Department of Defense states that it will punish Christians for evangelizing

ECM posted this story from Breitbart.

Excerpt:

The Pentagon has released a statement confirming that soldiers could be prosecuted for promoting their faith: “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense…Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis…”.

The statement, released to Fox News, follows a Breitbart News report on Obama administration Pentagon appointees meeting with anti-Christian extremist Mikey Weinstein to develop court-martial procedures to punish Christians in the military who express or share their faith.

(From our earlier report: Weinstein is the head of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and says Christians–including chaplains–sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the military are guilty of “treason,” and of committing an act of “spiritual rape” as serious a crime as “sexual assault.” He also asserted that Christians sharing their faith in the military are “enemies of the Constitution.”)

Being convicted in a court martial means that a soldier has committed a crime under federal military law. Punishment for a court martial can include imprisonment and being dishonorably discharged from the military.

So President Barack Obama’s civilian appointees who lead the Pentagon are confirming that the military will make it a crime–possibly resulting in imprisonment–for those in uniform to share their faith. This would include chaplains—military officers who are ordained clergymen of their faith (mostly Christian pastors or priests, or Jewish rabbis)–whose duty since the founding of the U.S. military under George Washington is to teach their faith and minister to the spiritual needs of troops who come to them for counsel, instruction, or comfort.

This regulation would severely limit expressions of faith in the military, even on a one-to-one basis between close friends. It could also effectively abolish the position of chaplain in the military, as it would not allow chaplains (or any service members, for that matter), to say anything about their faith that others say led them to think they were being encouraged to make faith part of their life. It’s difficult to imagine how a member of the clergy could give spiritual counseling without saying anything that might be perceived in that fashion.

Wow. So you can be openly gay in the military but you can’t be openly Christian. Thanks Barack Obama.

See, the problem is that the people who pass these laws think that a person can be a Christian without evangelizing. But Christianity is a missionary faith, there is an obligation to evangelize included in the practices of an authentic Christian life. To forbid evangelism is to be intolerant of genuine Christainity. The people who made this law are ordering Christians to override their obligations to Jesus Christ. It’s essentially fascism – using the power of secular government to force individuals to deny their freely chosen religion.

Let me illustrate from the Bible exactly what is expected of Christians.

Matthew 10:32-33:

³²“Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven.

³³But whoever disowns me before men, I will disown him before my Father in heaven.

Deuteronomy 6:4-9:

⁴ Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

⁵ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

⁶ These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.

⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.

⁹ Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

That’s what’s at stake here. These are just a couple of examples, there are many more.

People on the left should reflect and understand what it is exactly that they are doing by marginalizing Christianity and trying to stop people from believing it by shaming and intimidating Christians, and leading people into sin. If Christianity is true, then actions like that are probably the absolute worst thing you can do. It’s particularly nasty when you realize that the reason that secular leftists try to suppress Christians from being authentic Christians is because of their feelings. Secular leftists feel that they have a right to suppress the freedoms of others by force of law. They feel justified in forcing Christians to act like atheists because they feel offended.

Let’s double-check that with the Bible and make sure. (Note: This is Jesus talking)

Matthew 18:6-14:

⁶ “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

⁷ Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!

⁸ If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.

⁹ And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.

¹⁰ “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.

¹² “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?

¹³ And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off.

¹⁴ In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.

Trying to persuade a Christian that they are wrong is fine, but using the power of the state to take away a faithful Christian’s job, which discourages them from being Christian, is something else. It is wrong to intimidate someone away from an authentic relationship with God as he really is, just because of your feelings of discomfort at public expressions of religious faith. The right of each person to express their religion in public is a basic right, but there is no right not to be offended by someone else’s use of liberty to just be themselves. No one is asking for non-Christians to be forced to convert to Christianity or to be forced to celebrate and affirm Christianity by the power of the state. We’re just asking to be who we are without losing our jobs.

Filed under: Commentary, Authenticity, Bible, Chrisitanity, Coercion, Cross, Fascism, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Government, Leftism, Liberty, Moral Relativism, Pluralism, Postmodernism, Religious Liberty, Secular Humanism, Secularism

Is it still safe to defend marriage using your real name?

A Facebook friend is in hot water from his left-leaning classmates for a short essay that he wrote defending marriage. It was published in his college newspaper. In it, he makes a case that society has an interest in promoting marriage because the state has an interest in the development of children.

He writes (in part):

Marriage is a comprehensive union with a special link to children. It is a private union with a public purpose.

Private in that comprehensive union exemplifies the love of the spouses. Public in that their comprehensive union is intrinsically directed toward a purpose beyond the love of the spouses: children.

The state regulates marriage because it has an interest in children. Marriage produces and cultivates the development of future citizens within a family unit held together by norms of fidelity, monogamy, exclusivity, and permanence. The state incentivizes marriage both because it recognizes child-rearing to be a difficult task and because it wants to encourage men and women to form family units. Not all marriages have children; some are infertile. Nevertheless, all marriages between men and women are still capable of engaging in the kind of unitive act that is intrinsically directed toward children.

The essay is a 500-word version of a longer essay that he posted before.

Scary comments

I wanted to bring this up because if you read some of the comments on his post, you will find that most of them seem to be unable to even understand the case that he was trying to make in his small, short 500-word version of the longer essay. Yet, even though these people could not understand what he was saying, they nevertheless went ahead and insulted him personally, over and over and over again.

Take a look at some of these comments, and ask yourself – are they trying to engage with his arguments? Are they bringing new research to bear on the problem? Or are they just offering personal attacks and emotional outbursts?

Look:

The argument in the letter has been debunked time and time again. Ultimately, it implies gay couples aren’t human. At the very least, it implies that gay people aren’t already parents, which is false. I’m absolutely disgusted at your discretion in publishing this trash. You have stooped to an unbelievable low this time. As a side note, I’m embarrassed for [the academic department you belong to].

If it’s been debunked so many times, then we can’t he explain what’s wrong with it instead of becoming insulting?

Here’s another from that same person, right after the first one:

You don’t like gay people. How original. As a side note, I did offer arguments against the ridiculous fallacies in logic that you presented. But it’s not like you’re here to have a discussion. I’m sure you’ve made up your mind re: profile pictures and such.

Um, he never did post any arguments. He just posted about his feelings “disgusted” “embarassed”. That’s not an argument.

And here’s the same person again:

Your article is an insult to anyone who’s LGBT– yes, even your “friends.” It’s an affront to humanity. See Perry v. Schwarzenegger for an obliteration of your argument. I can’t even bother when the facts are all there in Supreme Court records for your easy consumption.

And the funny thing is – people keep clicking like on his comments. Why is that? Why do they think that he has said anything of value?

My advice

And here is the point I want to make about this. I do not recommend to people, and especially to students, that you write about social issues under your real name. I also recommend that even if you use an alias, that you do not make it widely known what your real name is to people who you meet casually online. You do not want to be in a situation where someone can just do a web search for your name before a job interview or a school admission. People who are on the left on these issues are not exposed to other points of view, so they do not tolerate other points of view. Often, they are coming from a position where they already have made lifestyle choices (I mean straight people, too) where they cannot allow themselves to consider the possibility that they would have to regulate their sexuality for the good of children or society.

Filed under: News, Alias, Censor, Censorship, Coercion, Gay Activists, Gay Marriage, Insults, Intolerance, Marriage, Personal Attacks, Same-Sex Marriage, Tolerance, Vandalism

Pro-life group at Johns Hopkins University denied official club status

Life Training Institute tweeted this article from the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

The Student Government Association at Johns Hopkins University has denied a pro-life group official club status at the Baltimore school for fear the group will make students feel uncomfortable.

“They were denied status because the students on the student council felt being pro-life violates their harassment policy,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, told Fox News.

The SGA at Johns Hopkins voted March 12 to deny the group, called Voice for Life, the right to become an official student club. The vote was affirmed on March 24 by the SGA’s Senate, Fox News reports.

According to emails obtained by Fox News, members of the SGA compared the pro-life students to white supremacists, which Ms. Hawkins said was deeply offensive to the group’s black members.

“To compare pro-lifers with white supremacists — it’s unreal,” she told Fox News.

Another SGA member said that allowing pro-life demonstrations made her feel “personally violated, targeted and attacked at a place where we previously felt safe and free to live our lives.”

An SGA senator said: “We have the right to protect our students from things that are uncomfortable. Why should people have to defend their beliefs on their way to class?”

Voice for Life is searching for an attorney to help them fight the ban. SGA representatives did not return calls seeking comment, Fox News reports.

Now the secular leftists who run the universities like to think of themselves as tolerant, open-minded and diverse. But, actually, they are so intolerant that they cannot even bear to listen to any view other than their own view. What we need on university campuses is an Academic Bill of Rights that guarantees basic liberties to students and faculty who do not toe the leftist line. That would be real diversity, and it would encourage real critical thinking. The university feels that it is fine to make pro-life students uncomfortable, with the many pro-abortion groups on campus. But making pro-abortion students uncomfortable is unthinkable.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Campus, Censorship, Coercion, Fascism, Johns Hopkins, Johns Hopkins University, Pro-Life, Pro-Life Club, Secular Humanism, Secularism, Student Government, Totalitarianism, University

Journalist Bob Woodward gets e-mail threat from senior person in the White House

That video is from left-leaning CNN.

Here is Newsbusters with the transcript.

Excerpt:

Tonight, Washington Post’s Bob Woodward alleged that because he is sticking to his guns in insisting that sequestration was the brainchild of the Obama White House, that it was personally approved by Obama, and that bringing up tax increases now to try to resolve the current sequestration impasse is “moving the goalposts,” he has been threatened by “a very senior person” in the White House. Woodward said so on CNN’s Situation Room earlier today. What’s even more troubling is that Woodward told two Politico reporters the same thing yesterday, and that they appear to have sat on the revelation until this evening when the CNN interview forced their hand. Relevant portions of the CNN transcript and Politico column follow the jump.

This is from a rush transcript at CNN. Woodward was interviewed by the network’s Wolf Blitzer and Kate Bolduan (I checked the first portion of it against the video; there was no supporting video for the last line quoted below; bolds are mine throughout this post):

BOLDUAN: What do you make of the White House’s response to your article?

WOODWARD: Well, I think they’re confused. I think they’ve got this idea. I mean, they put out these long talking points and said, see, even Woodward’s book reports that Speaker Boehner said, let’s get $600 billion over ten years in revenue in the super committee. That’s exactly right. That’s not the sequester. And they’ve said – they have,as you know, I said, get somebody from the White House here, and we’ll debate.

BLITZER: We invited the White House to send someone here, to debate this issue with you, and they declined.

WOODWARD: Why? Why? Because it’s irrefutable; that’s exactly what happened. I’m not saying this is a moving of the goalposts that was some criminal act or something like that, I’m just saying, that’s –

… BLITZER: You’re used to this kind of stuff, but share with our viewers what’s going on between you and the White House.

WOODWARD: Well, they’re not happy at all, and some people kind of, you know, said, look, we don’t see eye to eye on this. They never really said, though – afterwards, they’ve said that this is factually wrong, and they – and it was said to me in an e-mail by a top –

BLITZER: What was said? Yes.

WOODWARD: It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this.

BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?

WOODWARD: Well, I’m not going to say.

BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?

WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter – I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, you’re going to regret doing something that you believe in. And even though we don’t look at it that way, you do look at it that way. And I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication’s strategy – let’s hope it’s not a strategy, but it’s a tactic that somebody’s employed, and said, look, we don’t go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don’t like, that, you know, you’re going to regret this. And just – it’s Mickey Mouse.

… BOLDUAN: That line clearly has touched a nerve with folks at the White House. There’s no question about that.

Why would anyone think that the tactics of this socialist, big-government regime would be any different than other socialist, big-government regimes? They don’t like criticism. They don’t like questions. They don’t like being held accountable.

You can find a list of some of the previous acts of thuggish intimidation against journalists here:

Hey, Bob, you can’t say we didn’t warn you.  We knew this White House was capable of attacking even the great Bob Woodward for telling the truth.

You could have listened to Michael Barone.  He saw it coming even before Barack Obama was elected. In October 2008, he penned “The Coming Obama Thugocracy.”

I experienced it when DOJ press harpy Tracy Schmaler yelled at a half dozen reporters, as the White House official did to you, about my under-oath testimony involving the New Black Panther dismissal.  Her victims included Pete Williams, Quin Hillyer, and Shayrl Attkisson.  After Schmaler’s thug tendencies were well known, she was nurtured and promoted within the Thugocracy instead of being canned as any administration before this one would have done to her — Republican or Democrat.

Schmaler has since been appointed a Made Man of sorts, entering the rarefied private sector air of David Axelrod’s shop.

Schmaler’s story is typical of this gang.  Her shouting, threats, and rants at reporters would have rendered her unqualified to serve in the press shop of a state department of agriculture.

Leftists have always been like this – the sense of moral superiority, and the dismissal of critics as immoral. The thuggishness is natural because they believe that their plans can never fail because of their innate moral superiority. If their plans do fail, (e.g. – high minimum wage produces higher unemployment), it must be because some group of people is undermining them, and those people must be purged. It can never be that their plans are wrong and don’t produce the results they want. They have good intentions, and how could that not produce good results? Leftists are the same everywhere.

Filed under: News, Authoritarianism, Barack Obama, Bob Woodward, Censor, Censorship, Coercion, Communism, Democrat Party, Fascism, Fifth Estate, Freedom of the Press, Journalism, Journalist, Left, Leftism, Mainstream Media, Marxism, News Media, Newspaper, Persecution, Purge, Socialism, State Coercion, Totalitarianism

If God wanted us to believe in him, why doesn’t he give us more evidence?

Have you ever heard someone say that if God existed, he would give us more evidence? This is called the “hiddenness of God” argument. It’s also known as the argument from “rational non-belief”.

Basically the argument is something like this:

1. God is all powerful
2. God is all loving
3. God wants all people to know about him
4. Some people don’t know about him
5. Therefore, there is no God.

You may hear have heard this argument before, when talking to atheists, as in William Lane Craig’s debate with Theodore Drange, (audio, video).

Basically, the atheist is saying that he’s looked for God real hard and that if God were there, he should have found him by now. After all, God can do anything he wants that’s logically possible, and he wants us to know that he exists. To defeat the argument we need to find a possible explanation of why God would want to remain hidden when our eternal destination depends on our knowledge of his existence.

What reason could God have for remaining hidden?

Dr. Michael Murray, a brilliant professor of philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College, has found a reason for God to remain hidden.

His paper on divine hiddenness is here:
“Coercion and the Hiddenness of God“, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 30, 1993.

He argues that if God reveals himself too much to people, he takes away our freedom to make morally-significant decisions, including responding to his self-revelation to us. Murray argues that God stays somewhat hidden, so that he gives people space to either 1) respond to God, or 2) avoid God so we can keep our autonomy from him. God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to belief in him in order to avoid being punished.

But believing in God just to avoid punishment is NOT what God wants for us. If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation. But God wants us to respond to him out of interest in him, just like we might try to get to know someone we admire. God has to dial down the immediacy of the threat of judgment, and the probability that the threat is actual. That leaves it up to us to respond to God’s veiled revelation of himself to us, in nature and in Scripture.

(Note: I think that we don’t seek God on our own, and that he must take the initiative to reach out to us and draw us to him. But I do think that we are free to resist his revelation, at which point God stops himself short of coercing our will. We are therefore responsible for our own fate).

The atheist’s argument is a logical/deductive argument. It aims to show that there is a contradiction between God’s will for us and his hiding from us. In order to derive a contradiction, God MUST NOT have any possible reason to remain hidden. If he has a reason for remaining hidden that is consistent with his goodness, then the argument will not go through.

When Murray offers a possible reason for God to remain hidden in order to allow people to freely respond to him, then the argument is defeated. God wants people to respond to him freely so that there is a genuine love relationship – not coercion by overt threat of damnation. To rescue the argument, the atheist has to be able to prove that God could provide more evidence of his existence without interfering with the free choice of his creatures to reject him.

More of Michael Murray’s work

Murray has defended the argument in works published by prestigious academic presses such as Cambridge University Press, (ISBN: 0521006104, 2001) and Routledge (ISBN: 0415380383, 2007). The book chapter from the Cambridge book is here. The book chapter from the Routledge book is here.

Michael Murray’s papers are really fun to read, because he uses hilarious examples. I should mention that I disagree with his view that God’s work of introducing biological information in living creatures has to be front-loaded.

Here’s more terrific stuff from Dr. Murray:

• “Who’s Afraid of Religion?“, Inaugural Lecture delivered March 30, 2006. Franklin and Marshall College.
• “Seek and You Will Find“, in God and the Philosophers. Thomas Morris, editor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1994.

Is there any evidence of God’s existence?

Yes, just watch this lecture by Dr. William Lane Craig. It contains 5 reasons why God exists and 3 reasons why it matters.

Filed under: Polemics, Apologetics, Atheism, Christian Apologetics, Christianity, Coercion, Damnation, Divine Hiddenness, Evidence, Evil, Free Agency, Free Will, God, Good, Hell, Libertarian, Liberty, Love, Man, Michael Murray, Non Belief, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Problem of Evil, Punishment, Repond, Theodore Drange, Threat