Rare Earth

An article at Salvo (subscription required) drives a spike into the notion that the galaxy, and perhaps the universe, are filled with habitable planets and that intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos is an inevitability.

The article, by astronomer Hugh Ross, observes that the conviction that there simply must be life out there somewhere and that our earth is not unique in being fit for sustaining life is based on four assumptions:

1. The density and kinds of planets throughout our galaxy and all other galaxies in the universe are roughly the same as what we observe in the vicinity of our solar system.
2. About 20 percent of all planets are habitable.
3. Life inevitably will arise on all habitable planets.
4. The probability of a technologically advanced civilization arising from simple life-forms is better than one chance in 10 billion.

Each of these assumptions, especially #3, is deeply problematic, but Ross focusses in this article on #2.

The belief that 20% of all planets are habitable is based on the fact that of the 3000+ planets discovered so far, 20% of them lie at a distance from their star that would permit water to exist in the liquid state. Since water is a necessary condition for life, it's assumed that these planets could sustain living things.

Ross points out, however, that though water is a necessary condition for life, it's not a sufficient condition. There are, in fact, nine different "habitable zones" and all nine must overlap in order for life to exist on a planet.

In addition to the water habitable zone there are also the following:

1. Ultraviolet habitable zone
2. Photosynthetic habitable zone
3. Ozone habitable zone
4. Planetary rotation rate habitable zone
5. Planetary obliquity habitable zone
6. Tidal habitable zone
7. Astrosphere habitable zone
8. Electric wind habitable zone

Ross explains each of these zones in his recently released book Improbable Planet, but in the Salvo article he simply observes that:

Typically, these zones do not overlap. For example, the distance a planet must be from its host star so that it receives enough ultraviolet radiation to enable the synthesis of many life-essential compounds, but not so much as to kill living things, is rarely the same distance that a planet must be from its host star for liquid water to possibly exist on its surface.

For 97 percent of all stars, the liquid water habitable zone does not overlap the ultraviolet habitable zone.

Thus,

A planet is a true candidate for habitability only if it simultaneously resides in all nine habitable zones....So far, astronomers have measured the characteristics of 3,484 planets. Only one of all these 3,484 planets resides in all nine known habitable zones. That one is Earth.

For all we know there may be other habitable zones in addition to these nine, but there are in any case several conclusions to be drawn from the information Ross provides us. First, the principle of mediocrity - the principle, held by many naturalistic scientists, that the earth is not exceptional in any significant way - is ludicrous.

Second, the notion that residence of a planet in the water habitable zone is sufficient to justify hopes that life could exist on that planet is naive.

When the necessity for all nine habitable zones overlapping is combined with the dozens of other parameters that any planet must possess in order to be suitable for life suggests that life-sustaining planets are probably extremely rare.

In fact, if it turns out that such planets are not rare that finding in itself would be so astonishing as to point to intelligent, purposeful engineering of the universe.

The Tyranny of Crowds

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

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

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

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

Kaplan then notes that,

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

In addition to Nazism and communism Kaplan might have added Islamism. In any case, condemning others, destroying others, compensates for one's own inadequacies and spiritual impoverishment. It fulfills one's need for power, self-importance, self-righteousness, and purpose. It's a need that the individual is unable, by himself, to gratify but which can be satisfied by one's participation in "the crowd."

Here's Kaplan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaplan again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the Difference?

Mind Matters has an interesting piece that addresses an article at Scientific American written by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Loeb states that all the theories which seek to explain the origin of our universe without positing an intelligence are inadequate.

In his Sci Am article Loeb writes:

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen … an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

Loeb's objection to each of these explanations is that they simply push the problem back a step or two or are otherwise unsatisfactory. He argues that the best explanation is that our universe resulted from the intentional efforts of an intelligent agent or agents, but his explanation also just pushes the problem back a step or two, as we'll see:

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

This hypothesis is remarkably similar to the Judeo-Christian creation story except that Loeb substitutes some sort of hypothetical superintelligent, superpowerful extra-cosmic aliens for a creator God - aliens which seem for all practical purposes to be ontologically almost indistinguishable from the God they replace, but it leaves unanswered the question how this advanced technological civilization came to be. Are these superintelligent, superpowerful designers self-existent creatures like the Judeo-Christian God? If so what's the difference between these beings and God?

There's more to Loeb's hypothesis at the link, but it's worth dwelling for a moment on what he's proposing in what's been quoted above. He's arguing that intelligent beings of some sort created the universe out of nothing, ex nihilo, and designed it to produce civilizations driven by Darwinian natural selection:

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

So why the puzzling aversion to identifying the designer as God? What is it about the concept of God that repels our naturalist friends like Dracula from a crucifix? One gets the feeling that were it to be somehow discovered that there really was a heaven and a hell awaiting the departed that our contemporary secularists would insist that these had in fact been established by aliens and that there's no reason to suppose that a God had anything at all to do with it.

G.K. Chesterton famously wrote that when men no longer believe in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Loeb’s suggestion is a confirming instance of Chesterton’s claim. Unwilling to attribute the universe to God, he posits creatures whose existence not only lacks any unwelcome religious implications and overtones, but also lacks any supporting evidence.

The universe, Loeb acknowledges, is the product of intelligent design, but the designer need not be anything so rebarbative as the God of traditional theism. Yet positing unobservable aliens is not in any way testable or scientific, so what advantage does one gain by positing such beings?

What's the practical difference, after all, between a transcendent, superpowerful, superintelligent alien who brings about the creation of the cosmos out of nothing but who still requires an explanation for its existence, and a necessarily existing God who does the same?

It seems that a scientist can offer any explanation for the existence of the universe, no matter how outré, no matter how unscientific, as long as it's not a theistic explanation. It seems, too, that scientists have great difficulty escaping the need for a cosmic designer, but they steadfastly refuse to allow that the designer is the God of theism. We might well ask what lies behind their obduracy.

The Argument Clinic

Why is it that we can't have disagreements about politics, religion, whether to get vaccinated or not, climate change, evolution or a host of other topics without people losing their tempers, and not uncommonly, their minds? Why is it that disagreements ruin friendships and split families?

I know of one married couple who divorced over a political disagreement, and I'm sure there are other couples who've experienced serious tension in their marriage over politics and/or religion.

It seems that it'd be good for those of us who enjoy the to and fro of engaging with friends, family and acquaintances around ideas that are important to us to keep in mind that there are more important things than proving ourselves right on this or that issue.

It would be good to keep in mind that those who disagree with us will not be won over to our way of seeing things if our demeanor is arrogant, scowling, and angry. They certainly won't find our opinions compelling if we resort to insulting them or their ideas.

The most effective way to disagree is with a humble attitude, acknowledging to ourselves and to the other person that we could be wrong about whatever it is we are discussing. A winsome approach, full of humility and humor, is likely to be far more persuasive than pummelling one's interlocutor with polemical rabbit punches.

In almost every instance, it'll be more important that we love the person with whom we're engaged in conversation than that we "win" an argument with them. After all, as an old aphorism has it, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."

If the other person gets angry and insulting then it's better that we change the subject to something less contentious. What good can come of continuing the discussion under those circumstances anyway?

If we can love those with whom we disagree, if we can say, "I don't think you're correct, but you're more important to me than my being right," I think we'll be much more attractive to those who differ with us and much more effective in presenting our views and gaining those views a serious hearing.

Political, philosophical and religious differences are important, in many cases extremely so, but they're not the most important thing. The most important thing is that we treat each other with dignity, respect and kindness.

Folks on social media often don't treat each other that way, but we should.

It's also important to remember that an argument is not a shouting match or an insult fest. An argument is simply an attempt to defend what one believes to be the truth of some matter by putting forth reasons for believing it and countering objections.

If doing this devolves into people yelling at each other then it's no longer an argument, it's a quarrel or a verbal brawl.

Anyway, writing this post brought to mind an old Monty Python skit titled The Argument Clinic. It's pretty funny:

How Does the Brain Do It?

James Le Fanu, a medical doctor and science journalist, describes an interesting puzzle associated with how the brain works. in a forward to the book Restoration of Man, Le Fanu writes that the simplest of stimuli like the words chair or sit cause vast tracts of the brain to "light up" which prompts "a sense of bafflement at what the most mundane conversation must entail."

The sights and sounds of every transient moment are fragmented into "myriad separate components without the slightest hint of the integrating mechanism" that ties them all together into a coherent, unified experience of the world.

Le Fanu quotes Nobel Prize-winner David Hubel of Harvard who observes that, "The abiding tendency for attributes such as form, color and movement to be handled by separate structures in the brain immediately raises the question how all the information is finally assembled, say, for perceiving a bouncing red ball. They obviously must be assembled - but where and how we have no idea."

It is an astonishing thing. Consider how much the brain must organize in order, for example, for a batter to hit a baseball. The brain must calculate the velocity and trajectory of the ball and initiate and coordinate all the movements of the various parts of the body necessary to execute the swing, and do it all within a fraction of a second.

If all of these functions are being carried out in different regions of the brain how are they integrated so precisely that the ball is successfully struck? What structure or mechanism carries out the integration function?

That question leads to others. Is there more to our mental experience than can be accounted for by the material organ called the brain? Do we also have an immaterial mind? If we knew all the physical facts about how the brain works would our knowledge be complete or would there still be something non-physical left over? How did random, purposeless genetic accidents produce an organ with such amazing capabilities?

A Nobel Prize is waiting for anyone who discovers the answers to any of these questions and can empirically demonstrate the truth of the answers beyond reasonable doubt.

Critiquing Christian Nationalism

With an election approaching, and with Donald Trump's support among evangelical Christians seeming to be inexplicably high, both Christian and non-Christian writers are again trotting out their criticisms of what's been called "Christian Nationalism" or "White Christian Nationalism." I responded to one example of this criticism in the journal Commonweal back in 2019, and thought I'd rerun the response todaay for readers who might not be clear as to what they should think about these criticisms: The journal Commonweal has published an open letter ostensibly in response to a similar manifesto which appeared in the March issue of First Things. Commonweal so strongly agreed with the letter that they chose to run it even though their staff was not involved in its composition.

At any rate, the signatories are concerned by a "disturbing rise of nationalism, especially among some Christians, in the United States" which they espy in the First Things missive.

It's hard to say what in the First Things piece was so objectionable, but apparently there was enough there to animate the letter published by Commonweal and from which the following excerpts are lifted. I'd like to offer some critical reflections on the excerpts and will begin in the middle of the letter where the authors contrast nationalism with patriotism:

To be clear, nationalism is not the same as patriotism. Nationalism forges political belonging out of religious, ethnic, and racial identities, loyalties intended to precede and supersede law. Patriotism, by contrast, is love of the laws and loyalty to them over leader or party. Such nationalism is not only politically dangerous but reflects profound theological errors that threaten the integrity of Christian faith. It damages the love of neighbor and betrays Christ.

This seems a tendentious definition of nationalism. I would suggest instead that nationalism "forges political belonging" out of a shared national identity. As such it seems to me to be both salutary and innocuous, but having said that, what seems to be happening in this country is more in line with the authors' definition of patriotism. That is, what we're seeing unfold is a frustration with the failure of our political leaders to uphold the laws of the land, especially with respect to immigration, despite a patriotic desire on the part of many Americans to remain faithful to those laws, a desire that transcends party affiliation.

American Christians now face a moment whose deadly violence has brought such analogies to mind. Again we watch as demagogues demonize vulnerable minorities as infesting vermin or invading forces who weaken the nation and must be removed.

Who demonized vulnerable minorities as "infesting vermin?" It would be very helpful if the authors would quote the relevant claims rather than tacitly expecting us to simply trust them to have quoted the "demagogues" correctly. And why is it inaccurate to characterize tens of thousands of people storming across our borders illegally as an "invasion?"

Without answers to these questions the above paragraph is completely unhelpful.

Again we watch as fellow Christians weigh whether to fuse their faith with nationalist and ethno-nationalist politics in order to strengthen their cultural footing. Again ethnic majorities confuse their political bloc with Christianity itself.

This may in fact be happening although to what extent it's happening is certainly unclear. Even so, the authors are correct to deplore anyone confusing Christianity with a particular political party. The disconcerting thing about this concern, however, is that liberal Christians, like those in the black church and those on staff at journals like Sojourners and Commonweal have been acting like the religious arm of the Democratic party for decades and other liberal Christians have been indifferent or even supportive of their efforts. How is this significantly different from the complaint voiced in the preceding paragraph?

It seems that it's only when conservative Christians start to confuse politics and the gospel that folks like the letter-signers become alarmed.

Then follow five aspects of what the signatories perceive to characterize our present moment and to which they express their disapprobation:

1. We reject the pretensions of nationalism to usurp our highest loyalties. National identity has no bearing on the debts of love we owe other sons and daughters of God. Created in the image and likeness of God, all human beings are our neighbors regardless of citizenship status.

True enough, but how is insistence upon border security and an orderly process of immigration unloving? The signatories don't say. One wonders whether they themselves lock the doors to their homes and cars when they leave them or whether they lovingly welcome anyone who wishes to avail themselves of their houses and vehicles to do so whenever they please.

2. We reject nationalism’s tendency to homogenize and narrow the church to a single ethnos. The church cannot be itself unless filled with disciples “from all nations” (panta ta ethné, Matthew 28:19). Cities, states, and nations have borders; the church never does. If the church is not ethnically plural, it is not the church, which requires a diversity of tongues out of obedience to the Lord.

Why this appears in this manifesto is a head-scratcher. To the extent that there's anything non-trivial here who disagrees with it?

3. We reject the xenophobia and racism of many forms of ethno-nationalism, explicit and implicit, as grave sins against God the Creator. Violence done against the bodies of marginalized people is violence done against the body of Christ. Indifference to the suffering of orphans, refugees, and prisoners is indifference to Jesus Christ and his cross. White supremacist ideology is the work of the anti-Christ.

Yes, but if the authors are going to suggest that white supremacy is infecting the Church they need to do more than simply assert it. They need to offer some supporting evidence.

Of course, there are white supremacists outside the Church, just as there are black supremacists, and like the black variety some of the whites are horribly virulent, but do the authors mean to imply that President Trump is among them? On what basis do they make this implication? Is it based on the fact that he wants our laws to be enforced and our borders secured? Does that make him a white supremacist? If so, he's got quite a lot of company, including many blacks and Hispanics as well as former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

4. We reject nationalism’s claim that the stranger, refugee, and migrant are enemies of the people. Where nationalism fears the stranger as a threat to political community, the church welcomes the stranger as necessary for full communion with God. Jesus Christ identifies himself with the poor, imprisoned foreigner in need of hospitality. “For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me” (Matthew 25:41-43).

So what's to be concluded from this? That we're not feeding, clothing, and providing drink for those who are here illegally? That's simply false. Or is it that we should open our doors to everyone in the world to come here and be fed, clothed and sheltered? If that's how we're to understand it, it's nonsense.

Again, it should be asked whether everyone who agrees with this letter has removed the locks from their homes, cars and businesses so that anyone in need can partake of whatever amenities they might find therein. If they really believed what they've signed on to in this letter then it seems hypocritical not to exemplify these ideals in their personal lives. To fail to do so is to suggest that their public approval of the contents of the letter is mere virtue preening.

5. We reject the nationalist’s inclination to despair when unable to monopolize power and dominate opponents. When Christians change from majority to minority status in a given country, they should not contort their witness in order to stay in power. The church remains the church even as a political minority, even when unable to influence the government or when facing persecution.

Yes, so what's the point? What does this statement have to do with our present circumstance? How is the church contorting its witness? The authors simply proclaim that it should not do it. Very well, but without some sort of explanation they may as well have proclaimed that neither should the church violate the ten commandments.

The letter suffers from such vagueness and nebulosity that it's really hard to tell exactly what the authors and signatories were trying to say. Without more specific explanation the letter is little more than an exercise in trumpeting the authors' moral superiority and is otherwise frivolous.

Who's Weird?

Some Democrats and their media allies have been mocking Donald Trump for "backing out" of a debate with Kamala Harris, even though there was never an agreement to debate Harris.

The terms of the debate were agreed to with Biden's team, not Harris's. When Biden dropped out of the race the debate was automatically voided. If Harris and Trump are to debate the terms of the contest have to renegotiated. I don't understand why that's so hard for some in the media to grasp.

We're told that there's no reason why they can't just debate according to the agreement with Biden, but that raises a question.

Before she became the presumptive Democratic nominee Harris was supposed to debate J.D. Vance. Will she go through with the debate with Vance? If not, will the media mock her for "backing out" just because Vance is no longer her main opponent? If the media gives her a pass for not debating Vance, why do they criticize Trump for wanting to renegotiate the ground rules before signing on to debate her?

Here's something else about our current politics that apparently a lot of folks in the media don't grasp:

Some of these folks, as well as some in the Democratic party, insist on telling us that Vance is "weird" for one reason or another. It's amusing that many of the people who want us to believe that Vance is "weird" themselves are people who insist that men can get pregnant. Now that's weird.

They also believe that women should have to compete in athletics against men and that no one should think it perverse that men should have access to women's private spaces.

They believe, moreover, that it's normal for men to dress up in garish female outfits and shake their male parts in the faces of little kids. And then they tell us that Vance is weird?

Some of the same people declaiming on Vance's weirdness think there’s nothing wrong with Joe Biden sniffing kids’ hair or hiring people to work in his administration who steal women’s clothes in airports and engage in simulated animal sex.

Some of these folks laugh at Vance for being "strange" but would never admit that people who self-identify as cats, who walk around purring and demanding litter boxes be installed in their public school lavatories, are weird.

Many of those people can’t tell us what a woman is and, worse, think it’s somehow compassionate to mutilate gender-confused children for life.

Nevertheless, they look their audiences straight in the eye and declare that J.D.Vance is weird.

The Far Greater Abuse

Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion made a claim that many on the left cheered. He wrote that it's a form of child abuse to raise a child to believe religious doctrine. In this extraordinary claim he was eventually joined by philosopher Daniel Dennett and writer Christopher Hitchens.

Children are too intellectually undeveloped, these men argued, to be inculcated with religious beliefs and should not have beliefs foisted on them which are, in their view, false.

On several occasions Dawkins even made the claim that sexually abusing a child is "arguably less" damaging than "the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing up a child Catholic in the first place".

These claims are widely accepted on the secular left and considered obviously true by many, yet a child given religious instruction is always free in later years to renounce his or her childhood training. Children are not condemned for the rest of their lives to live with beliefs that have been instilled in them in their early years if their inner convictions change as they mature.

How much different, though, is the case of parents who put their children through sexual transition, who change their children's bodies in ways that last a lifetime even though the gender dysphoria experienced by the child is a state of affairs that may well resolve itself as the child matures?

Which is the worse form of child abuse? Is it a greater crime to instill in children religious beliefs which may be wrong or to rob them of the ability to determine their own personal or sexual identity as an adult? Oddly, the former is condemned by significant portions of the left while the latter is widely applauded.

Chad Felix Greene described his own experience as a gender-confused child in an article at The Federalist. Here's an excerpt:

Transition for children follows a predictable model. A young child is first socially transitioned through clothing, socialization, and identity. They adopt an opposite-sex name, opposite-sex pronouns, and attend school and social events dressed as the opposite sex.

With children, the transgender movement is extremely strict on imposing traditional gender stereotypes.

As the children approach puberty, they are given puberty blockers to “pause” physical development until they are old enough to “decide” which sex to live as. Yet these blockers have lifelong negative health effects, and while most children who do not take them grow out of gender dysphoria, most children who do take them will not.

If teaching religious ideas that may or may not be false to children is a form of child abuse then surely doing to them what Greene describes is moreso. If an adult wishes to transition to another gender that should be his or her prerogative (although I don't know why the rest of society should be required to subsidize the procedure), but it should be illegal to do this to children who are not mature enough to be able to decide for themselves whether they want to be permanently consigned to the opposite sex.

As Greene concludes, "Every gender-dysphoric child deserves the right to grow up free to decide who he wants to be when he is ready to do so."

Meanwhile, read about the tragic case of 7 year-old James Younger whose mother was determined to convert him to a girl.

Where are the voices of those who are outraged that parents would teach their child about God? Is not what James Younger's mother and others like her are doing to their children a far worse thing to do to a child than teaching them that God loves them?

Young Women and Liberalism

Last May 16th I wrote about Jonathan Haidt's book Anxious Generation and the masterful job Haidt does in tying smartphone use to an array of mental and emotional troubles. The troubles especially afflict the young and especially young women.

The information Haidt packs into his book raises a lot of concerns about the mental health of young women, but one alarming graph he derives from Pew survey data shows that at least half of young women who identify as being liberal have a diagnosed mental illness.

As can be seen from the chart mental illness diagnoses are especially common among liberal women and young liberal women in particular.

There certainly appears to be a correlation between age, gender, mental health, and ideology, but of course a correlation by itself doesn't prove causation. It could just be coincidence, but suppose there is a causative relationship here. If so, it raises a chicken and egg question: Does being liberal cause mental illness or does mental illness cause one to lean toward the left? And how do age and gender factor into this relationship? And why is the incidence of mental illness so much higher among young women than older women and so much higher than among young men?

Haidt thinks that social media is one very prominent explanatory factor for the mental illness among young women, but how does social media explain the correlation between mental illness and liberalism?

Whatever the answers to these questions might be they're doubtless complex, but finding those answers should be, for the sake of our daughters, a matter of some urgency.

Poisonous Rhetoric

A couple of weeks ago, July 15th, I posted this:

People have been warning for some time that the rhetoric of violence, particularly on the left, would at some point provide the psychological justification in the mind of some already unstable individual to actually carry out an attempt to vent his hatred in a notorious act of violence.

We can't marinate our politics in constant expressions of hate for our opponents without eventually having that hatred boil over in horrible violence.

The hateful rhetoric on the left, from our president on down, has now issued in the death of at least one man, serious injury to a couple of others, and the near assassination of a political candidate.

I gave some examples of what I was talking about and remarked that I was unaware of anything comparable to the left's hateful rhetoric emanating from the right, and invited readers to send me examples of conservatives engaging in equally violent discourse.

A friend took me up on the invitation and sent me a few links that contained some despicable stuff written, presumably, by people on the right. As I mentioned to my friend, I should've been more clear in my original post that what I had in mind were repugnant statements from conservatives who were more influential in our society than are most internet trolls since most of the objectionable material I was complaining about was generated by culturally prominent lefties.

Even so, my friend was correct that it's not hard to find disgusting stuff on both left and right. And yet, I'm not convinced that I was mistaken in thinking that expressions of political violence are predominately a characteristic of the left, a conclusion supported by this Daily Mail article:

Until now, many assumed that only a few bad apples wanted the Republican candidate to take a round to the head.

Not so, says alarming new research from a UK-based academic.

Eric Kaufmann says a shocking third of Democratic voters wished Trump had left his July 13 campaign event in a body bag.

Among progressives, the figure is much higher, says the University of Buckingham politics scholar.

A staggering 71 percent of hard-line lefties said they supported the attempt on Trump's life.

Then, more anecdotally, I came across this from Chris Queen at PJMedia:

Some items on Amazon shouldn’t be there. Specifically, I’m talking about an array of shirts that call for the death of Donald Trump. I found out about one this week that reads, “THE ONLY GOOD TRUMP IS A DEAD ONE.”

I searched for “Dead Biden T-shirt” and “Dead Kamala T-shirt,” and while I found a few anti-Biden and anti-Harris shirts, I didn’t see any calling for the death of the president or vice president.

Finally, what on earth did Joe Biden mean by saying that House Speaker Mike Johnson was "Dead on arrival" not once, but twice? Imagine the outrage if Trump had said something like that.

Political Ideology and Church Attendance

Sociologist Ryan Burge has a column in his substack in which he deduces from survey data that "There is almost no 'Liberalizing Religion' in the U.S."

Burge points out that the more frequently one attends religious services the more conservative they're likely to be. He observes rather wryly that, "the more Democrats go to church, the more they look like Republicans." He offers this chart to illustrate his point:

Burge writes that,

Just 21% of never attenders are conservative, while 46% identify as liberal.

Among yearly attenders, the conservatives start to take over compared to liberals (36% vs 25%). Among weekly attenders, 52% are conservative, while just 16% are liberal. It’s even more extreme among the most frequent attenders. For folks who are attending religious services multiple times a week, about 60% are conservative and 10% are liberal.

This holds across racial lines and generally holds across denominational lines.

[Even] folks who are members of what are perceived to be left leaning or moderate denominations like the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church USA are showing a similar pattern to Southern Baptists - higher attendance means less liberalism.

There are only two denominations that are clearly pointing upward - the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (and that’s likely because of the weekly+ group being so liberal) and members of the Episcopal Church.

Burge closes with an interesting coda:

Every once in a while a pastor or denominational leader in a mainline church will ask me if it would be wise for them to spend time and resources on publicizing the fact that their church is not conservative. I don’t know if there’s an empirically driven answer to that question. But it doesn’t appear that young people in the United States have any concept of what liberal religious groups accomplished in American history.

The Progressive Era was driven, in no small part, by those folks who believed fervently in the social gospel. Overtime rules, child labor laws, and work safety requirements were pushed by people of faith to make this Earth a bit more like heaven.

The Civil Rights Movement was infused with religiosity from top to bottom from the impassioned sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to the quiet activism of folks like James Reeb, a Unitarian minister who traveled from Boston to Selma, Alabama to march for voting rights for African-Americans. He was killed by a group of local white men, they were never charged with a crime.

For anyone born in the last forty years or so, the only conception that they have of religious activism is likely tied up with the Religious Right. Which, of course, was a conservative movement. Maybe the idea that religion can push people toward left-leaning ideas is over for good. It’s hard to say, or maybe the pendulum will swing back in the other direction at some point in the future.

From this data driven vantage point - there’s plenty of evidence that American religion is now inextricably linked to one political viewpoint. For good or for ill.

Perhaps Burge is correct, but there are reasons to think that liberal religious groups have found a new issue to devote their energies to - unlimited immigration. This article explains how not a few religious groups have been advocating for what amounts to open borders and contains the astonishing statistic that between 2010 and 2015 over 33,000 people have been killed by illegal aliens.

[The] last report the U.S. Government Accountability Office produced on illegal alien crime was in 2018. That report showed that between 2010 and 2015, illegal migrants who were incarcerated were responsible for the deaths of 33,000 people. Simple back-of-the-envelope math suggests that the total over the last 13 years could easily top 85,000.

If this is accurate it's both shocking and sickening. Maybe the folks who have no problem with it just don't go to church often enough.

Double Standard

Here's a puzzle. Commentators are remarking that Kamala Harris's candidacy is bringing African Americans and women back to the Democratic fold. No doubt it is. Blacks will vote for Harris because she's part black and women will vote for her because she's a woman. No one, at least not on the left, seems to think this is unexceptional or regrettable.

If someone were to suggest, however, that he planned to vote for Donald Trump because he's white or because he's a man, the poor soul would be pilloried by all the woke Puritans who would brand him a racist for the first offense and a gender bigot for the second.

Why is this double standard tolerated?

Thankfully, there are signs that it may not be tolerated too much longer as we see in this video. Watch the reaction of the others on this zoom chat when Paige says she's going to vote for Kamala only because she's a black woman.

Warning: Language

Three Things I'd Like to Have Explained

I'd like someone to explain to me why Democrats think it matters whether Donald Trump was struck by a bullet or a piece of shrapnel during what was clearly an assassination attempt in Butler, PA on July 13. The effort put in to arguing that he wasn't really struck by a bullet is incomprehensible to me.

Do the assassination skeptics think that if he was struck by a piece of shattered glass from an errant bullet that that would mean that the assassination attempt didn't really happen, that it was all a sham and that the other victims weren't actually harmed? Do they really believe that the attempt on Trump's life would somehow be negated if they could show that all the shots missed? What exactly do they think they will have proven if they can demonstrate that instead of being within millimeters of losing his life it was actually a matter of inches?

Here's another thing I'd like to have explained. The left has been beside themselves recently insisting that Kamala Harris was never really a "border czar." It's as if they think that if they can prove that she never really had the official title that therefore she was never really given the responsibility of "fixing" the border and thus had never failed in that job.

What does it matter what her title was? What matters is what her responsibilities were (and still are). She had all the responsibilities of a "czar" whether or not she had the actual title, and she did absolutely nothing to get the border under control so I'd like for someone to explain to me why they think it matters what her title was.

Finally, I'd like to have someone explain to me why both LGBTQ+ folks and feminists are protesting on behalf of Hamas Islamists. Don't they realize that they're aligning themselves with people who would kill LGBTQ+ individuals in an instant were they to wave their Pride flags in Gaza and would scoff at any feminist claim to equal rights with men? Indeed, Western feminists would find themselves in a real-life Handmaid's Tale were they to push their feminist agenda in any Islamic state, so what is their rationale for supporting Hamas barbarians against Israel - a state where women and gays do enjoy human rights?

Yet, like sheep campaigning to save wolves from extirpation, LGBTQ+ folks and feminists somehow think that they're impressing radical Islamists and gaining their favor by taking their side in the war against Israel. Maybe the sheep think this makes sense, but I need to have someone explain it to me. .

Post-Death Experiences

A discussion at Mind Matters between Robert Marks and Walter Bradley, both of whom are scientists, focuses on the phenomenon of Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and contains some interesting insights into these events.

The term "Near Death" seems to be misleading. Scientists have documented over 3500 cases over the past several decades in which people have been not just near to death but completely, clinically dead - no heartbeat or brain waves - but from which they returned to life.

More astonishing, upon regaining their life they were able to relate to their medical staff what had happened while they were dead.

In the past, these sorts of accounts were dismissed as hallucinations, wishful thinking or even fabrications, but so much evidence in support of their veridicality has accumulated over the last thirty years that they're being taken much more seriously today. The question contemporary researchers are trying to answer is not whether the experience is genuine but rather what exactly is going on when someone has one of these.

So far any natural, physical explanation has proven elusive. NDEs remain a mystery.

To the extent that NDEs are indeed genuine, they constitute a powerful argument for two claims that are incompatible with materialism. First, if someone is having an experience which includes thoughts, sensations and recall while his or her brain is completely shut down - dead - it strongly suggests that more than the brain is involved in thinking, sensing and remembering. NDEs are an emphatic pointer to the existence of an immaterial mind or soul.

Second, NDEs offer a compelling reason to believe that physical death is not the end of our existence, that there's more beyond this life and that death is a bridge to that further existence, much, perhaps, like childbirth is a bridge between two separate existences.

This short video offers a fascinating example of an NDE. A woman born blind lost her life, temporarily, in an accident and recounts what happened in the hospital. If she's telling the truth, and her account seems to be empirically verifiable, then it certainly detracts from the credibility of materialism's claim to be an adequate account of what it is to be a human being:

Kamala Harris' Radicalism

Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president after their August convention, so what are her views and positions on the issues? According to a putatively non-partisan political site called GovTrack she was the leftmost senator in 2019, even to the left of Bernie Sanders. She was also the most partisan senator as this chart shows:

Since it's no longer politically acceptable to criticize Ms. Harris, GovTrack has purged this article from their website.

According to various other sources, Harris has gone on record as being in favor of decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing ICE, killing the Senate's legislative filibuster, passing the Green New Deal, banning fracking, imposing racial reparations, siding with Palestinian terrorists instead of our ally Israel, confiscating legally owned firearms through a mandatory buyback program, eliminating private health insurance and implementing Medicare for All.

This ad by Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dave McCormick's campaign targeting his opponent Bob Casey, sums up Harris' political convictions pretty well:

There are other concerns as well.

As Attorney General, Harris ignored an accusation and lawsuit alleging sexual harassment by a top aide in her office. That complaint involved “gender harassment” perpetrated against her aide’s former executive assistant, along with allegations that she was forced into “demeaning behavior.”

The case ultimately led to a $400,000 settlement and the resignation of that aide who had been described as one of Harris’s closest professional confidantes. The then-AG feigned ignorance of the whole accusation and lawsuit despite it being reported years earlier.

Only an inept prosecutor would completely miss a harassment case in her own office.

In 2006, she granted probation to a man who went on to murder two people. At the height of the 2020 race riots, Harris encouraged people to contribute to a bail fund to free violent rioters. One of those freed ended up being charged with murder.

She continues to raise money for that bail fund.... and has been a vocal supporter of defunding the police.

She supported the movement and said we need to "reimagine" public safety, even applauding the Los Angeles Mayor for slashing police funding by $150 million as the riots were ongoing.

Ann Coulter, not at all a Trump fan, has penned a devastating piece on Harris's time as prosecutor and Attorney General, and there's more on Harris' radical ideology to be found here.

No doubt more information on her background will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead, but voters should be aware that Ms. Harris is easily the most radical left-wing politician ever to have such a good chance of becoming our president. Unfortunately, none of the above criticisms of her record will matter to many of her Democratic supporters who care only about two things: Ms. Harris is ardently pro-abortion and she's not Donald Trump. Little else is important to a substantial segment of our voting population.

Systemic Racism

Everywhere we turn, it seems, we're confronted with the allegation that our society is shot through with "systemic racism," and we hear it so often many of us simply assume it must be true that this vague but pernicious evil corrupts every institution of our culture. We might pause amidst our self-deprecation, however, and ask ourselves exactly what it is America is being accused of. What exactly is "systemic racism"?

Harvard Government professor Harvey Mansfield has written an editorial for the Wall Street Journal in which he dissects the idea and finds it to be pretty much vacuous. Here are some excerpts from his column:

Systemic racism, also known as institutional or structural racism, is a new phrase for a new situation. We live in a society where racism is not, and cannot be, openly professed. To do so not only is frowned upon but will get you into serious trouble, if not yet jail, in America.

Yet even though this is impossible to miss and known to all, “systemic racism” supposedly persists. The phrase describes a society that is so little racist that no one can respectably advocate racism, yet so much racist that every part of it is soaked with racism. We live with the paradox of a racist society without racists.

Systemic racism is said to be a result of structuring our institutions to privilege whites and consequently to be, perhaps unconsciously, biased against blacks. Mansfield notes that, "It is strange to describe an unconscious effect as racism, for an ism is an opinion, a doctrine, not a mere condition. A doctrine has adherents who articulate it; it cannot be held unconsciously as can a prejudice."

Nor is criticism of blacks ipso facto racist as is often alleged by those on the left:

Racist doctrine says that blacks are a naturally and inherently inferior race. To criticize the character or behavior of blacks, individually or even on average, is not racism. Criticism implies that blacks are not living up to their potential, hence that they are capable of behaving well. Criticism implies an essential equality between critics and whomever they criticize. This is contrary to racism.

He also puts his finger on another paradox:

The idea of systemic racism proclaims that racism is unjust but exists nonetheless despite ourselves. How could this happen? It is the bad result of the behavior we regard as good. The good behavior of conscientiously striving to better oneself is joined to the bad behavior of always preferring oneself.

Thus any privilege one earns and deserves is tied to undeserved privilege: A successful life if you are white comes out as white supremacy. Despite your verbal rejection of that result, the system behind your intentions brings it about.

The notion of systemic racism is designed to make you feel guilty about this if you are white. But why should you? The system did it, not you. You can’t change the system; that’s what “systemic” means....

The movement against systemic racism must fail. How could it succeed where Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t? Systemic racism exists despite our intentions; so it can’t be cured by changing our intentions — as by protesting.

In other words, those who accuse white culture of systemic racism tell us there's nothing we can do about it no matter how much we may want to. If that's so, however, and if whites benefit from these unjust structures there's no reason to feel guilty about it since things couldn't have been otherwise.

Moreover, those who declare that society is systemically racist are themselves operating under an assumption that can only be described as itself racist:

Systemic racism ...tells blacks that they are quite OK, and that it is entirely up to whites to change their thinking and their behavior. This means that blacks must allow whites to hold their future for them.

But is not the claim that black well-being depends on white behavior an implicit claim that blacks are helpless unless whites take care of them? It might also be said that if the structures of society are unavoidably and inveterately racially repressive and nothing can be done to change them then the implication is that they must be torn down or else blacks will never be able to thrive in America. The foolishness of the conclusion demonstrates the foolishness of the premise:

Systemic racism ignores the agency of black citizens, leaving them nothing to do except to protest in the streets or cheer from the sidelines. Meanwhile whites are told by the same idea that all their past efforts against white supremacy have been in vain. Nothing they have done has worked or could have worked.

All along our history, the Constitution and the Rights of Man we thought we practiced and defended were nothing but the power of white men. All the heroes of both races and their sacrifices were defeated by systemic racism and went for naught. What we might do now differently from what we have done in the past is left totally unclear. More affirmative action and more subsidies—what can they do that will now help instead of hurt? Call them “reparations”—will that do any good?

What is the evidence that our institutions are arrantly racist? We're often told that the evidence is the unequal representation of races in various fields of endeavor, but this racial inequity, if it exists, can hardly be evidence that racism is afoot. If it is then the most racist institutions in our country are professional sports leagues, which, except for ice hockey, are dominated by blacks.

As one letter writer to the Journal asks, "How is it possible for a country stricken with pervasive racism to have, over the years, elected black mayors and appointed black police chiefs? How can it be that these pervasive racists also elected a black president twice?"

Actually, there is institutional racism in this country, but it's not the sort that the progressive left thinks it is. Indeed, the institutional racism in this country is in institutions dominated by the left. Our universities systematically deny highly qualified Asians admission because of their race, blacks are often given preference in hiring and college admissions because of their race and Democratic politicians, like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, refuse to allow black parents to send their children to the schools of their choice where they'd have a much better chance of getting an education that would help them succeed as adults.

Each of those is an example of racism in this country that progressives are perfectly happy with.

Beauty Requires Meaning

Michael Baruzzini writing at First Things recalls an exchange between Richard Dawkins and Archbishop Rowan Williams in which Dawkins admitted that he was an agnostic about God, and was not, strictly speaking, an atheist. Much was made of the admission in the media despite the fact that it was a trivial distinction as Baruzzini explains:

This admission, though it caught the notice of the media, was not really anything new for Dawkins, who has made similar concessions in the past. Dawkins’ approach to all knowledge is strictly scientific.

And since scientific knowledge is always technically tentative, so too must his ostensibly scientific opinion of the non-existence of God. Dawkins dismisses God because he finds no scientific evidence for God, but he must make allowances for the fact that scientific knowledge is always expanding.

Dawkins is still an atheist, after all, because agnosticism is simply a species of the genus atheism. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God and agnostics lack a belief in God. They are what might be called soft atheists because, unlike the hard atheist, they don't make the very strong and undemonstrable claim that God doesn't exist. They simply hold that the evidence is insufficient to justify believing that He does.

It was another comment that Dawkins made in the same discussion that I found much more interesting:

Speaking to his believing conversational companion, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, Dawkins said, “What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing—that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”

I don't think Dawkins is quite right about this. Beauty ultimately depends upon meaning. Meaningless form and color may please the senses, it may be pretty, but it doesn't rise to the level of beauty unless there's meaning to it. Just as a meaningless sexual experience, though it may afford some degree of pleasure, is hardly beautiful, a world full of things for which we've evolved an aesthetic appreciation may be intriguing, but it's ultimately beautiful because it exudes meaning from every nook, cranny, and pore.

Baruzzini puts the point somewhat differently:

The archbishop, rather than disputing, agreed with Dawkins about the beauty of the scientific description of the development of life. But he then explained that God was not an extra that was “shoehorned” onto the scientific explanation.

Dawkins’ mistake, the archbishop attempted to show, was to suppose that the scientific explanation suffices, and the religious one is an unnecessary complication. The beauty that Dawkins finds in science is not challenged by belief in God; it presupposes it.

The beauty of scientific explanation comes from seeing that the arrangement of things is so ordered to produce the phenomena we observe. The scientist begins with a mess of clues and an unfinished puzzle. He begins with a mystery. He seeks that moment when the pieces fall into place....

But where creation presents a unified theme returning, finally, to reason, atheistic scientism must insist that at bottom [there] is only unreason.

If it all has no meaning, no purpose, if it's all simply the effluent of a cosmic belch, the beauty drains out of it.

Baruzzini goes on to make a further point about Dawkins' views that should be emphasized. He asserts that:

Dawkins supposes that the doctrine of creation requires a Divine Tinkerer, interfering with or co-opting the natural beauty present in the workings of the natural world. Whether or not God tinkered with creation in the manner envisioned by creationism or some versions of intelligent design, such tinkering is neither necessary to the doctrine of creation nor is it the source of the beauty seen by the believer.

To use an analogy previously developed by Stephen Barr, to ask whether God or evolution created life is like asking whether Shakespeare or Hamlet killed Polonius. If there is no Shakespeare, Hamlet’s act is meaningless. It is merely the accidental arrangement of ink on a page. If there is a Shakespeare, however, his existence as the creator of the literary Denmark does not obviate the drama of the play. It is rather a necessary prerequisite for it.

Shakespeare, as a playwright, is not a competitor with the drama of the play.

There's more at the link, but I want to return for a moment to the matter of beauty: Philosophers going back to Plato have affirmed that the highest ideals are the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, but if the world is nothing more than atoms spinning in the void then there really is no Good, no Truth that matters, and no Beauty.

The awe we feel when we look at mountains or a sunset or a galaxy is just the perturbations of chemicals in our brains triggered by a particular visual pattern.

It's when we somehow see meaning in what we observe that we experience its beauty, but there can only be meaning if behind the experience there is a mind that has intentionally created it. Take away the author, the painter, the composer, the architect and there is no meaning and thus no beauty for us to enjoy.

A novel filled with eloquently turned phrases and well-crafted sentences nevertheless lacks beauty if the story makes no sense. The world and life are beautiful because they're filled by it's composer/author with deep, profound meaning. Just as the beauty of a work of art reflects the style, personality, and genius of the artist, the beauty of the world reflects the style, personality, and genius of the Creator.

The Problem Is the Policies

We're living in very interesting times. We had, for a time, a presidential campaign in which both candidates have served as president and now may have a campaign in which one candidate has never received a vote in his or her party's primaries. We've witnessed an unprecedented use of the law to seek to eliminate one of the candidates, which has only increased that candidate's popularity and cash resources, and we were horrified by an assassination attempt on that candidate.

Then we saw a decision by the other candidate, based upon his obviously failing cognitive abilities, to discontinue his campaign for a second term, but to nevertheless continue serving out the remaining six months of his first term. If his cognitive health precludes a second term why does it not preclude leading the country for the next six months?

Anyway, now there'll be a lot of drama as a successor for that candidate is selected.

The Democrats pressured President Biden to drop out of the race because he appears too unpopular to win, but, contrary to what they'd have us believe, his unpopularity is not due to his debilities, which have been apparent to everyone who has been paying attention almost since the beginning of his presidency, but to his and his party's policies and behavior.

For example, the lies Americans were persistently told by sundry Democrats about Trump's Charlottesville remark, the lies by the media and former government officials about Trump having colluded with Russia in 2016, and the attempt to impeach him over it are repugnant to a lot of Americans. So are the aforementioned attempts to have Trump thrown in jail on charges that no other American citizen would ever prosecuted on.

Many Americans are also repelled by credible reports of corrupt use by Mr. Biden of his office to benefit his family.

Furthermore, a majority of Americans are bewildered by the Democrats' failure to secure the border, opening it up to a flood of immigrants, including among them violent criminals and potential terrorists. The lies the nation has been told by administration officials like Alejandro Mayorkis about the border being secure are offensive and outrageous.

Americans were stunned, too, by the incompetence of the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan, the loss of American lives, the betrayal of thousands of Afghanis who had helped us over the years, and the lies we've been told about that debacle. Americans' lack of confidence in the Democrats' ability to navigate foreign policy has been exacerbated by the administration's tepid, on again/off again policies toward Ukraine and Israel, the latter despite Hamas holding five Americans hostage.

They're dismayed by the exorbitant spending and the resulting inflation that prevents them from buying a home, putting food on the table or gas in the car. They're puzzled by the assumption that we have to upend our economy in order to mitigate climate change, as if it's been proven beyond doubt that whatever change that's occurring in the climate can be arrested by anything we do.

They're appalled by the sexualization of our children in schools and the Democrats' support for compelling our daughters to compete athletically against men and to shower with them. They're shocked by the Democrats' support for gender transition surgeries that permanently mutilate a child confused about who he or she really is. They're outraged that Democrats pass laws requiring schools to hide a child's gender confusion from the child's parents, and they mock the Democrat fetish of pronoun usage and laugh about the crime of "misgendering" and other "microaggressions."

Many Americans are disgusted by the emphasis in almost all of our governmental and educational institutions on DEI rather than competence, and disgusted, too, with the failure of Democrat prosecutors to enforce the law, to punish criminals, and to make our cities safe. The disgust extends to judges and SCOTUS justices, appointed by Democrats, who believe that the law should be interpreted according to the jurist's feelings and not according to an objective reading of the relevant statutes or the Constitution.

They're disgusted, moreover, with the Democrat tolerance of antisemitism and anti-white racism in our culture and on our campuses, as well as the religious zeal with which Democrats reverence abortion, cherishing it as sacramental and demanding its legalization up to and even after birth.

These Americans are puzzled as to how January 6th could be plausibly labeled an "insurrection" when it was obviously a riot by a motley mob of confused goofballs, but the riots in the wake of the George Floyd death, riots which took the lives of dozens and caused billions of dollars of property damage, were "mostly peaceful" expressions of discontent.

They're dismayed by the hostility the current administration has displayed toward Christians and Christianity, labeling traditional Catholics as terrorists, using the courts to punish business persons who simply wish to peacefully remain true to their consciences, and seeking to delegitimize religious expression in the public square.

They're disturbed, too, by the authoritarian approach to governing resorted to by the Democrats whose president has frequently imposed policy by executive fiat, regardless of its legality. Last weekend the party that has campaigned on "saving Democracy" has simply overridden the will of millions of voters and executed a coup d'etat to remove their party's presumptive nominee because they believe he can't win.

Finally, many Americans are fed up with a corrupt media that distorts, lies and covers for all of this, abandoning traditional journalistic principles in order to refashion itself as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.

The Democrats may come up with a candidate who'll appear a bit more reasonable and moderate than Joe Bidenand his administration have been, but the appearance will not be the reality. Whoever the Democrats pick - and if it's not Kamala Harris there'll be a civil war in the Democratic party - will be at least as far left as Mr. Biden and do nothing to end the policies that resulted in Mr. Biden's unpopularity.

Only a thorough political housecleaning will do that.

Doubting Darwin

For most of my adult life, any skepticism toward the reigning dogma in biology, Darwinian evolution, was considered a form of either heresy or idiocy or both. Darwinism was beyond doubt and for a biologist to question it was to imperil his or her career. That state of affairs, however, seems to be changing.

Challenges to the Darwinian orthodoxy are arising almost daily in labs across the country as an increasing number of biologists are growing increasingly doubtful that the standard neo-Darwinian model of unguided, naturalistic evolution can explain either the origin or the complexity of living things.

Stephen Meyer is a philosopher of science who has written several books that raise perplexing questions for the standard Darwinian model. His first book, Signature in the Cell (2010), dealt with the difficulties posed to Darwinian evolution by our current understanding of the structure and function of DNA.

The second, Darwin's Doubt (2014), explained how the fossil record, specifically the fossils found in the Canadian Burgess shale deposits, points to an extremely sudden (in evolutionary time) appearance of almost all the major animal body plans with no evolutionary precursors, a finding that confutes all Darwinian expectations.

His most recent book Return of the God Hypothesis (2021), is a compelling case for the existence of God based on discoveries in three areas of scientific research - the origin of the universe, the extreme fine-tuning of the universe, and the origin of life.

Meyer summarizes the arguments presented by the first two of these books in this six minute video for Prager U.:

It's important to note that, as far as I know, none of the science that Meyer adduces in this video is in dispute. Indeed, it's arguments like these that are generating a great deal of the current rethinking among evolutionary biologists and workers in related fields.

Vance's Conversion

Donald Trump has named Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate for the November election. Vance has a great resume, although it's thin on the kind of experience necessary for a chief executive of a huge organization like the American government. Nevertheless, his biography as told in the book and movie Hillbilly Elegy is a remarkable rags to riches story and has been much discussed in the last week.

What's not so well-known about Vance is his account of his gradual conversion from atheism to Roman Catholicism in the period between 2016, when he first announced that he was thinking of adopting the Catholic faith, to his eventual baptism into the Church in 2019.

A piece at TheBlaze.com by Joseph MacKinnon fills in a lot of the details. MacKinnon writes:

President Donald Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), is now a practicing Catholic, but that was not always so.

Years before his baptism and reception into the Catholic Church, Vance told Deseret News he grew up in a "pretty chaotic and hopeless world. Faith gave me the belief that there was somebody looking out for me, that there was a hopeful future on the other side of all the things I was going through."

Vance's Pentecostal father would occasionally take him to church.

"Going to church showed me a lot of really positive traits that I hadn’t seen before. I saw people of different races and classes worshiping together," said Vance. "I saw that there were certain moral expectations from my peers of what I should do."

The future Marine, venture capitalist, and senator indicated that unlike the other children on his block in Middletown, Ohio, the kids his age at the evangelical church he would occasionally attend expected him "not [to] do drugs or have premarital sex or drink alcohol."

Although he found a supportive community through church that could serve as a check against the negative influences he encountered elsewhere, he felt that the particular kind of evangelical Christianity he practiced with his father encouraged "a cultural paranoia where you don't trust and want to withdraw from a lot of parts of the world."

Years later, when he entered Yale Law School, he indicated he "would have called [himself] an atheist." He elsewhere indicated that his reading Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris corresponded with this turn away from faith.

One wonders how many intelligent young people who are searching for answers to the questions they're beginning to have about life and the world, have been influenced by people like Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins. It's really a shame that anyone has been taken in by them since their anti-theistic arguments are usually superficial and unconvincing unless the reader is eager to be convinced of them.

I did a series of VP posts on Dawkins's book The God Delusion which you can find in the archives starting here (2/1/2023) and running through 2/15/23.

MacKinnon continues:

By the time of his graduation, however, he began exploring his faith again.

"Back home, kids who grew up to be relatively successful tended to abandon their faith," Vance told Deseret News. "All of my close friends growing up were all really religious but, with the exception of one of us, we all considered ourselves nonreligious by age 25."

At Yale, I was exposed to faith groups in which that didn't seem to be happening. Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. There was a moment when I was like, 'Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.' You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That's not the world I grew up in, but maybe that's true.

Vance hypothesized at the time that the practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Catholicism, contra the variety of Evangelicalism he was exposed to early on, did not apply the same type of "isolating pressures."

Months prior to the 2016 election, he indicated that he was "thinking very seriously about converting to Catholicism."

You'll have to go to the link for the rest of MacKinnon's account. It's a quite interesting look into a side of Vance that hasn't been prominent in stories about him since his selection by Trump as his running mate.