1) Say you're Mom, and you told your two kids NOT to have any cookies before dinner. While you're gone, deadbeat Dad comes by, raids the cookie jar, looks at the two kids with an innocent grin and say they can have some and leave it out there for them. You come by and catch them in the act. Is it justifiable to send them to their rooms with no dinner for that night and no TV/Computer for a month?

2) Can you think of any crime so horrendous that it would justify eternal, unrelenting torment, with no second chances ever being given, even if the criminal honestly repents and is completely forgiven by his victims?

3) Would our justice system let off a criminal if someone agreed to take his punishment instead?

4) You likely have no desire whatsoever to stab people with a kitchen knife and dine on their entrails, although there's nothing specific preventing you from doing so. Does this, nevertheless, take away your "free will"?

5) There are still a few rare people who, incredibly, believe the earth is flat despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. This is demonstrably false, yet they hold such a belief regardless and can't be convinced otherwise. Would you, regardless, be able to completely give up on these people for their honest, albeit incredibly delusional, mistake, leaving them forever condemned for it?

6) Hypothetically, if a doctor had the power to cure every single child suffering of malaria across the world easily and at no personal expense, but only did so for those who asked him just right, would you consider him a good human being?

7) Are you familiar with confirmation bias (remembering only hits, not misses)?

8) Similarly, are you familiar with selective thinking (applying undue skepticism to arguments and data unfavorable to your position, while having a less stringent standard of evidence for data confirming it)?

9) Will wishful thinking often make an otherwise rational person accept something which is literally 'too good to be true', such as pyramid schemes or spirit mediums that allegedly let them communicate with departed loved ones?

10) Are people suffering from emotional turmoil, a great deal of stress, depression, or those going thru a monumental upheaval in their lives often impaired in utilizing their best judgment and hence vulnerable to cult leaders and other charlatans?

11) Are you aware that very realistic mystical experiences can be produced by a myriad assortment of known causes, from drugs such as LSD, to sensory deprivation, to direct magnetic stimulation of the brain?

12) Do you recognize that the human mind is capable of recognizing patterns where none really exist, such as images in clouds, the Rorschach ink blot test, and numerology, among others, especially when it has already developed a bias to look for specific patterns?

13) Is a sunset beautiful when no one is watching, without first requiring an intelligent observer to assign such profound meaning to it?

14) Continuing, are our lives meaningful because we can now recognize and/or assign such meaning, where little such meaning existed for animals who were not self-aware and intelligent?

These and other thought provoking questions at Questioning Theistic Beliefs


"ANTIBIOTIC EFFECTIVENESS: A CRITICAL REVIEW" by Allan L. Glenn, Ph. D.*

Antibiotics - in Western society, the very mention of the drugs evokes images of caring doctors in white coats curing all manner of devastating illness with cute little tablets.

But below the surface of this modern myth lies a shocking truth. Contrary to popular belief and medical propaganda, antibiotics just don't work.

In the good old days, everyone knew that disease was caused by demon possession and/or sexual immorality, not germs. The populace of the day wasn't as easily duped, and as a result, "Germ theory", not "Germ fact", got its well-deserved name.

Medical journals, textbooks and doctors would have you believe that antibiotics do work, but on closer inspection, they only create that impression by selectively citing favorable data and discarding the rest. Numerous cases exist (conveniently suppressed by the establishment, of course) where antibiotics didn't work as advertised, even going so far as to contradict accepted medical knowledge.

Here's a short list of cases where antibiotics didn't work as expected:

* "... a combination of antibiotics failed and the 79-year-old patient died."
* "She didn't respond to antibiotics and was placed in the hospital. After developing pneumonia and falling into a coma, she was placed in intensive care where she died on December 12, 1968."
* "The 63- year-old photo editor for the supermarket tabloid The Sun suffered cardiac arrest and died Friday after he didn’t respond to antibiotics and his kidneys failed."
* "A slow improvement was noted and a different antibiotic was prescribed. Following a telephone call from the patient, Dr Ellison saw the patient again on 12 August 1996. The patient presented with indications of pneumonia. Dr Ellison's advice was the patient should go to hospital... The patient was admitted to hospital on 15 August 1996. Pulmonary embolism was diagnosed. The patient died on 17 August 1996 following a cardiac arrest."

The list could go on and on, as tens of thousands of similar cases are known from the last few decades alone.. But you won't hear about them in the medical journals! The bigoted materialists who want our kids to learn this nonsense in medical school aren't even willing to do the legwork to support their claims.

Those misotheistic doctors, of course, have dozens of unevidenced ad hoc rationalizations for why antibiotics fail so often. One is the case of "antibiotic resistance". But this excuse is, for lack of a better term, pathetic. One alleged resistance system, that of the Vancomycin-immune strain of staphylococcus, involves a complex enzyme pathway with 5 different and interacting parts 5. But as Leigh University biochemist Michael Behe has demonstrated, irreducible complexity can't evolve. Therefore, this bacterium can't be immune. It's as simple as that.

Another is the carefully-crafted excuse of "viral infection". Allegedly, antibiotics don't work on a virus. But this explanation also fails when you consider that viruses have never been proven to exist. The sole purpose of postulating them is to provide another excuse for the failure of antibiotics.

Occasionally, an infection that by the doctors' own admission should be susceptible to antibiotics remains unaffected, often resulting in a patient's death. The medical establishment usually chalks this up to a freak occurence, but this is just more evidence that they have no explanation! Their a-priori commitment to materialistic antibiotics blinds them to the truth and makes inventing wild excuses a necessity.

However, in using those rationalizations to account for the times when antibiotics don't work, yet using the times they allegedly do work as evidence, doctors remove antibiotic effectiveness from the realm of falsifiability and hence make it pseudoscience. With that mindset, any possible observation would be consistent with the effectiveness of antibiotics. Practitioners of ineffective alternative medicine generally use this approach, invoking "you didn't have enough faith", "the spirits aren't generous enough today" or other excuses when explaining the failure of their "treatments", but one is surprised to find this practice alive and well in the trusted mainstream.

In response, Scientists will cite double-blind studies that suggest antibiotics work better than a placebo, but there are a variety of demonologist explanations available for those studies. One is the hypothesis that demons desire to make people believe they're not responsible for disease, and thus let up the possession (resulting in relief from symptoms) whenever scientists are performing a study. This has the desired effect of making the populace believe antibiotics do work, in turn making them scoff at the reality that DEMONS DO EXIST and cause illness, removing the weapons of spiritual warfare and exorcism from their naive arsenal and letting the masterful spirits have free reign.

Another explanation is that God won't make the existence of spiritual forces obvious, as that removes the free will of materialists to believe. Consequently, the Lord will make sure to surreptitiously exorcise demons from a host if he or she is involved in a recorded study. This ensures that antibiotics appear to work on a limited basis, making the existence of demons only obvious to those knowledgeable in scriptural Truth™.

A number of other explanations are possible, thus, the effectiveness of antibiotics rests on the materialist interpretation of double-blind studies and other data, not the facts themselves. Demonologists don't deny facts, we just deny the anti-supernaturalistic interpretation of those facts.

Of course, a naturalist commitment to denying the existence of demons allows them to make unwarranted assumptions like "demons haven't interfered with the results of this study" or "angels didn't accelerate radiometric decay," whereas a demonologist has no such bias.

* Dr. Glenn is Associate Professor of Demonology at IDR. His doctorate thesis at Patriot University studied the negative effects possession has on Catholic scriptural interpretations.


Refuting Unfalsifiable Claims with Superior, Incompatible Explanations

So the next time you get asked for evidence that vampires or ghosts don't exist, you can just say "That's irrelevant when dealing with such intentionally unfalsifiable claims--all things considered, the best explanation is that both were invented by superstitious people when they were working with limited observations and just didn't know any better." Alternatively, say you received divine revelation that they're lying, and ask them to prove you didn't.