Mark Earley on “The Heroes of 2007”, and what it says about atheism.

[tags]Mark Earley,Breakpoint,atheism,Christopher Hitchens,Richard Dawkins[/tags]

Now that normal skin cells can be made to mimic embryonic stem cells, you’d think that the big push to keep destroying embryos and the ethical considerations that accompany it would pretty much die out. You’d be wrong. Michael J. Fox, one of the more vocal and visible players advocating embryonic stem cell research, will have none of that.

MENOUNOS: Tell me what that does to Parkinson’s and how exciting that was for you?

FOX: Well any of these breakthroughs are fantastic. And it’s just thrilling. And at the same time too we don’t want to discontinue the embryonic stem cell research that’s being done because one begat the other and, and it all becomes part of a broad canvas that we want to continue to work on.

In the name of some ephemeral “broad canvas”, Fox simply won’t let go of his emotional tie (how else to explain it) to actual embryos. Science could very well get rid of the need to deal with the ethical and moral entanglement, but Fox won’t cut the umbilical cord.

MENOUNOS: Do you think that this will end the whole hot button issue of stem cell research?

FOX: Well I want to make sure that we, that, that doesn’t happen. But I think that the bottom line is whatever happens in the next election, the chances are very good that there’s gonna be a new attitude towards science.

Sounds to me like it’s Fox who needs to new attitude. Science is progressing, George W. Bush’s stand against destroying embryos has been vindicated, but Fox is stuck in his ways and his politics.

FOX: Well just about everybody’s in favor of it with the couple of exceptions on the, on the Republican side. But, but what I did in the last election in the midterm was not about parties but, but about who was in a race where they supported stem cell research and, and were, were opposed by someone who’s not in favor of stem cell research.

MENOUNOS: Who are you backing this election?

FOX: Whoever the most pro-science candidate is that comes out of either primary.

Turns out that Dubya’s faith in science — that it would find a way around destroying embryos — is the most pro-science of them all. Too bad he’s not running for re-election, eh Michael?

[tags]embryonic stem cells,science,Michael J. Fox,abortion[/tags]

Mike Huckabee, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, says that states shouldn’t be given the chance to determine their own abortion views.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee rejects letting states decide whether to allow abortions, claiming the right to life is a moral issue not subject to multiple interpretations.

“It’s the logic of the Civil War,” Huckabee said Sunday, comparing abortion rights to slavery. “If morality is the point here, and if it’s right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can’t have 50 different versions of what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“For those of us for whom this is a moral question, you can’t simply have 50 different versions of what’s right,” he said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

As much as I like Huckabee’s positions, I have to take issue with this. Government’s job is not to say what is right, but what is legal. Sometimes those two coincide, and sometimes they don’t.

I don’t believe that government should be the leading indicator of what’s right and wrong. It is very unfortunate that, for too many people, if it’s legal then it’s right. However, we can’t use that situation to then say that the government should pass laws against all that is immoral. This may sound funny to some, coming as it does from this evangelical Christian, but there are a couple of ideas at play here.

First is the idea that any set of rules made by men as to what is right and wrong is, by definition, going to be flawed. We can’t do it, and that’s taking on a job that God has exclusive rights to. Passing a low solely because it fits my moral code is, therefore, not a good idea. (Bear in mind that I’m emphasizing “solely”. We’ll come back to that.)

Second is the idea that my personal morality can inform what I want government to do. So based on my reading of the Bible, I may be against state-run gambling. My concern over taxing the foolish and government-sponsored co-dependence are moral stances, and they contribute to my opinion of laws regarding them. The Civil Rights laws of the 1960s were largely informed by a religious view of equality among people, equal in the sight of God. The laws were both morally right and a proper use of government in that they promoted liberty, equally, for all. For example, gambling promotes slavery to an addition.

So, while writing a pure moral code into a man-made document is doomed to fail, there is still a place for the Christian (and any religious person) in the creation of laws for the state or country. And while I appreciate Gov. Huckabee’s stance on the issue of abortion, I’m a little leery of him suggesting that the federal government should do it solely because it is right. That suggestion opens the door to abuses by more well-meaning politicians, and can result in less liberty as the government encroaches on the individual.

Now, having said all of that, I’m going to spin you in further circles and say that I do agree that the matter of abortion should be decided at the federal level. The reason is that protecting the right to life is a primary function of government, and without the right to life, no other rights can be enjoyed. Further, the Roe v Wade decision did nothing but muddy the waters as to what the Constitution really says about privacy. So yes, I think it should be overturned, and indeed I think abortion, as a matter of liberty, should be a matter of federal legislation.

But to do it because it is “right”, from a political standpoint, invites abuse. Government has a specific purpose and it should be used accordingly.

[tags]Mike Huckabee,abortion,gambling,church and state,morality,liberty[/tags]

Gov. Sonny Perdue attended a prayer vigil last Tuesday that other state legislator attended.

While public prayer vigils might raise eyebrows in other parts of the nation, they are mostly shrugged off in the Bible Belt, where turning to the heavens for help is common and sometimes even politically expedient.

“Christianity has more of a place in the culture here than in some other region,” said Ray Van Neste, a professor of Christian studies at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. “And it’s only natural, in a way, for the public to pray for rain.”

But politicians, according to some on the Left, are not allowed to express religious convictions. (Those folks would have been very uncomfortable during our nation’s founding, that’s for sure.) The inappropriately names Atlanta Freethought Society doesn’t think those thoughts should be aired.

The loudest opposition to Perdue’s move has come from the Atlanta Freethought Society, a secular group that is expecting about a dozen of its 125 members to protest at the vigil.

“The governor can pray when he wants to,” said Ed Buckner, who is organizing the protest. “What he can’t do is lead prayers in the name of the people of Georgia.”

Because that impinges on their civil liberties…how, exactly? Does the AFS worry that God may get the wrong idea? The governor can pray when he wants to, except when those espousing “free” thought don’t think he should. Needless to say, the Founding Fathers (you remember them; the guys who wrote the Constitution that this protest is based on) would see things quite differently. The guys who created a chaplaincy for Congress and opened every session with a word of prayer welcomes religious expression in government.

[tags]Georgia,Sonny Perdue,drought,Christianity,Atlanta Freethought Society,church and state,Constitution,Ray Van Neste,Union University,Ed Buckner[/tags]

Hollywood is finding out.

The public isn’t going to Hollywood’s antiwar movies – and it’s not just the hicks if you look at the amazingly-consistent comments on Breitbart.com beneath the article: “Hollywood is casualty of war as movie-goers shun Iraq films.” It’s everybody and his brother from Tacoma to Tallahassee, not to mention a large number from abroad. As of last Saturday night, the Agence France Presse report had over 500 comments and counting.

The article itself, not surprisingly anonymously written, is filled with the usual shopworn explanations for the audience’s disinterest. For Lew Harris of Movies.com, it’s the canard that movies are escapism only. Serious films are just too heavy for the great unwashed. For Gitesh Pandya of boxofficeguru.com, it’s that audiences don’t want to pay for what they already see for free on television (Iraq). Veteran television producer Steve Bocho says it’s hard to gain audience interest in a “hugely unpopular war.”

These liberal folks just can’t believe that anyone disagrees with them. You’d almost expect to hear, “But everyone I know thinks like me.” But, as the comments note, there is another explanation.

The audience members themselves – that is the Breitbart commenters – are having none of this nonsense. The third one down, “Extremely Bored,” puts it this way: “Let me correct this point – I am not weary of war news at all. I am shunning these movies – and many others- because I am tired of Hollywood’s anti-American stance on absolutely everything. However we got into the war, and whatever mistakes were made up to this point, we are one country. We need to win and we need to remain tough against terrorism. It doesn’t benefit anyone to do otherwise. I will go see a movie that reflects that point.”

He is echoed almost immediately by commenter “Lee”: “The real answer – the obvious one that liberals can’t bring themselves to accept – is that most Americans are tired of liberal spinmeisters trashing their country, our soldiers, and our way of life. The Redfords of the world sit in their ivory towers and try to tell us how to think and react based on their own prejudices …”

And so it goes down the page… hundreds, soon thousands.

The problem here is that the Left finds whatever fits their narrative and blows it out of proportion, as I have noted before with the movie “Redacted”. Brian De Palma found a horrifying incident, but then he calls it “the reality” of what’s happening in Iraq, and by extension (i.e. by not showing the positive things happening in Iraq) he and all these writers and directors paint a horrendously proportioned and one-sided picture of the war.

Essentially, all this anti-Americanism does not interest the public. Further, it plays into the hands of our enemies. We are producing their propaganda films for them! (But don’t question their patriotism.)

One other thing this exposes is the canard that Hollywood is a strictly money-making machine, and they only produce what the public wants. You hear this excuse trotted out when someone complains about the excessive and gratuitous sex and violence. But these anti-war movies are not making nearly the money others do, yet they keep making them. Flop after flop hits the theaters, even with big stars in them. If this explanation of Hollywood’s subject matter were true, they’d stop hitting their heads on this particular wall, and they’d also make more G and PG movies.

Truth is, they know the influence they have, and will, in many cases, take the loss to get their views out there, dressed up and made up to look respectable. But it’s still just a pig with lipstick, and the American people are not buying the propaganda this time.

[tags]Hollywood,war movie,Iraq war,Lew Harris,Gitesh Pandya,Steve Bocho,Robert Redford,Brian De Palma,Redacted,movie ratings[/tags]

We have a new poll on the sidebar asking how you / your family / your kids celebrate Halloween.  Some folks stick with the old tradition, some have opted for a Halloween alternative (sponsored by a church, neighborhood or community), some go to Halloween parties, and some just stay home and hand out candy to folks from the first group.  Let us know your habit, and if you have additional answers, go ahead and post them in the comments to this post.

Maimon Schwarzschild put up a thought-provoking post last week about charity in the world. It starts thusly:

The New York Times ran a front-page story recently about an elderly man who starved to death in Japan, having been denied help by the welfare bureaucracy. The man kept a diary as he died: heartbreaking to read. The Japanese welfare bureaucracy seems to have been notably heartless, and not only in this case. There are other, similar cases of starvation in the past year or two in Japan, according to the Times.

There is this brief throwaway in the lengthy Times story:

With no religious tradition of charity, Japan has few soup kitchens or other places for the indigent. Those that exist — run frequently by Christian missionaries from South Korea or Japan’s tiny Christian population — cater mostly to the homeless.

Say what you will about the “Abrahamic” religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – can there be any doubt that they have brought an ethic of charity into a world that would otherwise be a crueler place?

The ancient, pagan world, for all its brilliance, was coldly cruel. The Hebrew Bible put enormous emphasis on charity, which was something radically new.

Some of the commenters have their own issues with Muslim charity (little at all, or only to other Muslims).

Maimon winds up with this thought to chew on.

If the Christian world is on its way to being post-Christian, will the tradition of Christian charity persist?

Or is the ethic of charity liable to go down with the faith that inspired it?

[tags]Maimon Schwarzschild,Abrahamic religions,Christianity,Judaism,Islam,paganism,charity[/tags]

They couldn’t win in the courts, so the Left is attacking the Boy Scouts any other way they can. Sometimes the Scouts win, but sometimes, as in this case, the Left gets cities and organizations to back out of agreements.

Prompted by opposition to the Boy Scouts’ rule disqualifying homosexuals as troop leaders, Philadelphia has forced the city’s local chapter to pay fair-market rent of $200,000 a year for its city-owned headquarters.

As WND reported in June, Philadelphia’s city council voted to renege on a 1928 ordinance allowing the Cradle of Liberty Council to have its headquarters in a building on a parcel of public land “in perpetuity” for $1 a year.

The city argues it can’t rent public property for a nominal sum to any group that discriminates.

City officials in San Francisco and Boston have made similar decisions displacing the Scouts because of the group’s behavior code.

Fairmount Park Commission president Robert N.C. Nix announced this week the Cradle of Liberty Council must pay the $200,000 rent if it wants to remain in the building after May 31.

This is not to say that cities and organizations can’t decide to do whatever they want with their property; they certainly can. But what it does show are the lengths to which the Left will go to destroy something they have a disagreement with. Not content to battle ideas (because they’d lose that battle with the public), they put pressure on the economic side of things, in hopes that they can ruin them financially.

The whole “live and let live” pathos that homosexuals allegedly just want to live by is shown to be the lie that it is; the “let live” part is apparently only supposed to apply to others, not themselves.

This also highlights the differences in conservative and liberal ways of dealing with problems. Instead of letting ideas compete, liberals wish to use the government’s heavy hand to quash anything that they disagree with. The Scouts are simply one of the more higher profile groups they have their sights on.

There is no right to belong to a private organization. There are other organizations that will take homosexual leaders. No one is being denied anything. Free association is still legal, at least for the moment. Therefore, this campaign should be opposed by anyone who still believes in a free country.

[tags]Boy Scouts of America,Philadephia,Cradle of Liberty Council,homosexuals,free association[/tags]

“Hmm, my first attempt at bribing for votes was a little too obvious. Let’s try it this way.”

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed tax cuts of up to $1,000 a year on Tuesday to encourage millions of working-age families to open personal 401(k) retirement accounts.

The New York senator said the program would be paid for through higher estate taxes.

At the same time, Clinton said she has given up another idea for a savings incentive — giving every baby born in the U.S. a $5,000 account to pay for college or a first home.

Instead, she said, her plan for what she called “American Retirement Accounts” will provide “universal access to a generous 401(k) for all Americans.”

From Wikipedia, I found the source of a well-known phrase.

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions – everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses

If Hillary gets elected, I guess we could then add to that list “and 401(k)s”.

[tags]Hillary Clinton,presidential election,Democrats,bread and circuses[/tags]