The Grand Illusion...

Why Conservatives Have Lost Cultural and Political Ground to Liberals:

Conservatives accept the logically flawed premise that liberals employ. Consequently conservatives often end up not even arguing for their cause. Rather they get drawn down the rabbit hole of illusion which often helps advance the liberal argument and/or makes the conservative seem out of touch or incoherent. 
 
This tactic is successfully complete when conservatives actually adopt the liberal approach of using logical fallacies to construct and support their argument.
  

Atheism: Analytic Thinking Results in Qualified Belief, not Disbelief

It has become fashionable to assert that Atheism is simply a lack of belief. Of course position denies the definition of Atheism and skews the meaning of belief. I have included the definitions of these words at the end of the article for reference.

Analytic Thinking Results in Qualified Belief, not Disbelief

Disbelief is the result of "Intuitive″ type of thinking. Intuitive thinking is spontaneous, unreflective thinking which generally results in short, easy, binary answers like "Yes" or "No" to questions.

Belief is the result of "Analytic″ type of thinking. Analytical thinking is careful (suspicious due to skepticism), deliberative and reasoned thinking. Conclusions from this type of thinking result in qualified belief. 

People who initially answer questions in an intuitive mode, which is prone to easy binary answers, will say, "Yes" or "No." But when you engage their analytic traits, they will begin qualifying their response through a process of cognitive thinking or reasoning based upon a body of evidence whether seen or unseen. 

Consequently if an Atheist is going to present an intellectual argument, denying a supreme being or beings, they would be doing so from an analytic perspective which is grounded in qualified belief. Therefore, they too are subject to the same "burden of proof" as those they oppose. Otherwise there is no opposition and their entire argument fails by default. 

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good. (Psalm 14: 1)

a·the·ism

noun

1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.

2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.

be-lief:

 noun

1. something believed; an opinion or conviction: a belief that the earth is flat.

2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof: a statement unworthy of belief.

3. confidence; faith; trust: a child's belief in his parents.

dis-belief:

 noun

1. the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true.

 February 18, 2016
Author: Brett Kunkle
Stand to Reason Ministries

On Sunday, I returned home from another Berkeley Mission trip, where I intentionally exposed high school students to some of my atheist friends in the Bay Area. For the last six months, we’ve taught apologetics to these high schoolers from Upland Christian Academy. Now it was time for them to “get off the sidelines and into the game” and engage non-Christians with the truth. Of course, my atheist friends are more than happy to oblige, so they meet with our missions teams, challenge them with a short lecture, and then dive into some rigorous dialogue.

Without fail, a couple of our atheist guests will contend, “Religion is the cause of most wars.” This cultural mantra has been uttered so often and with so much force, it has come to be accepted as an undeniable declaration. Prominent atheists like Sam Harris contribute to the chorus of voices, arguing religion is “the most prolific source of violence in our history” (The End of Faith page 27). Richard Dawkins claims, “There’s no doubt that throughout history religious faith has been a major motivator for war and for destruction.”

But as we trained students for this trip, we equipped them with a simple question to expose such claims: “How did you come to that conclusion?” (also known as Columbo Question #2). We simply taught students to recognize when someone makes a claim and then to request their supporting reasons. When our atheist presenters were challenged to provide justification, they could only offer up the Crusades, the Inquisition, 9-11, or vague references to Islamic terrorism. Certainly we recognize religion’s role in these examples, but three or four references cannot support the claim that most wars are caused by religion.

Not only were students able to demonstrate the paucity of evidence for this claim, but we helped them discover that the facts of history show the opposite: religion is the cause of a very small minority of wars. Phillips and Axelrod’s three-volume Encyclopedia of Wars lays out the simple facts. They examined 5 millennia worth of wars—1,763 total—and found that only 123 (or about 7%) were “religious in nature.” If you remove the 66 wars waged in the name of Islam, it cuts the number down to a little more than 3%. A second scholarly source, The Encyclopedia of War edited by Gordon Martel, confirms this data, concluding that only 6% of the wars listed in its pages can be labelled religious wars. Thirdly, William Cavanaugh’s book, The Myth of Religious Violence, exposes the “wars of religion” claim. And finally, a recent report (2014) from the Institute for Economics and Peace further debunks this myth.

We didn’t stop there. We showed students it gets worse for the atheists’ claim. A strong case can be made that atheism, not religion, and certainly not Christianity, is responsible for a far greater degree of bloodshed. Indeed, R.J. Rummel’s work in Lethal Politics and Death by Government has the secular body count at more than 100 million...in the 20th century alone.

Our students were able to see that a simple examination of the facts relieves religion from blame for most of the world’s wars. In addition, we were able to help cultivate in students a healthy skepticism of atheistic claims. If the skeptic will shout such an unsubstantiated claim so loudly and with so much force, what other skeptical claims might quickly fall apart under rational scrutiny? 

Gambling, Drugs, and Odd Political Bedfellows

Personal Autonomy and Big Government

By: John Stonestreet|Published: August 5, 2014 6:04 AM

 

What do legalized gambling and legalized pot have in common? They fill
government coffers and fuel social pathologies -- all in the name of
personal freedom.

 

In most political commentary, libertarians and liberal advocates of  an expanded role for government are considered to be on the opposite sides of the political spectrum. Libertarians oppose increased government revenues as an assault on personal freedom, while the people they deride as “big government” supporters argue that these revenues are needed if government is going to perform its proper role.

As it turns out, the reality is not nearly as clear as the theory. There are times when their interests coincide to the detriment of many.

This was the subject of a recent Washington Post op-ed by one-time Chuck Colson colleague and former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson. According to Gerson, both “the growth of payday gambling and the legalization of marijuana” are “justified as the expansion of personal liberty,” and at the same time “they serve the interests of an expanding government.”

The latter is, or should be, obvious: legalizing various forms of  gambling allows states to raise revenues “without the political inconvenience of requesting broad tax increases.” For instance, Maryland voters legalized video slot machines in 2008 and approved the addition of a casino just outside Washington, DC in 2012.

As Gerson pointed out, Maryland’s motives had nothing to do with “personal autonomy.” Its motives were the 61 percent tax it collects on video slot machine revenue.

The same is true of every other state with legalized gambling. State-sponsored gambling allows elected officials to provide voters with government services without asking voters to pay for the services if  they don’t want to. Instead, they can stick other people, often those who can least afford it, with the tab: between 40 and 60 percent of all video slot revenue comes from problem gamblers. And, as if to reinforce the whole “free lunch” idea, “casinos are often sited to attract working-class” customers.

And as Gerson tells us, history seems poised to repeat itself. My state of Colorado is expected to collect $114 million in its first year of marijuana legalization. Other states are watching, and it’s safe to say that many will follow the money trail. The political logic that drives the spread of legalized gambling also drives legalized drug use.

Of course, no elected official will acknowledge the cynical political calculation at work here. Instead, the preferred rhetoric is that of personal freedom. Thus, as Gerson writes, “libertarians are now,
paradoxically, providing ideological cover for irresponsible government.”

Missing in all of this is any consideration of the impact of  government’s trafficking in human weakness. Just as there is ample evidence of the damage that problem gambling causes to individuals,
families, and communities, there are reasons to be concerned about the impact of legalized marijuana, especially on children.

But all of this takes a back seat to government’s need for revenue and the libertarian desire to maximize personal freedom. As Gerson writes, “the idea of a political community upholding standards, in order to help other institutions (such as families) pass healthy cultural norms between generations, is anathema.”

As Chuck Colson pointed out on this program 15 years ago, it’s as if  government were deliberately setting about “to increase crime, divorce, suicide, child abuse, bankruptcy, and domestic violence.”

Come to BreakPoint.org and click on this commentary. We’ll link you Mike Gerson’s excellent editorial. We’ll also link you to Focus on the Family’s resources on the scourge of gambling—as well as the Family Research Council’s work on marijuana.

As Gerson says, “politicians increasingly benefit when citizens are addicted, exploited, impoverished and stoned.” And, the oddest of  political bedfellows—libertarians and the advocates of big government—are calling it the “advance of freedom.” Gerson is correct when he says that a better word is “contemptible.”

Do You Know Why Economics Is a Moral Issue?

Summit Ministries 
August 7, 2013

Every liberal economic policy is predicated on the assumption that coercive governments are morally superior to free markets. But how would progressives react if they realized the exact opposite is true?
Bad economic ideas lead to bad — and immoral — economic decisions. As the Acton Institute’s Dr. Samuel Gregg puts it in Becoming Europe, quoting economist Arthur Brooks, the goal of a free market system of economics is not “the endless acquisition of wealth.” Rather, it is human flourishing1 — our ability to, inasmuch as we can after the fall, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and rule over creation (Genesis 1:28).

The Bible doesn’t instruct us on specific tax policies. Nowhere does it prescribe what percentage of gross domestic product the federal government ought to be spending. But it does give us a framework from which to orient our economic thinking: people are made in the image of God and carry inherent dignity and the ability to produce good things. Economic systems that affirm these truths lead to human flourishing. It’s for that reason that the free market system, when coupled with personal virtue and community responsibility, better aligns with a biblical worldview than any other economic system. Christians ought to learn to articulate this: what is immoral is not the free market system, but the diminishment of opportunity and dignity when it is corrupted by greed or destroyed by power.
As New York Times bestselling author and Summit faculty member Jay W. Richards recently said in an interview with Summit, “If we, as Christians, care about people, economic reality is something that impinges on people in a thousand different ways. We need to learn something about it.”

Our Economic Responsibility Includes Learning Basic Principles

Aside from basic economic principles like the law of supply and demand or the function of price in a market, two key principles can help us rightly order our economic thinking.

1. Prudence
As Richards says in Money, Greed, and God, “Prudence means to ‘see reality as it is and to act accordingly’ to conform your mind, and then your actions, to reality.”2 Elsewhere in the book, Richards recounts the story of Bob Geldof, who helped organize movements in the 1980s to fight poverty in Africa, including Live Aid and Band Aid. Those movements have done little to lift struggling nations out of poverty, mostly because they misunderstand what creates prosperity. Geldof’s take: “Something must be done, even if it doesn’t work.”3

Well, his plan didn’t work. Unthinking aid creates lifelong dependence and stamps out the entrepreneurial spirit of whole nations. Though his intentions were good, the outcome was deeply immoral. “We spend too much time focusing on what we mean to do and what we like to do instead of putting serious empirical work into what’s actually going to work,” Richards said in an interview.

2. Subsidiarity
The principle of subsidiarity goes back to medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas. Subsidiarity claims that it is wrong for a “larger or higher association” to step in and try to fix a problem when an institution closer to the issue can act.4 So, for example, when a young family finds itself in trouble, it’s inappropriate — even unjust — for the state or federal government to provide aid when extended family members, a local church, or neighbors can help the family in need.

This principle has significant implications for fighting poverty. In the face of federal welfare, poverty rates in the U.S. have remained between 12 and 15 percent for the last fifty years. Prior to President Lyndon Johnson’s welfare programs, local communities were primarily responsible for taking care of the poor. Poverty was actually on the decline in the years leading up to Johnson’s War on Poverty; federal welfare halted that decline.5

Economic Responsibility Also Means Having the Right Cultural Values

In Becoming Europe Gregg pinpoints the differences between European economies and that of the U.S., demonstrating how the U.S. can avoid plunging into the sort of economic crises in which Europe currently finds itself. At the root of Gregg’s argument is a study of the cultural values that undergird economic realities. As Gregg puts it, “. . . any given economic setting . . . is influenced by a range of value commitments, ideas, and movements.”6 In other words, economies serve as cultural barometers for their respective countries:

A market economy, for example, relies on processes such as market prices and the exchange of goods and services, institutions such as private property and rule of law, as well as actions such as innovation and economic entrepreneurship. Note, however, how every single one of these economic processes, actions, and institutions assumes a commitment to freedom.7

As Gregg explains, top-down economies necessarily restrict freedom, ignoring prudence and subsidiarity and thus denying essential truths about humans and the imago Dei. Ignoring these realities, in turn, creates a negative view of entrepreneurship. A biblical view, on the other hand, begins with God as creator. Bearing his image, we too know how to create. God wants abundance; bearing his image, we are by nature equipped to produce more than we consume.

Thus, coercive economic policies have the effect of suffocating the entrepreneurial impulse. In the European Union 45 percent of citizens preferred to be self-employed, while 46 percent preferred to be an employee. What happens in a nation when a majority of the citizens expect others to take care of them instead of taking responsibility themselves? Interestingly, too much economic despotism may actually cause people to wake up to their servitude. In China, where citizens have lived under severe state planning, entrepreneurship is much more highly valued: 71 percent of Chinese citizens preferred to be self-employed, as opposed to 28 percent who said they wanted to be an employee.8

So is it possible to avoid Europe’s path? Gregg says yes, but only if we affirm five values that stave off an immoral economic despotism and create an environment for freedom and flourishing:

1. Wealth Creation Over Wealth Redistribution. History — and the principle of subsidiarity — shows us that people benefit when they can work to improve their lots themselves. This value affirms the fact that God made people to be co-creators of culture, not passive consumers.
2. Accountability and Transparency: Truth Over Falsehood. In a true market economy, people are held accountable for poor economic decisions by the outcomes of those decisions. A culture of bailouts and corporate welfare undermines this value.
3. Justice: Rule of Law Over Rule of Men. None of these values will amount to much if the government fails to enforce just laws. In addition to protecting the innocent and punishing wrongdoers, securing justice provides a climate of stability in which wealth creators can reap the rewards of their risk and create greater abundance.
4. Property Rights Over “Dirigisme.” Dirigisme is simply the government stepping into the private sector to directly manage wealth. Leaders who regularly threaten to diminish private property rights create uncertainty, diminish investment, and generate a climate of fear.
5. Hope Over Fear: Openness vs. Defensiveness. Productive people are not the bad guys, and our government ought to stop portraying them as such.

So how do we reclaim the moral high ground from those advocating leftist policies? Bill Whittle thinks he knows. Bill is the “Virtual President” whose mock presidential addresses have gone viral on the Internet for articulating what our president should say. Whittle suggests using simple questions to communicate three central components of free market morality: freedom, private property, and virtue:

1. On freedom: ask, “Are you the kind of person who wants to be left alone, or are you the kind of person who likes to tell other people what to do?” Leftists assume that they are so smart that they deserve to coerce the rest of us. But very few people will admit to wanting to be a busybody.
2. On private property: ask, “If you believe in ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ are you willing to donate your smart phone and other possessions to charity? How can you justify eating every day when others are starving?” Why do they expect others to make their sacrifices for them?
3. On virtue “Do you believe it is okay to hit someone and take their stuff if they have more stuff than you do?” If it is not okay on a personal level, it’s not okay for governments to do it either. Obviously we all must pay taxes. But to base tax policy on jealousy is to institutionalize theft.

People may not have a clear idea of what freedom, private property or virtue are, but when you put these simple questions to them, you’ll leave them thinking. You might even get them to see the moral basis of the free enterprise system.

Notes

1. Samuel Gregg, Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future (New York: Encounter Books, 2013), 300.
2. Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the Problem (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 46.
3. Ibid, 45.
4. Ibid, 51.
5. Ibid, 47.
6. Gregg, 41.
7. Ibid, 8.
8. Ibid, 19.