TBC Today – Remedial Reading Would Help

Here is yet another example of an alleged contradiction in Scripture based upon the critic’s own sloppy examination of the Bible.

On Circumcision
“This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.” — Genesis 17:10

“…if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing.” — Galatians 5:2

http://www.atheists.org/christianity/contradictions.html

TBC: The covenant of circumcision is clearly given to Israel. During what some have called the first Church council, the question came up as to whether or not Gentile believers should keep the law.

“Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain which went out from us have troubled you with words, subverting your souls, saying, Ye must be circumcised, and keep the law: to whom we gave no such commandment…” (Acts 15:24). As pointed out when this series began, skeptics are desperately counting upon the biblical ignorance of Christians in order to maintain a veneer of legitimacy.

TBC Today – Politically Incorrect But True

Meteorologist Likens Fear of Global Warming to ‘Religious Belief’ [Excerpts]

An MIT meteorologist dismissed alarmist fears about human induced global warming as nothing more than ‘religious beliefs.’

“Do you believe in global warming? That is a religious question. So is the second part: Are you a skeptic or a believer?” said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, in a speech to about 100 people at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

“Essentially if whatever you are told is alleged to be supported by ‘all scientists,’ you don’t have to understand [the issue] anymore. You simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief,” Lindzen said. His speech was titled, “Climate Alarmism: The Misuse of ‘Science’” and was sponsored by the free market George C. Marshall Institute. Lindzen is a professor at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Once a person becomes a believer of global warming, “you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists — except for a handful of corrupted heretics,” Lindzen added.

According to Lindzen, climate “alarmists” have been trying to push the idea that there is scientific consensus on dire climate change.

“With respect to science, the assumption behind the [alarmist] consensus is science is the source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists [who agree.] But science is not primarily a source of authority. It is a particularly effective approach of inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science — consensus is foreign,” Lindzen said.

Alarmist predictions of more hurricanes, the catastrophic rise in sea levels, the melting of the global poles and even the plunge into another ice age are not scientifically supported, Lindzen said.

“It leads to a situation where advocates want us to be afraid, when there is no basis for alarm. In response to the fear, they want us to do what they want,” Lindzen said.

Recent reports of a melting polar ice cap were dismissed by Lindzen as an example of the media taking advantage of the public’s “scientific illiteracy.”

“The thing you have to remember about the Arctic is that it is an extremely variable part of the world,” Lindzen said. “Although there is melting going [on] now, there has been a lot of melting that went on in the [19]30s and then there was freezing. So by isolating a section … they are essentially taking people’s ignorance of the past,” he added.

The only consensus that Lindzen said exists on the issue of climate change is the impact of the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to limit greenhouse gases, which the U.S. does not support.

Kyoto itself will have no discernible effect on global warming regardless of what one believes about climate change,” Lindzen said.

“Claims to the contrary generally assume Kyoto is only the beginning of an ever more restrictive regime. However this is hardly ever mentioned,” he added.

The Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2010. But Lindzen claims global warming proponents ultimately want to see a 60 to 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gasses from the 1990 levels. Such reductions would be economically disastrous, he said.

“If you are hearing Kyoto will cost billions and trillions,” then a further reduction will ultimately result in “a shutdown” of the economy, Lindzen said.

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200412/CUL20041202a.html

TBC Today: 3/13/07

Bono, Who Preaches Charity, Profits From Buyouts, Tax Breaks [Excepts]

During the final concert of U2's world tour on Dec. 9, Bono, the Irish rock
band's lead singer, launched into "One," a song about a love affair gone
sour. "Did I disappoint you or leave a bad taste in your mouth?" he sang to
47,000 U2 fans at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu.

At Bono's command, some of the fans held aloft their cell phones and sent
text messages of support to ONE, the U.S.-based group that's lobbying the
U.S. government to donate an additional 1 percent of the federal budget to
ending poverty.

Bono made the same tie-in for the lobbying group during most of the 131
concerts on the Vertigo tour, which began in March 2005 and was seen by 4.6
million fans in Europe, North America and Asia. They sent about 500,000 text
messages of support to ONE, according to the group.

While Bono was making his appeal, U2 was racking up $389 million in gross
ticket receipts, making Vertigo the second-most lucrative tour of all time,
according to Billboard magazine. No. 1 is the Rolling Stones' current tour,
which by the end of 2006 had received $425 million.

Revenue from the Vertigo tour is funneled through companies that are mostly
registered in Ireland and structured to minimize taxes. "U2 are
arch-capitalists -- arch-capitalists -- but it looks as if they're not,"
says Jim Aiken, a music promoter who helped stage U2 concerts in Ireland
during the 1980s and 1990s.

U2 has sold about 9 million copies of the album linked to the Vertigo tour,
"How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," for which it owns all rights. In
addition, U2 sells merchandise at the concerts, such as a $30 T-shirt with a
photo of the band on the front.

With his trademark wraparound sunglasses and cowboy hat, Bono is as famous
for exhorting world leaders -- from U.S. President George W. Bush to
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern --
to give money to Africa as he is for his music.

The 46-year-old Dublin native, born Paul Hewson, is also focusing on his
investments. Bono declined to be interviewed for this article.

Bono's own dealings haven't always followed the altruistic ideals he
espouses, says Richard Murphy, a Downham Market, U.K.- based adviser to the
Tax Justice Network, an international lobbying group.

Murphy points to the band's decision to move its music publishing company to
the Netherlands from Ireland in June 2006 in order to minimize taxes. The
move came six months before Ireland ended an exemption on musicians' royalty
income, which is generally untaxed in the Netherlands.

"This is somebody who's exceptionally rich taking the opportunity to shift
his tax burden to somebody else, but then asking governments around the
world to spend that tax take in the way that he would like," Murphy says.

In addition, Bono shares three homes with his wife and four children,
including a house near Nice in the south of France, a duplex apartment
overlooking New York's Central Park that he bought from Apple Inc.'s Steve
Jobs, and a gated estate in Killiney, 10 miles south of Dublin, with a
panoramic view of the Irish Sea.

"We don't think this fits with Bono's image, and we're trying to get him to
recognize this fact," says Chuck Kaufman, a Washington-based spokesman for
the international Venezuela Solidarity Network, which supports the
government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

While Bono promotes charitable causes, he doesn't disclose whether he
personally gives any money to them and, if so, how much. These include
Amnesty International, the Burma Campaign U.K., DATA, which stands for Debt,
AIDS, Trade and Africa, the environmental group Greenpeace and ONE.

"It's actually, I think, more honest to say we're rock stars, we're havin'
it large, we're havin' a great time and don't focus on charity too much --
that's private; justice is public,'' he told the Dublin-based Sunday
Independent newspaper in June 2005.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aqdKjGJi9cHc&refer=home

TBC Today: 3/9/07

Jihad's campus collaborators [Excerpts]

The general tendency of Westerners is to view global jihad as a foreign
policy issue. But today it is clear that it is also a domestic policy issue.

Over the weekend The Sunday Telegraph reported that a recently circulated
British intelligence report warned: "The terrorist threat facing Britain
from home-grown al-Qaida agents is higher than at any time since the
September 11 attacks in 2001."

After foiling the jihadist plot to down US-bound British passenger aircraft
last summer, MI5 director Eliza Manningham-Buller claimed that there are
some 1,600 British Muslims actively involved in plotting attacks against
Britain. According to the intelligence report cited in the Sunday Telegraph,
today that number exceeds 2,000.

It is not surprising that Britain faces the specter of mass attacks carried
out by its own citizens in the name of Allah. Repeated exposes of the
goings-on in British mosques and in supposedly "moderate" British Muslim
communal organizations have shown unequivocally that they are being used as
indoctrination centers for jihad.

WHILE IT is true that in the US the danger of home-grown jihadists to
national security is lower than it is in Britain, it is also true that there
is a growing phenomenon of jihadist violence being perpetrated by Muslim men
against American civilians in the name of jihad.

The Investors Business Daily published an editorial enumerating a partial
list of acts of terrorism carried out by Muslim men against their fellow
Americans since the September 11 attacks. Most recently, Sulejman Talovic
entered a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, murdered five and wounded four
unsuspecting shoppers before being killed by an off-duty police officer.

As was the case when Derrick Shareef, another Muslim male, was arrested in
early December for plotting to carry out a similar attack at a shopping mall
in Illinois just before Christmas, the media and the law enforcement
agencies covering the Salt Lake City massacre have made light of the fact
that the perpetrator was a Muslim.

While Talovic is dead and so cannot explain his motives to authorities,
Shareef was arrested after telling an FBI informant of his plans to murder
Jews specifically and Americans in particular for Allah. As Shareef told the
informant, "I swear by Allah man, I'm down for it too. I'm down for the
cause. I'm down to live for the cause and die for the cause, man."

SHAREEF'S protestations of jihadist ardor made little impression on either
federal authorities or the media. Upon announcing Shareef's arrest, US
Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that he was acting on his own
and that he had no outside inspiration for his decision to commit mass
murder for Allah. As was the case with Talovic and with Naveed Afzal Haq,
who murdered one woman and wounded five during his shooting rampage at the
Seattle Jewish Federation last July, the media and federal authorities have
hushed up and failed to investigate the jihadist motives for the Illinois
attacker or link him to any larger phenomenon.

Unfortunately, there can be little hope that universities in the US or in
the West in general will devote any serious consideration to this most
important sociological, psychological and national security trend. Far from
being willing to study the most central issue of our times, universities are
leading the charge in either ignoring it, or apologizing for it.

[On February 22, 2007] the Dean's office at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology co-sponsored an event on the Arab-Israel conflict called,
"Foreign Policy and Social Justice: A Jewish View, a Muslim View." The man
invited to provide the Jewish view was Dovid Weiss, a member of the crackpot
Neturei Karta sect. Weiss rose to prominence when he traveled to Teheran
last December to participate in Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
Holocaust denial conference.

At an "Israel Apartheid Week" event at City University of New York, after
watching a propaganda film, 19-year old Binyamin Rister rose and politely
asked the ISM presenters if they supported terrorism. When he received no
reply he politely repeated the question. Rather than wait for an answer,
CUNY security guards dragged Rister from the room and then repeatedly banged
his head against the wall of an elevator and threw him head first down the
stairs. Rister's injuries from the assault by campus security required him
to be evacuated by ambulance in a neck brace to the hospital.

In an almost identical case at Georgetown last year, Bill Maniaci a
65-year-old retired Jewish American police officer was brutalized by
Georgetown security guards after he asked ISM spokesmen if they supported
terrorism. He is currently suing Georgetown for $8 million in damages for
the assault. According to Lee Kaplan's report of the CUNY event in Frontpage
Magazine, there were seven witnesses to the unprovoked attack against
Rister. He too has filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit against CUNY.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0207/glick022707.php3

TBC Today – Israel and Islam

“Infidel vaccine”

The label that radical clerics in northern Pakistan have given to a polio vaccine administered by the World Health Organization. The clerics have spread rumors that the vaccinations are a trick to sterilize Muslim children, prompting parents of 24,000 children to refuse them.

http://www.worldmag.com/articles/12699

TBC Today – Poilitically Incorrect But True

[TBC: The Global Warming movement is more than what it purports to be. Activists stress that their conclusions are based purely on "science," but when other scientists raise questions about their methods and their conclusion, they consistently avoid, demean, and seek to discredit contrary opinion.]

Activists Trying to Shut Down Climate Debate, Skeptics Say [Excerpts]

Climate change skeptics – and journalists who report on them – have become the target of a campaign aimed at stifling legitimate debate at a time when Congress is planning an aggressive new environmental push.

This is the assessment of environmental scientists and free market advocates who see a concerted effort to silence and de-fund think tanks that publish material challenging “prevailing global warming orthodoxy.”

Bonner Cohen, author of “The Green Wave: Environmentalism and Its Consequences” said in an interview with Cybercast News Service that the censorship campaign hinges on two key components – a call for congressional oversight leading effectively to “show trials” aimed at discrediting global warming skeptics and an assault on press freedom.

At issue is a report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) earlier this month accusing ExxonMobil-funded “contrarian scientists” and “ideological advocacy groups” of a “disinformation campaign” aimed at deceiving and “confusing” the public about the connection between human activity and climate change.

It also criticized media organizations for quoting scientists who criticize the UCS views as being out of step with mainstream opinion.

The UCS report took aim at “climate contrarians” affiliated with the Independent Institute such as Fred Singer, David Legates and Frederick Seitz, accusing them of bucking the scientific consensus.

Singer, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia, told Cybercast News Service that proponents of global warming models that see a significant correlation between human activity and rising temperatures are “afraid they might lose the debate” because their data is unlikely to withstand scrutiny.

“The facts and the data are pretty convincing now,” he said. “Any warming taking place is largely due to natural variability, not human activity. The way we can tell is by comparing the pattern of warming with what greenhouse warming models predict. They don’t agree.”

Cohen also took issue with the UCS’s invoking of “consensus.”

“Science does not run by consensus,” he said, adding that the organization was simply trying to “shut off debate.”
“Tell me where I’m wrong on the issues,” said Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation, another organization named in the UCS report.

“What’s really going on here is the skeptical arguments have merit and they are resonating with American people,” Lieberman said. As a result, “there’s a frustration on the part of alarmists who have not been able to scare the American people.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200701/CUL20070123a.html

TBC Today – Bogus Beliefs

Virgin Mary image draws throngs [Excerpts]

Metal baking sheet at an elementary school yields apparent likeness on Ash Wednesday

They kneeled. They cried. They asked for healing.

Before them, on an altar of roses and prayer candles, was a metal baking sheet, stained with what hundreds of Houston Catholics now believe is an image of the Virgin Mary.

Guadalupe Rodriguez, a Pugh Elementary School cafeteria worker, discovered the possible miracle on Ash Wednesday, while scrubbing away the last crumbs from the pizza lunch.

By Friday, a steady stream of people were filing through the southeast Houston front yard of Sylvia Calderon, a PTA member who took in the sheet pan after school leaders decided they couldn’t accommodate the curious crowds.

At dawn, one woman arrived at Calderon’s home in the Denver Harbor neighborhood asking to see the Virgin’s image before her 8-year-old son had surgery. That afternoon another woman came for a blessing bearing a picture of her grandson, who has cerebral palsy.

“It was beautiful,” said Angie Bentancur, who left the picture of her grandson beside the sheet pan Friday afternoon.

The pan appears to be stained, maybe by grease, with an image several inches tall. A splotch of missing color resembles the Virgin Mother’s down-turned face, a slight rainbow stain running alongside this could be a shawl.

For believers, there is no doubt about Rodriguez’s discovery. It is a message from God. The find created a logistical problem for school officials. When they got home Wednesday, many pupils who had seen the sheet pan told their parents, many of whom returned to school to see for themselves.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4578164.html

TBC Today – Israel and Islam

Upgraded Syrian army advancing on Israel [Excerpts]

Agence France-Presse
February 22, 2007

A Syrian army significantly bolstered of late by an injection of Iranian funds and arms is redeploying in a menacing fashion near the Israeli border.

That according to Ha’aretz military correspondent Ze’ev Schiff in a report filed on Thursday.

Schiff said that the last few months have seen an “unprecedented” strengthening of Syria’s armed forces “with the help of generous funding from Iran.”

He said the emphasis of the rearming effort has been on long-range missiles with which Syria can strike nearly all of Israel.

Schiff also warned . . . . that the redeployment is similar to moves made by Syria prior to its surprise invasion of Israel in 1973.

http://www.jnewswire.com/article/1689

TBC Today – Remedial Reading Helps

Here is a an example of an alleged contradiction in Scripture based upon the critic’s own sloppy examination of the Bible.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” — Exodus 20:8

“One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” — Romans 14:5

http://www.atheists.org/christianity/contradictions.html

[TBC: We know from the context of Scripture that the Lord specifically gave Israel “my sabbaths, to be a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord that sanctify them” ( Ezekiel 20:12). That this is a particular command to Israel is borne out by many other scriptures (Exodus 16:29, 31:14-16, Deuteronomy 5:15, etc.). Exodus 20:8 is dealing with a specific command to Israel.

Romans 14:1-6 (specific to the Church), is discussing eating or not eating certain foods, observing or not observing certain holy days, and leaving us with the admonition to ”let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” To the one who finds contradiction, this is like finding irreconcilable differences between how Americans conducted governmental affairs in 1753 and 1953. Anyone who regards these two Bible passages as contradictory has simply not paid attention.]

TBC Today – Israel and Islam

IDF: Hamas has advanced anti-tank missiles in Gaza [Excerpts]

Feb 21, 2007

Further blemishing the supposed benefits of having fled the Gaza Strip more than a year ago, IDF officials on Wednesday said they are now reasonably sure that Gaza-based Hamas forces are in possession of semi-advanced anti-tank missiles.

Arms prohibited by the Palestinian Authority’s peace agreements with Israel have been flowing into Gaza ever since Israel handed over control of the Gaza-Sinai border to Egypt and the “Palestinians.”

http://www.jnewswire.com/article/1680

[TBC: It bears repeating that despite all world efforts or claims for peace, things remain the same. The Islamic world will not tolerate any Jewish presence in the Middle East regardless of past historical tenure. Secondly, the Palestinian Charter still calls for the destruction of Israel, despite periodic claims to think about it. Thirdly, not one provision of the numerous peace treaties has ever been honored by the inhabitants of Gaza as missiles continue to be fired into Jewish population centers and illegal arms brought in. And finally, Islamic eschatology teaches that all Jews must be exterminated as a prerequisite for the last day to come. (The hadith, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177 - Narrated Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'").]