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“I am seeing more and more bumper stickers saying, ‘God, save us from your people,'” said Walsch, author of “Tomorrow’s God,” which proposes a broader concept of God than traditional religions. “Most of the killing in our world has not been done by those who do not believe in God but by those who do.”

This is a silly statement in several senses, since it is manifestly not true that most of the killing in human history has been done by those who believe in the Judeo-Christian God. Even if Walsch is speaking crudely and incorrectly lumping in the worshippers of every historical pagan god and goddess with those who worship(ped) Allah, Pharoah, Caesar, Kali Durga or Jesus Christ as functionally identical believers in a deity of one sort or another, his assertion is meaningless since this encompasses the overwhelming majority of individuals past and present. The only relevant point is whether these diverse religionists are disproportionately responsible for bloodshed; the unprecedented murders of the godless Soviets, Chinese and Kampucheans indicates that atheists have a far greater taste for blood sacrifice than anyone since the Aztecs.

“Atheists are pretty much demonized,” Castle [co-founder of Atheists for Human Rights] said. “People see atheists as anti-religious, anti-something good and with no moral compass. We want to show that we do have a moral compass and it is based on making this world the best that there is because, in our view, it is the only one there is.”

Perhaps they see atheists this way because atheists are openly and overtly anti-religious. Christianity, provably the most humane and civilizing force in human history, is certainly something atheists oppose, even hate, and I’ve yet to encounter a single atheist who can make a case that his moral compass is anything but something instilled by the Judeo-Christian culture in which he has been raised. Sans what they unwittingly absorb from the world around them, they have no moral compass – which is why we can expect general societal immorality to increase in America as the ability of Christianity to influence non-believing individuals continues to wane.

Nonbelievers — they go by various names, including atheists, humanists, freethinkers and brights — say their goal is to become a part of the everyday fabric of society and be as accepted as anybody else.

Atheists remind me of the obnoxious fat kid who can’t figure out why everybody hates him. If you insist on giving yourself titles that imply everyone else is anti-human, a slave thinker and dull, don’t be surprised when no one wants anything to do with you. They’re pretty bright, those godless. Interesting, too, that not a one of these supposedly first-rate thinkers was able to successfully make a case for either atheist rationality or morality in this forum a few months ago.

Consider the following sequence of events.

1. 12-20-1860. South Carolina secedes from the Union.

2. 02-28-1861. U.S. House passes proposed 13th Amendment, 133-65.

3. 03-02-1861. U.S. Senate passes proposed 13th Amendment, 39-5.

4. 03-04-1861. Abraham Lincoln inaugurated as U.S. President.

5. 07-11-1861. Ten remaining Southern senators expelled from the Senate, 32-10.

Now, keep in mind that there were 34 states at that time, thus 68 senators. The twenty-two senators from the Southern states mostly resigned or never showed up, and as for their seats: “During a brief special session in March 1861, weeks before the start of hostilities, the Senate decided to consider these seats as vacant to avoid officially recognizing that it was possible for a state to leave the Union.”

This is significant as it proves that the Southern senators were not present to vote on the proposed 13th Amendment that passed in February and March. President Lincoln even referred to this Amendment in his inaugural address, saying:

I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

And what was this amendment? It was as follows:

No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.

Three Northern states ratified this amendment, Ohio, Maryland and Illinois. To make matters even more clear, Lincoln stated:

Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that— I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

He also makes it clear that he will recognize no right of secession or brook any possibility of breaking the Union, which he states is perpetual and unbreakable as well as being pre-Constitutional:

I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself…. It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.

So, the facts are that the Northern House and Senate approved a Constitutional amendment permitting slavery and President Lincoln publicly announced his approval of this amendment in his inaugural address. To conclude that they then elected to fight a war with the primary purpose of ending slavery only three months later is not just incorrect, but downright absurd. Slavery was merely the primary flash point, it could have as easily been homogamy, abortion or any other issue on which people seriously disagree. This sequence of events demonstrates very clearly that the Civil War was about nothing but maintaining central state power, or, in Lincoln’s famous words, “preserving the Union”. Indeed, had the Southern states been willing to accept their continued economic abuse by the North, we might well still have slavery in the United States today. So died the American Revolution and with it the revolutionary concept of free and mutual association.

Ironic, is it not, that it should be argued that a people have no right to self-determination on the basis of living under a government that permits the ownership of human beings as private property. It seems to me that this argument involves little more than the simple exchange of private slavery for public slavery.

In speaking for his amendment, Pinckney told messengers there is an abundance of evidence “government schools are becoming more and more anti-Christian,” though he acknowledged “many differences from one public school to another.” He commended Christians teaching and working in public schools.

I wonder how many people would, in like manner, wish to commend those Christians who worked in the death camps of Auschwitz, bringing “light and salt” to the inmates and guards alike? I don’t care at all about intentions, it’s the reality of the actions and predictable results that matter. Pinckney had the right idea with his resolution; why throw the sell-outs a bone?

In response, Calvin Wittman, Resolutions Committee chairman, expressed opposition, telling messengers the convention had passed 11 resolutions on education in the last 19 years, pronouncing its support for public, private and home schooling. In a statement issued later, Wittman said, “Southern Baptists have spoken to this issue sufficiently, and it does not need to be readdressed.”

Wittman sounds like a leftist radical: “We won, therefore the matter has been settled and should never be brought up again. If we lose, however, that only means that the world/nation/organization is not yet ready and we will be back next year with the same proposition.” And, of course, he skips over the fact that the resolution was killed in committee, not addressed by the convention.

After Pinckney’s resolution was defeated, messengers approved the resolution on secularization with few opposing votes. The measure called for Southern Baptists to “cry out in desperation to God” and seek His forgiveness “for our part in the cultural decline that is taking place on our watch.” It also urged them to hold government officials accountable “for their personal conduct and the legislation” they support.

It figures. They’re pleased to “cry out in desperation”, but the thought of actually doing anything themselves to challenge the single greatest engine of societal secularization is unthinkable. Well, the SBC leadership may be weak sisters on this one issue, but I have confidence that this will change over time, as the government schools continue to devolve towards overt paganism. At least the SBC leadership is not in direct opposition to the Bible and Jesus Christ’s teachings as are some of their counterparts in other denominations.

Great, great game yesterday, and for once the Dutch didn’t choke so much as they were outplayed by a team performing to the utmost of its ability. It looked like the Orange were going to run away with it, up 2-0 after twenty minutes, when Giovanni van Bronckhorst demonstrated why he’ll never play for Arsenal again in making a horrid back pass to no one. The Czechs jumped on it and the game was on.

Paolo Nedved was incredible, getting stronger as the game went on until he took complete control somewhere around the 75th minute. The winning goal was a brilliant display of unselfishness as Poborci declined to risk drilling the ball home from four feet away, instead faking a shot to force Van der Sar to commit himself, then flicking the ball square to create a certain finish for Smicer. Definitely the best game of the tournament so far, although the Czechs were helped by a dumb substitute by Advocaat, who removed Robben for Gosvelt which resulted in ceding control of the midfield to Nedved.

I didn’t watch the German game, but it was apparently a real snoozer. If they couldn’t score against Latvia, I don’t like their chances against the Czechs, not when Nedved is hitting crossbars from 35-40 yards away. For today, I’m thinking Greece knocks off Russia in a technical upset that everyone is expecting, and home referee conspiracies notwithstanding, Spain finishes off Portugal.

My late friend, Nobel laureate (economics), F.A. Hayek told me years ago when I visited him in Germany that decades before he had a discussion with the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes, where Keynes told him that he (Keynes) had made a terrible mistake and was prepared to write an important piece to disavow deficit spending and hence paper money creation. But two weeks later Keynes died. World governments have all embraced Keynes’ mixed up theories because it gave them a convenient solution to cover up their economic mismanagement. Because of this, huge debts and huge piles of paper money have been fostered on populations creating what is now an economic tidal wave that is now on the horizon.

How would that have changed the world, I wonder? Keynes is almost single-handedly responsible for handing governments the world over an excuse to economically rape their citizenry. What a treasure a recanting essay would be!

Unfortunately, the Southern Baptist Convention didn’t see fit to allow a vote on encouraging its membership to remove its children from the government schools. I didn’t expect the motion to pass on the first go-round, but I did expect the leadership to permit a vote considering how strong the homeschooling movement is among Southern Baptists and other evangelical Christians.

I’m not concerned, though. The issue isn’t going away. The various offshoots of the Perfect Aryan Bible Study must have around fifty children that belong to its extended family, and I’d be surprised if a third of them are in state-run institutions – there are more of them suffering the lack of socialization that comes with being homeschooled than are having their little brains washed by government propagandists.

It will be interesting to see what they will have to see their children experience before the SBC leadership sees fit to stop supporting government-run schools. Graduates who can’t read? Fifth-graders forced to perform sex acts on their teacher in order to prove they learned something in sex ed? Seventh-graders sacrificing a goat to Satan in World Religion 101? Ninth-graders turning in their parents to the Tolerance Police for thought crimes against humanity?

What’s sad is that no matter how bad the schools get, you’ll always be able to find a Christian who will justify them somehow. “I know they’re worshipping Satan and using the naked body of their teacher as an altar, but they do have some of the best test scores in the state, and besides, his friends are all there.”

It was a great game yesterday, and the Italians surprised me with their effectiveness in controlling the midfield in the first half without Totti. But del Piero and Vieri were miserable in front of goal and squandered too many chances, missing the opportunity to put the game away early. Sweden didn’t win as I had predicted, but the draw puts them in the driver’s seat for the group. Denmark, as expected, had no trouble with Bulgaria and could easily have doubled its two goals.

Italy has to worry now, as a 2-2 draw or higher will knock them out of the tournament even if they beat Bulgaria. In any case, I suspect Trappatoni will be out of a job unless the Azzurri come home with the trophy. They won’t be able to blame anything on a Uruguayan referee this time.

As for today’s games, I expect Germany to trounce Latvia and Holland to win a tight game against the Czechs. The latter could go either way, but I expect the orange-clad head cases to pull it together for a change. The Czechs weren’t great against Latvia and as the German game proved, Holland has enough talent to rescue it even on nights when the team isn’t playing well.

As those who have read this blog from the beginning may remember, I have had a few run-ins with defensive atheists who took umbrage at being referred to as irrational for failing to fully embrace the sociopathy of the truly godless. In almost every case, those atheists who wrote to me criticized Christianity for being responsible for the “millions” of individuals killed by the Inquisition, which they regard to be one of the most monstrous institutions in human history.

I stated at the time that this only demonstrated their historical ignorance, as contrary to the cluelessness of the masses, historians have long known that the Inquisition was a markedly human institution, a civilizing force and one that was relatively innocent of bloodshed. This sounds like blasphemy to those who have gotten the bulk of their Inquisitional history from Monty Python instead of source material in the original Latin, but there is no certainty so self-assured as the arrogance of the ignorant. Now, copious and conclusive evidence has been released which demonstrates that these atheists are not only irrational, but downright uneducated.

In 1998 the Vatican opened the archives of the Holy Office (the modern successor to the Inquisition) to a team of 30 scholars from around the world. Now at last the scholars have made their report, an 800-page tome that was unveiled at a press conference in Rome on Tuesday. Its most startling conclusion is that the Inquisition was not so bad after all. Torture was rare and only about 1 percent of those brought before the Spanish Inquisition were actually executed. As one headline read “Vatican Downsizes Inquisition.”

The amazed gasps and cynical sneers that have greeted this report are just further evidence of the lamentable gulf that exists between professional historians and the general public. The truth is that, although this report makes use of previously unavailable material, it merely echoes what numerous scholars have previously learned from other European archives. Among the best recent books on the subject are Edward Peters’s Inquisition (1988) and Henry Kamen’s The Spanish Inquisition (1997), but there are others. Simply put, historians have long known that the popular view of the Inquisition is a myth….

Compared to other medieval secular courts, the Inquisition was positively enlightened. Why then are people in general and the press in particular so surprised to discover that the Inquisition did not barbecue people by the millions? First of all, when most people think of the Inquisition today what they are really thinking of is the Spanish Inquisition. No, not even that is correct. They are thinking of the myth of the Spanish Inquisition. Amazingly, before 1530 the Spanish Inquisition was widely hailed as the best run, most humane court in Europe. There are actually records of convicts in Spain purposely blaspheming so that they could be transferred to the prisons of the Spanish Inquisition. After 1530, however, the Spanish Inquisition began to turn its attention to the new heresy of Lutheranism. It was the Protestant Reformation and the rivalries it spawned that would give birth to the myth.

The 763-page report states that approximately 1,250 sentences of death were meted out, around one percent of the 125,000 heresy trials, over a period of 356 years. Accounting for population differences, it was thus about one-half as deadly on an annual basis as children’s bicycles in the United States. (This about one-quarter of the 6,000 deaths usually estimated by academic historians, however the larger number refers to the entire Inquisition, not only the Spanish.) Keep this in mind the next time that an atheist wishes to lecture you on the historical crimes of Christianity. The world will be fortunate indeed if the determinedly secular experiment of the newly constitutional (if still unratified) European Union should turn out to be one-tenth as civilized as the dread Spanish Inquisition.

Responding to scattered reports of physicians nationwide using unsavory tactics to fight for state aid and lawsuit liability caps, House Democratic leadership is pitching a law that would prohibit Pennsylvania doctors from refusing to treat a patient based on the patient’s job, political opinions or litigation history.

It could be the first proposal of its kind in the United States, and it’s already drawing criticism from the Pennsylvania Medical Society, which said the law is unnecessary and would unfairly target doctors, when attorneys — doctors’ nemesis in the fight for lawsuit caps — are free to turn down clients as they please.

It is a very strange argument which insists that doctors must treat everyone. A right to free association, not to mention one’s own labor, dictates that a doctor can treat or not treat anyone he wants, for any reason. There is no moral claim to another individual’s knowledge, skills or labor, and I find poetic justice in witnessing physicians declining to treat trial lawyers, who are making a parasitic living off of them.

This is not to say that physicians are a collective paragon of virtue either. The AMA has probably caused more pain to more Americans through drastically reducing the number of medical schools and practicing doctors than almost any other organization outside the federal government. Watching the two sides battle is a win-win situation for the outside spectator – one rather hopes they will both lose.

Gregg writes: But seriously, who would tell their daughter: Honey, get a boob job and grow you hair out, and you can get more dates. Every women is someone elses daughter. Sorry Vox, but you are giving very poor advice, unless I missunderstand you.

Who would tell their daughter that? Anyone whose daughter is unhappy with her progress in mate-finding and is also cognizant with the way the world operates. First, is the statement true or not? Second, we’re not talking about 15 year-old girls here, we’re talking about 30-something women who have more than a decade of unsuccessfully doing it their own way under their belt and whose basic assumptions about the elements of attraction are clearly in direct violation of that which has long demonstrated proven appeal to men.

Now, I could have easily added ten other elements, but I was simply going with the two most obvious things. The idiocy of dismissing superficialities as unimportant is profound, as one cannot start with anything but superficialities here. And obviously, if a woman is happy with her life and does not want to attract more masculine attention, this advice would not apply to her.

Consider two women. Similar builds and facial structure, both dressed similarly in a silk blouse, short skirt, and heels. One has short hair, no chest, a degree from Brown and works at a law firm. The other has a long mane that reaches to her posterior, a Casta-lian chest, a certification as a personal trainer and works as an aerobics instructor. I would bet that if given the choice between the two, nine out of ten men would choose to ask out the latter, including 9/10 Ivy League-educated lawyers.

In fact, most of the less-educated men wouldn’t consider asking out the first woman at all, correctly reading, (consciously or subconsciously), her signals that she doesn’t want to date anyone “beneath” her. And what is a breast augmentation – $5k and a week of recovery – compared to the $100,000 and six years that go into obtaining an advanced degree that runs a real risk of hurting a woman’s chances of finding the sort of man she wants to marry. Law firms hire secretaries too, after all, and if you want to meet young executives, you’ll probably meet more as a nanny for a CEO’s family than you will by becoming yet another middle manager yourself.

I’m not saying that things should ideally be this way, I’m only recommending accepting the world as it actually operates. Pragmatism and practicality have their places, and the Search for the Other is one of them. What is the conflicting principle anyhow, the right of everyone to be considered equally attractive? Please.