American Atheists president Dave Silverman simply crushed Sean Hannity. Hannity started in demeaning manner and with usual accusations. Dave Silverman roundly shoot at him back, so Hannity just closes debate quickly. Basic Hannity/Fox projection, to accuse different minded guest for everything they do regularly.
A moment of levity in Oklahoma Tuesday when Wolf Blitzer, concluding an interview with a woman who survived the devastating tornado, asked her if she had thanked the Lord for a decision she made that saved her life. She replied that she was an atheist.
On May 20, 2013, a deadly EF5 tornado destroyed the town of Moore, Oklahoma, killing many and wounding many more.
Rebecca Vitsmun lost her home in the disaster, and she unwittingly gained national fame by giving an unexpected answer to a question posed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
CNN's Gary Tuchman reported a fundamentalist Christian couple who killed their 7-year-old adopted daughter while practicing a violent form of discipline.
They reportedly beat their nine children regularly because they thought God wanted them to. Both parents were jailed after pleading guilty to the crime and the surviving children are now in foster homes.
Larry and Carri Williams, a white christian couple from Washington are accused of murdering their adopted Ethiopian daughter, Hana Williams. The 13 year old girl was found outside the house with her face buried in a pile of mud and had a large lump on her head as well as several fresh bloody markings on her hips, knees, elbows, and face. Her autopsy showed that she was abnormally thin, had a swollen hematoma bruise on her forehead, abrasions on both the right and left upper pelvic region, and there were patterned contusions on her legs.
The couple admitted to using words from the bible and several christian parenting books as guides for raising the 13 year old. The other children in the household admitted that the couple would often leave Hana outside for hours in the freezing cold without food or water, as a form of discipline for behaving rebelliously. The other children also spoke of the forms of physical abuse she would receive for not obeying her adopted parents' orders. She would receive daily abuses for doing everyday things that children her age would do. The couple had stopped the other children from speaking to authorities after they had given them their testimonies.
Carri Williams, the adoptive mother had the nerve to claim that Hana had committed suicide in her 911 call to the police and blamed her for the injuries on her body. "Yes, um I think my daughter just killed herself." "Um, she's really rebellious, and she's been outside refusing to come in, and she's been throwing herself all around, and then she collapsed."
A book titled "To train up a child" written by fundamentalist christian authors Michael and Debbi Pearl which inspired a similar murder of another African girl by her white christian adopted parents, was taken from the couple's home as evidence. The book details forms of child abuse written in the bible as well as which instruments to be used for the beatings, such as a plumbing supply line.
The surviving children have been taken to foster homes. Unfortunately prosecutors have no plans to press charges on the authors of the book, though the Williams couple has been charged with homicide by abuse and felony assault of one of their children.
This is just one of the many examples of white christian extremism that are downplayed by the media which is fully supportive of the christian religion. The same religion that has cost the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide for thousands of years now. The same religion that supports the concepts of white supremacy, white separatism, a white God, and a white heaven.
The full "Friday Night, Saturday Morning" of 9th November 1979.
On the edition of 9 November 1979, hosted by Tim Rice, a discussion was held about the then-new film Monty Python's Life of Brian, which had been banned by many local councils and had caused protests throughout the world with accusations that it was blasphemous. To argue in favour of this accusation were broadcaster and noted Christian Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood (the then Bishop of Southwark). In its defence were two members of the Monty Python team, John Cleese and Michael Palin.
After the heated debate, "The Blues Band", headed by Paul Jones, performs "Boom Boom, Out Go The Lights", and Norris McWhirter, the author/editor/compiler of the Guinness Book of Records, is interviewed.
What would happen if Born Again Christian Stephen Baldwin got into a debate with Atheist Richard Dawkins.
Well Stephen Baldwin recently posed an interesting point against Evolution on Celebrity Big Brother UK 2010. So what would Richard Dawkins say in defence of Evolution? Lets find out.
When Ignorance Begets Confidence: The Classic Dunning-Kruger Effect
Published on June 6, 2010 by Daniel R. Hawes, Ph.D.
The use of German expressions to describe a number of very particular emotional states is fairly common in the English language. Schadenfreude, Angst, and Gemuetlichkeit are good examples of this.
While Angst and Gemütlichkeit may have adequate translations in fear and - to a lesser extent - coziness, Schadenfreude captures a much more complex psychological concept, and therefore lacks a single-word counterpart in the English dictionary (Schadenfreude itself is a combination of the German words Schaden and Freude; meaning damage and joy respectively).
Nonetheless, Schadenfreude is such a basic human experience, that it is only natural that - if you don't develop your own word for it - you would certainly want to adopt somebody else's word for it into your vocabulary.
Another word that seems similarly essential to describing a particular feeling that most humans experience at some time or another, but which - unlike Schadenfreude - has somehow evaded incorporation into the English language, appears in the verb "Fremdschämen":
Fremdschämen describes embarrassment which is experienced in response to someone else's actions, but it is markedly different from simply being embarrassed for someone else. In particular it is different from being embarrassed because of how another person's actions reflect on us or because of how another person's actions make us look in the eyes of others.
Instead, Fremdscham (the noun) describes the almost-horror you feel when you notice that somebody is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are. Fremdscham occurs when someone who should feel embarrassed for themselves simply is not, and you start feeling embarrassment in their place. It is at the heart of beloved "mockumentaries" such as The Office, Modern Family, or Ricky Gervais' Extras. It is also what makes the auditions [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_01WbShQHs (with {over 4,000} comments) (next below)]
for American Idol, Britain's got Talent and Deutschland Sucht den Superstar so discomfortingly entertaining...
Besides the emotional response, Fremdscham-inducing events and items (such as this creationist video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZFG5PKw504 (with {over 111,000} comments) (next below)])
also usually cause one to ask this question: "how on earth can these people be unaware of how stupid they are being right now?".
And more than to lecture you about the beauty of the German language, I want to write about a classic psychological theory that laid the groundwork for addressing precisley this question of how people remain ignorant of their ignorance.
The Dunning Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance. As a result, such people remain unaware of their incompetence and accordingly fail to take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence. In my extended version of the Dunning-Kruger effect, this also leads to extensive Fremdscham in others, but this is not covered by the original research...
Dunning and Kruger reported their seminal experimental findings more than ten years ago in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Dunning-Kruger effect has since become a popular culture item, similar to inattention blindness, or cognitive dissonance. For most of my readers therefore, the general concept might be very old news indeed. Nonetheless, I think it is original research, well worth reconsidering:
Finding the Effect
The first of the original Dunning Kruger experiments featured a group of undergraduate students who were asked - just as they walked out of an exam - to rate their performance for the class just completed. In particular they were asked how well they had mastered the course material, and what they predicted their raw score to be for the test just taken.
After comparing the student's own impressions with their actual performance, a clear pattern emerged in Dunning and Kruger's data: Worse students grossly overestimated their own performance, while top students somewhat underestimated theirs. You get a clear sense of the extremety of the poor student's penchant to overestimate their own performance, when you consider these results: For the bottom quartile, while their actual performance may have
"put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated their mastery of the course material to fall in the 60th percentile and their test performance to fall in the 57th".
Bottom performers tended to overestimate their performance by roughly 30%; a general pattern that has been replicated many times over since.
Similarly,
"Participants taking tests in their ability to think logically, to write grammatically, and to spot funny jokes tend to overestimate their percentile ranking relative to their peers by some 40 to 50 points, thinking they are outperforming a majority of their peers when, in fact, they are the ones being outperformed."
As Dunning and Kruger point out in an overview of the literature that followed their research:
"This pattern also emerges in more real-world settings: among debate teams taking part in a college tournament and hunters quizzed about their knowledge of firearms just before the start of hunting season [Note to Dick Cheney]; among medical residents evaluating their patient-interviewing skills; and among medical lab technicians assessing their knowledge of medical terminology and everyday problem-solving ability in the lab."
Dunning-Kruger as a Vicious Cycle
Dunning and Kruger often refer to a "double curse" when interpreting their findings: People fail to grasp their own incompetence, precisely because they are so incompetent. And since overcoming their incompetence would first require the ability to distinguish competence from incompetence, people get stuck in a vicious cycle.
"The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else's, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people's responses as superior to their own."
[I.e. they became creationists]
How to Escape the Vicious Cycle?
More important maybe than recognizing the intrinsic dilemma in the Dunning Kruger effect, is the issue of how people may overcome this incompetence driven vicious cycle. After all, it might be flattering to think of you and I as so smart that we are never the incompetents in the Dunning-Kruger story, but alas, this is the very problem of it all: Our own judgment of competence isn't worth much, when it is possible that we are merely too incompetent to provide good judgment.
One possible way to improve people's ability to discriminate between poor and great performances on a particular task domain, is of course to teach them additional discrimination skills. And indeed, one of Dunning and Kruger's experiments aims to find out how well this method works. As in the previous experiments, students first participated in a logic test and then rated their perceived performance. (Again, poor performers grossly overestimated their performance on the test, and high performers erred towards the side of modesty.) This time, in a second phase of the experiment, half of the participants were now given a mini-lecture on how to solve the type of logic questions they had just seen on their test. This was an attempt to provide them with systematic tools for distinguishing accurate from inaccurate answers.
"When given their original test to look over, the participants who received the lecture, and particularly those who were poor performers, provided much more accurate self-ratings than they had originally. They judged their performance quite harshly- and even lowered their confidence in their own general logical reasoning ability, even though, if anything, the mini-lecture had strengthened that ability, not weakened it."
In light of the above the result, one might view the Dunning-Kruger effect a little less as a vicious cycle, as it can be broken fairly easily by external communication of meta-cognitive skills. Such communication seems to significantly improve people's self-assessment ability and thus lay the groundwork for self-improvement.
What About the Cream of The Crop?
So far, I have mostly mentioned the poor performers in the Dunning Kruger effect, but there are of course also the top performers, who tend to underestimate their performance? For them, the cognitive bias in the Dunning Kruger studies is of a different kind than the one described for the poor performers:
"Top performers tend to have a relatively good sense of how well they perform in absolute terms, such as their raw score on a test. Where they err is in their estimates of other people-consistently overestimating how well other people are doing on the same test".
Not surprisingly, an easy way of providing top students in the Dunning Kruger study a perspective on the true exceptionality of their performance was to simply show them some samples of other people's answers. Given these students general ability to discern a good from a poor performance, such comparison opportunities were sufficient for high performing students to revise their self-assessments and rate temselves more accurately.
Quite notably, providing poor students with sample answers of their better performing peers did nothing to improve their relative self-assessment. In line with Dunning and Kruger's hypothesis, poor performing students seemed to lack the ability to identify other student's answers as superior to their own, and therefore were unable to use this information as a benchmark for re-evaluating their own relative performance.
Self-View Not IQ
To be clear, the main reason for the Dunning Kruger effect should not be viewed as lying in a person's general IQ. Much rather the Dunning Kruger effect seems to arise from the general top-down approach in which people estimate their own performances: In evaluating ourselves, we tend to start with preconceived notions about our general skill and then we integrate these notions into how well we think we are doing on a task.
A great illustration of this can be found in another experiment by - again - Dunning and Kruger. These guys are prolific: In this experiment students were first asked to report their views about their own "abstract reasoning ability" as well as their perceived knowledge and skill regarding the use of computers.
After assessment of these self-related views, participants were administered a test which was claimed to be either a logic quiz or a computer quiz, but was in both cases actually the exact same quiz.
In general people were far more confident about their logical reasoning ability than they were about their computer skills, and quite tellingly, when it came to rating their performance on the subsequent test, overestimation in poor performers - the Dunning Kruger effect - was much stronger for those participants who believed they were taking a logic quiz, than for those who believed they were taking a computer quiz.
To a substantial degree, it was participants preconceived notions that seemed to drive the observed overestimation.
Why it Matters
As Dunning and Kruger point out
"The top-down nature of performance estimates can have important behavioral consequences. [...]Starting in adolescence, women tend to rate themselves as less scientifically talented than men rate themselves. Because of this, women might start to think they are doing less well on specific scientific tasks than men tend to think, even when there is no gender difference in performance. Thinking they are doing less well, women might become less enthusiastic about participating in scientific activities".
In a final clever experiment, Dunning and Kruger tested this hypothesis regarding women's motivation to participate in scientific endeavors as follows: Male and female students were given a pop-quiz on scientific reasoning, and results were compared to previously obtained self-views on scientific skills. Although there was no gender difference in actual performance, women both reported lower self-views regarding their skill, as well as lower self-ratings regarding their performance on the pop-quiz.
Quite illustratively, later, when asked if they would like to participate in a
"science competition for fun and prizes , the women were more likely than the men to decline the invitation".
Statistical analysis revealed this reluctance to be correlated strongly with the women's perceived performance on the test.
"Perception of performance, not reality, influenced decisions about future activities".
PART 1: Richard Dawkins reads excerpts from The God Delusion at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006.
PART 2: Richard Dawkins answers questions at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006. This Q&A features many questions from Jerry Falwell's Liberty "University" students.
"If I was just intelligent, I'd be okay. But I am fiercely intelligent, which most people find very threatening." --Actress Sharon Stone
"People the world over recognize me as a great spiritual leader." --Actor Steven Seagal
Do conspicuously gifted people--people who are prodigiously and undeniably skilled--go around boasting of their abilities? I can understand them occasionally "showing off" just to confirm or re-establish their creds, but I can't see them needing to brag about stuff. In other words, it's hard to imagine Albert Einstein going around telling people that he was "fiercely intelligent."
There is a phenomenon in psychology called the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." It's a theory that was developed, in 1999, by Dr. David Dunning and Dr. Justin Kruger, two Cornell University psychology professors.
Broadly speaking, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is defined as "a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability to recognize their [own] ineptitude."
To be clear, this not to say we don't need strong, resilient egos, or that a healthy sense of self-esteem isn't essential to performing our most productive work. Indeed, most would agree that low self-esteem can be a real hindrance. I'm reminded of the Woody Allen joke about the guy who had such low self-esteem, that when he was drowning, another person's life flashed before his eyes.
But when you read Dunning-Kruger, and consider its implications, you instantly think of Sarah Palin and Herman Cain. Palin was the short-term governor of Alaska, who ran for vice-president on the platform of getting the government out of our lives, even though Alaska had the highest per capita rate of government subsidy in the nation, and Herman Cain was a successful businessman who believed that by virtue of having been a former pizza maker, he was entitled to be president.
In Barbara Walters' interview with Palin, she delicately mentioned the fact that people were "concerned" about Ms. Palin being put in a position where she could accede to the presidency. Palin's face lit up with utter astonishment. "But why would they think that?!" she asked plaintively, without so much as a sliver of self-doubt. How could anyone think I wouldn't make a great president? Her certitude was scary.
More weirdness: In 2012, when a goofy reporter asked Donald Trump if he planned to run for president in 2012, didn't Trump answer him by saying, solemnly, "I don't want to, but I may have to"? What a preposterous statement. To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, if Donald Trump were given an enema before his funeral, they could bury him in a match box.
Think of any lightweight Republican politician, and imagine him or her as president. Take John Boehner, for example, the gutless, mealy-mouthed Speaker of the House, who can't read the telephone book without fighting back tears. Say what you will about Boehner--call him a clumsy, bumbling second-rate political hack--but compared to the likes of Palin, Cain and Trump, he's Venerable Bede.
The next time we assume it's simply a combination of inflated ego and wild-assed ambition that drives certain people to want to become president, we may want to reconsider. These people could actually be suffering from a metacognitive inability to recognize their own ineptitude. In which case, there's an epidemic of it.
In the latest in John Harris's National Conversations series of interviews, Richard Dawkins is invited to defend his atheism. What about the comfort, community, and moral education offered by religion?
The complete 2 hour debate which includes all the Q&A session etc.
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IS A FORCE FOR GOOD IN THE WORLD
For the motion: Archbishop John Onaiyekan, Ann Widdecombe Against the motion: Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry
Chair: Zeinab Badawi
Edit: In response to a common statement that this isn't the 2 hour version - I must admit that I was being quite liberal with the title description. This is actually the 1 hour, 59 minutes and 10 second version...;) The extra 50 seconds were the closing titles and were edited out due to them being irrelevant... If you need them I will happily upload and post a link here:)
This is an excerpt from a great Australian piece of telivision called Q&A where politicians and other intellectuals from scoiety have to answer direct questions from the public.
This week was all about religion. And this bigoted woman called Angela Shanahan gets booed from the audience and shot down by Davis Marr and our former forgeine affairs minister. It's great to see Atheists and persons of logic standing up against this poetic hatred.
Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He was voted Britain's leading public intellectual by readers of Prospect magazine and was named one of Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People" for 2007.
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene", which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term "meme". He is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book "The Blind Watchmaker", he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics.
Richard Dawkins is an atheist, secular humanist, sceptic, scientific rationalist, and supporter of the Brights movement. In his 2006 book "The God Delusion", he contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that faith qualifies as a delusion - as a fixed false belief.
If you enjoy the video and would like to support the work of The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, please purchase the program on DVD at http://richarddawkins.net/store/
The True Core Of The Jesus Myth | Christopher Hitchens @ FreedomFest (1)
Uploaded on Apr 11, 2009 by FFreeThinker
The True Core Of The Jesus Myth - Christopher Hitchens @ FreedomFest (Part 1).
Dinesh D'Souza and Christopher Hitchens go at it again at the 2008 Freedom Fest as the "Main Event".
FreedomFest is an annual festival where "free minds meet" to celebrate "great books, great ideas, and great thinkers" in an open-minded society. It is independent, non-partisan, and not affiliated with any organization or think tank.
Founded and produced by Mark Skousen, since 2002, FreedomFest invites the "best and the brightest" from around the world to talk, strategize, socialize, and celebrate liberty. FreedomFest is open to all and is purely egalitarian, where speakers, attendees, and exhibitors are treated as equals.
Christopher Hitchens (born 1949) is an author, journalist and literary critic. Currently living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens is also a political observer, whose books — the latest being "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" — have made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits.
In 2009 Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in U.S. media." The same article noted, though, that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list" and that he "styles himself a radical", not a liberal.
A poem I wrote to highlight the difference between Jesus and false religion. In the scriptures Jesus received the most opposition from the most religious people of his day. At it's core Jesus' gospel and the good news of the Cross is in pure opposition to self-righteousness/self-justification. Religion is man centered, Jesus is God-centered. This poem highlights my journey to discover this truth. Religion either ends in pride or despair. Pride because you make a list and can do it and act better than everyone, or despair because you can't do your own list of rules and feel "not good enough" for God. With Jesus though you have humble confident joy because He represents you, you don't represent yourself and His sacrifice is perfect putting us in perfect standing with God the Father.
Richard Dawkins (author of "The God Delusion") gave a lecture at the Eden Court Theater and the last audience question asked was from this deeply disturbed faithful christian believer. Richard Dawkins answers him rather succinctly...
"According to police, the girls were home schooled, and subjected to strict punishment that included hour-long running sessions, memorization of Bible verses, and spankings with a wooden paddle. The couple also forced the girls to sleep in a backyard tent either nude or only in a diaper.
Police spokeswoman Amanda Jacinto said the oldest teenage girl remained in a local hospital due to her emaciated condition, and that the five-foot-tall (1.52-meter) teen had weighed just 60 pounds (27 kg) upon admission."
When Hitchens Gets Furious - Christopher Hitchens @ C-SPAN (Part 3).
Christopher Hitchens (born 1949) is an author, journalist and literary critic. Currently living in Washington, D.C., he has been a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry, and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens is also a political observer, whose books — the latest being "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" — have made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits.
In 2009 Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in U.S. media." The same article noted, though, that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list" and that he "styles himself a radical", not a liberal.
Christopher Hitchens at his finest - some of my favorite moments by the writer who has inspired the ideals of skepticism, free inquiry, and rational thought in so many. I believe Hitchslap is now the proper term for the unflinching intellectual prowess displayed in these exchanges.
Christopher Hitchens - The Best of the Hitchslap - Part Two
Uploaded on Dec 15, 2011 by JediJesseS's channel
I have been working on this video for some time, and had planned to upload it today as the rendering completed just yesterday morning. When I heard the sad news of Professor Hitchens' death late in the evening, I struggled with the thought of canceling this upload. It seemed somehow opportunistic to release a video so soon after, even if this coordination was not intentionally planned in advance. The beginning of this video especially carries a different meaning now that this news has reached all of us.
In the end, I decided I could cope with this feeling of unease in order to share more of his thoughts, provide a moment of reflection, and pay humble tribute to the man that is an inspiration to me and so many others. If the first video was a general critique of religion, this edition is aimed at responses to common complaints non-believers hear again and again.
Mr. Hitchens, your contributions to the struggle for liberty, equality, rationality, and freedom will never be forgotten. Your forcefulness, wit, and intelligence gave me the strength and courage to argue for these ideals in my own life. That you have done the same for so many is your great and immortal contribution to mankind. These seemingly small victories are what change the world; one action, one mind at a time, until the tide cannot be held back any longer. Your actions and words have moved us ever closer to that point. Thank you.
The first question for Victoria Jackson—Saturday Night Live alum, candidate for county commissioner—was about traffic improvements. "I don't know all of the specific details, she said, "but I'm worried about my country and so I jumped into the local government to try to help save it from socialism."
Jackson, the ditzy blonde caricature turned nutty rightwing Tea Party caricature, was clearly a bit out of her element talking county transportation policy at a Q&A for candidates in Williamson County, Tennessee, where she moved last year with her "police officer husband" to escape urban America and its creeping sharia communism. Nevertheless, she stumbled through an answer, which formed her first campaign video: "I don't know, I'm not an expert on highways. I guess widening a road is a good way to make cars go on it?"
Alas, Jackson's anti-communist crusade was savagely cut short yesterday by the radical leftist voters of Williamson County, who opted for overwhelmingly for two incumbent conservative women—not conservative enough for Jackson.
"I want to represent tea party constitutional conservative values, which I see lacking in the Capitol on fighting Common Core and Agenda 21," Jackson had said in her summation. On her website, she called Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam—a pro-life budget-cutting Republican—"the Progressive (Communist) who supports Common Core."
My first reaction? Hmmm. Well, I don't really like numbers, and Commissioners mostly talk about numbers, the budget...
My concern for Judy and Betsy is that they are not informed about Agenda 21 and Common Core and its ramifications on local government. The big picture. I think they've been living in the Williamson County bubble and are not aware that the Obama Administration and the fast-moving lunge toward socialism in our country has begun to erase our freedoms, even here. As their annoying constituent, I will try to share my knowledge and research with them, so they can make wise choices.
She summed up with a concession prayer, in lieu of the traditional speech:
My concession speech is this;
Dear Heavenly Father,
Thank you for your abundant blessings and your mercy. Please forgive our country and me for not honoring and obeying you. We seek your face. Help us turn from our wicked ways. Please heal our country. Please give us a revival. Please awaken your church. We are losing America. Our children are attacked by immorality in culture, TV, and our bad example. We are lost and blind. We need you. You alone, great and only God, Jehovah can save us. Please hear our plea. Our enemies are on every side. Our leaders are corrupt. Please expose their evil schemes and confuse them. Please replace our corrupt leaders with men who love and obey you. Please protect Israel. Please protect our military. Please give us wisdom. In my small part of the world, please give our elected and appointed officials wisdom to keep us from harm. Please protect us from our enemies within and without. Thank you for dying on the cross for our sins. That is a concept so amazing we can hardly comprehend it.