Richard Dawkins explains why he refuses to debate William Lane Craig

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And he does it with insults and petulance:

This Christian ‘philosopher’ is an apologist for genocide. I would rather leave an empty chair than share a platform with him.

Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either. Perhaps he is a “theologian”. For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused, in the spirit, if not the letter, of a famous retort by the then president of the Royal Society: “That would look great on your CV, not so good on mine”.

Craig’s latest stalking foray has taken the form of a string of increasingly hectoring challenges to confront him in Oxford this October. I took pleasure in refusing again, which threw him and his followers into a frenzy of blogging, tweeting and YouTubed accusations of cowardice.

A few points:

Craig isn’t the person trying to cajole Dawkins into a debate, it’s the debate organisers and many of Dawkins’ atheist friends who want it.

Dr Daniel Came, a philosophy lecturer and fellow atheist, from Worcester College, Oxford, has not only heard of Craig, but has written to Dawkins suggesting that, since he has debated the intellectual heavyweight,  Pastor Ted Haggard, perhaps he should take on the “foremost apologist for Christian theism”, William Lane Craig.

Dawkins’ own link to the Wikipedia article on Craig describes him as an “American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion”. Funnily enough, it omits to mention that Craig is someone who parades himself as a philosopher.

Calling Craig “an apologist for genocide” is damning evidence that while Dawkins is happy to use insults against Craig, he is less confident in using reason.

Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris both debated Craig and were routed. That points to the real reason why Dawkins won’t debate Craig: cowardice.

 

Canadian health care at its less than best

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From here:

Earlier this month, 82-year-old Ontario woman Doreen Wallace was walking out of a hospital in the Niagara Region when she had a fall, literally in the hospital’s front door. She cut herself badly and fractured her hip. If you’re going to take a tumble, you have to figure that a hospital’s main entrance is a pretty good place to do it. Not so, as it turns out — the hospital refused to admit her, claiming that the hospital could only treat her after she’d been attended to by paramedics. Call 911, they were told, and wait for an ambulance.

As if that’s not bad enough (and it’s plenty bad), after her incredulous son made the call, the woman had to wait almost half an hour while an ambulance was brought in from another region. None were available locally, even though three were already at the hospital where Ms. Wallace had her fall! While people are understandably shocked at the thought of an injured woman laying in a hospital going untreated due to a bureaucratic requirement, the real scandal is that not only was a precious ambulance assigned to this task, but that none were available for 28 minutes.

First of all let me say that my experience with Canadian health care has been moderately good: I haven’t had to resort to calling 911 very often, but when I did, the response was quite fast. In fact, recently, it was so fast, I had two policemen appear on my doorstep even before I called 911 (the phone line was faulty and making calls on its own, apparently). After searching the house and casting an expert eye over my wife in search of bruising, the officers left with the satisfaction that comes from a job well done – to my chagrin, they never did say evening all.

Secondly, the ambulance episode doesn’t surprise me that much. When my father-in-law fell in his retirement home, the resident nurse was reluctant to help him up because it wasn’t part of her job, although she did manage to struggle to the phone to place a call to us. We drove to the home and, after delivering a brief but concentrated barrage of caustic sarcasm (well, that was me mostly), my wife and I picked him up ourselves.

Thirdly, it’s time for 82 year-olds to develop the respect for bureaucracy that it deserves: remember, when you fall down and break something it’s not about you, it’s about the process and metrics and making sure that the God-forsaken Kafkaesque nightmare you are about to enter has had all humanity extracted from it  – in order to serve you better.

Homosexuality and the yuck factor

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From here:

Several students at a Hartford high school expressed horror and left the auditorium when two male members of a city-funded school play shared a passionate kiss onstage on Friday. School officials said they opted against informing parents about the event ahead of time, saying that the students needed exposure to homosexuality, and hailed the “chaotic” reaction as a victory for raising the gay issue.

It seems that quite a few students walked out in disgust. The disgust was almost certainly an instinctive rather than cerebral reaction. Is there anything wrong with that? I don’t think so. If we are designed for male-female sex, it isn’t particularly surprising that we are also designed to react with repugnance at deviations from that norm.

What is particularly satisfying is that the repugnance remains in spite of the exertions of pietistic liberal social engineers to eradicate it.

Primate Fred Hiltz endorses sympathiser of radical Islam for Huron college appointment

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Huron college has accepted a $2-million endowment for a new Chair in Islamic Studies within the College’s historically Anglican Faculty of Theology. As you can read here, the money is tainted by its jihadist association:

About half the money is to come via fundraising facilitated by the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC), and the other, matching half from the Virginia-based International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). A cofounder of the latter group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007-2008 trial of Sami al-Arian, an Islamist academic linked to jihadism.

Ingrid Mattson has been installed as the “inaugural Chair of the new Islamic Studies program.” Unfortunately, she comes with a rather less than  impeccable pedigree:

She has been disturbingly equivocal about Wahhabism, the repressive and backward strain of Sunni Islam that is the state creed in Saudi Arabia. In 2001, for instance, she told a CNN chat forum: “This is not a sect. It is the name of a reform movement that began 200 years ago to rid Islamic societies of cultural practices and rigid interpretation that had acquired over the centuries. It really was analogous to the European protestant reformation. Because the Wahhabi scholars became integrated into the Saudi state, there has been some difficulty keeping that particular interpretation of religion from being enforced too broadly on the population as a whole. However, the Saudi scholars who are Wahhabi have denounced terrorism.”

She has stated publicly that the best English-language Koranic commentary for Muslim youth is by Maulana Abul A’la Maududi, an Islamist author who wrote that “Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and programme of Islam.”

In commenting on the subject of “injustice,” she lambastes the Taliban and the Israeli government in the same breath, because in both cases, people stood by as the two regimes perpetrated “oppression” – an odious juxtaposition, in my view.

In his enthusiasm for interfaith dialogue garnished with a smattering of recreational jihad, Anglican Primate Fred Hiltz has endorsed  Mattson’s appointment:

 “In establishing the “London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies”, Huron College is on the cutting edge of interfaith dialogue. With delight I endorse the appointment of Dr. Ingrid Mattson as the first occupant of that chair. She is a highly respected scholar and widely published. She is well known for her leadership in nurturing Muslim-Christian relations. The College and Community will be blessed by Dr. Mattson’s academic qualifications, and her capacity to engage people in dialogue, mutual learning and public witness to the values we hold in common as people of faith.”

The Most Reverend Fred Hiltz
Archbishop and Primate
The Anglican Church of Canada

h/t to the person who kindly emailed me on this.

Anglican motorbikes to Cuba

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From here:

Hitchhiking priests are common in Cuba. Cars are expensive and hard to acquire, so ministers must get creative with parish visits. Some spend hours on local transit. Some spend precious pesos on taxis. Others hitch rides and some just walk.

[….]

Motorcycles are a great help to these travelling ministers. That’s why the outgoing General Secretary, Archdeacon Michael Pollesel, decided to raise money to buy one  instead of accepting a retirement gift when he left General Synod this fall.

That was very decent of Archdeacon Michael Pollesel. It’s a shame, though, that it probably won’t make him ponder the question why, in the Cuban socialist paradise, most people can’t afford to buy a car and why the Anglican Church of Canada is working so strenuously to turn Canada into an equally impoverished Arcadian collective.

And who will buy Fred Hiltz a motorbike if they succeed?

Occupying Wall Street with Strange Bedfellows

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The American Nazi Party is delighted with Occupy Wall Street and has released a statement with the enlightening news that Wall Street bankers are all Jews – and those who aren’t are spiritual Jews.

The Communist Party USA announced that it is squarely behind the occupiers. They concentrate on corporate greed – a real shocker – a new level of class-consciousness and putting people before profits – unless it’s people who are making the profit and then they go into an iterative tautological soliloquy, never to emerge from the resulting collectivist sinkhole.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gloated that the end of Capitalism is nigh – along with Western civilisation – and, I admit, looking at the protesters, he has a point.

Meanwhile, those who have not yet reached a new level of class-consciousness and don’t have time to occupy anything because they are busy trying to make a living (which may or may nor include the demon profit), are losing patience with the whole thing.

Holy relics in 2011

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When I was in Italy a few years ago, I visited the Basilica of St. Anthony where, proudly exhibited, was St. Anthony’s larynx, the cartilage of which, I was assured, is still incorrupt. I came away from the viewing with the satisfaction inherent in having seen something unusual, if not macabre. Perhaps because I am not a Catholic or perhaps because I was deemed unworthy by the petrified organ, I did not find myself especially edified.

Others, more pious than I, were genuflecting and raising their eyes to heaven.

There is nothing new under the sun, so now we have a 21st century relic: John Lennon’s tooth; the sacred molar is to be placed on the altar of Ebay where it will receive contemporary homage, possibly to the tune of three figures:

One of John Lennon’s teeth is expected to make £10,000 when it is auctioned next month.

The tooth was given to the former Beatles’ house keeper Dot Jarlett when she worked for him at Kenwood mansion in Surrey in the late 1960s.

He told her to give it her daughter “as a souvenir” after he had pulled it out in the kitchen of the Weybridge property.

The tooth will be auctioned in Stockport on 5 November.

Dot’s son Barry Jarlett said: “He was in the kitchen and he had this tooth which he had wrapped in a piece of paper.

“He said: ‘Dot will you dispose of this’ and then he said: ‘Or, as your daughter’s a Beatles fan, you can give to her as a souvenir’.

 

A new candidate for the Antichrist

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Well, new to me, although I admit I haven’t been keeping up on my Antichrists of late.

They seem to come and go: we’ve had Nero, Napoleon, Hitler and, more lately, the Pope (any Pope) and Obama. The most original theory has been the subject of a book: The Antichrist and a Cup of Tea – a seminal work on the subject according to some reviewers. No, I haven’t read it and have no plans to.  The author, Tim Cohen makes the case for Prince Charles being the Antichrist.

In some ways, I find this a great comfort: if I were voting for an Antichrist I would want an inept one and I can’t think of anyone with better qualifications in that department.

He does have to become king first, though; I can think of so many reasons why he shouldn’t become king that one more – even this one – is just a drop in the bucket.

Still, to be on the safe side, all together now: “long live the Queen”.

The UK is planning on withholding aid to African countries with poor gay rights

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From here:

Andrew Mitchell, the International development secretary has confirmed that the British government will withhold aid from countries with homophobic countries but denied that it will harm the most poor in those countries

[….]

Last week, the Mail on Sunday revealed that aid ‘fines’ may be imposed on countries such as Uganda and Ghana for hard-line anti-gay laws.

The UK hasn’t altered its plans to double aid to Pakistan, though. Of course, although Pakistan persecutes gays just like any other part of the burgeoning Islamic caliphate, it compensates for it by also persecuting Christians, providing the UK with a vicarious sense of atonement for real or imagined past Christendom inspired imperialist sins.

In its defence, the UK is working on self-propitiation by doing its bit in eradicating Christianity within its own borders. Sadly, the British government doesn’t truly have its heart in the effort since it hasn’t resorted to burning or raping Christians. Yet. Withholding aid to Africa will have to do in the meantime.

 

Lesbian couple wants a sex change for their 11-year old

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From here:

A lesbian couple in California who say their 11-year-old son Tommy who wants to be a girl named Tammy are giving their child hormone blockers that delay the onset of puberty — so that he can have more time that he can have more time to decide if he wants to change his gender.

[….]

Thomas began saying he was a girl when he was 3 years old, his parents said in an interview with the Daily Mail. He was learning sign language due to a speech impediment, and one of the first things he told his mothers was, “I am a girl.” They say they thought he was confused or mistaken, and signed back, ‘No. No. Thomas is a boy.”

But Thomas insisted, they said. He shook his head “no” and repeated what he had signed.
They said Thomas threatened to mutilate his genitals when he was 7, and psychiatrists diagnosed a gender identity disorder.

One year later, he began transitioning to Tammy.

It can’t be a coincidence that a child brought up in an atmosphere of gender malleability has decided, at an age when most children are barely aware of what sexuality is, that he wants to change his sex.

The lesbians have made a creature in their own image; even if it was inadvertent, an act of consummate selfishness.

What better recommendation for not allowing same-sex couples to adopt children.