Four Challenges for the NDE Skeptic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tired Yet of Winning?

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

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

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

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

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

The tax cuts have been preserved;

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

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

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

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

Go here and here for more examples of winning.

Worst of the Worst

Bill Glahn has done some research on who, exactly, is being deported from his state of Minnesota, and discusses his results at Powerlineblog.

He first takes the media to task for deceptive and tendentious reporting on the issue:

As far as I can tell from my deep dive into the illegal immigration issue, the Feds really are concentrating their efforts on the worst cases. Yet, the typical media headline, this one from NPR, reads, "Sharpest growth in ICE detention population: people with no criminal convictions."

Obviously, this definition excludes any convictions having to do with the illegal immigration itself. By “no” they refer to convictions only in the United States. And by using “convictions” they exclude a huge population of aliens charged with other serious crimes but deported before the local judicial system has run its course.

Well, those are fine points about the detainee population that NPR seems to want you not to think very hard about. Glahn then focuses on cases in Minnesota in which deportees return illegally to the U.S.

If you return to the U.S. after being previously deported, that is ... a felony under U.S. law. For the past few weeks, I’ve been tracking such cases in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota.

I’ve been tracking 60 of the cases filed in the District since Pres. Trump began his second term. Which is admittedly a drop in the bucket considering there are easily more than 100,000 illegal aliens in Minnesota.

The last rigorous study of the phenomenon (using 2019 data) counted only 81,000. Of those, the plurality are from Mexico. Add in illegals from El Salvador and Guatemala, and you have the majority.

My sample of five dozen match these demographics. The majority of the men (and they are all men) are from Mexico. All but one of the remainder are from elsewhere in Latin America. Of these 60 cases filed since January, at least 25 defendants have already been deported.

Glahn offers another significant caveat to NPR's claim:

Keep in mind that the goal of the U.S. Attorney, or ICE officer, or FBI agent at each step is to provide just enough background to achieve the immediate goal: obtain a search warrant, an indictment, a detention order, a conviction, etc. They don’t serve as biographers to each defendant passing through the system.

The indictments for illegal entry typically run no more than a couple of sentences each with the goal of establishing just two facts: 1. the defendant was previously deported and 2. now he’s back. Anything else is extraneous material.

That said, the U.S. Attorney, in some cases, has bothered to document additional deportations for individual defendants, totaling 51 prior deportations across the 60 defendants. One defendant alone recorded eight (8) of the 51 earlier deportations.

It’s only when the process gets beyond the indictment stage does the backstory (or even nationality) emerge for an individual defendant. In general, the deeper the process goes, the more horrors emerge.

As an example consider that,

[T]he Minnesota Dad (allegedly) sexually assaulted his 12-year-old daughter. But he was not “convicted,” as NPR would require before pursuing his re- re-deportation. Other Minnesota Men have backgrounds in drug dealing, burglary, theft, assault and other sex crimes. DWI’s and car crashes pop up with great frequency.

Okay, so ICE is getting rid of a lot of very bad people, but what of all the innocents that have been putatively caught up in the ICE dragnet? In Minnesota, at least, there don't seem to be too many:

What I have not run across is anyone employed in either the agricultural or hospitality industries. There was one restaurant cook, but he was also a convicted felony cocaine dealer.

When defendants are indicted on felony re-entry charges, they are given a Hobson’s choice: they can agree to be handed over to ICE and deported, or they can stay in the custody of the U.S. Marshals and receive weeks or months of due process (assisted by a taxpayer-paid lawyer) and then be handed over to ICE for deportation.

In a few instances, the court has released a defendant on bond, while awaiting his Federal trial, but then he is picked up ICE and deported. I’ve dug and dug and dug but have not yet encountered one of those seemingly ubiquitous cases of the military veteran/U.S. citizen/permanent resident/innocent bystander who got swept up in an ICE dragnet and kidnapped off the street by masked gunmen.

Of course, Glahn's samnple size is relatively small and there may be troubling cases that would show up in a larger sample, but if innocents were being routinely detained and deported it seems likely that there'd be at least one such instance of it in his data. He closes with this:

The backstories of these gentlemen always involve some other criminal event(s) that got them onto the radar of ICE/FBI/U.S. Attorney. Always, with no exceptions.

Does anyone know of any well-documented instances in which this wasn't the case? How many instances are there in which someone was deported who posed no threat to anyone, who committed no crime other than crossing the border illegally, who has been in the country for several years and has lived a quiet, productive life while here? I'd sincerely be interested in knowing how common such cases are. If any readers know of any you can email me by clicking on the "contact us" button above. Please include links to the story.

Hurting Those Who Love Them

We all have friends and/or family, or know someone who does (or maybe it's ourselves), who believe that it's wrong for the administration to deport those who are in the country illegally but who've not committed any crime while being here.

With certain qualifiers, I'm partly sympathetic to this view, but what I have no sympathy for are those who, because of deep disagreement over this issue, have divorced themselves from family and friends and who will henceforth have nothing to do with the people they formerly claimed to have loved.

One person wrote on social media that separating himself from his family over this issue was a matter of human decency. This is very sad, especially since it suggests that these folks' self-righteousness outweighs their love for those from whom they've estranged themselves and whom they've often deeply hurt in the process.

Imagine a fellow named John who lives in a nice house with a wife and several children. John makes a comfortable living and is politically active on behalf of liberal causes.

John is always careful to lock his doors when he leaves the house or his car because he doesn't want to have his possessions stolen, but one day he forgets to do so. Coming home early before his wife was home from work and his kids were out of school he's shocked to find a rather bedraggled-looking family of complete strangers sitting in his living room.

When he asks them what they're doing in his house, they tell him that the front door was open and they needed a place to stay, so they came in. They also tell John that they left their old neighborhood because it wasn't very nice, there were drugs and gangs, his place was much nicer, he had a well-stocked refrigerator, and they wanted to stay there.

They promise him they'd mow his grass and clean the house, and that since he had an extra bedroom, they assumed it'd be alright with John, since he had old Biden/Harris stickers on his door, if they made themselves at home.

John tells them that he sympathized with their plight, but that they couldn't stay; they'd have to leave; he'd even give them a meal and some cash to help them on their way. Nevertheless, they were insistent about moving in.

Finally, John takes out his phone and calls the police, who come and escort the family back to their old neighborhood.

Was John wrong to refuse to allow these poor people to remain in his house? Did his practice of locking his doors and his refusal to allow the intruders to stay make him a moral reprobate? Does he lack human decency? Doesn't he have the right to decide whom he'll invite into his home and whom he will exclude?

How many of those who've estranged themselves from friends and family because their former loved ones react the same as John did would themselves fault John? How many of them leave the doors to their houses and cars unlocked? How many of them would decline to evict people who tried to move into their houses uninvited?

Yet locking one's doors is analogous to building a wall on our border of our national "house," and calling the police to evict the intruders who were in his house illegally is analogous to deporting immigrants who are in our national home illegally. Our nation is our home writ large.

If you think I'm wrong about this, tell me what the significant difference is between John's situation and that which we find ourselves in after four years of a reckless border policy.

Abandoning Dawkins, Embracing Christ

An article at PJ Media by Mark Tapscott summarizes a 16-minute video in which a millennial named Josh Timonen recounts how he returned to the Christianity of his childhood.

Timonen's testimony was especially interesting to me because beginning in 2006 he had been a collaborator with evolutionary biologist and committed atheist Richard Dawkins on some of Dawkins' projects.

Tapscott writes:

Timonen initially created Dawkins' website, then steadily became an indispensable resource for the then-high riding English evolutionary biologist and author of "The God Delusion," who was in high demand for speaking engagements, particularly on college campuses and at influential conferences across the U.S. and Europe.

Timonen was riding high, but "during this time, there were definitely glimpses of emptiness in all of this, glimpses of people who were definitely not satisfied with their life." An experience at an atheist conference where Dawkins and fellow atheist advocate Sam Harris were speaking began opening Timonen's eyes.

Harris happened to mention something remotely positive about spirituality and the crowd rebelled, making it clear they didn't want to hear anything remotely good about anything in the way of spirituality, or suggestion that there might be an afterlife.

That intolerance made a deep impression on Timonen. "He was saying the most lukewarm thing about spirituality, but everybody just shut him down. It bothered me that no one was open to that and that there was such an attachment to a physicalist, materialist worldview.

"The materialist world-view means I'm only going to accept things that are within the natural world and I'm going to exclude anything spiritual or that I cannot explain with natural law. I think the atheist world-view has a lot to do with control. It's about controlling the walls of your sandbox, to say that 'if I keep everything within these walls of sand, then I am safe. I can understand it, I can explain it and that's it."

Not long after, Timonen's wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, who came prematurely, and was not given much chance of living. Timonen recalled thinking that this child was the most important thing in his life, and yet, as an atheist, he had to believe his daughter was just another human who, like him, would simply live and then die a meaningless death.

"The atheist world-view can easily discount the value of a single human, and I remember wrestling with that and thinking 'but this is everything,' and it just felt wrong. It was a moment of realizing that the world-view was not connecting" with reality, he explained.

Then in 2020, Josh and his wife and daughter moved to Portland, Ore., where they witnessed the riots that exploded there and elsewhere in the wake of the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Neighborhoods Timonen had come to know and love were left in flames.

A few of the rioters were being arrested, but then they would be released without consequences the next day. Timonen was amazed when some of his young friends and business associates defended the rioters, claiming it was a "good cause." But what is a "good cause" in an atheistic worldview, he wondered, if there is nothing after death?

"Those kids rioting had no moral compass. That got me thinking a lot about that moral compass, where is it coming from. I thought I aligned with these people who were defending the riots, but I didn't, I thought, wait a minute, I thought we were the good guys. And I remember clearly thinking 'why are you defending what is clearly violence and destruction and desecrating our city"?

Timonen explains that he was also shocked during the COVID pandemic by how big institutions such as the government, the drugmakers and the medical profession, as well as individual Americans, sought to control people, to "police each other" with social distancing and mask-wearing mandates.

"That really shocked me and it felt like there was a wave of evil that had come over everyone. I think of it like an ocean wave where the individual particles are all being pushed in the same way. I also noticed that there was this upswell of Satanic imagery in the world," Timonen said.

"So you would see evil obviously rising on all these different fronts and at the same time people are celebrating Satanism, claiming that it's all just in good fun. Is this not just a coincidence, this working together, how many coincidence am I going to allow before I say maybe there is something else at work here," he explained.

That's when Timonen ceased being an atheist, because he realized the supernatural had to be acknowledged and considered. He and his family moved to Texas, where they found a culture vibrantly open to and publicly celebrating Christianity in a thousand informal ways.

One thing led to another: They began homeschooling their daughter, and they checked out a church. "We saw the fruit, we saw there was a difference, that people treated each other better, there was more respect. And I think it all goes back to the idea of the soul," he said.

Timonen also saw that a lot of the resistance to the tyranny of the COVID pandemic came from churches and the people attending them. Those people have "the firm foundation that Jesus spoke of. If you don't have that firm foundation, the world has a much easier time of it in pushing you around," Timonen realized.

So Timonen and his wife began a thorough reevaluation of their understanding of Jesus and Christianity. They dug into questions such as: Can the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life be trusted? Did Jesus really exist? Can we trust what people said about His life?

"And then you have to wrestle with is He who He said He is," Timonen said. He dove into "Cold-Case Christianity" by J. Warner Wallace and "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. He became convinced the death and resurrection of Jesus could not be denied or rationalized away.

Today, the Timonens are active followers of Christ.

You can watch Timonen explain all this here. I wonder what Dawkins is thinking after at least two of his closer associates, Timonen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have both abandoned for Christianity the atheism that Dawkins has devoted his life to promoting.

Should Pastors Leave Politics Alone?

The IRS declared on Monday that church pastors henceforth would be free to discuss politics from the pulpit without jeopardizing the church's tax exemption.

Cal Thomas views this relaxation of what was called the Johnson rule after then-Senator and future president Lyndon Johnson with a bit of caution. First, though, he explains the Johnson rule:

The root of the ban extends back to 1954. Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) was running for re-election and faced a primary challenge from a wealthy rancher and oilman. A nonprofit conservative group published materials that recommended voters support Johnson's challenger.

In what many believed to be retribution, Johnson introduced an amendment to Section 501 (c)(3) of the IRS Code, prohibiting organizations that are tax-exempt from trying to influence political campaigns.

Many took this as an attempt to muzzle preachers.

The measure was rarely, if ever enforced. Many Black and white liberal preachers invited mostly Democratic candidates to their services close to elections, giving them tacit, if not outright, endorsements. Their tax-exempt status was never canceled.

Thomas proceeds to explain why the new freedom to broach politics from the pulpit is fraught with pitfalls:

On one level this is a freedom of speech issue, but not all freedoms are necessarily worth exercising. The larger question is: who benefits the most and least from the IRS ruling? Some politicians will benefit, but churches that see this as an opportunity to jump into the political waters will be harmed as they will dilute their primary mission.

Besides, many churches have members who hold different political views. For the pastor to engage in partisan politics runs the risk of having some of them leave. I would.

There has always been a presumption among those advocating for more political involvement by churches that members are ignorant about politics and can't form their own opinions without instructions from their preacher. Organizations - liberal, but mostly conservative - have raised a lot of money promoting a fusion between church and state.

I don't attend church services to hear about politics. Neither do I wish to hear theological pronouncements from politicians, many of whom misquote Scripture, or take it out of context to fit their political agendas.

....Politicians and preachers should mostly stay in their own lanes. Where Scripture speaks clearly to a contemporary issue, including marriage, gender, abortion and the wisdom found in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, I'm ready to listen. But don't let me hear who the pastor prefers in the next election. I am not without information and neither is anyone else if they take the time to do research.

Here, though, lies a difficulty. Thomas is right to urge pastors to refrain from endorsing candidates, but no pastor should refrain from preaching on issues that touch on morality or on social policy that affects the church. Yet, in doing so an implicit endorsement of one or another candidate will be unavoidable.

Social issues are inextricably knotted up with politics and to explicitly preach on the former is to tacitly preach on the latter. This has always been the case as a reading of the Gospels and the book of Acts makes clear. If a pastor takes a strong stand against abortion or in favor of open borders, he's tacitly taking a strong stand against the Democrats in the first case and against the Republicans in the second.

Toward the end of his column Thomas says, "One of the reasons cited for the decline in church attendance in America is that many, especially young people, believe churches are already too political and identified with the Republican Party."

This is doubtless true, and it should serve as a warning to pastors to not assume that everyone in their audience is going to be sympathetic to their opinions, but that applies to almost any topic that a preacher might sermonize on whether moral, theological, or political. A pastor who preaches on abortion, climate change, gay marriage, or the role of women in the church, for instance, is just as likely to antagonize members of his congregation as a pastor who endorses a political candidate from the pulpit.

Pastors have a difficult job. They need to walk a tightrope, avoiding needless offense on the one hand while being faithful to Scripture on the other. It's often not an easy task, and a pastor who ventures out on the tightrope is an intrepid soul, indeed.

Moreover, the members of his or her congregation should have the maturity to be able to disagree with their pastor with grace and love, and not take offense just because they heard something from the pulpit that conflicts with their own moral, theological, or political convictions.

We need wisdom in the pulpit and grace in the pews.

How Trump Might Address the Illegal Alien Problem

I first wrote this post back in 2010 and have reposted it several times since then, most recently last April. I've made a few minor changes and thought that, given the current controversy surrounding illegal immigration, it might be worthwhile to offer it again:

There are said to be 11 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S., most of whom were let into the country by the feckless Biden/ Mayorkis open border policy. President Trump campaigned on deporting them all back to their home countries, an ambition which would seem to be impossible to achieve, especially humanely, given the numbers of people that would have to be moved.

I'd like to offer a few suggestions as to how the Trump administration might proceed in a way that I believe finds the best balance between both justice and compassion.

The issue is contentious, to be sure, but I think the American people would be willing to accept a two-stage measure which looks something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border wall be completed where feasible and the entire border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform [1]. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking.

Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy authority or commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, any subsequent plan for what to do with those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living.

To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens who've lived and worked here for a length of time to be decided upon by Congress would be required to apply for a government identification card, similar to the "green card", which would entitle them to guest worker status. After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc. Nor would they be counted on the census.

They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other private charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes immigrant workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This might require amending the 14th amendment of the Constitution), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any felonious criminal activity, past or present, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation [2], as would multiple misdemeanors or any serious or multiple infractions of the motor vehicle code. Immigrants who illegally entered more recently would also be subject to deportation.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of ICE.

This is just an outline, of course, and there would be many details to be worked out, but what it proposes would be both simpler and fairer than either mass deportation or amnesty. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear of being caught.

The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants.

It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls by counting illegal aliens on the census and/or awarding them citizenship. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems to be a simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as would amnesty, and it conditions allowing immigrants to remain in the U.S. upon stanching the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, these conditions for being allowed to work in this country prove to be too onerous, if illegal immigrants conclude they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

[1] The border has been effectively secured since Mr. Trump took office, and the recently passed BBB will make a secured border more permanent.
[2] This process is currently underway.

Identity Politics Is a Primal Scream

R.R.Reno at First Things (subscription required) once wrote a brief review of Mary Eberstadt's book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. In the book she makes a very interesting point about today's "identity politics."

Here are some excerpts from Reno's review:

Many diagnose identity politics as a consequence of “cultural Marxism,” an invasion of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Mary Eberstadt takes a more sympathetic and persuasive view. In her latest book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, she interprets today’s feverish insistence on race, sex, and sexual orientation as so many desperate attempts by atomized, disoriented people to figure out their places in the world.

“The Great Scattering,” the weakening and fracturing of family life by the sexual revolution, brings disorientation. It has deprived two generations of the “natural habitat of the human animal,” the stable context in which we see ourselves as sons and daughters carrying forward an intact family legacy. As a consequence, the profound question Who am I? becomes more and more difficult to answer.

We’re left with the “clamor over identity.” Our current fixation on issues of race and sex is incoherent, but it is an authentic primal scream born of the need to belong.

Primal Screams continues Eberstadt’s analysis of the cultural revolutions that came to a head during the 1960s, especially the sexual revolution and its disintegration of the family. Her 2014 book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, demonstrated the connection between the decline in family stability and decreased religiosity.

Taken together, these trends strip away the strong, identity-defining institutions that formerly provided people with a stable, multifaceted sense of self. Today, with neither a Father in heaven nor a father at home, young people cast about for sources of belonging, turning to the ersatz paternity of identity politics, a view that unites people around DNA, sexual practices, and shared grievances.

For thousands of years people in the West felt themselves anchored by family, faith and place. Few worried about such arcane abstractions as identity. They didn't launch themselves on psychological journeys to "find themselves." They didn't ask, "Who am I?"

Then faith began its collapse in the West in the mid-19th century and family collapse followed a century later. Modern mobility has exacerbated the sense of unmooring by enabling many to leave the place of their birth and childhood. Thus, many today are uprooted from place, from faith, and from family and consequently feel alienated, lost, and identityless.

Reno continues:

And it’s not just children without fathers. We are witnessing a sharp increase in the percentage of adults who have no children, or only one. The bonds linking generations and siblings have weakened. Cast into the world alone—often as a consequence of contraceptive technologies and our own choices—we nevertheless seek a collective identity. Feminism is one coping strategy, Eberstadt argues; androgyny and the blurring of male-female differences is another.

“Whom do I love? is another way of answering Who am I?” writes Eberstadt....The Great Scattering has loosened the bonds of love. This was not the intention of the sexual revolution, perhaps, but it has been its effect. We now live in a love-impoverished culture, which means we have a difficult time knowing who we are.

As Eberstadt observes,

Anyone who has ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from its pack, knows the sound. The otherwise unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is nothing more, or less, than just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures trying desperately to identify their own.

Back in the 1960s existentialist philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and his mistress Simone de Beauvoir argued that there's no fixed human nature, no way we have to be, that we are what we make of ourselves, we are what we feel ourselves to be.

Combine that thinking with the loss of belief in God and two generations later we have countless numbers of young people who are conflicted about their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, and much else.

It's no wonder they're asking the question, "Who am I?"

The New Atheism Grown Old

Ben Sixsmith at ARC declares the decease of what for the last couple of decades has been called the "New Atheism" and undertakes a postmortem which he concludes with a few especially interesting remarks. He opines, for example that:

I think the New Atheists receive both too much and too little credit. Consider a recent tweet sent out by Bret Weinstein, a biologist associated with the Intellectual Dark Web:

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God.” Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?

He was missing an awful lot, actually. He was missing the fact that, by this logic, atheists should “quit broadcasting” the “exclusionary claim” that there is no God, given the “brutal coercion of people” in the Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror in Spain, the Cultural Revolution, and so on.

But he was also missing the fact that if Christians stopped maintaining that Jesus is the son of God, they would not be Christians.

He also adds this perspicuous observation:

The greatest enemies of religious believers are not, then, atheists who reject the idea of God’s existence, but apatheists who don’t consider the subject relevant.

He's surely right about that, especially since those among the New Atheists who have assayed to offer arguments against the reasonableness of belief in God in general and Christian belief in particular have never failed to fail miserably. Sixsmith makes the same point:

To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to ["nothing"]. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous “Five Ways” of Aquinas without even attempting to understand [Aquinas's] terms. (“Whereof one cannot speak,” groaned Wittgenstein, “Thereof one must remain silent.”)

There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying that the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.

Why is the question unanswerable? People have certainly tried to answer it. Answers readily came centuries prior to Hitchens himself, actually. Hitchens is free to take issue with Aquinas’ distinction between contingent and necessary existence if he wants, but he’s not free to suggest that no answers have been offered.

How does the concept of the “necessary being,” for example, fail? Hitchens offers no sign of knowing what it is, because that “unanswerable” is not a logical conclusion but a rhetorical sledgehammer swung at the reader’s skull.

He adds that the New Atheists can make better arguments, and he's correct, although it's hard to find among philosophical anti-theistic arguments one that hasn't been met with a convincing counterargument:

I know atheists can make better arguments. But the New Atheists never felt obliged to, because they were so confident in their own rationality that they never learned about the ideas they were mocking. If challenged on their philosophical ignorance ... they were liable to observe that the average Christian does not have the theological sophistication of [a theistic philosopher].

But so what? That's like declaring Darwinism to be refuted because the average man on the street who accepts it can't give an explanation of it as sophisticated as a college biology professor could.

Sixsmith concludes with this:

Still, for all their errors, the New Atheists were right that certain matters raise questions that demand a serious attempt to resolve. Does God exist? Does life have objective significance or does it not? Is there an objective moral code or is there not? Is there an afterlife?

These are not questions we as individuals or societies can sidestep. A principled inquiry into these kinds of things may catch fewer eyes than a tribally-sorted debate about, say, gender differences or free speech on Youtube. But this is no failing for the people who insist on having the argument anyway. Richard Dawkins may be wrong about many things, but he was right about that.

The President's Win Streak

President Trump continues his win streak. On Thursday Congress passed his signature piece of economic legislation, which should catalyze significant economic growth, fix Biden's immigration mess, and strengthen the military. Plus, it avoids a massive tax increase which would've otherwise kicked in this year.

Jim Geraghty has more on Mr. Trump's week at National Review:

I haven’t loved every detail of how Trump has treated NATO, but there’s no getting around the fact that the recent announcement that (almost) every member of the alliance is going to get military spending up to 5 percent of GDP represents A) a giant win for American interests, B) a major deterrent to further Russian military aggression on the European continent, and C) a stronger alliance in the years to come.

Trump has strong-armed our NATO allies into becoming stronger and more unified by making it clear that if our European allies and Canada didn’t pull their weight, he wasn’t interested in remaining in the alliance. We may not always like the methods, but it’s difficult to argue with the results.

[S]ince Trump took office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 38,000 illegal immigrants with criminal convictions and 2,711 alleged multinational gang members. As of the end of April, about 65,682 illegal immigrants have been removed from the country, with 1,329 accused or convicted of sex offenses, 498 accused or convicted of murder, 9,639 accused of assaults, 6,398 accused or convicted of DWIs or DUIs, and 1,479 accused or convicted of weapon offenses.

It's not clear how many illegals have self-deported but the New York Post published an estimate of close to one million. The article also estimated that there are about 15.4 illegals in the country, most of whom entered during the Biden/Mayorkis open border era.

Geraghty continues:

Since January, the Trump administration has also “destroyed” any inflation rate above 3 percent. The traditional midsummer spike in gas prices is, if not destroyed, then significantly mitigated compared to recent years.

After a calamitous stretch in spring, the stock markets have rebounded. The day Trump took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 43,487.83, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed at 19,630.20, and the S&P 500 closed at 5,996.66. Last night, the DJIA closed at 44,484.42, the Nasdaq closed at 20,393.13, and the S&P 500 closed at 6,227.42 — record highs for the latter two. Compared to January 20, that’s modest growth; compared to the low points of spring, that’s a phenomenal comeback.

There's much more that the White House can point to with satisfaction from the week just ending. Inter alia, Trump seems to have gained the support of the Qataris in settling the war in Gaza, antisemitic universities are on defense, job numbers are up, and Democrats are reduced to nominating communists to run for office.

Not a bad week for the president.

Happy Birthday America

I posted this Toby Keith song last year when things were looking much gloomier than they are today. Nevertheless, I post it again as a reminder of how far we've come in six months:

The Moral Crisis of Our Time

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.

Toner 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....

We 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, but that's where large segments of our culture are headed in these postmodern times.

[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 we wish.

Unless there is a transcendent moral law-giver which (or who) can hold us responsible for our choices in life then there is no such thing as a moral obligation.

As the great Russian novelist 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.

The price we pay in a 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 means by 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 adds a final thought. "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.' " Unfortunately, I was unable to find a complete copy of Herberg's original essay anywhere.

Philosophical Idealism

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

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

Michael Egnor: What is idealism?

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

George Berkeley 1727

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

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

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

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

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

Likewise with everything, including humans.

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

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

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

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

Immanuel Kant 1768 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idealism has considerable intellectual appeal for quantum physicists (and increasingly for biologists and cosmologists), but I should think it would also be attractive to some thoughtful theologically oriented folks since the doctrine conforms nicely to the conviction that the reality we experience is fundamentally a projection of the mind of God.

The Worst Persecution Most People Have Never Heard About

While Americans fret over the deaths of Palestinian Muslims and the Trump administration promises to make Muslim Iran "Great Again," Muslims are continuing to be responsible for perpetrating the worst atrocities in the 21st century. According to Global Christian Relief,

Nigeria has become known as the world’s center of Christian martyrs. In any given year, the number of Christians killed by extremist groups is rarely less than 4,000—often more than in the rest of the world combined.

Violence against the Nigerian Christian population is significantly localized in the north, where twelve Muslim-majority states declared sharia law in 1999, resulting in huge numbers of Christians experiencing daily discrimination. But it was the rise of an extremist movement called Boko Haram, which first started its murderous attacks in 2009, that resulted in Christians experiencing unprecedented violence.

According to an April 2023 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law, at least 52,250 persecuted Christians have been killed in the past fourteen years, simply for the crime of being Christian. In the past five years, violence has spread southwards to the middle belt of Nigeria, with radicalized Fulani herdsmen killing Christians to steal their land.

Boko Haram has now been joined by another extremist group operative in the area, called the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), and both seek the eradication of Christianity from the northern states.

The violence has resulted in refugees now numbering over four million, mostly Christian farmers. The government of Nigeria has proved unwilling to condemn the levels of violence, which some call genocidal, or inept in its attempts to engage and neutralize extremist movements.

This is a staggering report. While the Trump administration promises billions to Iran and Gaza, Nigerian Christians, who have done nothing to offend the Muslims who hate them, suffer in poverty and fear at the hands of terrorists who have been supplied and abetted by Iran.

No doubt were Muslims being slaughtered by Christians or Jews for no reason other than that they were Muslims, our campuses, and indeed the world, would be in a state of volcanic outrage.

As it is, since it's Christians who are being killed by Muslims, and black Christians at that, the world just yawns.

Trump's Incredible Week

Michael Smerconish at CNN explained the other day why last week was the best of Mr. Trump's presidency. Indeed, it may have been the best week of any presidency ever. Hot Air's John Sexton summarizes Smerconish's argument in the following bullet points:

• A stealthy mission to strike Iran's nuclear facilities in which there were no American casualties.
• Estimations of the success of the mission range from modestly successful to extremely successful.
• Trump announced a ceasefire and put Israel and Iran on blast in front of the cameras when they initially violated it.
• At a meeting with NATO allies, Europe agreed to up its contribution to the alliance. "Before this week’s annual NATO summit had even begun, allies reportedly agreed on Sunday to hike their defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2035."
• He announced a trade deal with China.
• The stock market is up despite predictions Trump's tariffs would kill it. CNN headline: "America’s incredible stock market rebound is complete as S&P 500, Nasdaq hit record highs"
• Border crossings are down more than 90%. From Fox News: "Between June 1 and June 22, there have been 5,414 apprehensions at the border, with the busiest sector being El Paso. During that same timeframe, there have been 986 known 'gotaways.' Both numbers are the lowest ever recorded."
• New analysis by Pew shows there was no circumstance in which Kamala Harris could have won the 2024 election.
• Trump's win among Hispanic voters was even greater than believed. From Axios: "Pew's analysis of election data shows that Trump won 48% of Latino voters — a group that had soundly rejected him in 2020 and 2016 — and that it was a crucial factor in his victory."
• The Supreme Court put an end to nationwide injunctions which have been used against Trump more than any other president. In fact, they have been used against Trump almost as many times this year as they were against Biden in his entire term in office.

There's more that Smerconish could've added. Here are some additional successes Trump enjoyed last week, courtesy of Eric Daugherty at Twitchy:

• Rwanda and the Congo have just signed a Trump-brokered peace deal - another war ended.
• Trump received permission from SCOTUS to send illegals to third-party countries.
• Trump emerged victorious after a Senate attempt to rein in his Iran strikes through a War Powers resolution.
• Several food giants joined the growing list removing artificial dyes from their food products.
• Social Security handouts saw the largest monthly decline EVER after attempts to end waste, fraud and abuse.
• General Electric Appliances is moving manufacturing from China to Kentucky, USA.
• The Pentagon began reinstating service members wrongfully discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine.
• The DEI President of University of Virginia resigned after pressure from the Trump administration.

It certainly was at the very least a remarkable week.

The Bee

For those who don't get the Babylon Bee in their inbox, may I take a moment to recommend it? It's always humorous and will bring a smile to the face of even the most dour conservative. Here's a recent sample of their satire:

TEHRAN — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared a resounding victory over the United States and Israel after Iran destroyed 14 American bunker buster bombs with its nuclear facilities.

In a video message released today, Iran's Supreme Leader said that the advanced American weaponry was no match for the destructive capabilities of Iran's foremost nuclear sites.

"We have brought utter and complete obliteration to the weapons of our enemies," the Ayatollah declared triumphantly, brushing soot off his turban. "The pitiful Zionist bunker busters were ultimately annihilated by our nuclear facilities. Our nuclear bomb program, which did not exist before the Americans' failed attacks, has not been set back at all. Iran has won a great victory today."

Trusted media outlets like CNN and Al-Jazeera reported that the American and Israeli forces suffered significant setbacks due to the loss of their bombs.

'There's just no way the U.S. can come back from losing 14 entire bombs at the hands of Iranian nuclear sites," said Brian Stelter. "How embarrassing for President Trump. Iran and the Ayatollah pretty much have this one in the bag. Nice try, bunker busters."

At publishing time, the Ayatollah had ordered the rubble from the former nuclear facilities to be heaped up into a monument to commemorate the Iranians' glorious destruction of the American weapons.

You can see more of their work here.

Religion of Peace

Catherine Salgado explains the source of the hatred by Muslims for Jews in https://restoration-news.com/biden-gave-$14-billion-to-islamist-groups-from-joe-taxpayer an article at Restoration News. Here's the relevant part of what's a much longer piece:

Islam teaches that god is irrational and violent, and so Muslims model themselves on their false god, Allah. For more than a millennium, Islam has been a patriarchal, barbaric, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, violent religion with no value for individual human life and no inhibitions on what crimes they are willing to commit to achieve their ends.

Every country that becomes majority Muslim, or has a very strong minority of Muslims, turns into a Sharia nightmare: Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Syria are modern examples.

Too many Americans never hear or read any source texts from Muslims themselves, and instead believe politicians or academics who assert that Islam is a religion of peace—and that Hamas, the Taliban, and Hezbollah are the exceptions rather than the rule. But Islam speaks for itself, and the truth is as ugly as Yahya Sinwar.

Multiple passages in the Quran and Hadith (collected sayings of Muhammed), Islam’s holy texts, and the Sirah (biographies of Muhammed), command or endorse slaughter and depravity.

For instance, below are texts supporting jihad and murder of non-Muslims, including women and children (there are others, but below is a selection):

“Indeed, Allah has bought from the believers their lives and their wealth, because the garden will be theirs, they will fight in the way of Allah and will kill and be killed.” (Quran 9:111)

“So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them.” (Quran 9:5)

“[Hadith:] It is reported on the authority of Sa’b bin Jaththama that the Prophet of Allah (may peace be upon him), when asked about the women and children of the polytheists being killed during the night raid, said: They are from them.” (Sahih Muslim 4321)

“[Hadith:] Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” (Sahih Muslim 6985)

Notice that Jews are particularly singled out as targets of jihad. As a concrete illustration of this, Muslim Arabs have been waging jihad on Israel since its modern rebirth, and the terrorism has only intensified in recent years (especially after some Arabs began labeling themselves “Palestinians”), culminating in the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, the worst day of slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

These 2023 attacks included raping women to death, burning babies alive, kidnapping civilians, and gunning down whole families. All of these crimes are fully allowed and even praised actions within Islam. In fact, Islam is also one of the two ideologies most responsible for violence against Christians in the world now, the other ideology being Communism.

Anyone in the West who thinks that Islam is a religion of peace should read more of the history of Islam and more of the Islamic hadiths.

We might also wonder why Westerners show so much concern for Muslims in Gaza caught in a vicious war between Hamas and Israel and so little concern for the thousands of Christians being murdered each year by Muslims in Africa. Why are we sending millions of dollars in aid to Muslims in Gaza while African Christians in nations like Nigeria live in poverty and fear of the Muslims who periodically rape and murder them?

Sleepers

As a consequence of the American bombing of Iran's nuclear weapons production facilities, concerns have grown about the possibility of Iranian "sleeper cells" in the U.S. perpetrating acts of terror in our homeland.

Those concerns have a plausible basis given the fact that President Biden's irresponsible open border policy resulted in at least 700 Iranians coming into this country illegally. The actual number is probably significantly higher since no one knows how many of the millions of "got-aways" were Iranians. It is known, however, that many of those 700 have criminal histories or terrorist connections.

For instance, ICE recently arrested 16 Iranians, three of whom merit special concern. From the Washington Free Beacon:

Immigration authorities have arrested 16 Iranian nationals, including a former member of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with ties to Hezbollah, a former Iranian Army sniper, and a third individual on the terrorist watchlist, in a multi-state operation since Sunday.

One of the arrested men, Mehran Makari Sahel, is a former IRGC operative and has "admitted connections to Hezbollah," according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials quoted in a a CBS News report Tuesday morning. Both the IRGC, an elite branch of Iran's armed forces, and Hezbollah, a Lebanese group backed by Iran, are U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations.

Ribvar Karmi, who was arrested Sunday in Alabama, was carrying an identification card from the Islamic Republic of Iran Army, according to federal agents. Karmi reportedly served as a sniper in the Iranian Army from 2018 to 2021 and entered the United States in October 2024 on a K-1 visa, which is issued to foreign nationals engaged to American citizens.

A third arrestee, Yousef Mehridehno, has lived in the United States illegally for nearly eight years and was added to the terrorist watchlist in February after federal officials found out that he had lied on a visa application.

Authorities arrested at least five more Iranian nationals with criminal histories, Fox News reported Tuesday afternoon.

We'll be living with the consequences of the Biden presidency for years. Already, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Americans have had their lives damaged or taken from them in acts of rape, sexual assault, murder, and drunk or reckless driving by illegal immigrants.

Hopefully, the consequences will not also include acts of terror committed by Iranians seeking revenge for the humiliation they've suffered in their war with Israel.

DNA Reading Frames

Imagine a software code of 0s and 1s in a long string, and imagine that if you read off each digit in sequence the string coded for a particular meaning, but if you only read off every third digit the string coded for a completely different meaning. Now imagine the improbability of such a code being produced by random combinations of 0s and 1s by completely mindless processes and forces.

If you do this little thought experiment, you get some idea of the complexity of the DNA code in the nuclei of every cell of our bodies, and why so many people not committed a priori to naturalistic materialism believe that the code had to be the product of an intelligent mind.

DNA is not quite like the preceding example, but it does have overlapping codes whose regulation is carried out by a complex of proteins which themselves couldn't have existed until the code for them existed. But the code couldn't have come about until the proteins were available to allow the code to be read.

An article by biologist Ann Gauger at Evolution News discusses this property of what biologists call "alternative reading frames." She uses this graphic to illustrate:

Gauger goes on to explain:

If you look at the figure ... you’ll see the sequence of DNA from a human mitochondrion: AAATGAACGAAA and so on. Above in red you see the nucleotides (ATCG) have been grouped in threes, and a letter assigned to each. Each group of three is a codon, and each unique codon specifies a particular amino acid, indicated by the red letters: K W T K I, etc. That is the protein sequence that the DNA specifies for that particular way of reading the DNA.

That way of reading the DNA, with that set of groups of three, is called a reading frame, because it establishes the frame for the way we read the information in the gene. In this case it encodes the protein ATP8.

If DNA were a human code, then it would be inconceivable to have a code that could be read in more than one frame at a time. By this I mean starting at one nucleotide and getting one sequence and starting at another nucleotide and getting another sequence with a different meaning.

But that is exactly what happens in this stretch of mitochondrial DNA. Look below the nucleotides to a different set of letters in blue. Notice that they are offset from the first reading frame by two nucleotides. This changes the way the nucleotides are read. The first codon is ATG, the second AAC, and so on. And the resulting protein, ATP6, has a very different sequence from that of the first, ATP8.

That's not all. DNA is double-stranded and when the strands separate in order to be read it's possible that both be read simultaneously, one forward and one backward, so that six different proteins can be coded for by a single segment of DNA.

This is an absolutely stupefying level of complex information. It's an incredibly ingenious solution to the problem of packing maximum information into the shortest possible code, and the notion that it could've come about in some primordial environment as a result of eons of blind, undirected chance requires herculean credulity.

The simplest and most plausible explanation for the complexity of the DNA code is that it was engineered by an intelligence, and the only way to avoid that conclusion is to eliminate any possibility of such an intelligence at the very outset, to decide that no such intelligence exists and that therefore the DNA code must have been generated by blind impersonal forces no matter how improbable that would be.

But why decide that? What reason can be adduced to rationally justify such a decision? Why assume that no such agent exists when the existence of such a being would explain so much, not just about DNA, but about the world and life generally?

The only reason anyone makes that assumption is, it seems, that they have a strong psychological or emotional preference that no such being exist and they allow that preference to shape everything else they believe.

The conclusion that an intelligent agent must've been involved in the development of the structure of the DNA code certainly seems warranted by the evidence. The big question, then, is what might be the nature of the intelligent agent that designed and created this code? Who or What might it be?

Wouldn't these questions be important to think about?

God's Hiddenness

There are two antitheistic (against the existence of God) arguments that non-theists have found particularly convincing over the last several centuries.

One of these is the problem of evil which has received perhaps its greatest literary expression in The chapter titled "The Rebellion" in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.

The other argument, which is in some ways similar to the problem of evil (or suffering), is based on what philosophers call "Divine hiddenness" and which the Japanese Catholic Shusako Endo portrayed so powerfully in his novel Silence (See also the movie based on the book).

The technical form of the argument from Divine hiddenness can be found here, but in simpler English the argument goes something like this:

1. If a good God exists, He would not allow anyone who would otherwise believe in Him to remain ignorant of His existence and be lost for eternity.
2. There are people, however, who are ignorant of God's existence who would otherwise believe in Him if they knew of Him.
3. Therefore, there are people who would believe in God if they knew of Him who are lost for eternity.
4. Therefore, a good God does not exist.

Or, put more simply, because there are people who are innocently unaware of God's existence and who would believe in Him if they knew, therefore He doesn't exist.

This argument makes three questionable assumptions. It assumes that there really are those who are genuinely ignorant of God's existence; it assumes that those who are ignorant of God's existence will necessarily be lost for eternity; and it assumes that God could not possibly have overriding reasons for not revealing Himself in ways that persons ignorant of His existence, if such there be, would find compelling.

Each of these assumptions is doubtful, and in this form, at least, the argument is not very persuasive.

Perhaps a more psychologically compelling version of the argument is the one developed by Endo in his novel.

Roughly based on a true story, the novel describes the terrifying ordeal of a 16th century missionary to Japan who is put through mental tortures to persuade him to commit what seems to be a relatively minor act of blasphemy. He's required to step on a crude portrait of Jesus, and his refusal to commit this act of desecration is punished by Japanese samurai who subject innocent Christian villagers to unimaginable suffering until the missionary relents.

Despite his agonized prayers, however, there's no apparent answer from heaven. God seems silent, hidden, absent.

As emotionally gripping as this story is, in the end it doesn't demonstrate that God does not exist. The only thing it demonstrates about God is that He's sometimes, perhaps frequently, inscrutable, but believers already knew that.

It's interesting, too, that Endo's missionary, although crushed and broken by his ordeal, ultimately retains his belief in God.

To say that the argument from Divine hiddenness ultimately fails is not to minimize, however, its emotional and spiritual force.

God's seeming absence has been the cause of much anguish among many believers in the midst of great suffering and fear throughout most of human history. I have a friend who has drifted into agnosticism largely because of it.

A family member recently sent me a simple vignette that's a parable about the doubt materialists have about life after death but which actually, if perhaps inadvertently, also addresses the problem of Divine hiddenness. It goes like this:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”

The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover, if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery, there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her, this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only reasonable to believe that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

From the fact that the babies don't perceive her, don't see or hear her, it surely doesn't follow that she doesn't exist or care about them and their well-being.

An Islamic Republic

Iran calls itself an Islamic Republic, which means that it's people live under Islamic, or sharia, law. To help us see what that entails, Matt Tardio has compiled a list of twenty laws to which the Iranian people are subject, and which devout Muslims aspire to impose on everyone, everywhere:

1. Apostasy (Leaving Islam): Punishable by death, especially for men who publicly renounce Islam. Women can face life in prison.
2. Homosexuality: Gay men can be executed; lesbians face 100 lashes. Even suspicion can result in arrest or forced confessions.
3. Blasphemy: Insulting the Prophet or sacred Islamic figures is punishable by death. This includes online posts, art, or speech.
4. Adultery (Sex outside marriage): Married offenders can be stoned to death. Unmarried receive 100 lashes. Applies to men and women.
5. “Corruption on Earth”: A vague charge used against dissenters, protesters, or activists. Often results in the death penalty.
6. Alcohol Consumption: Muslims caught drinking get 80 lashes per offense. 4-time offenders risk execution.
7. Female Hijab Law: Mandatory for all women. Punishment is imprisonment up to 10 years, flogging, fines, surveillance.
8. Criticism of the Supreme Leader: Even memes can lead to arrest. Public dissent brings 1–10 years in prison.
9. Same-sex relationships (non-penetrative): Still criminal. Punishable by lashes, prison, or worse.
10. Public Affection (Unmarried couples): Holding hands or kissing in public can get up to 74 lashes.
11. Women Need Husband’s Permission to Travel: Even for passports or leaving the country.
12. Child Marriage Legal age: Girls 13 or younger with father's or court approval.
13. Compulsory Military Service (Men only): Failure to serve results in being banned from travel, jobs, and university.
14. Cybercrime & Online Dissent: Criticizing Islam or the regime online is punishable by imprisonment, asset seizure, surveillance.
15. Western Music & Clothing: "Immoral" music, films, and fashion are banned with fines, confiscation, or arrest for disobeying.
16. Women Banned from Stadiums: Women are largely prohibited from attending men’s sports. Defiance results in arrest.
17. Public Singing or Dancing (Women): Illegal to sing solo or dance in public. Punishable by fines or jail.
18. Gender Segregation: Schools, buses, and workplaces are often segregated by law. Violations result in fines or expulsion.
19. Dog Ownership: Dogs are "unclean." Walking one in public could cost you jail time or seizure of your pet.
20. Baha’i Persecution: Adherents of the Baha’i religion can't hold government jobs, attend university, or practice freely.

Young men executed in Iran for homosexuality

What Jews Have Contributed to the World

The above title of this post should not be understood to imply that the following exhausts Jewish (or Muslim) contributions to humanity, but it's certainly an impressive statistic. Nor do I vouch for the accuracy of these claims, but anyone who's skeptical should be able to check them out easily enough.

The post points out the disparity between the world's population of Muslims and Jews along with an indicator of their relative achievements:

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is one billion two hundred million or 20% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat, 1990 - Elias James Corey, 1994 - Yaser Arafat, 1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:(none)

Physics:(none)

Medicine:1960 - Peter Brian Medawar, 1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is fourteen million or about 0.02% of the world's population.

They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:1910 - Paul Heyse, 1927 - Henri Bergson, 1958 - Boris Pasternak, 1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1966 - Nelly Sachs, 1976 - Saul Bellow, 1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer, 1981 - Elias Canetti, 1987 - Joseph Brodsky, 1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:1911 - Alfred Fried, 1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser, 1968 - Rene Cassin, 1973 - Henry Kissinger, 1978 - Menachem Begin, 1986 - Elie Wiesel, 1994 - Shimon Peres, 1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer, 1906 - Henri Moissan, 1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson, 1908 - Gabriel Lippmann, 1910 - Otto Wallach, 1915 - Richard Willstaetter, 1918 - Fritz Haber, 1921 - Albert Einstein, 1922 - Niels Bohr, 1925 - James Franck, 1925 - Gustav Hertz, 1943 - Gustav Stern, 1943 - George Charles de Hevesy, 1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi, 1952 - Felix Bloch, 1954 - Max Born, 1958 - Igor Tamm, 1959 - Emilio Segre, 1960 - Donald A. Glaser, 1961 - Robert Hofstadter, 1961 - Melvin Calvin, 1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau, 1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz, 1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman, 1965 - Julian Schwinger, 1969 - Murray Gell-Mann, 1971 - Dennis Gabor, 1972 - William Howard Stein, 1973 - Brian David Josephson, 1975 - Benjamin Mottleson, 1976 - Burton Richter, 1977 - Ilya Prigogine, 1978 - Arno Allan Penzias, 1978 - Peter L Kapitza, 1979 - Stephen Weinberg, 1979 - Sheldon Glashow, 1979 - Herbert Charles Brown, 1980 - Paul Berg, 1980 - Walter Gilbert, 1981 - Roald Hoffmann, 1982 - Aaron Klug, 1985 - Albert A. Hauptman, 1985 - Jerome Karle, 1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach, 1988 - Robert Huber, 1988 - Leon Lehman, 1988 - Melvin Schwartz, 1988 - Jack Steinberger, 1989 - Sidney Altman, 1990 - Jerome Friedman, 1992 - Rudolph Marcus, 1995 - Martin Perl, 2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson, 1971 - Simon Kuznets, 1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow, 1975 - Leonid Kantorovich, 1976 - Milton Friedman, 1978 - Herbert A. Simon, 1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein, 1985 - Franco Modigliani, 1987 - Robert M. Solow, 1990 - Harry Markowitz, 1990 - Merton Miller, 1992 - Gary Becker, 1993 - Robert Fogel

Medicine:1908 - Elie Metchnikoff, 1908 - Paul Erlich, 1914 - Robert Barany, 1922 - Otto Meyerhof, 1930 - Karl Landsteiner, 1931 - Otto Warburg, 1936 - Otto Loewi, 1944 - Joseph Erlanger, 1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser, 1945 - Ernst Boris Chain, 1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller, 1950 - Tadeus Reichstein, 1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman, 1953 - Hans Krebs, 1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann, 1958 - Joshua Lederberg, 1959 - Arthur Kornberg, 1964 - Konrad Bloch, 1965 - Francois Jacob, 1965 - Andre Lwoff, 1967 - George Wald, 1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg, 1969 - Salvador Luria, 1970 - Julius Axelrod, 1970 - Sir Bernard Katz, 1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman, 1975 - Howard Martin Temin, 1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg, 1977 - Roselyn Sussman Yalow, 1978 - Daniel Nathans, 1980 - Baruj Benacerraf, 1984 - Cesar Milstein, 1985 - Michael Stuart Brown, 1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein, 1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini], 1988 - Gertrude Elion, 1989 - Harold Varmus, 1991 - Erwin Neher, 1991 - Bert Sakmann, 1993 - Richard J. Roberts, 1993 - Phillip Sharp, 1994 - Alfred Gilman, 1995 - Edward B. Lewis, 1996 - Lu Rose Iacovino

TOTAL: 129!

The author goes on to note that,

The Jews are NOT promoting brainwashing children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non-Muslims.

The Jews don't hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, nor blow themselves up in German restaurants.

There is not one single Jew who has destroyed a church.

There is not a single Jew who protests by killing people. The Jews don't traffic slaves, nor do they have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.

Perhaps the world's Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask 'what can they do for humankind' before they demand that humankind respects them.

Whether one agrees with the foregoing or not one has to wonder if there's not a connection between the last few sentences and what preceded them.

A Just Conclusion to Israel's War

Discussing the Israelis' end game in Iran, First Things' editor R.R. Reno notes that since the end of WWII, most wars have ended very unsatisfactorily. Indeed, I can't think of any war since 1945 that's ended in unconditional surrender. Here's Reno:

War seldom ends according to a satisfying script. Unconditional surrender—the banner headline of 1945—is a historical rarity, the exception, not the rule. More often hostilities conclude in the gray zone of ceasefires, armistices, and grudging diplomatic arrangements.

Israel stands in that gray zone now. Its defensive campaign against Iran and the Iranian proxy network seems to have primarily met its battlefield objectives. From a military standpoint, Iran appears to be defeated.

The harder task is to translate that success into a durable peace—without stumbling into George W. Bush 2.0, the grandiose dream of regime change by force.

Hopefully, he's correct that Iran is defeated and doesn't have a military ace up its sleeve. Though if it did, it'd be very puzzling why it wouldn't have played it before now. Anyway, after recounting Israeli successes against Iranian proxies, Reno adds this:

The just war tradition demands prudence at the end of war as well as at the start. As I see it, a settlement, whether by formal treaty or tacit modus vivendi, must impose three conditions:

• No nuclear pathway. Centrifuges disabled, inspections enforced.
• No ballistic missile expansion. Delivery systems are inseparable from warheads.
• No proxy rearmament. Hezbollah and Hamas must remain shells of their former selves.

These conditions are not maximalist fantasies. They are the foundation on which Israeli security—and regional peace—can be built. The peace will not be celebrated widely in the region. It is likely to be grudgingly accepted. But it can be achieved.

Reno is correct that these three conditions are necessary for achieving a durable peace, but they're not sufficient. As long as the mullahs and their brutally oppressive apparatus is left in place, then all of what Israel has accomplished in the last week will amount to little more than kicking the can down the road.

Any deal that Israel and the U.S. agree to must ensure that the Iranian people have a fair chance to establish on their own a much freer society, a society in which people are able to speak, write, worship, and dress as they please without fear of imprisonment, torture, and execution. A society whose wealth is used to raise the quality of Iranian life and not to buy missiles, guns, and nuclear weapons to wage war against Israel and perpetrate acts of murder and terrorism against Americans.

It won't be easy, but as Reno states,

Because Iran’s theocrats may spurn any compromise that forecloses their revolutionary aspirations, the “deal” Israel seeks may be no deal at all, but rather something imposed by realities on the ground. Even so, diplomacy must finish the work that airstrikes began: reassure nervous Arab capitals, institutionalize new alignments, and clarify redlines that make further aggression too costly for Iran to contemplate.

We'll see over the coming months whether such a peace is achieveable.