Why Bigotry Is Wrong

Insistent demands to end racism and bias against women and LBGTQ individuals are rife in our culture, but rarely, it seems, does anyone ask why these bigotries are wrong. On those occassions when it is asked it's sometimes replied that any form of discrimination is morally wrong, but what, exactly, is meant by this is unclear.

Here's what I'm getting at: Let's assume we've all adopted a secular perspective in which either there is no moral authority that transcends human society or, if there is, that that authority should be permitted no role in our secular affairs.

Given this assumption what does it mean to say that racism, misogyny and discrimination against LGBTQ folks are wrong? If there's no moral authority how can "wrong" mean anything more than "something some people don't like"? And if that's all we mean then what reason is there for all the outrage? Why not just accept that different people hold different values and let it go at that?

After all, something can be wrong in any meaningful moral sense only if there's an objective moral authority who promulgates an objective moral law and holds people accountable for living according to that law. If no such authority exists, or if any such authority is excluded from our public lives, then racism is little more than a behavior some people practice and some people don't like.

An example of the former is the famous 19th century British evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley (1825-1895). Huxley was the man who coined the term "agnostic" to describe his own attitude toward God and was also a firm believer in the Darwinian doctrine of survival of the fittest.

His evolutionary convictions led him to believe that some races were superior to others, and he argued that emancipation of the slaves in the U.S. had doomed blacks who would now have to fend for themselves, a task for which he believed them poorly suited.

Huxley stated that, "no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man.”

Huxley's racism was little different from that of his hero Charles Darwin. Writing to the Rev. Charles Kingsley in 1862, Darwin stated,

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.

Almost twenty years later he offered similar sentiments in a letter to Irish philosopher and political economist William Graham:

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

People today would be aghast were they to hear preeminent thinkers voice such bigotry, but the question we should ask is why do we consider views like those of Huxley and Darwin to be morally offensive?

One might answer that they're offensive because they're hurtful, but that answer assumes that it is objectively wrong to hurt others. But why is it? Is it wrong to hurt others because we wouldn't want someone to hurt us? It's of course true that we wouldn't want others to hurt us, but how does that make it wrong for us to hurt others? If we had the power to hurt others with impunity, in what sense would it be wrong to do so?

The secularist has no convincing answers to these questions. He or she has to assume that there is no relevant objective moral authority, that objective morality therefore doesn't exist and that all of our moral judgments are simply expressions of our own personal, subjective preferences, like one's preference for Ford trucks rather than Chevys.

If the secularist wishes to maintain that moral judgments are objectively meaningful then he's piggy-backing on a theistic worldview while all the while insisting that that worldview is either utterly false or irrelevant to morality.

In other words, the moral secularist must behave irrationally in order to assert that racism is wrong. On his own secular assumptions he has no grounds for claiming that anyone or anything is objectively wrong. All he can say is that he doesn't like it.

But how does a Judeo-Christian view of the world provide grounds for affirming that racism and other bigotries are morally wrong? It does so because according to that view all men are created by God in His image and are loved by Him. We are all equal in the sight of God, and God, the creator of the universe, demands that we treat each other with compassion and justice. Moreover, He will ultimately hold us accountable for whether we actually do or do not treat others this way.

To harm others is morally wrong because it violates the objective will, nature, and law of God who, being perfect goodness, is Himself the ultimate source of moral knowledge and the ultimate standard of right and wrong.

Only if this is true can racism, sexism and bigotry of any kind be objectively wrong. Only if this is true does our belief that human beings have rights and dignity make sense. If it's not true then Huxley and Darwin were probably right, and we should cease our pretensions of believing in moral right and wrong and the equality and dignity of men and just do whatever serves our own interests and desires.

Of course, the decision to follow that road leads to all the horrors perpetrated by the state atheisms of the 20th century.

Hamas Bears All the Guilt

The Western media have been very vocal in condemning Israel for alleged starvation in Gaza, even to the point of using photos of children with Cerebral Palsy as instances of starving children, but an article in the Free Beacon by Andrew Tobin paints a much different picture of the situation in Gaza. Everyone who thinks Israel is to blame for hungry Gazans should read it.

Here's the lede:

Every day this week, hundreds of U.N. trucks stacked with pallets of humanitarian aid have exited Israeli-patrolled routes and rumbled into population centers across the Gaza Strip, where Israel has implemented daily pauses in military operations.

Many of the trucks, though traveling under enhanced Israeli protections introduced on Sunday, have not reached U.N. warehouses, according to Gazans on the ground. Once the trucks have arrived in the population centers, armed Hamas militants have hijacked the cargo, the Gazans said, and what aid has arrived at the warehouses has disappeared into a patronage system controlled by the Palestinian terrorist group.

Most Gazans have been forced to buy the aid at exorbitant prices from merchants handpicked and heavily taxed by Hamas.

"Fifty trucks arrived yesterday at warehouses in Gaza City, and Hamas stole all of the aid," Moumen al-Natour, a 30-year-old lawyer in the northern Gaza capital, said on Tuesday. "Today, the aid went on sale in the black markets at very high prices."

Al-Natour said a childhood friend, seeking to feed his family, joined a hungry mob trying to loot the trucks and was trampled to death along with a number of other civilians.

Gazans and Israeli military officers say this has been the reality in Gaza since fighting resumed in March. Hamas exerts near-total control over U.N.-led aid operations and seizes nearly all the incoming goods to feed and finance its terrorist regime, according to the people. Rather than confront the problem, the United Nations has effectively aligned with Hamas, prolonging the Gaza war and the suffering of Gazans, the people say.

"Hamas has unfortunately been able to infiltrate the mechanism of the United Nations for a long time," said Al-Natour. "They take all the aid for their own people and leave nothing for the civilians. This is how they maintain their criminal government while their popularity is collapsing."

Tobin goes on to explain how Hamas and the U.N. essentially work together in a way that results in the immiseration of the Gazan people. Contrary to what the antisemites in our media and universities want us to believe, the war, the thousands of casualties, and the suffering of the Gazans are all crimes perpetrated by Hamas, and it is Hamas who bears the guilt and the blame for them.

Those critical of Israel in this war would be hard pressed to think of any other country in history that has done more in wartime to avoid civilian casualties and done more to try to ease the suffering of the very people (the Gazans) who have overwhelmingly supported their government (Hamas) in its efforts to annihilate the very people (the Israelis) who are coming to their aid.

The Evil That Men Do

International Christian Concern (ICC) reports that of the five most populous nations in the world, in four of them either the government persecutes Christians or it tolerates persecution of Christians by other groups within the country.

Here are some excerpts from the report:

Four of the five most populous countries in the world share a disturbing reality: Christians are systematically and harshly persecuted within their borders.

China (1.41 billion people), India (1.46 billion people), Indonesia (285 million people), and Pakistan (255 million people) routinely strip Christians of fundamental human rights like worshiping freely and sharing their faith with others. The United States (347 million people) is the other country in the top five.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China is openly atheistic and continuously attempts to curb the religious expression of Christians within its nation. According to a 2023 report from Pew Research, the CCP’s religious restrictions “are part of a long-standing strategy by the Chinese government to align religion with communism and ensure loyalty to the…CCP, which espouses and promotes atheism.”

In May, Chinese authorities released a plan to incorporate lyrics that applaud communism into church worship music.

In India, Christians endure being evicted from their homes simply for following Christ. Evictions are often carried out by Hindu nationalists who want Indians to adhere to Hinduism only.

According to the European Center for Law and Justice, Christians were the targets of more than 160 violent attacks [in India] in 2024, including physical assaults and attacks on church meetings.

Indonesian authorities, functioning in a Muslim-majority nation, routinely condone the suppression of Christian rights. A prayer house was attacked in July, and Christian churches have been closed in recent years due to restrictive Indonesian law.

According to Christianity Today, “a 2006 law requires churches to secure signatures of approval from 60 Christians and 90 people from another faith” to build a Christian church. This allows those opposed to Christianity to stop the construction of churches.

In predominantly Muslim Pakistan, blasphemy laws are egregiously used to target and punish Christians for following Jesus. Christ followers are often discriminated against and not given equal opportunities in employment. Jobs like sewer maintenance and street sweepers are typically reserved for Christians, and believers are jailed for their faith if they are found to have violated the nation’s strict blasphemy laws.

Christians in these nations may face harassment, intimidation, and imprisonment for following Christ. The most basic human right, the liberty to follow one’s own conscience, is often out of reach for believers in these countries.

They also face murder as in several countries in Africa where 62,000 Christians have been murdered by Muslims in Nigeria alone in the last two and a half decades, and any Christians caught practicing their faith in North Korea are subjected to horrific suffering.

This is evil and the religion, in the case of Islam, and the ideology, in the case of communism, that spawn this evil are rooted in a profound hatred for anyone who refuses to accept the haters' belief system, but any belief system that's rooted in hatred and which gives rise to so much evil, is itself evil. What else could it be?

D.C. Crime

Democrats are attacking Trump for taking action to clean up Washington by federalizing the city's law enforcement, a move the D.C. police themselves support and the mayor doesn't oppose. Apparently, some on the left think it's racist to fight crime, which says a lot about who they think the criminals must be. Either that, or they think that black and brown people should be left alone to pillage, rape, and murder.

One of their arguments is that violent crime in D.C. has declined by 30% so there's no need to bring in the National Guard, but what they don't say is that the former police commander is under investigation for falsifying crime data.

In any case, what are the facts about crime in D.C.? Here are some from the White House via Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com:

• In 2024, Washington, D.C. saw a homicide rate of 27.3 per 100,000 residents. That was the fourth-highest homicide rate in the country — nearly six times higher than New York City and also higher than Atlanta, Chicago, and Compton.
• If Washington, D.C. was a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation. It's murder rate is roughly three times higher than that of Islamabad, Pakistan, and 18 times higher than that of communist-run Havana, Cuba.
• The number of juveniles arrested in Washington, D.C. has gone up each year since 2020 — many of whom have had prior arrests for violent crimes.
• There were 29,348 crimes reported in Washington, D.C. last year, including 3,469 violent offenses, 1,026 assaults with a dangerous weapon, 2,113 robberies, and 5,139 motor vehicle thefts.
• So far in 2025, there have already been nearly 1,600 violent crimes and nearly 16,000 total crimes reported in Washington, D.C.
• There have been nearly 100 homicides, including the fatal shootings of innocent civilians like three-year-old Honesty Cheadle and 21-year-old Capitol Hill intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym.
• Vehicle theft in Washington, D.C. is more than three times the national average — ranking it among the most dangerous cities in the world. Carjackings increased 547% between 2018 and 2023. In 2024, there were triple the number of carjackings compared to 2018.

What President Trump is doing is perfectly legal, so one can only assume that those who oppose him on this are concerned about...what? Are they concerned that D.C. will be made safer and cleaner? Are they concerned that it'll be a bad look if more minorities are incarcerated?

One thing they should be concerned about is that once again they're going to find themselves on the wrong side of an 80/20 issue, but that doesn't seem to bother them. Maybe the Democrats' real concern is that they fear people will see that Republicans get things done that the people want done while Democrats do nothing but sit on their hands and fuss over pronouns.

Beautiful Ugliness

The title of this post is an oxymoron, but it befits the subject of the following wonderful 8:00 minute video about vultures.

In eastern North America there are two species of vultures that can be commonly seen - the turkey vulture and the black vulture - and neither of them would ever win a beauty contest. Yet, they're graceful flyers and play a very important role in the ecosystem of which they're a part.

Moreover, vultures in general are impressively designed to accomplish all that they do. Their digestive features are unique among birds.

In the video, the turkey vulture is the one shown in connection with Darwin's observation in South America, and the black vulture is shown at the end flying along with the photographers. Enjoy:

That Hideous Strength

C.S. Lewis was an Oxford scholar of medieval literature, prolific writer and a famous Christian apologist (i.e. defender of the faith). He died in 1963 on the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In his novel That Hideous Strength (1945) Lewis writes a "fairy tale," as he calls it, that's a prophetic allegory of the cultural battle we see raging in our own day between the forces of left-wing progressivism/scientism and those who struggle to hold on to the traditional values of family and religious commitment.

In THS Lewis illustrates this struggle by means of a plot by the progressive National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to take over, first a part of England, and ultimately the whole country and the world. N.I.C.E. is led by men who have embraced a scientistic worldview - naturalistic, atheistic, materialistic, reductionistic, objectivist, and purely rational.

As Lewis describes them in a classic work, The Abolition of Man, they're men without chests. They have no heart, no passions. They're men bereft of souls who can be pictured as disembodied heads, which is, in fact, how Lewis symbolically represents the leader of N.I.C.E.

N.I.C.E. and the men who run it may seem like fantastically implausible caricatures, but the story should be read as a bi-level allegory. On one level it's Lewis' portrayal of the spiritual nature of the battle, and on another level it's a portrait of the left's program for crushing their opposition and gaining power, a program that has been employed consistently by the left ever since the days of Karl Marx in the 19th century and perhaps since the French Revolution in 1789 and its ensuing terror.

The Marxists and their progressive allies have throughout this era sought to advance along three fronts. These can be summarized as follows (the summary is taken from Faith and the Arts):

The Four Stages of Cultural Revolution – As described by former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov in the 1970s, these are the stages by which Soviet agents worked to infiltrate and undermine America and other western societies.

1. Demoralization – using pornography and other methods through media, entertainment, education, etc., to break down the moral courage of the people. 
2. Destabilization – By undermining police, courts, borders, etc., to overwhelm public safety and further demoralize the people.
3. Crisis – Build 1 and 2 to the point of a crisis where people resort to rioting or to civil war.
4. New Normal – Declare emergency powers and install the administrative state as a solution for all of the problems which the revolutionary forces have themselves caused.

The Long March through the Institutions – This is a central concept of cultural Marxism. It concerns the strategy of neo-Marxists in America and in other Western societies to overcome the resistance of successful middle-class cultures to the Marxist rhetoric of revolution. Middle-class people tend to be somewhat satisfied with their lives and tolerant of income differences with others.

Cultural Marxists therefore target all of the institutions of middle-class society — church, family, public education, media, the press, entertainment, business, academia, science, law, etc. — in order to create the problems and crises that lead to the imposition of emergency powers and the administrative state. 

Mass Formation – This is an academic concept that has been used for many years to try to understand the mass psychology that appears to be at work in societies like Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany, and Mao’s China, where thousands of ordinary citizens either turned a blind eye to the suffering of their fellow citizens or, in some cases, joined the forces that shamed and tortured them.

The process is based on fear and the desire to survive or escape the threat of suffering. Under these conditions, “normal” people may become callous to the suffering of others. They “go along to get along,” but the result is a complete collapse of genuine religious and moral civilization.

All of these corrosive strategies certainly seem to be experiencing alarming success in our contemporary culture, and Lewis shines a light on them in his depiction of the machinations of N.I.C.E. and the spiritual barrenness of those employed in advancing its cause.

For those who may never have read That Hideous Strength, I'd recommend first reading Abolition of Man and perhaps then perusing brief summaries of the first two novels in Lewis' "space" trilogy Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra before tackling That Hideous Strength.

The story will make more sense if you do.

Orb Weaver Spiders

The following beautiful short film describes some of the amazing features of spiders in general and orb weaver spiders in particular. As you watch it you might ponder how such an astounding organism with such a tiny brain can "know" to do all that it instinctively does.

You might wonder, too, how its instinctive behaviors could've evolved through purely undirected, blind, and random processes, and not only its behavior but also all of the anatomical structures and functions necessary for the spider's mode of life.

If something looks like it was intelligently engineered, and if the alternative to intelligent engineering (undirected, unintelligent forces) is exceedingly implausible, then intelligent engineering should, at the very least, be considered a viable hypothesis.

In fact, the only reason one could have for not considering intelligent agency to be the most likely hypothesis is an apriori philosophical commitment to naturalism, but that's not a move based on science. It's not a move grounded in evidence, but is rather the intellectual expression of an irrational aversion to any suggestion that ultimate reality is immaterial and non-physical.

The video is produced by the John 10:10 Project and is about 8:00 minutes long:

Gulliver in Washington, D.C.

In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Lemuel Gulliver is shown around the Grand Academy of Lagado in which all sorts of projects are being conducted to improve the lives of the citizens. These projects included the following:

• Extracting sunbeams from cucumbers to warm the air in raw, inclement summers
• Reducing human excrement to its original food
• Learning to plow fields with pigs motivated by strategically placed acorns
• Extracting silk from spiders
• Developing a technique for building a house by starting at the roof and working down to the foundation
• A team of blind men learning to discern the color of paint by feel and smell

Of course each of these efforts was a colossal waste of time and money, and Swift was satirizing the stupidity of government waste in his own day.

I was reminded of his satire some time ago when reading about the some of the government programs the Trump administration has been keen on eliminating since his inauguration. Here are just a few examples:

• $45 million for diversity scholarships in Burma (Myanmar).
• $40 million for social and economic inclusion of "sedentary migrants" in Colombia, benefiting Venezuelan refugees.
• $10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique, reportedly for AIDS prevention.
• $20 million for the Arab "Sesame Street" a program focused on education and promoting inclusivity for young children.
• Programs aimed at promoting LGBTQ+ advocacy or acceptance in countries like Botswana, Belize, and Peru, including funding for an LGBTQ+ comic book.
• $325,000 for a program adapting an LGB+ teen pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys.
• $22.6 billion for aiding illegal migrants through resettlement programs, home and car purchases, and loans.
• $7.5 billion for funding a few dozen electric vehicle stations across the nation.

Those who complain about the work that DOGE has done, and is doing, should understand that had the government not so severely abused taxpayers in the past, there wouldn't be so much appetite for paring it down today.

There may be worthwhile programs that've been thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak, but the abuse has been so massive that there's little inclination to spend time drawing subtle distinctions. The government workers who've lost their jobs in the first six months of the current administration have only themselves and/or their colleagues to blame.

Do They Really Think It's Not Alive?

Thirty years ago some embryos were produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF), and the mother had them frozen. Recently, one of those embryos was brought to term and born. It's a fascinating, and in some ways troubling, development, but some of the commenters to the report, in an apparent attempt to dump snark on pro-lifers, displayed alarming ignorance of basic biology.

One commenter wrote that "Since right wingers think life begins at conception is this baby old enough to go to war?" Another asked if "people who believe life begins at conception would sell liquor to this baby."

Implicit in these questions is the assumption that it's preposterous to believe that an embryo is a living entity, but of course it obviously is. Do these people think that the cells that comprise an embryo are non-living cells? Are the cells inert? Are they dead? It's simply absurd to imply that metabolizing, replicating cells are not alive.

If those who made these comments meant to suggest that the embryo is not really human then perhaps they'd be willing to tell us what sort of embryo it is. What sort of being was it that ultimately grew into a human baby? It wasn't the embryo of a cow or a frog or a tulip. Obviously, the being, or entity, which was frozen thirty years ago was a human entity. It was a living human being.

Another point: The assumption throughout the X thread that forms the basis for this article is that this newborn baby is actually thirty years old, but of course, it's not thirty years old. Everyone's age is calculated from the date of his or her birth, not the date of one's conception. This baby (its name is Thaddeus Daniel Pierce) was born on July 26th of this year and thus, as of this writing, is a little over one week old.

Blaise Pascal once stated that our first responsibility is to think clearly. That's good advice in any case, but in discussions that have life and death implications it has special salience.

80 Years Ago Today

Today marks the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. An old article by Max Hastings offers some thoughts on the bombing upon which we might reflect. He argues that there are good arguments both to justify and to condemn the use of the atomic bomb on Japan and anyone interested in the continuing debate on this historical watershed should read his column. He closes it with an important observation:

Those who today find it easy to condemn the architects of Hiroshima sometimes seem to lack humility in recognizing the frailties of the decision-makers, mortal men grappling with dilemmas of a magnitude our own generation has been spared.

In August 1945, amid a world sick of death in the cause of defeating evil, allied lives seemed very precious, while the enemy appeared to value neither his own nor those of the innocent. Truman's Hiroshima judgment may seem wrong in the eyes of posterity, but it is easy to understand why it seemed right to most of his contemporaries.

It's hard to disagree with what Hastings writes. I think we have an obligation to try to understand the circumstances in which the men who made the decision to drop the bomb found themselves. Even so, there is something Hastings omits from his column which I think is of overriding importance in judging what happened, not just at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also at Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg and many less-noted cities.

In all of these, there was a conscious decision to deliberately target civilians for death. It doesn't much matter, in my opinion, whether the death was administered by conventional or nuclear explosives, the salient point is that the intentional killing of non-combatants, women and children, is prima facie morally unjustifiable.

I am not saying that it is absolutely wrong. There may be circumstances which would make such a measure necessary, and perhaps such circumstances obtained in August of 1945, but it's not obvious that they did.

We were outraged on 9/11 when 3000 civilians lost their lives to Islamic terrorists. We were incensed that the hijackers targeted innocent people. We called them cowards (which they certainly weren't). We called them evil (which they certainly were), but in what morally significant ways did their deed differ from the fire-bombing of thousands of children in Dresden or Tokyo?

I sympathize with the difficulty of the decision those men had to make during WWII. I don't know what I would have decided myself, especially if I had a son slated to take part in the impending invasion of Japan. But I do think we can spare those men harsh judgment without withholding moral assessment of their choices.

If we seek to justify deliberately killing innocents now it will only make it easier for us to yield to the temptation to do it again.

We are fortunate to be in possession of precision weapons today that our fathers did not have and which enable us to target combatants without deliberately harming non-combatants. We have, as best as can be discerned, used these with great care and effectiveness. They have relieved us somewhat of the moral burden previous generations of Americans carried.

Even so, there are many times in war when the temptation to kill indiscriminately must seem overwhelming. To the extent we excuse what was done in WWII we make it more likely that it will happen again today in the war against Islamic terrorists.

If you'd like to learn more about the history of the American air war against the Japanese homeland, I highly recommend James M. Scott's book Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb.

Dragonflies

All of us have seen dragonflies around ponds and lakes but there's a lot more to these fascinating creatures than perhaps we realized. They really are amazing and their anatomy and behavior is unique as the video below illustrates.

It's a bit long (18 minutes), but if nature is an interest of yours, once you start watching you'll probably want to watch the whole thing. It's certain that you'll never look at dragonflies quite the same way again, and you won't take them for granted.

One question you might keep in mind as you watch is how such amazing engineering ever could've evolved through chance and fortuitous genetic mutations as the modern Darwinists claim.

Is England Facing Civil War?

Writer Mark Steyn is predicting that there will be a civil war in England within the next fifteen years. His reason is that over the next decade Muslims will have gained decisive political clout and will begin imposing Sharia on the rest of the English who by that time will be fed up with the two-tier justice system that already prevails in England.

They will also be fed up with the criminalization of speech, especially speech critical of immigrants. You can read more of Steyn's thinking on this here.

Relatedly, Powerline's John Hinderaker notes a very disturbing trend in England. Whereas in recent years Muhammad has been the most popular name given to boys, Hinderaker cites a story from The Telegraph which tells us that another name is rising in the rankings:

Imagine if in 1945 hundreds of Brits christened their newborn sons Adolf. That might have rattled us as a nation, right?

I feel similarly about the news that, last year, 583 baby boys in the UK were given the name Yahya.

Yes, hundreds of families saw fit to bestow on their little ones the name shared by the one-time leader of Hamas and the architect of the worst mass murder of Jews since Adolf’s days – Yahya Sinwar.

The Top 100 Boys’ Names of 2024 were released this week, and Yahya has really blown up.

It reportedly enjoyed a larger spike in popularity than any other male name. It leapt a staggering 33 places up the rankings, to become the 93rd most popular boy’s name.

Hinderaker comments that,

No doubt some would argue that it is good, or at least acceptable, that large numbers of “British” babies are named Muhammad. But I don’t know how a positive spin can be put on the fact that a considerable number of Muslim parents are naming their male babies after the architect of the October 7 massacre.

How are actual Englishmen supposed to share their country with people whose values are literally as evil as Hitler’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s?

The Left has been telling us for decades that Muslim immigration into the West will have a meliorating affect on their religious fanaticisms, that they'll assimilate into the larger culture and adopt the values of the larger culture.

Well, in England, France, Germany, and The Netherlands Muslims are well on the way to becoming the larger culture and there seems to be scant indication that they have any desire to assimilate.

What Are They Afraid Of?

The Office of Personnel Managementsent out a memo the other day instructing federal workers that religious expression in the workplace will henceforth not be forbidden. The memo is reproduced here:

🚨Just in: The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to safeguard religious expression in the workplace, allowing employees to display crucifixes, carry Bibles, and pray with rosary beads pic.twitter.com/FZPwcpB7ya

— The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) July 28, 2025

As anodyne and sensible as this directive is, the folks at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) considered it an intolerable breach of the "wall of separation" between church and state. Exactly how this memo violates that principle isn't clear but here's the memo they sent out:

An outrageous memo the United States Office of Personnel Management released yesterday says “during a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the nonadherent should rethink his religious beliefs.” https://t.co/8ExblnsKOe

— FFRF (@FFRF) July 29, 2025

What exactly are these people afraid of, that someone might have a meaningful conversation about what is perhaps the most important topic anybody could discuss? That someone might actually find themselves learning something important?

If two federal workers during their break got into a discussion on politics would that be considered "outrageous"? Since politics is an ersatz religion for some people, since some individuals are so zealous for their particular political beliefs that they're willing to estrange themselves from family and friends over their disagreements, why are the folks at the FFRF so allergic to the possibility that someone might bring up the topic of God in the workplace but not, presumably, to the possibility that someone might mention Biden or Trump?

Part of what it means to be an intellectually mature individual is being able to hear with equanimity opinions at variance with one's own. The person who cannot abide the knowledge that someone might disagree with them about something as important as religion is like a child who sticks his fingers in his ears while loudly insisting that he can't hear you.

Not only is the FFRF reaction childish, it also seems to be a symptom of insecurity. It's the sort of reaction one might expect from people who deep down fear that the views they've spent their lives believing and promoting simply cannot withstand scrutiny, and the only way to keep them from collapsing altogether is to avoid any discussion of their rationale.

Good for the Trump administration for treating federal workers like intellectually mature and psychologically healthy adults.

How Not to Find a Good Man

Nathanael Blake, writing at The Federalist, discusses a New York Times column titled "The Trouble With Wanting Men," by a writer named Jean Garnett. Blake writes that Garnett's piece,

portrays the sexual and relational landscape as a hellscape, or at least a dreary purgatory in which Garnett longs for men who are just not that into her. She is, as she eventually explained, on the dating scene because she recently divorced after her “open” marriage fell apart partially because she fell in love with a paramour who had no interest in a relationship.

One writer on X was quick to point out that Garnett had written a long, positive piece about said open marriage only a few years ago.

Now, Garnett is learning a painful lesson, as seen in her account of how she and her friends commiserate together, wondering, “Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?” The answer should be obvious: Ladies, you’re competing with younger women — and endless internet porn — for the attention of guys who do not want a relationship.

Even if you were once irresistible to men, did you really think you would remain so forever?

It must be very difficult for women to understand that men are not like women. Men, quite often, are averse to commitment to one woman, and they're especially so if the women who desire a commitment are willing to give men what they do want without any serious conditions attached. Blake continues:

It is darkly humorous how these men have learned to use therapy-speak to dull the edge of the proverbial fury of a woman scorned. Garnett recounts one guy she hooked up with texting her the next week, “I was really looking forward to seeing you again … but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.” She reports that she replied, “Totally understand,” but tells her readers that she “didn’t. Feeble, fallible ‘looking forward’ is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all.”

Well, this guy clearly doesn’t want her — not really.

But Garnett doesn’t seem to get this, writing that, “lately I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want.” Again, they’re not confused. They’ve just learned that saying they are anxious and confused provides cover when they want to keep women of Garnett’s type at arm’s length.

It's just another way of saying, "It's not you, it's me" when in fact it's probably both of them.

It seems to be working. Though she wants to blame men for her miserable dating life, Garnett still writes that “the men my friends and I are feeling bleak about” are “the sweet, good ones. Dammit.” Of course, they aren’t sweet or good. They are selfish through and through. They’ve just learned that they can get away with that selfishness as long as they cover it with therapeutic language while telling women not to expect much from them.

And yet Garnett and her friends are somehow disappointed when the little they are promised is all they get.

Actually, "the sweet, good ones" are often the men most accomplished at play-acting. Their sweetness is a mask that hides both selfishness and arrested development, but they know that women like Garnett are easily fooled by the act.

In truth, the “good guys” aren’t the ones using anxiety as an excuse to ditch their middle-aged hook-ups. Indeed, the really good ones are, by Garnett’s age, mostly off the market. They aren’t hooking up with bitter writers. Rather, they are going to church and raising their children and are still married to their first wives. Those are the good ones. What Garnett is sifting through are the dregs — maybe superficially attractive dregs, but still the dregs — and dregs that have no intention of settling down with her.

This reality almost breaks through when Garnett reflects on the affair that ended her marriage:

“[T]hroughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.

"It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who ‘can’t.’ Have these men not heard of ‘don’t want to?’"

Oh, they know about it. “Don’t want to” is indeed at the root of their refusal to commit to women such as Garnett. But anxiety and helplessness are palatable excuses, ones that women such as Garnett buy, or at least lease, because the alternative — realizing that she just isn’t that desirable and most of the good men are long gone anyway — is too painful.

If Garnett wants to find a good man, she should try joining a large, independent Christian church. She may find a good one through an online dating service, of course, but if she wants commitment and character in her man, especially at her age, she's going to have difficulty finding it amongst a secular demographic that hasn't ever made such virtues a priority in their lives. She's certainly going to have difficulty finding trust, respect, and faithfulness among acquaintances who've dabbled in open marriages which allow each spouse the freedom to "leave the house" to seek sex.

Blake concludes with this:

Garnett’s present unhappiness is a result of the ideology and behaviors she has promoted. The immediate cause of her unhappiness is that she’s a middle-aged woman hooking up with noncommittal men. The more comprehensive cause is the culture she has marinated in and furthered. She obviously yearns for the “old-fashioned man-woman stuff” she wants to dismiss. And she should — she was made for it.

But our culture encourages people to give their bodies quickly and their hearts slowly, if at all. This divides the person and precludes genuine love, which requires the gift of the whole self. This is why Christian sexual morality — and the marital sexual exclusivity it requires — is not a killjoy. Rather, it is a protector and promoter of human well-being. It directs us toward our good and the good of others.

The freedom, pleasure, and authentic flourishing the sexual revolution promised were lies and are why sexual liberation has hurt so many people. Sexual liberalism presumes that we thrive as autonomous pleasure seekers, unconstrained by norms or obligations. But this is false. We thrive through love, and real love, including romantic and sexual love, requires real commitment.

This, in turn, protects people by directing them toward their long-term fulfillment and happiness.

One hopes that Garnett and others like her find the happiness and fulfillment they're seeking, but until they realize why they're having trouble finding it the dating scene will, for many of them, largely remain a romantic hellscape.

The Democrats' Popularity Problems

Frankly, I don't believe the polls that say that the Democrats' approval rating is lower than the remains of the Titanic, but given their liabilities it probably should be. Jim Geraghty summarizes some of those liabilities at National Review.

He begins with a question: "What have Democratic leaders delivered to their constituents, at the national, state, and local levels in recent years?" To start with there's inflation:

Early in Biden’s term, former Harvard president and Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers warned the Democrats that excessive stimulus spending was creating inflationary conditions, but his party ignored him.

In July 2021, President Biden insisted, “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” When he said that, the inflation rate was 5.4 percent; it peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and remained above 3 percent until June 2024.

The Biden administration boasted of gargantuan, inflation-fueling spending bills, but by the end of Biden’s term, the results were thoroughly underwhelming — most famously, spending billions but only building 58 new charging stations. Even Democratic senators called the progress “pathetic.”

Biden himself complained to staffers in December 2023 that there were still no major construction sites for photo opportunities to tout the passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill he signed into law in November 2021.

The Democrats have also been on the wrong side of the immigration issue:

It took a while, but Democrats also gradually soured on how the Biden administration was handling illegal immigration; when Biden was elected, Democrats largely believed immigration was not a threat, the proportion who believed controlling and reducing illegal immigration to be an important goal was near its all-time low, and opposition to increased border patrols and opposed border wall construction was near its all-time high.

By the end of the Biden years, Democrats had started to sound more like the Republicans they had demonized as xenophobic.

Then there was the dishonesty surrounding President Biden's obvious mental incapacity:

If every elected official in the Democratic Party except for Dean Phillips was ready to play along with the idea that the doddering octogenarian was doing just fine and all the footage of him looking out of it were “cheap fakes,” why should Democratic voters trust them? Why should anyone trust them?

On the state and local level Democrats are facing a crisis due to what could be called Blue flight:

Looking beyond Washington . . . sure, lots of people still enjoy living in blue states like California, New York, and Illinois, as long as they can afford it. Even with a small increase in 2024, California’s population is lower than it was before the pandemic; at best, it’s now a slow-growth state. “Comparing census numbers from 2010 to 2024, California’s population has increased by less than 6 percent; in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Utah, the increases range from 15 percent to nearly 30 percent.”

California is losing middle-class families and businesses and gaining illegal immigrants. As I’ve written before, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s popularity outside of his state appears to be based on a completely inaccurate sense of the quality of life in the Golden State:

U.S. News and World Report ranks each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment, California ranked dead last in opportunity, dead last in affordability, 47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education.

The Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in its most recent State Tax Competitiveness Index. For five straight years, California has ranked highest in people moving out of the state, according to U-Haul’s data. BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement. California ranks fifth-worst in roads and third-worst in drivers, second-highest in accident rate, and second-worst in drunk driving.

Can anyone point to California’s high-speed rail project — $15 billion spent so far over 16 years, with not a single stretch of track laid down — and conclude, “Yes, this is good government?”

Doesn’t it trouble Illinois Governor JB Pritzker that on his watch, Boeing, Caterpillar, and the hedge fund giant Citadel all chose to move their headquarters to other states, lamenting the state’s business environment and Chicago’s inability to get crime under control?

Doesn’t it bother Governor Tim Walz that the Minnesota state government keeps getting robbed blind, for billions of dollars’ worth of fraud, in every major state spending project?

Karen Bass apparently thought being mayor of Los Angeles was a form of semi-retirement. The county government is no better; we’re almost at the end of July, and Los Angeles County has issued 137 rebuilding permits for the 12,048 buildings damaged or destroyed by the wildfires.

In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson got what he wanted and now enjoys a job approval rating of 14 percent.

And New York City is on the cusp of electing a communist Islamist antisemite who wants to abolish prisons, defund police, have the city run the grocery stores, and "globalize the intifada," i.e. kill Jews wherever they're found.

There's more of Geraghty's column at the link, but it's little wonder that people, even many Democrats, are beginning to doubt that the Democrats have any idea how to run a city much less the country.

Why Public School Enrollments Are Dropping

Public school teacher Auguste Meyrat writing at The Federalist highlights a decline in public school enrollments.

[Since the cessatin of the pandemic] many parents have either continued homeschooling or gone on to enroll their children in private or charter schools, apparently fed up with their neighborhood public schools.

A recent report in Education Next from researchers Joshua Goodman and Abigail Francis offers some numbers that support what many of us teachers have observed firsthand. They mainly focus on enrollment in Massachusetts’ public schools, where the total enrollment in 2024 was “4.2 percent lower than it was in fall 2019,” and the numbers in future school years are only going to continue to worsen under these conditions.

Moreover, the drop was steeper among white and Asian students and mainly occurred in the middle school grades (five through eight).

It’s significant that this is happening in Massachusetts, a state with a well-funded school system that routinely leads the country year after year and has set the standard for public education ever since Horace Mann invented the whole concept nearly two centuries ago. If enrollment is declining here, then it’s fair to conclude that this is happening nationwide. Indeed, Goodman and Francis say as much: “Fall 2023 public school enrollment nationwide was 2.8 percent below predicted levels compared to a 2.6 percent drop for Massachusetts by fall 2024.”

So what accounts for the decline? Why is it more pronounced among whites and Asians? And why is it during middle school?

The standard answer for any public school problem is that there's not enough funding, but Meyrat isn't buying that:

It should go without saying that the leftist responses to this question, usually revolving around funding, equity, and accessibility, are utterly misguided. On the whole, public schools are amply endowed — particularly in Massachusetts, which spends more than $24,000 a student — and they are decked out with every instructional resource a teacher could ever want.

Most campuses aren’t the squalid, impoverished, gang-infested dens depicted in movies like Dangerous Minds or shows like Abbot Elementary. Rather, they are generally clean, boring, and look more like corporate offices.

The real reasons for declining enrollment ironically have more to do with the inverse of these complaints: Public schools are now excessively funded and overly obsessed with equity and accessibility, which then prevents them from being reformed. Regardless of the state, most public schools are now failing in three critical areas that parents care about when deciding on their children’s K-12 education: academic rigor, student discipline, and the campus’ moral influence.

This is pretty much right, although the failure to maintain student discipline is actually the root of a decline in academic rigor and concerns about the moral influence on campus. Nor did it start with the covid years. It's been an ongoing problem in public schools for decades. Meyrat continues:

To prevent mass failure, grading systems have been reconfigured in such a way as to discourage studying, practicing, and applying new concepts, and thereby deepening one’s understanding of any given subject.

Even in supposedly advanced classes, students are often awarded perfect grades for projects and games and rarely assessed objectively. When they actually encounter the occasional test or essay, many cheat and use AI. The students who rise above all this mediocrity and really do prove themselves to be formidable scholars are typically the students in affluent households who either have personal tutors or attend test-prep centers after school.

As for the on-level or non-advanced classes, there are hardly any demands. Simply showing up and completing a few busywork activities will allow a student to pass. For the rest of the time, the students in these classes are on their phones goofing off or allowed to roam the halls for hours at a time — something I’ve described elsewhere as “Vegetative Learning.”

The teacher’s job in these classes is to keep the peace, pass on the students, take attendance, and pray that their students already have some kind of rudimentary knowledge of reading and math so they can pass their standardized tests.

Predictably, due to this lack of rigor, there has been a surge in student misbehavior. As the saying goes, “the Devil finds work for idle hands,” and never have students been so idle in their classes as they are after Covid. Not only has this led many of them to become constantly restless and disruptive, but it has also led many to become addicted to their smartphones.

Again, all this is a consequence of the failure of school authorities to maintain a disciplined atmosphere. Students know that if they misbehave and get sent by their teacher to an assistant principal for discipline, that the principal is very likely to return the student to the classroom with a note to the teacher to solve the problem him or her self. With little recourse for handling disruptive students teachers often give up even trying and classrooms devolve into barely controlled chaos.

Assistant principals are in a tough spot because they know that if they discipline disruptive students they may not get support from the building principal when angry parents demand to confront him or her. And the lack of support extends, often, to the school board which doesn't want to deal with irate parents and threatened lawsuits.

This state of affairs derives from a view of school, promoted by inept administrators, as a "happy place" where students are to be coddled and pampered rather than as a "boot camp" where students are to be trained and taught basic life skills.

His concluding paragraphs nicely summarize the current circumstances in many of our public schools:

To make matters worse, the tools to deal with these students (remedial classes, suspension, expulsion, disciplinary campuses, or even juvenile detention centers) have been removed in the wake of the false DEI narratives that have prevailed in education ever since President Obama’s infamous memo to school districts to essentially stop disciplining black and brown kids.

Along with everything else, this misplaced equity agenda has resulted in certain students regularly wreaking havoc on school safety and student well-being with little recourse for teachers and principals to do anything about it.

Finally, the overall culture and spirit of public schools has become increasingly immoral. Many young people from otherwise wholesome households are introduced to a wide variety of obscenity, vice, and nihilism at the typical school.

Bullying and harassment go unchecked, kids routinely swear, everyone cheats on their work, most of the boys are addicted to online pornography, most of the girls consume mindless slop on social media, and most teachers are demoralized by idiotic policies that dictate how they’re supposed to teach.

All true. When minority kids aren't, or can't, be disciplined then it's hard to justify disciplining anybody, and when students can use the most vulgar obscenities in lashing out at teachers, then discipline has collapsed and teacher morale plummets.

This is why so many teachers, after ten or fifteen years of putting up with this, seek out some other, less stressful, line of work. It's why parents who care and can afford it are taking their kids out of public schools and either homeschool their children or find a private school alternative.

Too many public schools are just not "happy places" for either teachers or the students who want to learn.

Islam: Optimism and Pessimism

In the early years of this century, the journal First Things ran an essay on Islam by George Cardinal Pell in which the prelate considered the prospects for a peaceful future between Islam and the West.

Cardinal Pell gave the reader much to consider in the column, which would repay being read in its entirety. I've tried to encapsulate the main points in which he considers both an optimistic and a pessimistic prospect. First, the optimism:

Optimists also take heart from the cultural achievements of Islam in the Middle Ages and the accounts of toleration extended to Jewish and Christian subjects of Muslim rule as “people of the Book.”

Some deny or minimize the importance of Islam as a source of terrorism, or of the problems that more generally afflict Muslim countries, blaming factors such as tribalism and inter-ethnic enmity; the long-term legacy of colonialism and Western domination; the way that oil revenues distort economic development in the rich Muslim states and sustain oligarchic rule; the poverty and political oppression in Muslim countries in Africa; the situation of the Palestinians, and the alleged “problem” of the state of Israel; and the way that globalization has undermined or destroyed traditional life and imposed alien values on Muslims and others.

Indonesia and Turkey are pointed to as examples of successful Muslim societies, and the success of countries such as Australia and the United States as “melting pots,” creating stable and successful societies while absorbing people from different cultures and religions, is often invoked as a reason for trust and confidence in the growing Muslim populations in the West.

The phenomenal capacity of modernity to weaken gradually the attachment of individuals to family, religion, and traditional ways of life, and to commodify and assimilate developments that originate in hostility to it, is also relied on to “normalize” Muslims in Western countries.

Even so, there seems to me to be greater reason for pessimism, and I suspect that Pell agreed:

On the pessimistic side of the equation, concern begins with the Koran itself. I started, in a recent reading of the Koran, to note invocations to violence—and abandoned the exercise after fifty or sixty pages, as there are so many of them.

In coming to an appreciation of the true meaning of jihad, for example, it is important to bear in mind the difference between the suras (verses) written during Muhammad’s thirteen years in Mecca and those written after he had based himself at Medina. Irenic interpretations of the Koran typically draw heavily on the suras written in Mecca, when Muhammad was without military power and still hoped to win people through preaching and religious activity.

After emigrating to Medina, Muhammad formed an alliance with two Yemeni tribes and the spread of Islam through conquest and coercion began. One calculation is that Muhammad engaged in seventy-eight battles, only one of which, the Battle of the Ditch, was defensive. The suras from the Medina period reflect this decisive change.

The predominant grammatical form in which jihad is used in the Koran carries the sense of fighting or waging war. A different form of the verb in Arabic means “striving” or “struggling,” and English translations sometimes use this form as a way of euphemistically rendering the Koran’s incitements to war against unbelievers.

But in any case, the so-called “verses of the sword” (sura 9:5 and 9:36), coming as they do in what scholars generally believe to be one of the last suras revealed to Muhammad, are taken to abrogate a large number of earlier verses on the subject (over 140, according to one radical website).

The suggestion that jihad is primarily a matter of spiritual striving is also contemptuously rejected by some Islamic writers on the subject. One writer warns that “the temptation to reinterpret both text and history to suit ‘politically’ correct requirements is the first trap to be avoided,” before going on to complain that “there are some Muslims today, for instance, who will convert jihad into a holy bath rather than a holy war, as if it is nothing more than an injunction to cleanse yourself from within.”

Islam holds that the whole earth must be converted to Islam, by the sword if necessary. Those who refuse to convert are to be subjected to dhimmi status, essentially third-class citizenship, or killed. Pell poses a few crucial questions about this to his hypothetical Muslim dialogue partners:

Every great nation and religion has shadows and indeed crimes in their histories. This is certainly true of Catholicism and of all Christian denominations. And it is legitimate to ask our Islamic partners in dialogue whether they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are abrogated by the verses of the sword. Is the program of military expansion to be resumed when possible? Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would impose shari’a law? Can we discuss Islamic history and even the hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran without threats of violence?

Obviously some of these questions about the future cannot be answered, but the issues should be discussed. Useful dialogue means that participants grapple with the truth and in this issue of Islam and the West the stakes are too high for fundamental misunderstandings.

Both Muslims and Christians are helped by accurately identifying what are core and enduring doctrines, by identifying what issues can be discussed together usefully, by identifying those who are genuine friends, seekers after truth and cooperation and separating them from those who only appear to be friends.

It's been over two decades since the Cardinal wrote this. Is there any more cause for optimism today than there was then? Given the ongoing slaughter of Christians by Muslims it's hard to feel optimistic.

Common Sense

A post from last March that bears repeating: Some things are just common sense. For example, it's common sense to believe that:

• men cannot make themselves into women, cannot menstruate, lactate, or get pregnant.
• women should not have to contend with men in their locker rooms or restrooms, or compete against men in athletic contests.
• we should not stock our public school libraries with salacious reading material or permit men who dress as women to flounce about in front of children or otherwise influence them.
• society should protect the lives of the innocent and helpless.
• criminals should be prosecuted and that failure to prosecute encourages more crime.
• if the only way to drive Russia out of Ukraine is to precipitate WWIII then we should strive now to seek the best deal for an end to the war that we can.
• our Bill of Rights is a blessing and a bulwark against tyranny.
• defending Hamas and anyone who supports them is to side with evil.
• our government should be as lean, efficient and as free of fraud and waste as possible.
• people who never went to college should not have to pay off the debt of people who did.
• judging people by their abilities and their character is fair and just and that judging them by their skin color is not.
• a nation should have secure borders and properly vet all who seek to get in.
• if there are rapists, murderers, and other felons in our country illegally they should be deported.
• children born to people who are breaking our laws by being here or who are otherwise here only to have children should not be rewarded with citizenship.
• if nuclear power plants can operate safely and the spent fuel be stored safely we should build more nuclear power plants.
• if the government continues to print more money inflation will ensue and more people will ultimately be unemployed.
• we cannot increase our national debt indefinitely.
• if a state raises the minimum wage the prices of goods will go up and the people who work minimum wage jobs will soon be unemployed as over 10,000 fast food workers in California have discovered.

As you reflect on this list ask yourself which of our two major political parties is most likely to be found on the side of common sense and which is most likely to be found on the other side.

Testing One's Worldview

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live within it consistently. On this test the worldview called naturalism - i.e. the view that the natural world is all there is, no supernatural entities exist - falls short since many, if not most, naturalists find that they have to abandon some beliefs and assumptions that are very difficult to give up.

For example, among the things for which there is no room in a logically consistent naturalism are the following:

1. ultimate meaning in life
2. free will
3. objective moral right and wrong
4. the intrinsic value of human beings
5. objective human rights
6. mind/consciousness
7. an adequate ground for beauty, love, and truth

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in a classical Christian worldview, it could be argued that they're actually entailed by that view.

The logic of naturalism, though, compels one to regard them all as illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that. They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if there are objective human rights, as if they have free will.

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but they affirm their reality over and over again in the way they live their everyday lives. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, human rights, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage because their own worldview cannot provide them.

But when one has to poach from competing visions of reality in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to be holding a rational, coherent philosophy of life. Indeed, to be consistent a naturalist should be a nihilist and accept the emptiness, sterility, and despair nihilism entails, yet even though some naturalists recognize these bitter fruits are the logical consequences of their view of things, few can bring themselves to accept them.

They embrace the naturalism while simply suppressing or ignoring the logical implications as if they don't matter.

For those who do accept the consequences of their naturalism, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that lies at the heart of naturalism. It's all worth it, they implicitly calculate, if the upside is being freed from any obligation to a supreme being.

Naturalists are at liberty to embrace this schizoid view of life, of course, but they're not free to live as if they can hold on to those existential needs while denying the only adequate ground for them and then declare that their worldview is more rational than the Judeo-Christian alternative.

Many Colleges Are Closing Their Doors

There's an evolution taking place in higher education that is in one way very unfortunate. It seems that enrollments at many colleges are declining, which suggests that a lot of young people have decided they don't want to get up to their chins in debt by taking out loans to go to school.

This is probably in the main a good thing. Most high school graduates don't need, and aren't suited for, college. On the other hand, the reduced enrollments mean that many colleges are closing, which also would not be a bad thing were the closures primarily affecting schools committed to DEI indoctrination rather than education.

Sadly, many of the schools that have closed their doors are small non-profit liberal arts colleges which are more likely to have maintained high academic standards.

An article by Laura Hollis at elaborates:

Siena Heights University, a small Catholic college in Adrian, Michigan, just announced that it will be closing at the end of the next academic year, after 105 years. Siena Heights -- whose enrollment has dropped 20% since 2008 -- follows other Michigan schools: Marygrove College closed in 2019, Finlandia University closed in 2023, and Concordia University Ann Arbor has shuttered all its undergraduate programs.

These are not isolated instances; they are part of a national trend.

Earlier this week, BestColleges.com published a list of colleges and universities that have closed since 2008. In that period, 194 private for-profit schools have closed. It used to be that for-profit institutions -- often viewed as fly-by-night organizations with poor academic standards -- were at greatest risk of closure. Not anymore. The traditional two-and four-year nonprofit colleges and universities are now facing perilous futures as well; 126 have closed since 2008.

A huge part of the problem is skyrocketing costs. In 1980, the average cost of one year at college -- tuition plus room and board -- was $9,438. In 2014, it was $23,872. In 2024-25, it was $38,270. Just since 2000, annual tuition and fees alone (without housing) at private colleges and universities have gone from $15,800 to almost $40,000.

Even if we look only at public universities, we still see staggering increases. Annual tuition at public universities went from $738 in 1980 to $9,349 in 2014. By 2024, the average public university tuition was $27,146.

Part of the reason for this is the proliferation of administrators in many universities. Many schools of all sizes have hired far more administrative staff than what's needed to provide their students with a good education.

They've also expanded their recreational programs to attract students, but to run a sport like, say, soccer which brings in little or no revenue, the school must provide facilities, equipment, insurance, busses for transportation, and staffing. Many schools have numerous such programs for both men and women and these programs need to be funded.

Hollis continues:

And as bad as those numbers are, they don’t reflect the true costs. Most students today must borrow to fund at least part of their education. Average federal student loan debt (not including other private loans) is now around $37,000 per individual borrower. A graduate who leaves college with, say, $50,000 in student loan debt and takes the full 20 years to repay the loan at a 7% interest rate will pay back $93,000 -- or nearly twice what she borrowed.

In aggregate, student loan debt in the United States exceeds $128 billion. That is $128 billion that won’t contribute to economic growth in the purchase of homes, cars or other consumer goods, won’t be spent on children, won’t be invested in new businesses.

Part of the tragedy of this is that many students graduate with enormous debt and a degree that will be completely unhelpful in paying the debt off. These unfortunate young people will have a great deal of difficulty buying a home, their marriage prospects will be diminished, and they'll be burdened for most of their adulthood by a debt that stifles them in their every attempt to flourish.

There's more on this at the link, but Hollis closes with this prediction:

It’s ... reasonable to assume that there will be demand for institutions of higher education that focus on students’ needs rather than the esoteric interests of faculty pressed to publish for publication's sake; that have practical residence options without expensive and unnecessary frills like granite countertops, flatscreen TVs, and indoor climbing walls; that focus on professional preparation and skills development; that encourage self-esteem based upon achievement rather than skin color, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or membership in a class of self-appointed elites.

Unfortunately, it's in large part the no-frills schools that are closing down first.

Muslim Intolerance, Leftist Jew-Hatred

Recently, an army of Syrian terrorists attacked Druze communities along the Syrian border with Israel. The Druze are peaceful people, but the Syrians, many of whom were ISIS and al Qaeda holdovers, perpetrated mass slaughter on these people nonetheless until the Israelis bombed the Syrians to smithereens.

Alan Joseph Bauer at Townhall.com asks the question, "Why would the ISIS and al-Qaeda guys in army fatigues go after the Druze, who seem like such nice people?" His answer is that Muslims tolerate nobody.

He goes on to explain,

In Europe, emboldened Muslims will tell locals not to walk their dogs in their neighborhoods. They will tell women to cover themselves, even if these women are Christians and have no relationship whatsoever with them. They will prevent alcohol from being moved through their areas.

Islam as a religion and political movement does not favor compromise with or respect for other religions and peoples. Whereas the UAE shows incredible tolerance for other faiths, those [countries] associated with Iran, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood express a chauvinism that is not Kumbaya.

They want to take it all, they respect no alternative religion or way of life. One can find many videos online of alien Muslims harassing European women on the street, on buses, and on trains. There is no respect there. There is no consideration or thought that the host culture, while different, is worthy of respect.

Just opening X now revealed Muslim youths attacking German boys at a mall in Germany for no particular reason. So on that matter, they are equal opportunity haters: they hate the Jews, Christians, Druze, other Muslims who don’t think like them (Sunni vs. Shia), etc. In the mind of the Syrian terrorists ... the Druze need to be dealt with like the Alawites a few months ago.

Some people might object that their Muslim friends don't fit Bauer's description, and that may be true, but in America Muslims are still largely in the minority. Their intolerance will grow as their numbers increase. Those who hold to a more moderate form of Islam, or are secular, will find themselves eclipsed by the fundamentalists who see it as a religious duty to convert the infidel or, failing that, to kill him.

The more radical and ideological a group is the more likely it is that they will ascend to power and influence. Bauer goes on to show how the larger society, at least on the left, is cowed by the radical Muslim minority and how their cowardice has engendered in them a species of Jew-hatred:

So we live in a very confusing age. There are times when one has to listen to women as per Me Too; there are other times when women are completely ignored or blamed for the horrors they experienced. There are good genocides that you don’t discuss and bad genocides that you have to protest for endless months on the university green.

How can a poor person figure out when to be on which side? Here is a simple cheat sheet: if the event makes the Jews look good, just look the other way. If it makes the Jews look bad, pile on.

Israeli women violated and murdered [on 10/7]. Nothing. Palestinians being bombed in a war to get rid of Hamas: Genocide! Israel saves Druze in Syria from ISIS and al-Qaeda ...: not a word about genocide as Israel would look good. The left either went quiet on Iran or came out on the side of the mullahs.

Jew hatred is the guiding principle of the left. The fact that Israel saved a religious minority from a murderous government gets the Jews no credit points. Israel made a smart move to strengthen an important minority group and help stabilize its northern border.

Israel is thinking about its future and not the headlines in a hateful Western press.

If anyone should think Bauer overstates the case he or she might listen carefully to the words of the Muslim Zohran Mamdani who will probably be the next mayor of New York City and who refuses to condemn calls to "globalize the intifada," which, given the history of previous intifadas, means killing Jews everywhere one finds them.

The Battle of Belgrade

There is, unfortunately, an abysmal ignorance in the Western world of both the theology and the history of Islam, an ignorance which the historian Raymond Ibrahim has been working hard to correct. In his two fascinating books, Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West, Ibrahim, whose family is Egyptian and Coptic Christian, recounts much of the history of the long war between Islam and Europe, a war that it often seems only Muslims are fighting.

Yesterday marked the anniversary of one of the crucial battles in that war, the Battle of Belgrade (1456), and Ibrahim narrates an animation that depicts those events. In it, we're introduced to one of the greatest heroes of Western civilization, a man named John Hunyadi, a man of whom few Americans have ever heard, although he's a national hero in Hungary.

As the Muslim multitudes swept toward the Hungarian city of Belgrade Hunyadi took it upon himself to lead a small group of professional soldiers and a ragtag assemblage of peasants against the armies of the Turks. In Hunyadi's words, "We have had enough of our men enslaved, our women raped, wagons loaded with severed heads of our people, the sale of chained captives, the mockery of our religion... We shall not stop until we succeed in expelling the enemy from Europe."

The battle Ibrahim describes is only part of Hunyadi's story, a story that includes terrible betrayal and astonishing courage. I encourage you to watch the video, and if you're a reader of history, get your hands on either or both of Ibrahim's books. You'll be very glad you did, but if books are not your preference (although they should be), Ibrahim has a regular column at PJMedia.

The video is about twelve minutes long:

Three Thoughts

1. It's probably a consequence of the deplorable state of history education in so many of our public schools that young people think Zohran Mamdani has "new ideas."

2. Pope Leo lamented the tragic accidental bombing by the Israelis of the only remaining Catholic church in Gaza. Maybe he'll next lament the fact that there's only one Catholic church left in Gaza in the first place. It'd be instructive if the pope would publicly elaborate on why that is.

3. The Trump administration is regularly accused of being a "threat to our democracy." Ironically, the accusation is made by the same people who voted for an administration, the Biden regime, which tried to establish the abortive Disinformation Governance Board, a bureaucracy that would've policed speech that dissented from the leftist establishment’s perspective; whose apparatchiks sicced the FBI on angry parents protesting at school board meetings; who worked with Twitter (X) and other social media giants to silence and deplatform people with opposing views; and who sent spies into Catholic churches to keep tabs on pro-lifers.

Now we hear on the news that Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, has conclusive evidence that the Obama administration, including Obama himself, along with his intelligence agencies, deliberately and falsely produced documents in 2016 to slander the newly-elected Donald Trump and to undermine his presidency.

If that's all true, nothing Donald Trump has done in either of his terms as president comes anywhere close to being the threat to our democracy as what the Obama and Biden people did.

Iran Intends to Assassinate Trump

Friday’s Wall Street Journal published a column titled Iran Is Out to Assassinate Trump (paywall), by Behnam Ben Taleblu and Saeed Ghasseminejad. Here's the gravamen of the piece:

Threats against Mr. Trump began in his first term and ramped up after he authorized the 2020 drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, architect of Iran’s regional terror strategy. In response, Iranian officials authorized an arrest warrant, placed a bounty on Mr. Trump’s head, and threatened to take deadly revenge against the president and his national security team.

Contrary to recent denials by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, these threats and plots are real. Books about the president’s time in office and on the campaign trail detail the precautions Mr. Trump had to take. U.S. authorities have been tracking, uncovering, and, where possible, prosecuting people involved. The feds have disrupted several Iranian plots to assassinate Mr. Trump on U.S. soil.

The threats proliferated following the 12-day war between Iran and Israel.

Leading Shiite clerics tied to the regime branded Mr. Trump with labels such as mohareb (one who wars against God), mahdur al-damm (one whose blood must be spilled), mufsid fil-arz (corruptor of the earth), and kafir harbi (warring infidel). Under Islamic law each of these terms invites violence against the offender.

After Mr. Trump mocked Mr. Khamenei on Truth Social on June 27 and bragged about sparing his life, Grand Ayatollahs Nasser Makarem Shirazi and Hossein Noori Hamedani issued a fatwa condemning Mr. Trump as a mohareb who merits execution.

Their fatwa echoes the chilling decree by Mr. Khomeini against British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie in the late 1980s. Mr. Rushdie has had to live under protection for decades and nearly lost his life in a 2022 stabbing attack.

Clerics who train the next generation of Islamic Republic theologians at the Tehran Seminary released a statement labeling Mr. Trump a mahdur al-damm, indicating that his life is forfeit and his blood can be shed without legal consequence.

Ayatollah Mohsen Araki, a member of the regime’s Orwellian-sounding Assembly of Experts and Expediency Discernment Council, broadened the scope of these fatwas. Mr. Trump’s “property and life,” he said, “are permissible targets, and the lives of those dependent on the American government are also permissible targets.”

It's a very sad fact about our contemporary left that in a poll released last April 55% of those who identify as left of center said that killing President Trump would be justified, so a successful assassination attempt against him by the Iranians would doubtless result in much jubilation in Democrat precincts.

It's sick and deranged but that's unfortunately where a lot of the American electorate is in our current moment.

Perhaps, though, Mr. Trump might himself be considering declaring a fatwa, a fatwa against those horrid Iranian clerics. If so, I'm sure the Israelis would be happy to carry it out.

A Fifth Challenge

Yesterday I posted Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's four challenges to skeptics of Near-Death Experiences. Today I want to post his fifth challenge. It involves the remarkable story of a woman named Pam Reynolds.

Here's Egnor's description of Pam Reynolds' experience (slightly edited for clarity):

Pam Reynolds was a woman who had an aneurysm at the base of her brain and needed a special kind of neurosurgery.

It was done in 1991 in Phoenix. What they had to do was stop her heart. They had to drain the blood out of her brain. They cooled her body temperature down to about 60° F, and they had to repair the aneurysm.

They had to open the artery at the base of her brain with no blood flowing. They monitored her brain to prove that she had no brain waves. She had no brain stem activity. And she had a near-death experience when she was proven to be basically clinically dead during the operation.

She popped out of her body, went up to the ceiling. She watched the operation. She was able to describe the surgeon's instruments rather precisely afterwards. She described the conversations the surgeons had. She described who entered and left the room. She described the music that was playing.

She went down a tunnel. She saw her dead relatives. It was a beautiful place, a beautiful scene. She realized she had to return to raise her three children. She came back down the tunnel. Went back into her body. And when she went back into her body, she said it felt like diving into ice water because her body temperature was 60 degrees.

A slightly more detailed account of Ms Reynolds' experience can be found here. Egnor continues, "[This] is a very well-documented near-death experience, and there have been hundreds of people in the medical literature who have had experiences similar to that."

So, people who deny the reality of near-death experiences have to explain how Pam Reynolds saw the things she saw when all the blood was drained out of her brain and her body chilled to 60° F during surgery.

P.S. In yesterday's post I noted that skeptic Michael Shermer claimed that there've been no instances of NDErs seeing numbers or symbols that would've been out of view of everyone in the room. I mentioned that that claim is not correct, but neglected to give any examples. I've since corrected the oversight on that post.

Four Challenges for the NDE Skeptic

From time to time I've talked about the evidential value of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) or more precisely Post-Death Experiences for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul. In their book The Immortal Mind neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and writer Denyse O'Leary devote a chapter to addressing various efforts by skeptics to debunk near-death experiences.

One suggestion skeptics offer is that they originate in hypoxia (shortage of oxygen) or hypercarbia (excess carbon dioxide) in the brain. Egnor, who has treated these conditions, points out that these conditions produce distress, not the calm of a near-death experience.

Egnor recently appeared on Piers Morgan's podcast with prominent skeptic Michael Shermer and offered four challenges to anyone who doubts that NDEs are veridical, (i.e. they can be shown to be true). His appearance on the podcast is recounted in an article at Evolution News, and the whole episode is very interesting. It can be viewed here. In it Egnor presents the following four claims about NDEs beginning at about the 12:18 mark:

1. NDEs are very clear. They’re very organized. They often involve a life review, which is not the kind of thing you see from a brain that is hallucinating or a brain that is dying, a brain that lacks oxygen.

2. NDE experiencers often see things that can be confirmed. About 20% of people with near-death experiences have out-of body experiences where they leave their body and see things that are happening in the room during the time that they have no heartbeat, during the time that they are deeply unconscious and comatose because their brain isn’t working.

In the podcast Michael Shermer states that one test of NDEs that he could accept as dispositive would be if the near-death experiencer reported seeing numbers on machinery that could only be seen from a vantage point near the ceiling of the room. Shermer claimed that such experiences have never been reported, but in fact they have.

In one case related by Gary Habermas in the book Minding the Brain (p.335), a patient in cardiac arrest and experiencing an Out-of-the-Body event noticed a twelve digit number on the top of a piece of medical machinery. Having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, the patient memorized the number and when she regained consciousness, related it to the nurses who wrote it down. When the machine was no longer needed a custodian brought in a ladder, the number was read, and it was exactly as the patient had said.

Habermas writes that there are numerous such accounts, and gives other examples.

3. Meeting only persons who have died. Egnor says that a third thing that fascinates him and isn’t often mentioned is that he's unaware of any reports in the medical literature of a person who goes down the "tunnel" and meets dead relatives but who actually also met a living person. That is, all near-death experiences where one encounters people "on the other side" are [with] people who are dead, even if the experiencer didn’t know they were dead.

There have been some fascinating cases of people in car accidents where somebody in the car died. Another passenger has a near-death experience and the experiencer sees the dead person on the other side but doesn't see other passengers in the car who, unbeknownst to the experiencer, survived the accident.

Egnor goes on to remark that, "Of course, at some point, a credible instance of seeing a living person may emerge from the literature. But even so, if the vast majority of experiences involve seeing people who have died, we should ask, how likely is it that a mere hallucination would work so selectively that way?"

4. The fourth challenge Egnor poses to the skeptic is to account for why near-death experiences are often transformative. People are profoundly affected by their experience. From the Evolution News summary:

In The Immortal Mind, Egnor quotes Tulane University psychologist Marilyn A. Mendoza, a specialist in grief counseling, who succinctly expresses what many counselors have noted: “Perhaps the most common after-effect of an NDE is the loss of the fear of death and a strengthened belief in the afterlife. There is typically a new awareness of meaning and purpose in experiencers’ lives. A new sense of self with increased self-esteem is reported.”

That effect shows up in research studies too. Leeds Beckett University psychologist Steve Taylor, author of Spiritual Science (2018), offers a striking fact about the depth of the transformation:

“It’s remarkable that one single experience can have such a profound, long-lasting, transformational effect. This is illustrated by research showing that people who have near-death experiences following suicide attempts very rarely attempt suicide again. This is in stark contrast to the normal pattern — in fact, a previous suicide attempt is usually the strongest predictor of actual suicide.”

That is indeed a significant finding. Some might argue that people who recall NDEs are overstating their newfound commitment to a different way of seeing life. But when suicidal people stop attempting suicide, they have clearly undergone a concrete and highly significant behavior change. Generally, the best predictor of any future behavior is past behavior.

In addition to these four challenges Egnor mentions one other fascinating story that I'll explain in tomorrow's post.

Tired Yet of Winning?

Candidate Trump promised his voters that they'd win so much in a Trump presidency that they'd get tired of winning. We'll see if exhaustion eventually sinks in, but it hasn't so far for most Americans.

National Review's Jim Geraghty sums up yesterday's column on some of Trump's recent successes with this:

To sum up, the Iranian nuclear program is now smoldering rubble;

Europe’s ready to enact tough sanctions on Tehran again; the Russian economy is creaking with strain; NATO’s stronger than ever; the Chinese are holding their export-focused economy together with duct tape;

Unemployment’s low; inflation’s still mostly okay for now, the stock market is roaring;

The tax cuts have been preserved;

PEPFAR (The anti-AIDS African program) is preserved;

Planned Parenthood is so financially squeezed the organization might go under;

The wealthy, snooty, and overwhelmingly left-wing universities finally get to pay those higher taxes they’ve been calling for all these years.

Altogether it's such a refreshing change after four years of lassitude, drift, and corruption. President Trump and his administration are engineering this renaissance, but the American people, and indeed the people of the world, are the beneficiaries.

Go here and here for more examples of winning.