Atheism is full of illogicalities both from an ethical and scientific viewpoint.
This book deals with the ethical aspect of atheism's self-contradictions, and it does it brilliantly.
The only consistency of atheist "morality" or rather of atheism in general is with the requirements of a society that simply wants to follow its own wishes and urges without any constraints.
But this is also a society which was founded on Christianity, therefore the remnants of the ethical system that has dominated it for almost two millennia still echo in the hollow chamber of even the most entrenched atheists.
And here is the origin of another contradiction: modern secularists want their cake and eat it. They don't want an external source of their morality so they can forge it the way they like it, but at the same time they want to feel to be self-righteous and doing "the right thing". So they claim that those qualities and acts that we consider good only in virtue of their adherence to the Christian values can find their grounds on something else. But what?
The options offered are all wanting.
Science. One of the most irrational claims of many atheists is that science can guide morality. Hume's principle is here an invincible obstacle: you cannot derive "ought" from "is".
Subjectivity. But that, as Roversi says, is the opposite of morality, which must by its own very nature be universal and therefore objective.
"Nice, good" feelings, like empathy and compassion. But we also have nasty, bad feelings, destructive and harmful to others. If we are only a conglomerate of atoms and cells bent solely towards survival and self-interest, on what rational - not emotional - grounds can we choose which are better between those two competing groups of feelings?
This book should be read by everyone because the subject it deals with concerns all of us in the most fundamental and vital way. A society cannot survive without ethics and, therefore, without God.
The West is trying on itself an experiment that is bound to fail and is already failing, as we can see, for example, from the devastation of the family, the race towards primitivism, the erosion of civilisation and all their consequences, like multiculturalism, destructive immigration and the growing power of Islam.
Giorgio Roversi's The Amorality of Atheism is the antidote to the poisonous misconceptions and deceptions spread by Hollywood, the mass media and the elites (political and intellectual) every minute of every day.
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Christians forgive, don't fight back, don't retaliate. In this world, in short, they are easy victims, be it of Isis and other violent Muslims in Asia and Africa or of people who try to milk the Church by way of false accusations in our part of the world.
But at least one priest is pushing back.
Xiu Hui "Joseph" Jiang, a 31-year-old Chinese priest who had faced religious persecution in China for his faith, went to America and experienced something similar, albeit presented in a different way.
Not once but twice the St. Louis priest was falsely accused and cleared. He says that the police officers who arrested him didn't investigate the claims, otherwise they wouldn't have arrested him.
In the first case, involving a girl, Judge Chris Kunza Mennemeyer dismissed the charge of "child endangerment" in November 2013 because Father Jiang had never been alone with the alleged victim, so it was impossible for him to perpetrate the sex abuse of which he had been wildly accused.
In the second case, in April 2014 prosecutors charged Fr. Jiang with two felony counts of first-degree statutory sodomy involving a boy younger than 14.
The archdiocese [of St. Louis] said in a statement issued Friday that the new allegation was reported through the Missouri Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline by a family who over the past year has been pursuing a claim against the archdiocese related to their child being bullied by other students.
“The family had never claimed that their child was abused by a priest until this week,” the statement said. “Fr. Jiang voluntarily surrendered yesterday at the request of police pending a decision whether charges are going to be brought.”
At the time the archdiocese of St. Louis released this statement:
“During the investigation into the veracity of the abuse allegation, Fr. Joseph Jiang agreed to undergo an independent polygraph examination. According to the report released, the examiners concluded that Fr. Jiang responded truthfully in his steadfast denials of sexual abuse of a minor at any point in his life, both during his interview and polygraph examination.”
Last month prosecutors decided to dismiss the charges, quite likely for lack of any evidence to support them.
Now Father Jiang has resolved that enough is enough and, in a first, he has filed a federal lawsuit against his accusers, members of the St. Louis police department for publicly accusing him of being a child molester and two leaders of the group SNAP, who launched a smear campaign against him through the media.
In both 2012 and 2014, Rev. Jiang was publicly accused of abuse charges which received wide media attention with SNAP breathlessly claiming that Jiang was a dangerous child molester on the prowl. Yet even at a glance the accusations against Jiang were clearly bogus.
In his lawsuit, Fr. Jiang sets forth a litany of facts which demonstrate just how crazy one accuser's claims were from the start:
◾The accuser's fourth-grade teacher has stated that it was "virtually impossible" that Fr. Jiang pulled the accuser "out of line" at school and abused him as claimed;
◾"The alleged victim had made previous unfounded allegations of sexual abuse";
◾"[The accuser's] fourth-grade teacher indicated that [the accuser] was a serial exaggerator to the point of being 'delusional'";
◾"[The accuser's] parents had a history of making unfounded claims against the Catholic Church for monetary gain";
◾"[The accuser] has never had any personal acquaintance with Fr. Joseph, and he could not identify Fr. Joseph's name when he made the allegation";
◾"[A parent of the accuser once] physically assaulted the principal of [a Catholic school] by choking him or her";
◾"The accusations were brought by a deeply troubled and unreliable 12-year-old boy at the suggestion of his abusive father."
SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) is a controversial association. Reading its material, you find plenty of cases in which a mere accusation, unsupported or not established to be true, against a Catholic priest is treated as an irrefutable proof of guilt. They don't seem to go by the rule "innocent until proven guilty" but on the contrary "guilty until proven innocent (and even after that)".
Based in St Louis, SNAP refers clients to law firms that have pried no less than 2 billion dollars from the US Catholic Church in settlements and judgements between 1992 and 2010, some of which the law firms return to SNAP in donations. A SNAP director had a salary of $90,000 a few years ago.
The two leaders of SNAP who fiercely attacked Father Jiang in the media are Barbara Dorris and David Clohessy. The latter says that he had repressed his memories of abuse at the hands of a priest.
Indeed, many of the claims against Catholic clergy have been based on "repressed and then recovered memories", although the theory behind them is not accepted by the consensus of scientific psychology, despite being the basis of widespread beliefs and practices of lots of "therapists" in a field which is unregulated and where rarely a professional is accountable for his actions and malpractice, unlike other professionals like doctors.
Memory simply doesn't work like that. Memory is not the faithful taperecorder or mirror of events that most of us believe it to be: it's much more "creative" than that.
World expert on memory, Professor Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, for 30 years has been performing experiments showing that any memory can be easily implanted, making people "remember" with certainty something that never happened.
Israel’s unfair treatment of Christians continues. At the end of June, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) arrested Greek Orthodox Bishop Atallah Hanna during his peaceful participation in a march protesting the illegal seizure and subsequent sale of Beit al-Baraka hospital, which is part of al-Baraka church, north of Hebron.
A delegation from the Presbyterian church as well as international and Israeli activists participated in the march against the sale of Beit al-Baraka, a hospital which provided medical services to Palestinians as part of al-Baraka church services. The sale is illegal under international and canonical law…
Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month leaked details of the seizure of Beit al-Baraka hospital by a Jewish billionaire, the sale having been allegedly made through a fake Norwegian real estate company. Days after publication of this illegal seizure, the sale process halted, however Israeli Defense Minister, Moshe Ya’alon, subsequently decided that there was no legal impediment to the sale of the building.
The previous week saw one of the most serious episodes of violence in recent memory against Christians in Israel.
Five teams of firefighters were necessary to put out the flames which at dawn woke up Tabgha, the area on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, in northern Israel, where Jesus fed the 5,000 with the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Mark 6:30-46) and where Jesus appeared for the fourth time after his resurrection following his Crucifixion (John 21:1-24).
A fire broke out at the Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish, built on the site of the miracle, in the middle of the night, “causing extensive damage to the inside and outside of the building, said Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.” A monk and a church volunteer were hospitalised from smoke inhalation.
A spokesman for the fire brigade said that the blaze broke out in several places inside the limestone church, evidence that it was started deliberately.
Hebrew graffiti had been spray-painted in red on a wall outside the church, reading "False gods will be destroyed”, a passage from the Aleinu Leshabeach, a prayer recited by practising Jews at the end of each of the three daily services, suggesting that Jewish zealots were responsible.
So much for the much-vaunted "Judaeo-Christian tradition". These Israeli Jews didn't get the memo.
Police briefly detained 16 young Jewish settlers, all religious Jewish seminary students visiting the Sea of Galilee area from settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. They were freed within hours. Police spokeswoman Luba Samri said that 10 of those detained were from Yitzhar, which is known as a bastion of extremists and where some residents have been involved in previous hate crimes.
The Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fish is one of the Holy Land’s most famous Catholic churches and one of the places most visited by pilgrims to the Holy Land, with more than 5,000 people visiting it daily. The church had to be closed for a few days due to the fire damage.
Nahum Weisfish, a Jerusalem rabbi, said the site might have been targeted because it housed a synagogue some 2,000 years ago.
The site is owned by the German Roman Catholic Church, and Berlin's envoy to Israel Andreas Michaelis said he was "shocked" by the incident, adding: "Religious institutions must be as well protected in Israel as they are in Germany and Europe."
That’s exactly the point. If Israel wants to be considered as a Western democracy, it’s no good to argue that Christians in the Jewish state are not butchered and tortured with the degree of barbarity we find in Muslim countries and Muslim-controlled areas. The difference pointed out between Israel and other Middle Eastern nations is true, but the right object of comparison for a country which claims to be part of the West should be Western democracies.
Tabgha had been subjected to a previous attack in April 2014. Father Matthias Karl, a German monk at the church, explained that a group of religious Jewish teenagers had pelted worshippers with stones, destroyed a cross and threw benches into the lake.
In April, vandals smashed gravestones at a Maronite Christian cemetery near Israel's northern border with Lebanon.
In recent years, many mosques and churches have been vandalised in both Israel and the West Bank.
The attacks are often attributed to extremist Jews, particularly from West Bank settlements, but, despite condemnations and promises of crackdown on religiously-inspired hate crime by Israeli politicians, few have been convicted.
The Rabbis for Human Rights group says there have been 43 hate crime attacks on churches, mosques and monasteries in Israel and the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2009.
Many of these are so-called "price-tag" attacks, carried out against Israeli security forces as well as Palestinian property, both Muslim and Christian, in reprisal for Israeli government’s action against the Jewish illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. The name indicates that these attacks are the price to pay for anti-settlement activity.
The US State Department's 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism included price-tag attacks for the first time. It says: “In August, the Beit Jamal Monastery near Jerusalem was firebombed and spray-painted with the words “death to the Gentiles” and other slogans.”
It quotes UN figures of “399 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage.” It adds that such attacks were “largely unprosecuted according to UN and NGO sources.”
Whenever there is mention of the UN, Zionists reject wholesale every one of its pronouncements or reports because it is "pro-Palestinian". The implication is that it is biased. They often argue that all Muslim countries, through the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), vote as a bloc in the UN, thus skewing the vote results in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel. OIC is a 57-member state organisation representing 1.5 billion Muslims around the world. As the largest Islamic organization in the world, it is quite powerful and the largest voting bloc in the UN.
Could it be that the UN is "pro-Palestinian" because of the right of return that Israel denies that people or the 3/4 of a million illegal settlers in Israel’s occupied territories?
Israel’s Joint Arab List party alliance, in the wake of the latest attack, that against the Church of the Multiplication, called for the immediate dismissal of Israel's police chief, Yohanan Danino, and for Right-wing extremist groups to be declared terrorist organisations. It also accused the government of doing nothing to control extremist Right-wing organisations:
"Netanyahu stands at the head of the incitement system against the Arab public in Israel, and he is guilty of the revenge attacks we witness in the morning news," the party stated. "A so-called price-tag attack is not an act by deviants, but rather an act by calculated, thinking people that are indicative of the existence and repercussions of institutionalized racism and oppression."
Prime Minister Netanyahu has used strong words against the recent unknown vandals, but it’s impossible not to notice that the perpetrators of this kind of crime have almost never been identified, captured and put on trial. Isn’t it a bit strange, in a country which has an impressive and efficient security and police apparatus?
In 2014, just before Pope Francis’ visit to Israel, in Jerusalem both the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Notre Dame Center, the large Christian complex just outside the Old City, were covered with offensive graffiti. Before that, the Franciscan Church near the Last Supper Room, the Dormition Abbey and a nearby Christian cemetery were attacked. In 2012, using methods similar to those employed in Tabghah, the Latrun Trappist Monastery had been attacked. People tried and sentenced? Nil.
With all the best will in the world, it’s a bit hard to see Netanyahu as someone who doggedly pursues Jewish vandals coming from the settlements. That’s because Netanyahu is and has always been the settlements’ number one supporter. When Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza in 2004, Netanyahu left his government in protest. In the last twenty years the surface occupied by Israeli settlements in the occupied territories has grown by over 180%, and for at least half of this time Netanyahu has been Prime Minister.
The last act of the previous Netanyahu government, the one that led to the disintegration of the government and early elections, was its approval of the law that defines Israel as the "state of the Jewish nation", potentially discriminating against ethnic and religious minorities.
In short, all of Netanyahu’s political action has been in favour of the settlements policy. He has drawn a growing political support from it. The reality is that today the settlers are those who dictate the political trend in Israel. Their interests influence the agenda of governments. The intransigence of those who hold the front line, even risking their lives, is to be respected. The rest, including arsons, is just a consequence.
Living cells contain vesicles, sacs that transport water and substances like proteins and lipids among different compartments of the cell, including between the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and the Golgi apparatus, or between the outside and the interior of the cell.
The formation of such trafficking vesicles is among the most fundamental processes taking place in the cell.
A team of scientists of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Heidelberg has produced - using low-temperature cryo-electron tomography - the most detailed pictures ever obtained of the coats surrounding transport vesicles, images that have revealed a thus-far unimagined complexity.
This is the first time that a model of a complete assembled vesicle coat has been realised. The study, published in Science earlier this month, contradicts the current “adaptor-and-cage” view of coated vesicle formation.
The way these highly interconnected coats, made of proteins, function has been compared to a self-driving car which, when you walk out of your front door, assembles around you, rises from the ground, takes you to your destination levitating in the air, then disassembles, ready to pick up another passenger. Something very similar does happen in biological cells.
Progress in science constantly shows that life is much more intricated, sophisticated and complex than we suppose.
There are three types of known transport vesicles, each with its specific type of coat which is composed of different proteins and assembles onto a membrane surrounding the vesicle: Clathrin-coated vesicle (CCV), Coat Protein 1 (COPI), Coat Protein 2 (COPII).
While it was believed that the assembled COPI coat was similar to Clathrin and COPII, it was found instead that it is more complicated, having seven proteins coming together simultaneously and forming complexes with triangular symmetry that allow the complex to attach to the vesicle membrane. The "triads" forming the coat are called "coatomers":
[A]ssembled coatomer can adopt different conformations to interact with different numbers of neighbors. By regulating the relative frequencies of different triad patterns in the COPI coat during assembly -- for example, by stabilizing particular coatomer conformations -- the cell would have a mechanism to adapt vesicle size and shape to cargoes of different sizes.[Emphasis added]
The complexity of these coats, and the accessory proteins that build them, attach them to vesicles and disassemble them, defy unguided evolutionary explanations. They exhibit irreducible complexity; they don't work unless all the protein parts are present simultaneously.
An irreducibly complex mechanism is such that it cannot work unless all its components are present at the same time.
Many machines exhibit this property. But so do many biological mechanisms and organs.
When modifying the design of a machine, an engineer is not bound by the need to maintain a real continuity between the first machine and the next modification .. But in evolution, transitions from one type to the next presumably involve a greater continuity by means of a vast number of intermediate types. Not only must the end product - the final machine - be feasible, but so must be all the intermediates. The evolutionary problem is, in a real sense, the gradual improvement of a machine while it is running.
Frazzetta, an expert in functional biomechanics (the study of how animals work) had for many years studied and dissected the skulls of the bolyerine snakes, rare snakes of the Island of Mauritius. These animals, similar to boas, have a unique anatomical specialisation: their upper jaw is made up of two segments joined together and requiring many specialised tendons, bones, ligaments, muscles, nerves and other tissues.
This characteristic allows the bolyerine snakes to bend the front half of their divided upper jaw backwards when attacking a prey, resulting in a wider opening of the mouth.
How could this system of interconnected tendons, ligaments, muscles, bones and nerves have evolved gradually, as neo-Darwinism contends? It's an all-or-nothing situation.
No intermediate condition could have worked and consented the viability of this species.
On 16 July 2015 Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, a Muslim man, opened fire at two different military centres six miles apart (the first a military recruitment station and the second a Navy and Marines reserve facility) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, wounding two service members and a police officer and killing four other service members immediately. One of the wounded servicemen died from his injuries two days later. The gunman was killed by police at the site of the second shooting.
The killer was a 24-year-old Muslim immigrant from Kuwait granted US citizenship, a college graduate with a degree in electrical engineering.
The authorities' head scratching in search of a motive for the killing is slightly ridiculous, if the situation were not tragic.
Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez is dead now but has left vital clues in a blog he ran on his Islamic beliefs. The blog has only two posts, both posted just three days before his horrific crime. The Daily Mailreports:
The first post was entitled 'A Prison Called Dunya,' Abdulazeez refers to prisoner who is told he would be given a test that would either take him out of his earthly prison - or send him into a more restrictive environment.
According to the website [The Daily Beast], he wrote: 'I would imagine that any sane person would devote their time to mastering the information on the study guide and stay patient with their studies, only giving time for the other things around to keep themselves focused on passing the exam.
He added: 'This life is that test, designed to separate the inhabitants of Paradise from the inhabitants of Hellfire.'
The second post is called 'Understanding Islam: The Story of the Three Blind Men.' It suggests Abdulazeez felt his fellow Muslims had a 'certain understanding of Islam and keep a tunnel vision of what we think Islam is.
He also wrote:
Brothers and sisters don't be fooled by your desires, this life is short and bitter and the opportunity to submit to Allah may pass you by.
As measures of terrorism prevention, six different governors of US states have authorised their respective National Guard soldiers to be armed for both deterrence and self-protection, while the Pentagon recommends "closing the blinds" ("that won't stop bullets, but may help cut down on the air conditioning bill", is The Examiner's sarcastic comment) and other "new security measures" such as increased surveillance.
These are not real, effective preventative measures, and nobody genuinely believes they are.
Much more sense makes what the American evangelist Franklin Graham proposed on his Facebook page, namely completely closing the US borders to Islam:
Four innocent Marines (United States Marine Corps) killed and three others wounded in #Chattanooga yesterday including a policeman and another Marine--all by a radical Muslim whose family was allowed to immigrate to this country from Kuwait. We are under attack by Muslims at home and abroad. We should stop all immigration of Muslims to the U.S. until this threat with Islam has been settled. Every Muslim that comes into this country has the potential to be radicalized--and they do their killing to honor their religion and Muhammad. During World War 2, we didn't allow Japanese to immigrate to America, nor did we allow Germans. Why are we allowing Muslims now? Do you agree? Let your Congressman know that we've got to put a stop to this and close the flood gates. Pray for the men and women who serve this nation in uniform, that God would protect them.
Islam divides the world into two parts: Dar al-Islam (Arabic for "house of Islam") and Dar al-Harb (in Arabic, "house of war"). The latter is the whole part of the world where Islam has not yet triumphed and Islamic law is not in force. For Islam, there must be war initiated by Muslims against all those peoples and in all those countries who have not yet submitted to Islam until they have done so.
What about all those peaceful and law-abiding Muslims living in the West? They cannot do anything to stop their extreme co-religionists, who not only are more determined but also have the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence on their side.
As Theodore Dalrymple put it, a minority can have much more power than a majority, on which it can exercise tyranny:
[A] handful of fanatics can easily have a much more significant social effect than a large number of peaceful citizens. There is more to fear in one terrorist than to celebrate in 99 well-integrated immigrants.
Researchers are developing miniature models of human organs on plastic chips, which will replace lab animals. Big pharmaceutical companies have started using these in vitro systems in drug development.
The science journal Nature reported that earlier this month at the Organ-on-a-Chip World Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, Big Pharma showed great and immediate interest in the latest advances in miniature model organs exhibited there that respond to drugs and diseases in the same way as do human organs such as the heart and liver:
“We’re surprised at how rapidly the technology has come along,” says Dashyant Dhanak, global head of discovery sciences at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, which announced last month that it would use a thrombosis-on-chip model from Massachusetts biotechnology firm Emulate to test whether experimental and already approved drugs could cause blood clots.
With the help of a 3D printer mini human organs can come in all shapes and sizes. In this video, a cluster of tiny hearts – shown on the right – beat in sync, and another pulsing heart is fused with a spherical, darker-coloured liver.
Developed by Anthony Atala and his team at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the mini-organs represent the first step in developing an entire human body on a chip.
The hearts were created by reprogramming human skin cells into heart cells, which were then clumped together in a cell culture. A 3D printer was then used to give them the desired shape and size – in this case, a diameter of 0.25 millimetres.
Organs-on-chips are more realistic – and more reliable for drug discovery and testing – models of the human body than both human cell cultures and the very expensive lab animals, that belonging to other species frequently give dangerously misleading results.
Although any new drug must first be tested in healthy humans for safety, says James Hickman, a bioengineer at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, using an in vitro organ might help to eliminate or shorten this step.
The chips could also help companies to pinpoint the dose of a drug that is both effective and safe, says Matthew Wagoner, a drug-safety scientist at AstraZeneca in Waltham, Massachusetts. If regulators accept such data, the method might eventually allow companies to skip the portion of a clinical trial that tests a wide range of drug doses on patients.
The scaled-down organs mimic the function of the real life-size organs. The next step, in order to reproduce the complexity of a human body, is to integrate these different model organs and systems together and reproduce a whole organ system, to test new treatments and drugs or examine the effects of chemicals and viruses.
[M]any pharmaceutical companies say that organs-on-chips are now sufficiently advanced to justify investment in their use and refinement. “We think it’s important to be involved,” says Michelle Browner, senior director of platform innovation at Johnson & Johnson. Only that way can the technology be developed in line with what the company needs, she says.
Government regulators are also participating. In autumn the US National Center on Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) will organise a meeting of drug companies, scientists and regulators on the Organ-on-a-Chip’s use. And NCATS is financing 11 research teams, each of which working on a different organ or system that, when developed, will be connected to form a whole ‘body-on-a-chip’.
