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Evolution and Atheism Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. ~ Richard Dawkins,

Rules of atheism "Science":

Rule #1 God is IRRELEVANT
Rule #2 If God is relevant, see Rule #1
Rule #3 If God might be relevant, see Rule #1

Theists will consider natural causes.
Atheists will ONLY consider natural causes.

Theism posits an eternal mind followed by contingent matter.
Atheism posits matter followed by contingent minds.

Although I am a keen advocate of freedom of opinion in all questions, it seems to me (rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and Theism hardly have any effect on the public; and that freedom of thought will best be promoted by that gradual enlightening of human understanding which follows the progress of science. I have therefore always avoided writing about religion and have confined myself to science. 

Possibly I have been too strongly influenced by the thought of the concern it might cause some members of my family, if in any way I lent my support to direct attacks on religion. ~ Charles Darwin

The overt rejection of logic in relation to such matters, as is apparent in the present day, can be traced back to a series of historical accidents that happened over a century ago. In the middle years of the nineteenth century the Church had become a formidable social force to be reckoned with through most of Western Europe. The power of the Church provoked resentment in some circles, and the only way forward to become freed of what seemed to be its repressive regime was to attack the very foundation of its beliefs. To such an end an intellectual movement was launched that culminated in the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. This book has been widely acclaimed and interpreted as being a justification for abandoning the biblical ideas of creation in favour of random processes. Such processes are thought initially to operate on inorganic chemicals leading to primitive life, and thereafter on living systems themselves to produce the spectacle of life in its entirety.  ~ Fred Hoyle 

The root of the problem is that "science" has two distinct definitions in our culture. On the one hand, science refers to a method of investigation involving things like careful measurements, repeatable experiments, and especially a skeptical, open-minded attitude that insists that all claims be carefully tested. Science also has become identified with a philosophy known as materialism or scientific naturalism. This philosophy insists that nature is all there is, or at least the only thing about which we can have any knowledge. It follows that nature had to do its own creating, and that the means of creation must not have included any role for God. Students are not supposed to approach this philosophy with open-minded skepticism, but to believe it on faith.

The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is the main scientific prop for scientific naturalism. Students first learn that "evolution is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more about what that "fact" means. It means that all living things are the product of mindless material forces such as chemical laws, natural selection, and random variation. So God is totally out of the picture, and humans (like everything else) are the accidental product of a purposeless universe. Do you wonder why a lot of people suspect that these claims go far beyond the available evidence?  ~ Phillip Johnson 

The Darwinian revolution was not merely the replacement of one scientific theory by another, as had been the scientific revolutions in the physical sciences, but rather the replacement of a world view, in which the supernatural was accepted as a normal and relevant explanatory 

principle, by a new world view in which there was no room for supernatural forces. ~ Ernst Mayr

I suspect there is a lot of intellectual dishonesty on this issue. Consider the following fantasy: the National Academy of Sciences publishes a position paper on science and religion stating that modern science leads directly to atheism. What would happen to its funding? To any federal funding of science? Every member of the Congress of the United States of America, even the two current members who are unaffiliated with any organized religion, profess to be deeply religious. I suspect that scientific leaders tread very warily on the issue of the religious implications of science for fear of jeopardizing the funding for scientific research. And I think that many scientist feel some sympathy with the need for moral education and recognize the role that religion plays in this endeavor. These rationalizations are politic but intellectually dishonest. ~ William Provine     see also: Poll

The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.  ~ National Association of Biology Teachers    see also: Textbooks

The cosmos is all there is or ever was or ever will be.  ~ Carl Sagan  

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.   ~ Bertrand Russell

In the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural. The earth was not created: it evolved. So did all the animals and plants that inhabit it, including our human selves, mind and soul as well as brain and body. So did religion.  ~  Julian Huxley 

Every part of existence is considered to be obedient to physical law requiring no external control.  The scientist's devotion to parsimony in explanation excludes the divine spirit and other extraneous agents.  ~ E.O. Wilson

Science is the human search for a natural explanation of what the universe is: how it is constructed, how it came to be. ~ Niles Eldredge

The ancient seekers after truth differ from their modern successors in only one respect. It was permitted to them to suppose that supernatural forces were at work in the world-forces which could be perceived only by the eye of faith. The modern seeker refuses to accept any explanation which involves the action of a supernatural agent, even as a last resort.  ~ Arthur Keith 

[Darwins's notebooks] include many statements showing that he espoused but feared to expose something he perceived as far more heretical than evolution itself: philosophical materialism -- the postulate that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

It is apparent that Darwin lost his faith in the years 1836-39, much of it clearly prior to the reading of Malthus. In order not to hurt the feelings of his friends and of his wife, Darwin often used deistic language in his publications, but much in his Notebooks indicates that by this time he had become a ‘materialist’ (more or less = atheist). ~ Ernst Mayr

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN stands among the giants of Western thought because he convinced a majority of his peers that all of life shares a single, if complex, history. He taught us that we can understand life’s history in purely naturalistic terms, without recourse to the supernatural or divine. ~ Niles Eldredge

I think that we should recognize, both historically and perhaps philosophically, certainly that the science side has certain metaphysical assumptions built into doing science, which -- it may not be a good thing to admit in a court of law -- but I think that in honesty that we should recognize, and that we should be thinking about some of these sorts of things.  ~ Michael Ruse 

Any creationist lawyer who got me on the stand could instantly win over the jury simply by asking me: 'Has your knowledge of evolution influenced you in the direction of becoming an atheist?' I would have to answer yes. ~  Richard Dawkins

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. ~  Richard Dawkins

Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent. ~ William Provine  

We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher’ answer - but none exists. ~ Stephen Jay Gould 

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Housman put it: ‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know.’ DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music. ~Richard Dawkins

In the Theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer, so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that IN ORDER TO MAKE A PERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL MACHINE IT IS NOT REQUISITE TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express in a condensed form the essential purport of the Theory and to express in a few words all Mr Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill. ~  Robert Mackenzie Beverley    see also: Daniel Dennett

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. ~ Richard 

Lewontin    see Pearcey below  see also: Treasure Island  see also Science  see also: NSTA

Darwinism rejects all supernatural phenomena and causations. The theory of evolution by natural selection explains the adaptedness and diversity of the world solely materialistically.~ Ernst Mayr

And it seems to me very clear that at some very basic level, evolution as a scientific theory makes a commitment to a kind of naturalism, namely, that at some level one is going to exclude miracles and these sorts of things, come what may. ~ Michael Ruse

The only alternative is to say that they did arise from muck because God’s finger went out and touched that muck. That is to say, there was a non-natural process. And that’s really where the action is. Either you think that complex organisms arose by non-natural phenomena, or you think that they arose by natural phenomena. If they arose by natural phenomena, they had to evolve. And that’s all there is to it. ~ Richard Lewontin 

It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous over use of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind, Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental feature of the world. ~ Thomas Nagel

Darwinists believe that the mutation-selection mechanism accomplishes wonders of creativity not because the wonders can be demonstrated, but because they cannot think of a more plausible explanation for the existence of wonders that does not involve an unacceptable creator, i.e., a being or force outside the world of nature.  ~ Phillip Johnson

There is indeed one belief that all true original Darwinians held in common, and that was their rejection of creationism, their rejection of special creation. This was the flag around which they assembled and under which they marched. When Hull claimed that “the Darwinians did not totally agree with each other, even over essentials”, he overlooked one essential on which all these Darwinians agreed. Nothing was more essential for them than to decide whether evolution is a natural phenomenon or something controlled by God. The conviction that the diversity of the natural world was the result of natural processes and not the work of God was the idea that brought all the so-called Darwinians together in spite of their disagreements on other of Darwin’s theories. ~ Ernst Mayr

More disquieting still is Professor D. M. S. Watson's defense. "Evolution itself," he wrote, "is accepted by zoologists not because it has been observed to occur or... can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible." Has it come to that? Does the whole vast structure of modern naturalism depend not on positive evidence but simply on an a priori metaphysical prejudice. Was it devised not to get in facts but to keep out God?  ~ C.S. Lewis 

For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was no evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.  ~  Richard Dawkins

Darwinists know that natural selection created the animal groups that sprang suddenly to life in the Cambrian rocks (to pick a single example) not because observation supports this conclusion but because naturalistic philosophy permits no alternative. What else was available to do the job? Certainly not God -- because the whole point of positivistic science is to explain the history of life without giving God a place in it. ~ Phillip Johnson

Science is typically defined as objective investigation (discovering and testing facts)--the means for making faster airplanes and better medicines.

But there's another definition held implicitly in the scientific establishment, and it is tantamount to the philosophy of materialism or naturalism. This is the idea that science may legitimately employ only natural causes in explaining everything we observe.

The way this definition of science operates is to outlaw any questioning of naturalistic evolution. Darwinists don't ask whether life evolved from a sea of chemicals; they only ask how it evolved. They don't ask whether complex life forms evolved from simpler forms; they only ask how it happened. The presupposition is that natural forces alone must (and therefore can) account for the development of all life on earth; the only task left is to work out the details.  ~ Nancy Pearcey    see also: Meyer 

Is the blind watchmaker hypothesis true? From the naturalistic standpoint of Darwinists like Dawkins, the question really doesn't arise. Instead of truth, the important concept isscience, which is understood to be our only (or at least by far our most reliable) means of attaining knowledge. Science is then defined as an activity in which only naturalistic explanations are considered and in which the goal is always to improve the best existing naturalistic explanation. Supernatural creation-or God-guided evolution-is not a naturalistic explanation. The blind watchmaker hypothesis is therefore merely a way of stating the commitment of "science" to naturalism, and as such the existence of a blind watchmaker is a logical necessity. If a critic doesn't like Darwinism, his only permissible move is to suggest a better blind watchmaker. That a competent blind watchmaker doesn't exist at all is not a logical possibility. ~ Phillip Johnson   

We need to realize that methodological naturalism is the functional equivalent of a full blown metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism asserts that the material world is all there is (in the words of Carl Sagan, "the cosmos is all there ever was, is, or will be"). Methodological naturalism asks us for the sake of science to pretend that the material world is all there is. But once science comes to be taken as the only universally valid form of knowledge within a culture, it follows at once that methodological and metaphysical naturalism become for all intents and purposes indistinguishable. They are functionally equivalent. What needs to be done, therefore, is to break the grip of naturalism in both guises, methodological and metaphysical. And this happens once we realize that it was not empirical evidence, but the power of a metaphysical world view that was all along urging us to adopt methodological naturalism in the first place.  ~ William Dembski    see also: Johnson  

Scientists committed to philosophical naturalism do not claim to have found the precise answer to every problem, but they characteristically insist that they have the important problems sufficiently well in hand that they can narrow the field of possibilities to a set of naturalistic alternatives. Absent that insistence, they would have to concede that theircommitment to naturalism is based upon faith rather than proof. Such a concession could be exploited by promoters of rival sources of knowledge, such as philosophy and religion, who would be quick to point out that faith in naturalism is no more "scientific" (i.e. empirically based) than any other kind of faith.  ~ Phillip Johnson

In the Conclusion, on page 136, Jones says “Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs’ scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator [emphasis added].” I have not read the scientific experts’ testimony, and I wonder if Judge Jones has slightly distorted what they said. If they said that the theory of evolution in no way conflicts with the existence of a divine creator, then I must say that I find that claim to be disingenuous. The theory of evolution demolishes the best reason anyone has ever suggested for believing in a divine creator. This does not demonstrate that there is no divine creator, of course, but only shows that if there is one, it (He?) needn’t have bothered to create anything, since natural selection would have taken care of all that. Would the good judge similarly agree that when a defense team in a murder trial shows that the victim died of natural causes, that this in no way conflicts with the state’s contention that the death in question had an author, the accused? What’s the difference? ~ Daniel Dennett 

Creationists are disqualified from making a positive case, because science by definition is based upon naturalism. The rules of science also disqualify any purely negative argumentation designed to dilute the persuasiveness of the theory of evolution. Creationism is thus out of court and out of the classroom-before any consideration of evidence. Put yourself in the place of a creationist who has been silenced by that logic, and you may feel like a criminal defendant who has just been told that the law does not recognize so absurd a concept as "innocence."   ~ Phillip Johnson 

We have thus arrived at the answer to our question, What is Darwinism? It is Atheism. This does not mean, as before said, that Mr. Darwin himself and all who adopt his views are atheists; but it means that his theory is atheistic, that the exclusion of design from nature is, as Dr. Gray says, tantamount to atheism.  ~ Charles Hodge    

Darwin did more to secularize the Western world than any other single thinker in history.  ~ Niles Eldredge

Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented. ~ William Provine     see also: Fark

Evolutionism needs atheism needs evolutionism needs atheism needs evolutionism.
Garbage in: Garbage out.

http://bevets.com/evolution.htm#atheism

Wendy Atheists The Cult of Death Davis: Dreams from my Uterus, Gynecism, as a major political movement, is anti-God and anti-morality baked into Marxism and socialism. But its central tenet is so unnatural -- that every human being begins life as a disposable object and ends life as a disposable object --

The Texas gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis is not a feminist; she is what may be better termed a gynecist. Gynecism promotes the political position that the primary and most essential power a female can hold is the control of her own sexual and genital functions. Gynecism sexualizes and sexually empowers girls and women throughout the lifespan and insists upon the absolute and sole right of a pregnant female to terminate her own pregnancy at any point. Some gynecists believe infanticide is also the right of the mother.


Gynecism is a facet of socialist political philosophy based on the worldview of scientific materialism. Ultimately, it is not feminism. True feminism is a universal belief system which advances the welfare of all girls and women, including those who follow traditional religious beliefs. But because gynecism revolves around a psychologically and spiritually riveting force over life and death, it has hijacked and disfigured feminism in America for the last fifty years.


Wendy Davis rose to national prominence in a June 25, 2013 11-hour filibuster against improved medical standards for late-term abortion. In the mode of leftwing politicians who offer tributes to themselves before achieving any accomplishments worth a book, she published an autobiography in 2014 entitled Forgetting to Be Afraid: A Memoir. This book, which includes descriptions of her own two abortions, is self-glorification warmed up and served in Texas cowpile. It provides the information that makes Ms. Davis an ideal case study for understanding gynecism.


The Godly men who founded this Republic objected to Redcoats tromping through their domiciles with muddy boots, and so codified the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Not in their worst wig-spinning nightmares could they have imagined that amendment would someday be used to grant a Wendy Davis the legal right to kill her daughters in utero.


Gynecism, as a major political movement, is anti-God and anti-morality baked into Marxism and socialism. But its central tenet is so unnatural -- that every human being begins life as a disposable object and ends life as a disposable object -- it took one hundred years for Marx’s theory of historical materialism to be expressed as gynecism.
Gynecism came to the forefront of socialism as a result of scientific advancements in gynecology, especially regarding the use of artificial sex hormones. Gynecism has changed the language regarding a woman’s procreative capacities. It caused spiritually resonant terms to be replaced by medical terms. The womb became the uterus and conception became fertilization. “My, what an adorable little reproduction you have there, is it a girl or a boy?”
In Forgetting to be Afraid, Ms. Davis casts herself as an intrepid innocent carrying the burden of a struggling family on her slender shoulders. But the title doesn’t match the storyline. She doesn't give much evidence of fearlessness, except fearlessness of being hot to trot from a young age, as she became sexually active in adolescence. 

Because gynecism is a dimension of socialism, Wendy Davis’ story has a subtext of a failed family being replaced by a protective socialist state. By 1963, the year Wendy Davis was born, the suggestion that a bright, ambitious girl would lack access to higher education was simply absurd. In fact, the wide-eyed Wendy had already attended the University of Texas at Arlington when a nurse handed her the stunning pamphlet that “changed my life.” It was about becoming a paralegal. Sanctified marriage and family are the principle threats to socialism in general and gynecism in particular. Wendy Davis’ narrative transfers credit away from her family to the public sphere, in our heroine’s case, the nurse’s earth-shattering pamphlet. The current Wikipedia article about Ms. Davis identifies four areas of her political positions: 1) abortion rights, 2) gun control 3) lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender rights, and 4) marijuana rights.

Gynecism presupposes every female, even girls in the early teen years, has a built-in decisional capacity regarding sexual activity and pregnancy termination. Just a little sex ed and she knows what will be right for her now and for the rest of her life. This is crazy and cruel. The grave responsibility for committing justifiable homicide, such as in war and criminal punishment, is designed to be shared as widely as possible through group moral heritage and democratic legal process. Gynecism isolates the girl or woman at a vulnerable moment and tells her, “You’re on your own, what are you going to do?”


Wendy Davis and all gynecists are among the most harmful people in the world today, not only because of what they have done to themselves but because of what they encourage others to do. They should not be judged for their private choices; our weakness is the place through which God enters. But they are to be held accountable for their public choices and policies which waste the promise of modern feminism on a cult of sex and death. Wendy Davis is using the left wing of the Texas Democrats for national prominence. She does not understand that her party has become a death cult. Unlike husbands and children, death cults cannot provide anything worth having. They use up the humanity of their members. If Texans want such a pitiable woman for their governor, than Texas has become equally pitiable.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/wendy_davis_dreams_from_my_uterus.html

How Liberals Dominate the Public Debate

According to former Green Jobs CzarVan Jones, the Democrats have a linguistics “Jedi” named George Lakoff (rhymes with back off), a Professor of Linguistics at U.C. Berkeley. He advises Democrats on how to win in the political arena by controlling the language. Lakoff's theory -- according to his Little Blue Book -- is that people use metaphors or narratives make decisions about politics. The way liberals frame issues in narratives undermines conservative’s positions in a subtle way that lets Democrats easily defend their disastrous policies.

10) ObamaCare – At one point, the president embraced the word “ObamaCare”. It is the frame for the Affordable Care Act as “Obama given healthcare”. Then, the website debacle and the lies about “keeping your doctor” and “keeping your plan” began to tarnish the word by proxy. Obama dumped the frame went back to the “Affordable Care Act”. The media quickly followed.

9) Progressives – The “liberal” label has lost its glow, so it is back to “progressive” from Woodrow Wilson’s policies of the early 1900s. They choose “Progressive” because it implies that opponents are regressive. Same hula dance, different grass skirt.

8) Tea Baggers -- The Tea Party is overwhelmingly made of decent Americans who believe they have been Taxed Enough Already (TEA), are called "Tea Baggers" (A sexually offensive term) even by Biden. They are the moral opposite of the crude, law-breaking left’s Occupy Wall Street crowd.

7) Pro-Choice -- The term "pro-choice" frames those who are champion abortion-on-demand as defenders of a woman’s “right” to choose. Maybe the "war on the unborn" would be an effective Republican frame.

6) Trickle down -- The “trickle down” frame paints a picture of money trickling into the economy as the rich pay for their indulgences. This is just wrong. The rich are usually successful business owners. They invest in their successful businesses, while others spend more of their money on products made in China from Walmart. Investing in successful businesses creates a higher multiplier effect by creating jobs both directly and indirectly. They hire more employees. Their employees purchase things from other businesses. These businesses can then hire more people and create even more jobs. The suppliers to a successful business also grow. Increasing tax rates, leaves successful business owners with less invest and the employees less to spend. It is a damper on the multiplier effect. The job growth and the economy suffer.

5) Capitalism -- Capitalism was Marx and Lenin's derogatory term for the free enterprise or entrepreneurial system. Even conservatives use this term too frequently. The “capitalism” frame credits the money (aka capital) for a business’s success rather the entrepreneur, who puts his money, sweat and reputation on the line to create a company. The USA is a free enterprise, constitutional republic.

4) War on Women – The war on women is an effective narrative. Any opposition to a Democrat proposal that benefits primarily women is a "war on women." When for moral reasons, Hobby Lobby didn't want to pay for the birth control methods that caused a fertilized egg to abort (morning after pills) but were willing to pay for the other 28 methods, it was a "war on women". The hysteria was over the top as libs cried that women’s reproductive rights were under assault!

3) 1% -- The narrative is: “the top 1% have all the money, so there is little left for other 99%.” The top 1% pays more in taxes than the bottom 90%, but that is not enough for the Democrats. They attack the 1%, and if the greedy Democrats could, they would tax the heck out of the top 49%. The other 51% would keep them in office.

2) Racist -- The most difficult to defend frame is the charge of "racist' especially made by an African-American. It is their most effective frame. When conservatives oppose any proposed social program that benefits African-Americans more than others, they are called "racist". Opposing President Obama or Eric Holder is racist. When the Bush administration tried to investigate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that was racist. The investigation could have saved hundreds of billions.

1) Democracy – The liberals frame America as a Democracy. It is a constitutional republic. The Democrats are delighted that the media refers to the USA as a democracy -- a term that is nearly identical to the term “Democrat”. In a child’s mind, the obvious choice in a democracy is to be a Democrat. In a democracy, the majority gets what it wants. In our constitutional republic, the minority's rights are guaranteed in the constitution and are protected by the courts. The USA has never been a democracy.

"…Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch. Freedom comes from the recognition of certain rights which may not be taken, not even by a 99% vote." Marvin Simkin -- LA Times 1992.

The Republicans have a few. Communist and socialist frames don’t pack much of a punch anymore. The sympathetic press marginalized “communist” on the excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy. Calling someone a communist has such old-fogy, Cold-War ring to it. You rarely see it. The communist goal of a centrally-controlled State run economy can be more easily accomplished with socialism using taxes and regulations.

Post-Vietnam, liberal college professors eroded the term “socialist”. Many of the young now embrace the term.

The Benghazi and “IRS” abuse frames still have legs, but before long, because they are pressed by racist Republicans who are engaged in a “war on women”; they will lose their power. The media will not press on the side of the Republicans. These words will at some point become benign. People stopped caring about “Fast and Furious” long ago. Who knew that people so passively accept NSA spying? They did when the press quickly dropped it as an issue.

Lakoff thought that Republicans referring to the liberals “safety net” frame as a “hammock” was an effective counter frame. His advice is to ignore right-wing frames and narratives. Change the conversation! Have you noticed how quickly the conversation changes every time the Democrats hit a policy land mine? See Fast and Furious, IRS abuse, spying on reporters, record people on food stamps, record people not employed, record people on disability, NSA spying, Obamacare lies, Obamacare site failure, Benghazi, Syria red line, Russian annexation of Crimea, failure in Egypt, failure in Libya, and Russian attacks on the Ukraine. They usually fall back on old narratives about a Bush, Rove, or Cheney being war criminals or profiting from the war, or to the narrative that to criticize Obama (or Holder) is racist.

Predictably today, a Dick Cheney meme arrived on my FB feed that said “My company made 39.5 billion… U.S. Tax Dollars off a lie”. You would think they would be reacting to Obama's sudden decision to go back into Iraq and attack ISIS in Syria. Committing U.S. troops to battle does not fit their narrative. So, they are ignoring it -- just as Lakoff recommended. This meme is reinforcing the narrative that it is Republicans are war mongers. It is not true. Since 1900, Democrats have involved the U.S. in many more major wars: WWI, WWII, Korean War, and Vietnam War. The Republicans: Iraq I and Iraq II, and Afghanistan.

I did not waste my time responding. The best defense is a strong offense.

Our narrative should be Obama is endorsing Bush’s war to remove Saddam. Saddam was 10 times the threat of ISIS. According to the Duelfer report, the same report that found no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam had retained his chemical warfare scientists and would rebuild his arsenal when sanctions were lifted. I should be holding Obama’s feet to the fire on this instead of defending Cheney.

Right now Democrats own the vocabulary and own the debate. This can change. We must create narratives of our strengths. The Democrats are willing to let our country decay into a generation of the jobless geeks playing video games in their parent’s basement. The Democrats are beating down ambition with taxes, regulations and criticism of the successful. The Democrats label those who have reached lofty goals as greedy. The Democrats are letting our country become a morass of a self-indulgent cynicism as they beat us up over long ago actions that they now judge as injustices.

We need to set the record straight.

We need to do it often. "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." In today’s upside-down world we must tell the truth often enough until it becomes the truth.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/10/how_liberals_dominate_the_public_debate.html#ixzz3FZiWOO6l
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The Magical Land of Progressitopia

There once was a land, a magical land, with a chicken in every pot. And in this land, which was called Progressitopia, there were two peoples. There were those who saw the world as it was, and there were those who saw the world as they oh-so-very-much wished it could be. The former were called the Trads, and the latter, the Progs. It was the Progs who held dominion over this great land, and so it was they who wrote, or re-wrote, her history.

Now, in this kingdom we must remember that Christianity, or “Christianism” as it would later be called (long since forbidden), along with similar such mythological and dogmatic phantasms, remained the foremost, if not the sole, thorn in the Progs’ collectivist butt. Any and all thought or practice that might, in any way, undermine full realization of, and strict adherence to, progressive thinking was, therefore, strictly verboten.

In fact, the Trads, the traditionalist remnant, had proven singularly responsible for the famines, Civil War II and Progressitopia’s endlessly spiraling state of affairs, both foreign and domestic – a state that, notwithstanding all predictions to the contrary, somehow became significantly and enigmatically worse subsequent to the onset of progressive governance.

There was, however, one exception to this rule: Islam. Shadowing the glorious dawn of progressive reign came, from o’er the sea, a mighty and fearsome caliphate. The Muslim faith spread like wildfire. Recruitment efforts were buoyed, and appreciably so, in that, while yet a loving and peaceful religion, any skeptic or “infidel” who failed to convert was either immediately raped and enslaved or summarily beheaded, stoned, shot or blown limb-from-limb.

Whereas Progressitopians, with their one-child-only abortion mandate, stopped reproducing altogether, adherents to the religion of peace rutted like rabbits. Every corner of the globe became thickly populated by devotees of the most praised Prophet Muhammad – peace be upon him.

As global violence and jihad spiked, it seemed for a time that Progressitopia and the Islamic caliphate would be one another’s undoing.

And then something extraordinary happened.

The King of Progressitopia, a brave and handsome man most wise, with visor of gold and scepter of 3-iron in hand, bowed before the great caliph and presented a series of official mea culpas on behalf of his land. He prayed Allah’s forgiveness for incurring his wrath – just desserts for centuries of Progressitopian Imperialism.

And so these two seemingly incompatible kingdoms, with wholly polarized worldviews, agreed to forge an incongruous socio-political partnership – an “Islamo-Progressive Alliance.” The alliance was built upon the maxim: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The common enemy, of course, had formed its own unholy alliance: the “Zio-Christian Axis of Evil.”

And so it soon came to pass that independent Islamic settlements cropped-up throughout Progressitopia. The Michganistan Territory became, for all intents and purposes, Mecca to the Western Hemisphere.

Presently, the Islamo-Progressive Alliance found itself enjoying a comparatively peaceful seven-year truce. Apart from a weekly handful of suicide bombings, mass shootings and random beheadings, carried out chiefly against Progressitopia’s women and children, things were simply capital.

But then, trouble in paradise – economic turmoil. Toward the middle of the new millennium’s third decade, Progressitopia’s national debt ballooned to over 60 trillion. For many years, Trad economists and “debt alarmists” had warned that Progressitopia’s skyrocketing debt and deficits were unsustainable. These anti-progressive thinkers openly questioned the progressive strategy of taxing and spending one’s way to prosperity.

They felt, irrationally so, that such approach represented, as one provocative naysayer phrased it, “an epically stupid and patently impossible self-contradiction. No more can one spend his way out of debt than can he cheat his way out of adultery.”

Another fundamentalist cynic offered a less hurtful, yet no less sensationalist analogy: “When a bridge’s infrastructure becomes unsustainable,” he alleged, “it will ultimately collapse if its integrity is compromised to the degree that it can no longer support some burgeoning mass. So too it goes, apparently, as relates integrity to politicians, governments and national debt.”

Right-wing propaganda aside, Progressitopia’s economy did, nonetheless, unexpectedly collapse for reasons ultimately deemed inconclusive.

Now, as heretofore told, and as go the history books, Christianism had, from time immemorial, been the very bane of free-thinking humanity’s existence. This hateful mythology had been largely to blame, in concert with its sister-faith, Judaism, and its insufferable cousin, conservatism, an equally curious mental disorder, for all of the world’s wars, slavery, racism, sexism, disease, capitalism, global warming and, most onerously perhaps, gluten sensitivity.

Moreover, both Christianism and conservatism were ultimately determined to have been the catalyst for the systemic phobia outbreak that inexplicably began around the turn of the century. First there was homophobia, an irrational, chronic and debilitating fear of the square-hole-round-peg people, or, as this flamboyant troupe, so enamored with acronymic wordplay, preferred to be called: the “SHRP community.” Since SHRPs displayed impeccable fashion sense and a flair for the fabulous, Neanderthalic Trads were, most naturally, terrified by them.

Then came Islamophobia, the irrational fear of having one’s head lopped off, followed by transphobia, the fear of naked men in ladies’ locker rooms, polyphobia, the fear of communal rompathons, as well as an all-inclusive litany of other phobias relating to myriad sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions.

Next, there emerged the great progressiphobia pandemic of ’27. This involved an equally absurd, though no less universal, fear of progressive thought, practice or people. This, for a time, threatened to halt Progressitopia’s progressing progress altogether.

Finally, there occurred a worldwide outbreak of phobia-phobia. This was, of course, a condition delineated by the once again irrational denial that any of the aforementioned phobias had “any basis in reality whatsoever,” but, rather, were “simply ham-fisted pejoratives intended to marginalize one’s political opposition.”

But, alas, we must for now part ways. My gluten-free frittata grows cold. 

http://townhall.com/columnists/mattbarber/2014/10/06/the-magical-land-of-progressitopia-n1901390/page/full