NYC has declared that under its Human Rights Law, businesses must use a transgendered persons’ preferred pronoun when referring to him/her/ze/they/it/hir or they will be fined.
I’m not surprised that liberals would want to take away free speech to force people to say things they do not want to say and know are not true under the pain of financial penalty. Liberals are not pro-freedom, but pro-liberal values. They are only for the freedoms they want to champion, and if that requires reducing the overall amount of freedom in this country, they fully support that.
All of us like compliments, but why? I think a large part of the reason is that they serve to either validate our own healthy sense of self-perception or, if we have an unhealthy self-perception, they serve to bring hope that we just might be better than we perceive ourselves to be. Compliments serve as confirmation that we are, indeed, valuable. Receiving compliments is necessary to a healthy development of one’s self-perception. A failure to receive compliments can cause someone to doubt their own value, and may lead to them doing abnormal things to solicit compliments so they can be reassured of their own value.
Of course, there is always the temptation to pride when one receives compliments. That’s where a health Christian theology comes in handy. We recognize that everything we are, and everything we do, is because of God’s grace. He is to be thanked for everything we are/do, and thus we redound the praise to the glory of God.
Many scientifically-minded atheists claim that science can explain or has explained everything that God was once invoked to explain, and thus there is no more room for belief in God. But when theists point to gaps in scientific knowledge and argue that God best explains that gap, atheists accuse us of committing a God-of-the-gaps fallacy. If the discovery of natural processes to explain some phenomena counts as evidence against God, how can it also be that the lack of a naturalistic explanation cannot count as evidence for God’s existence when God is the best explanation for the phenomena?[1] Heads I win, tails you lose.
Obviously the lack of a naturalistic explanation for some phenomenon in and of itself is not evidence for theism, but it does show that (1) science has not explained everything that needs to be explained or that the God hypothesis has been invoked to explain, and (2) it shows that there is still explanatory power in theism.
Alan Shlemon has answered that question in the space of a tweet: “There’s only one way to Heaven because there’s only one God that exists who’s made only one offer of forgiveness through His only one Son.”
Well put. He unpacks the statement as well in a short article.
Thinking to Believe 