Does Christianity have a Future?

The Daily Beast asks: Does Christianity have a Future?

Does anything else under the sun?

When Hell is Heaven, Heaven seems like Hell

And for readers of Salon.com, Hell looks a lot like what normal people consider normal.

Keep that in mind, the next time you find yourself liking a politician or commenter who is viewed favorably by Salonniks.

Our coming theocratic hell: Look out, the right’s “religious freedom” push is just the beginning

Draw the line from Hobby Lobby to Indiana: Religion has dangerously infected our legal system. It's getting worse

Here is just a taste of what passes for urbane commentary and convincing argument in Salon:

"Yet religion is far too dangerous to our liberties to be laughed off or mischaracterized as harmless.  In its Abrahamic strain, it is a triad of antiquated, largely pernicious ideologies of control and exclusion suffusing various “holy” books that detail a phony cosmogony, a fairy-tale version of humankind’s origins, and a plethora of strictures meant to regulate and restrict our behavior.  This “sacred” canon glorifies the (frequently) vile misdeeds and plodding pontifications of a wide range of characters, among whom occur prophets and patriarchs (some of whom are felonious, even murderous, miscreants) and their hapless victims (mostly women, girls, infants, foreigners, and “unbelievers”).  A fictitious celestial tyrant superintends the almost ceaseless slaughter playing out in the Bronze-Age phantasmagoria of his alleged creation.  He periodically issues injunctions to his wayward subjects, and punishes them cruelly when they fail to obey (or just for the heck of it, as one righteous resident of the Land of Uz discovers).  Though these ideologies purport to embrace humanity as a whole, the phantasmagoria’s action takes place in a dusty, too-hot corner of the Mediterranean, parts of which once had the honor of hosting the Greeks and their Hellenic culture, the Romans with their laws and roads, and of course the haunting civilization of ancient Egypt."

Please don't tell JEFFREY TAYLER that Moses is front and center on the US Supreme Court building. He might not be able to handle that.

 

Abortion Wars

Early as we are in this presidential election cycle, it seems like the pro-aborts are not enjoying the advantages they have become accustom to.

They came across as entirely unreasonable in the fight over the Human Trafficking bill and the entirely reasonable and decades old Hyde Amendment to it.

“We need to stop trafficking and the Hyde provision is absolutely antithetical to the goal of anti-trafficking,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said in an interview, referring to the so-called Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions and that Democrats say is broadened in the trafficking bill. “And to expand the Hyde provision is anathema to the goals of stopping trafficking.”

Not sure how that follows. But Democrats have the advantage of not having to make sense when they say things. Unfortunately, in the end, they will get what they want, a AG who is at least as doctrinaire on Leftist issues as Holder. Hopefully she won’t be as incompetent, but there is no reason in her record to indicate that to be the case. And O’s regime has proven adept at ignoring laws it doesn’t like, so the Hyde Amendment will most likely be simply ignored.

“The stalled trafficking bill and the Lynch nomination are emblematic of a glacial start to the new Republican Senate, which has moved more slowly than recent predecessors as it hits the 100-day mark midweek.”

How exactly it can move more glacially than the Reid Senate, which did nothing after jamming O-Care, is left unsaid. Again, Politico, being part of the Democrat spin machine is not constrained by facts or reason.

“I don’t know why they've all of a sudden decided to draw the line in the sand on [abortion] and kind of make this the holy grail for Democrats,” said South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the third-ranking Republican in the chamber. “Because it just doesn't seem to be, in the end, a position they can prevail on.”

Simply because it is their sacrament, Senator Thune. Killing children in the womb and profiting thereby is just that important to them.

Rand Paul deftly handled a 'gotcha' question on abortion by re-framing it in terms more overt and less easily obfuscated by the pro-abort Democrats and their MSM fellow travelers

"when he gave a characteristically brusque answer to a series of questions about abortion:

“Here's the deal—we always seem to have the debate waaaaay over here on what are the exact details of exemptions, or when it starts," said Paul, waving his hands to the left. "Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it okay to kill a 7-pound baby in the uterus? You go back and you ask Debbie Wasserman Schultz if she's OK with killing a 7-pound baby that is not born yet. Ask her when life begins, and you ask Debbie when it's OK to protect life. When you get an answer from Debbie, get back to me."

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig obfuscates the question in order to maintain a regime that permits the killing of children in the womb up to (and sometimes after) the moment of birth. Would she raise fewer or merely different objections if Paul had said explicitly that pregnant women shouldn’t be punished at all? Of course she would. She isn’t interested in protecting women or children (notice her criticism of laws intended to protect children in utero from poisoning by their mothers). She is interested in protecting the unfettered operation of the abortion industry. Maybe she is a shill for PP. Maybe she is an ideologue who has taken her principle of absolute personal freedom to the point of the absurd, as DWS has clearly done (ESB doesn’t mention DWS’ reply to Paul’s challenge). I don’t know. But I do know that she has proven in this article that she cannot conceive of any acceptable limitation to the killing of children in the womb. To help keep her readers comfortably in their mental cocoon, Bruenig misrepresents a statement by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review Online that she read about in an even leftier, more pro-abort (in fact the website is a front for the abortion industry) article: 

“Anti-choicers like Williamson lack understanding of or just simply deny immutable facts of public health, such as the fact that access to safe abortion care is directly correlated to improved health outcomes for women, infants, and children.”

This is typical pro-abort confusion. It is an immutable fact that killing children in utero is directly correlated to improved health outcomes for infants? – assuming they survive until birth. It also excludes the fact that the unfettered and largely unregulated abortion regime permits the execution of woefully unsafe abortions (see Gosnell et.al.). Careful population selection is vital to preferred statistical outcomes. But the fun thing is that the unreality check propaganda waxes vexedly about a series of tweets by NRO columnist Kevin D Williamson taken out of whatever context they were originally in which are presented to show his barbarism, even to the point of preferring hanging for women who undergo abortions (a sane person might ask: hey, hanging? Really? Hyperbole maybe? Not at unrealitycheck.com)

Unfortunately for rhrealitycheck, the author linked to an actual column by KDW in NRO. I suppose she figured her readers wouldn't bother to click on it, since she had already told them what to think of him. But I did. And the article is merely reasonable. If she had been able to recognize reason, she might have avoided calling attention to it.

And if rrc had perhaps engaged KDW in anything deeper than a tweet war, she might have discovered the uncomfortable fact that he is actually quite reasonable – inpointing out the unreason of her position

Oh, and back to Rand Paul’s question: Democrats Are the Real Abortion Extremists

“On Wednesday, newly announced Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul rebuffed a reporter’s question about his abortion stance by encouraging the reporter to ask Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz “if she’s okay with killing a seven-pound baby that is just not born yet.” Wasserman-Schultz spared him the trouble of asking. “I support letting women and their doctors make this decision without government getting involved,” she volunteered in a statement. “Period. End of story.””

Yes. DWS is OK with killing a seven-pound baby that is just not born yet.

It is part of her party’s official platform:

“The party’s steadfast opposition to any restrictions on abortion is enshrined in its official platform, adopted in 2012: ‘The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.’ 

“The Democratic party of the United States maintains that literally tearing an unborn child limb from limb is a private decision between women and their doctors.”

And it isn't news that it’s not news to the News.

How crazy pro-abort are they? So crazy that like DWS, they won't deny support for killing a seven pound baby before she is born? Yes, that crazy. Even crazier. From Salon.com:

I am pro-abortion, not just pro-choice: 10 reasons why we must support the procedure and the choice

Yes. That crazy.

The Case Against Same-Sex “Marriage”

JACOB W. WOOD

Yeah, This is a good explanation. It also is the case against divorce, various unnatural fertility techniques, and other common modern social maladies related to the family.