Bret Weinstein and Brandon Strat

\\\\Leave No ALeave No American Behind: Brandon Straka on DarkHorse (youtube.com)maricon Behind: Brandon Straka on DarkHorse (youtube.com)

Leave No American Behind: Brandon Straka on DarkHorse (youtube.com)

Trying to et the right URL I got the three above and I'll have to try to sort them out carefully sometime.  At least one of them goes to the middle of the video, I don't know if any go to the starting point of the video.  

Anyway.  Brandon Strat is the founder of the Walkaway movement which consists of people who feel disenfranchised by the Democratic Paty and left it, although they don't all nevcessarily to to the same place.  Strat himself has pretty much joined Trump but seems to have some rservations about that too.

Bret Weistein has done his own alking away but I find him less easy to understand or agree with than Strat.  He's still too much of a liberal for me, his reasoning just comes from some other place than minde andit's hard to get into his.  

He still doesn't get MAGA meaning the last A because his focus is all on how America has failed with racial issues.  Strat says he doesn't see it that way but as getting back to a time when Ameria was prospecerous and enjoyhing our liberties or something like that.  I'd agree with that but when I think of being great again I thik mostly of the Greatest Generation, the fact that Amerida has always been a generous good force in the world, helping our enemies rebuild after war being part of that.  That's the kind of greateness I'd like ot see us get back to , but also the propsperity and especially the times when we felt safe and trusting of our neighbors and left our doors unlocked.  That America is long gone since the Left took over.

And Weistein doesn't swant Strat to identify the Left as the prolblem but I agree with Strata and hoepe he doesn't change his mind about that.  I get bBret's problem that he still identifies with that word but to my mind the Left just now has come to stand for all the bad stuff.  If he wants to hold onto Liberal I can handle that one, but no, Left belongs to the stuff i want to get rid of.  

It's always good to have da discussion about these things anyway and maybe Bret's views will start making more sense to me if I hear more of them.

Just a Little Rant Against dawkins and the other antireligionists, and against the Left

I am cancelling this post because I was way too intemperate.  And 

And I spologize to Mr. dawkins for my insulting remarks.

IBest of Richard Dawkins against Religion (youtube.com)

Authenticity and Believability

 The idea that we must believe something in order to be saved, which is taught in the Bible, doesn't sit well at all with the atheists out there.   There is something suspicious about the idea of belief or fatih to them.  Dawkins is always saying that faith simply means belieivng something for which there is no evidence.  I keep answering that no, the evidence is there and it is witness evicdence, which iis the only kiind of evidence you can have for something that occurered only onece which you weremn't there to see for yourself.  Jesus Himself is to be known only by faith because it is impossible for anyone to meet Hims today.  All the events and peroplld ofthe Bible are knowlable only by faith.  

And they are knowlable.  That word is appropriate enough.  Wek know many things by witnesse evidence alone that we can't witness ourselves.  Most of our knowledge ois of this kind.   But when it comes to the supernatural claims of the bible in particular, that's where they get all fidgety and annoyed and try to dismiss it all as fiction because there is no way for any of us to witness it now.  

But th whole thing from Genesis to Revelation is kowlable only by faith.  All the people are dead and all the events are in the past.  All we hae is the words of the people in the bible that any of it happened, or the bible itself presenting them as real.  So of course they have to bring the Bible into doubt and disrepute if they simply cannot entertain the idea of a miracle for half a second.  

That way of course they stand no chance of ever believing in Miracles unless God grants them one of their very onewn and tchances are they won't believe that weither beause they can always interpret it out of existence as a miracle, or ir not always then certainly most of the time, by doubting their own perceptions, suppossing it to have been a neuropsycholgoial experience rather than real and that sort of thing.

Futile it  for John to write his gospel with the aim of giving evidence "that you may believe" since they will doubt the very existence of John among other things.  Who is this John anyway?  

There really isn't any point in trying to discuss these thins with someone who discounts any or all of it as possibly fictional because there really isn't any way to prove that it's not.  It's a matter of judgment.  You either have an ear for the truth or you don't.  Fallen  humanity is born into this world, acording to Christian understanding, lacking the faculty of spiritual discernment, it having been lost at the Fall when our fistrst parrents disoveyed God.  We are all born dead in that way, unable to know God.  We may or may not logically decide that a God must exist but there is nothing in our nature to require it of us.  to actually discern God requires the regeneration of the faculty of the spirit in our natures, requires, in orther words, being born again.    Without that we are confined to what we can know through our senses and that keeps us tethered to the physicla universite.  this is why science deals only with the material world and why it is so common for people to seek physicalistic interpretations for spiritual things.  Such as to say that it must be neuropsychological.  everything is physical to the fallen mind.  It all originates in phsycial reality.  that is the basis of evolutionary theory too of course.  It all started with something physical happening in the primordial ooze, some coming together of atoms and molecules, an evlution itself is of coruse all a matter of physical beings making more physical beings, and thn in the end when they have to try to account for consciousness all they have is the physical and that's when we get all the fanciful notions about how it could arise from the physical.    In sohort, again, it's all because the human rce is fallen.  Fallenness is being relegated to the physical realm.

"The They are but flesh"  God says I think in Genesis five or six, therefore He will not always strive with us.  After the Fall we becmae "but flesh" unable to relate teo Him because He is Spirit.    I think it was Watchman Nee who pointed out in something I read recently, or maybe it was Andrew Murray, that we are the only creature with the tripartite nature of body, soul and spirit.  the animals have a body and a soul but not the spirit withich communicates with god.  the angels and demons are pure spirit.  But we are this unusual combination of matter and spirit.  Or we were originally since at the Fall we lost the spirit, or it fell into a corrupted state, not sure hjow to think about that.  It's "dead" however, acording to sciprture, and needs to be "quickened" by the new birth for us to be saved.  Being saved is first o all being regenerated in our psirits so that we can apprehend god.  We have to grow into it after being merely born into it again and that thakes time but it is in fact renewed in us and is the foundation of our salvation.  We receive the Holy Spirit through this rebirth.

that is mre or less a side trip here though probably necessary.  I mostly wanted to get into the futility of trying to confince a fallen person about the things of the spirit, to confince him or her about the truth of the Bible for istnace or the need for salvation.  I know that God must do that work and that is because we can't, mere persuasion isn't going to accomplish anything you must be born again.  yet they must hear it in order to be in a position to be born again.  there's that too.

Most of the debates on these subjects I hear lately are frustrating because they are usually trying to compromise something to make the truth more accessibly to the fallen mind.   TIt doesn' work but it continues anyway.  Far better in my opinion just to state the flat facts as the bible presents them no matter how unpalatable to the fallen ear and leave it to God to sort it out.  

There are parts of the discussion that do seem to be more or less amenable to simple locial arguent such as that it seems to me that the Biblcial presentation doesn't read like fiction to me at all or to other believers.  Still the fallen mind will turn it into fiction even though it has none of the marks of fiction just beuase the content doesn't fit into their worldview.  So even that little bit of argument doesn't go anywheresjere either.

*     *     *     *

I keep frgetting to add my new email address that is managed by my daughter:  

faithswindow@mail.com

Ham n Nye Debate Continued: evidence for the Flood etc.

 Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham - HD (Official) (youtube.com)

ye is saying that there isn't any evidence for th Flood.  Well, tht's because they've coopted it to eovolution.  the strata and the fossils are teh main evidence for the Flood.  The strata are separate homogeneous layers of sediments, a sandstone here a limestone there a shale elsewhere and so on, all homogeneously a single sediment or single material of some sort such as conglormerate.  Here and there.  But mostly sedimetns such as sand and limestone.    this fact of stacked layers of sediments fits with what water does, in deltas, at the shoreline etc.  It has been demonstrated in the laboratory to occur in studies of fast moving wqater.  It would have taken a n enormous amount of water to produce the enormously huge layers of sedimentary rocks that span many thousands of square miles, covering conteintens, and reaching highests in some cases of hundreds of feet.    Fits a worldwide Flood very well.

and of course the enormous number of dead things ofossilized sithin those sediments fits with the biblical reason given for the Flood, to kill all things living on the land, except for the few saved on the ark.  Besides land creatures of course a great humber of sea creatures also died but all the land creatures died while not all the sea creatures did.  

thas prestty good evience for the Flood.  And when the evidence is appreciated that these layers are undisturbed by normal tumults seen on the surface of the earth all the time, not occurring within the layers but only after they wer all laid down, that adds to the evidence picture of a short period of time for their laying down rather than even years let alone millions of years.  They are also tabletop flat in their original horizontal position with razor edge sharp contact between the layers, which doesn't fit any slow processes of deposition we'd expect to see on the survfa e of the earth or at the bottom of the ocean.  

'All that is pretty solid evidence for a worldwide Flood.  and I'd also mention that the surface of the earth looks repretty tubmbled and swirled and tossed around which would also fit the Flood.  

thenmeone askes the question how they reckon the timing of the drifting apart of the continents, and Ham says that Baumgartner hs studied that and that they generally see it as having started with the Flood breaking things up, which I'm glad to know because I came to that conclusion on my own as well.  I think of it as occurring at the very end of the Flood and I did my own calculations about how fast it would have .... start over, how fast the continents would ahve started out drifitn g aapart because I figure they started out fast and slowed down over the last four millennia to their present rate.  I can't read Baumgarten but I'm now interested to know what conclusion he came to anout all that.

Correction:  He said Dr. Snelling as well as Dr. Baumgartner studied the tectonic plate movement

Propaganda takes Down Even Some of the Best

 Glenn Loury seems to have read the nw book by this guy Coates, sorry I hear his name but it's too much of a blur for me to attempt to write it out, anyway he read it and was convinced by it that there is an apartheid ituation in Israel against the Palestinians and a basic injustice on th part of Israel against those people.  This disburbs me in sutrn because everything I've heard puts the cause of the problems there squarely in the hands of the radical Islamists like Hamas and Hezbollah and clearly Coastes didn't take any of that into account but just repeated their own propaganda and apparently Loury accepted what he said at face value.

Over and over I hear how Hamas steals the food and other aid sent to help the Palestinian people in harm's way during this war is stolen and throw out by their leaders, by Hamas so tht the people go on strarving and suffering even when tone and tones of help is sent to them.  And they pblame it on israel which has nothing to do with it except to try their best to help the people get what they need.   Israel in fact is said over and over again to go to great extremes to proect the people from even their own attacks on Hamas, by making sure they are warned loudly and clearly of a particular raid they are planning so that they can escape the area.  No other army does such things but Israel doeass.   

as uses their own people as human shields, they won't let them get away.  they set up their aresenals and headquarters in putlib places especially schools and hosptials where the most damage to the public could be done by Israel trying to target the leaders.  So that if they do attack and some get killed it can be blames on Iaszrael and the Palestinians will aleways be the victims of Israel instead of Hamas.   All fo the sake of propaganda against Israel.  Hamas doesn't care one bit about their own people.  they also routinely toss out figures of how many sewere supposedly killed in this or that operation by Israel as if it could all be counted within an hour of the event.    

So Iraeldios their best to protect the people, to facilitate their protection, an aim only at the leadership.  They may take out dozens of Hamas leaders and that too will be called civilican victims of Israel.    

As for apartheid the Arab population within Israel proper has all the rights of any citizen. and if they keep to themselves which some do it is their own choice based on their own culturue and religion, it is not because of Isaraeli decisions.  

Thisi what I har all the time.  But Loury seems to beleive Coates instead.  

zWe liv in a time of lies and propaganda running everythign in the world, and it's the good guys who are made the bad guys and the bad guys the good guys, good for evil and evil for good.   that's what is going on in our election right now.  Perhaps it would help if some of the liars got a tiny inkling that lying and plotting harm against teh innocent is not overlooked by god and that there will be justice against them in favor of their victims in the end.

zAfter listening back to this post once again I'm aware that ther is someone else or something else that is tampering whith what I write.  I'm well aware of my own mistakes and I'm alwaso aware of making a special effort to get some words writght ubut the y are nevertheless altered in the final result.     Speaking of targeiting innocnets.  i'm a single elderly woman being targeted by who knownss what.

can't Stop Sketching Out that List of Evidences, Just Keep Going with it. Oh Well.

I need a new blog.  Or help with this one.  Or no, really what I need is a new set of eyes.  I've asked the Lord for that, and the nineteenth century South african pator Andrew Murray says the redeemed should expect to receive healings as part of our salvation but we have to have the faith for it and I don't.  I suppose that is the reason anyway, but maybe I could build up more faith if I prayed about it.  But then again I never expected to live to this age and I don't kow why I'm still here.  I don't seem to have anything I'm called to do expect write my blog.  

I could probably just dither myself to death about such things.  

I thinkthe arguments I've collectd against evolution are enough to kill the monster dead but if I can'yt make the arguments clear to people I'm just flailing around unselessly.    Yes I could dither myself to death this way.

they really  do think that the changes we see in every species from generation to dgeneration are evidence of evolution.  I don't know how they can ohold onto that idea knowing what we know about how the genetic processes work but apapretly the simple fact that the phenotype or creature itself is seen to vary is enough for evidence for them.    Dawkins didn't build in any form of restraint to his little figure that rolls from change to change and supposedly proves evolution.  Coyne said the difference between the wolf and the chihuahua is proof of evolution.  This astonishes me.

Ken Ham of course talks about the Kindsx as the basic forms of living things, each creted separately and unrelated to all the other kinds renetically.  This is the creationist reference point.  As Ham says we don't have to think about the many thousands of species evolutionists identify in the world today as having been on the Ark, since all we need o have on the ark is eighter two or seven of each creature Kind.  All the species we see now would descend from those afger the Flood.  

I think we need to make more of the fact that each Kind has its own genome.   There is a human genome, and a cat genome and a dog genome and I think also a bird genome.  thw  genome defines the Kind and all the species of that Kind come from genetic variations built into the genome, the two alleles per gene and many genes per trait in most cases and so on.  That is enough to make for all the different kinds of cats and dogs and birds and human hbeings.  RThese different species emege in isolation from other populations, wthether through natural selection or just random selection and geographic isolation, whatever brtings about the inbreeding of a particular set of gene frequencies within an isolated population.  That's all it takes.  It's variation not evolution.

ther eis n way to get from any of these evolved species to anything other than another species of the same Kind if there is enough genetic variability left for that after a breed has been well established.  All you can eve get is variations on the traits established by the genome to belong to that AKind and that's all you an ever get.  

Or if they think you can get to another Kind or SPeicies that way they haven't yet demonstrated how they think this is possible.  I've speent a lot of time tring to think that through and enver been able to come up iwth a way it could be possible.  Outside the genome as it were    or maybe that is the wrong way to put it.  You have to change the trait itself not just the variation of tht trait.   

Back at EvC forum I was always being asked how do I define the Kind.  Ham says it seems to be the equivalent of the Family on the Linnaean system.  I don't think that is true for every Kind but for many.  But I'ds want to define it as a shared genome.  You can look at a genome and know whether it belongs to a human being or a dog or a cat, right?  That's one way to define the Kind.   Another way is the body plan.  that hit me a few years ago as I relaized that even the very different looking birds have skeletons that are prettymuch identical, same proportions, same location of appendages etc.  

And body plan doesn't vary, or varies only slightly, through all the manyu vaiaiont so fhte spearate traits that develope the many different breeds of dogs, cats, cattle etc etc.  they all have the same body plan even if they are very different from each other in their general appearnace.  

My main argument at EvC for years was that you get reduced genetic vqaariability when you are getting changes in the appaearance of a population.  It is a trend, so it won't always show up in some obvious way, but it has to happen as getting new forms of a trait means losing the other forms of it.  As you get a particular kind of fur for your bred you are losing all the other kinds.  Eventually as the breed becomes refinesd you can lose ALL the alleles for all the other forms of a trait so that your breed is homozygous for all its salient traits.  That is a very reduced genetic variability.  You need heteroszygosity for variability.  

Body plan and behavior too.  Dogs all act like dogs, all of them they all bark and wag their tails and slobber all over you if they like you and mark their territory in the same way and sniff each other's behinds and all that.  that is the dogness of dogs.  Cats also have their own set of behavior s that identify them as cats.  

So there you have some eaysways of identifying what a Kind is, that creature that was idndepently and uniquely formed at the Creation.

I can't remember if I'm leaving out some other parts of the biological picture that make for evidence against evolution.  

But then there is the geological evidence which is against an Old Earth rather than evolution as such.     If you ponder the physical facts of the layers of sedimentary rock in which the fossils are found it's not hard to realize pretty soon that they couldn't possibly represeent time periods of tens of millions of years which is what we are told .   And I still enjoy Bill Nyr'd trbrlsyion  Bill Nye's revelation that not only is there no fossil from higher levels found in lower levels but the same is true of the fossils in the lower levels.  they don't "swim" up to the higner levels as he put it because he thinks of it as a problem for the Flood.  Rally is t is a problem for evolution as even theyh don't think that when a creature evolved all the creatures that it evolved from just disappear, but that is the way it looks according to Bill Nye.  Oops.  

I'd like to sketch out the whole thing here and hope I'll get back to it but I'm ready for a break at the moment.

Later:  So where as I?

The Kind is defined by its genome which contains the intstructions for that Kind in all its variations and no other Kind.

Whenever a breed or race is being developed, when phenotypes are changing the character of a population, that is always accompanied by a reduction in genetic diversity as the variations that do not fit the new breed or race are eliminated from the population over generations, and means that there is a natural limite to the changes that are possible down any line of so called evolution which is really just ariation.  AThat means that evolutoin is brought to a halt exactlyh where it is asupposed to be particularly about to take off according oto the evolutionist argument.

Then we find that in the so called fossil record fossils lower in the stack of layers do not appear in layers above but if the layers did actually repreesent the time periods of tend of millions of years assigned to them by the theory of evolution all the creatures should persist through all the layers to present time that are now living in our own time on this earth, but according to Bill Nye this is not the case.  We get a fish or sea animal in onwe layer and in the next layer we cget an amphibian and we say the second evolved from the firsrt but we get no more of the sea creature, it stops and onlyh the amphibian continues and only for that layer because in thelnext layer up whatever supposedly evolved form the amphibian is alone there without the ambphibian itself and so on, no reptiles with the mammals, no apes witht e humans and so on.    This is not a picture of how evolution is said to occur so therefore the fossil record is bogus.

then I'd mention the erosion piles at the base of various formations such as the buttes in Monument valley where if they are supposedly millions of years old ovr even many thousands the erosion is way too little for that length of time.  That's an argument for a young yearth instead of the millions or billions of years.\

Then the is the fact that the layers of sediments in which the fossils are found are clearly undisturbed in themselves while the entire stack of layers shows a lot of disturbance.  That couldn't be if they each represent time periods of tens of millions of years.  it is onlyh after they are all in place that we see the usual disturbances this planet is said to experience such as volcanoes and earthquakes and hurricanes and other things that would disturb the surface of the earth or even the sea bottom for that matter.

then there is the fact that if you just look at the layers and think about them you hae to conclude that they couldn't ever have been part of a time period of millions of years or any time period at all.  they are made up of separate sediments which already makes no sense out of the idea that each occupied a particular time period.  They are tabletop flat in their original laying down and that doesn't happen anywhere under normal circumstances of deposition, on the sea floor or on the surface of the earth or even perhaps some depth eneath the surface.  

That do in the idea of time periods of millions of years and leae it open for a young earth.

supernatural versus natural evidence

 I called it an apparition, the ghost as it were of a human being I'd seen earlier that day on the street who had threatened me.  It was threatening me now in its demonic form, the man I'd seen apparently having been demon possessed and the demon appearing in my room that night.  

this happened almost forty years ago and I was telling it to give an example of some experiences I've had theat lead me to believe in the Bible as a supernatural wsork, supernatural experiences being some evidence of that to my mind.  

did I kn hat such things can be neurologically created he wanted to know.  Well sure, that sort of explanation accompanies every discussion of the supernatural with unbelievers.  We always get the physical version of it in response.  So sure I know that but this was an apparition.

How do I know that.  Well I don't know I can't prove it I simply know it the way I know a dream from reality or something like that.  yeah I guess I could be wrong but no this was a real apparition it was not a neurological event.  

I should be open minded he said.  

after forty years of knowing this is an papparition I should be open minded and recondsider that I decided forty years ago is not a neurologial event?  Obviously being open minded in rthis case simply means giving up the idea that it was an apprition and believe it was a neyurological event.  that's the only answer that will be accepted.  

So there is no point in sdiscusing such thigns once you know that the conclusion is determined already.  T

There is no more evidence for the one than the other.