William Lane Craig explains the moral argument to Georgia Tech students and faculty

This video has 3 parts, as well as questions and answers in individual clips.

For those who cannot watch the video, you can grab the MP3 file of the lecture, or read this essay by Dr. Craig which covers exactly the same ground as the video.

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

If you want to show this lecture and Q&A to your apologetics group, you can find the DVD here.

You can also read a debate transcript where Dr. Craig puts his ideas to the test, against Dr. Richard Taylor.

Filed under: Videos, Apologetics, Atheism, Can We Be Good Without God?, Christian Apologetics, Ethics, Goodness Without God, Meta-Ethical, Meta-ethics, Metaethics, Moral, Moral Argument, Morality, Nihilism, Ontological Foundations, The Moral Argument, Why Be Moral?, William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig lectures on the moral argument at Georgia Tech (2008)

This video has 3 parts, as well as questions and answers in individual clips.

For those who cannot watch the video, you can grab the MP3 file of the lecture, or read this essay by Dr. Craig which covers exactly the same ground as the video.

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Questions and answers: (individual Youtube clips)

• Aren’t Christians motivated by fear of Hell?
• Is morality purely conditional?
• Is moral relativism livable?
• Atheism and nihilism
• How do you know objective morality is based on God?
• What good is morality in light of immortality?
• Was Hitler a Christian?

If you want to show this lecture and Q&A to your apologetics group, you can find the DVD here.

You can also read a debate transcript where Dr. Craig puts his ideas to the test, against Dr. Richard Taylor.

Filed under: Videos, Apologetics, Atheism, Can We Be Good Without God?, Christian Apologetics, Ethics, Goodness Without God, Meta-Ethical, Meta-ethics, Metaethics, Moral, Moral Argument, Morality, Nihilism, Ontological Foundations, The Moral Argument, Why Be Moral?, William Lane Craig

China confirms that photo of forced late-term abortion is authentic

From AFP:

Chinese authorities confirmed Thursday that a woman was forced to abort seven months into her pregnancy, several days after her plight came to light when images of her baby’s corpse were posted online.

Rights groups have blamed authorities in north China’s Shaanxi province for forcing Feng Jianmei to abort her pregnancy because she failed to pay a hefty fine for exceeding China’s strict “one-child” population control policy.

The Shaanxi provincial government said in a statement that a preliminary probe had confirmed the case was “basically true”, and the investigators have recommended action be taken against the perpetrators.

[...]Chinese web users have reacted in anger to the abortion, with one comparing it to acts perpetrated by “Japanese devils and Nazis”, after photos online showed Feng lying on a hospital bed next to the blood-smeared body of her baby.

A relative told AFP on Wednesday that Feng and her husband had opposed the termination.

[...]China has implemented its draconian family planning policy since the late 1970s in an effort to control a population that has grown to 1.3 billion people, the world’s largest.

Under the policy, urban families are generally allowed to have one child, while rural families can give birth to two children if the first is a girl. They have to pay a fine if they contravene the rules.

Rights groups say that as a result of the policy, thousands of women have been forced by authorities to terminate their pregnancies.

Blind activist Chen Guangcheng, who recently left China for the United States after fleeing house arrest, was once jailed after angering local officials for bringing to light hundreds of forced abortions.

Official statistics show that since the start of the policy, the number of abortions peaked in 1983, with a total of 14.37 million terminations that year.

You can see the absolutely horrifying photo of the woman and her child here on Life Site News. China is, of course, a country whose official state religion is atheism. There is no grounding for human rights – like the right to life – on atheism. The strong can do anything thing they want to the weak if it makes them feel good – there is no objective morality, so things like this are rational on atheism.

Would the Democrats be any different than China on the issue of coerced abortions? Vice president Joe Biden expressed support for China’s one-child policy, and presumably for their methods of enforcing it. Not only is Barack Obama the most pro-abortion President ever, but he also has voted for infanticide several times and he opposed the ban on partial birth abortions. Additionally, Obama appointed John Holdren to be his “science czar”, and Holdren had previously advocated for mass sterilizations and coerced abortions.

Take a good look at that picture. That’s what happens when a country turns its back on God and his moral laws.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Atheism, Barack Obama, China, Coerced Abortion, Feminism, John Holdren, Late-Term Abortion, Murder, Nihilism, One-Child, One-Child Policy, State Religion, Sterilization, Termination, Unborn Child

What do PETA and animal rights activist Meredith Lowell have in common?

Here’s Meredith Lowell, the main character in a very weird story.

Excerpt:

Meredith Lowell, 27, of Cleveland Heights, appeared Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, where a magistrate judge ordered her held by the U.S. Marshals Service pending a hearing next week, court records show.

[...]Investigators say the FBI was notified in November of a Facebook page Lowell created under the alias Anne Lowery offering $830 to $850 for the hit and saying the ideal candidate would live in northeast Ohio, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the court on Friday.

The affidavit says an FBI employee posing as a possible hit man later began email correspondence with Lowell, and she offered him $730 in jewelry or cash for the killing of a victim of at least 12 years but “preferably 14 years old or older” outside a library near a playground in her hometown.

“You need to bring a gun that has a silencer on it and that can be easily concealed in your pants pocket or coat. … If you do not want to risk the possibility of getting caught with a gun before the job, bring a sharp knife that is (at least) 4 inches long, it should be sharp enough to stab someone and/or slit their throat to kill them. I want the person to be dead in less than 2 minutes,” says an email reprinted in the affidavit.

She told the undercover employee she wanted to be on site when the slaying took place so she could distribute “papers” afterward, the affidavit says.

[...]Reprinted emails also say Lowell wrote that she sees nothing wrong with “liberating” animals from fur factory farms and laboratories since “soldiers liberated people from Nazi camps in World War 2.”

She also criticized a new aquarium in Cleveland – saying “it is wrong for animals to be taken against their will and put into their (equivalent) of a bathtub” – and research by the Cleveland Clinic, where she said animals should be “liberated and put somewhere where they are not tortured.”

And here’s what PETA believes:

The graphic campaign and exhibit “Holocaust on Your Plate,” devised by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, juxtaposes 60-square-foot panels displaying gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps side by side with disturbing photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One shows a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow.

The exhibit opens Friday in San Diego, California, and went up Thursday at the University of California at Los Angeles. It also is posted on a PETA Web site, http://www.masskilling.com, which calls for support for the campaign from the Jewish community.

The comparisons prompted an angry statement from Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League national director and a Holocaust survivor.

“The effort by PETA to compare the deliberate, systematic murder of millions of Jews to the issue of animal rights is abhorrent,” the statement said. “PETA’s effort to seek approval for their ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ campaign is outrageous, offensive and takes chutzpah to new heights.”

Lisa Lange, PETA’s vice president of communications, told CNN’s “American Morning With Paula Zahn” on Friday that the idea for the public relations effort came from the late Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, who, she said, wrote: “In relation to them [animals], all people are Nazis; for them it is an eternal Treblinka” — a death camp in Poland.

Lange said the campaign is appropriate because “Nazi concentration camps were modeled after slaughterhouses.”

One more thing about PETA. PETA is not a pro-life organization. Every single animal rights person I have ever spoken to is pro-abortion. I find it so weird that an organization that worries so much about animals has nothing at all to say about protecting humans.

Filed under: News, Animal, Animal Liberation, Animal Liberation Front, Animal Rights, Animal Rights Activism, Atheism, Death of the West, Earth First, Environmentalism, Extremism, Factory Farms, Fashionable Nonsense, Fur, Global Warming, Human, Human Rights, Ideology, Leftism, Leftist, Narcissism, Naturalism, Nihilism, Overpopulation, PETA, Peter Singer, Secularism, Speciesism, Terrorism, University, Vegan, Veganism, Vegetarian, Vegetarianism

Is Barack Obama responsible for rising gas prices?

Here’s an article that takes a look at the effects of his energy policies. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

With gasoline currently above $3 per gallon nationwide and economists expecting that price to rise even further in 2011, America should be getting serious about producing more of its own resources. But instead of focusing on how to bring more relief to American motorists, President Obama has imposed massive new regulations, restrictions, and even threatened higher taxes on American energy, all of which negatively impact domestic production.

What follows is a list of the five most egregious actions on the part of the Obama administration that have contributed to higher gasoline prices and greater dependence on foreign dictators for our energy…

Here’s the one I thought was the most interesting:

Cancelling existing permits: Immediately after taking office in 2009, President Obama’s handpicked Secretary of the Department of Interior, Ken Salazar, canceled 77 leases for oil and gas drilling in Utah. The fact that this was one of the administration’s first regulatory decisions meant that American energy companies were immediately concerned about their ability to produce oil and gas in the future, injecting a level of uncertainty into the market that moves the country away from job creation and economic recovery. One year later, the administration canceled 61 more leases, this time in Montana, as part of President Obama’s war on global warming.

And here’s the conclusion:

Why has President Obama led the charge to restrict American energy? The answer is elusive, and it’s anyone’s guess what his administration will do (if anything) to fight for lower gasoline prices. But if past statements from him and his administration are any indication, the U.S. could be stuck (absent major legislative and regulatory changes) with prohibitively high gasoline prices: Then-Senator Obama said on the campaign trail in 2008 that he doesn’t object to high oil prices as long as they come about gradually, and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu once famously said he hoped the U.S. would “boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” where prices are currently about $7 per gallon.

Yes, it’s true. People on the left are willing to enact policies that cost consumers more money, reduce the number of jobs for Americans, outsource energy production to other countries, and even pay our enemies to produce energy in ways that are more damaging to the environment than our ways of producing energy. This is the Democrat way. They don’t care about you having cheaper energy prices, they don’t care about creating jobs for Americans, and they don’t care about reducing pollution. If you want to see where this is going, just look at the policies of the socialist Dalton McGuinty in Ontario, Canada.

Why do they do this? Well, people on the secular left are often stuck believing in doomsday predictions about overpopulation and resource exhaustion that were discredited years ago. Having rejected God’s sovereignty over the universe as part of their embrace of moral relativism and rejection of ultimate accountability, they look to big government to reduce the uncertainties and fears of a mindless, random universe.

If no one is in charge, then anything could happen, they think – and they are frightened. Thus, they look to government to coerce people to behave predictably, and also to reduce the total number of people (abortion, DDT bans, purges of dissenters, etc.). And of course fussing about imaginary bogeymen like global warming gives them an inflated sense of self-righteousness and justifies their nanny-state micro-managing of ignorant taxpaying businesses and workers.

These are not good people. These are not competent people.

Filed under: News, Atheism, Barack Obama, Carbon Tax, Chance, Consumption, Dalton McGuinty, Delusion, Democrat, Doomsday, Doomsday Cult, Energy, Energy Policy, Energy Tax, Fear, Infrastructure, Myths, Nihilism, Ontario, Outsourcing, Overpopulation, Pollution, Solar Power, Taxes, Wind Power