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Dear Matt Damon ... Sincerely, Jason Drexler

Dear Matt Damon,
 
In a recent interview, you opined about the supposed ridiculousness, and your great fear, of a Sarah Palin presidency, or even of a Palin vice presidency. Most of us have heard its infamous lines, I'm sure, in particular the one about a Palin presidency being like a "bad Disney movie."
 
(Here please insert your subpar rendition of "Ooh, I'm the Hockey Mom, facing down Vladimir Putin!")
 
The Liberal arrogance, and the sheer disdain you have for Palin and rural people, that came through in this interview were monumental and infuriating. At one point you mocked Palin by saying that she would handle crises with what you scathingly termed "folksy" wisdom; well, as someone who comes from a rural area (Maine) and would still prefer to live in a rural area (I'm now in "hip" Southern Cal, you see), and who learned many truths about life while growing up in the country, I find your "folksy" comment insulting.
 
I also find it illuminating, because it reveals just what the typical Hollywood celebrity thinks -- about the average American, and about conservatives. For all the Liberal ballyhoo about finally putting a woman in the White House, the nomination of Palin to the McCain ticket has made one thing clear: The only women whom Liberals want to see in positions of authority are Liberal women. In other words, for all the feminist blathering of Liberals such as yourself, what you guys really want is not an equal shake for the fairer sex, but simply more Liberals in power. Period. I guess this shouldn't be surprising -- judging by other Liberal notions ("feminism" means scantily clad women everywhere; 14-year-old girls should be able to have sex, and abortions), it was already clear that Liberals have quite a low opinion of women. (As a side note: It seems, then, that all the drivel coming out of Hollywood about "equal rights" -- for homosexuals, transgenders, women, Hispanics, radical college professors and every other "disadvantaged" group -- is nothing but a ploy to get homosexuals, transgenders, women, Hispanics, radical college professors and members of every other "disadvantaged" group who are Liberal into positions of authority, where they can wreak havoc with regular, conservative people such as myself.)
 
Another of your "criticisms" of Palin was that she believes that Earth is only a few thousand years old. And that has what to do with managing a country?
 
Listen, Mr. Damon, I, like you, believe that Earth is really old. This conflicts in no way, however, with my Christian faith, including my belief that God created everything. Your insinuation that a "young Earth" worldview in particular, or a Christian worldview in general, is a sign of limited intelligence makes me question your own capacity for rational thought. Science is a great thing, and I happen to believe that it's basically right in its guess as to Earth's age, but it's a fact that science is sometimes wrong -- as seems to be the case when it claims that global warming is entirely man-made, a claim that conveniently forgets the fact that Earth has gone through many natural warming and cooling cycles during its long history. No doubt we've contributed to the problem, and no doubt recycling and conservation are good ideas, but let's not make them holy relics, okay?
 
One other thing: No, I don't want an "elite" running the nation. I want someone who's intelligent, yes, someone earnest and understanding and wise and respectful, but these things are different than "elite" -- as far as the current political usage of the word, at least, which suggests someone who has a superiority complex and thinks they're smarter, cooler and just generally better than everyone else. That is, someone like you.
 
Thanks for your time. In the future, though, please remember to at least act as though you like us common folk, and feel free to circulate this letter among your high-falutin' socialist comrades.
 
Sincerely,
 
Jason Drexler
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Supremely Foolish: Cal. High Court Refuses to Grant Delay

So the California Supreme Court has refused to grant a delay in their ruling allowing same-sex marriages. Well, I hope its justices have fun in the fall, after Californians have added a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages that will throw all this summer's planned nuptials into legal limbo. And to all those judges in California's other courts who will have to deal with the fallout of such a legal mess: do feel free to send thank-you cards to your friends on the high court.
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Preston's 'Blasphemy' Aptly Named

I recently read Douglas Preston's latest novel, Blasphemy. The title -- plus the fact that I've read Preston's work before and enjoyed it -- was enough to get me to pick it up and take a gander at the back-cover blurb.
 
The last couple years have seen an abundance of mainstream novels with the "here's the real story about Jesus" theme. You know, that he was married, fathered children, imparted secret wisdom to Judas Iscariot, yada yada yada. That kinda bunk. I'd read my fair share and was tired of it. But Blasphemy promised something different: the story of a secret scientific project that would recreate the moment of creation (the Big Bang, as science types call it). I was intrigued, wanting to know how Preston saw the implications of such a project, and what his general views on God are.
 
As with so many novels, the run-up was good but the ending was lacking -- in this case, spiritually as well as in literary terms. (If you want to avoid spoilers, don't read any further).
 
Turns out the project (called Isabella) was functional and had real scientific merit, but was ultimately part of an elaborate hoax by the project's director -- a hoax meant to convince his fellow scientists that they had communicated with God (not the God of the Bible, by the way) so that he (the director) would have "disciples" to spread the message of a new religion he was creating -- a religion meant to undercut all other religions in general, but Christianity in particular.
 
And the real kicker? The director's inspiration for his scheme is none other than L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the spaced-out, Hollywood-hip Scientology cult.
 
Preston's book does nothing (in my view) to pose a serious challenge to Christianity, but he certainly does a decent job of making Christians and other God-believers/religionists look like a bunch of whackos. The book's two "Christian" characters, Pastor Russ Eddy and the Rev. Don T. Spates, are, respectively, a nutty zealot and a televangelist huckster (gee, haven't seen those characters before). During the course of the book, Eddy goes from quietly respectable country preacher to the leader of a bloodthirsty mob, and Preston shows that the only thing Spates loves as much as money is looking good. On top of all this, the director's scheme "proves" that the Christian God is worthy only of the scrap heap.
 
The story's protagonist, an ex-CIA-agent-turned-Catholic-monk-turned-Isabella-chaperone named Wyman Ford, starts off promising enough. He's a real human being grappling with real faith struggles who truly seems to want to do what's right, whatever the cost. At one point towards the end of the book, he even defines the line between legitimate faith and religious violence, choosing the former. But at the very end -- after the director reveals the hoax to him -- Ford makes only a half-hearted attempt to convince his ex-girlfriend and "new religion disciple" Kate of its fraudulence. No, make that quarter-hearted ... at best. And so the new religion is allowed to take off, and so it does -- it spreads like wildfire across the country. And why? Basically, because Wyman sees that Kate is "so happy" now, and why spoil it?
 
In sum, Blasphemy is built on a healthy amount of intrigue but falls short, both spiritually (the start of another false religion) and in literary quality (the whole thing is a hoax that never gets into the much-hoped-for scientific inquiry of God). There were several sections in which the characters were supposedly communicating with God through Isabella's supercomputer, but these became less interesting as it became apparent that "God" was more Eastern mystic than Biblical. Then they ceased being interesting when they were revealed to be nothing more than a man-made charade. For some reason (perhaps because Preston really wants people to give up the God of the Bible?) Preston includes the book's entire "convo with God" -- uninterrupted -- at the back of the book. Riveting stuff (not really).
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Get Expelled: Evolutionary Thinking, Part II

   The primary point of Ben Stein's movie "Expelled" is highly valid, and appropo to my last post: The science establishment shouldn't be dogmatically loyal to anything other than what verifiable empirical evidence shows to be indisputable ... and evolution hardly fits that bill.
 
Let me again be clear: I'm not opposed to the possibility that species-to-species evolution is real. I'm also unconvinced that God's act of creation was a literal 6-day process that occurred no more than 12,000 years ago. I'm a Christian who believes that God is responsible for the creation of everything that does exist, ever has existed or ever will exist in the universe, including the universe itself, and that He could have employed (or could still be employing) species-to-species evolution as one of His creative methods.
 
All of that said, I also believe that evolution (at least, as we understand it) could not account for the origin of life (because something cannot evolve from nothing), and that today's science establishment is woefully closed off to the idea of "following wherever the evidence leads." I understand that God cannot be empirically "proved" (physically weighed, measured, etc.), but it's absolutely absurd that Big Science refuses to even entertain the possibility that there's a design in nature and, therefore, that there may be an intelligence behind it all. Nor should the textbooks or other science literature of public (taxpayer-funded) educational institutions be telling that students that evolution equals atheism, or that atheism is essential to a proper approach to science, or that the pursuit of science inevitably leads to atheism.
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Atheists Gone Wild

As much as the "new atheists" rub me the wrong way, I'm glad that they're shooting themselves in their feet with publicly advertised ridiculousness.
 
Take, for example, the verbally rabid Richard Dawkins -- really, please: take him away, white-coated men. This man who supposedly prides himself on rigorous scientific research is so scared of the possibility of God that he confesses -- when pressed by Ben Stein in "Expelled" -- his belief that the seeding of life on Earth by aliens is more likely than the existence of God. This from a man who thinks Christians are living in a fantasy world.
 
Then there's Peter "Der Feuhrer" Stringer, an atheist so radical that he has no qualms suggesting that parents ought to be able to kill their babies as late as 28 days after birth. Yes, it's crazy. He's crazy. Maybe not in the clinical sense, but in the sense of what can (and does) happen when people eliminate God from every facet of their lives. Such drastic action creates a slippery slope that knows no bounds -- no, Mr. Hitchens, et al., your "evolution-based" morality has no constraints, because it does not exist. This is why/how society is able to devolve from one that abhors abortion to one that calls an unborn baby a mere lump of flesh -- and, now, to one (in some circles, at least) that considers babies 28 days old or younger expendable.
 
What many people don't realize is that people are sheep, and as such will -- must -- follow someone or something. In the absence of God, there are many things they might follow: lust, power, greed ... in other words, their own selfish tastes and desires, which vary from person to person, thus disproving the notion of a well-defined "universal evolution-based morality" and preventing a societal moral consensus other than "anything goes."
 
As glad as I am that many of the "new atheists" are showing off their foolishness, I hope even more that society in general realizes what's going on and being said. Otherwise, none of us save the select powerful few will have any control over our lives. Already, we have atheists such as Hitchens calling it child abuse for parents to teach religion to their children, and saying that the government ought to be able to step in and take over in such situations. Do you want that? Today's liberals chasten the Bush administration for alleged civil-rights abuses, but nothing the Bush administration has done can hold a candle to what atheists desire for you and I. And their method of operation is the double-standard typical of those who desire power at all costs: they rail against the teaching of religion in public schools (even in religion and philosophy classes) yet work hard to make sure that an atheistic form of evolution is taught in classrooms, as opposed to simply presenting the scientific facts and letting students draw their own conclusions about the universe.
 
*** Everybody: Go see Ben Stein's "Expelled" ***
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To See or Not to See

Hebrews 11 talks about believing in what we can't see. Some people believe only in what they can see -- or touch, or smell, or sense in some other material way. But they are mistaken, far too narrow in their view of things. And the proof, the clues, the evidence -- whatever you want to call it -- is all around us: within us, even.
 
The first thing to consider is the fact that all the things that set us apart from everything else in the natural world -- emotions; the power of reasoned, logical thought; highly developed consciousness and sense of self-awareness -- are all nonmaterial things. Atheists and some scientists say that all these things really do have physical (material) causes -- chemical reactions in the brain, for example -- but this cannot be.
 
It's well-known, among both scientists and nonscientists, that "like begets like": oak trees produce acorns that produce more oak trees, humans produce more humans, and so on. It's quite simple. And in the material universe, you only have material things. Physical organisms may change over time (evolution), but however they might change, they are always physical organisms -- because material things can produce only other material things.
 
Yet we find that humans have several highly developed internal sensibilities that are decidedly nonmaterial. When I say "internal," I don't mean that you can cut open a person's body and see them or touch them; what I mean is that they are inside a person's psyche -- more to the point, they are part of the person himself, who he is and what he's like. For that's what a "person" really is -- not the bundle of nerves, bones and flesh that comprise his physical body, but the nonmaterial entity occupying his physical body. Again, some suggest chemical reactions or other physiological causes for the existence of things like thoughts and emotions, but we have to remember that "like produces like," so no matter how many changes might occur in an organism over time, or how drastic those changes might be, they are all changes of a particular kind: from one physical (material) thing into another physical (material) thing; nothing nonphysical or nonmaterial is involved (strictly speaking). For the physical knows nothing of the nonphysical, and thus cannot even allude to it. Therefore, no physical process could give rise to something nonphysical (like a thought), nor could it even give rise to something that simply appeared to be nonphysical.
 
At this point someone might bring up hallucinations, but this is nonapplicable on two counts. First, when people hallucinate, they think (because of some physiological ailment in the brain or body) that they're seeing something that in reality isn't there -- but these things that they think they're seeing are hallucinations of physical things (people, places, etc.). Sure, people experience emotions while they're hallucinating, but people who are not hallucinating also experience emotions. So unless you're going to say that all "supposedly nonmaterial" things (like thoughts and feelings) are hallucinations, then you can't equate thoughts and feelings with authentic hallucinations.
 
Which leads to the second reason: If you do happen to believe that all "supposedly nonmaterial" things are illusions (hallucinations), then you've painted yourself into a philosophical corner. Because if the whole of human thought, feeling and experience is merely one giant hallucination, then every part of it is equally valid, or equally invalid; you can't throw away one part of it (belief in the nonmaterial) and keep only the parts you like without discrediting yourself. So either all of life is one massive illusion -- in which case there can be no true "right" or "wrong," and I can't be held accountable for what I might do to you -- or else the nonmaterial is as real as the material, in which case God must be given full and earnest consideration.
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