nice site dude….

…

Here’s another falsehood in Harris’ book:

You quote him as follows:

” And yet, Christian conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex.”

This is a demonstrably false statement.

Harris cites a 2005 New York Times op-ed piece as his source for this statement (He seems to only be able to use the New York Times and the New Yorker Magazine as his “primary” sources).

Turns out, this source points not to the members of the Bush Administration, but instead the Family Research Council.

And does Harris accurately portray their real position ?

Surprisingly, he does not.

In testimony before the CDC in February 2006, their policy analyst states their position clearly — they favor the development of the vaccine, just want its administeration at public schools to twelve year old girls to come as part of an entire program that includes information on abstinence.

“The rate of gonorrhea among teenagers in the US is 70 times that of the rate in France and the Netherlands.”

I checked out his source on this and it is — surprise — a 2005 article in the New York Times.

That article, in turn cited a study published in 2000 by the Guttmacher Institute.

So I checked out that study, and here’s what I found.

The data for the US was taken from 1996. The data for France and the Netherlands came from 1990, 1993, 1996.

US Data in 1996 from our CDC showed the incidence of gonorrhea in kids 15 to 19 to be 581.6 per 100,000. (That incidence declined to 490 in 2001 and 432 in 2005, by the way, the time period during which the abstinence programs Harris complains of were funded).

The reported data for France and the Netherlands was 7.7 per 100,000.
France does not collect data in gonorrhea in the same systematic way that way do. Instead, they have sentinel data from private labs, which the authors of the report acknowledge dramatically underreports the incidence of gonorrhea. Taking this suspect data for all age groups, the authors then extrapolated age distributions based upon assumptions that they also acknowledge were weak.

The data from the Netherlands was compiled similarly, though the authors feel the quality of the data there is better than in France.

Harris leaves the reader with 3 false impressions:

1. The data was current, as opposed to ten years old.
2. The unfavorable ratio was the result of US policies on abstinence. In fact, those policies were not in place until AFTER the study, and during the 10 years since the study, US rates have declined dramatically.
3. The authors themselves report that the French data understates the true incidence.

If Harris were intellectually honest, and not a propagandist, he would have made these facts known.

You are too kind in attributing “honesty” to Mr. Harris.

You may want to order my soon to be published book, Letter to an Atheist, which demonstrates 25 factual errors and misrepresentations made by Mr. Harris in his short 91 page book.

I am not talking about his opinion. I am talking about blatant misrepresentations of fact.

For more, check out http://www.michaelpatrickleahy.com

I’ve never experienced this view of Christianity of which you speak. I’m sorry that when I say “sin”, you’re experiences lead you to hear “evil, negative, downtrodden”. I do realize that my occasional ethical inconsistencies, or the times I might hurt others keeps me from being a perfect human being. And since I believe in a heaven, I know I need to be perfect to be in the presence of God. Thus, the need for a Savior (Jesus Christ) to appeal for me, and to stand for me so God will see me as perfect.

Romans 2 ties in very well with what Brett and I were talking about earlier in describing John 8 and the adulterous woman. What a great story! Not only are we not to judge or bring condemnation on others, we should bring encouragement to leave the life of sin. After all, believers or non-believers, aren’t we all sinners?

Believing a lie and being a dishonest person are wholly different things.

Also, don’t forget to keep reading into Chapter 2: “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”