Liberals don't understand rights

From the Huffington Post, we read this new tactic of one, radical liberal who wants to foist gun control on us:

The Second Amendment is highly contested. There is no doubt that people do have the right to carry and have a stockpile of guns (“the right of the people to keep and bear arms”) and a state has the right to organize a well-regulated Militia. But, the main issue is on the right to self-defend with a firearm.

The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial. Therefore, using a firearm to defend oneself is not legal because if the attacker is killed, he or she is devoid of his or her rights.

OK, so it's not that new – I've heard variations of this argument before. I just think it's hilarious. I really don't think such an assault on common sense could ever gain much popularity among the population at large and certainly couldn't become law. Still, liberals have surprised me before so I never take their crazy ideas too lightly.

Do I really even need to explain what's wrong with the idea of making self-defense illegal? Such a bizarre concept can't even stand up to its own logic: The constitution also says I have the right to life, liberty, and property. Therefore, an attacker who intends me harm or an intruder who intends to steal from me has already infringed upon my rights. So the liberal's solution is that I should let this person victimize me so he can face a fair trial later? This is why I say liberals are brain damaged.

I believe the flaws in this argument are self-evident so I won't waste any more time pointing them out. Instead, I want to use this as an opportunity, once again, to educate liberals in the concept of rights.

Our founding fathers believed our rights are endowed by our Creator. It's not the government or the constitution that grants us our rights. They are literally, God-given. We establish governments to do things like keep the peace, build roads, and defend our borders. We give them the power to make laws and we agree to live by those laws. We also understand the government needs money to do the things we expect it to do so we also agree we'll pay taxes.

When we grant the government so much power, we risk creating a tyranny. To help prevent this, the founding fathers placed specific restrictions on the government saying there are certain things we will never allow it to do: it cannot infringe on our right to practice our religion, for example, or to speak, or to assemble, or to own guns. The government can't search our homes without a cause and, if we're ever accused of a crime, we must have a speedy trial and be judged by our peers – not by some bureaucrat. The thing to remember about our Bill of Rights is that the restrictions are meant to limit what the government can do and protect us!

Private citizens aren't restricted by the Bill of Rights. One right I have is the freedom of speech. This specifically means I am able to share my thoughts about politics or religion or whatever strikes my fancy and the government cannot censor what I have to say. Believe me when I say I have a lot of opinions and I exercise my freedom to speak every time I blog. If you have a different opinion than mine, go start your own blog but don't expect me to open my blog to you so that you have a forum. If I want to censor the comments people leave on my blog, I will. If I should censor someone's comments, I'm not “violating” his free speech. He's free to speak somewhere else. I'm not obligated to provide someone else a forum to speak but neither can I stop him.

Liberals have a misunderstanding about rights. They believe the constitution gives us our rights and that it's the job of the government to guarantee that we get to exercise our rights. For example, liberals believe there is a “right” to health care. Therefore, they want the government to either provide medical insurance (like medicare or Medicaid) or force private employers to provide insurance. In other words, if someone doesn't have medical insurance, liberals think everyone else is obligated to provide that person with insurance so that his right to health care is not infringed. This attitude about rights is exactly backwards. It grants more power to the government and places more burdens on citizens.

The liberals' abuse of rights can be seen in many forms. I've already talked about the “right” to healthcare. There's also some imagined right to birth control so Obamacare requires insurance companies to provide contraception for free. There's a right to have an abortion so federal funds are made available to groups like Planned Parenthood. From time to time, liberals bring up the fairness doctrine that would require radio stations that air conservative radio hosts, like Rush Limbaugh, to provide equal time to people with a liberal point of view. They believe this “protects” the freedom of speech by ensuring the speech is “balanced.” That's funny, I don't remember the word “fair” being part of the first amendment – only “free.”

So now liberals want innocent, law-abiding citizens to become victims so that rapists, murderers, and burglars can be guaranteed their right to have a trial. I'm sorry, but that's not my job. The criminals are the ones who are putting their lives and liberty at risk when they choose to commit crimes. If someone tries to harm someone in my family, I will let God judge him; I'll also do what I can to arrange the meeting.

It's OK to say someone is wrong!

It's the law statewide in WA but will soon be coming to a restroom near you – the end to gender discrimination! What discrimination? They mean the barbaric practice of having separate facilities (restrooms, locker rooms, spas, etc) for men and women. How archaic it is that modest people do not want to disrobe in front of people whose gender is different than their own!

It's the usual tactic of liberals to force the majority to kowtow to the minority. Last time it was gay marriage. It wasn't enough that a gay couple had the right to have a ceremony and call themselves married, liberals wanted to make everyone else to treat them as married. Now they're doing the same thing with gender-confused persons. They can't just pretend to be another gender, we're being forced to accept their stated gender.

The problems I have with this are the same problems being discussed by everyone else. Why do I have to share a locker room with a woman because she's confused about her gender? And what's to stop a grown man from using these laws to spy on little girls in restrooms? If a man wants to wear a dress and say he's a woman, he can. There wasn't a law against it. But now there are laws that say women have to welcome him into their locker rooms and restrooms. What about my rights? What about my right to privacy? What about my right of association? What about my right of religion? It's the majority that is made to feel uncomfortable for the sake of sparing the feelings of the minority. It's insane.

But none of this is really the point of my post. Instead, it's about this twisted attitude of tolerance that says we must accept people for who they are. Here's a short video that really drives this point home.

At the end of the video, the interviewer sums it up well. How can we discuss complicated issues if one side believes no one should ever say another person is wrong? A 5'9”, grown, white man could say he's a 6'5”, 7-year-old, Chinese woman and enter the first grade. You can see the college students hemming and hawing in the video, struggling to be tolerant of what they knew were ridiculous claims, but they just couldn't bring themselves to say the interviewer was wrong. It's funny, because I'm sure these same students would have no problems telling me I'm wrong to believe in creation or that Christians are wrong to call someone a sinner.  It's my opinion that this brand of tolerance is dangerous. 

I've heard about a strange disorder called xenomelia (literally, “foreign limb” in Greek). People with this disorder do not identify with one or more of their extremities. They might feel like their foot, for example, doesn't really belong to them. Victims of xenomelia will often ask doctors to amputate the intruding limb. Fortunately, most doctors will refuse.

My point in raising xenomelia is to demonstrate that the correct treatment for victims of dysphoria is not necessarily to indulge their disorder. Since we don't amputate the healthy limbs of people with xenomelia, why should we perform gender-reassignment surgery on people with gender-identity disorders? From a Federalist article we read:

[A] study commissioned by The Guardian of the UK in 2004 reviewed 100 studies and reported that a whopping 20 percent (one fifth) of transgenders regret changing genders.... The review of 100 studies also revealed that many transgenders remained severely distressed and even suicidal after the gender change operation. Suicide and regret remain the dark side of transgender life.

I'm not a medical doctor – but neither are most of the liberals (or these college students) who are pleading for tolerance and acceptance of the transgendered. It seems to me the jury is still out on the best treatment of gender-confused people and this rush to normalize them isn't helpful to anyone, especially the victims. I believe we've let political forces influence our medical decisions. It will not surprise me if laws are passed that ban counseling for gender-identity disorders if the goal is to rid the victims of the desire to change genders.

But this phenomenon to “not judge” people for how they identify themselves isn't limited to gender-identity. We see similar “tolerance” of other types of body modification like tattooing, piercings, gauging, and even more extreme examples. There are also examples of people obsessed with improving appearance through plastic surgery and boob jobs. At what point do we tell people they're harming themselves? Or are we just supposed to indulge any behavior because that's how they identify themselves?

Yet more than all that, I feel this attitude is especially dangerous in the Church. How many times have you heard Christians say something like, “we have to hate the sin but love the sinner”? I agree, but part of loving the sinner is to tell them they are sinners in need of forgiveness. We cannot water down the gospel by telling people, “Jesus loves you just as you are.” If we allow people to think it's OK if they are gay or a philanderer or a drug user or whatever other vices they may have, we're telling them they don't need a Savior!

1 John 1:8-9 says, If we say that we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

The key to the gospel is repentance. Unless a person is convicted of his sin, he will not feel the need to repent. If we are telling people they have no sin, the Bible says we're lying! If we love people, we need to tell them the truth. It's for their own good! It's OK to tell people they're wrong!

Evolutionists treat science like a religion

I was watching another debate on YouTube the other day. It's no wonder that more evolutionists won't debate creationists; they routinely get trounced. I've heard their excuses – that creationists are professional debaters, they don't want to give creationism a forum, or that such debates seem to legitimize creationism by giving it equal time with evolution. I think it's just because they're routinely embarrassed by their poor performance. But I digress.

During this particular debate, the evolutionist made the comment that creationists' treatment of the evidence “violates the rules of science.” That phrased piqued my interest. I googled the phrase and found a site by Neil deGrasse Tyson where he gives 5 Simple Rules of Science:

(1) Question authority.

(2) Think for yourself.

(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment.

(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads.

(5) Remember: you could be wrong.

Such a list begs the question: who made these the “rules”? Of course, these are simply his rules; other scientists might make a different list of rules. So they're not really “rules,” are they? They're more like opinions of what the rules should be. There is no immutable, objective, absolute standard that says what science is or how it should be approached.

Look at that list again and think about what Tyson is saying in rule #3, for example. Now ask yourself, where is his scientific evidence for idea that we should test ideas with scientific evidence? It's not an easy question to answer, is it? His “rule” has more of a philosophic premise rather than an objective scientific basis. Tyson has a secular paradigm, a starting point that he uses in his approach to science but obviously his paradigm isn't grounded in science. He, and others like him, have shaped a brand of science that conforms with a religion of naturalism.  These elitists think they have a monopoly on what science is and they think they have the right to qualify what counts as evidence.

I've seen this many times before. From Scientific American, we find this gem:

"Creation science" is a contradiction in terms. A central tenet of modern science is methodological naturalism--it seeks to explain the universe purely in terms of observed or testable natural mechanisms.

The irony in this statement is that seeking only natural mechanisms is more of a philosophical principle rather than a scientific one. Note their use of the word, tenet: it's a belief – a dogma! There is no scientific evidence for it, no place in the universe where the tenet can be observed or tested.

Evolutionists treat science like a religion. They are zealots with a unshakable faith in materialism. No observation, no piece of evidence, and no argument will ever be considered if it contradicts the doctrine that the cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be.

In a NY Times book review, Richard Lewontin made this most amazing admission:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Evolutionists do the very thing they accuse creationists of doing; they start with a conclusion, then seek evidence to support it. They may not know how the universe began but they know God didn't do it because that's not “scientific.” They claim they will go wherever the evidence leads but they have decided in advance that it can never lead to a supernatural explanation. In spite of all their scientific rhetoric, every evolutionist approaches science from a starting point that can't bear scientific scrutiny. There is no scientific evidence to support their core belief of naturalism!

Bill Nye thinks kids need to be better educated about evolution

I don't mean for my blog to become a battleground attacking Bill Nye. It's just that I blog a lot about creation and Nye happens to be championing evolution right now. He's especially nasty about it too. Consequently, he's become an icon for a lot of my criticisms. I just thought I'd say that before I write another post about Nye.

Anyway, Bill Nye said in an interview that he was concerned about the effect creationism has on education. In his own words...

[T]here are more people in the world — another billion people all trying to use the world’s resources. And the threat and consequences of climate change are more serious than ever, so we need as many people engaged in how we’re going to deal with that as possible. And we have an increasingly technologically sophisticated society. We are able to feed these 7.2 billion people because of our extraordinary agricultural technology. If we have a society that’s increasingly dependent on these technologies, with a smaller and smaller fraction of that society who actually understands how any of it works, that is a formula for disaster.... My biggest concern about creationist kids is that they’re compelled to suppress their common sense, to suppress their critical thinking skills at a time in human history when we need them more than ever.... There are just things about evolution that we should all be aware of, the way we’re aware of where electricity comes from, or that you have cells with mitochondria.

There are several problems I see with Nye's argument. I've said before that evolution is a trivial pursuit; it contributes nothing to the advancement of technology or medicine or any life improving invention. A better understanding of evolution would not contribute one tiny bit to finding alternative sources of fuel or building clean burning engines or any type of technology that Nye believes will save the planet.

Also, I don't believe Nye can establish a causal link between believing creation and lower academic performance. It's a tired scare tactic used by evolutionists to claim that kids can't understand science if they believe creation yet they have nothing beyond their flapping gums to support this claim. In fact, a case could be made for the opposite; kids who are home-schooled or who attend private, Christian schools – places where creation is more likely to be taught – generally perform better on standardized tests than kids in public schools where creation is not taught.

But if Nye really wants to better prepare kids to contribute to society, evolution would be very low on the list of where education needs improvement. Here's a short video you might find interesting:

I've seen dozens of videos just like this one – videos where kids can't answer basic questions about science or politics or geography or history. According to Wikipedia, “the "average" American reads at a 7th or 8th grade level which is also consistent with recommendations, guidelines, and norms of readability for medication directions, product information, and popular fiction.”

If Nye were truly worried about preparing kids for the future, he would be alarmed by the fact that they can't read! But no, he thinks we need to devote more energy and resources to teaching them evolution! I truly believe Nye is more interested in indoctrinating kids rather than educating them.