MAJOR HASAN AN HONEST FOLLOWER OF THE KORAN murdered out of obedience even against conflicting feelings. Read it and weep.

I want to get this information published even though I'm not going to take the time to format it carefully or comment much at this point. Here's the raw stuff.

Gist: Major Hasan who killed so many at Fort Hood did so in obedience to the Koran EVEN AFTER SEEKING WAYS HE MIGHT BE ABLE TO AVOID THIS DUTY. He even gave a speech outlining his thinking in this direction, yet nobody took it as the warning signal it was. The Koran is unfortunately not open to alternative views and he had to conclude that to be obedient to his God he HAD to kill nonMuslims. This conflict came to a decision point when he was being asked to go and kill Muslims, which he couldn't do and be faithful to his religion. The Koran teaches that killing a Muslim will take you to Hell, and killing nonMuslims will earn you blessings. There is no room for other interpretations. The man was excruciatingly honest about the position he was in on account of his religion. He wasn't unfaithful to the American Army so much as REQUIRED BY HIS RELIGION to make a choice he didn't want to have to make.

What sort of idiots are we in the West that we have been ignoring this obvious situation for years now?

I wasn't able to find the speech itself but maybe it's trackable from these links, and Rubin's article is pretty clear about what it says anyway:

http://www.gloria-center.org/Gloria/2009/11/why-i-murdered.html

Hassan is the first terrorist in history to give an academic lecture explaining why he was about to attack. Yet that still isn’t enough for too many people—including the president of the United States--to understand that the murderous assault at Fort Hood was a Jihad attack.

It was reported that the audience was shocked and frightened by his lecture. He was supposed to speak on some medical topic yet instead talked on the topic: “The Koranic World View as it Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military.” All you have to do is look at the 50 Power Point slides and they tell you everything you need to know.

It is quite a good talk. He’s logical and presents his evidence. This is clearly not the work of a mad man or a fool, though there’s still a note of ambiguity in it. He's still working out what to do in his own mind and is trying to figure out if he has a way out other than in effect deserting the U.S. army and becoming a Jihad warrior. Ultimately, he concluded that he could not be a proper Muslim without killing American soldiers. Obviously, other Muslims could reach different conclusions but Hassan strongly grounds himself in Islamic texts.

In a sense, Hassan's lecture was a cry for help: Can anyone show me another way out? Can anyone refute my interpretation of Islam? One Muslim in the audience reportedly tried to do so. But unless these issues are openly discussed and debated--rather than swept under the rug--more people will die.

In fact, I’d recommend that teachers use this lecture in teaching classes on both Islam and Islamist politics.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2009/11/10/GA2009111000920.html

http://www.rubinreports.blogspot.com/

STOP COPENHAGEN CLIMATE TREATY in DECEMBER -- WILL SELL OUT U.S. SOVEREIGNTY -- OBAMA HATES THE U.S. AND WANTS TO SELL US OUT

If you aren't hearing about this or keeping up with it, pay attention. Obama is poised to sign this treaty that is supposedly to protect the planet, but what it is really designed to do is strip wealthy nations of their sovereignty -- and that means us of course. This treaty has a provision to punish nations that are supposedly causing the climate problem -- that's us they say -- that will take American money and put it in the hands of Third World countries. Our Constitution PUTS INTERNATIONAL TREATIES OVER U.S. SOVEREIGNTY -- it's written into our own law, so if he signs this treaty he will be signing away our sovereignty to a world government.

Scott Johnson discusses this upcoming attack on our nation in last Sunday's talks. Here's the PDF file that covers all the same material that's in the talks.

Near the beginning of PART THREE of Johnson's talk from last Sunday he airs statements by Obama that show his true IDENTIFICATION WITH ISLAM and his hatred of America, shown among other things by his disgusting attribution of Western achievements to ISLAM that are ALL IN FACT DUE TO CHRISTIANITY. He's taking his clips from this You Tube video (Listening to this gives me such a stomach ache I can hardly stand it).

Show us the bones, Mr. Dawkins, show us the evidence, show us the science. We can do without the fairy tales.

Poor Richard Dawkins, poor Wendy Wright. She keeps saying there is no evidence for evolution or specifically for the supposed transitional forms between different species, and he keeps saying there is. I've barely begun watching this discussion between the lady from Concerned Women for America and Dawkins the biologist, but I want to comment before I watch further.

He keeps saying there IS evidence, go to the museum and see Australopithecus, homo habilis, homo erectus, that these represent a graded series of transitions to modern homo sapiens from something more ape-like (it's supposed to be the ancestor of both apes and man but it always looks particularly ape-like you know), and she's not saying clearly enough for Dawkins to get it why these are not evidence. At least so far - to the middle of Part 2 at this point.

She DOES say "show me the bones" and that is the beginning of our objections, but she doesn't get to explain what she means. What you see in museums and book illustrations are artists' conceptions of these supposed transitional creatures, not the actual facts, not the actual evidence. We are given only a fantasy idea of some creature that may or may not have existed for all we know, imaginatively constructed from only a few bones, sometimes ridiculously few bones. We are not given the actual evidence, the actual bones, which are hardly ever -- in fact more likely never -- entire skeletons, we are not given the reasoning that links a particular body part to another body part, or if by searching for it we can find such a description it often seems glibly and even sometimes romantically (in the literary sense) described rather than rigorously thought through.

Sometimes a skull is found sort of near to but not close enough to be unequivocally related to a particular bone or collection of bones and the insistence that they belong together is not all that convincing from the actual facts. We want the real evidence. We want to be able to think it through ourselves, but they give us only THEIR conclusions and withhold the evidence. We want to see some examples of ape bones versus human bones, and a good range of them since we know there are big differences between individuals, so we can make comparisons ourselves. We want to know exactly how many actual specimens of any supposed "hominoid" type are in existence and how complete they are and how it is known all the parts belong to each other in a particular case. We want to be told exactly where each piece of a specimen was found. We want to know exactly how they were all dated -- was it by the particular stratum they were found in? And how was that stratum identified and dated? Were actual tests done or was the date inferred from other clues and may we please know what facts validate those clues if so? And we'd like to see this all laid out in good English and not in shorthand or scientistic jargon in minuscule old fashioned typeface.

We know archaeologists are scrupulously careful to mark each artifact and fragment as to where it was found at the site as mapped on a grid, and it is all carefully photographed as well. Perhaps this is unfair, but it's easy to get the impression that evolutionists, on the other hand, are rather sloppy with their evidence, preferring to construct their finds from imaginative rhapsodizing rather than actual science, and that they couldn't produce a rigorously kept log of any of the evidence at any site where a specimen was found. If such logs do exist, publish them so we can all mull them over.

Then there are the artists' renditions of the supposed pre-homo sapiens creature. I often wonder: Have the scientists ever seriously considered the huge range of skull shapes and sizes and body types and sizes among LIVING HUMAN BEINGS? They insist that such and such a skull shape is a precursor or a transitional type as if there were a fixed modern type it is precursor TO, though it seems to me I've seen all those supposed precursor types walking around some city in the 21st century, working on a construction crew or reading the Wall Street Journal (or Darwin's Origin of Species) over a latte in a cafe. OR I've seen it in a cage at the zoo: That is, either it's an ape or it's a human being, there's nothing in between.

Also, do the scientists or the artists have the expertise, or work with those who do, in reconstructing the fleshy contours of a face over a skull? It's an exacting science, but I get the impression from the usual evolutionist illustrations that some pretty rough and exaggerated guesswork often suffices for them. TRULY SCIENTIFIC illustrations scrupulously indicate the actual evidence as distinguished from the artistic rendering. It's a mark of the LACK of scientific rigor that what we get from the evolutionists are completed artistic fantasies without a clue to how much of it has any real factual basis.

I'm sure Dawkins is genuinely convinced that those artists' renditions in the museums ARE evidence, ARE science. That's why he just can't get what Ms. Wright is trying to say about them and is so offended that a nonscientist would doubt the work of scientists. He needs to seriously rethink that belief.

I hope Wendy Wright gets into all this with more specificity but I'm going to post this at this point and come back to it later.

Assuming this discussion remains on the topic of evolution I'm moving any further posts on it to my Fantasy of Evolution blog. [Later: Dawkins' latest book on evolution promises to supply the evidence I'm asking for here, but in fact it fails to deliver on that promise, and at Fantasy of Evolution I posted a review of the book from Amazon that discusses this problem.]

Summary of Flat-Out Wrong (as opposed to Straw Man) Arguments made by Christopher Hitchens

1. This idea that religion was invented to explain the physical facts of life on this planet that we now understand by science is just a lot of hot air. I just heard him say this for the umpteenth time in that flat dogmatic way he has of pronouncing such things he can't possibly know but can only conjure out of thin air, how they didn't know earthquakes were caused by the cooling crust of the earth, that diseases were caused by germs and so on, so they made up the actions of gods to explain them.

But, Mr. Hitchens, we all know those things now and even knowing those things now some of us STILL come to believe in God AFTER knowing those things and I for one have no trouble at all reconciling the scientific explanations with God's control over all of it (I mean the TRUE scientific explanations of course, NOT evolutionism which is bogus). This connection is in fact a very exciting discovery to make after living 45 years as I did under the Scientific Explanation for Absolutely Everything. There is a magnificent and mysterious interaction between the goings-on in the material world and the goings-on in the spiritual world.

Prescientific man had enough sense to intuit this connection but unfortunately he too often put his trust in the demon gods instead of the one true God. Still, the demons may have some power over some physical events too, allowed by the one true God of course. This reminds me of the Lewis and Clark expedition which witnessed an Indian buffalo dance during their first hard winter, and sure enough the buffalo showed up a few days later although there was no rational reason to expect them to. God's mercy I assume. The Indians and the white men took down quite a few of them, the Indians taking by far the most as I recall, and the buffalo fed them all that winter, both tribes.

All the noise and hocus pocus in the buffalo dance is probably irrelevant to the result, though there are no doubt some demonic influences in all that, but the overall effect may be like an intense prayer to the Great Spirit that God hears in His mercy. The Indians had learned to trust in such appeals to the spiritual world -- from the empirical evidence that they got results! As for science, what explanation can science give for the buffalo showing up in a territory they'd left earlier in the season to roam elsewhere, arriving within a few days after the buffalo dance? Many natural explanations might be reasonably enough guessed at, even correctly, but none would be sufficient.

Normally no natural laws are violated in the spiritual-material interaction at all, things just sort of work out one way or another according to the spiritual forces at work -- there are so many possible scenarios that could occur in the natural scheme of things the actual one that does occur startles nobody out of their scientific assumptions. Those who have prayed for it will recognize in the event answer to that prayer though the natural mentality will remain unconvinced. But miracles are also possible, though they occur only very rarely, meaning events that defy all natural explanations.

HOWEVER, this is not likely THE REASON people believed in God or gods in the early days, or at any time.

2.

Post under construction.

Musings on the Catholic confusion in this atheist debate

Still working on the previous post, but wanted to get this in here somewhere. Dinesh D'Souza is a Catholic, and although he's a very bright and knowledgeable guy who has come up with some of the best arguments in this debate with atheism, in the course of it he's constrained to defend Catholicism, including diminishing the crime of the Inquisition.

In Part Five of a debate with Hitchens {earlier than the one previously discussed here) [1:22 - 3:28] Hitchens specifically accuses Catholicism of fascist politics, naming Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, Father Tiso and another name I couldn't get. Hitler hated Christianity but his nominal Catholicism shouldn't be ignored in this tally. I think in Hitchens' very tallying of the Catholic leaders who pursued the fascist cause there is possibly a revelation of the antichrist spirit of the Roman church that I hadn't been aware of before. I was aware that priests had conspired to help Nazis escape from Germany after the war, among other things (Dave Hunt's books describe much in this direction that I've forgotten), but I'd never put it together before with the essential antichrist nature of the Roman church. Definitely something I want to think about more.

Dinesh simply accuses Hitchens of taking the focus off the secular totalitarians, but there really is something startling about the degree of Catholic involvement that Hitchens has just laid out that needs to be acknowledged -- and not merely acknowledged -- it's a sign of the apostate anti-Christian nature of the Roman Church and we should probably be looking more in that direction as the end times continue to unfold. Remember, the Catholic Church has embraced evolutionism and regards Creationists as moronic fundamentalists, and that's just a small part of the worldly system it's embraced in its ambition to global power.

And of course because he IS a Catholic, poor Dinesh can't keep his focus clear on the elements of this debate and that's sad, but what's sadder is that he really does not know Christ, really is not saved, has only an intellectual grasp of the Christian revelation. By part 9 of this series D'Souza is saying he has faith because he does not know, pretty much demonstrating that he doesn't really have true faith as a born-again believer understands it, and this unfortunately contributes to the confusion that gives credibility to Hitchens' position. Faith IS the evidence of things unseen, and if we have true faith we DO know the things we have faith in. We KNOW the things faith shows us. Dinesh is affirming a leap-in-the-dark definition of faith because all he really has is mental assent, and that's unfortunately the case for the vast majority of Catholics, and really probably for all, as Catholicism cannot save. If there are true Christians in that church, the Lord says "Come out of her, My people."

Dinesh also wrongly equated Judaism with the Old Testament and described it as a religion only for the tribe, as if it had just about nothing to do with Christianity. He did this in agreement with something Hitchens said, about how Christianity is a rip-off of Judaism, a plagiarism. Thanks, Dinesh, for not correcting that misapprehension. But I guess he's stuck in a Catholic misapprehension. And it's interesting that it sounds a lot like what Hitler thought of the Old Testament -- evil religion, religion of the Jews. Does Dinesh have no sense at all of the seamless whole of the Bible, the fulfillment of the Old in the New, the continuity from Eden to Revelation? Sounds like he hasn't a clue. Judaism is not Old Testament religion, Judaism is Talmudic religion. the man-made tradition of the Pharisees that Jesus kept condemning that had supplanted the revelation of God. The Old Testament on the other hand is testimony to the one true God and the Jews were supposed to carry this testimony to all mankind. That's what Jesus ended up doing in their stead.

Hitchens and other atheists are rightly confused about what Christianity really teaches when they hear stuff like this, when they have to regard Catholicism as just as much Christianity as any other sect, having no ground for making a distinction, and not caring to make one anyway of course, happy to tar us all with the sins of our worst enemies, the Roman Church, Islam -- even their sins against us.

In part 6 of that debate a questioner says he thinks both Christians and atheists alike agree that morality evolved anthropologically. [around 8:50] Oh wow, has it gone that far that he thinks he can speak for all Christians about that? It's not just Catholics but great numbers of those who regard themselves as evangelicals who have been infected by evolutionism.

Summary of Hitchens' Straw Man arguments

Just a catchall for some of Hitchens' straw man arguments.

1. Straw man argument that we claim all morality is derived from religion or the supernatural.

No, we don't. We affirm that all humanity possesses a conscience. Some DO argue that this fact that we possess a conscience is evidence for the existence of God.

2. He claims we HAVE to believe that for 98,000 years out of the 100,000 evolutionists say humanity has been around, that God did not intervene in painful, miserable, helpless and fearful human lives, deciding to intervene only 2000 years ago.

First, God started intervening, according to the Bible, right after the Fall, right after Adam and Eve sinned, with the promise to send a Savior and with a plan to prepare humanity for that Savior, and providing animal sacrifice to atone for sin until the True Sacrifice would come. And there was never a time that He did not hear prayer and intervene on behalf of people who sought Him. So we do NOT believe that God only started intervening with the sacrifice of Christ.

Second, there are way too many theist evolutionists who accept those absurd numbers for the duration of the existence of humanity although there's no way to reconcile them with anything in Genesis, but if we accept them for the sake of argument along with the teaching of Genesis, and put Adam and Eve at the near end of that 100,000 years, say about 94,000 years after the supposed first human being (which allows for the 6000 years that we can count in the Bible since their creation), you have to reckon with the Biblical teaching that sin, suffering and death did not enter the world until their Fall. That means that ALL living things that preceded them did not die but were still living at the time they came into the world, including all the human race evolutionists believe had been here all that time. There would have been NO DEATH, NO SUFFERING in all that time for God to have been indifferent TO. There would also have been no evolution, as that assumes death. There would have been no fear as the physical universe would be perfectly accommodating to life, with an abundant food supply for animal and human both, no hostile animals, no pain in childbirth, no scary earthquakes etc (all destructive processes started at the Fall and increased drastically with the Flood) and all would have been constantly in loving communication with God, and so on.

There is no point in considering the possibility that Adam and Eve came at the beginning of those 100,000 years, because the whole Biblical testimony since their creation would be utterly destroyed. Hitchens says we HAVE TO believe his scenario. No, we do not.

Dinesh D'Souza's answer to this is a good one: those long ages of human suffering and helplessness that evolutionists believe preceded historical time are more of a problem for those of Hitchens' persuasion than for us. They are hard to account for if we assume that humanity was the same then as now, endowed with the same brain power and inventive abilities, yet didn't begin to do anything to improve their condition for some 94,000 years. I consider this to be a great argument against the whole idea of that supposedly long blank preamble to history.

3. Hitchens argues from that and other examples that the universe is a pretty unfriendly place for human beings. "Some plan" he says.

This needs to be answered in a way that I haven't seen it answered. It was MENTIONED on the Book Expo panel but not pursued. Death and disease and suffering in the universe are NOT part of God's original plan, but the result of the Fall. ALL suffering and death entered with the Fall, are the result of Adam and Eve's original sin, which effected a catastrophic break between humanity and God. We ourselves are now subject to suffering and death, AND we live in a ruined and battered universe as a result of the Fall, that nevertheless, by God's mercy, retains enough of the qualities of the original Creation to sustain us. (In listening to these debates it began to occur to me to wonder if possibly the whole universe outside our planet was also originally more friendly to human life, just as Earth was. Perhaps all the other planets in our solar system were once habitable. Wild idea of course.)

4. Straw man idea of what faith is, that it is supported by no evidence whatsoever.

Witness evidence. Many witnesses to amazing supernatural events. Which he dismisses as deluded, and those who believe the witnesses as even more deluded, and the written accounts of which he claims are hopelessly corrupted. Sometimes I don't even want to bother defending myself against such self-serving ignorance, just hand him the scimitar, bow my head and say Have at it. An honest sensibility ought to be able to see that the witnesses are honest and rational people, and there's a ton of evidence that the scriptures are reliable.

5. Straw man argument that religion says God created people sick and then orders them to be well.

This is a more direct version of the straw man argument about the 100,000 years of God's refusal to intervene for unhappy humanity. God did not create people sick -- that happened when sin entered. And I have no idea where this ordering them to be well comes from. He wouldn't be saying that sin is sickness, would he, and the ordering to be well then the commandments against sin? Another version of this is his statement that we have some innate inbuilt design flaws. Nope, we were made perfect and sin brought in all the deformities.

But this does get me pursuing some thoughts about this ordering us to be well. God knew very well we couldn't obey the commandments as perfectly as the Law demands, especially not their inner meaning which is only revealed in the New Testament. When humanity fell we lost the spiritual sense necessary to perfect obedience. The New Testament says then that God gave the Law as a tutor to bring us to Christ, teaching us just HOW unable to obey the Law we are, so that we will see our need of being saved. Of course Christopher Hitchens thinks he's doing just fine, thank you very much. Well, the rest of us who know better are grateful for God's mercy.

6. Related to the accusation that we think morality is the result of religion is Hitchens' claim that we think the Israelites had no sense of the wrongness of rape, murder and theft and so on until God gave the Law at Mount Sinai.

This is sheer silliness. We know all humanity was given a conscience. But conscience isn't a fixed thing and different people have more or less sensitivity to it in our fallen condition. Writing down the law was part of the covenant God was making with His people. According to something I read, the giving of the Law was a declaration that God was King of the Israelites, as apparently in that part of the world at that time kings did declare a law for their people as part of their rule over them, as I recall was the case with Hammurabi's law for instance. Such a written law was binding in a way the conscience-directed morality was not, and more strict. Then when we get to the New Testament we are told that the Law was given that the people might learn their inability to obey it in its perfection, as the Law is of an order of perfection and holiness fallen man can't ever hope to attain. This would lead those with a sense of the consequences for failure to obey the inexorable demanding perfect Law to a desire for the mercy offered in a Savior who would take the consequences upon Himself in our stead. Hitchens is contemptuous of this merciful offer, obviously having NO idea just what consequences are entailed by failure to obey the Law, consequences we all rightly deserve -- and if he did have some idea he'd just shake his fist at them anyway.

7. He says the substitutionary atonement of Christ is immoral.

Does he think he can take the punishment for his own sins which deserve an eternity of Hell? He forgets that while he reckons everything in the prosaic terms of the visible natural world, the Bible presents an unseen supernatural world in which our sins have far greater consequences than he can imagine. He can of course deny that this other world exists, but he should at least humbly recognize that in the context of this other world we believe in, the substitutionary atonement by God the Son Himself incarnate is an act of inestimable mercy, and cease from upbraiding us with his own narrow views.

8. Both Dinesh D'Souza and Marvin Olasky argued that Christianity brought a higher order of morality into this world with objective historical consequences that have been documented. Hitchens has never confronted this argument, reducing it to the false claim that Christians think morality is the product of religion or insisting that natural man has exactly the same moral sense. This is simply false but he hasn't yet grasped what is being said.

Christianity DID bring a higher order of morality into the world. Jesus Christ DID inspire respect for women that never existed in ANY culture prior to His coming. Jesus Christ DID inspire a level of compassion for all humankind that never existed in ANY culture prior to His coming. This included the very first inklings that slavery is wrong, that took time to work through, but it never existed in ANY culture prior to His coming and no other culture took even the first steps to abolish it. Dinesh pointed out that only the Christian West rushes to help the victims of a tsunami across the world. Actually now other societies are imitating our lead, but it's a Christianity-based attitude that prompts such actions and it never existed in ANY culture prior to the coming of Christ. Christians were moved to take in and care for the babies put out to die in pagan cultures, and also the sick and helpless elderly who were also abandoned to die. Now we are returning to the pagan practices of killing the unborn and suggesting that we should also kill the useless elderly and others who are helplessly dependent on our mercy. Eventually it was the Christians who established orphanages and hospitals on the compassionate principles of Christ, which have become huge finance-driven institutions in our day that are probably going to end up throwing out the weak and sick and elderly again in a return to pagan values -- and to the evolutionistic values of supporting the strong and abandoning the weak I might also add. A man from Tonga got up in one of the debates to say he was grateful that Christianity had turned his people from cannibalism. And much much more along these lines should be specifically attributed to Christian influence in this world.

These are all specifically Christian contributions to the world that Hitchens falsely attributes to normal human conscience. No, taking care of strangers was NEVER practiced in any culture before Christianity, and women were NEVER respected in any culture before Christianity, and slavery was practiced EVERYWHERE until Christianity. Christianity has so spread itself through the cultures of the West that outright atheists get righteously indignant when such Christian standards are violated, falsely thinking it's just normal built-in EVOLVED morality that feels that way.

D'Souza and Olasky are right about the source of this degree of concern for our fellow man, Hitchens is wrong.

9.

Atheist Inquiry Pt 4, Hitchens and D'Souza

Tonight I've been listening to Hitchens versus Dinesh D'Souza, 13-part debate at the Catholic Thomas Center. There are other debates between these two I may get to eventually.

Dinesh starts out saying he isn't going to argue from Biblical Christianity but from reason and skepticism. I'm disappointed in this. I think the arguments simply for the existence of God are futile and irrelevant.

But then it turns out his focus is on the history of Christianity and the major influence it had in the West, that compassion for instance is not a value in any other culture or religion, but it became a value in Christendom because of the influence of the Christians, also that although slavery persisted in Christian societies it also declined and was challenged in Christian societies and nowhere else on earth, all other cultures taking it for granted. He also points out that science developed only in the West, and would not have developed anywhere else because only Christianity has a concept of a rational Creator who made a rational and law-governed universe that can be rationally studied. These are important arguments I've also tried to make at times, to show that there is a real-world positive impact of Christianity you can trace historically. This should prove at least that something of a very high order happened back there in Jerusalem.

[I left out the reason for his addressing this historical information: he starts by pointing out the values expressed by the atheists that they direct against Christianity, so his answer is to show that those very values derived from Christianity and exist in no other context.]

Hitchens, however, either completely ignored or completely misunderstood the point and launched into his familiar polemic against his straw man conception of religion claiming to be the source of morals, which has been answered in many a debate in many ways but he keeps at it anyway. He says morality is innate as if anyone had ever said anything different.

He also repeats his familiar story about the evolutionists' claim of a minimum 100,000-year history of the human race, 95,000 years of which were theoretically lived in misery and fear without the slightest attention from God, who then decided only a few thousand years ago it was time to intervene. Some God, huh? Some plan.

D'Souza did correct his misunderstanding, clarified that he wasn't saying it took Christianity to bring morality into the world, and that it's quite clear that all human beings are born with a conscience, a built-in sense of morality. I'm glad that was finally said as nobody else had answered Hitchens on that one in other debates.

Unfortunately D'Souza is another theistic evolutionist rather than a creationist so he doesn't make the point about the whole story being nuts because of the bogus timeline, that I made in one of my last posts, but he does make an interesting point: that Hitchens' view of this history puts his own theory in trouble since he has to explain how clever homo sapiens, with all the attributes, brainpower etc. of homo sapiens possessed by all of us, managed for all those 95,000 years to accomplish absolutely nothing in the way of civilization or invention and so on, which only took off in the last few thousand years. Why no reading and writing, history and so on? It's a very good objection to Hitchens' claim. It really DOES raise an important question: How DO evolutionists explain those 95 to 250 thousand years of no progress whatever in the human race followed by a sudden explosion of inventiveness and knowledge that has increased by leaps and bounds for only a few thousand years since? It really is an observation that calls the whole evolutionary scheme into question. Too bad that apparently wasn't D'Souza's objective.

But Hitchens just shrugged it off as usual, even groaned at it while D'Souza was stating it as I recall. Which reminds me to mention that at least at a couple of points when D'Souza was talking Hitchens either fell asleep or pretended to fall asleep, breathing loudly into the microphone.

==============

One other remark Hitchens made in this debate, later on, was again to assert that faith is something you believe without evidence. D'Souza answered that there are other kinds of evidence than empirical evidence. And somewhere in there Hitchens said that sometimes Christians will claim they have evidence, usually miracles, and followed that with the remark that apparently "faith is not enough." Always there is this straw man idea that faith is blind, based on absolutely nothing. Maybe the biggest straw man of all Hitchens' straw man arguments. You have to know something about what you have faith IN, after all, you have to be convinced that the object of your faith is worthy of your trust, so at some point you must have evidence that persuades you of this, and in fact believers often need fresh reminders of God's presence and oversight of our lives to renew our faith. Evidence. But primarily the entire Biblical testimony is evidence, evidence to God's reality, nature and will. God provided enough supernatural evidence to demonstrate His otherness and His power, His judgment and His mercy. Jesus likewise did miracles to prove His claim to be the Messiah. These are our evidence. We believe the witnesses to all these things.

But the atheists scorn the witnesses and destroy the evidence and then claim there is no evidence for what we believe.