charge, or something else – but have found no difference. That has led researchers to question why the universe is still around at all.-The universe shouldn't exist, scientists say after finding bizarre behaviour of anti-matter

"All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist," first author Christian Smorra, from Japan’s RIKEN institute, said in a statement.-http://www.newsweek.com/universe-should-not-exist-cern-scientists-discover-692500

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

JFK Assassination: LBJ Knew He Was About To Be Dropped From The Ticket

Free Will Cartoon

Ravi Zacharias and Dennis Prager The Death of Truth, The Decline of Culture Q&A with Jeff Foxworthy

So just what is the deal with sex, anyway?

So just what is the deal with sex, anyway? Why are we so prone to extremes where it is concerned? The reason, I would say, has to do with our highly unusual place in the order of things. Angels are incorporeal and asexual, creatures of pure intellect. Non-human animals are entirely bodily, never rising above sensation and appetite, and our closest animal relatives reproduce sexually. Human beings, as rational animals, straddle this divide, having as it were one foot in the angelic realm and the other in the animal realm. And that is, metaphysically, simply a very odd position to be in. It is just barely stable, and sex makes it especially difficult to maintain. The unique intensity of sexual pleasure and desire, and our bodily incompleteness qua men and women, continually remind us of our corporeal and animal nature, pulling us “downward” as it were. Meanwhile our rationality continually seeks to assert its control and pull us back “upward,” and naturally resents the unruliness of such intense desire. This conflict is so exhausting that we tend to try to get out of it by jumping either to one side of the divide or the other. But this is an impossible task and the result is that we are continually frustrated. And the supernatural divine assistance that would have remedied this weakness in our nature and allowed us to maintain an easy harmony between rationality and animality was lost in original sin. So, behaviorally, we have a tendency to fall either into prudery or into sexual excess. And intellectually, we have a tendency to fall either into the error of Platonism -- treating man as essentially incorporeal, a soul trapped in the prison of the body -- or into the opposite error of materialism, treating human nature as entirely reducible to the corporeal. The dominance of Platonism in early Christian thought is perhaps the main reason for its sometimes excessively negative attitude toward sexual pleasure, and the dominance of materialism in modern times is one reason for its excessive laxity in matters of sex. The right balance is, of course, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position -- specifically, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology, which affirms that man is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal activities; and Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory, which upholds traditional sexual morality while affirming the essential goodness of sex and sexual pleasure. - Edward Feser

What are some Defeaters for Theism?

Sunday, October 22, 2017

HUMAN - clip #2: Death is not the end of everything

What is it that makes us human? Is it that we love, that we fight? That we laugh? Cry? Our curiosity? Driven by these questions, filmmaker and artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand spent three years collecting real-life stories from 2,000 women and men in 60 countries. Working with a dedicated team of translators, journalists and cameramen, Yann captures deeply personal and emotional accounts of topics that unite us all; struggles with poverty, war, homophobia, and the future of our planet mixed with moments of love and happiness.

http://www.human-themovie.org/

Med schools have students practice pelvic exams on unconsenting, anaesthetized women

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Atheists and Suffering

The belief that a living God would stop all suffering is consistent with the belief of most atheists that the possession of power comes with an obligation to impede free choices that might lead to suffering. That's why they are more likely than Christians to support totalitarian human governments. They think that's how God would behave if he exists, and therefore so should humans in positions of power.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Monday, October 9, 2017

Does Free Will Make Sense?

From now on, I’ll use character as an umbrella term that encapsulates all subjective reasons. Character makes us who we are. If anything gives us free will, character is it. But where does character come from? Let’s look at an example. Say I’m faced with a decision: I can eat an apple or I can eat an orange. I like oranges better, so I pick the orange. My decision is based on one subjective reason: my preference for oranges. This seems like a clear-cut case of free will in action. But things aren’t so simple. To show why, I’m going to ask a series of questions. First, why did I pick the orange? Say my response is, “I don’t know–I just prefer oranges. That’s just the way I am.” If that’s the case, my preference appears to be arbitrary. By my own admission I didn’t freely choose to prefer oranges, so how can my exercise of that preference be free? It can’t: if I was not the ultimate, original cause of my preference for oranges, then I am not now the ultimate, original cause of my choice of an orange. But what if I did choose to prefer oranges? Say I read a book a year ago that convinced me oranges are more environmentally sustainable than apples. Since I value environmental sustainability, I decided from then on to choose oranges over apples. Surely that choice makes my present choice of an orange free–right? Wrong. Once again, we must ask a question. This time it is: Why do I value environmental sustainability? Say my answer is, “I’m a moral person, and it’s immoral to destroy the environment.” Unfortunately, that leads to a new question: Why am I a moral person? If my response to this question is, “That’s just the way I am,” my decision is, as before, not a free one. If on the other hand my response is, “Because my parents taught me to be that way,” yet another question arises: Why did I accept my parents’ teachings? I won’t go further. A pattern is emerging: each “Why?” question about character yields a “That’s just the way I am” response or a further question. And since we haven’t made infinitely many decisions in our lives, “That’s just the way I am” will always come eventually. For us to have caused our characters–and therefore our actions–we would have had to have caused ourselves, which is impossible. The fact of the matter is: We are not the ultimate, original cause of our characters. And because we aren’t, we are not the ultimate, original cause of our actions. “Free will” does not make sense as a concept. It’s definition implies an impossibility.“Free Will” Does Not Make Sense As a Concept

Living Well in the Light of Death - NT Wright and Shelly Kagan at Yale

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Science vs God?

Bryan Enderle grew up in Modesto, CA though he now lives in Davis, CA with his wife, Peggy, and son, Isaac. Bryan received two BS degrees, in Chemical and Petroleum Engineering; an MA in Theology; and an MS and PhD in Chemical Engineering. Personally, he enjoys grappling with the topics of theology and science, both as individual and intersecting topics. Without arguing one way or the other, Enderle uses modern science to make certain fantastic aspects of a modern God more plausible. In doing so he creates a space where science and religion can coexist.

Unarmed is Slavery

Friday, October 6, 2017

NDE Research Proves Afterlife Exists l Dr Jeff Long & Lynn Fishman SSF-IIIHS

What are the common characteristics of a near death experience? Do we have to fear the life review? What is the difference between an out of body experience and a near death experience? What is the longest period of time someone has been clinically dead and resuscitated? What circumstances that led to an NDE or aspects of the NDE itself prove that consciousness exists out of the body? Does near death experiences differ in children versus adults? What is the usual age of children that report their NDE? How do children remember their NDE so many years and decades later? How does an NDE differ from a dream? What is the study methodology that Dr Long uses for his NDE research? How does our vision and our consciousness change when we are in the middle of an NDE? How does religion or culture affect the NDE that a person has? How does an NDE impact a person's life afterwards? How does love play a role in an NDE? How can health professionals help a patient or how can family help their loved one going through the dying process? How is it possible to see without one's eyes or without a body during an NDE? What happens to murders or pedophiles when they die?
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