Perversion of Justice?

Greg Price posted eleven reasons on Twitter why so many people believe that the Trump "Hush-Money" trial orchestrated by Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan bears an amazing likeness to the old Soviet show trials under Joseph Stalin.

For these eleven reasons and others, the guilty verdict in this trial is almost certain to be overturned on appeal, but that apparently doesn't matter to Bragg and Merchan who are being treated like heroes by the left at places like MSNBC.

What seems to matter most to those who think it's a good move to persecute a former president by prosecuting him for political benefit is that they'll get to call him a "convicted felon" in the campaign and maybe even get photos of him in a prison jumpsuit.

Here are Price's eleven:

- The Soros funded DA elevated a misdemeanor to a felony despite lowering 60% of all felonies for actual criminals in his jurisdiction.
- The lead prosecutor resigned his position as the 3rd highest ranking member of Biden's DOJ to join Alvin Bragg's team going after Trump.
- The judge donated to Joe Biden and has a daughter who raised millions of dollars for Democrats off the Trump prosecutions.
- The other lead prosecutor also donated to Joe Biden.
- The lead witness that the whole case relies on is a convicted perjurer and serial liar who admitted during the trial to stealing money from the Trump organization.
- The judge put a gag order on Donald Trump for pointing out the political conflicts of interest of the people prosecuting him.
- The "crime" relies on the idea that Trump paid off Stormy Daniels to conceal another crime, which is not mentioned in the indictment.
- The judge barred Trump's defense from explaining to jury that no campaign finance violation occurred but allowed prosecutors to assert as fact in their closing that there was.
- The judge cleared out the court room when Michael Cohen's former attorney was exonerating Trump but allowed the prosecution to bring in Stormy Daniels to talk about whether or not Trump used a condom.
- The judge barred a former FEC commissioner from testifying that Donald Trump did nothing wrong.
- The judge is allowing the jury to not have to reach a unanimous verdict on the underlying, unnamed crime Trump committed.

One doesn't have to be a Trump fan or a Republican to be sickened by this travesty and to fear for the future of our country if people like this continue to be in charge much longer.

Cut Flowers

The British atheist and writer Douglas Murray is, like Richard Dawkins, what some have called a "cultural" Christian. He doesn't believe that Christianity is metaphysically true, but he recognizes that Western civilization was built upon a Christian worldview and cannot survive without it. We are, he says, a "cut-flower" civilization:

There is this idea that Western civilization’s like a cut flower and you can look at it and enjoy it, but it’s going to die… So how do we make sure that it isn’t a cut flower? The answer to that is that we find the seeds that planted the flowers and we reseed the land… That doesn’t mean the dogmatic Christianization, or some people might like to go that route, but it does mean a recognition of the wellspring… nothing good can come without that. We will simply be a flower that withers and dies.

The problem with this, as Margaret Clark writes in a piece at Redstate, is that we simply can't have the cultural flower without the spiritual root.

Clark quotes historian Tom Holland, another British atheist and author of the much-praised book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Holland says that whether we like it or not, all the goods we take for granted in the West - freedom of speech and religion, hospitals, orphanages, welfare for the poor, universities, human equality, human rights - were birthed in the womb of biblical Christianity.

Holland writes:

People in the West, even those who may imagine that they have emancipated themselves from Christian belief, in fact, are shot through with Christian assumptions about almost everything. . . All of us in the West are a goldfish, and the water that we swim in is Christianity, by which I don’t necessarily mean the confessional form of the faith, but, rather, considered as an entire civilisation.

Clark adds this:

Holland’s book focuses much on the idea in Christianity that “The last will be first and the first will be last.” He argues that this thought in the Roman empire, which was known for its brutality and dominance, was so radical and repulsive that it shocked the world and subsequently turned the pages of history and society as we know it in a completely different direction. He argues that all modern concepts of human rights stem from this idea.

What value does a human have? A woman? A person of the LGBTQ community? A person of a different race? A person with a disability? A person who believes differently than you?

Christianity is the only belief system that protects all human life with the utmost dignity and honor — even to lay one’s life down for your enemy. As it shocked the Romans, it can still shock us in our divided country today. Christianity doesn’t just go against the grain; it rewrites it altogether.

If the great nation of freedoms that we have today can be owed to Christian visionaries, where does that leave us in one of the most secular times of our country’s history? Like the flower [cut from its root], we may be able to play the part for a time, but without the roots, we cannot survive. Our concept of human dignity without the roots of the Bible can leave us with good intentions but no compass.

She's right. To borrow an analogy from Tolstoy, we're like children who pluck a flower from its root, stick it in the ground, and expect it to flourish.

Having abandoned Christianity, moderns are terribly confused. We no longer agree that this, the greatest nation ever to grace the planet, is worth defending. We can no longer say why humans are special or why they have rights. We can no longer talk about objective moral right and wrong and can't define what we mean by evil. For that matter, we can't even define what a woman is.

A culture this rudderless and adrift is rapidly approaching the sunset of its existence.

Deep Design Requires a Mind

The narrator of this almost 8:00 minute video on Mount Rushmore makes an interesting comment. I'm paraphrasing, but he notes that none of the people looking up at the faces of the four presidents would ever conclude that the images they see carved in the stone were the product of the random action of atoms of granite and the effects of erosion.

Yet some, if not many, of those observers believe that they and everyone around them, organisms infinitely more complex than the stone faces they're viewing, are merely the products of blind, impersonal forces.

The faces on the mountain had to be the products of an intelligent architect, they assume, but human beings are the result of chance accidents and natural selection. One has to have an extraordinary amount of faith in blind chance to believe that.

Anyway, here's the video:

The Trinity

Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday in the Christian calendar, and the concept of a Triune God raises difficult theological questions. Many attempts have been made to explain it. Bishop Robert Barron discusses three attempts in this 14 minute homily:

The problem of course, is trying to explicate how one God can exist as three persons when none of the persons is identical to the other. The classic Christian view is represented by this diagram:

To many non-Christians, and even some Christians, this concept is hard to distinguish from polytheism. If the Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, that sounds a lot like three Gods.

I personally think that God has revealed much about Himself in His creation and am therefore drawn to theological metaphors and analogies from the created world. One that I think captures what it means to be three persons in one substance is water.

Water is one substance, H²O, but it manifests itself in three different states - solid ice, liquid water, and gaseous water vapor. Moreover, all three states can exist simultaneously at 0° Celsius, and they can transition between states, in a fashion that may be analogous to communion within the Trinity.

Some object that this analogy is a heresy called Modalism because it seems to deny the "is not" relationship in the above diagram, but I'm not sure this is so. Ice is not identical to vapor. Liquid is not identical to solid ice. These states behave differently, they have different physical properties and thus have different identities even though they are all the same substance, much like the three persons represented by the diagram.

Anyway, the nature of the Godhead has perplexed far greater minds than mine, and I certainly don't profess to have the definitive answer to the question. Even so, as Thomas Aquinas taught us, analogies can be helpful in at least gaining partial understanding of a truth, and perhaps the analogy to one of the most amazing of God's creations, water*, will be helpful to you.

* See biologist Michael Denton's excellent book The Wonder of Water. It will leave you amazed at this substance that we so easily take for granted.

A Day to Honor Valor

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but maybe it's not inappropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its year-long mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God this Memorial Day.

Which Worldview Is More Rational? (Pt.II)

Yesterday we examined the objection to theistic belief that belief in God is irrational. In reply to this objection I suggested that there are a number of things an atheistic materialist has to believe that many people, including atheists, would consider irrational or at least less rational than believing their contraries.

I'd like to finish up those thoughts by noting one other grave problem with what we might call the atheistic argument from irrationality. The atheist who employs this argument against the theist actually winds up shooting himself in the foot. Here's why.

Atheists, or naturalistic materialists (Nat Mats), are philosophically wedded to a Darwinian explanation of the emergence of the human species, but according to the Darwinian view organisms and all their capacities evolve to enable them to survive and reproduce.

It follows, then, that the Nat Mat must acknowledge that human beings have evolved their cognitive faculties, which include reason, to enable them to survive and reproduce. But survival is not the same thing as truth. Our cognitive faculties have not evolved to enable us to discover truth.

Most Naturalists freely admit this. Here are four examples of the dozens that could be cited:

“Sometimes you are more likely to survive and propagate if you believe a falsehood than if you believe the truth.” Physicist Eric Baum.

“According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.” Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman.

"Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive sometimes not." Neuroscientist Steven Pinker.

Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Philosopher Patricia Churchland.

You get the idea. If Darwinian evolution is true then we have no basis for trusting our reason to lead us to truth because reason didn't evolve to serve that function. The thoughts in our brains are just the movement of electrons along neurons which are, in turn, the result of a mindless, unguided evolutionary process.

If this is so, why should I believe anything those electro-chemical reactions in the brain tell me is true? Indeed, what grounds does a Nat Mat have for even believing that Nat Mat is true?

Naturalistic philosopher John Gray writes, "The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth," and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett agrees, “Our brains aren’t wired for accuracy. They’re wired to keep us alive.”

How then can our Nat Mat friends claim that it's rational to believe in the evolution of human reason, a faculty not designed to discover truth, but that it's irrational to believe that human reason was designed by an intelligent Mind to enable us to apprehend truth? Clearly, the atheist has put himself in a pickle here.

If the atheist is right that we are the product of mindless unguided natural processes, then he has given us strong reason to doubt the reliability of our cognitive faculties and thus also given us strong reason to doubt the truth of any belief they produce, including the belief that there is no God.

Moreover, since the atheist has no grounds for trusting the deliverances of his reason he a forteriori strips himself of any rational basis for science. If atheism is true then there's no warrant for either science or truth, since both depend upon the ability to trust the faculty of human reason. Atheism saws off the epistemic branch that it sits on.

How, after all, can it be reasonable to hold the belief that we have no basis for trusting reason?

So, which is more rational, holding a belief - atheism - that implicitly denies that our reason is trustworthy and that truth can be known, or holding a belief - theism - that tells us that our reason is trustworthy because it was instilled in us by a rational Creator?

Which Worldview Is More Rational? (Pt. I)

A criticism often leveled against theistic belief is that it's irrational to believe in an entity (God) that can't be observed. French philosopher Michael Onfray, for example, has written that "Monotheism loathes intelligence." And, "God puts to death everything that stands up to him, beginning with reason, intelligence and the critical mind."

Onfray, of course, is an atheistic materialist who, like the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens, and others, argues that belief in God is an irrational delusion.

Well, is it? Which is the more rational belief system or worldview, atheism or theism? Is it more rational to believe, for instance, that ...

• the information needed to form the first living thing arose by chance, or to believe that wherever we find it information is always the product of a mind?
• the extraordinarily precise calibration of the parameters, forces constants and initial conditions of the universe necessary to permit life to exist is just an astronomically improbable accident or to believe that this cosmic fine-tuning is the result of intentional engineering?
• the space, time, material universe created itself, or to believe that space, time and matter were caused by something that is itself neither spatial, temporal nor material?
• moral values - belief in human equality, dignity, rights, the belief that it's wrong to harm others - are purely subjective and arbitrary or to believe that they're objectively grounded and independent of whether people agree with them or not?
• every choice, act and thought is the inevitable consequence of prior causes that determine everything we do or to believe that we are in some sense free to choose between alternative futures?
• our conscious experience is just electro-chemical processes in the brain or to believe that the phenomena of human consciousness are the products of an immaterial mind working in concert with our physical body?
• your life is a pointless "tale told by an idiot" or to believe that your life is meaningful because what you do in this life matters forever?

Materialism offers no plausible explanation for the origin of the universe, the exquisite fine-tuning of the universe, the origin of life, or the origin of consciousness. To be a consistent materialist one should be a determinist about human choices and a nihilist about life in general and morality in particular.

Perhaps a further question one might ask in addition to those listed above is, is it more rational to adopt a worldview (atheistic materialism) whose entailments are almost impossible to live with consistently or is it more rational to adopt a worldview (theism) whose entailments are consistent with our most basic beliefs about life?

After all, what's irrational is denying that there's a God while living as if there is.

Who's Right About Meaning?

One of the questions I've been particularly interested in over the years is whether those philosophers, many atheists among them, who claim that life is utterly pointless and empty given an atheist worldview are correct or whether those who say that God is not necessary for there to be genuine meaning in life are correct.

The following short video takes a stab at the question from the standpoint of those who claim that if life ends in permanent, total annihilation nothing we do in our few short years here ultimately matters.

Check it out:

Presidential Pandering

President Biden has a disconcerting habit of pandering in the most obsequious fashion when addressing African American audiences.

Speaking to an audience consisting of a large number of African Americans in 2012 he warned his listeners that Republicans (Mitt Romney?!) are "going to put y'all back in chains."

In 2020 he told a black radio host that “...if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

More recently he gave the commencement speech at Morehouse College, a black college in Atlanta. The speech was shameful. It's hard to imagine a more racially divisive address.

He presented himself, rather dubiously, as something of a warrior in the civil-rights movement, but worse, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, he essentially told the graduates that America hates them.

Here are some excerpts from Mr. Biden's speech excerpted in a recent Journal editorial:

"You started college just as George Floyd was murdered and there was a reckoning on race. It’s natural to wonder if democracy you hear about actually works for you."

“What is democracy if black men are being killed in the street?"

“What is democracy if a trail of broken promises still leave black—black communities behind?"

“What is democracy if you have to be 10 times better than anyone else to get a fair shot?"

“And most of all, what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

Mr. Biden's rhetoric suggests he's still living in the 1950s. Each of the above quotes contains either an untruth or a half-truth, but set that aside.

The Journal's editorial continues:

Thanks for the uplift, Mr. President. Since Mr. Biden is asking questions, is this what he wants these young graduates to believe about their country—that American democracy is defined by its racial animosity, as if they still live in the Jim Crow South?

As others have noted, imagine working hard for four years to graduate and on a day of celebration for you and your families the President of the United States sends you off with a message that your countrymen who are white want you to fail. Is this what President Biden thinks of America?

Apparently it is. He also told the graduates that Republicans don’t want blacks to vote. “Today in Georgia, they won’t allow water to be available to you while you wait in line to vote in an election. What in the hell is that all about? I’m serious. Think about it. And then the constant attacks on black election workers who count your vote,” he said.

Yes, think about it. The 2022 Senate race in the Deep South state of Georgia featured two black men as the major-party nominees. The Democrat won after the election reforms that Mr. Biden caricatures as racist.

The next quote is galling.

Mr. Biden also turned the Jan. 6 Capitol riot into a racial event: “Insurrectionists who storm the Capitol with Confederate flags are called ‘patriots’ by some. Not in my house. Black police officers, black veterans protecting the Capitol were called another word, as you’ll recall.”

The riot was a disgrace for which hundreds have been severely punished, but that day wasn’t driven by racial hatred.

This is galling because Mr. Biden neglects to mention that the only person killed on Jan. 6th was a white woman named Ashli Babbitt who was shot by a black police officer for trespassing in the Capitol. The officer was never held accountable for what was clearly an excessive use of force every bit as unjustified, if not more so, as the actions that precipitated the death of George Floyd.

Mr. Biden is apparently desperate because polls show him to be hemorrhaging African American support and his default strategy with African Americans is to demagogue them. It's insulting to them and both demeaning and dishonorable for him.

Petition to Cut Harrison Butker

A gentleman by the name of Willard Harris has started a petition calling upon the Kansas City Chiefs to dismiss their place-kicker, Harrison Butker, from the team for remarks he made during a commencement speech at Benedictine College. In his address Butker praised traditional family arrangements which has apparently outraged the left. You can read the speech for yourself here.

Harris begins his petition with this:

The harmful remarks made by Harrison Butker, kicker of the Kansas City Chiefs, during his commencement address at Benedictine College were unacceptable. His comments were sexist, homophobic, anti-trans, anti-abortion and racist. These dehumanizing remarks against LGBTQ+ individuals, attacks on abortion rights and racial discrimination perpetuate division and undermine human rights.

These three sentences raise a lot of questions. How was what Butker said "harmful"? Did it hurt anyone physically or did it just make someone feel bad? Moreover, what is it exactly that Butker said that was racist? And what's wrong with being against killing babies? How did he dehumanize anyone?

And while we're at it, what does Harris base "human rights" on? Where does he think such rights come from? If they're just arbitrary conventions then what does it matter if they're undermined?

He goes on:

These comments reinforce harmful stereotypes that threaten social progress. They create a toxic environment that hinders our collective efforts towards equality, diversity and inclusion in society. It is unacceptable for such a public figure to use their platform to foster harm rather than unity.

It's hard to see how commending Catholic doctrine to the graduates of a Catholic college is creating "a toxic environment." If someone outside the campus finds Butker's opinions offensive, why, they can just not read his speech. Harris is apparently all in favor of diversity, equality and inclusion except for those whose opinions differ from his. That kind of diversity and inclusion is evidently unacceptable for Harris, and people who hold those opinions should not be granted equal standing in the society that Harris would have us live in.

It's important to note that these types of discriminatory attitudes contribute significantly towards societal issues such as hate crimes which have been on the rise in recent years (source: FBI Hate Crime Statistics). Furthermore, they can lead to increased mental health issues among targeted communities (source: American Psychological Association).

In other words, advocating traditional marriage and family contributes to hate crimes and mental health problems. How, exactly? What's the connection? Harris doesn't tell us. He just assumes that everyone knows that there is one.

We demand accountability from our sports figures who should be role models promoting respect for all people regardless of their race, gender identity or sexual orientation. We call upon the Kansas City Chiefs management to dismiss Harrison Butker immediately for his inappropriate conduct.

It's significant, I think, that Harris doesn't include a single excerpt from the speech in his petition so that potential signers could see what was disrespectful and inappropriate. I wonder if Harris even read the speech himself.

Please sign this petition if you stand with us against discrimination and believe in fostering an inclusive society where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.

Everyone is to be treated with dignity and respect, except, that is, those who hold viewpoints which conflict with those of Mr. Harris. Harris must have adopted a peculiar definition of "inclusive society" if his society excludes the opinions of probably the majority of Americans as well as excluding those Americans who hold them.

Anyway, almost 220,000 people have signed this petition. One wonders how many of these signers are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs' opponents fed up with seeing Butker's field goals deprive their team of a chance to beat the Chiefs. The rest perhaps are closed-minded, intolerant anti-Catholic bigots who can't abide anyone voicing any opinion that doesn't conform to or support their own group-think.

Mob Tyranny

Robert Kaplan, writing for the Wall street Journal a couple of years ago, discussed a 1960 book by a scholar named Elias Canetti who, Kaplan says, "may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years."

The book is titled Crowds and Power, and it discusses among other things the role of technology in accelerating the decline of the West.

Kaplan points out that the mass movements of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, would've been impossible without the technological advances that made mass communication possible:

It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.

Kaplan then notes that,

The mass ideologies of the 20th century, Nazism and communism, represented a profound abasement of reason. Yet those ideologies reveal more than we’d like to admit about our own political extremes....Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity.

Condemning others, destroying others, compensates for one's own inadequacies and spiritual impoverishment. It fulfills one's need for power, self-importance, self-righteousness and purpose. It's a need that the individual is unable, by himself, to gratify but which can be satisfied by one's participation in "the crowd."

Here's Kaplan:

The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.

Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”

There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own.

Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology—first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook —has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.

Social media amplifies the individual's sense of power. It amplifies all the worst characteristics of crowds (or mobs) which no longer need to be comprised of people physically present to each other as they did in the previous century. By folding solitary persons into a like-minded mass of anonymous individuals modern social media enables the otherwise impotent individual to slake his thirst for significance and meaning.

It also enables him to manifest his bitterness and vent his hatreds in politically effective ways.

Kaplan again:

There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.

But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies.

In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.

The need to parade one's own "virtue" is a major impetus behind "cancel culture." To condemn the sins of others, to humiliate them for their transgressions, is a means of drawing attention to one's own moral superiority. Social media mobs offer unprecedented opportunities for moral preening.

The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.

This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.

As Victor Davis Hanson writes in the introduction to his book The Dying Citizen:

...everything that we once thought was so strong, so familiar, and so reassuring about America has been dissipating for some time....Contemporary events have reminded Americans that their citizenship is fragile and teetering on the abyss....

If we soon tumble over the edge of that abyss it'll be hate-filled crowds of shriveled souls on social media who'll be largely responsible.

The Lonely Activist

A note by R.R. Reno in First Things sheds a bit of light on the psychological makeup of those who engage in political activism. Reno cites a study by the American Enterprise Institute that reveals a strong correlation between political activism and personal loneliness.

He writes:

An American Enterprise Institute study of loneliness (“AEI Survey on Community and Society: Social Capital, Civic Health, and Quality of Life in the United States”) indicates that loneliness and political activism are strongly correlated.

Here is a summary of results penned by Ryan Streeter and David Wilde:

Political volunteers [for campaigns], for example, are less embedded in the social and communal environments that produce trust and social capital.

They are more than twice as likely as ordinary Americans, and three times more likely than religious Americans, to say “rarely” or “never” when asked if there are people they feel close to.

They are five times more likely than religious joiners to say they rarely or never have someone they can turn to in times of need. And they are also more likely than other joiners to say their relationships are superficial.

Streeter and Wilde speculate that lonely people are attracted to the ersatz fellowship of feverish political agreement. “Lacking regular community, political joiners compensate ideologically. Eighty-seven percent report that their ideology gives them a sense of community, compared to 63 percent of ordinary Americans.”

I'll go out on a limb and guess that the correlation is stronger the more radical the activists are. People who commit their lives to political causes are often seeking a substitute religion to compensate for the lack of meaning and community that pervades contemporary secular life.

As our families become increasingly fragmented, our neighborhoods increasingly transitory, and our churches increasingly empty there are fewer places people can find a sense rootedness, a sense that they belong to something significant.

Joining with others in a political cause affords not only a sense of community but also a sense of purpose and fulfillment, both of which are hard to come by in a secular culture in which so much of what engages our attention seems ultimately empty, pointless, and boring.

Nature's Designs

The BBC has a couple of short one to two minute videos that point, each in a different way, to intelligent design in nature.

The first video explains how the morphology and effectiveness of the beak of a bird called the kingfisher attracted the attention of Japanese engineers trying to solve a problem with their bullet trains. The fact that nature's designs solve human engineering problems is at least suggestive of something more than random chance and blind forces behind those designs.

Kingfisher

The second video illustrates what might be called supererogatory design, i.e. designed systems in nature that certainly give the appearance of being both unnecessarily elaborate and intentional. The video shows the amazing underground communication system employed by trees that allows them to assist as well as wage "war" on each other.

It's fascinating to be sure, but the question that comes to mind is how such a system would arise simply through undirected, mechanistic processes.

This is not to say that it couldn't have, of course. Such a feat is within the realm of the logically possible, but it seems that very nearly every new discovery in the biological and cosmological sciences is more compatible with the hypothesis that the mind of an intelligent engineer is behind the phenomena we see than that these phenomena are all, in their billions and perhaps trillions of examples, just a lucky coincidence.

In fact, the conclusion that there's a mind responsible for it all would seem to be almost psychologically inescapable unless that conclusion were rejected a priori, but what rational grounds are there for ruling out an explanation just because one doesn't like its metaphysical implications?

Thanks to Evolution News for the tip and photo.

The Anxious Generation

I recently finished what I think will be one of the most talked about books of the decade. The book was written by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and is titled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. There's a thorough review of it by V. Susan Villani, a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist, in the Baltimore Sun.

Haidt's book is about how social media, the internet, and over-protectiveness of children are rewiring adolescent brains in ways that make it difficult for the young to function in the real world and which lead to serious dysfunctions.

Villani writes:

What have we done? First, we abandoned children to television, then to video games, and now to the internet and social media.

If anyone doubts the harm done to children by the internet and social media, then Jonathan Haidt’s must-read book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” will convince you otherwise.

Haidt presents powerful data about the emerging epidemic of anxiety and depression since 2010, when smartphones became easily available and soon were in the hands of most adults and many children. And while children were being over-protected in the real world by parents afraid to let them outdoors, they were under-protected in a virtual world, which was consuming them and rewiring their brains.

Haidt makes such a strong case for this that to deny his conclusions seems irrational.

The re-wiring process occurs in the adolescent brain through constant exposure to social media which employ algorithms intentionally designed to release dopamine and generate addiction.

Haidt also writes about the importance of play, which involves risk, fear, and excitement that are gradually mastered, producing the self-confidence and competence needed for the challenges of adulthood. Young adults who lack the skills acquired in play become more fearful, anxious, and withdrawn. Time spent on media displaces time that otherwise would have been spent interacting with other children and adults.

The constant use of smartphones during childhood harms them in at least four ways. It deprives them of sleep, face-to-face social interaction, the ability to concentrate (attention fragmentation), and it addicts them. Haidt is adamant that schools become phone-free to allow both education and social-emotional growth to take place. This would not require legislation and could be adopted as policy by every school district.

Haidt makes dozens of suggestions for helping both girls and boys to escape the avaricious manipulations of the people who design the smartphone and the apps that the phones can access, but the basic themes are these:

1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before age 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and independence for children

You'll have to read the book to understand his rationale for these measures, and every parent, teacher, school administrator, and pastor/priest/rabbi/imam in the Western world should consider it required reading this summer.

How Physics Refutes Common Sense

Yesterday's post looked at some of philosopher Bruce Gordon's thoughts on the philosophical theory called idealism.

Idealism holds that the world is real, but it's subjectively real. Its reality is like that of pain. Pain is real, but it's completely in the mind of the one who's experiencing it. It's reality is subjective. If there were no creatures on earth whose nervous systems could create the sensation of pain, pain would not exist.

The common sense view, of course, is that most of the world is objectively real. It exists independently of whether or not anyone is experiencing it. The moon is there whether anyone sees it or not. This common sense view is called realism.

Realism is the view that there is a world outside our minds existing independently of our minds and perceptions, whereas idealism holds that the world is created by our minds by means of the observations we make. Idealism is a philosophical expression of the ideas popularized by the movie The Matrix.

Idealism strikes most of us as at best counter-intuitive. We're accustomed to think of matter as the fundamental reality (a view called materialism). Matter, we assume, is objectively real and exists whether we perceive it or not. On this view, whatever mind is it's somehow a creation or function of our material brains. Idealism turns this view on its head and declares that mind is actually the fundamental reality and that matter only exists as a subjective experience in our minds.

As I said, this view is counter-intuitive, but it's the view held by a lot of physicists who study the fundamental quantum structure of the world. This video gives a pretty clear idea of the thinking of many physicists, some of whom think that idealism is not only correct but that it leads to the conclusion that there is a God, or something very much like God.

The video's a bit long (17 minutes) and moves quickly. It also discusses some arcane physics at points along the way. Nevertheless, you don't have to understand the physics in order to follow the narrative. The science really only illustrates the basic idea which is that mind is fundamental and that matter is downstream, as it were, from mind.

Give it a click, kick back and savor how mysterious is the world in which we live and move and have our being:

A Philosopher Discusses Idealism

Bruce Gordon is one of the most brilliant and accomplished thinkers alive today. Among other things he's a historian and philosopher of science and was interviewed recently by another scientist, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, on a number of topics, including philosophical idealism.

Gordon is one of a growing number of philosophers who find idealism a compelling hypothesis. The interview begins with Dr. Gordon explaining George Berkeley's (1685-1753) version of idealism:

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

Bruce Gordon: There are a lot of different varieties of idealism, and rather than go through a laundry list of its variations, let me just start with the kind of idealism that I would be an advocate of, which is an ontic theistic idealism, essentially a form of idealism that is probably most closely identified with the Anglican Bishop, George Berkeley.

George Berkeley 1727

Basically, it’s the idea that material substances, as substantial entities, do not exist and are not the cause of our perceptions. They do not mediate our experience of the world.

Rather, what constitutes what we would call the physical realm are ideas that exist solely in the mind of God, who, as an unlimited and uncreated immaterial being, is the ultimate cause of the sensations and ideas that we, as finite spiritual beings, experience intersubjectively and subjectively as the material universe....So we are, in effect, living our lives in the mind of God.

And he is a mediator of our experience and of our inner subjectivity, rather than some sort of neutral material realm that serves as a third thing between us and the mind of God, so to speak.

The discussion then turns for a bit to Plato's notion of idealism as expressed in his theory of Forms.

Plato believed that every particular thing that exists has an ideal essence or form that exists in some abstract realm of reality. Every chair, for example, is recognizable as a chair because it "participates" in the perfect abstract form of "chairness," every tree is recognizable as a tree because it "participates" in the perfect form of "treeness."

Likewise with everything, including humans.

Later Christian Platonists argued that these essences, or forms, or ideals existed not in some abstract realm but rather as ideas in the mind of God, and this, it seems, is Gordon's view as well.

Michael Egnor: There are, I believe, other kinds of idealism. For example, idealism by German philosophers. And how does that differ from Berkeleyan idealism?

Bruce Gordon: Well, .... [Immanuel] Kant (1724-1804) advocated a kind of epistemic, as opposed to ontic, idealism. Kantian idealism is entirely compatible with the existence of material substances, even though they are inaccessible as things in themselves.

So for Kantian idealism, you’ve got a self that .... precedes and grounds all of our experience. And our perception of reality, then, is governed by the innate structure of the human mind.

Immanuel Kant 1768 

What Gordon is saying here is that Kant believed that a material world existed but that everything we know about it is based on our sensory perceptions which produce ideas or sensations in the mind. Our mind is so structured as to create these ideas, but they may be nothing at all like the thing they represent.

In other words, what we know about the "thing in itself" is the sum of the ideas (or sensations) we have of it in our minds. We can't know it as it exists independently of our perceptions of it.

For example, our minds, upon seeing, smelling and tasting chocolate, generate the ideas of a certain color, fragrance and flavor, but these ideas are in our minds, they're not in the chocolate. The chocolate itself doesn't have color, it simply reflects certain wavelengths of light. Likewise, it doesn't have fragrance or flavor. It simply exudes chemicals which interact with our senses to produce the ideas of fragrance and flavor in our minds.

As Kant put it, “You only know me as you see me, not as I actually am."

Bruce Gordon: So we never experience reality in itself, which he called the noumenal world, but only reality as it appears to us, a ... phenomenal reality that is ordered by the innate structures of the human mind.

Kantian idealism and its descendants are, in many ways, an epistemic form of idealism, whereas the Berkeleyan form of idealism is ontic.

By this Gordon means that Kant's idealism had to do with what we can know about the world whereas Berkeley's idealism had to do with the ontology of the world - what was actually real and what reality was like. Gordon adds:

[Berkeley's Idealism is] a denial that there is material substance and [is instead] an embedding of reality in the mind of God, such that it is finite spiritual beings experiencing the reality brought into existence by this unlimited, uncreated, immaterial being.

Berkeley's idealism, then, was different from Kant's. Berkeley held that there was no material world at all. Everything we experience we experience as ideas in our minds, ideas which are presented to our minds by the mind of God.

As Berkeley himself says, “All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth — in a word, all those bodies which compose the frame of the world — have not any subsistence without a mind.” This may seem bizarre at first reading, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy “Berkeley’s system, while it strikes many as counter-intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections.”

It's interesting that in the last fifty years or so many physicists have embraced idealism. They're persuaded by developments in quantum mechanics that reveal that at the subatomic level many properties of the entities scientists study at that level don't exist until they're observed.

For instance, the 20th century scientist Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, once stated that,

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.

We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.

And Sir James Jeans, in his book The Mysterious Universe, wrote that, "The universe is beginning to look more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine."

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists, but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks, especially those who are heirs to the Calvinist tradition and its doctrine of predestination and who believe that everything that exists, and thus everything that happens, is in fact predestined by God.

Such a doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally an idea in the mind of God.

Richard Dawkins, Cultural Christian

Mathematician William Dembski has some wry comments to make about Richard Dawkins' recent conciliatory statements about Christianity. Dawkins is the author of The God Delusion (2006), a book that has done more to extinguish Christianity in the Western world than probably any other book in the last century or so.

Dawkins has said that although he believes Christianity is nonsense he nevertheless considers himself a "cultural Christian" inasmuch as he enjoys the cultural benefits Christianity has conferred and because it's a far better option than Islam, which he utterly deplores.

Dembski writes:

Critics have been quick to jump on the irony here since Dawkins, as the leading voice for atheism in the English speaking world, if not in the world as a whole, has helped bring about this waning of Christian faith. But let’s be careful not to give Dawkins too much credit. Christians, through their own ineffectiveness in Christian education, have been complicit in helping Dawkins’s crusade against the Christian faith.

In any case, here is Dawkins the newly minted cultural Christian:

The current Dawkins is one who has mellowed with age. He no longer seems to be the stark, tough-minded Dawkins that made his reputation. This Dawkins would write in River Out of Eden: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Or consider how he characterized the God of the Old Testament in The God Delusion: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

....the tough-minded Dawkins of the past was not a cultural Christian. He had no use for religion, period.

Religious faith.... was a pernicious virus that needed to be eradicated. Certainly, he has played his part in helping to undermine religious faith, and Christianity in particular, in Europe and North America.

But there's more. Dawkins seems to realize that if you're going to dispense with Christianity you not only must forfeit Christmas carols and humanitarian institutions like orphanages and hospitals but also "reason, truth, merit, free speech, critical thinking and respect for science in the academy and wider culture." Dembski might also have added objective moral obligations and human rights to the list.

In other words, [Dawkins] laments the turn from modernity to postmodernity, from truth-based inquiry to make-it-up-as-you-go inquiry, from sober, rigorous habits of mind to minds at home in an insane asylum. And yet he’s probably done more than any other current figure to bring about this shift.

Dawkins is these days attempting to stand against the woke subversion of the academy, and of science in particular. Increasingly, Dawkins is casting himself as a defender of traditional academic virtues (reason, merit, free discourse, etc.).

And yet, a compelling case can be made that precisely because of the materialist ideology that he has promoted in the name of science all these years, he has helped bring about the state of affairs in the academy that he is now lamenting — in which woke ideology subverts all that he deems precious in the academy and science (and, as we’ve seen, also in cultural Christianity).

Dawkins has been marvelously successful at advancing scientific materialism, the view that science (especially Darwinian evolution) functions to advance materialism, with Darwin being this atheistic ideology’s principal prophet. And yet, this very scientific materialism is the Pandora’s box that has opened our culture to all the evils that he now laments. What Dawkins seems not to have realized — or perhaps now is realizing too late — is that scientific materialism is the suicide of reason, even undermining science as reason’s most compelling expression.

Scientific materialism attempts to use science as a club to enforce materialism. Yet instead, scientific materialism is a snake that eats its own tail and in the end consumes itself. It destroys itself, collapsing of internal contradiction, and thereby ruining science, as we now see happening in real time.

Dembski fleshes all of this out in his article at the link. It'd be a very good thing if more people recognized that ideas have consequences and that atheism of the sort that Dawkins and his fellow materialists have purveyed for over three decades has consequences that can only be described as pernicious and calamitous for Western civilization.

Hopefully, Dawkins, at least, is beginning to recognize what a catastrophe he has helped to unleash.

Thanks, Obama

Jim Geraghty, who in my opinion is among the best political commentators, especially among those who churn out a column every day, has a recent piece in which he recounts some of President Biden's liabilities, particularly, his lack of principles, and then engages in a fascinating bit of speculation about all that might have been save for one fateful 50/50 decision made back in 2008:

Back in the summer of 2008, Barack Obama and his top campaign staff had narrowed their options for Obama’s running mate down to two men: Biden and former Indiana governor and senator Evan Bayh. Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe quoted Obama as calling it a “coin toss” between the two men.

Geraghty goes on to say that,

Every now and then I think about how differently recent U.S. political history would have unfolded had Obama selected Bayh instead of Biden.

You figure this alternate history would have continued about the same as our reality until 2015 or so. A Vice President Evan Bayh, then age 61, would be likely to run for the presidency in 2016, and have a decent shot of knocking off then-69-year-old Hillary Clinton in the primary fight — an even-keeled moderate and reassuring Midwesterner riding Obama’s coattails, against all the Clinton baggage. It’s fair to wonder if Bernie Sanders becomes the phenomenon that he did in 2016 in this scenario.

It’s tough for one party to control the presidency for three consecutive terms, so perhaps the Republican nominee — maybe Donald Trump, maybe someone else — would have won the 2016 presidency. Wasn’t Republican fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency a major factor in the rise of Trump in the 2016 primaries? Without Obama picking Biden, we probably don’t get Hillary, and without Hillary, we might not have gotten Trump.

(We can probably assume that throughout the multiverse, there is no world in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency, at least not by running the way she did in our world in 2016. You can’t just refuse to visit Wisconsin for the final few months of a presidential campaign!)

Assuming Bayh hadn’t won the presidency in 2016, this means that in 2020, he would be in the top tier of candidates in that crowded Democratic field, although it’s possible Democrats would have dismissed him as the guy who lost to the GOP incumbent.

But in this scenario, Joe Biden probably retires from the Senate in 2014 or so. (Remember, Biden won his Senate reelection bid in 2008, while he was winning the vice presidency.) And no one would have been clamoring for a then-79-year-old retired senator to run for president in 2019.

If Obama had picked Bayh, Biden would probably have been an irrelevant afterthought on the political scene for the past decade, instead of the 46th president of the United States.

What’s more, without nominee Biden pledging to pick a woman as his running mate, we probably wouldn’t have ended up with Vice President Kamala Harris.

With different presidents in office since January 20, 2017, does the Covid pandemic turn out differently? Does the investigation into the origin get as forgotten as it has in our world?

Does Afghanistan turn out differently? Without the Afghanistan withdrawal proceeding as disastrously as it did . . . does Russia invade Ukraine in February 2022?

Does Hamas attack Israel the same way on October 7, 2023? Does inflation take off like a rocket starting in 2021? Do we see the same waves of migrants at the U.S. southern border?

The alternative is probably not utopia, just different problems . . . but it would be edifying to see if different choices in leadership would have resulted in better outcomes for the country and the world.

As we used to say, “Thanks, Obama.”

Geraghty's column led me to reflect on how much difference our seemingly insignificant choices make to the future of our families and our communities. We have no way of knowing, of course, but the fact that decisions which seem unimportant at the time can snowball into major consequences in the future should cause us to be a smidge more thoughtful when making them.

Harrison Bergeron

In 1961 Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story titled Harrison Bergeron which, if written today, would be considered an excellent satire of the contemporary push for equity in all things.

The story was brief, only six pages long, and amazingly prescient. Here's the opening:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter.

Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

You can read the rest of the story here.

It has always been a goal of the left to do away with merit, which is today labeled a symptom of white supremacy, and force everyone onto the same level. Everyone must be equal whether it be in terms of academics, income, parent/child relationships, and in "every which way."

We don't yet have the equivalent of a "Handicapper General" but if it were ever up to our leftist friends, we probably would, and a lot sooner than 2081, too.

Why Religious Conservatives Support Trump

Back in February of 2020, nine months before the 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I wrote the following column. Now that we're about to reprise that election in six months I thought I'd post it again, especially since almost everything in it applies just as much today as it did then:

There's recently been a spate of controversy over whether Christians are betraying their principles by supporting Donald Trump. Andrew Walker is an Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement who has written a fine response to this concern at National Review.

His article is a bit lengthy but it's worth reading if the question of how a religious conservative can support the president is one that interests you. Here are a few outtakes:

There are two competing interpretations of Trump’s enthusiastic support from religious conservatives: that it is a lesser-of-two-evils transaction based on self-interest, or that it shows a voting bloc compromised by every form of democratic vice, whether racism, nativism, or nationalism.

They will vote not so much for Donald Trump — with his uncouth speech and incessantly immature tweets — as they will vote against the worldview of the Democratic platform. Those who make this calculation are not sell-outs, nor have they forfeited the credibility of their values carte blanche. For blind allegiance does not explain the voting relationship. That religious conservatives are not progressives does. Between Never Trump and Always Trump is a third category: Reluctant Trump.

[A]n event on October 10, 2019 explains the odd-couple relationship of religious conservatives and Donald Trump. That evening, during a CNN townhall on LGBTQ issues, the now-former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke proclaimed that churches failing to toe the line on gay and transgender rights would lose their tax-exempt status in his administration. O’Rourke’s comments represented a high-water mark of a culture that has jettisoned anything resembling a Christian moral ecology.

For years, religious conservatives predicted that the sexual revolution would eventually affect government policy and directly threaten churches. They can now point to O’Rourke and other examples as evidence of a massive cultural shift that has realized their predictions. Even the most convinced progressive should sympathize with religious conservatives who are concerned about federal law possibly turning against them.

Consider the Democrats’ garish and unapologetic devotion to abortion in the latest stages of pregnancy. Anyone who wonders why religious conservatives cannot bring themselves to vote for Democrats simply does not understand the religiously formed conscience that shudders at America’s abortion regime.

This sentiment was intensified during last week’s State of the Union address, when Democrats sat stone-faced at President Trump’s call for banning late-term abortion. A moment of such moral contrast demonstrates why religious conservatives do not care about the endless think pieces criticizing them as soulless hypocrites. They will endure that criticism if it means the chance to end abortion through Supreme Court appointments.

Walker includes a description of a friend of his who is doubtless typical of many religious conservatives:

To understand this complexity, take my real-life friend. Let’s call him Steve. Steve is a white evangelical in his forties, a middle-school teacher, the father of two daughters, and a deacon at his Southern Baptist church. These are identities that media narratives depict as culprits for Trump’s ascension: White, male, Christian, middle-class, husband, father. He’s the token “white evangelical” that the media depicts as red-state reprobates.

But there is more to Steve. Steve serves the homeless, sees diversity as a pillar of God’s creation, and helped an Iraqi refugee family resettle in his own hometown. I daresay he cares more about justice in real life than those who preen about it on Twitter.

Steve voted for Trump, and will again. Why? For one, he thinks abortion is America’s Holocaust, and will not support any party that supports abortion on demand. Whatever Trump’s eccentricities are, Steve won’t vote for a progressive, even if the media tells him that to do so would save America and its institutions.

For Steve, saving abstractions like “America” and its “institutions” can make America a lot less worthy of survival if abortion on demand continues apace. To the average religious conservative, in fact, saving America means saving it from the scourge of abortion.

Walker then adds some concluding thoughts:

Those are the stakes that many religious conservatives live with. My advice to progressives is that, if they want religious conservatives to let go of their devotion to the Republican Party’s platform, progressives should weaken their commitment to unfettered abortion access. The same goes for their support for gender fluidity, and opposition to any person or institution that does not affirm such things as gay marriage.

Until that happens, complaining about “white evangelicalism” and ascribing to it every imaginable authoritarian impulse will be like shouting into a void; no one will listen.

Donald Trump is not the savior of American Christianity. At best, he’s a bed of nails on the road, temporarily halting secularism’s advance. Yet the choice for so many religious conservatives is between someone who is crude and profane but who will defend their values and an eloquent politician who will undermine their faith and advance an agenda they see as barbaric and unjust.

Here’s my plea from one religious conservative to other religious conservatives in 2020. If the majority of us vote for Trump, let’s do so not because he’s a Protector of the Faith or a champion for “taking America back.” He’s neither. Instead, view him as a flawed, complex political figure whose admixture of vanity and pragmatism is resulting in a political agenda that is less hostile to Christianity than its alternatives.

Indeed, it's fair to say that this administration's political agenda is not just "less hostile" to all expressions of religious faith, it's actually, contrary to the alternatives, not hostile at all.

What was the alternative in 2016? Voters were given a choice between two morally compromised candidates, the policies of one were seen by religious conservatives as an almost certain disaster for the country and the policies of the other as possibly salutary. Which one should a religious conservative have voted for?

What's the alternative in 2020? Voters are given a choice between a party which is willing to demand that taxpayers subsidize and oversee the annual slaughter of a million unborn babies and an incumbent who, despite his character flaws, has appointed judges and jurists who will protect our freedoms and who may eventually end the slaughter. Which one should a religious conservative vote for?

Religious conservatives care about the poor and the marginalized, or at least they should. No president in history has done more to help the poor - by lowering minority unemployment to record lows, increasing blue collar wage growth, establishing enterprise zones in poor communities and implementing criminal justice reform - as this president. So who should a religious conservative vote for?

For many religious conservatives their support for Trump is tentative. It's contingent upon his conduct in office. As long as he does nothing Clintonian to disgrace the office and continues to uphold the First Amendment and appoint jurists who'll do so, they're willing to suffer his childish, neurotic outbursts and offer him their support.

He may be only a bed of nails on the road to a totally secular state hostile to traditional economic, social, civic and moral values, but sometimes a bed of nails in the road can force a change in direction. Meanwhile, I think most religious conservatives will prefer to vote for the bed of nails than for life in the fast lane to a secular nirvana.

Stephen Meyer and Piers Morgan

One of the foremost philosophers of science today is Stephen Meyer, author of three books on Intelligent Design and a very articulate advocate of the view that the evidence is overwhelming that the origin and fine-tuning of the universe and the origin of life are all the result of the agency of an intelligent mind.

Meyer has recently been on Joe Rogan's show and also been interviewed by Piers Morgan on Morgan's Uncensored podcast. The podcast is 33 minutes long, but anyone interested in the controversy surrounding naturalistic materialism and intelligent design will find it interesting and informative.

Check it out:

Russian Losses

From time to time the British Sun publishes assessments of the British intelligence agencies regarding Russian losses in Ukraine. Their most recent summary is shocking:

According to British intelligence Putin's forces have lost 450,000 soldiers killed, wounded or captured since their invasion began. The Sun states that this is 100,000 more than the previous UK estimate shared in February by Britain’s Defence Intelligence.

The article continues:

And Russia's losses have surged to 1,300 troops a day in just the last two months.

The eye-watering casualty figures don’t include mercenary groups like Wagner who were famously slaughtered during “human wave” assaults in the meat grinder battle of Bakhmut last year.

In December the UK said 20,000 of Wagner's soldiers had been killed and another 40,000 had been injured.

The latest figures also don't account for the humiliating “tens of thousands” of soldiers who have deserted Putin's armed forces.

They refer to the Russian soldiers taken out of battle by death or injury at the hands of Kyiv's impressive and resilient army.

Armed Forces Minister Leo Doherty also estimates Moscow has lost almost 3,000 tanks – up from 2,000 a year ago. The Sun exclusively revealed in February that Putin had lost almost all of his valuable tank force since invading Ukraine.

All this carnage, death, and destruction and for what? Where are the protestors at our universities demonstrating against the war crimes committed by Russia against Ukraine?

Campus Nihilism

From a short essay by Carl Trueman at First Things:

Now, expressing criticism of Israeli military action is of course entirely legitimate in a democracy like the United States. There is a right to dissent and a right to protest.

But the nature of these particular protests reveals something very disturbing. It is clear that they are not motivated by legitimate concern for Arab and Muslim lives, whatever the rhetoric. If they were, then Israel would hardly be the only, or even primary, target.

The death toll from over a decade of government-led bloodshed in Syria is catastrophic but has not gripped the imagination of campus activists. The slaughter there continues to this day, though one could be forgiven for not knowing this, given the lack of media and student interest in the conflict. Rather, these campus protests are motivated by hatred of Jews.

One can offer the specious dodge that Hamas’s 2017 manifesto speaks of Zionists rather than Jews as the enemy. But Hamas thinks Israel is the result of a Jewish conspiracy. To replace “Jews” and “Judaism” with “Zionists” and “Zionism” is thus to change words but not to change direction.

Anti-Semitism is the motivation of both Hamas and the student activists who care only for Muslim lives when they are threatened by Israeli rather than Syrian bombs.

This also points to the nihilism that lurks just below the surface. When one notes the craziness of some of the protests—queers professing solidarity with Palestine, for example, or a drag queen leading children in pro-Palestinian chants—it becomes clear that, for all of the blather about “human rights,” these people share no common vision about what it means to be human.

The thing that unites these groups is neither concern for Arab lives nor a respect for Islamic culture. They are united only in wanting to tear down. In short, these protests are a manifestation of the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration.

To borrow from Marx, all that is holy must be profaned. What is to replace it—Shariah law, drag queen story hour, Judith Butler reading groups—is anybody’s guess. There is no agreed moral vision here. There is only consensus on a hatred of Jews, of Israel, of America, and of what is. And ironically, it comes from those who enjoy some of the greatest privileges that America has to offer.

The ignorance of these protestors and their faculty abettors concerning the history of the region as well as the nature of Islam in general and Hamas in particular, is appalling. But then the point isn't to rectify wrongs or get the history right. These protests are just one battle in a long war to destabilize and destroy the institutions and culture of the West, and Israel is just one battleground on the front lines in that war.

Lincoln's Proclamation

In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed April 30th to be a National Day of Prayer, and the nation has observed that day ever since. Last Tuesday marked this year's observance, and in honor of the day the John 10:10 Project produced a short video recounting Lincoln's proclamation.

It's a powerful speech, so much of what he said sounds as though he were speaking to us and our culture today. Here it is:

Materialism Is a Superstition

John Zmirak offers an acerbic critique of Woke culture in an essay at The Stream and wonders how we've come to the place where so many highly educated Americans have been reduced "to a Stone Age level of fanatical superstition." His answer is, "In a word, Darwin."

He explains:

[Darwinism] insists that the existence of the universe itself is a meaningless cosmic accident. No purpose or mind lies behind it. Likewise the emergence of life, which Darwinists believe by some secular miracle leapt fully-armored from the mud like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Mere chance somehow engineered not just the baroque complexities of the humblest bacterium, but the vast, elaborate rococo of higher mammals, then primates. Natural selection can explain the survival of the fittest, but not their arrival.

But somehow this combination of infinitesimally unlikely genetic mutations, and ruthless natural selection red in tooth and claw produced … human beings with brains perceptive and reliable enough to generate Modern Science.

I'd quibble that it may be more accurate to use the term naturalistic materialism, of which Darwinism is one expression, for what follows, but no matter. Zmirak continues:

Even though this Science tells us that we’re meaningless epiphenomena of random cosmic burps and vicious competition, somehow we also have dignity and rights, including the right to Equity. (Insert stolen premises from the biblical worldview here.) But the science that teaches us about that dignity and those rights - theology - should curl up and die once we’ve taken ... the gold fillings out of its teeth.

The Woke folk will decide what “Equality,” “Equity” and “Justice” mean. And they’ll do so with all the arbitrary, random, irrational whimsy that the universe showed in mutating us into existence. They’ll enforce their capricious verdicts with all the ruthlessness of Natural Selection, throwing their failed competitors onto the fossil heap of history.

True enough. Once a substantial percentage of the educated population comes to believe that life, including human life, is all a big accident, that there's no meaning to any of it, that death is the end of existence, then the only ethics that makes sense is an egoistic form of might makes right.

In a world devoid of purpose there can be nothing that's wrong in any meaningful sense, and thus there's nothing wrong with destroying, either literally or figuratively, people who disagree with them.

So, in the universe of the naturalistic materialist, whatever it takes to make my own existence more pleasant - including using others as means to my ends and imposing my will upon them - whatever I have the power and desire to do, I might as well do.

In this purposeless world, whoever has the loudest voice and the most political heft makes the rules, and it's pointless for the less powerful to object that the rules make no sense or are immoral. Sense and morality depend upon the existence of objective truth about human nature, and in a Godless, Darwinian world there is no objective truth about human nature that binds us or constrains us.

Human nature is malleable. It's whatever humans are able to make it. What rules there are, about morality and about human nature, we make for ourselves.

All of this follows from the embrace of an antitheistic materialism by our cultural elites. Our ivy educated betters scorn what they like to call "religious superstition," but they adopt instead all manner of other superstitions - superstitions about human nature, race, gender and evolution to name just a few.

As G.K. Chesterton famously observed, "When people no longer believe in God they don't believe in nothing. They believe in anything."

Spring Migration

Long time readers of VP know that I enjoy birds. It's something of a hobby of mine, and the spring migration is a great time to get out and try to get a good look at some of the beautiful bits of feathered fluff passing through on their northward trek.

Here are a few of my favorites from this past week. All of these pics are of males of the species. Females are often more drab, and, in the case of the last two species, they look much different than the males:

The bird above is a Magnolia warbler. It's the bird that inspired a young teen-ager named Roger Tory Peterson to take up birding which led to a lifetime of painting birds and a whole series of nature field guides. Peterson saw the Magnolia warbler in New York's Central park and was immediately hooked on birds.

The Blackburnian warbler is in my mind one of the most striking birds in all of North America. When the sunlight hits the bird's throat it's as if it has been set aflame.

The Cape May warbler nests in boreal forests in the U.S. and Canada and is only found in Cape May, NJ during migration. It was first described by ornithologist Alexander Wilson in Cape May, NJ but not seen there for a hundred years afterward. The Cape May warbler's tongue is unique among warblers. It's tubular, like the hummingbird's tongue, and enables the bird to sip nectar from flowers on its wintering grounds in the Caribbean.

The Prothonotary warbler is famous, those who've read about the "Red Scare" of the early 1950s might recall, for being instrumental in convicting Alger Hiss on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. You can read about it here. The Prothonotary warbler got its name from the bright yellow robes worn by papal clerks, known as prothonotaries, in the Roman Catholic church.

The bird pictured above is an Indigo bunting. Here's an interesting fact about birds that many people have a hard time believing. Birds do not have blue pigment in their feathers. The blue color found in many birds is due to the way their feathers refract sunlight. The Indigo bunting is common in eastern North America but is often overlooked because it's small, and the dazzling blue color only shows up in good light against a proper background.

The Rose-breasted grosbeak is a handsome woodland species that occasionally visits sunflower feeders during migration. The female looks like a large brown sparrow.

Bird migration is one of the most astonishing phenomena in nature and it's occurring this week across much of the United States. Since it happens largely after dark most people aren't very much aware of the amazing spectacle that's occurring in the skies above them most nights at this time of year.

Even so, millions of birds are traveling each night from their winter haunts in Central and South America to their breeding territories in North America. The migration involves birds of all types, hundreds of different species, navigating their way north to find a mate, establish a territory, breed and return south again in the Fall.

To help give a sense of the movements of birds during migration, the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology has produced a fascinating animated feature that shows the annual migration pattern of 118 different North American species. The migration animation can be viewed here.

There's also a link on the page which takes you to a similar animation which shows the particular species of bird that's being represented. If you love nature you're sure to enjoy this.

Here are a few questions to ponder while you're watching: How and why did migration, not just in birds but also in butterflies, fish, turtles, whales, dragonflies and numerous other creatures, ever evolve in all these different groups through mindless, unguided processes like random mutation and natural selection? Did it evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

How do these animals know how to navigate their way back and forth, often returning to the exact patch of territory they departed from six months before? How do the young of the year, which have never made the trip before, know how to do it? How did that ability evolve through mindless, unguided processes?

Birds truly are a marvel.