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George Stanciu #crackpot theimaginativeconservative.org

Lewontin and most scientists are true believers in materialism, possessing an absolute faith that matter and its workings will eventually explain everything in the universe. But such a faith has already failed at the most basic level; brain function alone cannot account for the simple experience of seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling. All human beings, scientists and laypersons, live in the nonmaterial world of the smell of lavender, the deep resonance of a cello, the beauty of a sunset over an ocean, the wonder evoked by the night sky, the elegance of Euclid’s demonstration of the infinitude of prime numbers, the very world that materialism cannot explain. If only matter existed, then we would have no interior life; we would be mindless things like rocks and volcanoes.

Like every ideology—political, religious, or intellectual—materialism at some point is closed to reason, so that eminently intelligent adherents must make exceedingly idiotic pronouncements: “All of us human beings and all the objects with which we deal are essentially bundles of simple quarks and electrons;” “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons;” and “You’re a gigantic lumbering robot manipulated by genes.”

For me, materialism is far from absolute because it has failed again and again. No one can doubt we live in a bio-friendly universe. The multiverse strategy to avoid the existence of God borders on the absurd and furthermore declares the core of the physical world is irrational and thus unknowable. Giving up the ideology of my youth and following reason, I had no choice but to “allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

George Stanciu #crackpot theimaginativeconservative.org

I, like you, was born in the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age of Hindu mythology, when all the great faiths of the world are on the wane. The secular faith in the Nation-State, in grand schemes to institute Paradise on Earth, and in placing transcendent hope in human institutions has been destroyed by history. No theoretical arguments are necessary to show that the goal of a heavenly future on earth is perverse and that the pursuit of such a goal leads to untold death and destruction, to a Hell on Earth for tens of millions. The sight of the rubble of Hiroshima, the smell of burning bodies in Auschwitz, and the sound of frozen corpses thrown on sledges in the Gulag destroyed secular faith. A technological utopia, a Master Race, and a classless society are nightmares from the past, only believable to a handful of science-fiction writers, to a few crazy ideologues blind to history, and perhaps to one or two drunks in bars near M.I.T and Harvard.

Secular faith is dead, and religious faith is stumbling toward the graveyard. Pope Benedict XVI, in the first year of his pontificate, lamented the weakening of churches in Europe, Australia, and the United States. “There’s no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ,” he told a meeting of clergy in the Italian Alps. “The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.” Capitalism focused attention on material prosperity, on the good life in this world, away from eternal salvation, so that few Christians today see themselves as pilgrims journeying through this Earthly life, shunning the attachment to worldly things and avoiding the snares set by the Devil.

Michael Bauman #homophobia #fundie theimaginativeconservative.org

You might recall the awful option faced by the title character in “Sophie’s Choice:” Pick one child or the other. It’s not a choice any mother wants to make. No matter what she chooses, her loss is unutterable.

Nor would any child want to make the same choice in reverse: “Mommy or Daddy, Sally. Pick one.”

But that is the ugly position into which same sex marriage plunges children, except that the children themselves do not get to choose. Someone else chooses for them.

No matter what you might think about same sex marriage, we know this: Any child raised under a same sex union faces a tremendous loss—either no Mommy or no Daddy. In a union where two men or two women are involved, that’s always the outcome. When Mommy picks a woman or Daddy picks a man as a life partner, the children always lose something enormously valuable and irreplaceable: a mother or a father.

That loss often has tragic consequences for a child. If, for example, you are raised in a home with no father around, the odds that you will drop out of school, that you will take or sell drugs, that you will go to prison, that you will be poor, and that your children will suffer the same fate you did all skyrocket. That same cycle of hopelessness and crime follows upon the absence of a mother.

When Mommy has sex with another woman, it doesn’t make that other woman a Daddy. Having sex with Mommy doesn’t make you a Daddy any more than drinking milk makes you a calf.

The point here is not remotely homophobic. The point here is not that Mommy and her lover, or Daddy and his, are to be shunned, much less hated. The point here is that mothers and fathers are fundamentally important to the development of children, and therefore to the future of the nation, which depends upon the development and maturation of the next generation. That works best when children have both a father and a mother.

I say so because, according to a recent groundbreaking study by University of Texas scholar Mark Regnerus, we discover this:

Compared to children who were raised in intact homes with both the biological father and mother present to raise them, the children of homosexual parents grow up to:

Be Much more likely to receive welfare
Have lower educational attainment
Report more ongoing “negative impact” from their family of origin
Be more likely to suffer from depression
Have been arrested more often
(If they are female) Have had more sexual partners—both male and female

If they were the children of lesbian mothers, they are:

More likely to be currently cohabiting
Almost 4 times more likely to be currently on public assistance
Less likely to be currently employed full-time
More than 3 times more likely to be unemployed
Nearly 4 times more likely to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual
Three times as likely to have had an affair while married or cohabiting
An astonishing 10 times more likely to have been “touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver.”
Nearly 4 times as likely to have been “physically forced” to have sex against their will
More likely to have “attachment” problems related to the ability to depend on others
Use marijuana more frequently
Smoke more frequently
Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor offense

None of these dire statistics seem to have much weight with the same sex marriage crowd. Rather, they argue that marriage equality is rooted in human equality. But that bogus argument does not work. It moves illogically from one kind of equality to another. The equality of all persons does not equal the equality of all lifestyles or all relationships. For example, the mere fact that all persons are created equal does not mean that polygamy or incestual marriage ought therefore to be made legal. You cannot move logically from the equality of persons to the equality of actions, choices, lifestyles, or relationships. It simply does not follow.

Same sex marriage advocates also argue that it is wrong to make value judgment about marriage. Yet they allow themselves to make value judgments about who should get to marry. Here again they fail logically. By insisting that same sex unions ought to be considered marriages on a par with heterosexual marriages, they make a value judgment about marriages, both their own marriages and those of others. If they are against making value judgments about marriage, then they have to stop saying what they say. But of course they won’t. Rather, they press their judgments on others while, at the same time, refusing to permit others to make judgments.

Let me clarify a point often misunderstood: I am not saying that marriages without children are not marriages. I never once said that or meant that. I am saying that marriage and family go usually together. I am talking about a common connection between marriage and family, not a necessary pre-condition for marriage. Marriage and family are simply the usual mechanism of creating and nurturing the next generation. But in the case of a homosexual union, that is naturally impossible. And if you try to grant them by some other means the children nature denies them, then the children are statistically more likely to suffer bad consequences as a result, which is not the case with a heterosexual marriage. Or, put differently, my wife and I have no children as yet. I obviously do not argue that we have no marriage.If we had children, it wouldn’t as likely damage the children involved as would being raised by two men or two women, a situation that entails the significant loss of either mommy or daddy. In short, wise governments and wise citizens do well always to remember that important and basic fact of life and to avoid making laws that undermine the traditional family and traditional family roles, which serve us and our offspring best.

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