If Evil Exists God Must Exist

On July 22nd, 2007 two thugs broke into the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Petit and their two daughters in Cheshire, Connecticut. They held the Petits hostage for seven terrifying hours. The doctor was beaten, his wife was raped, his youngest daughter was sexually assaulted and their house set afire. The mother and daughters, having been tied up and doused with gasoline, burned to death. Only the father managed to escape. The crime was unimaginably evil.

It's not uncommon after a horrific event like this has occured to hear someone claim that they can't believe in the Christian God because no God who was good would've allowed such senseless depravity to happen. A good being of any sort would have a moral obligation to prevent such wickedness if he could, and the failure to do so is a strong argument for the conclusion that God, if He exists at all, is either impotent in the face of evil or not willing to prevent it and thus not good.

In the aftermath of the horror that the Petit's suffered it's easy to feel the emotional power of this argument, and people who are grieving and in shock don't want or need to have their reasoning analyzed. They need to be loved.

Nevertheless, for those not immediately in the throes of emotional devastation it might be noted that this is actually a very odd argument. As has been asserted here at VP on many occasions, in order to speak of moral evil one has to assume that God exists. In a Godless universe there are no moral rights and wrongs and thus there are no moral duties and thus nothing is evil.

So the skeptic who pleads the existence of horrible moral wrongs as a basis for denying that God exists can use that argument only if God does, in fact, exist.

As I say, this is a very odd argument.

The conviction that the world contains terrible moral evils - deeds that are profoundly wrong to do - assumes that there is an objective moral law that transcends human subjectivity, but an objective moral law can only exist if there really is a God who grounds it, who insists that we conform to it, and who holds us accountable to it.

As philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes, a secular view of the world "has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort...and thus no way to say there's such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there is such a thing as horrifying wickedness, then you have a powerful argument" for the existence of God.

The belief that what happened to the Petits, or to Israeli families on October 7th, or untold millions of others, is morally evil must presuppose that an objective moral law has been violated and that must itself presuppose the existence of an objective moral lawgiver.

Someone might retort that it's a mistake to say that morality is based upon some objective standard and that, on the contrary, morality is merely rooted in the strong feelings of individuals and societies. Therefore, we don't need to posit a God in order to have morality, the argument goes, all we need is a consensus of feeling.

This is a commonly held view but if it's a sound argument those who embrace it cannot say that any human action at all is evil. It may be that they are personally revulsed by the thought of people being deliberately burned alive, but if the perpetrators of Oct.7th, for example, strongly feel that what they did is right then whose feelings are the correct ones? Some are revulsed by the deed and some rejoice in it, so how can anyone judge what they did to be objectively wrong?

If God does not exist then what those two men inflicted upon the Petits is neither wrong nor right, it's just a fact about what happened. We may not like it, it may outrage us, but our outrage doesn't make anything wrong. It can only be wrong if it violates some objective standard of behavior and if the men who perpetrated the deed will ultimately be held accountable for it by God.

And neither of those conditions exists, of course, unless God does.

Is the World an Illusion?

King’s College philosopher of physics Alexander Franklin wishes to stress that “everyday reality is not an illusion. There really is a world outside our minds." Perhaps so, but there's a more interesting question, I think, concerning the world of which he speaks. More on that in a moment.

Here's an excerpt from an article at Mind Matters on Professor Franklin's argument:

Popular science often tells us that we are radically deceived by the commonplace appearance of everyday objects and that colour and solidity are illusions. For instance, the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington distinguished in 1928 between two tables: the familiar table and the scientific table, while the former is solid and coloured, the scientific table “is nearly all empty space”.

Eddington then makes the striking claim that “modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there”.

Franklin’s essay in response is a plea for Emergentism (the reality we experience emerges from more basic principles), as opposed to what he calls “Illusionism,” the popular belief that it is all an illusion. Along the way, he offers a useful interpretation of the empty space “table,” in terms of quantum physics (the behavior of elementary particles).

Franklin argues that, according to quantum mechanics, an electron in orbit around an atomic nucleus actually occupies the entire orbit, more like the surface of a hollow ball than like a solitary planet orbiting the sun. Thus, there really is no empty space in the orbit and therefore the table's solidity is not an illusion.

This is a bit misleading, though. The atom is in fact mostly empty space. Even if the electrons can be thought of as existing everywhere in their orbits at once, there's a relatively enormous amount of space between orbits. If, for instance, the nucleus of a hydrogen atom were made the size of a bb and placed on second base in a major league stadium, it's lone electron would be orbiting out around the upper deck.

If our hydrogen atom, represented by the bb on second base, was bonded to another hydrogen atom, the nucleus of the second atom, or bb, would be out in the parking lot somewhere. That's a lot of empty space.

Nevertheless, the more interesting question, at least for me, is not whether the solidity of Eddington's table is an illusion but rather how much of what we experience when we observe the table is objectively there in the table and how much of what we observe is actually a creation of our minds.

For example, suppose the table is painted green. We'd say that the table is green, but, of course, the table itself is not any color at all. The sensation of green is in our brains or minds. The paint merely reflects light energy of a certain wavelength to our eye and our visual sense in concert with our brain/mind translates that energy into a sensation of green.

The same is true of the sensations we have of sound, taste, warmth, smell, etc. The stimuli which give rise to these sensations may be generated by objects, but the sensations they produce are in us.

In other words, were there were no perceivers, no one to observe the world, there would be no color, flavor, sound, warmth or odor - just colorless, tasteless, odorless, soundless matter and energy flying about. Just as there'd be no pain if no one felt it, there'd be no color or sound if no one saw or heard it.

This being so, we might ask what is the world in itself really like apart from our perception of it? How much of what we call reality do our senses/brains/minds actually create and how much is objectively independent of our perceptions?

If the color of the table is a sensation in our brains, and if the smell, coolness, texture, etc. are likewise sensations in us rather than in the table, what's left when all the sensations have been abstracted away? Matter? But what's that? Matter's just a lot of empty space.

We might also wonder how much of our understanding of the world is a function of our size? Suppose the table appears smooth to us. Would it appear smooth to a bacterium? The table appears solid to us, but pace professor Franklin, it certainly doesn't appear solid to a neutrino, tens of thousands of which pass through every square inch of everything on earth (including us) every second.

Here's another question: How much different would the world appear to us if we had six or seven senses? A man born blind has no concept of light or color. How much different would this world seem to him were he suddenly able to see? Likewise, what experiences would the world present to us if we had the additional senses with which to experience them?

We go through life thinking that the world is just the way we perceive it to be, but why should we think such a thing? The world may be far stranger, far different, than what our five senses reveal to us.

The Breeze and the Hurricane

In a fine piece at PJ Media titled Who Caused the Cultural Revolution? Victor Davis Hanson argues that the culprits behind the massive layoffs of government workers are not really the Trump administration or Elon Musk but rather the activists who burrowed their way into almost every government department and commenced a regime of fraud and waste of the taxpayer's dollars that went on for years.

Almost every politician who's been elected to office has promised to eliminate the "fat" in government, but no one has ever actually done it. Not even Ronald Reagan was able to do much about the bloat in government that he complained about.

Now, the first serious effort to introduce accountability and efficiency into government is being undertaken and those who have benefited from feeding at the public trough are doing everything they can to stop it. Undoing the damage that has been done to our country will not be easy or painless, but thankfully it's being done.

Anyway, in the conclusion to his article Hanson also notes a few interesting examples of the stark difference between the current administration and its predecessor that should receive more publicity than they have. Hanson points out that:

• No FBI SWAT teams are now raiding the homes of ex-presidents.
• No one is trying to take a presidential rival off state ballots.
• No one is coordinating local, state, and federal prosecutors to indict, harass, and bankrupt an ex-president.
• And no president -- his dementia sheathed by political insiders and a toadish media -- is working three days a week, avoiding press conferences, or stonewalling reporters' questions.

Of course, it's still early and things could change, but so far the difference between the Biden administration's approach to governance and that of Mr. Trump is like the difference between a breeze and a hurricane.

Moreover, the Trump administration gives one hope that it'll be far more forthcoming with the American people than was the Biden White House. Perhaps we'll learn the details behind the attempted assassinations of candidate Trump, the source of the cocaine that was left in the White House, the names of those implicated in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, the role of the FBI in the J6 riots, how the plot to have Trump impeached in 2017 was hatched, and much else.

The American people have the right to know how their tax dollars are spent and who or what is behind many of the mysterious events of the past few years. After all, as we're frequently reminded by folks in the media, "Democracy dies in darkness."

Four Questions about Free Will

An article at Mind Matters lists and discusses four questions concerning free will that often arise in conversations on the topic.

Here are the four with a brief summary of the discussion. For the complete discussion see the article:

1. Has psychology shown that free will does not really exist? No, in fact the experiments of Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) show just the opposite. We've discussed these experiments on VP in the past, for instance here.

2. Is free will a logical idea? Yes, in fact denying it is often illogical. If all our decisions and beliefs are determined then our denial of free will is the inevitable product of our genes and childhood influences of which we may be only dimly, if at all, aware. We may think we have good reasons to disbelieve in free will, but whatever those reasons are they likely play a very minor role in our disbelief.

3. Would a world without free will be a better place? No, it'd be a dystopia in which there's no guilt, no moral obligation, no human dignity and in which people would inevitably come under the tyranny of totalitarian "controllers." (See B.F. Skinner's Walden Two)

4. Are there science concepts that support free will? Yes, the concept of information is one. Check out the original article to see why.

It's interesting that the conviction that we're free seems almost inescapable. Even people who are determinists can't shake it. Philosopher John Searle, for example, writes that, "We can't give up our conviction of our own freedom, even though there's no ground for it." John Horgan, a writer for Scientific American, states that, "No matter what my intellect decides, I'm compelled to believe in free will."

So why do many people deny that we're free? Perhaps the overriding reason is that they have embraced a metaphysical materialism that eliminates from their doxastic structure anything that cannot be explained in terms of the laws of physics. Those laws are strictly deterministic, thus our intuition that we're free must be an illusion.

The next question we might ponder is why should anyone embrace materialism? Perhaps the answer to that is that the alternative, the belief that there are immaterial substances like minds, puts one on a slippery slope to belief in God and that belief is just not tolerable for many moderns.

Better to deny that we have free will, the thinking goes, than to open the door of our ontology to supernatural entities.

The Mystery of Red Cell Enucleation

Reading a few books on evolution and Intelligent Design inspired me recently to browse through some old posts on the topic, and I stumbled upon this one. It recounts an interview with geneticist Michael Denton who discusses one of the strangest phenomena in cell biology and a huge problem for Darwinian explanations of the evolution of the cell.

Denton is the author of several outstanding books, including Evolution: A Theory in Crisis which explains many of the shortcomings of Darwinian explanations of life and Nature's Destiny which addresses how the laws of physics and chemistry and the properties of water and carbon dioxide are all precisely suited to make the world an extraordinarily fit place for the emergence of higher forms of life.

He's interviewed at a site called The Successful Student and the interview is a must read for anyone interested in how discoveries in biology consistently refute the Darwinian paradigm.

Here's just one of the problems he discusses, a problem I confess I had never heard of before reading the interview:

At King’s [College in London] the subject of my PhD thesis was the development of the red [blood] cell and it seemed to me there were aspects of red cell development which posed a severe challenge to the Darwinian framework. The red cell performs one of the most important physiological functions on earth: the carriage of oxygen to the tissues. And in mammals the nucleus is lost in the final stages of red cell development, which is a unique phenomenon.

The problem that the process of enucleation poses for Darwinism is twofold: first of all, the final exclusion of the nucleus is a dramatically saltational event and quite enigmatic in terms of any sort of gradualistic explanation in terms of a succession of little adaptive Darwinian steps. Stated bluntly; how does the cell test the adaptive state of ‘not having a nucleus’ gradually? I mean there is no intermediate stable state between having a nucleus and not having a nucleus.

This is perhaps an even greater challenge to Darwinian gradualism than the evolution of the bacterial flagellum because no cell has ever been known to have a nucleus sitting stably on the fence half way in/half way out! So how did this come about by natural selection, which is a gradual process involving the accumulation of small adaptive steps?

The complexity of the process — which is probably a type of asymmetric cell division — whereby the cell extrudes the nucleus, is quite staggering, involving a whole lot of complex mechanisms inside of the cell. These force the nucleus, first to the periphery of the cell and then eventually force it out of the cell altogether. It struck me as a process which was completely inexplicable in terms of Darwinian evolution — a slam-dunk if you want.

And there’s another catch: the ultimate catch, perhaps? Is an enucleate red cell adaptive? Because birds, which have a higher metabolic rate than mammals, keep their nucleus. So how come that organisms, which have a bigger demand for oxygen than mammals, they get to keep their nucleus while we get rid of ours?

And this raises of course an absolutely horrendous problem that in the case of one of the most crucial physiological processes on earth there are critical features that we can’t say definitively are adaptive.... Every single day I was in the lab at King’s I was thinking about this, and had to face the obvious conclusion that the extrusion of the red cell nucleus could not be explained in terms of the Darwinian framework.

And if there was a problem in giving an account of the shape of a red cell, in terms of adaptation, you might as well give up the Darwinian paradigm; you might as well "go home." .... It’s performing the most critical physiological function on the planet, and you’re grappling around trying to give an adaptive explanation for its enucleate state.

And the fact that birds get by very, very well (you can certainly argue that birds are every bit as successful as mammals). So, what’s going on? What gives? And it was contemplating this very curious ‘adaptation’ which was one factor that led me to see that many Darwinian explanations were “just-so" stories.

Denton also talks about another fascinating development in biology - the growing realization that everything in the cell affects everything else. That even the shape, or topology, of the cell determines what genes will be expressed and that the regulation of all of the cellular activities is far more complex than any device human beings have ever been able to invent.

It's all very fascinating stuff.

Common Sense

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 dance 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.

Our Contemporary Moral Crisis

In early 1968, a year of enormous social convulsion in the U.S. and Europe, philosopher William “Will” Herberg (1901-1977), published an essay entitled “What Is the Moral Crisis of Our Time?”

The essay has become a classic and James Toner offers some reflections on it here. He writes:

As a college senior reading that essay, I was struck by its analytical and prophetic power.

Herberg’s thesis was as perceptive as it was succinct: “the moral crisis of our time consists primarily not in the widespread violation of accepted moral standards . . . but in the repudiation of those very moral standards themselves.”

The moral code of the Greeks, based upon reason, and of the Hebrews, based upon Revelation, had atrophied, he wrote, to the point of dissolution. We were “rapidly losing all sense of transcendence.” We were adrift, by choice, in a sea of disorder with no “navigational” standards to consult....

People have always flouted moral standards, but rarely in the history of Western civilization have we come to the place where we reject the very idea of morality altogether, yet that's where large segments of our culture seem headed in these postmodern times.

Toner continues:

[Herberg] pointed to Jean-Paul Sartre’s advice to a young man living in Nazi-occupied France as an example of the moral bewilderment increasingly held as “authentic” in the 1960s.

The man had asked Sartre if he should fight the Nazis in the Resistance movement or cooperate with them, obtaining a sinecure in the Vichy Regime. The choice hardly mattered, said Sartre, as long as the decision was authentic and inward. If there are no objective standards to govern moral choice, then what is chosen does not matter.

The only concern is whether one chooses “authentically.”

Thus Herberg concluded: “The moral crisis of our time is, at bottom, a metaphysical and religious crisis.”

Herberg prophesied rabid subjectivism, all-pervasive antinomianism, and a soul-searing secularism, what Pope Benedict was much later to call the “dictatorship of relativism.”

We now may be so mired in narcissistic norms that we cannot even understand Herberg’s jeremiad: “No human ethic is possible that is not itself grounded in a higher law and a higher reality beyond human manipulation or control.”

The reason of the Greeks and the Revelation of the Hebrews are now replaced by modernist profane worship of man by man: thus, tyranny beckons and awaits.

The problem that Herberg puts his finger on can be expressed in the following chain of hypothetical propositions:

If there is no God (No transcendent moral authority with the power to hold men ultimately accountable) then there can be no objective moral duties.

If there are no objective moral duties then the only duties we can have are subjective duties, i.e. duties that depend ultimately on our own feelings, biases, prejudices and predilections.

A subjective duty is self-imposed, but if it's self-imposed then it can be self-removed.

Thus, if our only moral duties are subjective then there are no moral duties at all since we cannot have a genuine duty if we can absolve ourselves of that duty whenever it suits us.

In other words, unless there's a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there's no such thing as a moral obligation.

As Tolstoy put it:

The attempts to found a morality apart from religion are like the attempts of children who, wishing to transplant a flower that pleases them, pluck it from the roots that seem to them unpleasing and superfluous, and stick it rootless into the ground. Without religion there can be no real, sincere morality, just as without roots there can be no real flower.

Part of the price of living in the present secular age is the loss of the ability to discern, evaluate and even talk about good and evil, right and wrong. This is what Herberg saw so clearly coming to fruition in the sixties. It's what Friedrich Nietzsche prophesied in the 19th century in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals.

It's what atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas meant when he wrote the following:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Toner concludes with this:

Herberg quotes cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897): “When men lose their sense of established standards, they inevitably fall victim to the urge for pleasure or power."

You can read a PDF of Herberg's original essay here, but unfortunately the quality of the PDF isn't good.

Islamic Tribalism

Raymond Ibrahim is a scholar of Islam and has authored several excellent books on the history of Islam, two of which I especially recommend to anyone interested in this history Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022) and Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018). In a recent column at PJ Media he writes:

Despite its religious veneer, Islam can easily be defined and understood by one non-religious word: tribalism.

This is key. The entire appeal of Muhammad’s call to the Arabs of his time lay in its perfect compatibility with their tribal mores, three in particular: loyalty to one’s tribe; enmity for other tribes; and raids on the latter to enrich and empower the former.

For seventh-century Arabs — and later tribal and pastoral peoples, such as the Turks and Tatars, or Mongols, who also found natural appeal in, and converted to, Islam — the tribe was what humanity is to modern people: to be part of the tribe was to be treated humanely; to be outside the tribe was to be treated inhumanely.

This certainly explains the Arab aphorism: "Me against my brother. My brother and I against our cousin. My brother, my cousin, and I against the world." Islam, Ibrahim writes, repackages this ancient tribalism by making religion, rather than blood relationship, the basis for tribal identity. Ibrahim goes on:

Thus, in his “Constitution of Medina,” which he promulgated with various non-Muslim tribes in 622, he asserted that “a believer shall not slay a believer for the sake of an unbeliever, nor shall he aid an unbeliever against a believer.” Moreover, all Muslims were to become “friends one to the other to the exclusion of outsiders.”

Hence the umma, which is often translated as “Muslim nation,” was born. Etymologically connected to the word “mother” (umm), the umma came to signify the Islamic “Super-Tribe,” a universal tribe that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers, encompassing any and all who identify as Muslims.

Its natural enemies remained everyone outside of it.

This enmity toward those outside Islam found its way into the Koran:

Or consider the Islamic doctrine of al-wala’ wa’l-bara’ (translated as “loyalty and enmity,” or “love and hate”). Muhammad preached it, and the Koran commands it. Taken together, for example, Koran 58:22 and 60:4 call on all Muslims to “renounce” and “disown” their non-Muslim relatives — “even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred” — and to feel only “enmity and hatred” for them, until they “believe in Allah alone,” that is, until they become Muslim.

Those two verses refer to a number of Muhammad’s close companions, who, according to Islamic history, renounced and in some cases slaughtered their own non-Muslim relatives as a show of their loyalty to Allah and the believers. One slew his father, another his brother, a third — Abu Bakr, the first righteous caliph — tried to slay his own son, and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered his relatives.

This certainly helps us to understand much of recent history as Ibrahim explains:

At any rate, from here we come to the natural origin of jihad: tribalistic blood ties were exchanged for religious ones, thereby dividing the world into two mega tribes: the believers in one tent, and their natural enemies, the non-believers, or infidels, in another. And, as we’ve seen, the essence of tribalism is warring and preying on other tribes in order to empower your own.

This dichotomized worldview is actually enshrined in Islamic law’s, or sharia’s, mandate that Dar al-Islam (the “Abode of Islam,” or the world of Islam) must battle Dar al-Kufr (the “Abode or world of non-Islam”) in perpetuity until the former subjugates the latter.

In, for example, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, we read under the entry for “jihad” that the “spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated.”

In other words, the doctrine of jihad — warfare on the other — is so pivotal to Islam that without it, Islam ceases to be.

You can read more from Ibrahim at the link.

It's stunning that Muslims have made their hatred of unbelievers so clear and yet American and European political leaders seem to think that it's somehow irrelevant in the contemporary world. Blinded, perhaps, by a secular worldview, they seem unable to comprehend that millions of Muslims, hundreds of whom they've blithely permitted to immigrate into their countries, are deeply committed to killing anyone outside Dar al-Islam.

Fervent Muslims are committed to eliminating the infidel, either by converting him to Islam or killing him. They abhor the idea of assimilating into the cultures of the countries into which they migrate. Assimilation is seen as a profound betrayal.

They don't hate non-Muslims because of anything they've done. They don't hate the infidel because of the crusades, or because of colonialism, or because Muslims are often poor and resentful of the rich. Those things may exacerbate their enmity but their not the primary cause of it. The primary cause of the Muslim hatred of non-believers is that they're not Muslims.

There can only be war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Kufr. There is only temporary peace if and when Muslims are in a position of weakness. As soon as they are strong enough there will be war. This is a cycle we've seen play out in the Middle East for the past eighty years and it's why there can be no lasting "Two-State Solution" with Israelis and Muslims living peaceably side-by-side.

It's why Christians throughout Africa are being murdered by Islamic terrorists almost daily. It's why as soon as Hamas felt itself strong enough it launched a sickeningly cruel raid on Israelis on October 7th. It's why Muslims drive cars and trucks into crowds of people in European cities.

And it's why Iran must never be permitted to possess a nuclear bomb.

Putting Federal Layoffs in Perspective

As jobs are cut from our bloated federal bureaucracy the media and the Democrats would have us believe that this is very cruel. Yet tens of thousands of people lose their jobs in the private sector every year. Why should those working for the taxpayers expect to have lifetime job security that workers in the private sector don't enjoy?

Tom Bevan posted on X a partial list of private company layoffs announced in the last two months:

• Chevron: 8,000
• Blue Origin: 1,400
• Estee Lauder: 7,000
• Workday: 1,750
• Salesforce: 1,000
• Dow: 1,500
• Amazon: 1,700
• Bridgestone: 700
• BP: 7,700
• Meta: 3,600

He could've added Joann and Starbucks to the list. Starbucks announced that they'll soon be laying off 1000 workers and Joann is closing all their stores which employ 19,000 workers.

If opponents of DOGE's work want to cite cruelty, they might look in the political mirror. Joe Biden fired 2% of the Federal Workforce (70K) for refusing a very dubious vaccine; he also deprived at least 10,000 pipeline workers of their livelihoods by canceling the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, and his "green energy" boondoggle cost thousands of miners and others their jobs.

The advice given to these folks by the compassionate Democrats was "get green jobs" (Jen Psaki) or "learn to code."

What many of the fired federal workers were doing while collecting a paycheck from you and me ranges from the ridiculous to the disgusting. Many of them were doing next to nothing, including not even showing up to the workplace. Others were seeking to undermine administration policy, and still others were using their office computers for online chat groups involving various forms of sexual perversion.

It's unfortunate that the house-cleaning will probably harm some good employees, but it's hard to get rid of a malignant tumor without harming some healthy tissue. Even so, just as a tumor needs to be purged before it kills the body so, too, does our federal bureaucracy need to be purged before it does irremediable harm our country.

One Self or Two

Materialists believe that our self just is our material brains, and that there's nothing immaterial about us. If that were true it would seem that if our brains were split in two by severing the corpus callosum that we'd have the sensation of being two selves, but this is not what happens when that procedure is done. Patients whose brains are split still perceive themselves as being a solitary self.

This would be unexpected if materialism were true, and in fact one neurosurgeon, Dr. Theodore Schwartz at Cornell, remarks that the fact that split-brain patients continue to think of themselves as a single self must be an illusion of some sort:

As a brain surgeon...I’ve severed the brain in two and watched in amazement as my patients wake up feeling like their complete and undivided selves. When I first did this type of operation, I had fantasies that they might suddenly refer to themselves as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. Thankfully, this never occurred...the patient’s sense of a unified self is the illusion.

Schwartz assumes that the patient's sense of being a unified self is an illusion because his materialism doesn't permit any other explanation, but another neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor, argues that there is indeed another explanation. Egnor asserts that "The split-brain patient’s sense of a unified self is real, not an illusion."

He adds that,

I say this for two reasons.

1. It makes no sense to say that two people have an illusion that they are one person. To have an illusion presupposes that the subject with the illusion is one person. Two people would have two illusions, or they would have similar illusions, or share illusions, or conspire to claim to have the same illusion, etc. But having an illusion — even an illusion that I am one person after having my brain split in two — presupposes that I am a single person that has the illusion.

The claim that two people have one illusion...makes no sense.

2.There is clear neuroscientific evidence for unified consciousness in patients with split-brains. Neuroscientist Justine Sergent studied split-brain patients and found that while some perceptual abilities are indeed split — for example, the right side of the visual field is seen via the left hemisphere, and vice versa — there remains a genuine unity to the human mind.

Sergent showed images of different objects to each of the two split hemispheres, and found that patients could compare the objects reasonably accurately, even though no part of the brain perceived both objects.

Egnor develops his argument more fully at the link, but why does it matter whether a split-brain patient is one self or two?

If, despite the brain being split, we still perceive ourselves as being one person, then that's good evidence that there's more to us than just the matter that makes up our brains. It's evidence, in other words, that there's something essential about us that's immaterial - a mind or soul.

If this is true, materialism - the belief that everything in the universe is reducible to matter and energy - is false, but materialism is a major pillar of naturalism. If materialism is false then naturalism - the belief that the natural world is all there is - would be on the brink of collapse.

If materialism is false, if immaterial minds or souls do exist, then the belief that there is a Supermind that created the universe and all of life becomes even more plausible than it already is.

Amazing Migrant

One of the more remarkable migrations in the animal kingdom is that undertaken by a small bird which breeds in and close to the arctic circle. The following is a quote from the introduction to the short video which follows it:

Every year, the Arctic tern (a bird weighing less than five ounces) completes one of the greatest journeys in the animal kingdom. In their constant search for daylight, moderate temperatures and small fish on which to feed, the terns literally follow the sun from the North Pole to Antarctica, and back again.

Their migrations can extend more than 50,000 miles, and the biological systems that make this odyssey possible offer spectacular displays of intelligent design and purpose in the living world.

The video is as fascinating as it is lovely:

Whether the migrating creature is the salmon, the monarch butterfly, the leatherback tortoise, or just the millions of songbirds that make an annual round trip between northern and southern hemispheres, how such a phenomenon could've arisen by purely natural processes is a profound mystery. The mystery is much diminished, however, if the phenomenon was engineered by a Mind.

Evil

There seems to be no end to the depths of depravity of Hamas, the Palestinian people who support them, and, by extension, those on our campuses who identify with them.

As part of the cease-fire agreement with Israel Hamas returned the bodies last week of four Israelis taken captive on October 7th. Three of the four were the bodies of a mother and her two very young children (the putative mother was actually the corpse of an unknown woman and not the mother of the children). Hamas claimed that the four were killed in an Israeli airstrike, but forensic analysis showed that the two children were strangled to death.

What kind of people do this?

As the caskets were being delivered to the Red Cross for transfer to the Israelis the Palestinians were singing and dancing in the streets in celebration of the dead Israeli children. When the caskets were opened the authorities found propaganda materials that had been placed there by Hamas and other Islamic groups. What kind of people do this?

Despite NPR's absurd claim in this video that both sides were "solemn," the video does more to show the moral difference between Israelis and Palestinian Muslims than any words could do:

On the same day that the bodies were to be returned to Israel bombs went off in three busses in various areas around Israel, and unexploded bombs were found on two other busses.

The carnage would've been unimaginable had the bombs detonated when they were supposed to, but they apparently were not set correctly. Israelis believe they were supposed to go off at 9:00 a.m. when the busses would've been fully occupied with commuters, but the devices were mistakenly set to explode at 9:00 p.m. when the vehicles were sitting empty.

Were it not for this act of incompetence perhaps hundreds of civilians would've been slaughtered or maimed. A West Bank branch of Hamas has taken responsibility for the bombs. What kind of people do this?

Meanwhile, on the 13th of this month Muslim terrorists in the Democratic Republic of Congo captured and beheaded seventy Christians:

Seventy Christians have been found beheaded in a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in what’s the latest devastating attack on believers in the north east of the country.

According to field sources, at around 4am last Thursday (13 February) suspected militants from the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) – a group with ties to so-called Islamic State (IS) – approached homes in Mayba in the territory of Lubero, saying: “Get out, get out and don’t make any noise.” Twenty Christian men and women came out and were captured.

Shaken by this incident, people from the local community in Mayba later gathered to work out how to release those held captive. However, ADF militants surrounded the village and captured a further 50 believers.

All 70 of those kidnapped were taken to a Protestant church in Kasanga where they were tragically killed.

A local church leader said that, “We don’t know what to do or how to pray; we’ve had enough of massacres. May God’s will alone be done.”

What kind of a religion is it that encourages and justifies such horrific acts of cruelty against Jews and Christians almost everywnere that Islam has influence? What kind of religion is it that motivates people to slaughter innocent people, film it, and brag about it to their mothers as Palestinians did on Oct. 7th? What kind of religion is it that motivates people to drive trucks and vans into crowds to try to kill as many people as they can?

Why Trump Wants Tariffs

President Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on Canada in retaliation for the tariffs the Canadians have imposed on us that make it very difficult for American farmers and other businesses to sell their goods in Canada. Below is a list of some of the tariffs the Canadian government has imposed on American goods which Ed Morrissey posted on Hot Air.com:

• Milk: 270%
• Cheese: 245%
• Butter: 298%
• Chicken: 238%
• Sausages: 69.9%
• Barley seed: 57-57.8%
• Copper: 48%
• Aluminum: 45%
• Steel: 25%
• Cars: 45%
• TVs: 45%
• Eggs: 163%
• Wheat: 94%
• Bovine/Meat: 26.5%

The original source of this list was a Canadian who gleaned the data from a source titled Global Affairs Canada and posted it on X. He went on to say that "We [the Canadians] started the trade war. Most Canadian businesses are taxed heavily by the government and couldn't survive without imposing tariffs on the USA. This is the price of socio-communism."

Free trade is a good thing but it has to be based on mutual fairness otherwise it doesn't work. Tariffs on Canadian goods imported into the U.S. will doubtless hurt American consumers, but Mr. Trump believes that the Canadians have taken advantage of American largesse for long enough and that it's time to end it, even if imposing reciprocal tariffs causes some short-term pain to Americans.

Humans Aren't Just Animals

It's been said that the 20th century abolished the difference between man and animal (via Darwinian materialism) and that the 21st century seeks to abolish the difference between man and machine (via AI, among other things).

Whether the latter effort will be successful remains to be seen, but the conflation of man with other mammals is hard to credit. The differences between human beings and animals are not simply quantitative - humans are not simply more intelligent - they're qualitative as well.

Humans, for example, have a sense of beauty and a desire to be surrounded by it. We possess a sense of humor, a sense of morality, a sense of the transcendent, an ability to create music, and an ability to think abstractly, all of which are unique in the animal kingdom.

Paul Gosselin, in his book Flight from the Absolute, adds a few more unique human capacities. He writes that in addition to some of the aforementioned, mankind's abilities include:

...the awareness of his own existence, awareness of his future death (even when not imminent), his ability to develop and perceive his identity, his ability to develop a belief system and build a culture/civilization on this basis.

Perhaps, though, the most amazing ability possessed uniquely by humans is language. Gosselin quotes linguist Noam Chomsky who wrote:

When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the "human essence," the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man ....this creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.

Ideas have consequences. Gosselin observes that if the difference between humans and animals is only quantitative we're led to the conclusion that there's no reason to treat humans differently from animals. He quotes philosopher Mortimer Adler in this regard:

If a difference in degree justifies a difference in treatment, why would not superior men be justified in treating inferior men in whatever way men think they're justified in treating non-human animals....[Men] kill animals for for the enjoyment of the sport; or, ... for the purposes...of medical research.

Now, if these actions can be justified by nothing more than a difference in degree between human and non-human animals, why is not the same justification available for the actions of Nazis or other racists?

Indeed, the superior/inferior distinction has been used throughout human history to justify all manner of slaughter and slavery.

"But," someone might object, "humans have a responsibility to act differently because we're aware of what we're doing." Yes, but then we're not only conceding that humans are indeed unique, we're imputing to them a special responsibility that no other creature has. Where does this responsibility come from? If we're solely a product of blind, purposeless evolutionary forces how can we be burdened with any responsibility other than, perhaps, to insure our own survival?

We humans insist that we have a responsibility to treat others as equals, not as inferiors, and not only this but a responsibility, too, to preserve the earth's resources for future generations. But such responsibilities only exist if they're imposed on us from outside ourselves.

The naturalistic view that tells us that we're just an animal leaves no room for any such outside imposition of responsibility, nor can it it account for it by invoking the evolutionary process. It is, in other words, a totally baseless assumption, an article of blind faith, that the naturalist has no reason for holding other than that it makes him feel good.

Why Does the Left Resist?

Hanlon's Razor is a principle that says that one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, and perhaps the principle applies in the current attempts by Democrats to stifle the Trump administration's efforts to remove waste and fraud from our federal bureaucracy and to gain control of our immigration process.

Maybe, but I have doubts. The attempts to stop Trump seem too desperate and involve too many people. Few of them are stupid but a sufficient number can be malicious.

It's hard to see what anodyne motives could be animating those who are seeking out compliant judges to file Temporary Restraining Orders against DOGE, which is engaged in doing what politicians have always promised to do but never did - eliminate the waste of taxpayer dollars by the federal bureaucracy. What non-malicious motives can the left possibly have for opposing this? Yet they are.

DOGE recently discovered that there are 20 million Social Security recipients listed in the Social Security database whose ages range from 100 to 350 years old. They uncovered billions of dollars of waste and abuse at USAID, and found that approximately $4.7 trillion (!) was disbursed by the Treasury Department with no indication of how the money was spent. Elon Musk's minions have uncovered billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse in other agencies as well.

At the same time, ICE is trying to track down and arrest violent felons who came into the country illegally and remove them from our communities. Democratic mayors and governors are doing all they can, however, to impede ICE's efforts. How can these politicians and judges justify deliberately shielding murderers and rapists who don't belong here in the first place? Yet they are.

No non-malicious motives suggest themselves for all of this malfeasance, but malevolent ones do. The left for several generations has been conducting what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called the long march through the institutions, a strategy for bringing about the collapse of capitalist societies by infiltrating their institutions - family, government, education, church, entertainment, law, etc. - with enough committed ideologues who will, like termites, undermine the economic and social health of the society until it collapses from its own rot.

Frankly, I'm reluctant to attribute malice to the left's resistance to leaning out our federal bureaucracy and removing vicious illegal aliens from our communities, but if that's not what's behind their opposition, if the left has not undertaken an all-out effort to bring about the ultimate collapse of our socio-economic structure, it surely wouldn't look much different than what we're seeing if indeed they had.

The left considers progress toward the "revolution" to be a kind of ratchet. It can go forward, it can be paused for a time, but it can never go back. It has managed since WWII to squander so much of our wealth, to foment so much social unrest, to all but destroy the family, weaken the glue of religion, distort our history, and bring us closer to national ruin, that they could see success looming on the near horizon. Now Trump and Musk are threatening to undo all that it took decades or more for them to accomplish and they're livid and desperate.

For the first time the ratchet isn't just being paused, it's being reversed, and Democrats are stunned. Trump's not only frustrating their aspirations for revolution but also lifting the rock and exposing what has been going on in our government bureaucracy since at least the Obama administration and doubtless long before that.

The left likes to recite the slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," but the last thing they want, apparently, is an administration that actually shines a light on what they've been up to.

How to Rise Out of Poverty

As a follow-up to Monday's post on racial inequality I thought I'd rerun an older post on the topic of making one's way out of poverty: Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, offers some advice to anyone who truly wishes to rise up out of poverty into the American middle class:

Policy aimed at promoting economic opportunity for poor children must be framed within three stark realities. First, many poor children come from families that do not give them the kind of support that middle-class children get from their families.

Second, as a result, these children enter kindergarten far behind their more advantaged peers and, on average, never catch up and even fall further behind.

Third, in addition to the education deficit, poor children are more likely to make bad decisions that lead them to drop out of school, become teen parents, join gangs and break the law.

In addition to the thousands of local and national programs that aim to help young people avoid these life-altering problems, we should figure out more ways to convince young people that their decisions will greatly influence whether they avoid poverty and enter the middle class.

Let politicians, schoolteachers and administrators, community leaders, ministers and parents drill into children the message that in a free society, they enter adulthood with three major responsibilities: at least finish high school, get a full-time job, and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.

Our research shows that of American adults who followed these three simple rules, only about 2 percent are in poverty and nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class (defined as earning around $55,000 or more per year). There are surely influences other than these principles at play, but following them guides a young adult away from poverty and toward the middle class.

There's much more worth reading in Haskins' essay and readers interested in the plight of the poor are urged to check it out. Here are a couple of suggestions, in addition to the three mentioned above, that Haskins is perhaps alluding to when he mentions other influences, but doesn't make explicit:

1. Get married before you have children.
2. Stay away from drugs, alcohol and pornography.
3. Strive to be an outstanding employee at your workplace.
4. Never stop learning.
5. Limit your time on social media.

Sound too preachy? Consider #1, about which Haskins offers some statistics:

Today, more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage.

This unprecedented rate of non-marital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood — and for a considerable number of these, all of their childhood — in a single-parent family.

As hard as single parents may try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty. In turn, poverty is associated with a wide range of negative outcomes in children, including school dropout and out-of-wedlock births.

Sure, it's harder for some than it is for others, given the circumstances of their lives, to rise into the middle class, but someone who wants to do it can certainly make it much less difficult by following Haskins' advice.

Designed to Stay Warm

No matter where we look in nature and no matter whether we look at whole organisms or at any system or part of an organism, down to the tiniest cells that make it up, we see evidence of intentional design.

The following short video gives us a glimpse into just a few aspects of the design that permits the Emperor penguin to survive and thrive in the harsh conditions in Antarctica. It's fascinating:

The Darwinian naturalist would have us believe that every single adaptation, whether structural or behavioral, in every single organism on earth, came about because of some fortuitous genetic mutation which was then seized upon by natural selection and promulgated throughout the population.

For the naturalist genetic mutation is a magic wand that has blindly and solely by random chance produced the trillions of adaptations we find in living things.

The faith it takes to believe in the efficacy of mindless, unguided processes in nature is truly impressive.

Is There Racial Inequality in the U.S.?

The answer to the title question is certainly "Yes," but not always where some people think. There's certainly racial inequality in the NBA, NFL, MLB and major college sports, but that racial inequality doesn't seem to concern anyone.

Where else in our culture is there inequality? Is there racial inequality in the entertainment world? In movies, television shows and commercials? Among pop music stars and dancers? In the student bodies on major college campuses?

Is blackness somehow de-emphasized in our culture? What other race has an entire month devoted to recognizing them? If a person has one black parent or one black grandparent, that person is most likely to identify as which, white or black? Do we spend less money per pupil on predominately black schools? The answer to each of these questions is "No" so where is the inequality?

There is indeed an inequality between whites and blacks in average household income, which it would be nice to be able to do something about, but much (though not all) of the reason for that is that black households are often headed by a single mother.

Over the course of several generations, single motherhood hinders a child's ability to accumulate wealth, often by limiting the economic help available from grandparents. A child who has four grandparents is in a much better position to build wealth, is more likely to afford college and a home, less likely to wind up addicted to drugs or alcohol, and less likely to be imprisoned, than a child who has only one grandparent who is often herself a single mother.

Broken down by race, Asians had the highest percentage of children living with their married birth parents (81%) in 2022, followed by whites (70%), Hispanics (55%), multiracial children (51%) and blacks (33%). Of children living apart from their biological father 57.6% are black, 31.2% are Hispanic, and 20.7% are white.

Moreover, the figures in that last sentence don't reflect the fact that though children might be living in the household with their biological father, he may not be married to their mother. Almost 70% of black children are born to unmarried mothers.

Not coincidentally, Asian households, who have the highest percentage of intact families, also have the highest median household income, while black households, which have the lowest percentage of intact families, have the lowest median household income.

In 2023, the median household income for Asian households was $112,800. The median household income for white households was $89,050, for Hispanic households it was $65,540, and for black households it was $56,490. These figures track the statistics for households with both biological parents.

So what can be done to reduce the economic inequality between blacks and everyone else? Maybe the best place to start is to recognize that only blacks can solve this problem, no one can solve it for them. The second thing that should be acknowledged is that if blacks are going to narrow the income gap they're going to have to narrow the marriage gap.

There won't be much economic progress until they do, and that's true of households of all races headed by single mothers.

Naturalism and Moral Value

Here's a five minute clip from a discussion twenty some years ago involving two philosophers, one a theist (Dr. William Lane Craig) and one a naturalist (Dr. Bernard Leikind), discussing whether naturalism can provide a ground for objective moral values.

Dr. Leikind is a relativist who apparently believes that some things, like slavery, are indeed objectively bad, but he struggles to give a reason why slavery is bad other than his own subjective aversion to it.

If naturalism is true then all moral values are subjective personal preferences, and if moral values are simply subjective preferences, like a preferred flavor of ice cream, then there is no genuine right and wrong, just as there's no right or wrong preference in ice cream flavors.

Nevertheless, the naturalist can choose to live by certain values, and most do, but the logic of his or her basic worldview should actually lead the naturalist to moral nihilism.

Fortunately, most naturalists are not logically consistent and don't follow their naturalism all the way to its logical endpoint.

If they were consistent not only would they be nihilists (see here), but they would never make moral judgments about any other person's behavior, for no matter how cruel or harmful that behavior might be, it wouldn't be morally wrong if morality is merely subjective.

Five Offers, Five Rejections

President Trump has made a very controversial proposal to move the Palestinians out of Gaza and rebuild it under U.S. control. The idea was widely derided by those who for decades have been promoting a two-state solution in which the Palestinians would be given a state side-by-side with Israel.

This solution to the conflict in the Middle East not only seems naive - the Arab Muslims don't want a two-state solution, they want a one-state solution in which Israel is eliminated - but it's also been offered to the Palestinians five times since before the founding of Israel and the Palestinians rejected it each time.

The region named Palestine (it was named that by the Romans after their conquest of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. as a way of insulting the Jews) was controlled by Turkey until WWI. It was a desert with a smattering of Arabs and Jews living an exiguous existence. After the war the British took control of the region, and in 1936 the Arabs rebelled against both the British and their Jewish neighbors.

The British formed a task force, the Peal Commission, to study the cause of the unrest and concluded that the best solution would be to establish two states in the region, one for the Arabs and one for the Jews.

The Brits' suggestion heavily favored the Arabs. The British offered them 80% of the disputed territory, the Jews the remaining 20%. Despite the tiny size of their proposed state, the Jews voted to accept this offer. But the Arabs rejected it and resumed their violence against the Jews.

According to the article linked above, in 1947, in the wake of the Holocaust, the British asked the newly-formed United Nations to find a solution. The UN decided that the best way to resolve the conflict was indeed to divide the land into two states. In November 1947, the UN voted on this "two-state solution." Again, the Jews accepted the offer and again the Arabs rejected it.

This time, however, the Arabs launched an all-out war against the tiny Jewish state. Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria joined the attack against Israel. Nevertheless, Israel won the war and got on with the business of building their new nation. Most of the land set aside by the UN for an Arab state, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, became occupied territory. Occupied not by Israel, but by Jordan.

Then, 20 years later, in 1967, the Arabs led this time by Egypt and joined by Syria and Jordan, once again sought to destroy the Jewish state. The 1967 conflict, known as the Six-Day War, ended in a stunning victory for Israel and a huge humiliation for the Arab countries. Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the area known as the Gaza Strip, fell into Israel’s hands.

The government split over what to do with this new territory. Half wanted to return the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt in exchange for peace. The other half wanted to give it to the region’s Arabs, who had begun referring to themselves as the Palestinians, in the hope that they would ultimately build their own state there.

Neither initiative got very far. A few months later, the Arab League met in Sudan and issued its infamous three-NOs, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Again, a two-state solution was dismissed by the Arabs.

Another war ensued in 1973 and the Arabs lost again, but they were determined to keep attacking Israel. They showed noinclination to accepting a separate state for the Palestinians.

The fourth rejection came in 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met at Camp David, with Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, to conclude a new two-state plan. The talks were mediated by President Bill Clinton. Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza, and 94% of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But the Palestinian leader rejected the offer.

In the words of President Clinton, “Arafat was here 14 days and said no to everything.” Instead, the Palestinians launched a bloody wave of suicide bombings that killed over 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands more, on buses, in wedding halls, and in pizza parlors.

Finally,in 2008, Israel tried for the fifth time. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further than Ehud Barak had, expanding the peace offer to include additional land to sweeten the deal. Like his predecessor, the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, turned the deal down.

The Israelis have done everything that could be reasonably expected of them, but the Arabs are recalcitrant. They don't really appear to want peace or a two-state solution. They want Israel out of the Middle East and until they are gone or exterminated there'll be more October 7ths whenever they feel strong enough to pull it off.

President Trump seems to be the only Western leader who recognizes this, and the only leader anywhere who has offered an alternative to the incessant conflict.

"Be Cruel"

This is the sort of people President Trump is dealing with in the Russian government. From an article in the Wall Street Journal (paywall):

In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of St. Petersburg’s prisons delivered a direct message to an elite unit of guards tasked with overseeing the influx of prisoners from the war: “Be cruel, don’t pity them.” Maj. Gen. Igor Potapenko had gathered his service’s special forces at the regional headquarters to tell them about a new system that had been designed for captured Ukrainians....

Normal rules wouldn’t apply, he told them. There would be no restrictions against violence. The body cameras that were mandatory elsewhere in Russia’s prison system would be gone.

Those meetings set in motion nearly three years of relentless and brutal torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners’ genitals until batteries ran out. They beat the prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see what type of material would be most painful. They withheld medical treatment to allow gangrene to set in, forcing amputations.

Three former prison officials told The Wall Street Journal how Russia planned and executed what United Nations investigators have described as widespread and systematic torture. Their accounts were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who has helped the Russian prison officials defect.

Needless to say, this is not only an unambiguous violation of the Geneva Conventions it is pure evil. Not only has Russia under Vladimir Putin targeted Ukrainian civilians, including children, with their missiles, not only have they removed thousands of Ukrainian children from territory they've captured and sent them deep into Russia to be raised as Russians, but they've committed untold atrocities against combatants.

Russia has a long history of cruelty in its prison system, reaching back to the earliest decades of the Soviet Union, when Joseph Stalin created labor camps for those deemed dangerous to Soviet rule. In recent decades, Russia has taken some steps to improve conditions, such as separating first-time offenders from the rest of the prison population, and some regions have introduced body cameras for guards after years of campaigning by human-rights groups....

While dealing with Ukrainian prisoners of war, they were tasked with working with local prison guards to direct the POWs’ activities. They interpreted Potapenko’s instructions at that March 2022 meeting as a carte blanche for violence, said the two former guards. They pushed their mistreatment of Ukrainians to a new level with the belief that they had the permission of their leadership, said one of the former guards.

While on duty, the guards wore balaclavas at all times. Prisoners were beaten if they looked a guard in the eye. Those measures, along with the month-long rotations, were taken to make sure individual guards and their superiors couldn’t be recognized later, said one of the former officers....

Pavel Afisov, who was taken prisoner in the city of Mariupol in the initial months of the war, was among the first Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia....

He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred into new prisons. After arriving at a penitentiary in Russia’s Tver region, north of Moscow, he was led by guards into a medical examination room and ordered to strip naked. They shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his head and beard.

When it was over, he was told to yell “glory to Russia, glory to the special forces” and then ordered to walk to the front of the room—still naked—to sing the Russian and Soviet national anthems. When he said he didn’t know the words, the guards beat him again with their fists and batons.

The violence served a purpose for the Russian authorities, according to the former guards and human-rights advocates: making them more malleable for interrogations and breaking their will to fight. Prison interrogations were sometimes aimed at extracting confessions of war crimes or gaining operational intelligence from prisoners who had little will to resist after they suffered extreme brutality....

The former guards described a staggering level of violence directed at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used so often, especially in showers, that officers complained about them running out of battery life too fast.

One former penitentiary system employee, who worked with a team of medics in Voronezh region in southwestern Russia, said prison guards beat Ukrainians until their police batons broke. He said a boiler room was littered with broken batons and the officers tested other materials, including insulated hot-water pipes, for their ability to cause pain and damage.

The guards, he said, intentionally beat prisoners on the same spot day after day, preventing bruises from healing and causing infection inside the accumulated hematoma. The treatment led to blood poisoning and muscle tissue would rot. At least one person died from sepsis, the officer said.

Many of the guards enjoyed the brutality and often bragged about how much pain they had caused prisoners, he said.

Ukrainian former POW Andriy Yegorov, 25, recalled how guards at a prison in Russia’s western Bryansk region would force prisoners to run 100 yards through the hallway, holding mattresses above their heads. The guards stood to the side and beat them in the ribs as they ran by.

When they got to the end of the hall, they would be forced to do sit-ups and push-ups. Each time they came up, the guards would punch them or hit them with a baton.

“They loved it, you could hear them laughing between themselves while we cried out in pain,” he said....

The sadism of people who would do this to other human beings is truly Satanic. It reminds me of the words of Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor, who spent years ina communist prison in Romania in the late 40s and early 50s. Wurmbrand wrote in his book Tortured for Christ that,

When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man. The Communist torturers often said, “There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish. I heard one torturer say, “I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.” He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.

The Wall Street Journal's account continues:

Two of the longest-held prisoners of war, both Afisov and Yegorov spent around 30 months in the Russian prison system before they were finally released in a swap that brought them home on Oct. 18. Yegorov found out during his medical checkup following the exchange that he had five broken vertebrae....

After returning home, Afisov resisted sleep for days, fearing it could turn out to be a dream and he would wake up back in prison. “Then whenever I finally trusted myself enough to fall asleep all I had was nightmares,” he said.

The former prison officials were preparing to start new lives when they spoke with the Journal. They are now living in undisclosed locations and have had to cut off contact with people they had known all their lives. One of them said he had always been a Russian patriot and never wanted to live anywhere else but Russia. But after the war began, he said, he couldn’t stay in the country or remain silent. He said giving testimony to the ICC was one way to work toward justice.

One wonders how much of this the Russian people are aware of. Do they know what their leaders do? Would they care if they did know? Did seventy years of atheistic communism dull their consciences to the point of turning them into moral zombies? These are the same questions people asked seventy-five years ago of the German people when the atrocities of the Nazis came to light.

After the 20th century, the horrors of 9/11 and October 7th in this century, and the atrocities committed by the Russians in their war against Ukraine, it's hard to believe those who tell us that humanity is making moral progress.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The Washington Post's slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" has been amplified throughout the culture by self-congratulatory liberals ever since the WaPo adopted it in 2017, but today liberals are in a quandary. It's the progressive left and their Democratic allies who are seeking to turn out the lights and conceal in darkness the mischief and corruption their friends in executive agencies have been fomenting over the past several decades.

As the Trump administration, through its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), seeks to shine a spotlight into the dark recesses of the Washington bureaucracy we're being treated to the spectacle of diehard resistance from the left.

This turnabout of "principle" by the left is something we should all be used to by now. There was a time when Democrats stood for the little guy and against the corporate fat cats. Today they're bankrolled by the fat cats and as numerous commentators have observed, they no longer give a rip about the little guy.

Gerard Baker points out in a column at the Wall Street Journal (paywall) that the Democrats have chosen to bankroll illegal migrants over American citizens, to give criminals a pass while ignoring victims, to pretend that men who think they're women should be allowed to compete in sports against girls, and to bow to the demands of powerful teachers' unions over the interests of children and the parents who pay the teachers' salaries.

Is it surprising then that Democrats would endeavor to hide from scrutiny the unconscionable waste of taxpayer dollars by government bureaucrats who deviously funnel the little guy's resources into their pet projects such as earmarking $15 Million for "Contraceptives and Condoms" in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan?

They argue that what Trump's doing - saving the taxpayers money by eliminating waste, fraud, and unnecessary jobs - is unconstitutional, but this argument is hard to credit. Article II of the Constitution clearly states that the executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States. These agencies are all executive branch agencies, so aside from completely eliminating a department established by Congress, the president is pretty much free to do as he pleases in managing them.

The left also objects to the work undertaken by DOGE on the flimsy basis that Elon Musk is un-elected, but so are the bureaucrats who are channeling these multimillion-dollar grants to the most dubious recipients. Which is better, un-elected bureaucrats secretly wasting our resources, often in support of causes that are antithetical to the interests of the United States, or an un-elected watchdog exposing their corruption?

They complain that Musk's army of investigators are mere 18 to 25-year-olds who have no experience and no business rooting about in the records of agencies like USAID. This is a very odd objection for the left to make since it was Democrats who led the fight to get 18-year-olds the right to vote, arguing that if they were old enough to fight in a war they were old enough to vote. Well, if they're old enough to fight in a war then why aren't they old enough to ferret out the waste and abuse in our governmental agencies?

In a parenthetical comment Baker says,

A word about those teenagers: Funny how the left is so outraged about kids barely out of college marching into buildings along Constitution Avenue to investigate the misuse of government budgets. They cheered as hordes of little Maoists straight out of Ivy League schools took over tech companies, media organizations and the entire marketing departments of corporate America in the past decade to subject the rest of us to the iron rule of woke ideology.

He closes with this:

Whether or not it succeeds in dramatically reducing the size of government, the paramount virtue of this exercise is the exposure of the hegemony in our system of a political class that sees itself as immune from popular accountability. Government is supposed to exist for the people, but the DOGE process has laid bare what we have long suspected—that at scale, it exists first and foremost to further the interests of the permanent bureaucracy and their like-minded friends who dominate almost all our major institutions.

That’s why Democrats are so upset about the exercise: It is the most serious challenge to the control their people have long exercised, irrespective of election results and the popular will.

Yes, that and the fact that the revelations DOGE is bringing to our attention are likely to deeply embarrass a lot of powerful people.

Abandoning Religion, Embracing Superstition

There's an odd phenomenon apparently unfolding among millenials. As belief in God declines, belief in the efficacy of astrology is growing.

In other words, there's evidently a longing among young adults for transcendence, for something more than what materialism can offer them, but unwilling to return to the religious beliefs of their forefathers, they've been casting about among the occult for something else to serve as a substitute.

Denyse O'Leary wrote about this phenomenon some time ago at Mercatornet.

She noted that polls reveal belief in astrology at about 25% of the population in North America and Britain and that superstitious beliefs in general, e.g. belief in ghosts and witches, are increasing especially among liberal-minded young adults. Indeed, top liberal websites like Buzzfeed, Bustle and Cosmo feature much more superstitious content than do conservative sites.

Moreover, an education in science is no proof against an inclination toward superstition:

[I]nterestingly, “sciencey” types who lack scepticism about Darwin are often superstitious, despite the longstanding dismissal of occult beliefs from science.

The 2003 study, done at a British science fair, found that twenty-five percent of the people who claimed a background in science also reported that they were very or somewhat superstitious.

She closes with these observations:

Superstition feeds on itself. Like a drug habit, it at once satisfies and creates an appetite for more -- in this case, an appetite for occult knowledge, as opposed to transparent knowledge. That appetite can affect a person's perception of everyday reality.

It’s not science that holds superstition in check in Western society. It’s traditional Western religion, which insists on transparent truths (truths that all may know) and forbids attempts at occult, secret truths.

It's puzzling that people who scoff at the possibility of miracles and the existence of a supernatural God are nevertheless open to the possibility of an occult world of ghosts and demons, etc. Why is the latter any more plausible than the former?

The early twentieth century British writer G.K. Chesterton once said that, "When people cease to believe in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything." Perhaps we're seeing evidence of the truth of Chesterton's claim in the twenty first century.

The Last Universal Common Ancestor

An article by Dirk Schulze-Makuch at Big Think tells us that researchers now believe that life originated very quickly after the earth cooled enough to allow the necessary molecules of life to form and to coagulate into cells. The age of the earth is estimated to be approximately 4.5 billion years, the moon is believed to have formed about 100 million years after the earth did, and new calculations put the origin of life at about 4.1 to 4.33 billion years ago.

This means that the first living cell, the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) of all living things, arose very quickly - in a space of about 200 million years. The article goes on to explain why a brief window for the origin of life is significant and the strange theory being resurrected to explain it:

While the exact dating of LUCA might seem unimportant to many readers — what’s a few hundred million years in the grand scheme of things? — the timing has far-reaching implications. If Moody and colleagues are correct, it means life arose extremely rapidly, almost as soon as our planet became habitable.

According to our present knowledge, Earth formed about 4.56 billion years ago, and the Moon formed (violently) about 100 million years later. That leaves a very short interval, maybe just 200 million years or so, before the first living cells appeared. Moody’s team also found that this early life was already quite complex, encoding about 2,600 proteins, comparable to modern bacteria. It even had a primitive immune system that defended it from viruses.

Can the appearance of life really be that rapid, something like the inflationary phase of the Universe right after the Big Bang? That’s certainly faster than most of us previously thought. And if it happened that fast, shouldn’t it be relatively easy to decipher the steps life took to develop?

Yet we still have no real handle on how all the functional components came together. We don’t even know for sure in which type of environment life originated. Maybe it was near “black smoker” hydrothermal vents, but it could also have been in ponds, tidal flats, or other locations. We just don’t know.

There are two important admissions in the above excerpt. Not only does recent research indicate that life arose amazingly fast, scientists don't have any idea how it could have done so. The level of complexity of the first cell, the LUCA, is so high that to think it came about through random chance and the laws of chemistry alone requires an enormous faith in the power of serendipity.

Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer writes about the difficulties involved in any naturalistic theory of the formation of the first life in two excellent books, The Return of the God Hypothesis and his earlier, perhaps more technical work, Signature in the Cell.

To put it in layman's terms, the chances of those 2600 proteins forming along with the instructional material encoded in nucleic acids, along with a membrane to encase them all, along with the ability to replicate itself is somewhat like imagining that all the minerals necessary to build a computer were scattered across the surface of the earth and that the action of natural forces like sun, wind, lightning, etc. acting over a span of 200 million years, somehow produced a fully functional computer along with the operating software necessary for it to work properly and also with the capacity to replicate itself.

The inconceivable improbability of such a feat places a severe strain on the credulity of many scientists so some of them, in order to avoid the conclusion that a transcendent intelligence designed the LUCA, are resorting to a theory called panspermia:

The breathtaking speed with which life appeared on Earth opens the door to another intriguing possibility known as “panspermia” — the idea that life originated on some other planet and arrived here inside meteorites. It’s an old idea, usually dismissed because it appears statistically very unlikely.

I agree with that evaluation if the incoming meteorite came from outside our Solar System: Traveling through interstellar space for eons would likely sterilize any life forms due to harsh radiation. What’s more, any object arriving from so far away would be much more likely to fall into the Sun or Jupiter due to their much stronger gravitational pull.

But it’s a different story if a life-seeding meteorite came from Mars. It’s entirely plausible that life arose on the Red Planet independently. Our two worlds formed at about the same time, but Mars cooled much faster than Earth, and the geological record suggests that, shortly after its formation, the planet was habitable with plenty of water.

Without a large moon to violently interrupt its early years, the life-starting window on Mars was actually longer than it was on Earth. And because Mars has lower gravity, rocks blown off its surface by asteroid impacts escape the planet more easily, to be hurled into the inner Solar System — toward Earth. The hundreds of Martian meteorites already discovered on Earth are proof of that.

Even naturalistic scientists keep drifting back to the idea that life on earth required an intelligent agent to at least get it started. Here's Schulze-Makuch:

As long as we’re speculating, we might also consider another theory known as “directed panspermia.” More than 50 years ago, Nobel laureate Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA) and Leslie Orgel suggested that a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization could have seeded Earth on purpose, exposing our planet to the first primitive cellular life, which, after gaining a foothold, would evolve to become more complex and even intelligent.

He acknowledges that the panspermia hypothesis has some serious problems, however:

As intriguing as the panspermia hypothesis may be, indications still point to life getting its start right here on Earth, considering, for example, the similarity of Earth’s primitive oceans to the interior of microbial cells in terms of elemental abundances (cells are essentially bags filled with salt water!). In any case, if life did indeed begin somewhere else and arrive rather than arise on Earth, we still don’t know how it happened.

Here's a question I have about all this: Suppose panspermia is ultimately found to be scientifically untenable. Where does that leave a scientist whose entire worldview is predicated on a naturalistic explanation of the origin of life?

Confusing Moderates and Conservatives

New York Times columnist David Brooks once undertook to describe the distinctive characteristics of political moderates but managed instead to give a pretty good description, inadvertently, of political conservatives.

He listed eight ideas which, he writes, moderates tend to embrace. In fact, for the most part he's describing political conservatives. Of the eight traits Brooks discusses three are ideologically neutral but five are actually characteristics which define conservatives. Wherever he uses the term "moderate" the reader can more accurately, I think, substitute "conservative." Here are the five in boldface with my comments:

1. Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things.

Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.

This is precisely why conservatives argue incessantly for limited, decentralized government and for more autonomy for communities and families, what Edmund Burke called the "little platoons" of society.

2. In politics, the lows are lower than the highs are high. The harm government does when it screws up — wars, depressions — is larger than the benefits government produces when it does well. Therefore the moderate operates from a politics of skepticism, not a politics of faith. He understands that most of the choices are among bad options so he prefers steady incremental reform to sudden revolutionary change.

Conservatives are not opposed to change, but they are opposed to change simply for the sake of change. All change should be tempered by experience and traditions which have proven themselves reliable guides over long periods of time. Conservatives are very suspicious of revolutions, whether political, cultural or social. Sudden, rapid change rarely makes things better and very often makes them worse.

3. Truth before justice. All political movements must face inconvenient facts — thoughts and data that seem to aid their foes. If you try to suppress those facts, by banning a speaker or firing an employee, then you are putting the goals of your cause, no matter how noble, above the search for truth. This is the path to fanaticism,....

For just these reasons conservatives are the strongest advocates of free speech and the free flow of ideas in our culture. Those who prohibit or restrict this freedom, or who suppress facts such as the Hunter Biden laptop, etc. are taking us down the road to Big Brother totalitarianism.

4. Partisanship is necessary but blinding.....Moderates are problematic members of their party. They tend to be hard on their peers and sympathetic to their foes.

This helps explain why conservatives have been such a thorn in the side of their congressional leaders for the last decade or so, and why some conservatives were until recently among President Trump's strongest critics. The Democratic party has until this last election been disciplined and unified largely because it has no conservatives in it.

5. Humility is the fundamental virtue.....The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.

Precisely because of the humility Brooks describes, conservatives tend to be skeptical when authorities in various fields speak apodictically about phenomena like climate change, covid immunity, biogenesis, morality, religion, and what's best for our children. Conservatives often suspect that neither we nor they know enough to warrant their certainty.

Brooks finishes with this:

Moderation requires courage. Moderates don’t operate from the safety of their ideologically pure galleons. They are unafraid to face the cross currents, detached from clan, acknowledging how little they know.

In fact, the people who must have courage today are those who stand against the Zeitgeist, who are legally hounded for their political and religious beliefs, who are shouted down in the university, who are threatened with violence and who lose their jobs, businesses, friends, and even family because of their beliefs.

Few of these folks today are moderates, they're almost all conservatives.

What Is a Christian Nationalist?

One of the allegations sometimes leveled against politically conservative Christians by their opponents is that they are "Christian nationalists."

So, is that a bad thing? It depends on what one means by it.

An article a couple of years ago at MSN.com reported on a piece in the Washington Post that addressed Christian nationalism and in which the Post tried to clarify what's meant by the term. Christian nationalism, according to the Post, is "an ideology that says Christianity is the foundation of the United States and that government should protect that foundation."

If that's what we're to understand by "Christian nationalism" it seems rather innocuous.

A lot of people believe that the foundational principles of the United States, the freedoms included in the first amendment, for example, are rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview, and that the founders, whether or not they were Christians themselves, were heavily influenced by the Christian culture in which they lived.

Indeed, the concept of liberty and justice for all is, historically speaking, a uniquely Christian idea, and the claim that Christianity influenced the founding of this nation is clear to anyone who has read their Tocqueville.

Most people believe, moreover, that government should protect that foundation by protecting the principle of religious liberty.

So, if that's all Christian nationalists, believe then almost anyone who is a Christian in the U.S. would be ab defino a Christian nationalist.

But further along in their column the Post adds a twist that subtly alters the definition:

As part of our research, we examined the percentage of Americans who, over the past 15 years, said they agree or strongly agree with this Christian nationalist statement: “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.”

So now they appear to implicitly define a Christian nationalist as one who wants the federal government to officially declare the U.S. to be a Christian nation.

Here we should balk.

It's one thing for a citizen to acknowledge that the U.S. was founded on Christian principles and to expect the government to protect the principles upon which the nation was founded, the principles contained in all of our founding documents. It's quite another for a citizen to hold that the federal government should declare the U.S. to be officially Christian.

It's hard to picture specifically what such a declaration would even mean in practice. Would it entail making Christianity a state religion, a circumstance which our founders, for good reason, explicitly sought to avoid?

As the founders knew from Europe's experience, state religions can be oppressive, and receiving state favoritism often corrupts the religion.

However much Christianity influenced our founding it seems unwise at this stage in our history, a stage in which there's far more religious diversity present in our population than was present 250 years ago, to formally declare the U.S. to be officially a Christian nation.

Nevertheless, if ever a conservative Christian is called a Christian nationalist the Christian would do well to ask his or her interlocutor what they understand a Christian nationalist to be. Quite probably the accuser won't be able to answer.