Now you can see more clearly why they want to trash the Second Amendment

It's funny how you can understand motives of a political movement if you realize that the policies it champions are connected. They shed light on the purposes of the movement.

Can there be any more clear demonstration of the intentions of the Left than Georgetown Law professor Louis Seidman's jaw-dropping op-ed in the New York Times advocating throwing out the Constitution, and the moronic Leftie frenzy over gun control.

They are connected. The latter is what would make the former achievable.

Gun control has nothing to do with school shootings or reducing violence. Where Leftists govern (Chicago, Washington DC, etc), gun violence is everywhere. Leftist-governed municipalities are the most violent enclaves in America. In Leftist governed enclaves, the government and the criminals have all the guns. Only law-abiding citizens are disarmed.

Gun control and Constitution-trashing are part of a fabric: Leftist hegemony and the radical transformation of our nation. 

Philosophy and why science "progresses"

James Chastek at Just Thomism:

From Van Inwagen’s critique of Colin McGinn (ht) 

Here are some things we understand, at least pretty well: planetary orbits, cell division, rainbows, electrical conductivity. Here are some things we don’t understand at all: conscious awareness, knowledge, free will, understanding things. That is, we are, as a species, pretty good at mathematics and science and no good at all at philosophy. Why is this?

Van Inwagen must have realized the irony in his position: we can claim to understand things but not the very understanding by which we do so. We know all sorts of things, except for the small detail that we don’t know what it means to know. This is fine as an observation of fact, but it also seems to point to the futility of trying to separate “science” from “philosophy” and claim the first is successful whereas the second is a failure. All “science” is on this account is a doctrine that grounds itself on naive, operationalist principles and which tries to explain as much as it can on this unexamined and provisional basis. We are pretty good at explaining the causes of rainbows, so long as we don’t ask what we mean by “cause” (!); we have a total theory of the universe, but are totally confused about what theories are. For that matter, our account of the “universe” cannot determine whether it is all things or not (since whatever we mean by universe appears to allow for the possibility of a multiverse). Even if we had a theory of everything, it would only be a something-or-other about something-or-other. It might be a “better” something or other than the one it replaces, and it would certainly give us more power to do stuff, but any ultimate certitude we might feel in pondering it would be an illusion we created by forgetting the naive foundations that it rests on. We think we have certitude, when all we have is the consensus of the forgetful. 

The success of science rests on forgetfulness, i.e. a group of people agrees to shelve the discussion of the basis of things and work on something else. Philosophy refuses to do this, but the cost of doing so is lack of consensus and therefore of progress.

Science "progresses" because it takes as it's task the easier stuff-- the measurement and prediction of limited aspects of the natural world. That is not to say that science is easy. Hardly. But by its nature science takes on that which is tractable.

The tougher problem raised by the question "how can we know the mass of Jupiter?" is not "what is the mass of Jupiter?" but "what is it to know?" Philosophy doesn't shirk the profound questions. The easier disciplines of philosophy-- natural philosophy for example-- calve off when they make progress with the tractable questions.

Philosophy retains the disciplines-- metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of science for example-- that are not easy, yet are themselves the basis for science.

Science progresses because it has absconded with the tractable questions. That's fine, but it's no reason to denigrate philosophical disciplines that didn't take the easy road and continue to struggle with the more profound questions.

Gay fascism is the new Jim Crow

One of the tropes making the rounds about the proposed Arizona statute that would protect Christians from being forced to violate their faith is that the law is a 'new Jim Crow' aimed against gays.

Actually, the opposite is true.

Jim Crow was not private bigotry or private discrimination. Jim Crow was government social engineering. It was a system of law that dictated a spectrum of private interactions based on group identity. It was an effort on the part of a faction in power to use legal force to impose a certain social order. Obviously that order (segregation) would not have happened privately, or Jim Crow would not have been necessary.

The goal of Jim Crow was to drive a disfavored segment of society out of the public square-- to prevent members of the disfavored class from full participation in public life.

The gay and leftist legal lynching of Christian businessmen and women is much closer to historical Jim Crow than any private "discrimination" against gays that a faithful Christian baker or wedding photographer might engage in. The obvious goal of the attacks on faithful Christians who object to participation in ceremonies appropriately deemed sinful by Christian moral standards is to drive serious Christians from the public square.

This new expungement of Christians from the public square-- akin in many ways to the older expungement of blacks from the public square-- is being perpetrated by the same folks who did it early in the 20th century. Jim Crow-- government social engineering based on color or creed-- is a Progressive Democrat program, advanced with the original Jim Crow based on race by our first Progressive Democrat president (Wilson) who segregated the federal government, and now advanced by a new Jim Crow based on creed-- the Christian creed-- in an effort to drive faithful Christians out of public life.

I don't know if it can be stopped. This is a mimetic crisis (Girard) of sorts-- the haters on the left smell blood-- Christian blood-- and they have the press, a load of politicians, the courts, and a host of morons and Christian -haters of all stripes on their side. My prayer is that Christians band together and support our brothers and sisters under persecution, but I don't know if we have enough traction in this cess-pool culture to resist this tide of oppression.

I don't know that many of my Christian brothers and sisters understand just what is happening. This is real persecution, and it is growing with astonishing rapidity. This is the real thing, and it's going to get a lot worse.

"Bake me a cake, boy"

Matt K Lewis has a post on the efforts by gay activists to suppress Christians:

When ‘leave us alone’ became ‘bake us a cake!’

This is really a surrogate battle. A much bigger one is coming.

Opponents of these [religious freedom] bills score points when they argue that florists and bakers aren’t exactly granting their imprimatur when they make a cake or put together a flower arrangement for a gay wedding. Additionally, they are correct in assuming that most Christians, whether they agree with same-sex marriage, or not, would still bake the cake. In fact, this could be seen as an example of Christian love.

But this is another example of how this schism cannot be easily brushed aside like so many wedding cake crumbs. In recent years, libertarian-leaning conservatives have largely sided with the gay rights argument. Proud members of the “leave us alone” coalition were apt to side with a group of people who just wanted to be left alone to love the person they love (and what happens in the bedroom is nobody’s business). 

At some point, however, “leave us alone” became “bake us a cake. Or else!” 

And that’s a very different thing, altogether.

The reason conservative Christians are fighting this fight today is because it’s a firewall. The real danger, of course, is that Christian pastors and preachers will eventually be coerced into performing same-sex marriages. (Note: It is entirely possible for someone to believe gay marriage is fine, and to still oppose forcing people who hold strong religious convictions to participate — but I suspect that is where we are heading.)

Think of it this way. If you were a congregant in a church, wouldn’t you expect the pastor to marry you? Why should you be treated different?

Any pastor — if he or she wants to maintain the church’s tax status, that is — had better grapple with this now.

Whether the analogy is fair, or not, refusing to officiate a gay wedding can just as easily be called “denying service.” And it will predictably also be compared to the bad old days of Jim Crow — where racist Christians opposed interracial marriage (until the courts struck down state laws prohibiting biracial marriage).

Gay rights and religious liberty are on a collision course.

We make a mistake to infer that this campaign on the part of gay radicals to impose gay marriage on American society has anything to do with marriage, gay or otherwise. This is about sandblasting Christianity from our society, nothing else. This rather obvious denial of the human rights and right to free exercise of religion is merely a tactic drawn from Alinsky's rule number four:

“The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

They're making us live up to our faith, and this is going to put us in a position where we are forced to deny our faith or suffer persecution. This is not new for Christians. We've been ordered to "sacrifice to the gods or else" before. They've been doing this kind of crap to us for 2000 years.

You have to give the bastards credit for the audacity and guile. It's an old tactic, but it's working remarkably well. 

We should have no illusions about what gay marriage means or about their motives for imposing it on our society. And don't forget that the bastards imposing it on us-- Progressive Democrats-- are the same scum who wrote the Jim Crow laws a century ago.

"Bake me a cake, boy."

Jerry Coyne really doesn't understand irony

Jerry Coyne complains about proclivity to violence in Paducah Kentucky:

Coyne:

". . and our God-given right to blow away anybody we dislike. This picture was taken in Kentucky, near Paducah and the Confederate flag I photographed on my recent visit. These signs are in the window of—get this—a flower shop on the town square of Benton, Kentucky, which is, I’m informed, is “infamous around here for the KKK [Ku Klux Klan] openly soliciting donations on the town square not all that long ago.”


I suppose that after you shoot someone, this place provides flowers for the funeral.

The photographer is reader Manolo, who lives in the area and has his own atheist website in Spanish."

Reality check. Jerry Coyne is a liberal Democrat resident of the liberal Democrat city of Chicago. Chicago has a murder rate that is more than twice as high as the murder rate of Paducah Kentucky and it's fair to say that there aren't a lot of Confederate flags in the Windy City. 

What Coyne's silly post serves to show is that liberals are hypocrites regarding violent crime. By far the most violent segment of the American population is liberal Democrats. Crime rates in municipalities governed by the liberal Democrats are multiples higher then crime rates in municipalities governed by conservative Republicans. 

Regarding our "God-given right to blow away anybody we dislike...", I point out that Coyne's reader Manolo, like Coyne himself, has an atheist website. Atheism is a much deadlier ideology than anything Godfull folks have perpetrated-- atheists make Al Qaeda look like Quakers.

Public colleges are reminded that an anti-religious discrimination is unconstitutional

From Christian news.net:

Christian Legal Group Urges Public Universities to Restore Bibles to Hotel Rooms

A prominent Christian legal organization has sent rebuttal letters to two public universities that recently decided to remove all Gideon Bibles from their hotel rooms in response to complaints from an atheist activist organization.

As previously reported, the University of Wisconsin and Iowa State University were contacted by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) last month after they received anonymous complaints surrounding the Gideon Bibles that are placed in the university hotel rooms.

The organization asserted that the presence of the Bibles at University of Wisconsin’s Lowell Center and Iowa State University’s Memorial Union violated the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” FFRF also contended that the Bibles signified the promotion of Christianity by a government-0wned university.

“It is a fundamental principle of Establishment Clause jurisprudence that a government entity cannot promote, advance or otherwise endorse religion,” one letter stated. “Permitting members of outside religious groups the privilege of placing their religious literature in public university guest rooms constitutes state endorsement and advancement of these Christian publications.”

Both universities responded by advising that they would remove the Bibles from all guest rooms, and Iowa State University said that the copies would be moved to the library beginning in March.

But this week, the Arizona-based Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sent letters to both the University of Wisconsin and Iowa State University to urge officials to leave the Bibles in place. The letters outlined that FFRF’s reasoning was flawed and not in alignment with legal precedent.

“In reality, the First Amendment does not require you to remove these Bibles, and by removing them, you may have demonstrated the very viewpoint discrimination and hostility towards religion that the First Amendment prohibits,” it wrote. “The Supreme Court and numerous other federal courts have repeatedly condemned efforts to exclude or restrict religious materials and activities as viewpoint or content discrimination, both at universities and elsewhere.”

“[C]ontrary to what FFRF implied, the Establishment Clause does not require government entities to dissociate themselves from everything religious,” the letters continued. “Indeed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly made it clear that the Constitution does not ‘require complete separation of church and state.’ Rather, it ‘affirmatively mandates accommodation, not merely tolerance, of all religions, and forbids hostility toward any.’”

                                                          ***

The Alliance Defense Fund is exactly right. Selective removal of Bibles from state-owned hotels is a clear violation of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, which guarantee free exercise of religion and prohibit federal regulation of religious activities. Selective removal of the Bibles is an explicitly anti-religious act that the government is not permitted to undertake. 

Let us hope that litigation arises from this obvious constitutional violation and that these colleges are held to account for this unconstitutional act of state-sanctioned anti-religious bigotry.

Ed Brayton: "Apparently, hurting the feelings of the religious is a crime in that county".

Atheists are delightfully innocent, if you don't count the gulags and the genocide. They're innocent of logic, of course, and they're innocent of irony. Atheists lack the sense of the ridiculous in themselves, utterly. Richard Dawkins is the archetypal clueless atheist snob, but all polemic atheists share the blindness. They don't see how funny they are.

Ed Brayton was a stand-up comic, before he took up being wrong as an avocation, and he's still funny, not meaning to be.

To wit:

Another Reason to Love the First Amendment

January 20, 2012 at 9:29 am Ed Brayton

Here’s a very disturbing case out of Poland, where a singer has been fined by the courts for expressing doubt about the validity of the Bible during an interview. Apparently, hurting the feelings of the religious is a crime in that country:

Dorota Rabczewska, a singer who uses the stage name Doda, said in a 2009 interview that she doubted the Bible “because it’s hard to believe in something that was written by someone drunk on wine and smoking some herbs.”

A Warsaw court ordered her Monday to pay a fine of 5,000 zlotys ($1,450) for offending religious feelings.

But it seems they make this weird distinction:

The case comes months after another Polish court let off a death metal performer, Adam Darski, who tore a Bible during a 2007 performance. It deemed his act artistic expression.

So if she’d just put her thoughts into a song, that would be legal; saying it in an interview makes it illegal. Bizarre. And wrong either way. [Emphasis mine]

Wait... wait... hot off the presses... A Breaking Story... from the Dissociated Press Newsdesk... Newsflash to Ed:

... Hurting the feelings of the irreligious is a crime in this country, Ed.

There's a veritable atheist industry of "I feel ostracized and excluded".  Across this great land atheist after atheist after atheist turns to swooning litigious gelatin at the sight of a Christmas creche, or a cross on public land, or a prayer in a graduation ceremony or a football game, or a prayer mural on an auditorium wall.

The police are called, attorneys swarm, organizations whose sole mission is to flame allegations of injured godlessness march to courthouses, and grievously harmed atheists take the witness stand in federal court to recount through tears and shaking sobs the exclusion, ostracism, illegitimacy, otherness, disenfranchisement, and whatnot they suffer by the mere glimpse of the creche/cross/prayer/mural.

Shaken judges hit control-v on their Dells and churn out another batshit 'Alice-in-Wonderland' Establishment Clause ruling ('the plantiff suffered irrevocable harm when she heard the prayer... anything atheists don't like is an Establishment of Religion... the Ku Klux Klan initiation oath is a great basis for case law...') , decry the assault on the wall of separation that protects atheists from dissonance, threaten and fine the Godly assailants, and award fat attorney fees and pain and suffering to the sobbing prayer-victim.

The hurt hurts less with the award to the plantiff of a little "In God We Trust", if you get my meaning.

It's a fraud, Ed. You're right about Poland. Censorship sucks.

So why the double standard, Ed? You thoughtfully point out the injustice of religious people dragging irreligious citizens who express their views into court to answer to fake claims of "hurt feelings" of people who are really censors, not victims.

Why not point out the injustice when atheists use the courts to censor?

Oh, right, I forgot. In the U.S. atheists are just "protecting the Constitution", guarding the "constitutional wall of separation between church and state" that no one can seem to find in the actual Constitution, doing it for the benefit of us all, taking one for the team, keeping us free.

No one believes that crap, not even you, Ed. No one is harmed by a creche or a cross or a prayer. People who use courts to censor other people are money-grubbing publicity whores and bigots demanding judicial imprimatur for their hate.

So show some real love for the First Amendment. It's the charter of our freedom. It protects godless speech, even when we Christians don't like it, and it ought to protect Godly speech, even when you atheists don't like it.

And do try to work on getting a clue, Ed. Your befuddled irony is hysterical, and it's a shame that you can't appreciate it and laugh at it as hard as we do.