"He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!" (From 'The Life of Brian')
The United States of America has a new president: Barack Hussein Obama. Like a lot of people, I have a few thoughts about that, and in this episode I’m sharing a few of those thoughts.
No sooner has he taken office, new US President Barack Hussein Obama has released major funding for abortion services abroad. President Bush had imposed a Ban on taking US funds and spending them on foreign abortions. That was good in a couple of ways. Firstly it’s good because abortion in general is unjustified homicide. Secondly it was a good thing because the US has no place providing such social engineering in other nations. So the ban was great on moral and political grounds. Obama has undone it, as promised.
Otherwise conservative Christians who voted for Mr Obama knew this was coming, as Obama repeatedly and clearly anounced this intention, as well as his intention to still further increase the availability of abortion in America. Why they thought it was a good thing to knowingly vote for a man who promised these things eludes me (setting aside the fact that he’s a young good looking gifted public speaker who is black), but nobody here can claim to be surprised or shocked.
Christians who voted for Obama: You knew this would happen. You were told by Obama many times that it would happen. I would like to hear your comments on why you were happy about this. The microphone is yours.
In that bastion of interventionism and state-molded markets, the UK, there has been much talk about the environmental unfriendliness of imported food. This is because, so the argument goes, food that has to be transported longer distances requires more greenhouse gasses to be emitted in getting it to its final destination due to additional transportation energy that is consumed in the process. As everyone knows, CO2 is the devil and global warming is about to kill us all, so importing food is a bad idea for the planet. Right? And so the answer is put artificial pressure on the market by introducing what is effectively a tariff – an imported food tax to discourage people from buying better or more affordable in the interests of buying domestic products.
I’m not even going to touch the global warming/climate change issue here or even the issue of tariffs in general, I’m just bringing this subject up at all because of a piece I saw today in a fish and chip shop’s copy of the University of Otago magazine. Fish and chip shops being what they are, it’s not a recent issue – October 2007. The story is by Dr Niven Winchester (pictured) of the University’s Department of Economics.
Obviously with a fairly geographically isolated country like New Zealand, which depends as heavily as it does on exports, the prospect of other countries making it harder for our products to be sold there is a troubling one for our economy. But what if this tough talk on imports just amounted to economic redneckery (I claim ownership of that word) dressed up as genuine scientific concern, riding a wave of environmental hysteria?
What Dr Winchester points out is as follows:
Researchers at Lincoln University have … found that, having accounted for CO2 emissions from production and transportation, New Zealand lamb and dairy products supplied to UK supermarkets generate, respectively, around one fourth and one half of the CO2 generated by the supply of UK alternatives.
As it turns out, if food was carbon taxed, imported food from New Zealand would still be cheaper, and a move to restrict imports and towards food produced int he UK, CO2 emissions would increase and not decrease. Oh dear, our UK greenie friends. Maybe free trade is your friend after all…
The niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says Barack Obama doesn’t fulfill her uncle’s dream despite his election last week as president. Dr. Alveda King says Obama’s pro-abortion position makes it so the civil rights struggle is not complete because unborn children are killed in abortion.
I’m reminded of the time when MLK’s daughter Bernice marched against same sex marriage, telling the world that her father “didn’t take a bullet for same sex marriage.”
Opinions like these offend people who say that they favour civil rights. It’s funny when somehow the ideals of a conservative black man get morphed over the years into the views of liberal white women.
Previously I have written generally favorable comments on the middle knowledge perspective on divine foreknowledge – a perspective also called Molinism. Right at the outset of this post I want to say that I still maintain that favorable stance towards that perspective. I also want to stress that this particular area of philosophy is by no means something I regard as my forte. A Middle knowledge perspective has huge appeal to me because it retains certain features that many (perhaps most) of us find intuitively attractive: Some important sense in which our choices are freely made and not wholly determined, the obvious moral responsibility for our actions that accompanies this view of freedom, a God whose knowledge is not limited by the choices we make and so who is omniscient without qualification, a God who knows not only what will happen, but who also knows how things would play out if things were different from the way they are now, and so forth. Read the rest of the entry »
I’ve been reading the book by Christopher Hall and John Sanders, Does God have a Future? The Debate on Divine Providence. (http://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Have-Future-Providence/dp/0801026040). It’s a debate between an open theist (Sanders) and a classical theist (Hall). Open Theism is, in part, the view that God does not know about all the events that will happen in the future, as many of those events are the result of free human choices, and it is impossible for God to know what humans will freely choose. If he did know all the decisions that we would make in the future, so the open theist’s argument goes, then those decisions are not really free. My comments here have nothing to do with whether or not open theism is correct.
In this book John Sanders claims that in open theism, God has to allow horrendous evil to occur. God, he says, did not know that horrendous evils would ensue when God created the world. “However,” he adds:
Does this really help, since God could have prevented each and every instance of human moral evil? Again, here the answer of openness is not any different from that of traditional Arminians. God could not prevent us from doing harm to one another without constantly violating the very conditions in which he created us to live. That is, God would have to habitually remove our freedom, rendering our lives a world of illusion.
I think that this badly misconstrues what freedom of the will really is. In more general terms, if I handcuff a man to stop him from attacking me, I am “taking away his freedom.” But in philosophical terms, I am doing no such thing. I am preventing him from carrying out a certain course of action, but I am in no way preventing him from willing such a course of action. He is still able to freely chose to try something or wish to do it, and this is what freedom of the will is concerned with.
Would God have to actually take away our freedom in order to stop us from harming each other? Clearly not. He would merely have to stop us from succeeding. Examples of humans doing this are easy to imagine. What if, for example, someone had erected an impenetrable shelter over Dresden just prior to the Allied bombing? The bombers would have been prevented from harming the civilians below, and nobody’s free will would have been interfered with. If God restrained the hand of the violent husbands, stopped the bullets of the school shooters, or changed the course of the planes that smashed into the World Trade Centre, nobody’s free will would have been harmed, and yet it seems pretty obvious to me that people would have been prevented from harming other people. So it’s not true that “God could not prevent us from doing harm to one another” without habitually removing our freedom.
I am not for a moment suggesting that Sanders can think of no reason why the God of open theism does not intervene to protect people from the harmful free choices of others. He has not given such a reason, but I do not know that he has none. I’m curious as to what it is, though.
I know this picture has done the rounds on the internet over the last few years, but it seems particularly appropriate at present in light of current events. The question here is why are so many Palestinian children dying in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict while so few Israelis are dying? Doesn’t that show that Israel is over-reacting and using inappropriately disproportionate force? The answer, as explained in my recent post on the subject (“My thoughts on Israel and the Gaza Strip Invasion”) is succinctly summed up as follows (for those who don’t know, the Israeli flag is the blue and white one).
I’m no Zionist. For those who aren’t familiar with that term, Zionism is a religious belief that God has great plans for Israel, they are forever God’s chosen people and that by divine decree they have the right to the land of Israel (including, incidentally, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). Plenty of Christians are Zionists, and I think their theology stinks, but I’m not about to go into that here. The point is, I’m not a Zionist. In the past I’ve expressed my concerns to Christians who are Zionists that their theology has a tendency to make them blind to any wrong Israel can do. They are so fanatically pro-Israel that they might support Israel no matter what Israel does.
I wanted to say that at the outset in case anyone thinks my comments that follow are motivated by Zionism or anything like it. They’re not. Now, on to what I wanted to say.
These cheerful snaps were taken, not in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but London. For a long time, the Muslim nations of the middle east have hated Israel, because they hate Jews. I don’t think I’m at all overstating anything to put it that way. Many westerners do not realise that the conflicts between Muslim nations and other nations are as much religious conflicts as political ones.
Here in New Zealand, Muslims have taken to the streets in protesting against Israel. Regular (but rather mindless) activists have taken up this latest flavour-of-the-month cause as well, joining the marches. The choruses are a combination of gullible people condemning Israel in the name of peace (imagining that Israel’s actions are the reason that there’s no peace in the middle East. After all, they’re friends of America and therefore evil, right?) and general anti-Israeli and pro Muslim anger (Muslim protestors in NZ march to choruses of the now notorious catch phrase (ever watched an Iraq execution video?) “Allahu Akbar” http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/newsdetail1.asp?storyID=150719.
Part of the reason for the phenomenon is a bizarre kind of over-compensation in response to 9/11 and the actions of Islamic terror groups worldwide. The left is so petrified of reacting to these things in any way that might see them branded as prejudiced (or targeted for retribution, for that matter) that they bend over backwards to be super-nice to the Muslim world. I have no problem with being nice to Muslims, don’t get me wrong. But the over-compensation that we’re seeing comes in the form of pathological gullibility when it comes to denying the role of Islamic nations or groups like Hamas or Hezbollah in terrorist activities and siding with such groups against their non-Islamic foes, mostly against Israel and the United States.
The camera sometimes lies
Now I know, in the minds of many it’s a bit of an old chestnut to say that the media is liberal and biased, but then, it’s only seen as an old chestnut by those who are (often by their own admission) liberal and biased. For those of us in New Zealand – and pretty much anywhere else outside of the Middle East for that matter – the media provides our entire exposure to the conflict in Gaza. To those who follow the online commentary on the media’s coverage of this and other Middle East conflicts, it’s no secret that the media is simply gullible when it comes to it’s distribution of Muslim cries of outrage. I’ve documented this before (see here), and there are more examples over at whale oil with links for further reading (http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/?q=content/pallywood-full-swing).
I’m not about to deny that there are plenty of civilian casualties in this conflict, but the waters of truth get muddied when we know full well that this type of fakery is going on. The tragic thing is that once we become aware of this common practice, we approach genuine cases of tragedy suspiciously, not knowing for sure if it’s real or another case of a journalist perpetuating (innocently or otherwise) staged and sensational propaganda.
Why so many civilian deaths?
Hezbollah are well known for using the tactic of launching attacks from within civilian areas, banking on the hope that Israel will not shoot back for fear of harming civilians.
There was much fuss after Israel struck a school. Why did these very same reports not also remind viewers that Hamas launches rocket attacks from schools?
Again, Hamas deliberately uses civilian locations from which to launch their attacks, and if Israel strikes back at them in those locations, they are demonised.
It is also widely known and publicised by Israel that when Israel makes a strike in a civilian area, civilians are warned. And then this happens:
Hamas calls on citizens to occupy the areas that it knows are about to be attacked, creating a human shield, endangering civilians. This is not propaganda – this is the Palestinian side of the story. It’s what they are happy to tell the world.
Hamas is not exactly coy about the fact that this is what it does, or the outcome that they expect (civilian deaths). Observe this Hamas representative in the Palestinian legislative:
The zeal is apparent when he praises men, women and children for their excellence in the “death industry” (his words) that Hamas is engaged in. “As you desire life,” he rants, “we desire death.”
If you think that Israel is responsible for all the civilians deaths in Gaza, think again. If I ran into your house wielding an AK47, attempting to shoot your family, and I strapped a baby to my chest, does that mean that you are responsible for the death of that baby if you kill me and the baby dies as a result? I think it makes much more sense to hold me, the crazed aggressor, responsible because I deliberately put the baby in that position to enable me to kill you with impunity. Who then is responsible for the deaths of these civilians that Hamas intentionally puts at risk in its attacks on Israel?
So let’s review:
Hamas hates Israel
Hamas has been firing rockets into civilian areas in Israel to kill Israeli civilians, supporting suicide bombers who go into Israel, and claiming responsibility for various attacks on Israelis (e.g. the shooting of eight people in an Israeli school in March 2007 http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=4407718&page=1).
Hamas fires these rockets from civilian locations in the Gaza strip
Israel makes an effort to warn civilians when it is about to engage in bombardment against Hamas (who are refusing to stop attacking Israel)
Hamas uses civilians as human shields when it knows Israel are about to fire on them, expecting those civilians to die
The media peddles propaganda that deliberately overstates the damage done by Israeli forces.
People around the world are protesting against Israel, holding it responsible for all the violence and bloodshed that is now occurring in the invasion of the Gaza strip.
Let me tone down what I want to say, and instead say to the protestors: You are moral retards, and you haven’t the faintest idea about what is right and what is wrong.
What, then, am I advocating? Do I want the air strikes and the fighting to go on, which will mean more civilian casualties? Of course not. Who does? But the way that it should end is not for Israel to go back across the border and sit on its thumbs while a hostile neighbour lurks a short distance away and prepares to continue shooting rockets into Israel. Only a moral idiot would think that this is a real option here. The solution is very simple. No more rockets, no more invasion, no more civilian deaths, it can all end. It is achievable and it can be accomplished in a matter of hours.
Hamas should surrender.
It’s that simple. This remarkably simple answer does not seem to have occurred to a single one of the people who march and chant about ending the suffering. This would end the suffering. Why should Israel be the one to step down, when they are responding to, rather than initiating, aggression?
So there’s my answer to the crisis: Yes, end the suffering! Yes, stop the fighting! And also, end the self-righteous poseurism of the Muslims who, with the ignorant leftists, are marching the streets around the world when they have no actual connection to Palestine other than the fact that they too are Muslim and would condemn Israel regardless of the facts of the case just because it is Israel. Hamas should surrender!
Here it is, the first podcast episode for 2009, complete with my summer hay fever voice! Kicking things off for the year is a discussion of what lies beyond the grave. The resurrection of the dead is the hope of the New Testament for our eternal life, yet popular Christian theology has come to place a lot of weight on the hope of going to heaven when you die. Short story: It has to stop and we need to adjust our focus.
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I’m not even going to touch the global warming/climate change issue here or even the issue of tariffs in general, I’m just bringing this subject up at all because of a piece I saw today in a fish and chip shop’s copy of the University of Otago magazine. Fish and chip shops being what they are, it’s not a recent issue – October 2007. The story is by Dr Niven Winchester (pictured) of the University’s Department of Economics.
