The cockroach babies

It’s been a long time since I’ve visited the crew over at William Dembski’s abandoned blog Uncommon Descent, but this post by scordova caught my eye. He’s wrestling with the problem of malicious “designs” in nature, and gets right to the heart of the matter.

Can the Intelligent Designer of life create malicious designs? If the flagellum and other parts of bacteria are intelligently designed, it would raise the question whether microbially-based diseases and plagues are intelligently designed. It seems the best inference from the evidence is that even malicious designs are also intelligently designed.

Always the ID dilemma. Once you start confusing function with purpose, there’s no reasonable way to stop inferring design for everything, even the nasty stuff. And since ID, apart from superficial lip service to polytheism and panspermatism, is just window dressing for good old-fashioned fundamentalist creationism, the presumed design of the more “malicious” aspects of nature poses a theological problem of no small proportions.

[Read more…]

Troublesome Labor Day post

I’m sitting comfortably at home today, enjoying the Labor Day holiday, and wrestling with a post I want to write. Labor Day seems like a good day for it, because it’s about wage earners. But it’s giving me trouble.

Here’s what I want to say: I want to point out that most of the nation’s wealth is produced by wage earners—people who receive money in return for the productive work that they do in generating the goods and services that make up the nation’s wealth. But not everyone is a wage earner. There are other people who receive money, not as payment for goods/services produced, but because of their economic status.

Conservatives are famous for resenting the fact that the very poor are collecting welfare checks without working for them, but the fact is that the very rich do the same thing. It’s called “capital gains” instead of “welfare,” but no matter what you call it, it boils down to money you receive, not as wages for what you produce, but simply as a reward for being at either extreme on the financial spectrum. Investment, after all, is an alternative to acquiring money through earning wages.

That’s roughly what I want to say. I want to point out that liberals and conservatives (in the rank-and-file, at least) have shared concerns, in that wage earners are being asked to shoulder an unfair proportion of the burden of funding non-wage earners—an inequity that stems in large part from the fact that our laws are being written by people who are non-wage earners and who are stacking the deck in their own favor. That’s why taxes on wages are so much higher than the taxes on non-wages.

There’s an element of truth there that’s important and needs to be said. I’m just having trouble saying it.

[Read more…]

My new favorite slogan

You know, I think I have a new favorite slogan:

WE BUILT THAT!

Take Wal-Mart for instance. It didn’t become one of the world’s largest retailers because Sam Walton was so good at stocking shelves and ringing cash registers. The Walton family provided the leadership, true enough, but the labor, the actual building, came from millions of ordinary Americans working long hours at low-paying jobs.

Sam Walton didn’t build Wal-Mart.

WE BUILT THAT!

Or take the auto industry, the railroads, the hospitals, the universities. Take any large, successful organization or enterprise that is making some small group of people very wealthy. What do they all have in common? It wasn’t the labors of the rich that built the enterprise.

WE BUILT THAT!

Look at the United States of America. With all our flaws and failings, we’ve got a few things right. We’ve recognized (or at least, a good number of us have realized, starting with our founding fathers) that our strength comes not from imposed uniformity of religion or politics, but from a cooperative and tolerant diversity.

Jesus didn’t build America.

WE BUILT THAT!

The list goes on and on. I love that slogan.

Circumcision makes sexual promiscuity healthier

The American Association of Pediatrics has released a report that favors male circumcision on the grounds that it reduces the spread of sexually-transmitted disease among promiscuous heterosexuals.

Perhaps the most powerful evidence in favour of circumcision comes from randomized controlled trials in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda. These found that, for men who have sex with women, circumcision reduced the risk of infection with HIV. (No protection was observed for men who have sex with men.) The South African and Ugandan trials also found that circumcision reduced infection rates for human papillomavirus (HPV) and herpes.

So if you have a sexually-active infant, you should talk to your pediatrician about getting him circumcised.

The everlasting same-sex union of Christ and the church

Just to follow up on my previous post, let’s look at another passage I touched on briefly yesterday.

On that day some Sadducees (who say there is no resurrection) came to Jesus and questioned Him, asking, “Teacher, Moses said, ‘ If a man dies having no children, his brother as next of kin shall marry his wife, and raise up children for his brother.’Now there were seven brothers with us; and the first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother; so also the second, and the third, down to the seventh. Last of all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife of the seven will she be? For they all had her.”

But Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not understanding the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.

So the Sadducees are trying to trap Jesus with a question about heterosexual unions after the resurrection, and Jesus’ answer is that heterosexual unions do not exist after the resurrection, because the nature of the resurrected people will have changed to make them like the angels. And Biblical angels, interestingly enough, are all male.

[Read more…]

The gay Trinity

There’s an interesting passage in Eph. 5:28-32:

So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.

Many a Christian sermon on marriage will tell you that there’s a great mystery (i.e. a great truth that can only be understood through divine revelation) behind the physical union of a man and a woman in sexual intercourse, and that mystery is that the sexual union is really only a shadow of a deeper truth about the spiritual union of God and man. The true essence of the sexual relationship is thus not its carnal aspect, but its spiritual nature.

That becomes interesting when you remember that the Trinity is an even deeper union, not just of two persons, but of three—all male.

[Read more…]

Green car really sucks

An Indian car manufacturer hopes to sell a new air-powered car that runs cheap and has zero emissions.

The Airpod’s technology was originally created in France at Motor Development International but has since been bought buy Tata in hopes to bring it to the Indian consumer car market. With virtually zero emissions and at the cost of about a penny per kilometer, it is definitely one of the most environmentally and economically friendly vehicles in the world.

And how do you refuel it?

The tank holds about 175 liters of compressed air that can be filled at special stations or by activating the on-board electric motor to suck air in from the outside.

Yeah, the refueling method sucks (*groan*), but at a market price of only $10,000, it could sure put a crimp in the sale of all those pricey hybrids. You still need a source of electricity from somewhere, so it’s not, perhaps, totally green, but still, it’s a cool idea.

Prophecy limbo

Over at Evangelical Realism we’re looking at Justin Martyr’s First Apology, and this week we’re seeing how far he can bend over backwards to try and turn a passage, a phrase, or even a single word to turn into a prophecy that Jesus “fulfilled” somehow. Some of the passages, like Psalm 22, are still used by believers today, but others… well, let’s just say that modern believers, on the whole, aren’t quite so mentally flexible as Justin. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.