MOST ADULTS SAY BELIEF IN GOD IS NOT NECESSARY TO HAVE MORAL VALUES

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Adults in more than a dozen countries say it’s not necessary to believe in God to lead moral lives or have good values, according to a recent study. 

The majority of respondents were based in secular Western European countries of Sweden (90%), France (77%), the United Kingdom (76%), the Netherlands (76%), Spain (74%), Belgium (69%), Italy (68%), Germany (62%) and Greece (60%). Most respondents in other countries located outside Western Europe but still considered to be part of Western civilization, including Australia (85%), Canada (73%), and the United States (65%), also maintained that a belief in God is not necessary to “be moral and have good values.” Majorities of respondents in the Eastern European nations of Poland (67%) and Hungary (63%), which have governments sympathetic to traditional values and religion, said the same.

People in Israel and Singapore were more evenly divided on the question, with 50% and 54% of those surveyed, respectively, saying that a belief in God was a prerequisite for morality and having good values. Malaysia, a Muslim country, was the only country where the overwhelming majority of participants (78%) saw belief in God as necessary for leading a moral life with good values.

In the U.S., those who believe religion is not important (92%) and the religiously unaffiliated (88%) were most likely to view a belief in God as unnecessary for living a moral life and having good values. Majorities of all subgroups based on partisan identification, education level, gender, and age group indicated that a belief in God was not necessary to live a moral life. Even among those who described religion as “important” to them, a narrow majority (51%) suggested that a moral life is possible in the absence of a belief in God.

If God does not exist then how do we know what is good or bad or right or wrong? To say that something is objective is to say that it is independent of what people say or think, e.g. the Holocaust was objectively wrong even though the Nazis thought it right. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is good or evil independently of whether or not any human believes it to be so.

The atheist Richard Dawkins says, “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference… we are machines for propagating DNA… It is every living object’s sole reason for being.”

Without God, there is no basis for the objective moral values that do exist.

Paul wrote about “liars whose consciences are seared” (1 Tim. 4:2 ESV). What did he mean? What is a seared conscience? For that matter, what is the conscience? Our conscience is given by God; the inner voice that inflicts us with feelings of guilt when we have sinned.

“They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.” Romans 2 :15-16

If you want proof that we are living in the prophesied last days before Jesus returns these Poll results are just one of the prophesied signs being revealed in our day.

“But understand this, that in the last days, there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” 2 Timothy 3:1-7

“For in those days, there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now and never will be. And if the Lord had not cut short the days, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect, whom he chose, he shortened the days.” Mark 13:19-20

ANARCHY IS THE WAY FORWARD FOR AMERICA

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“Nah. I’m not going to call for peace. We’ve tried peace. For years. Y’all don’t understand that language. We are calling for a complete dismantling of American policing. It’s NOT broken. It was built to work this way. And mayhem is the consequence. You earned it.”

In a new episode of Fox Nation’s “No Interruption,” Tomi Lahren sat down with the president of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, Hawk Newsome, who argued that his organization and others like it are justified in using destruction to call attention to their grievances with American society. “The riot is the language of the unheard,” said Newsome, who compared modern-day protests to The Boston Tea Party.

The quote “language of the unheard” is from Martin Luther King Jr’s “The Other America” speech, delivered in 1967 and 1968. In the speeches, King did not defend rioting but said it was the result of understandable anger.

“What if you throw a whole bunch of tea in the water and start a war?” Newsome continued at another point in the interview. “That’s what this country was built on.”

Lahren specifically challenged Newsome over recent anti-police protests in the New York area and, most notably, a Jan. 31 demonstration involving reportedly thousands of protesters who flooded transportation stations and hubs around New York City. The protests were reportedly organized by a collection of 30 grassroots groups called “Decolonize This Place.”

Protesters carried signs with slogans like “F— the Police” and “No cops! No fares!”  NYPD Chief Terence Monahan said in a tweet that some individuals even attempted to “physically assault” police officers.

“There are a lot of black people who say ‘f— the police,'” said Newsome. “But the majority of the people out there who are saying ‘f— the police’, in these particular events, are white people.”

“You have to really start to ask why people say, ‘f— the police,'” he continued. “You really have to take away this fetish or the way that we fantasize policing and really look at it for what it really is.”

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COPS GTFO

“From day one, black people’s interactions with the police had been negative,” argued Newsome, who says that the “institution of policing” is racist. “They started out with slave patrols,” he said, pointing to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, which allowed for the capture and return of enslaved people.

“The Fugitive Slave Act, where they would take black people, stop them in the street, ask them for their papers, if they couldn’t produce them they’d send them back into slavery,” he said. “Sometimes they sent free people back into slavery. The interaction between black people and police in this country has never been good.”

While Lahren said she disagreed with Newsome’s assessment of the police, she said she wanted to focus on the tactics of the movement.

“I’m not going to disagree with what you believe in… What I’m saying is this — when we’re talking about solving problems, the methods in which I’ve seen groups like Black Lives Matter advance their ills or societal grievances — when it turns into burning, looting in the streets, I don’t see it being productive,” said Lahren.

Newsome claimed that destructive protests are rare, but he did not condemn them.

“For a country that drops bombs on people, for a country that incarcerates people, for a country that enslaves people — to criticize us for vandalism is preposterous,” said Newsome.

“I want to make sure I’m getting you clearly,” pressed Lahren. “It is OK to vandalize, to light things on fire and to loot businesses because the United States of America drops bombs on other countries, and because we have problems… people have grievances.”

“It is OK to act in that manner? And you co-sign on to that as the chairman of Black Lives Matter. You were saying that that is OK?”

“I think that it is a tool of white supremacy to say if you want freedom, then you get it by protesting peacefully,” said Newsome.

“Why is it a tool of white supremacy?” he concluded. “Because the white supremacists who built this country never earned anything peacefully. They did it through bullets and blood. And that’s the American way.”