An Atheist Chastises Evangelicals Who Don’t Evangelize - Penn Jillette

A few years ago atheist Penn Jillette, of the magician duo, Penn & Teller, expressed indignation at evangelicals who don’t share their faith, asking, “How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?” Video, followed by transcript, below: “I’ve always said that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life, and you think that it’s not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward—and atheists who think people shouldn’t proselytize and who say just leave me along and keep your religion to yourself—how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? “I mean, if I believed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t believe that truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that.”

Some Random Thoughts From Thomas Sowell

How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on, and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?

Why should being in a professional sport exempt anyone from prosecution for advocating deliberate violence? Recent revelations of such advocacy of violence by an NFL coach should lead to his banishment for life by the NFL, and criminal prosecution by the authorities. If you are serious about reducing violence, you have to be serious about punishing those who advocate it.

Have you noticed that what modest economic improvements we have seen occurred during the much-lamented "gridlock" in Washington? Nor is this unusual. If you check back through history, doing nothing has a far better track record than that of politicians intervening in the economy.

With all the talk about people paying their "fair share" of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their "fair share"? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?

Some people are puzzled by the fact that so much that is said and done by politicians seems remote from reality. But reality is not what gets politicians elected. Appearances, rhetoric and emotions are what get them elected. Reality is what the voters and taxpayers are left to deal with, as a result of electing them.

Instead of following the tired old formula of having politicians and bureaucrats give college commencement speeches, in which they say how superior it is to follow a career as politicians and bureaucrats -- "public service" -- why not invite someone like John Stossel to tell the graduates how much better it is to go into the private sector, supplying what people want, instead of imposing the government's will on them?

In politics, few talents are as richly rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims. Welfare states on both sides of the Atlantic have discovered that largesse to losers does not reduce their hostility to society, but only increases it. Far from producing gratitude, generosity is seen as an admission of guilt, and the reparations as inadequate compensations for injustices -- leading to worsening behavior by the recipients.

Some people say that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But the runaway taxes of our time are the price we pay for being gullible.

Whatever the ideology or rhetoric of the political left, their agenda around the world has been preempting other people's decisions and regimenting their lives.

The limits of Narcissism

President and Mrs. Obama filled their speeches to the International Olympic Committee with references to themselves, their lives, their experiences, all because of their self-evident significance to the progress of humanity. "Both Obamas," writes George Will, gave heartfelt speeches about ... themselves."
This is only a slight exaggeration in the case of President Obama's speech, though entirely on the mark with respect to Mrs. Obama's. Mrs. Obama also earned extra credit with her Olympic memory of sitting on her father's lap to watch Carl Lewis compete when she would have been 20 years old. While Mrs. Obama's speech edged President Obama's in narcissism, it was a helluva close race. (The texts of both speeches are posted here.)
To read the rest: Powerline

The Myth Unbelievers Cling To

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"If God did not exist, all would be permitted."
Feodor Dostoevsky

¹⁸For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, ¹⁹because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.

Romans 1:18-19NASB

Fleeing High State Taxes

Economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that analyzes how people and capital leave higher tax states for lower tax states.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas. We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.

…Or consider the fiasco of New Jersey. In the early 1960s, the state had no state income tax and no state sales tax. It was a rapidly growing state attracting people from everywhere and running budget surpluses. Today its income and sales taxes are among the highest in the nation yet it suffers from perpetual deficits and its schools rank among the worst in the nation -- much worse than those in New Hampshire. Most of the massive infusion of tax dollars over the past 40 years has simply enriched the public-employee unions in the Garden State. People are fleeing the state in droves.

This is a no-brainer: you get less of that which you tax; you get more of that which you subsidize.If New Jersey wants to run its millionaires out of state, all they have to do is raise the marginal tax rates.

Now who will pay the taxes in that state?

HT:Right Mind

Defining Decency Down

Christians are foolish to sing the praises of Miss California, Carrie Prejean, simply because she uttered some inarticulate opinions against same-sex marriage and speaks of God. To find a heroine in her is to define decency down, just as social science defined deviancy down decades ago (as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out in a ground-breaking article in 1993).

This young woman is a beauty queen, both ensnared by and loving that sad and silly skin game. However, the category should not exist. American society has created an unreal and cruel standard for women to reach: the beauty queen--a woman known for curves and perfect skin, heavenly hair and preternatural teeth. They prance and pose and preen; the cameras churn and burn; the media salivates and speculates. My stomach turns. It is all sinful a waste of the short time we have on this fallen planet. Moreover, in addition to the intrinsic immodesty and vanity of the beauty queen persona, this woman apparently posed for even more indecent photographs. This model is no model (of character).

Carrie Prejean is no heroine. She does not deserve any more attention. To give it to her, whether you are James Dobson or Sean Hannity, reveals the paucity of both real virtue and Christian discernment today. We have defined decency down. Perhaps we should lift some prayers up.
By Doug Grootuis

The odious Democrat bootlicker Jon Stewart gets his tail handed to him in the Washington Times.

I have always considered Jon Stewart (The Daily Show) to be a thoroughly repugnant ass and his TV show a bunch of garbage for only the very stupidest of left-wing nobrains. As a result of my avoidance of the man and his works, I have seldom had occasion to write about him.

Thus I greatly enjoyed Andrew Breitbart's column about Stewart in today's Washington Times, in which he shows up Stewart as a partisan hack.

My only prior substantive reference to Stewart in this august publication, in fact, characterized him as "another open Democrat partisan talker" as opposed to him being any sort of comedian, and I dismissed him as an uninteresting Democrat water-carrier.

Predictably, Stewart has continued his old ways, attacking obscure and powerless Republicans while giving a free pass to President Obama as the Chief Executive and his complicit Congress attempt a grotesque and horrifying transformation of the United States into a combination of 1970s Great Britain and current-day Mexico.

Jonathan and his amazing technicolor dream-teleprompter (yes, he has one too) has for 10 years used sophisticated character assassination to slyly annihilate the political enemies of the Democratic Party.

The show's multitude of liberal, Ivy-League-educated writers—another Obama echo—feed the mildly successful former stand-up comedian irony-laden words that he offers up with his signature goofy facial expressions. And Jon Stewart has a studio audience of pliant seals commanded and trained to flap their fins at every smirk or sarcastic joke.

As a smug and pretentious elitist who portrays himself as more intelligent than the opposition when in fact he simply reads Democrat talking points in a snarky tone of voice while expressing mock astonishment, Stewart caters to an audience of people who likewise think themselves superior to the population as a whole and hence think that pseudo intellectuals such as themselves should be given the keys to the car and the rest of us should remain in the back seat and shut the hell up.

Scientific Pretense vs. Democracy

“We will restore science to its rightful place…”
—Barack Obama

Unpacked, this sentence means: “Under my administration, Americans will have fewer choices about how they live, and fewer choices as voters because, rightfully, those choices should be made by officials who rule by the authority of science.”

Thus our new president intends to accelerate a trend a half-century old in America but older and further advanced in the rest of the world. There is nothing new or scientific about rulers pretending to execute the will of a god or of an oracle. It’s a tool to preempt opposition. The ruler need not make a case for what he is doing. He need only reaffirm his status as the priest of a knowledge to which the people cannot accede. The argument “Do what we say because we are certified to know better” is a slight variant of “Do what we say because we are us.”

By Angelo M. Codevilla from the April 2009 issue of American Spectator To read the rest

How Bad Is the Stimulus Bill?

Harvard economics professor Robert Borro: "This is probably the worst bill that has been put forward since the 1930s. I don't know what to say. I mean it's wasting a tremendous amount of money. It has some simplistic theory that I don't think will work, so I don't think the expenditure stuff is going to have the intended effect. I don't think it will expand the economy. And the tax cutting isn't really geared toward incentives. It's not really geared to lowering tax rates; it's more along the lines of throwing money at people."
To read the whole article click here

Obama's Heterodoxy

Steven Waldman:

The most detailed and fascinating explication of Barack Obama's faith came in a 2004 interview he gave Chicago Sun Times columnist Cathleen Falsani when he was running for U.S. Senate in Illinois. The column she wrote about the interview has been quoted and misquoted many times over, but she'd never before published the full transcript in a major publication.

Because of how controversial that interview became, Falsani has graciously allowed us to print the full conversation here.

Read the whole thing.

Some reactions (click their names to read more of their thoughts):

Joe Carter:

. . . from a political point of view, whether the President is a Christian, Jew, Muslim, whatever, should make no difference. But I believe it is useful to have an idea of what theological commitments we might have in common. And after reading this interview, I would say that Obama and I share very few beliefs. . . . In fact, nowhere in the interview did I ever get the impression that Obama subscribes to even the most basic beliefs that are typically associated with being a Christian.

Rod Dreher:

Unless Obama was being incredibly and uncharacteristically inarticulate, this is heterodox. You cannot be a Christian in any meaningful sense and deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. You just can't. . . . People think you can make this stuff up as you go along, and that nobody has the right to define authoritatively what any of it means. It's the Church of Christianity without Christ. It's Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, so let's call it what it is -- but not what it is not, which is Christianity.

Daniel Larison:

Ultimately, the inquiry into Obama’s faith does not tell us much that we didn’t already know, which is that he is a liberal Protestant with an accordingly poor grounding in theological orthodoxy. I have to wonder how much power this critique has unless it is made as part of a general argument for theological conservatism in public life. Would cultural conservatives be open to this kind of critique when it is one of theirs being criticized, or would they repeat the arguments marshalled in defense of Romney?

Ross Douthat:

Given the muddled way in which most Americans approach religion, and the pervasiveness of heterodoxy, I suppose I'm basically with Alan Jacobs: I think that figuring out exactly what sort of things Obama believes about God and Christ and everything else, and how those beliefs may affect his Presidency, is ultimately a more profitable pursuit than arguing about whether he should be allowed to call himself a Christian. Or put another way: I expect my Presidents to be heretics, but I think it matters a great deal what kind of heretics they are.

posted by JT at Tuesday, November 18, 2008 7 comments links to this post

The Futility Of Being A Detroit Lions Fan

"Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless." Ecclesiastes 1:1
These are the words of a Lions fan. The teacher went on to say, "generations come and generations go" how did he know about the Detroit Lions? "What has been will be again, what has been done will be again." Its like this every Sunday, what has been done, bad play, bad coaching, bad ownership, will be again. The next Sunday it happens all over again, "there is nothing new" absolutely true! "It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time". What hope can young fans have? I started attending lions games in the 50's when they were still winning championships but they have only won 1 playoff game in over 50 years. All I can say is thank God for the Red Wings and the Pistons!

Newsweek On The Osteens - What's God Got To Do With It?

Lisa Miller:

Prosperity preachers are neither new nor unique in America, but the Osteens' version seems especially self-serving. Victoria's book betrays her interest in the kind of small gratifications that rarely extend to other people, let alone to the larger world. She recommends that women take "me time" every day, and indulge occasionally in a (fat-free!) ice cream. She writes repeatedly about her love for the gym. Her relationship advice is retrograde dross: submit to your man, or at least pretend you're submitting, and then do what you want anyway. "I know if I just wait long enough," she writes, "eventually my idea will become Joel's idea, and it will come to pass." When I asked her how she kept her two children interested in church, she answered that even though they were a broccoli and lean-meats household, she gave them doughnuts as a special treat on Sundays. All this is fine, in the pages of a women's magazine or a self-help book. But what has God got to do with it?
Read the whole article here.