Thinking to Believe

The power to tax is the power to enslave. That’s not to say taxation itself is immoral. All of us can agree to a reasonable amount of taxes to pay for a functional government and basic social resources like funding the military, paving roads, and the like. But the bigger the government gets, the more taxes it needs, and the more money it takes. If the government taxed an individual 100% of their income, they will have effectively enslaved them because they are working entirely for the government and not benefiting from their own work. If the individual was allowed to keep 10% of their earnings, they are little better than a slave. It’s just a matter of degree. As this entitlement culture demands more and more, the government will continue to take more and more in taxes, enslaving us degree by degree. If you want freedom, keep our government small.

Diversity is not a value.  Diversity just is.  We don’t value diversity for diversity’s sake, but for what that diversity provides us. For example, we value diversity in food because we enjoy eating different kinds of food.  We value diversity of clothing styles because we like to express ourselves in different ways, and we think it would be wrong to make everyone wear the same kind of clothes or eat the exact same food.  But there are some examples of diversity that should not be valued or “celebrated.”  We should not celebrate diversity in moral views, particularly when some of those moral views entail gross immorality.  The British did not celebrate the diversity of Indians when they burned their widows on the funeral pyre.  They forcibly ended that barbarism.  We should not celebrate diversity in how women’s genitalia is treated – celebrating those who mutilate women’s genitalia alongside those who do not.  We should not celebrate the diversity of killing one’s own daughter after she is raped to preserve the honor of the family.  Not all ideas are of equal value.  We celebrate the diversity of people, but not the diversity of ideas.  Bad ideas should be fought against – first by persuasion, but if that fails, in some cases we must fight those ideas by force.

A lot of Christians are arguing that our Christian principles, based in Scripture, demand that we welcome the Syrian refugees. This article shows why this is a hasty conclusion regarding the teaching of Scripture.

Surely the Scripture does not mean to say we should allow foreigners to come into our nation who intend to kill us (as if the Israelites would have let the Philistines or Babylonians into Jerusalem!).  And surely those who argue that Scripture demands we accept the Syrian refugees would not cite those same passages if they knew members of ISIS or Al Qaeda were among them, but could not be identified.  But here’s the thing: We know from the experience in France that terrorists are coming in with the refugees undetected, and people have been murdered as a result.  Until and unless we can properly vet these refugees to determine who is a possible terrorist and who is not, how can any reasonable person say we should just let them into our country?  It only takes a few terrorists to produce mass killing.  9/11 and the French attacks are proof of this.

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Trying to make Christian morality palatable to those in moral rebellion against God is like trying to make civil law palpable to criminals. They will never like God’s laws no matter how reasonable we demonstrate those laws to be. Defiant children do not care that eating too much candy will make them throw up or give them diabetes. They simply want candy. Likewise, those who want their sexual sin, their abortion, and a myriad of other sins do not care about the wisdom in God’s laws. They want what they want, and they will ridicule and deride those who say otherwise. This is not to say that we should not attempt to explain the reason for and benefits of God’s law. It’s just to say that we shouldn’t be surprised when this fails to change their behavior.

Imagine for a moment that a man wrecks his car in a rural area. The car bursts in flames and the man is trapped inside. There is no way for authorities to reach him in time before he dies. Knowing this, he reaches for his gun in his glove box and shoots himself in the head to avoid a long and agonizing death by fire.  Did he commit sin (suicide), or is this morally justified?

Now let’s change the scenario a bit. A man wrecks his car in a rural area, right in front of your house. The authorities could never reach him in time to save him.  In this scenario, however, he does not have a gun.  You hear the accident and explosion from your house and rush to the road to see what has happened.  You can hear the man writing in pain from within the car.  He sees you through the flames and shouts, “Shoot me!  Kill me please!”  Is it morally permissible for you to honor his request, killing him with a gun to shorten the amount of agony he must suffer?  Or is this murder?

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In Texas of all places.  Two employees at a daycare in Houston were fired for refusing to call a six year old girl a boy after her two fathers instructed the daycare center leadership that she should now be referred to as a boy.  Only in our day can people be fired for refusing to deny reality.

I always knew the move to normalize transgenderism would follow on the coattails of the “homosexual campaign,” but I never anticipated that the acceptance of transgenderism was actually embedded within the very pockets of the coat itself.

HT: Wintery Knight

Many people assume that science and religion conflict. Who believes this? The religious people, right? They are the ones who are anti-science, right? No. Pew Research indicates that those most likely to see a conflict between religion and science are not the most religious, but the least religious.

Why is that? It could be that the most religious people are scientifically illiterate, and are unaware of the conflict between their faith and science. But this is opposed to the meme that the most religious people are the most anti-science because they recognize that science conflicts with their religious faith. One cannot be both scientifically illiterate and know enough about science to determine that science conflicts with one’s faith.

Perhaps the most religious people do not see a science-faith conflict because they are scientifically literate and have found a way to reconcile the findings of both (e.g. theistic evolution).

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Ryan Anderson writes in the Daily Signal about a new study showing that contrary to the claims of some physician assisted suicide (PAS) advocates, legalizing PAS increases the number of suicides.  Did we really need a study to tell us this?  No, but these days common sense can’t get a hearing unless it is confirmed by a study.

HT: Wintery Knight