Time Immortal

Inigo Montoya’s phrasing just never gets old, does it? In this particular case, I’m applying it to a list of 20 “reasons” why evolution and the Bible are not compatible, published by Apologetics Press. The list seems, at first, to be quite persuasive…but as will become obvious, it should only be persuasive to those who know very little about both evolution and about the Bible.

I confess that such lists amuse me, if only because they again prove right the Augustinian teaching that “[u]sually, even a non-Christian knows something about the Earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the Sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men…. Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

Most lists of this nature are comprised of entries that reduce to one (or both) of two basic fallacies: ignorance of Scripture or ignorance of science. As we move through the list, then O Reader, let’s see if we can spot which error is the more prominent in each entry.
Read the rest of this entry »

The little guy is still an infant still, but he has become the focal point for a lot of seething rage and hatred from various quarters of the Left. I just learned that Bill Maher — supposedly a funny man — has taken to referring to Trig as “it,” a rather hateful polemic. And then, of course, there is this cretinous website.

Why is this? Why all this rage and animosity directed toward a simple infant?

I think, at some level, seeing Trig Palin up there, loved by his siblings and celebrated simply for the fact of his being alive, fills many on the Left with shame. After all, the Left is caught up in a contradiction. While they obviously support the rights of the disabled, and cheer things like the Special Olympics, they also support a woman’s right to on-demand abortion for any reason whatsoever. And one very common reason for abortion is the discovery that the unborn baby is less than perfect, thanks to some manner of genetic defect .

90% of Down’s babies get aborted. Ninety percent! As Michael Gerson notes:

This is properly called eugenic abortion — the ending of “imperfect” lives to remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence. And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities. By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens. A tragic choice becomes a presumption — “Didn’t you get an amnio?” — and then a prejudice. And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.

Most pro-abortion/pro-choice sorts tend to shy away from the reality of that which they support, but it’s the ugly reality of abortion. In other countries around the world (and in North America to a certain extent as well), abortion is being used for a different, but no less ugly, eugenic purpose: the elimination of female children because of social pressures which give preference to male children. In India, Pakistan, China, and many other nations, the birth rate for boys is unnaturally higher than that of girls…and it’s not hard to fathom the reason why.

Indeed, only a handful of dedicatedly pro-choice people can honestly admit the ethical dilemma that supporting abortion presents. Camille Paglia is one of these, and her summary of the issue is at once revealing and damning:

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, “Sexual Personae,”) has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature’s fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

Paglia also notes that there is both room, and a need, in modern feminism for the pro-life perspective, contrary to all the naysayers who are busily crucifying Sarah Palin — Trig’s mother — simply because she is unabashedly pro-life, in word and in action.

To which, Vox Day adds this analysis:

This was my position before I became a Christian. I always believed abortion was murder, but then, murder is the way of the world. This is why the feminist position has to hide behind a whole host of specious reasons that aren’t capable of standing up to even the most cursory examination — there is, for example, no such thing as a right to one’s body or the government would not collect DNA evidence — and why Democrats consistently lose on this issue. Nearly every left-liberal blog I’ve read since Palin was nominated has blathered on about how her pro-life stance politically dooms her, despite the fact that she has 80 percent approval ratings in Alaska. Since her pro-life position is presumably well known to Alaskans [and since we can probably assume, in safety, that Alaskans have a fairly normal distribution of political opinions, and that they are not abnormally right-leaning -- Ken], we can safely conclude that, as usual, these left-liberals have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.

It is their guilty knowledge of their immorality when judged by traditional and historical standards that lies behind the drive of the Enlightenment 2.0 crowd to attempt creating a new and better moral system.

And it’s that same guilt that drives this fanatical hatred not only of Sarah Palin, but of baby Trig as well, and then perhaps even more viciously.

I think this also explains why 17-year old Bristol Palin took so much flack from the Left when it was revealed that she was pregnant and would a) be keeping the baby, and b) would be marrying the father, Levi Johnston. The Left expected Palin to “reveal her true colours” and to act as they themselves would; they expected Palin to be mortified. They hoped that she would either cave in and insist that Bristol abort the pregnancy, or else that she would withdraw herself and her family from the spotlight until the “mistake” had been born and its mother duly married off.

In other words, the Left hoped to expose Palin as either a hypocrite or a narrow-minded bigot where women’s sexuality was concerned (a little bit of projection there, methinks?).

But Palin didn’t do that, nor did her family. Nor did the Republicans — instead, they applauded Bristol’s decisions, applauded Bristol herself, and applauded her husband-to-be who had summoned the courage to “man up” and accept his responsibility for the child he fathered.

And the Left ended up looking like the misogynistic troglodytes that they have spent the last umpteen years warning us all that the Right is comprised of.